Touching The Void Page #3

and I down climbed to join him.

And we'd repeat the process again.

Simon was trying to lower me fast,

and it meant that my foot kept jabbing

in and jabbing in and bending the knee.

Excruciatingly painful.

I can remember feeling angry with

him because he was hurting me,

and I was thinking "do it slow",

and I also knew that he had to do

it this fast. He hadn't got a choice.

And he was very grim faced,

I remember looking at him,

wondering if he was pissed

off with the whole thing.

I couldn't take too much notice

unfortunately of these cries of pain,

because we got to go down.

We would dig these holes from

the sitting in the powder snow,

and they would last about the length

of the time it took to lower me.

And in fact they were

crumbling around him.

And he was lowering me on a 9mm,

well 8.8mm rope. That's that thick.

But hands sort of frozen.

What he did was quite extraordinary,

and I've never heard of any single

handed mountain rescue like that.

We were now lowering in a full storm. I

don't know what the wind chill factor was,

but it would be like -80

or something like that.

I lost a liter of blood in my leg,

I was in shock and severly dehydrated

It was a point where we should have

dug a snow cave and taken shelter,

got in our sleeping bags and

made a hot brew, and rehydrate.

We couldn't, 'cause we'd run out of gas.

And we just lost control at this point

because we couldn't dig a snow cave,

and risk getting trapped by

a storm that didn't break.

It was all starting to look up in many ways

at that point, as we were virtually down.

And I started to slowly think,

"maybe after this one we will have

one more, and we'll be on the glacier".

And suddenly all got hard

on my elbows, and icy,

and it got steeper, going down a

slope and suddenly it's steeper,

and I just was full of alarm.

I was screaming at Simon to stop as loud

as I could, and he just couldn't hear me.

I did notice that more

weight came onto the rope,

but didn't really think a lot

about this. And I just thought,

"Well, he's going over

some steeper ground"

When I looked down, and I glimpsed

'cause there was a big drop underneath me,

I was horrified to

discover what I'd gone over.

And I could clearly see that there was

a large crevice directly under the cliff,

about 25m below me.

I was trying to get my axes to see if I

could reach this wall that was out there,

I think, almost as I start and try to

do that, I started being lowered again.

And I was thinking, "Christ,

don't do it, don't do it",

'cause I knew, that there wasn't

enough rope to get me to the bottom.

And if I couldn't get

my weight off the rope,

he couldn't disconnect the

rope, to get on the other side.

And I knew all this, and I was

screaming again, not to lower me.

I carried on lowering him, until I

reached the knot, then shook the rope.

My signal to him, to take

the weight off the rope.

And nothing happened.

And nothing continued to happen.

I knew, that the only way out of

this is if I could climb up the rope.

I had two prusik loops. Prusik

loops are thin cords of rope.

And if you use a special twisting knot

on the rope, you can slide it up the rope,

and pull on it, and

the knot grips the rope.

Clip a snapping to it and then a

sling to it, and you can stand up.

And if you got another one, tied

above it, you slide that one up,

Standing this loop is now higher.

I was trying to hold myself

upright, to keep the rope in place.

And then trying to put this knot

through itself, and through itself,

and this fiddly bloody rope... it is just

hard to describe how I couldn't do it.

Because my fingers, I just

couldn't feel the fingers at all.

And I'd be looking and trying to

push the thing in, and using my teeth,

and getting it round,

and getting it round.

My hands were cold, my feet

were... I was very very cold.

It was a desperate position, made worse

by the fact that that I had no idea

what Joe was doing, or

what position he was in.

I just couldn't figure out why it was taking

him so long to get his weight off the rope,

there was no sensible

explanation for it.

I got one on, and I clipped it to my

chest, because that would keep me upright.

And I tried to put the other one on,

and I had real trouble with my hands.

And I dropped the bloody

thing, and I watched it fall.

And I knew that I was stuffed then.

I just thought, "Well,

I can't climb the rope",

this idea that you can climb a

rope hand over hand, you can't,

especially when your hands are

frozen. You just can't do it.

Nothing I can do, and I

felt completely helpless.

And really angry.

There was nothing I could do. I

couldn't get the weight off the rope,

I was just there, and this went

on for maybe an hour and a half,

during which time my position

became more and more desperate.

I was struggling to maintain the,

sort of shivery seat that I sat in,

and the snow was gradually

sliding away from under me.

So my position was getting desperate.

I think psychologically I was beaten.

'Cause there was nothing I could do,

so I just hung on the

rope and waited to die.

And I think I would have died pretty soon,

actually. The wind chill was very low.

I was literally going down the

mountain in little, jerky stages.

'Cause this soft, sugary snow

collapsed away underneath me.

I was expecting him to come off,

and couldn't do anything about it.

He was gonna fall about 100m.

fall double that, he was gonna die.

And he really didn't know, whether I was

meters off the ground, or centimeters,

he just didn't know. But he knew, I

think, pretty sadly, that he was gonna die.

Then I remembered that I've got a

pen knife in the top of my rucksack.

I took the decision pretty quickly.

To me, it just seemed like the right

thing to do under the circumstances.

Because there was no way that

I could maintain where I was,

sooner or later, I was going

to be pulled from the mountain.

I took the rucksack off, and then

unzipped the top pocket with one hand,

and got the pen knife out.

Boof!

It was an awful night.

My mind was plagued with the

thoughts of what had happened to Joe.

It took a long time to warm myself

up. And I didn't properly, I guess.

Had a very, very cold night.

The overriding memory is just feeling

desperately, desperately thirsty.

To the point where I felt I could

smell the water in the snow around me.

I felt that very strongly.

It was quite a strange thing.

I didn't know what had happened.

What I landed on wasn't flat,

it was sloped on each side.

And I was sliding, in the dark.

I think I must have

fallen about 50m in total.

I was pretty surprised to be alive.

The head torch beam just

went down, and down, and down,

and the darkness just ate it, just gone.

I felt very unnerved,

very very vulnerable.

If I had landed less than

I would have just gone

down this huge hole.

I got this ice screw in, pretty quickly.

And then looked around, and thinking,

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