by Brian Keenan
The shallow pools around the camp are covered with ice in the early morning as we prepare for a long ride. Today we go to Argentina and will climb 5,000 feet in four hours. Before we start, we are treated to an impromptu display of virtuoso horsemanship as Mauricio races bareback across the rocky hillside rounding up the mules. When the first Spaniards arrived, the Indians, who had never seen horses, thought that man and mount were one beast. Watching Mauricio now one can understand their mistake. His skill is stunning.
Perhaps inspired by Mauricio’s display I feel really at home in the saddle this morning and although Charlatán shows no indication to move over shale at anything more than a stroll, my relationship with him has shifted from one of subjection to one of proprietorship.
Twenty minutes or so after setting out, we rode cautiously over a huge sloping plain of stone and then progressed upward following a washed-out river bed. Soon we were in blue-black cinder country. The whole place was littered like a burnt-out ash pan, the detritus of volcanoes. I remembered that these mountains were formed out of cataclysmic eruptions. We seemed to be surrounded by ‘exploding rock’ terrain. Beneath us the river had a covering of ice.
When we came upon the base camp of some mountain climbers, John and a few others went to chat. When they heard we were continuing upwards, one of them remarked, ‘You guys are nuts, horses aren’t supposed to go higher than this.’
The landscape was becoming more harsh and brittle. There were few rounded edges up here and the air was icy. Like the idiot McCarthy is always telling me I am, I had forgotten to put on my long johns and my legs were becoming more numb by the minute.
At this point Nigel had kindly procured the loan of one of the huasos’ ponchos for me. Though I was glad of it I had ominous premonitions about shrouding myself in this voluminous black cape. At first it made the ride cumbersome as it flapped wildly like a banshee in the wind. I remembered having referred to demons the night before and for some reason I associated this cape with them. But I soon adjusted to it and was content to have it around me. For an instant I glanced back to see where John and the others were. The sight was splendidly terrifying.
My first impressions at such altitude may well have been informed by the illusory effects of low oxygen. Everywhere the land was falling away from me, making it seem as though the mountains were being thrown up even as I looked at them. I was in the entrails of an immensely powerful landscape that awed me. I was being swallowed up by a pandemonium of stone.
We moved on, making a long, slow, steep ascent, then rounding the top to look out on an unending vista of mountain peaks and glaciers.
Nigel points to a glacier high above us across the valley. ‘See those little pinnacles of ice? They’re unique to the Andes. They call them penitentes, like repentant sinners on their knees.’
We go on up, aiming for a ridge high above us. The track is steep, winding forever upwards on barren rock and dust. Suddenly we are level with the penitentes and come across some on this side of the valley. It is a very odd sight, like something from a sci-fi film set. Dotted over an area about a hundred yards square are little pyramids of snow, the biggest about six feet tall. The ground between them is totally dry and rocky like everywhere else.
‘On your knees, sinner,’ I say to Brian.
He remarks with a scowl that they look more like those old-fashioned gents’ urinals you find in underground lavatories. ‘I’ll strangle Nigel from the bollocks upwards,’ he fulminates. ‘“Steady climb; not too difficult,” he told us but this is just boring and tiring.’
Clouds begin to mass over the summit for which we are heading. Although we are still riding in sunshine it is cool. I move up beside Nigel who is looking skywards, blissfully unaware of how close he is to a garrotting from Keenan.
‘Are we going to get bad weather?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know. Normally the clouds gather later in the day.’
‘It’s getting colder.’
‘Most of that is just the morning downdraught from the glaciers. In the afternoon, when the land’s heated up, warm air will be coming up.’
I enjoy picking up titbits from Nigel; he knows so much about this environment that we have imaginatively nicknamed him ‘Mountain Man’. He has climbed some and seems to have been everywhere, once earning his living as a shepherd in Argentinian Patagonia.
‘It’s on those thermals that the condors glide. They never need to beat a wing, just leave their high perches and soar up on the land’s heat. They each watch a valley and each other. They eat carrion and if one swoops down the others follow, assuming that food has been spotted.’
Looking down it is hard to believe we’ve climbed so far – I feel I am peering back to another world.
‘Are we nearly there?’ I ask.
‘Almost there. It’s easy now.’
I continue looking, watching the others coming up, a line of riders working their mounts back and forth across the steep hillside. On the far side of the valley and rising yet higher the mountains are covered in snow. This trail used to be used by smugglers and rustlers. I imagine that at this point they would have paused and felt elated like me. I am achieving a life-long dream; they were nearly on home ground and safe from pursuit. I turn Charlatán’s head uphill once more.
Leaving the airless, immobile ice sculptures we were off for lunch in Argentina as if it was a Sunday school outing. I found it hard to believe that we had come so far or so high. Loose shards of stone were dislodged by our horses’ hooves and then tumbled into oblivion below us. I stopped looking down for fear of following them. As I rounded a section of the path to come up on John, I was forced to stop suddenly.
Nigel has disappeared, Brian and the others are behind me, and suddenly I find myself riding another knife-edge ridge. But this is so high, the wind is strong and I cannot see that there is anywhere to go on the other side.
Lying bastard, I think.
Just last night Brian, Mellie and I were talking about how we deal with fear. We all tend to displace it by getting angry with something or someone. Nigel is going to be it.
Once across there seems to be no room at all: the land stops and just drops away in all directions. As I dismount I am certain that one false step would see me falling thousands of feet. Off the horse my instinct makes me crouch low. Here at the top of the world one feels certain to be toppled.
When my turn came I sat, half frozen in the saddle. From somewhere in front of me I heard Nigel call out, ‘Don’t hesitate or pull her up. Keep her moving!’ John’s voice joined his: ‘Come on, Bri, you can do it.’ My head was too full of words and my heart was in my mouth preventing them from escaping. I repeated Nigel and John’s advice: ‘Don’t pull her up, you can do it.’ Then I whispered to myself, ‘I’m gonna do both you bastards when I get over this.’ Get over what? I asked myself. There was nothing there except another chasm of air for me to gallop over. I sat poised on a knife-edge of loose stones with a 16,000-foot sheer drop on either side.
‘My horse is not a fucking tightrope walker!’ I screamed at the top of my voice so that every stone in the Andes could hear me. Immediately it’s out, I hear myself say, ‘Learn a song, or a few verses of several. You’ll need something to occupy your time when you are falling.’ It was something one of the K2 climbers at Jorge’s house had said to me. ‘K2 Keenan, that’s me,’ I quipped. As I threw the black poncho around me, I noticed Milly’s great big soft eye roll back to look at me. ‘OK, sweetheart, I’m all yours,’ I whispered as we both stepped off into the Andean air.
I didn’t know how to describe absolute terror because I don’t remember it. I only know that Milly became Pegasus and flew me to safety, for which I will be eternally grateful.
Landing on the other side, I dismounted to put the horse out of the wind. How could I have thought, even for a second, that this black cape had an ominous significance? Even if I had fallen out of the sky up there it would have flown me down to earth like a fallen leaf. The thought calmed m
e for no longer than a nanosecond. I looked around me. We were on a ledge barely able to accommodate one man and horse, never mind three, with another equine astronaut about to land any minute.
I looked briefly at Nigel, and he will never know, until he reads this, how close he came to forcibly encountering the Japhy Ryder/Dharma Bums mountain descent experience – first hand, with my right foot starting him off.
Last night Tom specifically quizzed Nigel about the ‘vertigo factor’ from which he suffers. I watch him now coming across the ridge on foot, like me keeping his centre of gravity low. The cameras around his neck must feel truly like a millstone at tense times like this. He gets across and sits down with Brian. They are both scared and very angry. Brian scowls and curses. He nods towards the narrow little path, a rock bridge really, to the level area where Nigel and Manuel are laying out lunch.
‘You don’t have to go over there with them, John. We can have our lunch here!’
Tom, every inch the Englishman, finds it hard to express his anger. Like me, a shock moves him to nervous laughter rather than angry outburst. ‘I have to say that this is not my idea of a great picnic spot. Don’t anyone mention the word earthquake!’
We begin to laugh.
‘Look, while no-one’s looking we could have Nigel and Manuel over the cliff. Then the swine couldn’t torture us like this again,’ says Tom.
‘OK, but be careful of the food,’ I say. ‘I’m starving!’
‘Typical bloody McCarthy,’ snorts Brian. ‘“Where’s my eating?”’ he squeaks in a childish tone, remembering me telling of a childhood picnic in an English summer’s downpour. Mothers and children trying to get dry in some shelter but the boyhood me jumping up and down in a petulant rage for the abandoned sandwiches.
I was vaguely conscious of passing a tall iron post on the ridge but had been too frightened, too concerned with where Charlatán would put his feet, to look at it. I look back at it now and realize it marks the border between Chile and Argentina. Mellie appears at the far side. My heart goes out to her; she must be going through the same nightmare that I had had, not being able to see where the track leads. My concerns for her are suddenly overwhelmed with selfish anxiety. There is not enough room for any more horses and people, I think, I must go and turn her back.
Fortunately my saner self intervenes and I decide to sit with Brian and Tom and get acclimatized to our immediate surroundings.
After a little while I realize that though this area is tiny, it is large and stable enough to hold us all. Once the rest join us, we consume smoked salmon sandwiches at over 15,000 feet. As ever, Nigel just laughs when we subject him to a barrage of finely chosen insults.
The drop to Argentina is as colossal as that we have climbed, of course, but from our eyrie I can see none of the gentler gradients to allow any form of trail. Every descent looks sheer. The mountains and valleys are orange in the sunlight. Far away a clear blue lake glints. Once more, any sense of perspective, any ability to judge depth and distance, goes completely. There is nothing to give one an ordinary sense of scale: the whole is once again distorted, surreal and fantastic. Who knows what other dimensions of reality could be conjured here?
Tom decides that he must take some photographs. He enlists Cristián to hold on to him, ‘In serio, Cristián’ – seriously.
Fulfilling his professional duties clearly puts him through hell again. He is unusually muted when he sits down, his back to the mountain. There is no trace of a smile on his face as he looks levelly at Nigel and says, ‘Nigel. You are a bastard.’
We mount up again, all of us tense. The wind has stiffened in the past ten minutes, bringing with it an icy chill. We are wearing all our layers and our hats are tied on fast. Recrossing the ridge I feel that Charlatán and I are little more than a feather buffeted by the whistling devil of the wind and that we will be hurled into the abyss. Hard snowflakes come snapping at us as if they are the agents of another, minor demon willing us to lose both heart and footing. Nevertheless soon we are all safely across and begin the long ride down. Ten minutes later we look back and the ridge has disappeared in a dark cloud as if it were a place of fantasy after all.
The change in weather and the long ride back to camp bring home the true nature of this experience. This is now no holiday outing, it is a survival course. The suddenness with which the mountains can become unfriendly is far more alarming than saddle sores and aches and pains. As with sailing the special nature of trekking is of being in a wild place, learning to respect it, and realizing that you can gain an expanded sense of wonder and purpose.
The snow, wind and sleet were like savage razor blades. I huddled underneath the huaso’s great black poncho. Nothing can overcome me. After my flight on Pegasus and protected by this huge Chilean cloak, I am unassailable.
I instinctively knew we had achieved something and wanted to relive the moment. Above us the sky was a clear, clean blue, behind us the mountains were reds and browns, dappled with white snowfalls. John’s pinto horse seemed to have been cut out of the landscape.
We had both made it to that mythic mountaintop the Psalmist had written about. I was filled with the same sense of muted elation that is the culmination of the Psalmist’s art. Having struggled through loneliness and despair with the enmity of the whole world thrust against him, the poet finds peace and comfort in the blissful contemplation of the glory and majesty of God. I had the same sense of things. Perched here where the mountains pierced the sky, we had made the journey of our captive imaginings into a reality. We had overcome and gone beyond and now stood God-like looking down on the world, quivering with fear, adrenaline and the kind of joy it is probably only possible to experience a few times in one’s life.
I wake feeling refreshed from yesterday’s dramas. Last night the huasos all slept in the open so Bri and I had a tent each. When I poke my head out after waking, Tom is passing. He comes over to exchange good mornings, nodding to where his tent sits beside Brian’s. ‘I had no idea anyone could snore that loudly,’ he says.
‘Oh yes! It just happens that I have a spare set of earplugs. I could let you have them for, shall we say, fifty quid?’
‘It was very loud, even fifteen feet away and out here in the open. What was it like in a cell?’
‘Well, loud enough. But we got used to each other after a while.’
He smiles down at me then his face grows serious. ‘How long was it?’
‘Four years for him, five for me.’
‘My God. My God!’ He staggers off, looking appalled.
We break camp in warm sunshine and head off on a leisurely ride to a new base. After the drama of yesterday even Mal Paso has lost its terror. It seems quite small in scale and I relish guiding Charlatán round the tight bends, my free hand held out for balance as he slides on the steeper sections.
I feel more at ease in the saddle now and realize that even though my legs are permanently knackered, I am growing stronger and fitter. Although I cannot swing into the saddle as the huasos do, without putting a foot in the stirrup, it is now no effort sliding on and off Charlatán’s back.
At the new camp, I help rig the windbreak and realize that with the growing fitness my head is clearer than for a long time; knots long unpractised suddenly form themselves in my hands. Having found a sense of place, I seem to have recovered a sense of purpose. It is hard to define, but it feels as if some unspecified weight has been lifted. Perhaps the physical exertions have eased psychological stresses.
After lunch some of us go to explore a fossil field. As soon as we move off I have doubts; all I can think of is my aching backside and how I could have had a pleasant afternoon bathing in the river and reading and snoozing in the sun. However, it is only an hour’s ride during which the spectacle of steam rising from Volcán Tupungatito (the younger, smaller but still active neighbour of Tupungato) eases my pain. The fossil field is an extraordinary sight. Acres of mounds and hollows, as if someone has been sifting for treasure. Yet everything looks
like cement and in a way it is: countless shell shapes bonded together into rock – thick seabed at over 10,000 feet.
While John and some of the others hunted for fossils, I stayed behind, daydreaming about our conquest of the Andes. The descent from Argentina reinforced the spectacular dimensions of the mountains we had crossed. Normally my logic would insist that there is nothing in reality that is unbelievable. But I now hereby declare my logic inadequate.
We had overcome terror and fear. We had recognized them as ghostly apparitions from the past and shunned them. We had defied our own animal instincts. We had achieved no great feat in the world’s terms, but for myself I felt that to overcome my own inadequacy and fear was earth-shattering enough. I remembered Tennyson’s words echoing Homer which I had imprinted somewhere in my psyche during our captivity: ‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’ It may be an old time-worn motto, but unconsciously I seem to have carried it with me into the Andes.
During that descent I remember I wanted to scream something utterly inarticulate that only the mountains would understand. I was still afraid, sometimes terribly so, but I was moving in a fantasy in which the fear could not survive.
The many poems I had read on our way to that angel-fearful place were echoing out of the ether of my still-fevered imagination. But it was merely a kaleidoscope of images and impressions to which I could give no form or shape.
Nigel, Manuel and Cristián start looking about with experienced eyes, hunting for good examples. Cristián teases Manuel who is clearly something of a fanatical fossil collector. Searching too, I begin to see the expression ‘as old as the hills’ in a new light – that perhaps it should be taken out of common usage, reserved for something more profound; something speaking more to the very core of nature and man.