Sibu nearly died that day when his oxygen ran out, although we did not know this until the following morning when one of our Sherpas found him slouched beside the ropes an hour or two below the tents. Various stories of recent happenings reached us on the walkie-talkie system or through other climbers. A few days earlier, when a Slovenian died on the summit ridge, a solo climber from Bhutan, close by him, ran out of oxygen and began to hallucinate due to hypoxia. He wandered by one of the old corpses near to the fixed rope, probably the one with green boots that most climbers remember, and thought he saw the corpse pointing at an object nearby. This turned out to be a half-snow-buried orange oxygen cylinder. The Bhutani, to his joy, found that there was still oxygen in it, clipped it to his system and survived to tell his tale to everyone in ABC.
From the Death Camp, the final climb ascends and traverses a steep stretch of striated limestone, known as the Yellow Band, mostly by way of a part-snow-filled gulley where many old ropes can cause confusion, especially since this section must be done at night. However, the great motivating thought is that from the tents to the summit ridge is a mere 300 metres in height.
So why on earth do people want to risk their lives on Everest year after year? George Mallory wrote:
If one should ask me what ‘use’ there was in climbing, or attempting to climb the world’s highest peak, I would be compelled to answer ‘none’. There is no scientific end to be served; simply the gratification of the impulse of achievement, the indomitable desire to see what lies beyond that ever beats within the heart of man. With both poles conquered, the mighty peak of the Himalayas remains as the greatest conquest available to the explorer.
Mallory, in fact, had a very reasonable motive for his Everest trials. Curiosity. Nobody had yet reached the summit. Nobody knew if the human body could survive at that altitude. On a more cynical level another British climber, Stephen Venables, observed, ‘Everest is prime Guinness Book of Records territory.’
In 2004 150 climbers had summitted Everest in a batch and, had the weather turned nasty at the wrong moment, there would have been dead people all over the Death Zone. Back in 1996 it did and there were. Two world-famous professional guides were among them. Questions were asked about Everest tourism. One amateur climber who survived was journalist John Krakauer who went on to write a bestselling book about the debacle, Into Thin Air. In it he apportioned blame and particularly criticised Anatoli Boukreev, an immensely experienced Russian guide who had rescued three people. Boukreev hit back with his own book, and was then killed climbing on Annapurna. The American television talk shows were packed with journalists and with survivors. Discussion forums sprang up on the web, filled with speculation by people who knew very little about it all. It began to rival the assassination of J.F. Kennedy for conspiracy theories. Everest had become a spectator sport.
I struggled into my boots, pack and oxygen system, said goodbye to Ian and the other three and, with Boca Lama a few yards behind, grinning as usual, began the fairly steep climb up the fixed ropes with new batteries in my head torch. The others would start out in an hour at 11.00 p.m. In seven or eight hours, on a fixed rope the whole way, I hoped to be on the summit of Everest. We moved off into the night, pitch black beyond the cone of our torch lights. There were slippery rocks, snow patches and a bewildering choice of upwards-leading ropes, some frayed almost through, others brand new. In the torch light it paid to take time. I found myself panting far more than on the previous climb, despite taking it slowly, perhaps because of the gradient. I felt cold despite the exertion, and I felt dizzy, too. Something was wrong but nothing I could identify, so I kept going in a stop-start way, gasping for breath every few metres. Then, some forty minutes after setting out, my world caved in.
Somebody, it seemed, had clamped powerful arms around my chest and was squeezing the life out of me. And the surgical wire that held my ribs together felt as though it was tearing through my chest. My thoughts were simple: I am having another heart attack. I will be dead in minutes. No defibrillator on hand this time. Then I remembered that Louise had pestered me to carry special pills with me – Glycerine Tri-Nitrate (GTN). You put one under your tongue where it fizzes and causes your system to dilate in all the right places. I tore at my jacket pocket and, removing my mitts, crammed at least six tablets under my tongue before swallowing.
I clung to the rope, hanging out over the great drop and waiting to die. My one glimpse of Boca Lama, who said nothing, was of his usual big grin as my torch light lit up his features. Five minutes later I was still alive. The tablets, I knew, could, if you were lucky, stave off a heart attack and give you time to get to a cardiac unit. They are not a means of avoiding an attack in order to allow you to continue climbing. This might not be my own end, but it was definitely the signal to descend to lower altitudes at once.
Some twenty minutes later we were back down in the Death Camp. There was no tent to enter as our group were in the act of booting and kitting up, using all available tent space. So I waited outside with Boca Lama until Ian and the others had disappeared up into the night.
‘I must go down quickly,’ I told Boca Lama. He shook his head and the grin disappeared. It would, he explained, be too dangerous to descend until we could ‘see our feet’. That meant dawn in five hours’ time. I knew my best hope of survival, as had been the case on Kilimanjaro, was to lose height rapidly. The tightness had gone from my chest, but the sharp discomfort around the stitch-wires was still there. I contemplated going on down without Boca Lama, but decided against it. Going up an icy, slippery, steep slope in the darkness is a lot safer than descending one. Statistically, the vast majority of accidents happen on the descent. The concentration of going up seems to disappear to be replaced by a weary nonchalance. Nothing matters apart from a longing for warmth and comfort. Lost in these thoughts you become careless. The focus gone and the mind weary, it is all too easy to lose your footing or clip carelessly into a rope. Three thousand metres of void waited directly below our tent.
Nine times Everest climber, Ed Viesturs, has two favourite sayings: ‘Just because you love the mountains doesn’t mean the mountains love you’ and ‘Getting to the top is optional. Getting down is mandatory.’
Dawn came eventually and we descended without a break to the North Col, where we rested for two hours, then on down to ABC for the night. My Everest was over. If I had feared a scathing reaction from our Times correspondent, I was pleasantly surprised: ‘Aborting his climb will be seen by the mountain community as a wise and courageous decision. Duncan Chessell, who has led thirty-five Himalayan expeditions, said, “For a 60-year-old man to make it even this far is extraordinary. You would expect only fifty per cent of climbers to reach anywhere near this high, especially during this season.”’
I congratulated my fellow Jagged Globe climbers, especially Sibu, who was the first black person to climb Everest from both sides, and Jens, who was a year older than me. Fred, who had recovered from his illness but still looked weak, assured me that he would be having another go, his third, in a year or so. I thanked David, Neal and our wonderful team of Sherpas, especially Boca Lama, for what had truly been a great experience. Would I try again? Not for a while. Maybe never, but I hate saying ‘Never again’.
Within a day, with Tore, Alex and Sibu, I was back down in Base Camp, and forty-eight hours after that I was checked out in Harley Street for new cardiac damage. None was evident, so it is likely that, on Everest and previously on Kilimanjaro, I had mere angina warnings. What would have happened if I had not heeded them or had not had the GTN tablets, it is impossible to know. I learnt later that, on the other side of the mountain a Scottish climber, 49-year-old Robert Milne, died of a heart attack on the same night and at the same height as I had my attack. I assume he had no GTN pills with him.
The tangible declared aim of my Everest attempt, all costs of which were sponsored by the generosity of Paul Sykes, had been to raise £2 million for an MRI Scanner Unit and Catheter Laboratory in the Great
Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London. The British Heart Foundation eventually raised the £2 million through the Ran Fiennes Healthy Hearts Appeal, despite my failure on the mountain, and I cut the ribbon to officially open the gleaming new clinic. Its purpose is purely for heart research, and it will enable BHF medical professionals to explore the heart disease that affects children, helping them to develop new interventional techniques with the aim of saving young lives.
Since our ‘honeymoon’ at the Everest Base Camp had been a non-event, Louise and I took up the kind offer of John Costello, who had checked out my lungs prior to Everest, to stay for a week in his family villa in southern Spain. A couple of months later, Louise told me that she was pregnant and, on Easter Day 2006, our daughter Elizabeth gave her first yell. A month later I was sixty-two years old and changed my first nappy.
19
Vertigo
The Everest experience and the advent of my new family extracted me from my period of misery and hopelessness following Ginny’s death. But my irrational fear of heights (or rather drops) was never put to the test on Everest, since the seventy-two days I spent moving up and down that mountain’s north side at no time involved any vertigo-inducing moves.
A couple of months after returning to England, I had a letter from Neal Short, who had led our ascent group two. He wrote: ‘As you were so close, I often wonder whether you are tempted to give it another go. Maybe you could go from the south side, with Kenton Cool, where they spend far less time above 5,300 metres and where dropping down the valley to lower altitudes for recuperation is an easier option.’ Kenton Cool had been one of four mountain guide instructors on my Jagged Globe pre-Everest course in the Alps. He had mentioned during that course that Everest was not a particularly scary feature in terms of sheer exposure, and he should know, as he was to become the first Briton to scale Everest five times. But I had assumed that his definition of scary was light years away from mine and that, since Everest was, after all, the highest mountain on earth, with a menacing casualty rate, it would prove a truly vertiginous experience for a person like me. Perhaps if I had completed the last few hours of traverse along Everest’s summit ridge, I would have experienced the ‘fearful voids’ I had looked for. But, as it was, my seventy-two Everest days had merely provided a long, toilsome trudge along fixed ropes up endless snow slopes with some rocky zones thrown in, plus a huge slice of boredom in high-altitude tents. My vertigo remained unchallenged, apart from by crevasses and school roofs.
Back on that Alpine course, it had been suggested that anyone looking for a real test of exposed climbing would be a lot better off in the Alps rather than in the Himalaya, since the daddy of all nasties was ready and waiting a mere three-hour drive from Geneva Airport: the North Face of the Eiger, the notorious Nordwand, the North Wall. In German mordwand means ‘murder wall’ and that is what the face is often called. I had heard various horror stories of this face, and some twenty years before, together with Simon Gault and Geoff Newman, had planned to walk up one of the easier ridges over a weekend with a guide. Those plans had never materialised for Geoff and me, although Simon had managed it and had never since let us forget the fact.
At some point I had tentatively approached Kenton with the suggestion that, if the Eiger was indeed to be a tougher challenge exposure-wise than Everest, would he guide me up it? And, if so, when? I knew that Kenton had climbed the North Wall of the Eiger with two friends and had taken three days and nights to do so. I also knew that he was held in huge respect by Britain’s mountaineering community. He was thirty-three years old and supremely fit. He lived and worked in Chamonix, the mecca of Alpine climbers, and did not suffer fools, especially climbing fools, gladly. In response to my Eiger query, he was forthright. He would not even consider climbing the Eiger with me unless he first taught me how to climb to a standard where he was sure he would not be risking his own life.
How long would such an instructional period last, I asked him. ‘As long,’ he replied, ‘as a piece of string. It depends on your ability, determination, strength and how long you’re prepared to spend training in the Alps. Have you read The White Spider?’
‘No,’ I replied.
‘Well, you probably should. It may put you off before you even think of going anywhere near the Eiger.’
I found a copy of the book, by the Austrian, Heinrich Harrer, one of the team who made the first ascent back in 1938, and noted his comments on some possible motives of a would-be Eiger North Face climber.
With the best will in the world no one could suggest any usefulness to mankind in such a climb. Nor could any material advantages be worth the risks, the indescribable labours and difficulties which demand the uttermost physical, spiritual and mental resistance merely to win fame at the expense of that horrific wall. To do the climb as compensation for an inferiority complex? Any climber who dares to tackle the North Face must have examined and proved himself a hundred times in advance. And how about a climb of the North Face as a counterbalance to hysteria? A hysteric, an unstable character, would go to pieces at the very sight of the Wall, just as surely as any mask would fall away in the face of this menacing bastion of rock and ice.
The White Spider made harrowing reading and explained in detail the reasons for many of the deaths of the highly capable climbers who perished on the North Face. I was impressed and not a little disturbed. Harrer was doing nothing to put my mind at rest, no doubt as Kenton hoped.
The North Wall of the Eiger remains one of the most perilous in the Alps, as every man who has ever joined battle with it knows. Other climbs, the North face of the Grandes Jorasses for one, may be technically more difficult, but nowhere else is there such appalling danger from the purely fortuitous hazards of avalanches, stone-falls and sudden deterioration of the weather as on the Eiger . . . The North Face of the Eiger demands the uttermost of skill, stamina and courage, nor can it be climbed without the most exhaustive preparations . . . The Eiger’s Face is an irrefutable touchstone of a climber’s stature as a mountaineer and as a man . . . Anyone who makes headway on the North Face of the Eiger and survives there for several days has achieved and overcome so much – whatever mistakes he may have committed – that his performance is well above the comprehension of the average climber.
I assumed that Kenton would, given time, be able to turn me into an ‘average climber’. Was that going to be enough? I moved on, depressed, from The White Spider in order to find more optimistic advice from equally famous but more contemporary climbers.
Joe Simpson, of Touching the Void fame, had written: ‘It wasn’t the hardest or the highest. It was simply “The Eiger”. The very mention of the name made my heart beat faster. The seminal mountain, a metaphorical mountain that represented everything that defines mountaineering – a route I had dreamed of climbing for my entire adult life.’ This, from the man famed for rescuing himself from the depths of an Andean crevasse after his partner had thought him lost and cut the rope, was less offputting than Harrer but hardly reassuring.
Jon Krakauer, who had stirred up the Everest ’96 hornet’s nest, wrote:
The problem with climbing the North Face of the Eiger is that in addition to getting up 6,000 vertical feet of crumbling limestone and black ice, one must climb over some formidable mythology. The trickiest moves on any climb are the mental ones, the psychological gymnastics that keep terror in check, and the Eiger’s grim aura is intimidating enough to rattle anyone’s poise . . .
The history of the mountain resonates with the struggles of such larger-than-life figures as Buhl, Bonatti, Messner, Rébuffat, Terray, Haston, and Harlin, not to mention Eastwood. The names of the landmarks on the face – the Hinterstoisser Traverse, the Ice Hose, the Death Bivouac, the White Spider – are household words among both active and armchair Alpinists from Tokyo to Buenos Aires; the very mention of these places is enough to make any climber’s hands turn clammy. The rockfall and avalanches that rain continuously down the Nordwand are legendary. So is the heavy we
ather. Even when the skies over the rest of Europe are cloudless, violent storms brew over the Eiger, like those dark clouds that hover eternally above Transylvanian castles in vampire movies . . . Needless to say, all this makes the Eiger North Face one of the most widely coveted climbs in the world.
All this and more in the same vein by other Eiger climbers put me off the whole idea in terms of treating it as a reasonable project. But from the point of view of a worthy vertigo-testing challenge, the mountain seemed perfect.
So I went back to Kenton, who agreed to have a go at teaching me how to climb on mixed rock and ice in the Alps. But because there would be a good deal of plain rock as well as ice on the Eiger, I needed to learn simple rock-climbing as well, which I could do near home on Exmoor, my finger stumps well strapped for protection. A Welsh climber from Cardiff, Haydn Griffiths, started me off on sea cliffs on the Gower Peninsula, various quarry-type cliffs near Cardiff, and the Avon Gorge near Bristol. Whenever I fell off, which was often, he held my fall from above and was always patient. Under his tutelage, I passed from climbs graded as DIFFICULT (meaning Easy) to those graded HARD VERY SEVERE (HVS), but never managed to complete the latter without considerable shouted advice from Haydn en route.
Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know Page 33