Far, Far The Mountain Peak

by John Masters

  It was microscopic work all the way, and the vastness of Meru resolved itself into an infinity of grains of rock, crystals of snow. Climbing was not climbing, but painful minutes of placing the foot and supporting the body in exactly the right balance on each of a thousand narrow holds; of levelling ice on which to place the gloved hand; of exerting exactly the right amount of force from the thighs, pressing up just so fast, no faster, holding each rhythmic move to the fineness of a pendulum’s swing.. . . The surface of the rock crawled, minute by minute, downward past his face, an inch, a foot, a yard away from his goggles. He forgot the shape of the Wilcot Ridge, but he knew the facets of each tiny excrescence round which he anchored the rope, and knew the exact tone of each grey and green fleck in the stone, the texture under his gloved hands of the two-inch cracks in the cliff--but once a blue vein of ice had filled the cleft, and there was no hold. He leaned against the mountain and groaned. A whole length of fixed rope was useless, for it depended on the climber’s being able to put his fingers in that crack. Minutes later he unroped, went up alone, hammered out the peg, refixed the rope. If he had had to think, he could not have done it; but he was inwardly prepared for any and every evil device of that mountain, and moments of thought were rare and painful.

  They moved, of course--someone, on one of the four ropes, was always moving--but whenever he looked down he saw the same scene: nine men, blind-goggled and still as tortoises, and as heavily bowed under the huge carapaces of their loads, dark-green-clothed, mottled with white for the snow ‘drifted’ against the lee side of each man as he climbed, as though he were a small fang of rock. The four lengths of rope fell straight, successive narrow streams of light, from man to man. Cloud was the far floor, and then came the sensation of falling, of a swooping, endless dive into space as the floor opened and the green light played like water below him, swimming down, down, bottomless, no stillness of earth or land or water or life to hold it, only the plunging air.

  He didn’t think they spoke a dozen words among the ten of them in the whole ascent, and at half-past eleven, as slowly as they had climbed, they came off the foot of Cleopatra’s Needle, and it was done. Slowly they began to pitch the camp. They meant to work as fast as possible, because there was no time to waste, but the altitude and the rhythmic slowness of the passage of the Needles had taken possession of them, and that was how they moved and thought and acted.

  In three-quarters of an hour the work was finished. For another half-hour they rested, pushed chocolate into their mouths, and tried to swallow, chewing endlessly on the tasteless mush. Listlessly they tried to melt snow, and failed. . . . Couldn’t wait any more. The compulsion was on him to continue the slow, hypnotic crawl. A little before one o’clock he and Harry made ready to begin their descent with the Sherpas.

  He said: ‘Good luck, George. Good luck, Oscar. Billy and I will be up here by noon tomorrow, weather permitting.’

  It was a fine afternoon by then, for Meru, and the summit, seemed very near--up the nevé, up a ridge, some dark rock, up . . . up . . . about 2,500 feet. Nothing much, after a night’s rest. Oscar said suddenly: ‘Look here, Peter, let me go down with Harry. You try with George tomorrow.’

  Peter shook his head. He had thought of this, but there were two sound reasons why he should not go in the first party. One was that he was the leader of the expedition, and they had still not quite used up their ‘leeway of decision.’ In the main he had been keeping to the middle of the expedition during the early stages, because there were choices to be made, decisions to be pondered--they could go by this or that route; they could rest a day or move on; they could launch either X or Y on such-and-such an attempt or reconnaissance. He had kept himself in a position where he could receive information from all sources, ahead and behind, above and below, and make the decisions. As they progressed up the mountain the number of choices, in terms of time and place and personality, gradually lessened, and as gradually he worked his way nearer the front. They had now almost reached the end of all choice--but not quite. Someone still had to decide whether the second attempt should be launched--what to do, what risks among many to take if there were a day’s delay up at Camp IV, who to send if the Count, his eye healed, suddenly appeared at Camp III. Tonight, or the following morning, he could afford to spend his own last effort, but not before.

  Secondly, and considerably more important, was the fact that the vital task before them at that instant was not the ascent of Meru but the safe return of the Sherpas to Camp III. For this he would choose the best men available, and those were himself and Harry Walsh. If Harry had been in bad shape Peter would not have hesitated to leave him at Camp IV, thus preventing any attempt on the summit the following day. But fortunately he was going strong, and in a fine, loose way that made even his slowest movements a joy to watch.

  Oscar said: ‘Well--we’ll do our damnedest. . . . Want us to bring a piece of rock down from the top for you?’

  They shook hands--again the slow-motion movements. Then Peter turned and began to plod through the thick snow towards the towering ice sheath of Cleopatra’s Needle.

  They were in two cordées this time, Harry and himself each behind three Sherpas. Four was an uncomfortably large number sometimes, especially in the ascent of a really severe pitch with few anchor points, but on this journey Peter thought it might have its advantages. He gave plenty of rope between each man, thinking that when conditions allowed he would keep the last three on the rope anchored close together while the first went down the whole length of each pitch; the three of them could hold him if he fell. Number 2 would follow in the same way; Number 3 was the danger position, since there were several places where the anchor man alone could not hold him if he fell. In such places Harry would join Peter and they’d send them all down one by one. Harry and himself, of course, like any last man on a rope, could not fall. If they did they were not, and would promptly cease to be, mountaineers. This was a hard rule of mountaineering--one of the few there were--and, once understood, it forced a man into a very mature relationship with his capacities. Peter thought grimly that he had never understood the rule better, and had never been less sure that he could obey it.

  On the first pitch he made everyone go up and come down again, as though they were on a practice slope in Wales. He did this because he had suddenly felt very queer in the balance and realized only when his first man was launched on the slope that his rucksack was empty. His centre of balance had shifted, but work and the dull rhythm of it at Camp IV had so numbed him that he had not noticed it; so he tried to make sure that everyone consciously thought about his new balance during the first few pitches. Then they began in earnest.

  The descent took four and a half hours. They moved fast enough when they were moving, but the times seemed endless when they were changing positions on the rope. Harry and he took the rear only when the general direction of a pitch was downwards; when the general direction was upwards, they led; when a single pitch went both up and down, they prayed. Three times they unroped and took the Sherpas down really dangerous pitches between them, one at a time. The descent was made possible, in these circumstances, only by the great strength and steady nerves of the Sherpas. Whatever happened now, the experiment of using them had succeeded. With further technical training, there was no limit to what they could do.

  There was one near-accident, when the third man on Harry’s rope, who was the strongest climber of the three, slipped on an easy hold and hurtled out over the Bowl. From above Peter heard the faint scream, looked, and thought that Harry and the Sherpa were both gone--and perhaps the lower two as well, unless the rope broke. But Harry’s work with his rock and body belay was instantaneous and faultless, so that although he was jerked half off his hold, and the rope must have stretched to the fullest it was capable of without snapping, he held the man and held his own position. The Sherpa broke his nose as he swung back against the cliff, and then the three of them managed to lower and haul him to safety. Peter thought that that o
ne act more than wiped out any debt Harry may have owed them for his decision of the night before. Next time they were together again, about half an hour later--there were not many places on the Needle Traverse where a whole party could meet--and after he had looked at the Sherpa’s broken nose, he croaked to Harry: ‘I suppose ... you realize that fellow will be responsible ... for raping the Goddess Mother of the Snows . . . someday? . . . Why didn’t you let him fall?’

  Harry grinned wearily, and Peter translated the joke to the Sherpas. If they had had the energy to laugh, they would have. They knew about Harry’s decision, of course, and thoroughly sympathized with it. The sanctity of high peaks, especially Chomolungma (the Goddess Mother of the Snows, Everest) was nothing strange to them in their own country, and they felt a new bond with Harry that his ignorance of their language had prevented from forming before; also his good manners had not been able to conceal from those shrewd and open souls this ‘outer layer’ of race pride, which made him feel that they were inferior. Now they regarded him much as they might have regarded an old-fashioned lama in their own high valley. They were emancipated; they knew it was all right (so they reassured themselves) to tread the summits of the great peaks; but there was still, as there usually is, an even greater respect for the man who sticks to the old beliefs.

  Then they went on down, and about half an hour before the end were joined by Billy Barnes. Peter reprimanded him with what energy he had left, but there he was, and he did useful work on the rope for the rest of the way down.

  At a quarter to six they reached Camp III after the hardest day’s mountaineering in Peter’s experience, and found Subadar Tilakbir and Dr Zaman Khan. The latter had a severe headache, was green with exhaustion, and vomited every hour with the regularity of a clock; but he was wildly proud and happy to be here and Peter could not find the heart to send him down. Tilakbir saluted, and reported bluntly that all was well below and that he had come to help climb the mountain now that two of the sahibs were out of action.

  That was impossible, but Peter could still feel pleasure that they had disobeyed his orders. He knew that he wouldn’t have been pleased ten years before; and that they wouldn’t have done it. So he berated them soundly, asked Harry to take charge of anything that needed attention, and retired to one of the tents. There he struggled out of his boots and gloves and curled up in his sleeping-bag. He felt very tired, and tomorrow he and Billy Barnes would have to reascend the Needles. Up at Camp IV Oscar and George would be sleeping already--well, they would be trying to; sleep was as hard to catch as appetite at high altitudes.

  Next morning at dawn he had a brief conference with Harry about the arrangements for the retreat from the mountain. This was June 20. The first attempt would be made today, the second and last tomorrow, June 21. There were decisions to be made about who was to bring down what, what to do in case of bad weather. Finally all was settled, and Peter thought: Those are my last decisions--except one.

  At nine o’clock he set off with Billy Barnes. Conditions on the Needles seemed to be almost imperceptibly better about eleven each morning than at any other time, and there was a nice balance to be attained between getting too little rest at III and too little at IV; yet they must be up at IV in good time, in case Oscar and George were in trouble.

  Billy’s day of comparative ease at Camp III had done wonders for him. None of the rest of them would have benefited so much, but he had the resilience of youth, and after an hour Peter asked him to lead. He was still enough of a schoolboy to flush at the implied compliment. (Peter supposed he flushed; nothing was visible through the blond beard and the sun-blackened skin: but he bridled and stammered: ‘If--if you think so, Peter. Thanks.’) The climbing itself seemed to be almost easy after the two trips with the Sherpas, and their loads were light, yet Peter did not feel cheerful. His legs felt like thick cylinders of dough, and he had lost the precious rhythm of his breathing. He continuously prayed that Oscar and George had reached the summit, so that he would not have to go. Yet that would be a most bitter blow for young Billy, who had set his heart on climbing Meru, and with his hero. The mountains were a glorious battleground to him, lit by scenes of heroism and treachery. He would not betray Peter, as Peter’s own best friend had done. He would not leave him, as others had done time and again in the legendary days before the war, when Peter Savage and Gerry Wilcot did twenty-four major peaks in fourteen days and Geoffrey Winthrop Young went from the Schonbühl hut to the Hornli hut, over the summit of the Matterhorn, in four hours, fifty-seven minutes . . .

  They came down the north face of Cleopatra’s, going very carefully, at noon. The tents of Camp IV were tucked against the leeward side of a small crag about two hundred feet from the base of the Needle. A heavy snowfall would have caused them to be buried under five or six feet of drift, but the only alternative, the windward side of the same crag, was made impossible by the force of the wind itself. It was an awesomely barren sight --the steep slopes of snow and ice ahead, the black and green rock patches jutting out among them, the two tents whipping and banging, the R.G.S. and Alpine Club pennants, already frayed, streaming from the ridge poles.

  They spent ten minutes scanning the slopes that led towards the summit, and then crawled into one of the tents.

  Peter lay uncomfortably on his back. He should have clumped round collecting snow. He should have lit the Primus and had water on the boil against the return of the summit party. He should have taken off his boots. ... He did nothing. After an hour Billy, who had dozed off, scrambled to his feet and set to work, leaving Peter alone.

  He wondered fitfully whether Oscar and George had succeeded. He prayed that they had; then hastily invited God to cancel that last prayer. Gerry wanted him to climb the mountain, because Gerry must understand by now that it was not he who had shot him dead on the summit of Monte Michele. Emily wanted him to climb it--because he wanted to. But he didn’t. Yes, he did. . . . Even Harry wanted him to climb it--no, he didn’t. But Harry would prefer it to be he if it had to be done. When rape is inevitable, hope it’s your friend who does it. That applied.

  Billy put his head through the flap and shouted: ‘I can see them--five hundred feet up--coming very slowly.’

  ‘Do they want help?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes--no, I don’t think so. It looks a simple slope, but they-- they’re coming very slowly. Mind if I go and give them a hand? I’m ready.’

  ‘All right,’ Peter said. The head vanished. Cursing, Peter found his gloves and crawled out into the shrieking wind.

  Billy was trudging slowly away from him, towards two motionless dark shapes on the nevé to the west. The sun flashed on something at the summit of the mountain and glared slowly into Peter’s goggles. Had they left something up there?

  He felt a slow welling-up of horrible disappointment. His legs trembled.

  The two shapes were moving, like black snails--slower than that. Three hundred feet an hour, downhill, on an even slope. At that rate they couldn’t have gone far. But they’d have started out faster.

  The group seemed to move a little more quickly when Billy joined them. It was over an hour before they reached the tents. By then Peter had cocoa made, and he knew they had failed.

  Oscar was in slightly worse shape than George, but both of them were finished. Tomorrow, Peter thought, he’d be like that.

  ‘I couldn’t go on,’ Oscar muttered.

  About half an hour later, when they’d drunk a little cocoa, George said: ‘We went up . . . easy . . . but slow. Got to the crest of the nevé . . . there . . . about ten-thirty.’

  Oscar said: ‘I was sick . . . vomiting.’

  ‘Had to wait half an hour.’

  ‘Went on.’

  ‘There’s an ice slope ... we were doing a hundred feet an hour there . . . half-past twelve ... at the top of that... I was feeling rotten.’

  ‘I couldn’t go on,’ Oscar croaked, staring at Peter. ‘I couldn’t. . .’

  ‘We’d got to a rock ridge. . . .’ />
  ‘Couldn’t make it. Sorry.’

  Peter thought that must be the place where the rope broke in 1913--the invisible rope by which he was dragging Gerry up the mountain and through his life.

  They continued to try to eat. Peter made some sort of arrangements for the next day. The others would stay here in case Billy and he got into trouble. There was little that could be done about it if they did. The weather looked promising. A bright evening ascended stealthily on them from that unknown and unreal world below their platform, the pale sky darkening, glowing in fire and ash behind Meru.

  George Norris said: ‘It’s the height. Nothing really difficult up there. Next time we’ll have to try oxygen.’

  Peter shook his head numbly.

  ‘We will,’ George repeated with indomitable anger. ‘It’s impossible up there. You can’t breathe. How did you feel in ‘thirteen?’

  ‘All right,’ he said. But he had been using Gerry’s heart as well as his own in those days. ‘I won’t use oxygen,’ he said.

  But this was going to be his last expedition to Meru, so it was an easy thing for him to say. He thought wearily: Here’s another pulpit in the theology of mountaineering. He had hardly thought about it before, but now he knew he did not intend to use oxygen to climb this or any mountain. Why not fly over the summit and jump out with a parachute? Or be lowered from a hovering dirigible? Better still, why not stay at home and read about someone else flying over the mountain and taking a photograph of it?

  ‘You use crampons and pegs, don’t you?’ George snarled. ‘Damn it, you used them first, on Meru.’

  ‘That’s different,’ Peter said.

  Perhaps it was a valid retort; perhaps it wasn’t. There were as many pulpits as there were mountaineers. Why didn’t he insist that all mountains must be climbed stark naked, without the use of any artificial equipment of any kind? If that were done he would in fact be joining Harry Walsh and his sect, because all the great mountain peaks of the world and most of the lesser ones would hold their inviolability until some cataclysm turned men back into sapient monkeys. A hairy ape could shin up Meru in no time, but would that make him a mountaineer? He must ask Harry . . .