Then, as suddenly as the noise had started, there was silence – just an occasional rustle from the bank showed that our attackers were still there. We packed up the camp in the dark and withdrew to the boats. We stayed there for a couple of hours, hoping to wait until the dawn before descending the river, but at 3.30 a.m. the bugle blared, almost certainly heralding another attack. John Blashford-Snell was worried about our shortage of ammunition and gave the order to cast off.
We drifted into the main stream in complete silence – it was an eerie experience, for we were able to see only the sheen of water and the dark silhouette of the banks. Then we heard the thunder of a cataract ahead, tried to pull into the bank, but were helpless in the current. Suddenly, we were in white water; we climbed a huge wave, came down the other side and were through, but the other two boats behind were less lucky. ‘We seemed to stand on end,’ Roger Chapman told me afterwards. ‘I jammed my leg under the thwart and somehow managed to stay in the boat, but the other two were thrown out. I immediately realised that if I couldn’t grab them we should never find them in the dark. They came to the surface just alongside the boat, and I dragged them in.’
Meanwhile, Jo Ruston’s boat, which had us in tow, was sinking: the air valve had developed a fault and the front compartment was completely deflated. He had no choice but to release us and we drifted away in the dark. It was a good half-mile before we managed to pull on to a sandbank in the middle of the river. We sat there until dawn, feeling very lonely and vulnerable.
The drama never seemed to end. John Fletcher had damaged the propeller of his boat immediately after being thrown out in the cataract. As soon as they reached a sandbank he got out his tool kit to change propellers while the party waited for the dawn. A few minutes later he walked over to Roger Chapman.
‘A terrible thing’s happened. I’ve lost the nut holding the propeller,’ he whispered.
The outboard motor was essential for our escape and they tried fixing it with a bent nail, but that was no good. Then, as a last resort they mixed some Araldite glue and stuck it back on the shaft, but the glue needed at least an hour to stick and by now it was beginning to get light. John Blashford-Snell waited as long as he dared before giving the order to move. John Fletcher tied a polythene bag round the propeller in an effort to keep the glue dry, and the boats were pushed off and drifted down the river.
The only noise was the gurgling of smooth, fast-flowing water. The wan light of the dawn coloured the fluted rocks and pinnacles on either side of the gorge a subtle brown. In contrast to the night’s violence it was unbelievably beautiful. And we swept on down the river – it was all so peaceful, yet full of lurking threats. We began to see more crocodiles, but they seemed a small threat compared with our human attackers. The crocodiles just scrambled into the river and vanished without trace.
At nine that morning, we reached the assault boat commanded by Captain John Wilsey, which had struggled up river to meet us and escort us for the last leg of our journey. Our progress was now like a triumphal procession as the assault boat, flying the Ethiopian flag and the Union Jack, towed us for the last fifty miles down to the Shafartak Bridge.
We finished our 500-mile journey at 4.30 p.m. on 25th September. Our Beaver aircraft dived low over us and a small welcoming party waved from the bank. As we pulled the boats ashore we drank champagne, yet felt rather sad and maudlin. I think we had all come too close to death and were too aware of Ian McLeod’s absence. We had succeeded in descending the Blue Nile, but no one could ever claim to have conquered it – too often we had been helpless in its grip.
– CHAPTER TWENTY –
ANNAPURNA: PREPARATION
The Blue Nile marked a boundary in my life. We had found a house in Bowdon, Cheshire, just before I had set out for the Blue Nile and Wendy was left with all the worry and hard work entailed in the removal, together with undoubted sadness at leaving the Lake District. We had lived there for five years and she, especially, had come to love the area where we had known carefree happiness, had met day-to-day worries and in which we had experienced a total, overwhelming grief. It was she, not I, who needed the real courage while I was away on the Blue Nile.
I came back to find a sharp knife had been cut through a section of our lives. For a time we were in limbo, for the house we had bought in Bowdon was still in the hands of the builders. We had snatched it in desperation, only a few weeks before my departure. It was an ugly, old Edwardian semi-detached in a cul-de-sac on the flat top of one of the few hills in that part of Cheshire – on top of a hill, but there was no view – we were surrounded by other houses. Although it was very different from Bank End Cottage, or even our house in Cockermouth, I was glad to be living in Bowdon; there were plenty of climbing friends around; also plenty of climbing within reasonable range, of a greater variety than is available in the Lake District – the Peak District, North Wales, Bristol and the Avon Gorge just down the motorway. I could get out climbing once a week in the evening, and become again a weekend climber, going off to Wales or the Lakes.
For a period of three months, while we waited for the builders to complete alterations to our house, we stayed with Nick and Carolyn Estcourt, still in their two-bedroomed flat in Alderley Edge. We arrived intending to stay for a few days and by some miracle we did not get on each other’s nerves, even though this time was extended so considerably – certainly this was a fine test of compatibility for any expedition. And it was here that the Annapurna South Face Expedition was conceived, or rather, was evolved, for it started out as something far less ambitious before it took its final shape.
Nick, Martin Boysen and I had been discussing expeditions for the past couple of years with little progress. That October we decided that come what may we should go on an expedition in 1970, but suitable objectives were limited. At that time all the mountains of Nepal and most of the better ranges in Pakistan and India were closed to climbers for political reasons, mainly the result of tension on the Tibetan border. It was possible to climb in the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan, and in the outlying peaks of the Karakoram in Pakistan, but I found these unattractive, for they seemed overshadowed by the true Himalayan giants. We considered Alaska, where there are still hundreds of unclimbed walls and the mountains are even more empty and desolate than those in the Himalaya, though of course very much lower.
I had known Martin for about eight years. One of Britain’s finest rock-climbers, at ground level his limbs seem uncoordinated, but once poised on a stretch of rock he drifts up effortlessly, a smoothly functioning climbing-machine. He is like a huge intelligent sloth, conditioned to a vertical environment. We had climbed together extensively in this country, but never in the Alps or farther ranges. For a brilliant climber he was remarkably uncompetitive, secure perhaps in his own natural ability and too lazy to enter into the rat-race that can dominate some aspects of British climbing. Even so, some of his new routes in Wales and Scotland are among the most difficult and dangerous ever put up in this country; he went on to climb at a very high standard in the Alps, making several first ascents and first British ascents.
Nick, on the other hand, was not a natural climber. Wiry, yet powerfully built, quite highly strung, very competitive, he had forced himself to a high standard of climbing. In some ways he had the traditional middle-class background of the pre-war climbers, and for that matter most of the Everest expeditions right up to the successful one of 1953. He was introduced to climbing by his father in the Alps, while still at school, and he gained a very broad mountaineering background in alpine climbing. Whilst at Cambridge he became President of the University Mountaineering Club, and also took part in an expedition to Arctic Greenland, his only experience of climbing outside Europe. He was sufficiently devoted to climbing to try to bend a conventional career in engineering to fit in with his sport, but finding engineering somewhat tying abandoned it for computers. Living in Alderley Edge, near Manchester, he was able to combine his new career with plenty of climbing.
A
s the fourth member of our team we chose Dougal Haston, whom Martin also knew well. Then, the news arrived – Nepal was allowing in climbers for the first time in four years. Immediately we forgot about Alaska and started to consider possible objectives. There were several unclimbed peaks of below 24,000 feet, which to me seemed unattractive, since they would have given me a lesser experience than I had received on my two previous expeditions to Annapurna II and Nuptse. The thought of a major face climb, however, did catch our enthusiasm – taut excitement and technical difficulty tempered with the slow snow-plodding that can turn Himalayan climbing into a featureless treadmill.
Then I remembered seeing a photograph of the South Face of Annapurna which had been sent to Jimmy Roberts.
‘Lets go for that,’ I suggested, with very little idea then of what ‘that’ entailed. The others, in their innocence, agreed. Another British expedition, to Machapuchare, immediately opposite the South Face of Annapurna, had included Jimmy Roberts and it was here that he had first seen the face. Having written to him, I telephoned two of the other members of that expedition.
‘South Face?’ said David Cox, a lecturer in Modern History at University College, Oxford. ‘I don’t remember much about it; looked huge; yes, there were a lot of avalanches coming down it, but I think they were going down the runnels.’
Roger Chorley, a London accountant, was even more discouraging. ‘Going for the South Face of Annapurna?’ in a voice of mild disbelief. ‘It’s swept by avalanches the whole time.’ By this time I had begun to think of other objectives, then Jimmy Roberts’ letter arrived:
‘The South Face of Annapurna is an exciting prospect – more difficult than Everest, although the approach problems are easier. Certainly it will be very difficult indeed, and although I am not an oxygen fan, it seems to me that the exertion of the severe climbing at over 24,000 feet may demand oxygen.’ I felt encouraged.
Then, a few days later, I received a colour slide of the face from David Cox. We projected it on to the wall of my living-room – a six-foot picture – and gazed and gazed – first excited and then frightened.
‘There’s a line all right,’ Martin said, ‘but it’s bloody big.’
It was. I had never seen a mountain photograph giving such an impression of huge size and steepness. It was like four different alpine faces piled one on top of the other – but what a line! Hard, uncompromising, positive all the way up. A squat snow ridge, like the buttress of a Gothic cathedral, leaned against the lower part of the wall. That was the start all right; perhaps it would be possible to bypass it, sneaking along the glacier at its foot – but what about avalanche risk? The buttress led to an ice arête which was obviously a genuine knife-edge. I had climbed something like this on Nuptse – in places we had been able to look straight through holes in the ridge a hundred feet below its crest. That had been frightening, but this would be worse. The knife-edge died below a band of ice cliffs.
‘I wonder how stable they are?’ asked Nick. I wondered too, and, with only partial confidence, traced a line through them leading to a rock wall.
‘Must be at least a thousand feet.’
‘But where the hell does it start? It could be twenty-three thousand. Do you fancy hard rock-climbing at that altitude?’
‘Yes, but look at that groove.’ It split the crest of the ridge, a huge gash, inviting, but undoubtedly more difficult and sustained than anything previously climbed at that altitude.
The rock band ended with what seemed to be a shoulder of snow leading to the summit.
‘But the picture must be foreshortened. That could be a long way below the top.’
Looking at some transparencies I had taken from Annapurna II in 1960, we saw that the top of the rock band was at around three-quarter height; there was another 3,000 feet to the top of a steep snow arête, with a rocky crest on which to finish.
Sobered by what we had seen, realising that this was something bigger and more difficult than anything that had ever been tackled before, we flashed a picture of the South Face of Nuptse. It was completely dwarfed by the huge South Face of Annapurna.
In spite of everything, I felt confident that with the right team we had a good chance of climbing it; that my own mountaineering background had perhaps built up towards this attempt. In a Himalayan environment we would use the techniques developed on the ascent of the Eiger Direct; in addition I had a yardstick of comparison from climbing the South Face of Nuptse, although that had been considerably more straightforward than Annapurna’s South Face. I had been to a height of 25,850 feet on Nuptse unaided by oxygen, but I had experience in the use of it from Annapurna II, and understood the tremendous difference it can make to one’s climbing potential.
Although attracted to the idea of a small, compact, four-man expedition uncluttered by the paraphernalia and complications of a larger expedition, it was obvious that the South Face of Annapurna would require a larger party. Six men also seemed insufficient and we went up to eight.
The next problem was the selection of the team from the numerous leading climbers of Britain. They would have to be the men who could climb at a very high standard on rock and ice, with plenty of endurance, and an ability to subordinate their own personal ambitions to the good of the expedition as a whole. Most important of all, they would have to get on together. Many top-class climbers, having a touch of the prima donna in their make-up, are often self-centred and are essentially individualists; in some ways the best expedition man is the steady plodder. On the South Face of Annapurna we were going to need a high proportion of hard lead climbers who would be able to take over the exacting front position as others slowed up and tired.
One can never be sure of anyone’s individual performance in the Himalaya, since people acclimatise to altitude at different rates and some never acclimatise at all. The safest bet, therefore, is to take out climbers who have already proved themselves at altitude, but because of the ban on climbing in Nepal and Pakistan in the late sixties, there was a distinct shortage of top-standard alpinists with Himalayan experience.
I approached Ian Clough first. I had done some of my best climbing with him and quite apart from being a capable mountaineer he was also the kindest and least selfish partner I had known. Certainly the perfect expedition man, he had very little personal ambition, but was always ready to do his best for the project as a whole.
Then I asked twenty-eight-year-old Mick Burke and, thirdly, Don Whillans. In some ways, Don was the most obvious choice of all, yet the one about whom I had the most doubts. Although certainly the finest all-round mountaineer that Britain had produced since the war, in the previous years he had allowed himself to slip into poor physical condition. He had lost interest in British rock-climbing, and even the Alps, preferring to go on expeditions to the farther ranges of the world. In spite of a strained relationship, which was ever-present, I had done some of my best climbing with him, each of us irritating the other, yet at the same time complementing each other’s weak points.
Up to that time Don had had an unlucky streak, having been three times to the Himalaya, each time performing magnificently but never reaching the top. On his first expedition to the Karakoram in 1957 he spent eight weeks above 23,000 feet and struggled to within 150 feet of the summit of Masherbrum but was forced to retreat when his companion collapsed. On his next expedition, to Trivor, another twenty-five thousander, he worked himself into the ground getting the party into position for the final assault, and as a result was unable himself to get to the top.
On Gaurishankar once again he was unlucky. After considerable trouble in finding a route to the foot of the mountain the expedition was then forced to make its way round the peak on to the Tibetan flanks to get a feasible route to the top. Its communications were over-extended and it was finally forced to turn back.
Whilst most of the team I had invited so far were comparatively inexperienced, Don’s particular qualities seemed ideally suited to the problem, but I was worried in case he had let himself sl
ide too far into bad condition to function well on the mountain.
I suggested we had a weekend climbing together, without telling him of my plans. We were going up to Scotland one Friday night and, arriving at his house at about 10.30 p.m., I found he was out but would be back in half an hour. At 2.30 a.m. he returned, having downed eleven pints of beer, and we set off straightaway, with me in a slightly self-righteous bad temper. We arrived at Glencoe and the following day set out with Tom Patey to make the first ascent of the Great Gully of Ardgour. On the walk up to the climb Don lagged far behind, taking his time and in the gully he was happy to stay at the back, accepting a rope on all the difficult pitches. Then, on the last pitch, an evil chimney lined with ice and just too wide for comfortable bridging, he said, ‘I think I’ll have a try at this. It’s about my turn to go out in front.’
There was an icy wind blasting straight up the chimney; it was so wide he was almost doing the splits on the way up, and its top was blocked by ice-sheathed boulders which you had to swing on. Don went up incredibly quickly and smoothly without bothering to protect himself with running belays. Both Tom and I had a struggle when it was our turn to follow. It was then that I made up my mind and that evening invited him to join the expedition. He looked at the photograph I showed him and commented, ‘It’ll be hard, but it should go all right. I’ll come.’ He was the obvious person to be Deputy Leader, and I promptly offered him this position.
So far I had selected people with whom I had climbed in difficult circumstances and knew deeply, who knew me and knew each other. This seemed the soundest basis for a tight-knit group – all with weaknesses and strengths, knowing each other well enough to accept them, and having in the past put ourselves and our relationships to the test of physical and mental stress. But now the choice of an eighth member of the team was influenced by finance.
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