Touching the Void by Joe Simpson Page A

me. I thought that he meant to jump down the west side if I fell. There was no other way of stopping me. I hobbled sideways and nearly lost balance as I snagged my foot. Something gristly twisted in my knee, and the shock had me sobbing. It eased away and I swore at myself for not concentrating. The crabbed sideways pattern of movement which I had tried before took over once more. When I couldn’t swing my leg across I reached down and hefted it along the trench Simon had forged, and then returned to my patterns. The leg had become inanimate, a weighty useless object. If it got in my way, or pained me, I cursed it and hefted it aside as if it were a chair I had tripped over. The col was exposed and windy, but for the first time we could see clearly down the west flank of the mountain. Directly beneath us the glacier we had walked up five days ago curved away towards the moraines and crevasses which led to base camp, nearly 3,000 feet below us. It would take many long lowerings, but it was all downhill, and we had lost the sense of hopelessness that had invaded us at the ice cliff. Reaching the col had been crucial. If there had been any steep ground between the cliff and the col we would never have got past it.
    ‘What time is it?’ Simon asked.
    ‘Just gone four. We don’t have much time, do we?’
    I could see him weighing up the possibilities. The face below the col was running with spindrift, and the cloud buildup was nearly complete. It was hard to judge whether it had started snowing because of the powder being swept against us by the wind. We hadn’t sat on the col for very long, yet already I was numb with cold. I wanted to carry on down but it was Simon’s decision. I waited for him to make up his mind.
    ‘I think we should keep going,’ he said at last. ‘Will you be all right?’
    ‘Yes. Let’s go. I’m freezing.’
    ‘Me too. My hands have gone again.’
    ‘We could snow-hole if you like.’
    ‘No. We won’t reach the glacier in the light, but it’s a clear slope down. Better to lose height.’ ‘Right. I don’t like the look of this weather.’ ‘That’s what worries me. Okay, I’ll lower you from here. We should go down further to the right but I don’t think you will be able to make it diagonally. We’ll just have to take our chances straight down.’
    I slid off the crest of the ridge and down the West Face. Simon stood back from the edge, bracing himself against my weight. The first of many powder avalanches rushed over me, tugging me down. I slid faster, and shouted to Simon to slow down, but he couldn’t hear me.

SIX
    The Final Choice
    I dug the bucket seat with frantic and nervous haste. The first lowering 300 feet down from the col had worried me. It had been quite impossible to descend in a diagonal line to the right. Gravity had turned me into a dead weight and no amount of scrabbling against the snow with ice axes had prevented a plumb vertical descent.
    The conditions on the face were markedly different from those on the slopes above the col. Simon let me slide faster than I had expected and, despite my cries of alarm and pain, he had kept the pace of descent going. I stopped shouting to him after fifty feet. The rising wind and continuous spindrift avalanches drowned out all communications. Instead I concentrated on keeping my leg clear of the snow. It was an impossible task. Despite lying on my good leg, the crampons on the right boot snagged in the snow as the weight of my body pushed down. Each abrupt jerk caused searing pain in my knee. I sobbed and gasped, swore at the snow and the cold, and most of all at Simon. At the change-over point, I hopped on to my left leg after feeling the tugs on the rope and hammering the axe shafts into the snow, bent over them, trying to think the pain away. It ebbed slowly, leaving a dreadful throbbing ache and a leaden tiredness.
    The tugs came again far too soon, and carelessly I slumped against the rope and let myself go. The drop went