by Simpson, Joe
As he swung the pick against the ice and I saw it bite solidly, there was a harsh scraping sound and the clattering rush of falling ice as his left foot shot into space. I winced, tensing as he swung away from the wall like an opening door. He teetered off balance, hanging grimly onto the left axe that he had just placed. Then, very carefully, he began to haul up on his left arm. His left boot swung back, scratched against the rock, found purchase with another sheet of loosely bonded ice and held.
I was scarcely breathing, weak with the shock of seeing Tat almost fall. I felt sick as the realisation that I was about to be ripped off the stance flashed through my mind. I wondered whether I could survive such a fall. Would the snow cone at the foot of the wall cushion the impact? I almost laughed at my desperation. Tasting the bile in my throat I wondered whether I would vomit and felt relieved to have missed out on breakfast.
Tat was breathing hard with the effort of trying to remain balanced and maintain a constant, even pressure on his ice picks. There was nothing I could do to help and I felt too paralysed with anxiety even to think of saying something encouraging. All I could think to say was ‘Don’t fall off’, an inanity that I guessed Tat could do without.
I watched as he detached the right axe and lifted it up to a point just above the placement of his left pick. As he was about to swing I spoke as calmly as I could.
‘It’s too close to your left axe, Tat,’ I said. ‘It’ll shatter the ice. You’ll be off instantly.’
He hesitated then replaced the pick carefully into its original position. I watched as he glanced at the front-points on his right boot. One inside point remained on a tiny edge of ice. He lifted his foot and with careful precision placed the same point in a thin crack one foot higher up the corner. He twisted his boot heel out to the left, increasing the torque so that the point bit securely into the crack. I heard the rock crunching under the pressure of the steel point. Straightening his right leg gave him enough height to stretch his right axe well above his left axe placement and he chopped it with firm confidence. The pick buried itself in solid water ice.
‘Yes!’ he said triumphantly. His feet scrabbled for purchase as he pulled up and planted the left axe high and to the left in even thicker ice. The danger was over. The route was in the bag. I was going to live a little longer.
I exhaled and shook my head. Unclipping the wire chock from the ropes with unsteady hands I felt a tremor of anger. I had just made the most stupid judgement call of my life. Nothing had been different from the day before but I had still let it happen. No runners, no belay and bad ice. Why? The answer was obvious. I hadn’t wanted to back down a second time in front of Tat. Not wanting to appear weak or frightened, I had risked everything to save face. That was not how decisions should be made and I knew I was a fool.
I was torn between anger and joy. I felt happy for Tat. He had got what he wanted and I admired all the skill and nerve and poise he had just displayed under immense pressure. Now that he had succeeded, he could reasonably argue that it was a good decision.
It wasn’t and I was angry with myself for saying nothing. It had put me in an invidious position and I had had to stand there and watch while the rest of my life was determined by the shaky adhesion of a few millimetres of frail, melting ice and the dubious friction of a tiny point of metal scratching against a flake of rock. In the past I might have felt that this was what it was all about. This was where you defined yourself, balanced tenuously between life and death. As I stood shakily on a fragile ledge of frozen vegetation all my justifications for climbing seemed suddenly meaningless.
It had been nothing more than a gamble. And for what? The right to say we had climbed a grade V ice route in a dangerously unstable condition. We could justifiably claim that it was grade VI, even grade VII. Technically we had both climbed harder routes but never at such risk. Accidents happen because we are all fallible. We make mistakes, we misjudge conditions, we overreach ourselves, but after all the years of accidents and deaths and mountains climbed, we should at least have learned when to back off. It wasn’t as if the situation suddenly engulfed us and we had no choice but to deal with it. We knew everything was wrong and yet we came back, ignored our intuition, and did it anyway.
It wasn’t worth our lives. The whole notion of ‘Deep Play’ – the gambling theory of extreme risk-taking when the gambler stands to lose far more than he could ever possibly win – may well be an apt description of some levels of climbing, but playing the game in reality now seemed a conceited and ridiculous enterprise.
However, when I reached Tat’s stance it was difficult not to be infected by his bubbling enthusiasm and pleasure.
‘Hiya, kid,’ Tat smiled and gave me a vigorous one-armed hug that nearly knocked me off the stance. I grabbed at the belay slings to steady myself.
‘Good lead, bloody good lead,’ I said.
‘It was thin.’
‘The wire fell out,’ I said bluntly.
‘Thought it might,’ Tat nodded cheerfully.
‘I thought you were off, you know?’
‘It was close,’ he agreed. ‘But the placements felt good. You climbed it pretty fast.’
‘Two pints of adrenalin helps,’ I retorted. ‘As does having a rope above you. I don’t think we should have done that. We nearly died.’ I looked hard at Tat and he was suddenly serious.
‘Maybe.’ He seemed defensive, as if recognising that we had gone too far.
‘I thought you were tired of risks. You said dying wasn’t worth it.’
‘Never has been.’ Then he shrugged and couldn’t suppress the grin. ‘But we’re not dead and we have done it, so what’s the problem, eh? Come on, let’s do the rest of it.’ He handed me the wires, pitons and ice screws, impatient to get on. ‘Up and to the left and then it curves round into that narrow rocky gully.’ He pointed across a short ice flow leading into an obvious rocky gash.
Forty-five minutes later I was abseiling from a tied-off ice screw back down to where Tat was belayed. A shower of ice particles was sweeping the gully. The sun had hit the top of the face.
‘Sorry, Tat,’ I said feeling ashamed of my second retreat in two days. ‘The ice ran out. It was good at first then became wet and thin. After that there was nothing – just a 15-foot-high, smooth rock gully. No cracks, no wires. I couldn’t climb it.’
‘Right,’ Tat smiled at me, still buzzing from his success. ‘Better get out of here.’
‘Eh?’ I was taken aback. ‘But don’t you want to try it?’
‘No.’ He began sorting the tangle of ropes into two separate coils. ‘If you couldn’t do it, I probably couldn’t. Come on, let’s go.’
We abseiled swiftly back down to the safety of the snow cone. As we trudged down to the car I marvelled at Tat’s equanimity. I had expected a repeat performance of yesterday’s moody disappointment. At very least I had expected some criticism about letting him down again. As we bundled the gear into the boot, Tat stopped to look up at the route.
‘We’ll do it next year,’ he announced.
‘If it’s in condition,’ I qualified warily.
‘Of course.’
I knew there was no ‘of course’ about it. Knowing Tat as I did, we would be back the next year and we would do it.
‘Do you know what Alea Jacta Est means?’ Tat asked as he drank deeply from a cold pint of beer.
‘No,’ I said, thinking about the name of the climb. ‘It’s Latin, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, that’s why I asked,’ Tat said. ‘You were taught Latin, weren’t you?’
‘I was so bad at Latin I spent most of the classes standing in the corner for failing to know the past pluperfect conjugation of some obscure verb. Never even understood what past pluperfect meant, let alone gerundives. And those damn stupid sentences you had to translate, “Labienus, having sacked Gaul, returned to Rome.” Who the hell was Labienus? That’s what I wanted to know but nobody knew. He was just this guy with a vaguely embarrassing name who kept sacking
things and then going home. It used to drive me mad …’
‘But you’re not bad at languages,’ Tat interrupted my rant. ‘You speak French and Spanish.’
‘I understand more Spanish than I can speak and I used to be able to speak French, but not Latin,’ I replied. I finished my beer. ‘So what do you think it means?’
‘I’m not sure. My Latin is a bit rusty, just what I learned as a medical student, but I think it means, “Only yourself to blame.” Good, eh?’
‘It’s about right,’ I laughed. ‘Except I would have been blaming you,’ I added.
‘Only for as long as it took for us to hit the ground.’
The following winter Tat and I returned to find Alea Jacta Est in much better condition. We climbed the route without problems and Tat was proved right. It was a superb climb. It was also the last ice climb we were to do together.
I later learned from Margaret Colwell that the name Alea Jacta Est actually meant The die is cast. Margaret said it was a loose translation but she was sure the word jacta was the Latin verb, ‘to throw’ and Alea meant ‘dice’, hence a gamble, a wager. A literal translation would be, the die is thrown, or cast. In good conditions the route name did not seem especially apt but in the dangerous state that we had first attempted the climb it was all too true. In effect, it was something that I felt it had always been – an unacceptable gamble, a last throw of the dice, a wintry version of Russian Roulette.
‘Alea jacta est’ had seemed a naggingly familiar phrase, reminding me vaguely of my miserable Latin lessons. Later I was to learn that the reason it was familiar was that it was what Julius Caesar famously uttered as he crossed the Rubicon, a river that no Roman general was ever allowed to cross as it was tantamount to a revolt against the Republic. Once he’d thrown the dice by crossing the river he had no choice but to press on, overthrow the Republic and set up his Imperium. He was then assassinated in Rome for precisely this act.
It was a huge gamble that Caesar took, knowing the implications of his decision and knowing also that there was no turning back. I wish I could have claimed to have been so decisive.
2 Intimations of mortality
I hadn’t liked the look of the seracs at all. Through the binoculars they had appeared even more threatening than when seen with the naked eye. I had turned away from the view of Chaupi Orco’s south face and glanced towards where Yossi Brain was crouched by the gas stoves. A huddle of tents had been pitched on the gritty ice of the glacier. A few parallel crevasses bordered the farthest tent and beyond that the glacier swept in a sinuous crescent down towards the green pampas of the Lago Soral valley.
‘Yossi,’ I called and he looked up from the steaming pans. ‘Have you got a moment?’ I nodded my head to one side to indicate that I wanted to speak with him in private, out of ear-shot of the clients. Yossi stood up and ambled over to me. He was a tall man, thin-faced with a shock of long straw-blond hair tied back in a pony-tail.
‘What’s the problem?’ he asked as we walked a short distance across the glacier.
‘Well, I may be paranoid but I don’t like those seracs.’ I passed him my binoculars and he scanned the serac band. At the foot of the south-east face of the mountain the glacier spilled down in a crevassed, snow-covered hump, flowing between two great rock buttresses. On the right side the rock walls towered up in a series of pinnacles and blocky towers. Directly above the rocks a beautiful conical snow summit flanked the right side of a distinct snow saddle, separating this smaller peak from the round shouldered mass of Chaupi Orco’s 6044-metre summit on the left. Where the glacier rose up to this saddle it was squeezed into a series of short ice falls interspersed with loose screes and boulders. From what Yossi had told me, we would be climbing in the dark early the following morning up through the screes and then traversing beneath the largest of the ice falls towards a spit of scree running down the right or eastern flank of the mountain. It was certainly not technically difficult and I knew that if we moved fast we could minimise the risk of a sudden avalanche. And there lay the problem. I was not confident that the group was fit enough to move that fast.
We had spent the last two and a half weeks trekking in the remote Cordillera Apolobamba region of the Bolivian Andes. I was leading a group of trekkers and climbers on a three-week exploration of this rarely visited Bolivian mountain range for High Places, a Sheffield-based adventure trekking company. Yossi Brain, a former journalist, and now a resident of La Paz, had drawn up the itinerary for the treks and climbs. We had climbed one mountain, Cuchillo (5660 metres), a striking pyramid peak that had presented no great problems. The view across the Altiplano of the Cordillera Real had been superb and at the time I had thought our hopes for three more summits in this wonderfully remote area were not over-ambitious. Yet by the time we had made the long, heavily laden trek up to our high camp on the glacier below Chaupi Orco we had not managed any more summits.
The trekking had been superb. There were only four villages of any size in the area and consequently we had run into a number of logistical problems on our trek, mainly concerned with re-supply of food and fuel and the difficulty of hiring sufficient donkeys, mules and llamas. The sense of remoteness had been heightened by the harsh arid conditions of the area and the grinding poverty that the local Indians endured with resigned stoicism.
Midway through the trek I found myself crossing some high pampas, having passed by the small mining settlement of Viscachani. After crossing a pass of nearly 5000 metres with the group I went ahead towards a deserted goldmine high on a rocky bluff, overlooking the decrepit and ugly settlement at Sunchuli. I was listening to Van Morrison on my personal stereo, occasionally glancing back to mark the progress of the group. I had gone a little too fast, something I have always been guilty of, but I was happy that both Yossi and Pira were bringing up the rear, and I planned to wait for everyone at the old goldmine. Far in the distance I noticed the small figure of an Indian walking diagonally away from me with what appeared to be a strange gait. A little while later I noticed he had changed direction and was walking directly towards me at some pace. When he was about a quarter of a mile from me he began waving his arms and gesticulating towards his head in a worryingly animated manner. I glanced back, suddenly anxious at being on my own with what appeared to be the only lunatic in an otherwise unpopulated area. I slowed to a halt and warily observed the man approaching. I noted that along with the arm gestures he was sporting a disturbingly manic grin. I gripped my ski poles a little tighter. They were useful for warding off attacking dogs and I was just wondering how I could fend off the man with them when he arrived quite breathless in front of me and shook a little transistor radio at me which had previously been fixed to his left ear. He swept his poncho clear of his shoulder and raising his radio to the sky, he declared, ‘France two, Brazil nil.’
I stared at him in bemusement. ‘Football, World Cup, si!’ he announced with great satisfaction. ‘Brazil nil! Heh, heh!’ He chortled, then, without another word, he strode purposefully off into the emptiness of the pampas. I listened to his laughter and the occasional yips of excitement as he raised a hand to punch enthusiastically at the sky. A complete stranger had just deviated a mile out of his way to inform me that France was winning the 1998 football World Cup.
I remembered a similar incident that Tom Richardson had told me about when he had been resting on the plains below Mount Kenya after having developed high-altitude sickness. A lone figure approached from an empty horizon. A speck at first, dust rising from his feet, the figure grew taller and more dominant as he strode directly towards Tom. Tom looked around, hoping the stranger might be meeting someone else, but to his alarm he too noticed that he was quite alone. As the figure came close Tom realised it was a very tall and imposing Maasai warrior dressed in his traditional red robes, a stately and somewhat intimidating figure, armed as he was with a long-shafted spear. When he drew up beside Tom he inclined his head and announced in a gravely sombre voice, ‘Elvis Presley is dead.’ He th
en strode off into the distance without another word, leaving Tom speechless.
The Cordillera Apolobamba, an extension of the main Cordillera Real range, lies to the north of Lake Titicaca and crosses the border into Peru. It had not been visited by any mountaineering expeditions until 1957 and there were still many unclimbed peaks over 5000 metres. It was relatively unmapped at any useful scale, under-populated and difficult to access, and many climbers – or anyone else for that matter – had been dissuaded from exploring the area. Yet there were literally thousands of new routes to be climbed as Yossi enthusiastically told me in La Paz when he had been showing me the proofs of his forthcoming climbing guide-book of Bolivia.
By the time we were to make our attempt on Chaupi Orco, the highest peak in the Apolobamba range and only climbed successfully once before, we did not have the high-altitude fitness I had hoped for. To add to our woes, half the group – who were awaiting our return at the camp site on the large pampa below Paso Yanacocha – were struggling with an unforeseen lack of fuel and minimal food. Some of Yossi’s logistical planning had gone awry. It was a two-day trek to the nearest village of Pelucho, so clearly we were about to go on a diet.
We were fit from days of trekking over high passes. In fact we had crossed twelve passes over 4500 metres in our circuitous approach to the mountain but I had hoped that we would have had at least two, maybe three, summits between 5500 and 6000 metres to our credit by the time we attempted Chaupi Orco. We were fit to cross high passes but not necessarily to scale a 6000-metre mountain. Now, when we needed to move quickly, I was worried that some of the group would not be fast enough. Of the main party of ten clients only a handful had reached the high camp, and of these one had already decided to withdraw from the ascent. Yossi was coming down with flu. Pira, our incredibly fit Spanish guide, and I were left to guide the remaining three clients.