Far, Far the Mountain Peak

by Arthur Clifford

  Back at the shelter he found the others getting up and sharing out the melons for breakfast. Greedily he ate his four big slices, the sweet, sticky juice dripping down onto his shirt.

  ‘Well this lot’ll be gannin’ straight through wor!’ said Jim with a scatological leer.

  ‘Still got yer bog paper, Jonnie lad?’

  John winced. At that moment he was still on his ethereal plane and far above mere animal functions. That Gateway that led into the heart of Toubkal, the coming Day of Judgement, glory or ignominy. But… conserve your street cred, Jonny boy, be a lad.

  ‘Yeah, just a bit,’ he replied. ‘But when it’s finished, I guess we’ll have to do what the locals do.’

  ‘And what’s that?’ asked Jim.

  ‘Well, Bob says they use water and their left hand. That’s why there’s no paper in the bog at Marrakesh.’

  ‘Stick your fingers up yer bum!’ snorted Rob. ‘That’s dessgustin’!’

  ‘Them Pakkies!’ sighed Jim. ‘They do ’ave some funny ways, don’t they, like!’

  The Great Ascent

  Things were made ready for the Great Ascent. Rucksacks were packed up and the rubbish religiously put into a poly bag.

  ‘No point in carrying our rucksacks up to the top of the mountain.’

  ‘Aye, it’ll fuckin’ kill wor! Thorteen thoosand feet do d’yer say, John? Yer get mountain sickness at that height, don’t yers?’

  ‘Yes, you do. That’s what the climbing books say. You know, headaches and spewing.’

  That was another worry. Suppose mountain sickness hit them and they just flaked out? You could just see Morris’s complacent, I-told-you-so grin.

  ‘Well, we can’t leave the rucksacks here,’ said John. ‘They’ll just get nicked. We’d better leave them at the hut there. There’s sure to be a warden. He’ll look after them for us.’

  ‘Aye,’ sighed Michael, ‘and fleece us right proppa an’ all!’

  ‘Well, have you got a better idea?’

  Michael hadn’t. It was decided to leave their baggage at the hut. The shelter was duly dismantled and John took another group photo.

  ‘That must be the tenth one yer’ve taken!’ said Jim. ‘Yer’ll have no film left!’

  ‘No sweat, I’ve got two more rolls.’

  They shouldered their packs and attacked the stony trail ahead of them.

  ‘Cor, I’m knackered already!’ said a panting Tracy.

  ‘It’ll be better once we’re rid of our rucksacks,’ said John, assuming a cheerful ‘good expedition leader’ role. But, under the forced heartiness, he was fretting about mountain sickness. All the climbing books said it could be a killer – literally! Suppose Tracy collapsed and died of pulmonary oedema? Appalling thought!

  They soon reached the hut, perched on its spur. It was a neat, beautifully built, stone affair; very European and in stark contrast to the Biblical world further down the valley. John felt a pang of disappointment. This thing could have been in a suburb of Boldonbridge. The explorer fantasy took a knock.

  ‘Why does they call this thing a hut?’ asked Michael. ‘It is more like a hoos?’

  The door was open and they went in to find a spacious dining room that could have been in an English youth hostel. A large group of European hikers was having breakfast at a long wooden table. Replete with expensive boots, climbing breeches and sweaters, they exuded a confident opulence. They stared disapprovingly at the intrusion. Among them, looking especially inquisitorial, John recognised the Frenchman he’d talked to the previous afternoon. Youthful anarchy did not seem to be welcome in this orderly place.

  A long, gaunt man in a skullcap and a white robe approached them, aggressively, a bit like a terrier. ‘Quoi? Quoi? Quoi?’

  John tried to explain the situation: ‘Excusez-moi, Monsieur, mais est-il possible…’

  Here his French gave out. How could he explain that they wanted to leave their rucksacks here while they climbed Toubkal? Theoretically possible, but faced with the hostile stares of the hikers, his brain just ceased to work.

  ‘Where’s your teacher?’ asked the Frenchman in his impeccable English. ‘I think you’d better wait for him.’

  Problem! Has he sussed us? Quick thinking needed. More lies.

  ‘He’s outside. He sent me in to talk French as a test. I don’t want him to see me making a mess of my French, so please, please, don’t ask him in! I’ll get a bollocking.’ Pleading voice. Flash the ingratiating smile and hope it works.

  The man seemed to melt a little. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘It’s good to see the English actually trying to learn a foreign language for once. It doesn’t always happen, does it.’

  He turned and spoke in French to the gaunt man in the white robe who was obviously the warden. Then he turned to John. ‘All right, leave them over there. But mind, don’t you start climbing the Toubkal without your teacher. It’s dangerous, you know.’

  He didn’t seem to be wholly convinced by John’s cover story. However! Better get away quick before he starts asking more awkward questions. They deposited their loads and hurried outside.

  ‘We’d better get going before he finds out that we haven’t got a teacher with us.’

  ‘But what if it’s too dangerous?’ said Michael. ‘I mean, like what he said.’

  ‘Well, we’ll just have to turn back, won’t we?’

  John’s anxieties were mounting. His prize, his whole being, was under threat. Just what did lie up in that corrie above the gateway? Please God, make it easy!

  As they set off, however, an elation began to grow within him, tiny at first, but slowly, like that ‘grain of mustard seed’ in the Bible, swelling in imperceptible stages. Without his heavy pack, he seemed to glide up the trail. Plodding slowly and rhythmically upwards as Mekon had taught him, he led the way. Glancing behind him, he saw that the others were following him just as easily; the girls, too.

  One after another they passed the landmarks – the two boulders, the river – and followed the cairned trail as it wriggled its way into the corrie and up the sun-swept avalanche of boulders before them. They were alone in the radiant dawn and all around them were harsh and rugged mountains. Bathed in the gentle morning light, they seemed friendly, affable even. Slowly and steadily upwards. Lots of rest so as not to tire the girls. Team work. Major Allen would just eat this! Photographs all the time. No hint of altitude problems. Rising hope.

  Then, as they topped the lip of the corrie, a surge of elation! A broad basin opened out before them with easy screes sweeping down from an encircling, lumpy ridge. There were no impassable rock walls or lethal snowfields. Just a zigzag path snaking a carefully graded way up to a skyline on the right. Vindication! Breaking through the barrier!

  ‘There, team!’ cried John. ‘What did I tell you? It’s easy! We’re gonna make it! We’re mountaineers!’

  ‘Jonnie, lad, yorra fuckin’ genius!’

  A delicious moment of bonding, togetherness and acceptance.

  So, slowly upwards into the cool, welcoming sky. As they topped the ridge a vast panorama burst into view: wonderful, spacious, with a hint of that Beyond World. Wave after wave of craggy brown mountains rippling away into the blue distance like a boundless ocean of storm clouds. Far away to the south the rumpled ridges subsided, one after the other, into a vast sandy plain.

  ‘Look team! There’s the Sahara! Cor, this is great!’

  To their left, a broad ridge, rocky in places, gravelly in others, led invitingly up towards a little plateau upon which they could see a large tripod: the top!

  ‘There’s the top! Not far now!’

  ‘This is easier than Helvellyn.’

  ‘A reet doddle!’

  A walk, a little scrambling to add a bit of spice. Cool air, not a hint of altitude problems, a few slabby rocks… and they were there!

 
‘We’ve done it!’

  ‘And we’re not knackered neither!’

  It was one of those moments of delicious emotion that come to us rarely, if ever. Hand shakes. Hugs. Kisses from the girls. More than ever, that sense of bonding and togetherness, laced with the joy of achievement, and for John, of final acceptance and friendship. If only it could last for ever! Here was a tale he could tell Major Allen!

  A group photograph. Then time to absorb the mountain drama that stretched away on all sides of them: those vast sinuous and craggy ridges snaking down into lonely, undiscovered valleys, those huge plunging mountain faces, that lordly panorama of rugged immensities, grey, black and brown, and fading into a hazy blue in the unknown distance. On the crest of a euphoric wave, John took an elaborate panorama, using up a whole film.

  Then a sense of anticlimax. ‘Well, I suppose we’d better be getting down,’ he said, pointing to the easy-angled scree slopes that swept down into the corrie beneath them. ‘It’ll be quicker to go down directly.’

  So down they plunged, almost wading at times through a veritable swamp of loose gravel. Clouds of dust. Grit in your boots. Tough on your knees. Covered in brown grime which clings to your sweaty face.

  A rest among the boulders of the corrie floor followed. Then they picked a careful way down towards the hut. As they left the corrie they ran into a party ambling slowly up behind a Moroccan guide. John recognised the Frenchman who spoke English.

  ‘Nous avons fait le sommet!’ he cried triumphantly.

  ‘Well done, boys!’ the man replied in his perfect English.

  Then he frowned suspiciously. ‘But where’s the teacher you said was with you? I can’t see him’

  Alarm bells starting to tinkle. Plot discovered. More quick thinking.

  ‘Oh, he had the gut rot and went down.’

  ‘And he let you come up here without him? That’s not right, is it?’ The suspicious frown deepened. ‘Or, perhaps, there is no teacher with you? I’m not sure that you have been telling me the truth.’

  With that bombshell he rejoined his group and plodded on up the path.

  ‘He seems to have sussed us,’ said John. ‘We’d better get moving before he gets the fuzz onto us.’

  ‘Hadaway man! Divvent be daft!’ snorted Jim. ‘How the fuck’s he gannin’ ter fetch the poliss up here, like?’

  ‘Well, he could have a radio in his rucksack. These big posh climbing groups often do, you know. We’re hunted men on the run.’

  Down to Earth

  They stumbled back to the hut and retrieved their rucksacks from under the dining room table here they had been placed.

  ‘Merci beaucoup monsieur,’ said John to the gaunt, white-robed warden as he shouldered his pack. ‘Vous êtes tellement aimable,’ he added, extending his hand.

  But to his bewildered dismay the man scowled back at him. ‘Deux cent dihrams, soixant!’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘He wants two hundred and sixty dihrams. I suppose I can just about manage it.’

  John handed him a bundle of dihram notes and they prepared to leave, but the man blocked their way, gesticulating angrily.

  ‘Cadeau! Cadeau!’

  ‘Bloody hell! Now he wants a present!’ groaned John.

  With a resigned sigh, he pulled his last remaining sweater out of his rucksack and handed it to him.

  ‘Nowt Burra Rich Snob’

  ‘Well, he were a mingy old bastard!’ growled Rob as they set off down the track.

  ‘Yeah!’ added Jim. ‘He seemed to think we could shit money!’

  ‘John, yer shudda told him ter fuck off!’ sighed Michael. ‘Ah mean, what the fuck’s he done forrus like? Nowt! An’ as well as the dosh yer had ter give ’im yer sweater! Yer daft, you!’

  Still euphoric about climbing the mountain, John was fixed in ‘charitable and forgiving Christian’ mode.

  ‘OK,’ he said with a hint of defensive sanctimony, ‘I take your point, Mike, but remember we’re far richer than he is. Just by coming from Britain we’re probably carrying on us far more money than he’d earn in a year. We’re rich, you know.’

  ‘Speak for yourself, Jonnie lad!’ said Jim, with more than a hint of an aggressive snarl. ‘You may be rich, but I’m not!’

  ‘Nor me neither!’ echoed Rob.

  Sensing a cleavage opening up in the previous warm bonding, John quickly backpedalled. ‘Please, I wasn’t saying you were rich. I was only saying that compared to the people here, we seem to be rich. Well, er…’

  The complex legalistic hair-splitting required to clarify what he had meant to say, however, was beyond him at that precise moment and he fell silent.

  Sensing blood, Jim went onto the attack. ‘Yer knaa Brian told wor that you was nowt burra rich snob? Whadda der yer say ter that? Eh?’

  Inwardly John groaned. Not this one again! Could nothing break through that iron-hard shell of class resentment in which they encased themselves? He felt the ground sinking beneath him, that Greenhill feeling of utter helplessness in the face of blind, unreasoning brute force.

  ‘But, I’m not!’ he mumbled.

  ‘Well, yer does talk posh and yer does gan ter a private school, like.’

  ‘Aw give ower, Jim lad!’ cried Maureen. ‘Divvent start rowin’! I mean, we’ve all been such good mates! That’s been the best part of it. Better even than climbin’ the mountain.’

  ‘Aye!’ added Tracy vehemently. ‘John’s not a snob, him! I mean he’s given all them things o’ his away and paid out all that nikker an’ all jus’ ter help us out, like. Ah mean, you haven’t done that much, have yers? Be fair! He’s a loverly lad, him!’

  With that she embraced John and kissed him. He reciprocated with interest – compound interest.

  ‘Well,’ declared Michael, when the two of them finally disentangled themselves. ‘Yer’ve had yer smooch and we’ve ’ad out bitch, so warraboot ’avin’ a birra lunch?’

  ‘Thank God, some o’ yer lads gorra bit o’ sense!’ said Maureen.

  With that they sat down and shared out the remaining food. All the tins of tuna were duly opened and eaten. That left the nine remaining tins of that weird Moroccan stuff.

  ‘Well, Ah’m not eatin’ none o’ that!’ said Jim. ‘It’ll jus’ gan strain through yers an’ come oot the other end.’

  ‘Nowt wrong wi’ that!’ replied Rob with a scatological grin. ‘Nowt wrong with shittin’, like! Ah mean, me arld granddad wot were in a Nip prison camp in the war, he always said to us bairns when we was having wor tea like, “Lads, if yer divvent eat, yer divvent shit. An’ if yer divvent shit, yer dies. Yer gorra shit to live!” Ah mean, we’s all the same inside, yer knaa!’

  Scatological giggles. Back to being a group again. An inward sigh of relief from John. The little altercation had alarmed him. It had shown that under the apparently friendly surface of the bonding, old unbridgeable chasms still lurked. And yes, he’d snogged Tracy, all right. And yes, the girls had come to his rescue. But what if they sussed his true nature? You’re not one of them. You never will be. So keep up your guard! But back to the present.

  ‘Look,’ he declared, ‘we can easily get down to Imlil. It’s only twelve o’clock. It’ll be quick going downhill, and then we can get a bus back to Marrakesh.’

  Knight in Shining Armour? All Good Mates

  After reducing the girls’ loads to a minimum, the little band set off for Imlil. By now the sun was beating down fiercely. A shimmering haze veiled the mountains, reducing everything to a monochromatic dullness, as if the land had gone to sleep and would only wake up in the evening.

  After three hours of stumbling down the stony track, the two girls sat down on a rock.

  ‘I’m bloody fucked, me!’ declared Maureen. ‘Me feet is killin’ us!’

  ‘Me an’ all!’ sighed Tracy. ‘Ah canna gan nee further, me!�
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  ‘Well we can’t just stay here, me bonny lasses,’ said Rob. ‘We got no food. We’ll bloody starve!’

  ‘Well, we’ve got them tins of Pakkie stuff,’ said Michael. ‘We ain’t eaten that yet.’

  ‘There’s no way I’m eatin’ that crap!’ replied Jim forcibly.

  ‘So what does we do, then?’ said Rob.

  They sat in silence for a while.

  Then John saw his chance. Perform an act of heroic self-sacrifice and unstinting generosity. Like one of those knights of old, rescue the two damsels in distress! Then, surely, nobody could ever call him a rich, snobby git again – not even Jim!

  ‘Don’t worry, lads,’ he said, ‘I’ll get some donkeys to take the lasses down to Imlil.’

  ‘And get done again!’ snorted Michael.

  ‘Maybe! But I’ve got five thirty dihrams left. Tha should do. You wait here while I go down to that Sidi-whatever-it-is place and see what I can find. Guard my pack, will you, while I’m gone.’

  ‘How long will you be?’

  ‘Not that long. Can’t be far.’

  But, complications… It was now three o’clock, and the round trip to Sidi-whatever-it-was would probably take three hours. That would mean starting off with the girls at six o’clock. They would have to buy more food and spend the night somewhere.

  ‘Eeee, John!’ said Tracy as he set off. ‘Yorra knight in shinin’ armour, you!’

  But he had hardly disappeared round a corner before he met two men coming up the track, each leading an unladen donkey. It was almost as if God had put them there on purpose.

  Quick pleading conversation: ‘Excusez-moi… Est-il possible transporter deux personnes à Imlil avec votres ânes?’

  Atrocious and hideously accented French, but after a few moments the message seemed to get through.

  ‘Oui, containment.’

  ‘Combien?’

  ‘Cent dihrams, chaque âne.’

  ‘D’accord!’