Next day we walked up the Rio Volcan, and as we walked the sides closed in, towering above us with an ever-closer proximity. There was no sign of the volcano; it was hidden in cloud, and I had the disturbing feeling of being in the middle of a vacuum, perhaps exaggerated by my own sensations of lethargy. Whether it was the altitude, a forest fever, or the result of my four weeks in hospital, I felt desperately ill and tired, yet was determined not to betray this to Jorge and Sebastian. At last we reached a point that seemed a dead end. The Rio Volcan spewed forth from a narrow gorge which would have been impossible to follow; our only hope seemed to be a steep gully, leading to the top of the cliffs and the upper jungle.
I retired to my sleeping bag that night, unable to control my shivering fit, worried that I might fail to complete this second, crucial, professional assignment. Our porters were crammed beneath the bivvy tent in a pile of humanity which at least enabled them to retain some warmth, for they did not even have woollen blankets to cover themselves at night but merely made do with a ragged cotton sheet.
To my relief, next morning, the fever had vanished, and I felt my strength renewed. Our Jivaro guides would go no further, but Don Albino, though obviously scared stiff, agreed to accompany us towards the base of the volcano. We were now gaining height fast, but every foot of the way had to be hacked from the impenetrable entanglement presented by the undergrowth. That day we advanced only a couple of miles. It had rained non-stop all day; our porters were cold and miserable and food was nearly exhausted. Sebastian was obviously enjoying the situation. He loved melodrama, and had a touch of the masochist in his make-up. I was sour and bad-tempered, worried about whether we should ever find our volcano, let alone climb it! And Jorge – patient, phlegmatic Jorge – who, I am sure, never ceased to be amazed by Sebastian and myself, did most of the cooking and somehow kept our porters going.
That evening, we stopped on the crest of an overgrown ridge; higher than the previous night’s camp, it was also considerably colder. We had now issued all our spare clothing to the porters, but by this time everything was soaked and they had the greatest difficulty even in lighting a fire, the brushwood was so wet and rotten. Next morning, we were confronted with mutiny – Don Albino was the spokesman.
‘The men are frightened and very cold,’ he told Jorge. ‘They want to go home. If we stay here any longer we shall all die.’
With promises of bonuses, Jorge persuaded them to stay for three more days at this camp, where they could, at least, find some firewood, help us to carry the tent to a high camp and then wait for us to return.
Reluctantly, Don Albino agreed and three of the youngest and fittest of our porters shouldered loads to help carry the gear to a point where we could, at least, see the volcano. The vegetation had now changed to a form of giant and leprous weed of huge umbrella-like leaves on soft fleshy stalks. It made me feel like a pygmy in a science-fiction film, and I half expected to be confronted, at any moment, with a giant sixty-foot high spider or a mammoth ant. We could have been on a set for Conan Doyle’s Lost World – and it continued to rain as though it would never stop.
Our progress was slightly faster than the previous day; by dusk, we had emerged from the forest of Sachapalma, and had reached the grass-line – great tussocks of coarse, man-high grass, which were almost as impenetrable as barbed-wire entanglements. With some way still to go, it was obvious that we were going to need a higher camp. I persuaded Gabriel, the strongest of our porters, to stay with us. This meant cramming four into our two-man tent, while the other two returned to await our descent.
Just as dusk fell, all our efforts were rewarded. The clouds suddenly unrolled, and we were able to see Sangay, squat, foreshortened, towering over us. Even as we gazed, there was a dull, heavy rumble, accompanied by a great mushroom of ochre-brown smoke which welled up from near the summit. There was no glow, no pyrotechnics, just boiling, expanding cloud that was somehow more menacing than any amount of molten lava.
We settled down for a damp and very cramped night. The bottom of the tent was full of puddles and a strong sense of survival was needed to avoid getting one’s sleeping bag soaked. I wriggled and manoeuvred throughout the night, in order to remain dry, while Sebastian, the eternal stoic, lay still and silent, in the middle of a large puddle.
I suspect I was the only one to appreciate fully how serious our position could become. We now had no more than two days’ stock of food, and although we were only thirty-five miles from Macas, that thirty-five miles had already taken a week to cover. More to the point, if anything should happen to us, there was no one in Macas who could, or, for that matter would, come to our aid. In the flat light of dawn, I could gaze back over our path. It was just possible to discern the swathe in the forest, cut by the River Upano, but apart from that there was a matt carpet of dull green stretching to the far horizon. Above us was the volcano, with featureless lava rubble stretching up into an even ceiling of cloud. Suddenly, I realised how easily we could get lost. It had taken three days to cut our way through the upper jungle to reach this point. If we missed this narrow thread of a path on the way back down, we should have very little chance of cutting our way back to the Rio Volcan. We were on our own, and the responsibility for the party was mine.
But we needed to get closer to the base of the volcano, and so, leaving a trail of wands marked with some torn-up red flag, we waded through the chest-high grass, towards the top of the grass line. Now we were faced with another problem. There was no running water and all the liquid we had was the contents of a single water bottle. That night we camped immediately below a ridge of lava that stretched smoothly up towards the brow of the skyline. There could be no question of awaiting the perfect weather. We had no food or water, and there was some element of doubt as to whether our porters in the camp below would wait for us. I was not sure how high we were, but guessed our altitude to be about 10,000 feet – still 7,000 feet below the summit, a long climb by any standards.
That night I was on edge, hardly slept and, at midnight, poked my head out of the tent to see a sky, velvet black, studded with stars.
‘Come on Sebastian, wake up; it’s a perfect night.’
He groaned and rolled over. Even so, I got the primus lit, boiled the half-panful of water, which was all we had, made some coffee, and thrust it into his hand. Jorge was still dead to the world.
Not wanting to waste any more time, I ordered Sebastian to get ready as quickly as possible. I got dressed and started out, up the lava slope, where I could see deep patches of cloud silhouetted against the glitter of the stars. I aimed to get to the summit by dawn, hoping to get those precious photographs of our objective.
The angle was easy, about 20 degrees, but the surface was covered with a thin layer of lava pebbles, which skidded underfoot on a compact base of lava mud. Even so, with a focused drive to reach the top, I just plodded on through the dark, occasionally flashing my torch to get an idea of my immediate surroundings. And then the lava changed almost imperceptibly to ice – it was dusted with lava dirt, embedded with lava bombs, but it was ice nevertheless.
Just as I reached the start of the ice, the stars blurred and then vanished – the mountain was, once more, engulfed in cloud. There were no features – no way for the others to follow my trail. I began worrying about them and cursed myself for being so impatient in leaving them behind. I sat down to wait for them until an hour had gone and there was still no sign of them. Where the bloody hell can they be – what do they think they’re doing?
I plunged back down in a towering rage; I had lost about 2,000 feet in height when I saw three shadowy figures emerging from the mist and gloom of the dawn.
‘Where the bloody hell have you been?’ I asked.
‘I’m frightfully sorry, Chris – all my fault,’ said Sebastian. ‘I’m afraid I forgot the rope and had to go back for it. We were only ten minutes or so behind you when we started, but we’d been gone for an hour before I noticed it. Don’t worry, I went all the way bac
k for it.’
‘You’ve wasted three bloody hours in doing so. Anyway, what’s Gabriel doing with you?’
‘I thought he’d like to come to have a look at the crater as well.’
‘God almighty, do you think we’re on a bloody holiday jaunt? There’s some steep ice up there. Jorge, can you explain to him that it’s too difficult for him and that he’ll need crampons?’
Gabriel, looking a little relieved, turned back and I drove the rest of my team up the lava slope. It was like going up a giant slag-heap, and in the swirling mist it could have been somewhere in the smog of a South Wales coalfield. Then we came to the ice – time to put on crampons. Jorge and I had put ours on, but when I glanced over to Sebastian – he was trying to put them on back to front!
‘I really am most frightfully sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve never worn these things before.’
I strapped them to his feet, tied a loop in the middle of the rope and dropped it over his head, to attach to his waist. Jorge quietly tied on to the other end and we set out once again. The slope was not steep, but had anyone slipped it would have been impossible to stop, since the ice was too hard for the pick of an axe to act as a brake.
‘I’m terribly sorry, Chris,’ Sebastian was always very apologetic. ‘I can’t see a thing. My glasses are misted up.’
‘Can’t you take them off?’
‘Well, no; that’s even worse – blind as a bat without them.’
‘Just follow the rope then – I’ll tell you if there’s anything to watch out for.’
At that point we reached a gaping crevasse, guarded by a superb portcullis of icicles. A narrow ice bridge led over it, and Sebastian felt his way across, tapping his axe to either side, as if he were a blind man. I began to feel a little like a guide-dog, as I sniffed my way up the slope, tugging at the leash, impatient to reach the top.
There seemed no end to it. We could have been in one of the circles of hell, destined to eke out eternity plodding ever upwards. The entire adventure had an unreal quality unlike any climb I had ever undertaken. The risk was there; I was a good deal more frightened than I had ever been on the fixed ropes of the Eiger Direct, but my fears were intangible, almost superstitious. I half expected the entire mountain to explode suddenly beneath my feet. And the lava bombs were real enough. It was like being at the end of a long skittle alley, as lumps of rock, some the size of a small table, came bounding from out of the mists, bouncing and ricocheting down the slope past us to disappear once again. You could almost imagine a group of old Inca gods swinging their bowls at us from somewhere near the top. There was no sound, no interruption – just the ting and clatter of the boulders bouncing past.
As we climbed higher we were able to guess their origin. We passed through a museum of lava bombs, hurled from the crater during former eruptions and now, each one isolated on its own icy plinth, raised in monument by the action of the sun melting the ice around each separate boulder. And then the ice beneath the rock had melted and down the monument had fallen, to roll and rattle to the foot of one of the highest slag heaps in the world.
A chill wind, just above freezing-point, was blowing thin sleet across the slope, but suddenly a warm blast of air, slightly sulphurous, mingled with the wind. Underfoot the ice vanished, to give way to a fine brown powder, hot to the touch. We could not see anything, but there was a smell of sulphur everywhere – a smell which tortured the back of the throat and sent us into paroxysms of coughing. The slope dropped away to our right, and we were struck by the heat, like the blast from the opened door of a furnace. We peered into the mist – but what was mist, and what was smoke? We couldn’t tell. There was a hiss at our feet, and little wisps of steam jetted from a crevice stained green and yellow by the sulphurous fumes of the fumarole. We stumbled on.
Sebastian pointed up the slope, to where it seemed to rise in some kind of crest.
‘Follow me,’ he gasped. ‘We must place the Union Jack on the summit.’
Although we had no Union Jack, we followed him dutifully. On taking a few uncertain steps, he collapsed, overcome by the fumes. I grabbed him and, with Jorge to help, dragged him back down the slope. Fortunately, after a couple of minutes, he regained consciousness and we were all able to stagger back the way we had come. The heads of our ice-axes were stained a dull yellow-green, and I couldn’t help wondering what effect the fumes had had on our lungs.
I trailed back down to the camp in the woods with mixed feelings – relief at getting away from this strange, unpredictable living beast of a mountain, but nevertheless filled with a sense of failure. My mission had been to get pictures – gaudy, lurid pictures of pluming red, hot lava fountains, and firework displays in the black night sky – but all I had managed to get were a few shots of Sebastian in the mist, looking like a bedraggled Outward Bound schoolboy in the mists of Wales or the Lakes. I found it impossible to transmit on to film the feeling of uncontrollable, unpredictable power that the heat, and the hiss of the fumes and the swirling clouds had imparted to all three of us. I could not reproduce my own fears. I did not even know what I had on film. I had just clicked the shutter release of the camera, in the midst of the grey gloom, uncomfortably aware of the all-pervasive grit and water which covered not only the lens, but also my hands and clothes.
I should have liked to have returned to the summit – to have sat it out until at last we had a fine, sunny day – but having no food, and with porters who could be held from flight no longer, we had no choice but to retreat.
– CHAPTER FIFTEEN –
SANGAY FROM THE WEST
Our adventures on Sangay were far from over. That night we got back to the camp in the woods, where our long-suffering but faithful porters were awaiting us. The following day we dropped back into the bottom of the gorge of the Volcan river, but by now it had rained almost non-stop for a week, and the entire bed of the gorge was filled with boiling brown waters.
‘We’ll have to wait for it to subside a bit and then make a dash for it,’ I decided.
‘But what if the rains don’t let up?’ asked Sebastian. ‘I’ve known them to go on for weeks at a time.’
‘Well, we’ll then have to cut our way out, along the top of the gorge.’
‘If we don’t make it, I suppose we could always make a second Fawcett story,’ said Sebastian. ‘Do you think John Anstey’d send anyone out to find our bones? I’ll keep a diary to the very end, with a last, loving message to Laetitia and the children.’
We sat it out, on a lava sprit at the end of the gorge, for another day. On the second morning, the level seemed to have dropped a little and we made a hurried descent of the gorge, fording a couple of torrents which had been little more than trickles on the way up. In the process, we very nearly lost Don Albino, who, frail as he was, let go of the rope I had taken across the torrent, and was on the point of being swept away into the main stream when Sebastian, with great presence of mind, and considerable courage, dived in and saved him. The Indians, indifferent to death, just looked on and, I suspect, would have let him drown.
This proved altogether too much for Don Albino, who sat down and told Jorge that he would go no further – we could leave him where he was and once he had rested he would continue the journey. I felt it impossible to abandon him, and ended up by carrying him, piggy-back fashion, down the river bank. He was little more than a skeleton held together by a few sinews and a bit of skin. At first he seemed to weigh nothing, but as the miles crept by, his weight increased, and at the end of the day I felt exhausted.
We had now reached the end of the Rio Volcan, where it joined the Upano. The gods were undoubtedly mocking us, for the weather had cleared, rewarding us with our first cloudless day since leaving Macas. Sangay, conical, serene, eternal, lay just ten miles up the valley down which we had fled the previous day. There was no question of returning, however, as we had to get more food before we could tackle the volcano once more. But determined to tackle it I was – I put it to Sebastian:
&nb
sp; ‘Look, I know you’ve got a superb story – the trouble is, I haven’t any pictures to back it up. My whole future depends on this story. Will you come back with me?’
‘But how can you guarantee it won’t be just the same, all over again?’
‘There’s no need to go in from this side again. We’ll go in from the other side, where it should be a hell of a sight easier. If we take more food, we can sit it out until we get a good day. Do you mind?’
‘My dear Christian, all I ask is a single hot bath in Quito, and I’ll go to the ends of the earth to help you get your pictures.’
Sebastian, although a master of superlatives, really meant what he said, and so we trekked all the way back to Macas. On the last night, before reaching the town, we went to bed at dusk, as was our usual custom. We were told the next day that we had slept through the most spectacular eruption of Sangay in living memory. Had I only been awake, I could have photographed the perfect volcano firework display. Everything about Sangay seemed ill-fated.
We flew back to Quito, where we spent a week collecting food, sending for some money, and living it up in the aseptic luxury of the Intercontinental Hotel. There were letters from Wendy, full of love and her own adventures in the Lake District. She was, at last, beginning to gain confidence in her folk-singing – had sung at a folk festival and was full of plans for the future. I longed to get home to her, and dreaded the thought of going on to Peru to join the expedition to Alpamayo. I had had enough of adventure for the time being, and had become a homing bird. But first, I had to get my pictures on Sangay. From the west, it would be as if approaching a different mountain, on a different continent, for we would approach it from the High Andean Plateau: no jungle, no slimy forests of Sachapalma, just shoulder-high grass, spread over a switchback of sharp, knife-edge ridges, that guarded Sangay with an intricate network of ramparts, as if it were the citadel of an eighteenth-century fortress.
The Next Horizon Page 25