by Andrew Greig
The same questions have occurred, disappeared, resurfaced ever since Mal offered me this trip. Perhaps one never stops asking them. But sitting on top of the huge split rock that gives Urdukas its name, looking at Mustagh, I wanted to go as far as I possibly could on that mountain. My commitment felt stronger than ever. I desperately wanted to climb on the Tower, though I was no nearer to understanding why. And for no reason I thought of Jon on the way back from his Annapurna 3 trip, walking weeping through the streets of Kathmandu.
‘Mr Andrew!’ I stuck my head out of our tent and there, improbably, delightfully, was Mohammed Ali. Smiles, hugs and handshakes. It was wonderful to see him again, I felt a rush of affection. Typically, he’d brought some sweet pastries with him, in case he bumped into us. We wolfed them down while he gave us the news.
It was good, much better than we could have possibly expected. The lads had Camp 1 loaded up, and Camp 2 had been established a few days before. Camp 2! Had Jon and Sandy got up the Col already? There was delight mingled, if I was not mistaken, with some consternation on Mal and Tony’s faces. They didn’t want to arrive at the Tower to find most of the climbing already done. Then Mohammed explained that the glacier running down from Mustagh had been much longer and harder than expected, so Camp 2 was at the bottom of the South-East face, not on the Col.
I’m sure I read relief in Mal and Tony. And in myself. If the lads had really moved that fast, and were going for an ascent in an Alpine stylee, there’d be little room or time for me to do anything on the hill.
For the first time since his hurried departure from Skardu, Mal felt a surge of confidence. Four strong climbers in good nick and with enough food to sit out bad weather should have a very good chance on any mountain in the world. Everything was finally coming right. The lads on the hill had obviously worked their guts out, laid the foundations. Now he and Tony were arriving with fresh energy at just the right time. All right, so he’d dropped £4000 of his and Liz’s money, the deposit for a house, on the trip. There was only one way to justify that: climb the fucker.
He looked thoughtfully at the ground while Tony babbled out his enthusiasm. Kathleen and Andrew looked strong enough still. If the lads still agree we need fixed ropes to the Col, he’ll have a chance to do something on the hill. Does he realize that he’ll be asked to carry loads? When Aido and Mohammed leave, he and Alex will be the only support climbers left. Is Alex up to leading? Is Andy up to following? Find out soon enough …
Mohammed had one of our two-way Motorola radios with him. To our surprise it worked clear across 10 miles, and we were able to chat to Adrian. He sounded pleased and relieved we were on our way, and quite proud of their progress so far. Then we listened in on his call to Jon and Sandy up at Camp 2.
Jon’s cockney drawl bounced through the static. He went straight to the heart of the matter: ‘But have they got the bleedin money?’ Aido said he wasn’t sure, but Burt and Donna hadn’t made it. No one seemed very surprised by this, perhaps it had always been on the cards and the old hands had recognized it quicker than I had.
We couldn’t get through to Jon and Sandy direct so decided to keep our good news till we saw them. Let them wait and wonder.
The sun went down. We were now at roughly 14,500 feet and it got cold quickly. Last mug of cocoa, early bed. I took a sleeping pill, but was too excited to sleep. Like a child waiting for Christmas, all I wanted was the next morning.
I woke round 2.00. My pulse was hammering, I was gasping for breath. Unpleasant sensation. I went outside to breathe deeply and calm down. Moonlight mined silver on the ridges opposite, and on the Mustagh Col. That’s where I wanted to be. Soon, inshallah. The air itself seemed to have a fuzz of light hanging in it – alpenglow, they told me later, caused by charged particles at altitude. Everything was frozen, no wind. I stood awed and elated in the absolute silence at the heart of the world’s greatest mountain range.
This was it. The last day. We set off to cross the Baltoro and get onto the Mustagh glacier that met it at right angles. The day began blue and cold, but quickly grew hot. Breathing was unpleasantly ineffectual, too light and fast, and the going was very rough. Only once in a while was there time to look up at Mustagh.
I kept up with Mal and Tony till ‘lunch’. They were desperately keen to press on and revved into the distance. Kath was suffering from her blisters and the altitude. I waited for her and she was in tears of frustration and anger at her inability to keep up. Abdul volunteered to stay with her, and I slogged on with Mohammed. It was good to be with him again and enjoy his optimism, energy and friendliness. But even he had found load-carrying on the hill exhausting, which made me doubt my own capacity to help the lads much.
The Mustagh glacier was no improvement. The rocks were loose underfoot, and every so often one would slide wildly on grit over black ice. I was in a thoroughly bad temper. Up front I could see that our porters had cut off the glacier and were toiling up a steep slope of eroded mud and boulders. I picked my way carefully up – and there was Jhaved, our Base Camp cook. He grinned, hugged me, insisted on taking my pack. I didn’t feel like being proud, so surrendered it gratefully. Another 20 feet up onto a plateau and there it was. Base Camp.
Rough grass, a loose cluster of tents, smell of flowers with just a hint of slaughtered goat, cardboard boxes and jerry cans – home for the next few weeks. A cliff behind it, the Tower just out of sight round the corner, colossal Masherbrum with spindrift trailing from its nose cone back across the Baltoro, Lobsang Spire like the spike of a sundial across the Mustagh glacier – the camp was a veranda at 15,000 feet, with one of the world’s finer views. On the entrance flap to the Mess Tent, someone had scrawled BREW ME CRAZY. I smiled and walked in.
Aido grinned and passed me a mug of cocoa. ‘So you made it, old boy.’ He seemed to have changed. Still laconic, earnest and schoolboyish – but now he had the Look. The Look that every party we met on their way down had. At once worn and fit, alert and withdrawn; the weathered skin, the eyes not so much distant as self-absorbed, relaxed yet revving … The on-the-hill look, the early stages of summit fever.
As he filled me in on their progress, I looked around. This was a five-star hotel compared to Askole or the walk-in sites. Jhaved turned out pastries, brews and goat’s liver. There were even boxes to sit on. It was littered with books, opened boxes, cassettes, lanterns, stoves, clothes. Could have some good nights in here, I thought.
I went back to meet Kath. She toiled up the hill to the plateau with painful slowness and utter determination. She came over the crest, saw Base Camp – and burst into tears. Tears of relief, of exhaustion, of pride and pleasure. Her summit, her journey’s end. She held on to me, laughing and crying at the same time. ‘I can’t let them see me like this, they’ll think I’m a right bumblie.’
She rubbed her face, took a deep breath and walked with me to the Mess Tent, a little unsteady but very upright.
I watched the tiny figures of Sandy and Jon bob improbably across the face of the cliff behind Base Camp, some 500 feet up. They were on the Ibex Trail running right across the rock face and round the corner out of sight, towards the Tower. It looked very exposed.
We shook hands warmly; Kath hugged Jon. They seemed genuinely pleased to see us – particularly when they discovered we had the money. When I mentioned to Sandy that Kath and I had been hurt by his addressing his notes only to Burt and Donna and what did this mean, he was quite taken aback. It obviously didn’t mean anything, other than our insecurity. And he categorically denied that he or the others had suggested sending us back from Askole.
Just back down from stocking Camp 2, they very much had that Look. Weathered, tired yet full of energy, eager for news and precious letters yet all their inner resources tuned to one thing: the hill. In shorts, Yeti gaiters, glacier goggles, Sandy with his Peruvian and Jon with his Rasta hat, dangling slings and krabs, sun cream and axes, they looked a total shambles. Yet they looked absolutely right and at ease. For the first time I was seei
ng them in their natural environment. They made much more sense here.
The porters squatted in double lines like primary school children, waiting to be paid off. They pocketed their handfuls of 100-rupee notes, receipted with a thumb print, and literally ran off down the hill to the glacier, whooping and laughing as if the summer holidays had just begun. We said a regretful goodbye to Abdul and arranged to see him in Skardu. He hurried away towards his wife and any-day-now baby, looked back once, waved, and was gone.
When I asked Adrian how the going looked up to the Col, he was serious and discouraging. ‘Forget about getting to the Col. The Icefall below Camp 1 is not like anything you’ve done before. You’ll have to have a considerable amount of glacier training before you can even set foot on it. You’ll do well just to get to Camp 1, let alone 2.’
Sandy looked up from his conference with Mal. ‘That’s right, youth. The Icefall is death on a stick.’ I just nodded. Being told I can’t do things makes me all the more determined. He grinned and added, ‘No problem. You’ll be all right – but you will have to learn how to move on a glacier quickly and safely, without belays.’
‘Like shit off a hot shovel, by the sound of it,’ Mal added. ‘This Icefall could be a real problem.’
‘It is.’ Adrian winced at some private memory.
‘It’s a piece of piss,’ Jon said. ‘They’re just winding you up.’
‘I’ll take him up and we can romp around on the bitch.’ This was Alex, slumped back on some boxes with his ostrich legs propped on his pack. He looked tired and out of sorts; both he and Aido had suffered from altitude headaches, and he was not fully acclimatized yet.
I resolved then and there to make Camp 2 at least. If Aido was frankly unsure of my ability to do so, I had something to prove. There was more than a heavy-duty trudge ahead. Kath looked over at me, raised an eyebrow. She knew very well what I was thinking.
We walked – painfully slowly, like deep-sea divers – up a bank and round the corner till we could see Mustagh. It looked brutal and unrelenting, but not outwith the bounds of possibility. As the last light hit its upper ridges, the Tower briefly mellowed, looked almost beautiful. It stood planted squarely across the top of the valley down which the glacier and Icefall tumbled, at once defiant and indifferent.
It was good to eat all together for the first time since leaving ’Pindi, a lifetime ago. We talked a while in the yellow lanternlight, catching up on each other’s news, making plans, getting used to each other again. When I went outside, the air was full of moonlight and alpenglow. As I sat looking at the grim bulk of Masherbrum, I could hear Mal coughing in one tent, the goat grazing, and Shokat’s blasted radio.
I was too keyed up to sleep. I crawled into my bag and, with the help of Sandy’s diary and the evening’s conversation, reconstructed the lads’ activities since they first arrived at Base Camp eleven days earlier.
The first day after their arrival, as Kath and I were approaching the Askole rope bridge and Tony was sitting his last exam in Wales, Jon and Sandy went to reconnoitre the lower end of the Chagaran glacier. What they found was a shock – a truly horrible icefall riddled with crevasses, cornices, boulders, ice towers. When the sun hit it, it fell apart. ‘Not too safe a way,’ Sandy noted laconically. Meaning it was desperate. They felt the glacier must have deteriorated considerably in the twenty-eight years since Brown and company had come this way, for they’d made no mention of major problems and had even taken porters up it. No porter in his right mind would go near this, and even a mountaineer with only two brain cells left to rub together would hesitate.
They worked their way, roped together, up the left side of it, not at all happy. But after half a mile or so they came to a point where a natural ledge seemed to run down from the cliff on their left. ‘Let’s check it out.’
And so they found the Ibex Trail, so called because of the ibex droppings that littered it. It ran on an irregular natural ledge right round the cliff back down to Base Camp. ‘A fine, picturesque and very safe route,’ Sandy noted, ‘lined with wild flowers, a small spring and a nice scramble.’
What it did was circumvent the entire lower Icefall. Without it we would probably have been unable to carry loads onto the Tower proper. ‘Put this down in your book, Andy,’ Mal said. ‘The Ibex Trail is a piece of mountaineering genius.’
Next day they went up the Ibex Trail with Mohammed and Alex (Adrian suffering from boom-boom altitude headaches). The latter pair left a stash at a quartz block at the end of the trail, while Jon and Sandy struck on up the glacier – and in thirty minutes ran into the second icefall.
‘It was quite difficult,’ Sandy conceded. Meaning it was desperately desperate.
Moving together, they threaded a way up through it and plugged on, suffering, across a stretch riddled with visible and concealed crevasses. Some four and a half kilometres from Base Camp, they established Camp 1, put up a two-man tent on a small moraine bank at something like 16,500 feet, and thankfully turned for home.
‘We tried to come down the left-hand side of the Icefall; this proved a very desperate and unsafe way.’ Meaning it was totally fucking desperately desperate.
On the third day they rested. They needed to acclimatize, and no point in burning themselves out at this stage. Adrian, Alex and Mohammed carried gear up to the Quartz Block.
On the fourth day Alex, Adrian and Mohammed set out to stock Camp 1. They got seriously lost in the worst part of the Icefall and with some difficulty beat a retreat. Thus Adrian’s intense dislike of that part of the glacier. It also pointed up the gap between Jon and Sandy and the others and how the Icefall was going to make support load-carrying much harder than anticipated. Burt would have a fit if he even saw this place, Alex thought to himself. He was fascinated by its unearthly, chaotic beauty, and decided to camp up on the glacier in the near future and let it get to him.
The fifth day:
The spirit of Light Dry Snow took the Spirit of Granular Snow as his mate and after a time she gave birth to a Mountain of Ice far to the North. The Sun Spirit hated the glittering child spreading across the land, keeping away his warmth so no grass could grow. The Sun decided to destroy Ice Mountain but Storm Cloud Spirit, the sibling of Granular Snow, found out the Sun wanted to kill the child. So in the summer, when the sun is most powerful, Storm Cloud Spirit fights with him to save Ice Mountain’s life …
Is this our happy Highlander, smiling Sandy Allan? I wondered, and read on late into the night.
Jon, Mohammed, Alex and I walked up the Ibex Trail carrying loads, heading towards Camp 1. I was last in departing Base Camp, not because I was slow, but just making sure that I had all my correct and only necessary personal gear and expedition equipment. Jon shouted down from high on the Ibex path for me to bring some things that he had forgotten. This disappointed me more than it should have, and I must try not to get angry at these tiny little details. Aido not too well really, so needed a day off …
The glacier did not prove too much of a problem except for one steep serac part where we had to traverse on some knife edge seracs, down between them, then up some semi-steep black ice. The rest was quite good.
At Camp 1 they put up the four-man tent, brewed up after Sandy had found running water by falling with one leg into a small crevasse full of it. Alex and Mohammed returned safely if somewhat apprehensively to Base. Jon hung his tiny external speakers from the roof of the tent and wired in the Walkman; while he gazed at the ceiling, listening to récherché reggae dubs and thinking of London, Sandy absorbed himself in The Clan of the Cave Bear and an existence even more primitive than his own. The day ended with the usual sequence: food, radio call, brew, alpenglow, sleeping tablet, sleep.
Day six. While half of our Expedition was stealing away from Askole in the race for Jolla Bridge, Sandy was brewing up and trying to rouse Jon at Camp 1. Neither of them was feeling too well – their first night sleeping at this level – but they forced themselves up and out into the wilderness. They could s
ee their objective, the foot of the south face of the Tower, about one and a half miles away across the glacier, with a height gain of some 1500 feet. Jon remembered Patey had laconically noted that this section was heavily crevassed. It was.
We went up the left side of the glacier and then traversed to the centre, up through some seracs and crevasses, up a small valley between lots of seracs, waiting to fall in some holes but did not. Then round some small glacier green water beautiful pools, stuck in some wands as markers. I led up a steep slope, quite hard work, and we decided to take a steep line to avoid some seracs but once at the high point of that discovered we were in the middle of really bad and dangerous seracs and crevasses. We had to traverse left, but sank very deep in soft snow. We were both really exhausted and our heads boomed with altitude. We tried to joke but could not.
Eventually we placed two snow stakes and tied the tent and other loads to them and marked the site with a ski pole and one of the UK flags Jon had lifted from a service station in London.
We started back to Camp 1, both very tired and sinking deep into soft snow. Fell into several crevasses, tried to find an alternative route back but the one we took was really bad. We jumped some huge holes and had a bad time. At last we staggered to Camp 1, both of us tripping over our crampons, having problems. Sacks off, we sprawled out on the moraine, exhausted, lost. Half an hour elapsed before we could begin to get our acts together. Crampons off, start a brew, crawled into our pits and just lay there …
