The Beckoning Silence Read online

  I increased the pace as we hurried across the traverse, slipping on the loose rocks and encouraging Alison to move, which she did efficiently and calmly. We were both aware of what was hanging above us and just as I had convinced myself that we had never been in any danger I saw the heavy, blue ice blocks, some as big as anvils and probably as weighty, strewn down the rocks we had climbed up in the night. It might not have been a huge avalanche but it was a sobering realisation to see how lethal it could have been. Blocks of ice of such mass and weight did not have to be travelling very fast to kill you.

  We were in the right place at the right time, I told myself, but I knew instinctively that there was a lot of luck involved. I could argue that I had noticed the threat the day before when I had questioned Yossi about the safety of the route. I chose to cross over to the left so maybe, conscious of the potential threat, I had made a good decision. Yet if I was truly honest with myself, I knew that deep down we were just plain bloody lucky. That was all it came down to in the end.

  We were drinking tea outside the tents when we saw the tiny figures of Pira, Malcolm and Brian appear on the ice slope below the saddle. They made quick progress down onto the glacier, by which time we had struck camp and loaded heavy rucksacks for the long carry down to the tents in the pampas.

  Pira approached looking relaxed. He was extremely fit and doubtless could have summitted alone in a quarter of the time they had taken. He was a delightful man, talented, modest, cheerfully affable and strikingly good-looking.

  ‘Hey, guys, good to see you,’ Yossi called out and went over to shake Pira’s hand. ‘Did you top out then?’

  ‘No, no,’ Pira shook his head, smiling wistfully. ‘It was too far back. We would not have been fast enough to get back down before dark. So …’ He shrugged expressively.

  We had only planned for one night camped on the glacier and Pira knew that we had to get back down to the lower camp that day. For those of us who had made the summit attempt it was going to be a long day. Brian and Malcolm looked tired but were content with the decision.

  ‘Here, there’s a brew on,’ Yossi said. ‘We’re mostly packed so we can get moving as soon as you have had a drink.’

  I waited until Yossi had moved away from the group before approaching him.

  ‘Did you hear the avalanche?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘But I couldn’t be sure whether it was near you.’

  ‘Went right past us.’

  ‘Was it big?’

  ‘Big enough to kill.’

  ‘They usually are,’ he said dismissively and emptied the dregs of his tea onto the ice. ‘It comes with the territory.’ He shrugged eloquently.

  ‘I think I had already worked that one out.’

  I turned away and went to fetch my rucksack. Either I was too cautious or Yossi was too brave. I didn’t know, of course, that by the following summer Yossi would be dead, killed in an avalanche that swept over him and his Canadian climbing partner, Darner Witzel, as they set off up an unclimbed face on El Presidente (5700 metres). They didn’t do anything wrong, didn’t take any excessive risks. They were unlucky. Wrong place, wrong time. It came with the territory.

  I stepped out of the shower and walked into the hotel bedroom drying my hair. The group had flown home that morning and Tat and Kate Phillips were due to arrive that afternoon. We hoped to attempt some new routes in the Cordillera Real and Yossi had already pointed me in the direction of a long unclimbed ridge on Illimani, which at 6440 metres is Bolivia’s highest mountain. Although Yossi had failed on the route the previous year he was keen to have another attempt. I was pleased for him to join us on the climb as his extensive knowledge of the mountain would be invaluable.

  As I moved to the side to step past a plastic barrel full of climbing equipment, I stubbed my toe against one of the bed legs. For a moment the pain was excruciating and I howled obscenities at the wall as I hopped around the room. I sat on the bed and examined the toes on my right foot, quickly identifying a tender spot on the bone of one toe. I had broken a toe before in just as stupid an accident. The last time had been kicking a parking cone which I hadn’t realised was covering the stump of a concrete lamp post. The time before had been as a kid slipping at the side of a swimming pool and accidentally stubbing my toes on a metal pole. Atop the pole had been a sign helpfully informing me that it was slippery. I put my sandals on and hobbled out of the hotel, trying to convince myself it was simply a painful bruise.

  By the time Tat and Kate had arrived that evening there was a livid black swelling on the side of the toe, an indication of haemorrhaging at the site of a fracture. Tat, drawing on years of medical experience as a general practitioner, gave it a painful prod and announced gleefully that it was in fact broken.

  ‘Trust me, I’m a doctor,’ he added and burst out laughing.

  ‘Bugger,’ I replied morosely and contemplated my throbbing toe. ‘Why now, for God’s sake?’ I moaned. ‘I’ve had three weeks looking after ten clients, striding manfully over high passes, playing hop-scotch with passing avalanches and now I break my bloody toe walking out of the shower?’

  ‘Because you’re an idiot,’ Tat said succinctly. ‘Come on, let’s go and get something to eat. I’m starving.’

  The next day we boarded a rickety bus and headed out for a sight-seeing tour of Lake Titicaca. It wasn’t something we would normally do but given that La Paz, the capital of Bolivia, is at the astonishing height of 3632 metres, making it the highest capital in the world, it seemed advisable to take things easy for a couple of days to allow everyone to acclimatise.

  The drive out to Lake Titicaca took us up onto the dry and dusty Altiplano, a bleak and inhospitable region where Indians struggle to survive, rearing flocks of ragged-looking sheep and llamas and tilling the dry soil for root vegetables. The bus wound its way down through lakeside villages, eventually arriving at Tiquina where it was driven onto an unstable and overloaded ferry which took us across the Straits of Tiquina to the small town of Copacabana. Here we searched out a cheap hotel and Tat and Kate checked out the tour boats at the small quay and chose to take a tour of the Island of the Sun.

  Early the following morning they boarded a tour boat that ferried them out to a landing on the lakeshore at Pilkokaina. Walking along the ancient Inca terraces past the Tiwanaku Temple of the Virgins of the Sun they passed some ancient Inca springs, now a tourist attraction bedevilled with the usual horde of handicraft sellers and hawkers. In the distance the snow-covered peak of Nevado Illampu rose above the great sapphire-blue body of Titicaca’s waters and the dried yellow grasslands and reed beds bordering the lake. Illampu is a nevado sacred to the Incas and was a mountain on which we had hoped to climb a new route. The white peaks of the Cordillera Real were a dramatic backdrop to the views across the lake. The five-hour walk to the beach at Challa, a small village on the northern tip of the island where they caught another boat back to Copacabana, provided ideal acclimatising exercise.

  I, on the other hand, was nursing my blackened toe and quite sick of walking after three weeks trekking. My throbbing toe meant an early return to the village and an opportunity to drink beer in the sun, practise my appalling Spanish and read up on the local culture.

  I discovered through a useful trekking guide that the inhabitants of Copacabana seemed to be utterly obsessed with trucks. The town has long been a sacred place, in earliest times the spiritual site of the Tiwanaku culture and then of the Inca. However, I doubt the thrust of their religions was quite so slavishly materialistic as that of the modern Copacabanians. In the Capilla de Velas attached to the left side of the main church local people burn candles to the Virgin Mary to support their prayers, emphasising the importance of their requests by writing and drawing on the walls in candle wax. The most sought-after gift was a truck. ‘Volvo’ had been carefully spelt out in wax to make quite sure that the Virgin Mary got the point – the unspoken message was a clear suspicion that, as a woman, she may know nothing of such thi
ngs. It would appear that Copacabana’s inhabitants spent their entire waking and praying hours thinking about trucks.

  Two days later, we stepped from a four-wheel-drive jeep at the tiny settlement of Tuni and set off on the three-hour walk – or hobble in my case – to a camp site beneath the towering icy summit of Condoriri. We pitched our tents by the shores of Laguna Condoriri where the surrounding mountains were beautifully reflected in the mirror-smooth surface. The following morning we set off up a long spine-backed scree ridge, steadily gaining height until a glacier crossing led us towards the rocky summit of El Diente. An hour later we were solo climbing up the icy penitentes of Pequeno Alpamayo’s conical summit. Kate and Tat were coping excellently with this early visit to altitude. It boded well for our plans on Illimani.

  As we descended to our tents I discovered that climbing down with a broken toe was considerably more painful than ascending and I gradually fell quite a way behind my companions. I noticed how bare and dry many of the surrounding peaks were compared with the photographs I had seen of them. Yossi had said the mountains were in the driest condition for thirty-five years. I was mulling over the likely effect these conditions would have on our proposed line on Illimani when the lake and tents came into view.

  ‘Hiya, kid,’ Tat called out as I dumped my sack by the tent. ‘There’s a brew on here.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I gratefully accepted the mug of sweet tea and sat down in the shelter of the rock wall we had built around the tent. A brisk wind was blowing off the lake. Unlacing my right boot I pulled it from my foot, wincing as it caught my bruised toe.

  ‘How is it?’ Tat asked solicitously. ‘I’ll bet that front-pointing on the summit slopes was fun.’

  ‘It was bloody murder.’

  ‘It’ll fade in a week or so,’ Tat said. ‘It might help if you strapped it to another toe.’

  ‘Yeah, one on my left foot maybe,’ I muttered.

  ‘Ooh. Lovely,’ he murmured as I pulled the sock off and examined the blue-black digit morosely. He reached out and gave it a poke with his finger and I yelped. ‘Yup, definitely broken.’ I shuffled out of range of his medical expertise.

  The following morning dawned clear and bright and I thought of suggesting to Tat and Kate that an attempt on Condoriri might be good training for Illimani. Tat had been uncharacteristically quiet and reflective. I tried to think what I might have said to upset him. It’s usually me, I thought. I can be quite abrasive sometimes, particularly with close friends, without realising that I might be causing offence. Unable to think of anything I walked over to where he was sitting on a boulder overlooking the lake. I sat down beside him.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I asked. ‘You seem a bit down, youth. Something I said?’

  ‘Eh?’ Tat seemed surprised to have his reverie broken. ‘Oh no, not at all. It’s not you.’

  ‘What then? You’re not a happy bunny.’

  ‘I don’t know how to put this,’ Tat looked distracted. ‘Look, this is going to sound really stupid given that I’ve only just arrived, but … well, I don’t want to be here.’

  ‘What?’ I looked around. ‘It’s not a bad place. I mean, I know it wasn’t much of a climb but it was just to get you guys acclimatised.’

  ‘I don’t mean the mountain. That was fun. I mean here. Bolivia. This expedition thing.’

  ‘Right, understood,’ I nodded, not understanding anything. ‘So you’re saying you’ve flown all the way out to Bolivia to tell me you don’t want to be in Bolivia?’

  ‘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 Gar
whal 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.