Over the Hills and Far Away

by Rob Collister

  It was not to be, however. The sky had been overcast all day and during the night it began to snow. When we awoke not even the col was visible. Snow was softly settling over the tent, swiftly and silently burying us. For the next two days Chris and I lived in a state of suspended animation within the stuffy orange world of our tent, scarcely aware that the other two still existed.

  The third day was bright and clear. Far away we could see Rakaposhi. The new snow was dazzling, even through goggles, but on the rock above it was vanishing before our eyes as the sun reached it. Kicking through the fresh snow to névé beneath, we quickly front-pointed the 100 metres to the col and started up the rock. It was granite, at first loose and shattered, but becoming firmer; and before long we were enjoying fine slabby climbing of about IV with the occasional strenuous ice-choked chimney. Colin even found himself a bit of V. Above, the ridge narrowed and there was interesting mixed climbing, with several little ice-pitches. We seemed to have been climbing a long time, but altitude and heavy sacks full of bivvy gear had slowed us down and our actual height gain was not very great. The angle eased, and emerging from behind two gigantic rock pillars which from below we had nicknamed ‘The Rabbit’s Ears’, we saw the ridge stretching before us. We were at about 6,100 metres; there was still 400 metres to go, but after the next sixty metres it looked like a snow-plod.

  However, it would soon be dark and the Rabbit’s Ears was the last sheltered site for a bivouac. We decided to stop there. With luck, we should be able to reach the summit and return to camp the same day. Jubilant at having all but climbed the peak, we settled down for the night. Dick and Colin found a perfect two-man cave twenty feet down a shaft that separated an enormous cornice from the rock. Chris and I made ourselves at home in a little hollow, with one of the Ears at our backs.

  With pits, duvets and a bivvy sack, we were quite snug. We were so warm in fact, it was ominous. I felt drowsy but could not actually sleep. Time passed. All at once, I became aware of a cold, wet sensation at the back of my neck. It was snowing; and it continued to do so all night. The bivvy sack was hopelessly small. I am five feet eight inches tall and had difficulty in keeping my head covered; Chris is six feet six inches. The night passed in a restless tug of war.

  Daybreak was a faint lightening of the gloom. The usual epics with clumsy mitts and frozen ropes and crampon straps. Chilled and stiff, we slowly started to climb, trying to postpone a decision. The wind was rising and it was very cold. It had stopped snowing, but a temporary lifting of the clag only showed more clouds rolling down the glacier towards us. We turned back. The weather had arrived just a day too early. Bitterly we thought of those wasted weeks in the valley.

  The descent took most of the day. The rock had disappeared under a foot of snow and we had to abseil all the way; just like Observatory Ridge last March. After the final abseil, inevitably, the rope jammed. The cold had caused rope and hemp loop to freeze together and both had frozen in a solid lump to the rock. I climbed back up an icy slab to free it and naturally, a crampon strap broke ...

  There was still the final slope of névé to descend, treacherous now with thick soft snow lying over it. Through a parting in the mist we could see the tents only 100 metres below. Carefully we climbed down till we reached the wide bergschrund which on the way up we had crossed some way to the left. Traversing a safe ten metres above it, Chris headed for the bridge. Suddenly he gave a yell. His crampons had balled up and one foot had slid from beneath him. The next instant he was tobogganing over the edge of the bergschrund. With a jerk the rope came tight around the axe I had hammered in as an afterthought. Faintly I heard a voice calling. Then the strain came off the rope and Chris appeared. He had shot straight over the bergschrund landing five metres below as he came on to the rope. Five minutes later we were crawling into the tent, while outside the snow came down harder than ever.

  Back at Advanced Base the weather remained bad, and our time was up. Nevertheless, we decided to give it one more try if the weather improved at all. Returning to Base Camp for more food, however, we were greeted by a beaming liaison officer with the news that our permission to climb the mountain had been rescinded by the government. We spent the next five days writing statements for an official enquiry into the affair; no less a person than the Colonel Commandant of the Chitral Scouts had come galloping up the valley on horseback to conduct it. My reconnaissance to the Thui An was the pretext, but injured pride was the real problem.

  After this, Munawar Khan wisely travelled down the valley on his own. That he had not starved while we were away on the mountain became evident when we were compelled to pay a food bill for £120. A chicken costs two shillings in Chitral.

  I have never hated anyone as much as I hated Munawar Khan, and the feeling was clearly mutual. When we finally came to leave Pakistan we were turned back at the Khyber Pass on his instructions and forced to spend a further week in Rawalpindi, explaining some poorly concealed black market transactions. Later I learned that it had taken considerable diplomatic effort to save me from a Pakistani jail. I suppose you could say he had the last laugh.

  – Chapter 19 –

  HIMALAYAN GRANDE COURSE (1974)

  Moonlight upon a glacier. Two figures picking their separate ways over the ice. Two minds conscious of frozen beauty in the silent black and silver mountainscape, but dwelling more perhaps on cold oats settling heavily in their stomachs. Overhead, rock looms higher, casting a cold forbidding shadow far across the glacier. Into its chilly embrace, reluctantly, with a sense of the irrevocable; up an avalanche cone encrusted with fallen stones thickly as the sky above with stars; by devious bridges over a bergschrund; to stand at last peering up the streak of grey ice which is the slip-road to the face above. A typical alpine situation.

  Not the Alps, however, but the Himalaya. The lesser Himalaya certainly – the mountain is only just over 6,000 metres high, and from a distance, its broad, wedge-shaped south face, 900 metres of striated, almost snow-free rock, reminds one of the Dolomites. No icy giant, but the Himalaya nonetheless; the South Parbati region of Kulu in Northern India, to be precise.

  Twenty-five years ago, Tom Longstaff, possibly the most widely travelled of all Himalayan climbers, wrote à propos Everest: ‘I hope and believe that one day it will be climbed. Then when no higher “altitude record” is possible, mountaineers can turn to the true enjoyment of the Himalaya, most likely to be found at about 20,000 feet or less.’ For most climbers it is not the height that makes the Himalaya so attractive, not once they have experienced altitude. Leaving aside the special fascination of the valleys with their ancient trade routes, simple, contented people, and exotic flora and fauna, it is the fact that climbers can be, must be, self-sufficient. By inclination, I am an alpinist – Harrison’s Rocks appal me, the south ridge of Everest attracts me, if anything, even less. Yet, except in winter, the Alps are being reduced to the status of outcrops, albeit serious ones. The alpinist must look elsewhere for a wholly satisfying test of his skill and judgment. And while the great peaks of the Himalaya still tend to demand not so much skill and speed as endurance and tenacity, the more so the harder the route, the lower peaks do provide such a test.

  Dick Isherwood, Geoff Cohen and John Cardy must have thought something similar, for I had little difficulty in persuading them to come. The previous day Geoff and I had climbed a fine ice face, resembling the Tour Ronde in length and difficulty. And now Dick and I were attempting the big, nameless rock peak which dominated our particular glacier.

  Dick, who does not like ice, has described the initial couloir thus: ‘The next four pitches were for me the most thrilling part of the climb. The dark grey section of the couloir was ice with bits of rock stuck into it, and was not too well frozen. I persuaded Rob to put a rope on and followed him up a shallow waterfall running in the central groove. Fortunately the moon was full, so I could see the small, bird-like marks left by his axe and hammer. I stuck my weapons into the same holes, but even my Chouinard hammer did not
seem to work properly, and I was thankful for the occasional rock big enough to pull on. I was very glad when even Rob decided that the gully was getting steep, and we traversed to the rock just before dawn.’

  We had timed it perfectly. As we traversed ice-coated slabs to a terrace running the breadth of the face, the sun began to caress the skyline above, and minutes later the first stones were clattering down the couloir. Below us now lay a blanket of cloud, smothering the glacier and the camp on its edge; above the cloud stood the mountains we had climbed and were to climb, the 17,000 feet col we had crossed to get there and the summits of a myriad other peaks stretching away into the crystal distances of China and Garwhal. It was another perfect day.

  Our satisfaction was short lived, however. As Dick started up steep rock from the terrace, weaving an improbable but, in the event, fairly straightforward way through a maze of little roofs, stones in ones and twos came bounding down the face itself. The climbing above was not sustained, in fact there were several sections of scrambling, but in places the rock was loose, with the looseness of tottering blocks stacked on top of each other, and increasingly frequent whines, thuds and crashes kept our nerves on edge. The stones flurried me more than Dick. ‘They’re only small and small ones can’t do much damage,’ he commented. I was impressed by his calm, but unconvinced by his reasoning. However, retreat would be no safer, so I pinned my hopes on the theory that most of the stones were coming from Snow-patch Terrace – another broad terrace about halfway up the face where a solitary pitch of snow had lingered providing a conspicuous landmark.

  Hurrying from relatively sheltered rib to rib, belaying where possible under overhangs, we made good time and by mid-morning were sitting at the top of the terrace, watching little stones, freed from their casing of ice, topple over, roll slowly to the edge and disappear on their long journey to the glacier. With our backs to a smooth grey wall, gaudily streaked with yellow and plumb vertical, we felt safe from above. But where now? The only two visible lines would clearly need much pegging, not at all to our taste though we had the gear for it. The wall stretched across the face, a good 300 feet high, unrelenting in its steepness. The only hope lay in a recess some way to our left, into which we could not see. Suddenly a pebble arrived beside us with a smack. Dick didn’t turn a hair but the place had lost its charm for me and I could not start climbing again too quickly. Traversing left along a sharp rim of ice, where the snow patch lapped against the rock, using it now for hands, now for feet, delicate without axe or crampons, I found the recess to contain a long scoop slanting back rightwards. The angle, compared with the sheer walls on either side, looked easy. ‘It’s a piece of duff,’ I yelled, promptly discovering that the difference was only relative. Breathless and out of balance, I found myself lunging for resting places which vanished as I reached them. Moreover, the holds were covered with a fine rubble which, it occurred to me briefly, could only have come from above. Predictably, the rope came tight in the midst of my struggles. Luckily, a sense of urgency must have been communicated down the rope, for although he could not hear me, Dick unbelayed, enabling me to climb a few feet higher to a good foothold which would serve as a stance. Dick had climbed over me and, with the aid of a couple of pegs, had emerged on to an easier slab when, with a whistle, a salvo of rocks came down right on top of us. There was a rattling on my helmet and something large gave me a nudge as it passed between me and the rock. I gripped the rope tighter waiting for a weight to come on it. Nothing happened; Dick, to my surprise, was unhurt. Nevertheless, even he must have been shaken, for he shot up the rest of that pitch to a friendly overhang, and when I next saw him his sharp features seemed to have become slightly sharper, though he said nothing. For my part, I peered upwards with great care, before scurrying over the exposed slab. Fortunately, I could see an apparently sheltered line slanting rightwards for at least the next run-out. I say fortunately, because otherwise I would not have continued and, as it turned out, that was the last time stone fall was to bother us until the descent.

  At the end of my pitch the rock was once more vertical and I was wondering if it could possibly go free, when I noticed that Dick had disappeared. Investigating a lower line, he had come to a hole beneath some blocks; ever curious, he took off his sack and crawled through it to discover an overhung but easy-angled ramp cutting through the verticality. This proved to be the key to the wall and in effect to the whole climb. The only bulge was well-endowed with jugs and at its top, we were on easy broken ground. The chimney-line which formed the continuation of our original couloir was only a rope-length to our right, and not far above was the crest of the east ridge, where presumably nothing solid could fall on us. We were at about 5,800 metres and for the first time could allow ourselves to feel confident of success. Suddenly, to our amazement, we spotted a white rope hanging down the chimney. Later we learnt that it had been left the previous year by an unsuccessful party from the University of Aston; but at the time it took the wind out of our sails to discover climbing litter on ‘our’ virgin mountainside.

  Following the line of least resistance leftwards, it was several more rope-lengths before we reached a snow shoulder on the ridge and could look down upon a new glacier and across at new peaks. Disappointment seemed to have reduced our impetus though we had, we were surprised to find, been on the go for fourteen hours. Either way, a brew was called for. The usual afternoon cloud was swirling up and sweaters and windproofs were pulled on hurriedly in a sharp flurry of snow. It did not last, however, and through windows in the mist we could see the ridge rising up above in a monolith of orange granite, its east side sheer and almost featureless, the south face equally compact but set back in a sweep of comfortably angled slabs.

  Morale improved by the cup of tea, we descended a little snow slope to a notch in the ridge and set off up the slabs. The climbing was glorious in golden evening sunlight, the cloud still boiling about the smaller peaks but dropping just enough to leave us unmolested. Big holds were few and far between but the rock was so rough that it sliced open fingertips, and was covered with tiny knobs and pockets on which bendy boots felt like PA’s. Only once, when, leaning sideways from a peg, I swung across in a committing mantelshelf over a short wall on to a slab steeper and smoother than usual, was the climbing hard enough to preclude conscious enjoyment of every moment. One stance, squatting beneath a long square-cut roof, reminded me or Rebuffat’s route on the Midi, and the climbing was not dissimilar to that of the famous ‘Red Slab’.

  Two pitches higher we came to the ideal bivouac site, complete with icicles, tucked away in a shady niche, for water. There wasn’t room for two side by side, so we took separate apartments, Dick excavating himself a coffin-like trench, while I built up a platform of flat blocks, taking care to add a parapet. The Hilton had nothing on that bivouac. Not that it mattered, we were tired enough to sleep anywhere. It had been a long day, and though the climbing had been easier than expected, it had had its moments all the same, altitude tending to make difficulties feel perhaps a grade harder than they would in the Alps. We were carrying sleeping bags rather than duvets and slept the clear windless night through, not bothering with the bivvy sack.

  After luxuriating in our bags until the sun came up next morning, three rope-lengths of the same superb slab climbing brought us to the summit ridge. This was snow, rimming the rocky face like froth on top of a pint. Almost horizontal, rising very gently to its highest point about 200 metres away, it was also sharply corniced, so that far from being the football field we had half expected, it was more like a screwdriver. A few minutes later, one at a time because of the cornice, we were on top, letting our eyes sweep slowly round through 360 degrees of mountains. On every side lay a parched brown landscape splashed with grey, turbulent and empty. Neither welcoming nor hostile, it was unmindful of us, waiting thirstily for the winter snows.

  – Chapter 20 –

  THE HIDDEN VALLEY (1974)

  From a distance, the little town of Tukche resembles some de
sert fort, with its flat roofs and windowless, seemingly continuous whitewashed walls. As one approaches it becomes apparent that the town is, in fact, split by a narrow cobbled street. On either side of it carved wooden doorways open on to courtyards where horses are tethered and women weave gaudily dyed wools. Apart from this street, the walls are indeed almost continuous and it is possible to walk from end to end of the town over the rooftops, stepping around fruit or grain spread out to dry. The likeness to a fort is not illusory, Early in the nineteenth century the local Thakali merchants were granted by the Gorkha kings of Nepal a monopoly of the salt trade with Tibet, and since virtually all salt has to be imported into Nepal, they waxed fat on the proceeds. Until the Chinese seizure of Lhasa in 1959 Tukche was the chief centre for this trade, and the solid two-storeyed houses, each looking inwards on to its own courtyard were both storehouses for salt and grain, and strongholds to withstand marauding bandits from Tibet or jealous rivals from the chain of petty castle kingdoms further north. Today, the richer merchants have transferred their activities to pastures new. Only occasionally does the mellifluous clanging of deep-toned bells herald the arrival of a mule-train, which usually does not bother to stop. Although all the houses are occupied, some by Tibetan refugees, the town wears a forlorn, forgotten aspect and its main street seems unnaturally silent and deserted.

  But even if it is reduced to a shadow of its former glory, the geographical position of the town still renders it significant. To the east, on the far side of a broad alluvial plain of stone and sand, where the great cleft cut by the Kali Gandaki river widens out, the magnificent ice wall of the Nilgiri peaks dominates the valley. To the west steep pine-clad slopes rise up to Tukche peak, the northernmost outlier of the Dhaulagiri range. In effect one is emerging from a defile between the Annapurna and Dhaulagiri massifs and, were it permitted, only four more days’ walking would bring one to Mustang and the Central Asian Plateau. One of the easiest Himalayan passes, the course of the Kali Gandaki is an ancient trade route on which Tukche occupies a pivotal position. Not only strategically, but also climatically and culturally, it can be seen as a doorway between the very different worlds of India and Tibet.