Touching the Void by Joe Simpson Page B

on until I could bear it no longer, yet there was nothing that I could do to bring the agony to an end. Howling and screaming for Simon to stop achieved nothing; the blame had to lie somewhere, so I swore Simon’s character to the devil. I kept thinking the rope must come to an end, that I would stop at any moment, but it seemed to have doubled in length.
    The face here was much steeper than above the col, steep enough to frighten me, and make me think that Simon was barely in control. I couldn’t ignore the thought of his seat collapsing and tensed up. I waited for the instant swooping acceleration that would tell me Simon had been pulled down, and that we were dying. It didn’t happen.
    The terrible sliding stopped, and I hung silently against the slope. Three faint tugs trembled the taut rope, and I hopped up on to my leg. A wave of nausea and pain swept over me. I was glad of the freezing blasts of snow biting into my face. My head cleared as I waited for the burning to subside from my knee. Several times I had felt it twist sideways when my boot snagged, and each time the movement was unnatural. There would be a flare of agony as the knee kinked back, and parts within the joint seemed to shear past each other with a sickening gristly crunch. I had barely ceased sobbing before my boot snagged again. At the end my leg shook uncontrollably. I tried to stop it shaking, but the harder I tried, the more it shook. I pressed my face into the snow, gritted my teeth, and waited. At last it eased.
    Simon had already started to climb down and the slack rope coiled past me as he descended. I looked up but failed to make out where he was. A plume of snow boiled down, hugging the slope. I could see nothing through it. If anything, the spindrift was worse than before, and that could only mean that it had begun snowing heavily. Below me the view was equally limited. I began digging Simon’s belay seat. It was warming work and distracted attention from my knee. When I looked up again Simon could be seen descending quickly.
    ‘At this rate we should be down by nine o’clock,’ he said cheerfully.
    ‘I hope so.’ I said no more. It wouldn’t help to harp on about how I felt.
    ‘Right, let’s do it again.’ He had seated himself in the hole and had the ropes ready for another lowering.
    ‘You’re not hanging around, are you?’
    ‘Nothing to wait for. Come on.’
    He was still grinning, and his confidence was infectious. Who said one man can’t rescue another, I thought. We had changed from climbing to rescue, and the partnership had worked just as effectively. We hadn’t dwelt on the accident. There had been an element of uncertainty at first, but as soon as we had started to act positively everything had come together.
    ‘Okay, ready when you are,’ I said, lying on my side again. ‘Slow down a bit this time. You’ll have my leg off otherwise.’
    He didn’t seem to hear me for I went down at an even faster pace than before, and the hammering torture began again with a vengeance. My optimism evaporated. I could think of nothing but enduring until the change-over. It came after an age, but the brief respite was too short, and before the agony had eased I was sliding down again.
    I pressed my hands against the snow, vainly trying to lift my leg away from the surface. The axes dangled from their loops around my waist and my hands froze. My leg snagged. There was nothing I could do. The muscles had seized up. I tried and tried again to lift it clear of the snow, but it had fused into lumpy dead-weight. I clenched my thigh muscles in an attempt to lift it clear, but nothing happened. It was no longer a part of me. It obeyed no commands, and dangled inert and useless. It snagged, and snagged again, twisted, kinked, and caused every sort of agony, until I gave up trying and lay limp against the moving snow, sobbing. The lowering continued. I forgot about it ending, and gave myself up to the pain. It swamped round my knee and