The Beckoning Silence (7 page)

‘Sounds stupid, eh?’ Tat said. ‘It’s been bugging me for a while now and it was only when I arrived out here that I knew it was over and I didn’t want to do this any more.’

‘Do what?’

‘Climb,’ Tat said quietly and I sat there, stunned into silence.

‘My heart’s not in it any more, not like it used to be. It’s all changed now, nothing like when we started.’

‘Yeah, well things do change, Tat …’

‘Oh, I know that, but I don’t think I’m doing anything different any more. It always seemed to be uniquely ours. There weren’t so many people doing it. Now everyone and his mother does it. It’s not special, not like it was …’

‘Hey, hang on,’ I said abruptly. ‘So other people do it too. What’s the problem with that? We can just go where they’re not, do things they haven’t done. That was the point, wasn’t it?’

‘Oh, hell, I’m not saying this right.’ Tat grimaced. ‘I mean I’ve done everything I ever wanted to do in the mountains. More, in fact, than I would ever have dreamed possible. So have you. We’ve been everywhere. We’re not going to do any better. At least I’m not. I’ve done new routes. I’ve had all the epics and the fun. I’m not going to beat that. I don’t want to.’

‘This is a bit sudden,’ I murmured. ‘Your timing does seem a bit off.’

‘Hey, I’m sorry, Joe. I don’t want to screw up your plans. I mean, I know you want to do this route. I just don’t love it any more. I don’t want the risks; don’t want the effort. I’m tired of these trips. I’d rather go on a whole load of one-week holidays than do this. You know, a week paragliding, a week skiing with the boys, maybe some ice climbing in La Grave, that sort of thing. It’s more fun.’

‘Ice climbing?’ I interrupted. ‘So you do still want to climb?’

‘Well, yeah, that doesn’t count really. I mean a bit of sport climbing in Corsica or some ice cascades in Italy … well, that’s fun. But not this, not this mountaineering any more. I’m sorry to drop this on you, kid, but I just want to go home.’

‘Right, OK.’ I wasn’t sure what to say. ‘Have you mentioned this to Kate?’

‘Yeah, she was OK with it. She understood.’

Give up climbing! Is this how it happens?
I thought as Tat stood up and wandered back to the tents.
I suppose you have to stop some day. I mean you always told yourself you would. When the legs hurt too much, you said. Do they hurt enough now? Yeah, they do, if I’m honest. Maybe he has a point.

I thought of the ice avalanche on Chaupi Orco only a week before and how it had unsettled me. I was tired of all the deaths. They seemed inexorable, as if they were moving in, moving closer. How many times recently had I looked around and thought,
Who next? Will it be Richard, or John, Tat or Ray? Will it be me?

The previous year on 23 April Mal Duff had died suddenly of a heart attack at Everest base camp. Whether it was the hard work at altitude that had brought it on we’ll never know, but it shocked me. Mal had always been so fit and strong, hard in the old way, a man who had successfully undergone the SAS training course while serving in the Territorial Army, a friend who had carefully taken control after the terrible fall on Pachermo in 1991 which had left me with a shattered left ankle and a face surgically rearranged with my ice axe. His strength, sense of humour and calm, unruffled mountaineering skill had undoubtedly saved my life that night.

I thought of his funeral in the little church in Culross – one of the rare few I had ever attended for friends who had been killed in the mountains. Most bodies were never recovered. Andrew Grieg, Rob Fairley, Andy Perkins and I had carried his coffin out of the church. I remembered with a wry smile the muffled curse that Andy had muttered as we had taken the full weight of the coffin off the bier. He weighed a ton. We walked gravely and with slow dignity out of the church, mainly because we could barely cope with the weight. As we stepped onto the loose gravel I felt my knees buckle momentarily and thought that Mal was about to go flying onto the driveway. I knew he would have laughed his head off. At last we gratefully slipped the coffin into the back of the hearse.

‘Good God,’ Andy said. ‘Has he got half the Khumbu glacier in there or what?’

And that was Mal gone, into a hole in the earth, a poem read out by a bare-headed Tat, and Liz Duff by my side as she lowered the man she loved into his grave.

Less than six weeks later, on 3 June came the news that Brendan Murphy had been killed in an avalanche while descending Changabang in the Garwhal Himalaya after the successful first ascent of the north face. As Andy Cave, Steve Sustad and Mick Fowler had been standing to one side Brendan had moved un-roped to the right to fix an ice screw in a more direct descent line. In stormy weather powder snow avalanches had been sweeping down the mountain with incessant regularity but had not normally been heavy enough to carry them off. Then when Brendan was in an exposed position a much heavier rush of powder came down. Brendan’s only hope was to cling to the ice screw with his hands but the force was too much and he was swept down a steep gully and over a series of ice cliffs. There was nothing that his friends could do for him. Mounting a search was impossible and they had to fight for their lives to get off the mountain safely. I always wondered what had happened to Brendan. I could never get the thought out of my head that he might have survived the avalanche and ended up hurt on the glacier below. I hoped he was killed instantly.

Ray Delaney, Kate Phillips, Brendan Murphy and I had climbed Ama Dablam in 1990 on an expedition with wonderful happy memories. Four years later, Tat, John Stevenson and Richard Haszko joined us on a trip to the north face of Gangchempo in the Langtang region of Nepal. Brendan was an extraordinary climber – committed, bold, immensely talented, he climbed to the very limits of his skill. Yet it was on easy ground, demanding no great skill, that he was killed. Bad luck, wrong place, wrong time. It was becoming a recurrent theme.

I walked over to the tents to find Tat packing his rucksack.

‘Come on, then,’ I said cheerfully. ‘Let’s go home. I’ve had enough of this.’

Tat looked up in surprise. ‘You as well?’

‘It’s been bugging me for a while now. You just vocalised it.’

‘So that’s it, then? End of mountains?’ He seemed confused.

‘Well, it was your bloody idea,’ I retorted.

‘Yes, I know, but it was my choice, for me. I didn’t expect you to join me.’

‘It was a surprise for me too.’ I told him about the avalanche and the accidents and the deaths and the painful legs and began to feel that I was trying a little too hard to justify my decision. I felt as if I was betraying something special. It made me feel guilty.

‘I just don’t want to do it any more. Simple as that,’ Tat said firmly. ‘I’ve had a few close shaves but nothing like you, no injuries, and the deaths, well …’ He shrugged helplessly. ‘They’ve always been dying. We know that.’

‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘I’m just finding it harder to accept. And there’s so many of them, and they’re getting closer.’

‘Don’t let it bug you. It’s simply because we know so many people climbing at such high standards, pushing the limits. It’s not representative of climbing
per se
. I’ll bet there are loads of people who have never lost friends, let alone had a serious accident.’

‘I know all that,’ I snapped. ‘It’s an explanation, not a reason to accept it.’

‘Are you sure you want to quit?’ Tat looked suspiciously at me. ‘You’re not just doing this for me, making it easy?’

‘Yes, I’m sure. At least I think I am.’ I looked up at the summit of Condoriri bathed in sunlight.
It would be good to be up there,
I conceded, but then shook my head. ‘I’m happy to go home now. I’ll think about it when I get back. Maybe I’ll change my mind. There are still a few things I want to do, you know, loose ends to tie up, a few things on the tick list. After all, you’ve been doing it almost ten years more than me, you ancient old goat. I bet you change your mind as well.’

‘No.’ Tat shook his head decisively and I knew he meant it. ‘That’s it with mountaineering. I’m going to do something fun, something safe. I want to paraglide more. You should try it again. It’s different now.’

‘No, I don’t want any more broken legs, thanks.’

‘Less likely now,’ Tat said. ‘Why not give it a go when we get home? You’ll get your pilot licence back in no time.’

‘Maybe,’ I said uncertainly. ‘Sounds a bit like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire if you ask me.’

Within twenty-four hours we were on a flight home. Tat looked relaxed and content on the way back. He was at peace with his decision.

I, on the other hand, couldn’t make up my mind. I couldn’t shake off the uneasy sense of being a traitor for even considering giving up on the mountains.

I knew Tat loved the newly-embraced thrills of paragliding. His enthusiasm was infectious. John Stevenson had already given up climbing in favour of flying. Richard Haszko, now a paragliding instructor, had done virtually the same. Highly talented climbers such as John Sylvester and Bobby Drury were now world-class paragliding pilots who had taken their taste for extreme mountain adventure into the booming thermals in the skies above the Himalayas. Perhaps there was more to life than mountains, which was something I could never have admitted only a few years ago.

I wondered whether writing
Dark Shadows Falling
had made me cynical, a bit more jaded with some aspects of modern mountaineering. Certainly the ethics and morality of mountaineering on Everest in particular had nothing to do with the motivations that had spurred my friends and me on to our various climbing adventures. No, the Everest circus had no bearing whatsoever on us. We had no desire to be anywhere near that mountain. Most of our friends were making extraordinary ascents on spectacularly difficult mountains and climbing new routes all over the world – from big walls in Patagonia and Baffin Island to alpine-style ascents in the Himalayas and beyond. Standards in mountaineering had never been higher. It should have been a time of great anticipation and ambitious plans. What had made me lose the passion? The loss of friends, too many accidents, a cumulative building up of fears that I now found hard to deal with? As Mal and Brendan had been picked off I experienced a growing certainty that it was simply a matter of probability before I, too, would end up crushed beneath a mound of icy debris.

I looked out of the oval window at the blinding white beauty of the Cordillera Real wheeling past as we carved an arc through the sky above La Paz and wondered where it had all gone wrong.

3 High anxiety

‘Paragliding is totally different now,’ John Stevenson insisted as he passed me a pint of Black Sheep Special. ‘The wings today are amazing.’

‘Wings?’ I was puzzled. ‘I thought they were canopies?’

‘Same thing. It’s just that a wing is a better description. It is what it does. It flies like a wing, unlike a parachute canopy which simply lowers you to the ground …’

‘Not always so gently.’

‘But these wings go up. They want to fly. It’s not like those tanks we were flying ten years ago.’

‘Good God! Was it that long ago?’

‘Yeah, we’re getting old, lad.’

‘Tell me about it,’ I replied thinking of my fortieth birthday. ‘So how long have I been away from flying then?’

‘After you smashed your leg on Pachermo. 1990?’

‘1991,’ I said. ‘I decided that flying was a bit risky with two knackered legs and no undercarriage.’

‘There was more to it than that,’ John interrupted. ‘I mean, I gave up flying for a couple of years as well. The wings were useless back then and to get anywhere we had to sacrifice safety for performance. Some would collapse for no good reason.’

‘Yeah, a lot of people were hurt,’ I agreed. ‘I always thought it was like using a climbing rope that had a 50–50 chance of snapping.’

‘I know, but it was the only way for the sport to progress. Hang-gliders were lethal when they were first developed and it took a lot of risks to get them to today’s standards. When we were flying in the late 1980s we didn’t really have a hope of getting anywhere. We could only soar in gale-force winds and none of us ever left the hill. Now we can fly cross-country, moving from one thermal to another. We can stay up on the lightest breezes when before we would have dropped like a house brick.’

‘That was true,’ I said, remembering the high winds we used to try flying in. ‘I don’t know how we survived it all. We didn’t have a clue.’

‘Yeah, but it was fun, wasn’t it?’ John smiled. ‘I thought it was the most exciting thing I’d ever done. Remember our first lesson? Jumping off a chair to simulate a parachute landing roll and then Geoff just threw us off the hill and bang, we were flying.’

‘Not for long, mind,’ I added. ‘We used to hit the ground – fast.’

‘True, but put it into perspective. When we first started flying the British cross-country distance record was 18 kilometres, now it’s over 175.’

‘Bloody hell! I didn’t know it was that far.’

‘The world record,’ Richard Haszko added, ‘is 330 kilometres. And despite the limits being pushed so far, it’s still relatively safe.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ I snorted derisively. ‘I’ve heard that one before. Anyway it’s not saying much is it? Within eighteen months of John and I starting we knew seven people who had crush fractures to their backs and Geoff Birtles had broken his neck. It nearly bloody killed him.’

‘I know, but it is safe now.’ John was passionate about his paragliding. It was about all he did, having given up climbing and mountaineering trips. ‘Well, as safe as any of these sports can be. I mean you choose the level of risk. You choose how much you want to push it.’

‘So it’s similar to mountaineering, then?’ I said. ‘Climbing is as dangerous as you make it.’

‘Exactly,’ John agreed, ‘the only difference being that the fatality rate of the top fliers doesn’t compare with that of top mountaineers.’

‘So how many pilots get killed?’

‘Hardly any, really,’ Richard replied. ‘Most commonly it’s through mid-air collisions or low-altitude collapses, that sort of thing. It’s about two or three a year, I suppose.’