Summit Fever

by Andrew Greig

  So I tried putting in ice screws, then prussiking up a 30-foot ice wall. It took ages, was very cumbersome. The knots work like jumars – push one up, step on the attached sling, push up the waist one, then sit back on it and push up the other. The kind of thing that’s straightforward enough in rehearsals, but could be tougher on the night. I hoped that night wouldn’t come.

  Then we set off on a follow-my-leader through the lower parts of the Icefall, to become accustomed to hurrying down 45-degree ice slopes, traversing, contouring, jumping, chimneying. It’s hard work with the pack on. It’s very like learning to drive a car – an impossible number of details to coordinate and dangers to watch out for, demanding a great deal of nervous energy. Got to watch my feet all the time, keep the rope between us neither too slack nor too tight, keep it from snagging, and always the head turning, turning, checking out the possible dangers above – a tottering overhang, a boulder on a pedestal that could give, rocks frozen into the slope above that could start to roll any minute … Yes, exhausting but exhilarating as we hurry between leaning white walls, past glacier pools, through tunnels of green and white, across dark crevasses, stickleback ridges, following clear trickling streams. All is bright and glittering, it is wonderful to be alive and moving and solving problems with the sun on your back and the air so thin and clear.

  Alex sets me at a couple of perhaps 80-degree walls of ice. I take the small axe out from the harness loop and, with the larger ‘walking’ axe in my other hand, front-point up them. Alex looks rather surprised. I explain that ice climbing is the one thing I’ve been trained to do and that in comparison with Scotland this ice is perfect, no problem at all. It’s great to be doing something familiar, to feel with surprise and pleasure, ‘Yes, I can do this.’

  And from that high point we cut down to the Brew Tent. It looks unlikely and desolate, a blotch of blue slumped in a small flat area below the Icefall. Off with the sacks. Alex puts up the single pole, then starts raking out squares of cardboard, stove, billy, packets of cocoa, coffee, a couple of Granola bars …

  Five minutes later, sitting on cardboard, propped up on our packs, stripped down to our thermal underwear, we’re lounging in the sun with all the ease kings are supposed to have but seldom do. The brew is just coming to the boil, we take our rest and look around our kingdom. There’s nothing to compare with the peace that follows endeavour – except perhaps the relaxation after making love, but without the occasional sadness we have at perfection not quite attained, or perfection gained and now slipping away.

  No, this is peace, perfect peace. Even Alex is content to let silence have its way. A faint whisper of wind, a near or distant slither, the rattle of stonefall, a Whumph! as some boulder drops and sends vibrations through the ice and up our backs. The Mustagh behind us, shattered granite cliffs on either side, looking down the glacier to the soaring Up Yours of the Lobsang Spire … Ourselves lying back here on this little island of safety … The senses ripple out, then echo back. Inside and out, everything is clear and uncluttered.

  I make our customary cocoa-and-coffee brew, pass one over. Alex digs out a packet of K2, passes one over. Reclining in this white world, I have a brief vision of the two of us as unlikely sages taking our ease on the cloud banks of heaven in our thermal underwear and glacier goggles. Our laughter rings in the silence.

  We talk idly as the day heats up. Alex talks about his strange upbringing in the Caribbean, the marvels of Yosemite, guiding and load-carrying in the Cascades. We swap stories, talk of books, places, our plans and ambitions. His bizarre humour and constant clowning have perversely made him difficult to know; for the first time we start to become intimate. We talk of Mal the eternal romantic optimist, of Sandy the taciturn Scot with 90 per cent of himself kept below the surface, like a mellow iceberg. Of Burt whom he describes as a showroom jock – ‘He wants to squeeze the mountains and put them on a wall. I like to let the mountains squeeze me.’

  Eventually it gets too hot to be comfortable. The light is so powerful up here. It comes leaping off the ice, frying the skin and hurting the eyes even through goggles. So we pick up rope and axes and go for another jaunt, into rather wilder country this time. Alex keeps exclaiming over the changes in the week since he was last up here – a new crevasse here, a boulder disappeared there, the whole entrance to the Icefall changed utterly. We jump over the ruins of yesterday’s bridges, tread gingerly on today’s. Up here, the normal pace of creation and destruction is speeded up a hundred times.

  One of my crampons comes off halfway up a 30-foot leaf of ice. I scramble up with difficulty, very annoyed at myself. Alex points out with heavy irony that this isn’t too good a thing to happen in the middle of the Icefall. This training, as everyone emphasizes, is to enable me to move through the dangerous sections as fast as anyone else. It’s as safe a place to hang around as the wrong end of a shooting range.

  I refrain from pointing out that I was aware of this and I don’t go about shedding crampons for the fun of it. I strap on the offending article so tight that I sprain my wrist and have to go easy on it the rest of the day. And still that crampon came loose again. Well, that’s one thing I’ll have to sort out.

  After another hour’s downright hard work, we return to the Brew Tent. I make another brew, feel good but tired. The day up here is good acclimatization as well as practice; another thousand feet up, next time we can sleep up here. ‘Slowly, slowly,’ as Alex always says. It seems to work.

  Mid-afternoon, we rather reluctantly collapse the Brew Tent and set off back down. The crevasse jumps come more easily now, cooler and more controlled. It’s the sort of thing that sounds worse than it is. I begin to see what Alex means about these jumps: don’t try to heave yourself over, it’s more letting your centre of gravity flow across the gap. A transfer rather than a leap. When I hit one of the combination jumps right, it feels oddly graceful and pleasing inside, as near to dancing as one can get, wearing crampons and a rucksack.

  But our exit from the glacier to the rubble above the Ibex Trail is the most unpleasant move of the day. It has fallen apart entirely since the morning. We are faced with a semicontrolled slide down mud over black ice, hoping to brake on a couple of loose rocks, then without pausing jump right across a gulf between ice and rock. We have, rather foolishly, left our crampons back at the collapsing Rock House. So no grip. Again foolishly, Alex goes first, very tentative, then, slipping down the slope, just catches the rocks, twists sideways and is standing on solid ground, looking very relieved.

  I look down at it. With Alex below me, there can be no belay. Only 30 feet down. But if I slip up here, it will put me out of the game. And the nearest hospital? This is stupid.

  Slowly slowly edge onto the mud, crouched, keeping my centre of gravity down, not committing myself till the last minute, down we go … oh shit – jump!

  Fine thing, terra firma.

  ‘This Bertha bitch gets worse every day,’ Alex mutters. ‘One of these days she’s gonna swallow somebody right up.’ I smile, not particularly amused. I know the danger’s there, I’d just rather not talk about it. But it’s wonderful to sit again at the Cave, pull off the Koflachs, untie rope, unbuckle harness, swap ice axe for ski pole. Quiet relief, contentment, done for the day.

  Arrive in Base Camp to be greeted by Jon, Sandy and Jhaved. They’ve been good to me, not patronizing, seeming to appreciate this is a big deal for me. Sandy’s shaved off his beard – does this signify we’re about to get serious?

  Sitting in the Mess Tent tonight, I realize we’re down to the hard core now. The Four Aces, a Poet and a Jester. Together we’re going to crack this mountain.

  You’ve got to believe it.

  Mal radios at 6.00 to announce their safe arrival at Camp 2 with coils of rope for fixing the ice slope up to the Col. They’ve filled in the rest of the day playing chess – Tony is still winning – and listening to music. Thompson Twins: ‘You Take Me Up’.

  We sit up till 8.00, unusually late for here. The hurrica
ne lamp lights on cheekbones, throws shadows round eyes. Hairy, dark-eyed Jhaved squats by the stove, Jon is sprawled back on massacred boxes, Alex spinning the preposterous yarn of Burt, Sybil and the possum, while Sandy grins and nods, hunched over his sewing, myself sitting on the bag of flour taking it all in. With the wind outside, the lamplight and the fluttering tent, it feels as if we’re at sea, on some voyage of adventure through the dark.

  This is what I’ve always wanted. It comes to me with sudden conviction as I look round my companions. There was a special warmth and closeness in our conversation this evening, a reaf-firmation of our comradeship and common endeavour. The others noted it in their diaries too.

  ‘Good value, eh?’ says Sandy about something, as he says about almost anything, and laughs. He and Jon are clearly enjoying normality after six days on the hill, their faces look less swollen now. They want rest, lots of food, privacy and new company – the good things of life, to be stored away for the drawn-out famine of living at altitude.

  I’m writing this by candlelight, my first night in Adrian’s tent. Clothes, gear, tapes, letters all strewn where I bundled them in this morning when Kath and I packed up our old tent. She should be in Lilligo tonight, lying under the stars I shouldn’t wonder, loving it. There’s a curious, resonant hollowness inside, loving someone at a distance. ‘But that’s all right,’ I hear Sandy say inside my head, ‘it’s all good jest, eh?’

  I smile, write this down, blow out the light.

  The next day was one of comparative inactivity. Mal and Tony radioed to say they were pretty shagged out, the weather looked dubious and the pressure was dropping, so they were coming back to Base. That was fine with us. They’d carried the fixed ropes to Camp 2; now it would be Jon and Sandy’s turn to push on ahead with the arduous task of fixing them.

  So we watched their tiny figures come round the corner of the Ibex Trail. As usual, everyone drifted out to meet the returning labourers. Funny how we always need to touch them – a pat on the back, a handshake – as if to assure ourselves of their reality. They do look a bit distant and strange at first, just as Sandy and Jon did. Their faces are swollen with water retention, their eyes slightly glazed with fatigue and distance, as if part of them were still up there in the white world.

  ‘Here you are, youth,’ Mal says, and tosses over his diary. They drop their packs and slump down in the warm sunlight to talk and drink their way back to normality.

  A dull headache for me today, probably a reaction to yesterday’s altitude gain. I sit on a rock above Base Camp, watching the summit of Masherbrum pluck white scarves of spindrift out of blue sky. Clouds come and go all day as the hours drift by.

  Porters turn up with food loads from Askole – sugar, salt, rice, flour. They also bring news that the helicopter had come for Burt and Donna, who are presumably in Skardu by now.

  ‘A nonchalant day,’ Sandy recorded. ‘Jon and I feel as though we’ve recouped our tranquillity. Reinstated our fundamental desire to assault this unremitting mountain again. Yearning now to scale to the Col, to see the remainder of the summit ridge. Will it shrug us or accept us?’

  It’s a rare night that finds us all together – possibly the last one till we’re done here one way or another. Expeditions are a constant coming and going, and the different teams inside them tend to meet only briefly on the hill. So while this was just another casual evening in the Mess Tent of reminiscence and climbing talk as the reggae crackled and the brews kept coming, it was made precious by its transience.

  We’re all so typical of ourselves. Jon sprawled, Sandy smiling and planning, Mal hunched forward, smoking, Tony being earnest and enthusiastic. And me … Oddly enough, I think little of how I appear to them. Waste of energy, really. But I was forced to think about it after Jon brought me his notebook today and murmured, ‘It’s quite nice, really, like having a confessor.’ I was pleased that much of his initial reserve about having A Writer along seems to have left him.

  I opened it at random and read ‘… Candlelight has only two associations – expeditions and romance. Andrew and Kath a lovely couple though maybe they wouldn’t like to be thought of like that! Kath bouncier and happier than I’d expected. Andrew receptive, professional, shy and modest.’ Who, me? Really? Aw, go on … ‘Some of the initial panic has left them as they relax into an environment they feel increasingly at home in …’

  I lay back in my tent and considered this. Yes, when we set out I was probably trying too hard both to ‘fit in’ and to be seen doing my job. And only made myself obtrusive as a result. Now I’m simply here, caught up in it, getting on with it, feeling confident enough to be myself. How odd it is to read about yourself, to see your own name in print. I must remember this when writing about the others, how it must feel for them too. Must make it clear that whatever I write is not gospel, not judgement, just the mood of the moment. I’m not here any more to judge or analyse these people. Perhaps I was at the beginning. Now they’re my friends and companions; I don’t observe, I react.

  Reading through Mal and Jon’s diaries, I’m fascinated, and touched by their trust. Jon’s is elliptical, shot through with curious insights and brief bursts of emotion. Mal’s is detailed and solid, tender about Liz, straightforward.

  Sandy that night was writing in his tent:

  … An interesting realization which has only now penetrated the side-roads of my inadequate head. Andrew asked for access to our diaries. This I like but ask myself now Hey, youth! Are you writing as you normally choose? Am I recording my real feelings, or only ones that I think that other people think I should have? Good value, that, I enjoy when my head asks my head such questions. Another boulder to look under. Should I be clear-headed, or inebriated? Is this expedition permanent or transitory? Never been in this position before, find the idea entertaining … But I am as I am, as I have been educated and reared to be, slightly off-track but who the hell ain’t? Anyhow, if I live long enough, perhaps I’ll look back through these scribbles and shall be able to decipher my rudimentary simplicity. That’s okay. Yes, I think so. Reality – fictitious word, that. What’s it mean? I wonder what Alex’s Zen dictionary says for it.

  But sleep now. ‘Me, Myself, I’ on the headphones – why did Andrew give me that cassette? I wonder what he intended. Remember to ask the youth that … The more I know him the more I like him – or am I just writing false face words again … Don’t know, I’ve only been here for twenty-eight years!

  But sleep now, drift to a better place, an equally pretty paradise, hello, Dominique …

  Four diaries, four inner worlds drifting in the mountains, touching like soap bubbles and bouncing away again. It’s obvious that all the people we meet, even the most apparently straightforward, have their complex, fervent inner life. Yet we keep forgetting it. The diaries are a salutary reminder that we’re each a unique world in ourselves, and that there are as many expeditions as there are members of that expedition. This book is even more subjective than I’d originally conceded.

  Jon and Sandy set off this morning, 18 July, to fix rope up to the Col. One day to Camp 1, another to Camp 2, then probably two days fixing the ropes, and another day to come back. It seems so drawn out and laborious. This is the brutal, unspectacular stage of the climb, the time of sheer slog with little apparent gain, the real testing time. When it’s hard to motivate yourself, when you can no longer remember a good reason for all this pain and repetition.

  But get up they do, and as we watch them trudge up the Ibex Trail for what must be the tenth time, I think of Jon’s summary of the three essential abilities of a Himalayan climber:

  To get up in the morning

  To keep putting one foot in front of the other

  Tolerance.

  All of which Sandy has in abundance. Massive competence and backbone, without the obvious brilliance of others I’ve climbed with. Very reassuring to sometimes sense his doubts, though! Inshallah we will emerge from this trip firm friends – we already behave a bit like a long
-married couple, thinking similarly, tolerating each other’s fetishes, arguments over in seconds.

  – The sheer mundaneness of Himalayan climbing! Why should one have to physically suffer so much to appreciate this scenery? Is this why museums are always freezing?

  Mal and Tony luxuriate in getting up late, eating and drinking as often and as much as they want. Tony, by far the cleanest and tidiest of us, sets off for a wash in the stream twenty minutes away. Today they’re resting, tomorrow they’ll be restless. I’m amazed and moved at these lads’ stamina and persistence, epitomized for me in Mal’s dogged, head-down trudging walk. It seems to say, ‘This may not be fun or fast, and I’m not feeling very well today, and I’ve forgotten why I’m doing this – but I’m damned if I’ll stop.’

  Restless myself, on impulse I packed a light sack and set off up the Mustagh glacier towards ‘China Mountain’. Good going at first, feeling strong and exhilarated as so often in the mornings here. Good to be alone, good to be moving and making my own decisions. Then the glacier became scored by fissures, which deepened into crevasses; I jumped them with increasing difficulty till I came on a fifteen-foot wide one with overhanging walls. No crampons, rope or ice axe. So I follow it along, cross lower down, come on another one, thread round it … In twenty minutes I was way off my course and could not really remember by what tortuous route I’d arrived there. Get out of this one, Greig.

  There seemed to be an exit right that might take me off the glacier onto the rubble and grass beyond our washing stream. I do it, as fast as possible, over rubble-strewn ice, across a couple of narrow bands of ice like slices of a 500-foot-deep loaf of bread, a precarious slide and jump down a mud slope, quickly under an overhanging section, then clawing up the mud and boulder pinnacle on the far side.