Far, Far The Mountain Peak

by John Masters

  So they did it and on the third evening, just before dark, stepped down from the last pitch on Needle One and staggered slowly towards Camp III. Extra tents had appeared there during the day, and Peter saw all the uninjured Sherpas, plus the two Rudwalis who had proved themselves. He also saw several climbers coming out to greet him, but he could not be bothered to register even who they were. Their presence meant the arrival upon him of the next problem, and he didn’t want to think about it. It was something to do with who was going to climb the bloody mountain and who was going to do some other bloody job.

  He didn’t want to climb Meru any more. For three hours George Norris and he had been quarrelling, in single long-spaced words thrown at each other like darts, about the placing of a peg he had hammered in the day before. He didn’t want to see George again, and he didn’t care where George went or what he did. There would be a crowd in the tents that night, which would not mean extra warmth, only more discomfort, a thicker layer of greasy sweat and congealed breath on the underside of the canvas in the morning. The wind droned and roared, and neither of the Primuses would light.

  He opened a tin of sweetened condensed milk and began to force some down his throat. One of the Sherpas was trying to take off his boots and massage his feet--no, it was a Rudwali, Baldev. He told the man that he had no intention of allowing him up the Needles and he could bloody well go down to Camp II the next day. Baldev said nothing but went on with his work.

  After about half an hour Harry said: ‘Who’s to go to Four tomorrow, Peter?’

  ‘I’ll decide in the morning,’ he said.

  ‘That’ll be too late,’ Harry said gently, insistently. ‘They’ll have to leave early.’

  Peter scowled at him, but it was true. Four climbers had to go over the Needles tomorrow. Two would bring the Sherpas back the same day, weather permitting. Two would try for the summit the following day.

  ‘Robin and the Count, to begin with,’ he said. He knew perfectly well that Robin was at Juniper and the Count had a bad eye. He only wanted to annoy Harry.

  Harry said: ‘The Count’s eye is worse. I’ve sent him back to Juniper.’

  Oh, God, how he hated the mountain Meru! Hate and fear formed a numb, terrifying pain, like a rock crushing a frozen finger. These past three nights he had dreamed about the mountain, and in the dreams it was leaning over his son Rodney, and Gerry was there (they ought to have brought that ice-axe up again somehow), and so was Emily, all as it had been during real life; but the dreams were more unpleasant than the reality, for all its tragedies, having many elements of the grotesque and the sordid.

  Harry’s voice reached him. ‘You must decide now, Peter.’

  Slowly he began to think. First he looked around at their faces. Baldev had gone, and Billy Barnes had come in to take his place. Harry Walsh was here. No room for any more.

  ‘Who else is up here at Three?’ he asked.

  ‘Oscar and George,’ Harry said, ‘in the other tent.’

  The Count at Juniper with a bad eye. Robin at Juniper with the sick Sherpa. Five of them at Camp III. That made seven, the total.

  Billy Barnes seemed tired, and his eyes were wild. His scruffy blond beard made him look like a probationary Viking or a young albino Sikh. ‘How are you feeling, Billy?’ Peter asked him.

  ‘I’m all right,’ Billy said and shut his mouth with a snap.

  ‘I don’t think Billy’s really fit,’ Harry said quietly--’quietly’ meant that Peter could just hear him against the wind and the raucous tent, though he spoke loudly enough. ‘I think he ought to have another day’s rest. He took a lot out of himself in the rescue.’

  ‘We’d all be a lot fitter if you hadn’t recommended Pahlwan to be promoted,’ Billy said, and shut his mouth again with the same snap.

  ‘That was my decision,’ Peter said.

  ‘He pushed you to----’ Billy began, but Peter cut him off-- ‘Shut up, Billy.... Well, George and I will take the Sherpas up and down. We know the Needles better than anyone... Harry, you and Oscar follow us at noon and try for the top the next day. No, come with us. We’ll need all the help we can get with the porters. Billy, you stay here. Then, the next day, you’ll go up to Camp Four with whoever’s the fitter of George and myself, and try for the top the day after, if Harry and Oscar fail.’ He stopped, panting from the effort of the long speech.

  ‘They’ll fail,’ Billy burst out angrily. ‘Oscar can’t make it by himself.’

  Peter turned slowly then and stared straight at him. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked. ‘Are you suggesting--that Harry isn’t even going to try?’

  ‘Yes--yes, I am,’ Billy stammered. ‘That’s just what I’m suggesting, sir. I knew Walsh would let you down! He isn’t going to try--because he’s windy. He’s afraid.’

  Peter said: ‘You’d better go down the mountain tomorrow, Billy. When you feel better, you can tell Harry you’re sorry ... There’ll only be one attempt, Harry, unless both George and I are feeling strong enough the day after tomorrow . . . very unlikely.’ He had a splitting headache and would have liked to shoot someone.

  Harry began to speak then. He said: ‘Billy’s reason is wrong --but his fact is right. I don’t want to climb Meru.’

  ‘Good God, nor do I,’ Peter snarled. ‘Everyone’s feeling the same.’

  ‘I’m not,’ Billy cut in with a grim satisfaction.

  Harry said: ‘I meant to wait. . . until you said who was to go in the summit parties... and only speak if you included me. You did ... but I should have spoken sooner ... in any event. That’s what I’ve been finding out.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Peter snarled.

  ‘I don’t want to climb Meru. Don’t want to get to the top,’ Harry said.

  Peter thought that he himself was going mad with the headache, the three terrible days on the Needles, and his dreams of the mountain and Emily and Gerry. But Billy’s haggard, angrily triumphant face told him he was sane enough.

  He screamed at Harry: ‘You don’t want to climb Meru? Why wait till now, tell us? You’ve taken our food, used the money, people have collected . . . now, when we need you, you don’t want to come.’

  ‘He’s got the wind up,’ Billy Barnes said with that venomous happiness, his eyes glowing red in the dim light of the guttering lantern.

  Peter’s eyes burned with pain. Where had he seen an expression, heard a voice pitched that way before? . . . Peggy, in the bad times. Gradually the physical pain in his head and the sense of baffled frenzy in his mind ebbed away. He looked at Harry, a foot away, and saw that he was perfectly calm, though sorry that he should have had to do this.

  He said: ‘Tell me, Harry.’

  Harry began at once, as though he had been waiting for Peter to join him on the platform of new understanding he had just reached. He spoke slowly and gathered his breath between the clipped, telegraphic phrases. He was as tired as the rest of them. He said: ‘I don’t think Meru ought to be climbed. So I am afraid, if you send me, I will be looking for excuses, to turn back, without knowing it. Not muscles that give in first, up here, but will. My will, not there, to begin with.’

  ‘This is a sudden change, isn’t it?’ Peter said, and he couldn’t help the bitterness creeping into his voice. ‘Remember our talk, by the blue lake?’

  Harry said: ‘Look, why don’t I think Meru ought to be climbed?--I believe, some mountains should never be climbed, but should be left. Symbols of the unknown thing, we strive for, altars to the Unknown God--Everest. This one. The Matterhorn. Whymper was wrong, to keep on and on, at the Matterhorn. Like seducing a special, proud, untouchable kind of girl. If you finally succeed--and you always will, if you go on--you make the girl, into a woman. But if you don’t, if you deny yourself, after you’ve found, that she’s different, special, then she stays different. She has a different meaning, greater. Has any wife, whore, courtesan, lover, meant--what Joan of Arc, means?’

  Peter listened carefully, torn by unwilling anger and u
nwilling understanding. Harry Walsh was announcing that he had a mystic-romantic strain in him; but he had chosen a bad time to do it. This attitude towards certain mountains that had come to be regarded as symbols of the mountaineer’s craft and art was not rare. At least a quarter of the people who said: ‘Everest will not be climbed,’ secretly meant ‘Everest should not be climbed,’ but were too afraid of mysticism to say so. Peter had also noticed that there seemed to be some obscure mechanism linking the ability to climb with the desire to preserve, so that it was only those mountaineers sensitive to this virginal quality of the highest peaks who were capable of ascending them. But most of them climbed on anyway, and if they had been forced to reconcile the two points of view they would probably have said what he would have liked to say now: It is not for us to set certain mountains apart; they must do it, by remaining inviolable. They had all discussed the subject one evening on the march up, in a camp by a blue salt lake, and Harry had agreed with the ‘rational’ point of view--but mountaineering is never truly ‘rational.’ They had been talking about some of the comedies and mishaps of the preparations at the London end, and in particular the character of a rural dean and first- class Alpinist who had written to The Times regretting their expedition as a desecration of this particular sacred high place. The letter was written with great charm and out of deep love for the mountains, but with a kind of pagan theology and metaphysical tortuousness which, they had decided, must have made the good cleric’s bishop blow his nose with more than episcopal force when he read it.

  Now Harry had struck them with the same mystically phosphorescent but nevertheless beautiful thunderbolt, and Peter’s sympathy dissolved in anger. By God, Meru would be climbed, in spite of Harry. He grated: ‘You don’t mind, us trying for the summit? I mean, you won’t cut the ropes, file the pegs?’ As soon as he had spoken, while Harry was still looking unhappily at him, the bitterness passed. ‘Sorry, Harry,’ he said. ‘Of course I accept your position. Work between Camps Three and Four---‘

  ‘Haven’t finished, Peter,’ Harry said. ‘Why am I here?’

  ‘Because Peter wanted to give you a chance--to make people forget that photograph,’ Billy said.

  ‘Not people,’ Harry said. ‘Me. People are all right. It was me, I couldn’t come to terms with.’

  Outside the wind had lessened, and Harry realized he had been shouting needlessly loudly. He paused and collected himself, leaning his head down as though gathering his strength for the ascent of a long, steep pitch. Peter eased his own position in the crowded tent. Now that the wind had slackened there seemed more room, for the wind had been like a physical presence in here with them, and now it had gone away for a moment. It would be back. Meanwhile, he could breathe more easily.

  Harry spoke more rationally, though still slowly. ‘Somewhere, before I came out this time, I started looking at myself. I had been a coward. I ought to feel I was a cur. I didn’t. Not when I really tried. What I’d been standing on, all my life, was cracked, and down below, where I had to look because everywhere else was so--inexplicable, was the idea that cowardice did not disgust me.’

  Young Billy Barnes snorted aloud. Peter said: ‘Keep quiet, Billy, or go into the other tent.’

  ’Stay, Billy,’ Harry said. ‘It didn’t matter what I found down there, only that it was different from what was on top. I tried the same with other things--gluttony, greed, honesty--all kinds of things, that I knew I either admired or despised. Sometimes, in the lower layer, I found the same feeling there was on top. Sometimes I found something different. I tried saying aloud what I really felt, but to myself. I began with the easy ones-- “Shyam Singh eats till he’s sick. I don’t mind.” Slowly I got most of the lower level uncovered. I wasn’t strong enough to show it to anyone else yet. . . .’

  He was looking at Peter and speaking very slowly, partly from fatigue and partly as though it were a difficult lesson and Peter a willing but slow-witted child.

  Peter said: ‘It took a lot to split the outer case.’

  Harry said: ‘The whole war, and then the earthquake, and what I did there. ... I came to the conclusion that people-- parents, Eton, Kings, the Alpine Club--had been building a cocoon round me, from the day I was born. It was hard. It couldn’t give. It could only crack, split.’

  ‘You didn’t find you were a coward?’ Peter said.

  ‘No. Only that I didn’t really abhor cowardice. That was enough--to make the crack happen in that place, when the pressure got too great, I suppose. . . . For a couple of months I’ve been throwing the top layer away. The one that I’ve lived by all my life. After that talk by the lake I began to think about mountaineering. . . . Hadn’t dared before, but then I had to. Was my mountaineering inner or outer layer? It’s taken a long time, and I’m really sorry, Peter, but, during the rescue business, I finally scraped away the plaster--and found--what I told you.’ ‘You’re not going to give up climbing?’

  Harry shook his head. ‘No. But I’ll be unhappy when Meru is climbed, and I’ve got to live, by what I’ve found, I really believe.... By God, Peter, already I feel--as if I’d just been let out of a strait-jacket.’

  They were all quiet for a long time, while the rising wind whistled a querulous commentary on man’s fitfully splendid soul.

  At length Peter said: ‘Billy, go and tell George and Oscar that they’re to make the first attempt. You and I will make the second. If there’s any need.’

  ‘I’ll be fit enough by then,’ Billy said. He turned in the low doorway of the tent and said: ‘I still think Walsh has got the wind up.’ Then he went out.

  Peter prepared to sleep, bade Harry good night, and lay down. A pair of smelly socks were under his nose, but his headache had gone. He brooded morosely on Harry.

  There was nothing to be ashamed of in his attitude, except that when it came to the point--Do, or Not Do--most mountaineers of the class capable of climbing such a peak as this finally overcame or suppressed their qualms. . . . But that was Harry’s point. He had found that he had been living in a plaster case of correct emotions and proper, even noble, sentiments. He could no longer pretend.

  Well, then, why hadn’t his damned truth come out quicker? He should have spoken earlier, and then he could have been used more in the rescue and on the lower ridges, instead of being saved for the high work. He had a barefaced gall, to make his announcement now, of all times, when they needed him most! When Billy Barnes, his only enemy, was in the best position to lay it to cowardice and throw the accusation in his face!

  Peter stiffened with a jolt of understanding more painful than an electric shock. By God, he was a fool! He was not fit to be charged with the supervision of two corporation dustmen, let alone the activities of these highly strung, magnificently fit, and dedicated men--examples, as he believed, of the highest that his race or any race could produce. Harry was sleeping already; Peter could hear his regular breathing, an occasional stertorous groan and snore, sound sleep for these altitudes. He had called Harry ‘traitor’ and hinted that he was mad, and worse; Billy had flung the photograph at him; Harry had turned away his face from the mountain that had meant so much to him for so long--and he was sleeping soundly.

  The first object of the expedition was accomplished. Harry had solved the problem that the evil moment at Rudwal had set him. He had been a great gentleman; he could now become a great human being, for he had found and demolished the barriers. What kind of priggishness was it to complain that Harry’s solution had been wholly unexpected?

  Peter decided, groaning, that he had been a pompous ass.

  He had somehow imagined that there could be only one solution--that Harry would find his old armour, new-burnished, by his feats of endurance and courage on Meru. How much greater was this quiet denial, and how much more powerful a proof of inner contentment! Almost anything else would have been easier for Harry to say and do than what he had said and done. So strongly were the circumstances set against him, so perfectly did his surmounting of them prove his
new, supple strength, that Peter wondered whether his sense of the inviolateness of Meru could not have been created by him from what he had found of his real character--not already existing in it-- in order to put himself to just this test.

  It was possible, but that was an area Harry could investigate, if he cared to, in the company of Viennese doctors with black beards and blacker notions about their mothers.

  For himself, he had Meru to think of, and, unfortunately but unavoidably, the bruised personality of young Billy Barnes, who might have been a post-war version of himself when young.

  Chapter 42

  At half-past six the next morning the four of them set off with the five Sherpas and Baldev. Some snow had fallen during the night, and the wind was blowing with its usual maniacal fierceness, whipping the snow like frozen sand into their faces. They were roped into four cordées, each climber with one Sherpa, except that Peter and Harry took two each. They were all heavily loaded, climbers and Sherpas alike, for the whole of Camp IV had to be made ready in this one trip, and they were carrying tentage, stores, bedding, and food sufficient to last two men for three nights, plus a reserve in case the weather grew worse. Certain types of weather--an ice storm, for example--would make the Needles absolutely impassable for two or three days on end, and then whoever was at Camp IV would have to stay there until conditions changed.

  It was mountaineering of a different dimension from anything any of them had done before. Though Peter, at least, by now knew the Needles as intimately as a man knows every loathsome wrinkle and malicious mannerism of a hated wife, they were still full of venomous surprises. He did not think he had ever felt such a continuous heat of admiration as he did for the Sherpas. Indeed it was the fervour of his admiration for them that kept him warm and enabled him to lead up and over the whole five-hour ordeal without a mistake.