Touching The Void Page #4

"Jezus, it's gonna be nearly

impossible to get out of"

My rope was going all the way up,

And I thought, Simon

is on the end of that.

But I felt sure he was dead.

And it didn't mean anything.

I just thought, "If I pull on this

rope, it will come tight on his body".

Because he would have flown off the

cliff, on to the downside of the crevice,

and then, Iying dead

there, like a counterweight,

the rope would have come back up

and then dropped into the crevice.

So I thought, if I pull on this

rope it will come tight on his body".

And it just kept coming,

and coming, and coming,

As soon as I saw it,

I knew it had been cut.

I thought, "you're gonna die in here".

I had a pleased feeling, that

it meant that Simon was alive.

Simon!

Looking where I was

was an awful prospect.

You don't die of a broken leg.

I think I did turn my head

torch off to save the batteries.

It was dark, and it began to get to me.

There is something about crevices,

they have a dread feel, not

the place for the living.

I could hear the ice cracking,

and wind noises in the ice.

I turned the light on again,

'cause I didn't like it in the dark.

I felt very, very alone.

And I was very scared.

I was 25, I was fit,

I was super ambitious.

And this was the first trip I've

been on. I wanted to climb the world,

and it just didn't seem... this

hadn't been part of our game plan.

It must have been quite late.

I think that I pretty much was

thinking that I wasn't gonna get out.

F***. Stupid, stupid...

As a climber you should always be in

control, you have to be in control.

So doing that, you could be seen

as half a failure. You lost it.

This is childish. I

just cried and cried.

I thought,

I'd be tougher than that.

It was getting light, as it was 5 or 6.

And I started screaming

Simon's name again.

I got myself up, got dressed inside the

snow home and packed everything away,

Just a horrible feeling of dread.

By this stage, I strongly felt that

Joe had been killed the previous day.

And that now I was going to

die, as some form of retribution.

But rather than just sit here,

feeling sorry for myself or whatever,

"I'll get on with it and

I'll die on the way down".

Very quickly, the ground

dropped away steeply.

So I skirted around this

area of steeper ground.

As I abseiled down, I could

see this overhanging ice cliff,

which was what I had lowered him over,

so I knew that he'd had

actually been hanging in space,

which is the reason he couldn't

get his weight off the rope.

And as I went down lower,

I could see to my horror,

that the base of this ice cliff

was an absolutely enormous crevice,

that's 12m wide and just bottomless

from where I was looking at it.

SIMON!

He would have been up with

first light, I thought.

'Cause I was desperately,

desperately thirsty.

And he would have been. And he would

have wanted to get down, and get water.

And he would have wanted to find me.

Now I did stop and pause, and I

shouted across into the crevice,

and I yelled and yelled, "Joe, Joe".

And I suppose again, with

the benefit of hindsight,

after I got off the rope, I

should have gone and looked,

into the crevice, to see where he was.

But to be quite honest, the thought

didn't occur to me at that time.

I was just convinced he was dead.

Absolutely convinced, by 10, totally

convinced, that I was on my own.

That no one was coming to get me.

I was brought up as a devout Catholic.

I had long since

stopped believing in God.

I always wondered, if things really hit

the fan, whether I would, under pressure,

turn around and say a few Hail

Mary's, and say "get me out of here".

It never once occurred to me.

It meant that I really don't believe.

And I really do think that when you die,

you die. That's it, there's no afterlife.

There's nothing.

And I was thinking, "Could

I climb out of here?"

I couldn't do it with a good leg.

I knew that they were both dead. But I

couldn't just clear off and leave the camp.

For one thing, I didn't

know anything about them,

except for their first

names, Joe and Simon.

I didn't know their family names,

I really knew nothing about them.

And I had this bizarre idea, that

if they'd fallen off the mountain,

they would have just

landed at the bottom of it.

And I thought, perhaps from the bottom

of the glacier, I'd be able to see them.

And set off with the aim

of going as far as I could.

I started to go down

the glacier on my own.

In this stage I was still certain

that I was gonna die myself.

Crossing a glacier is very

very dangerous on your own,

because there are crevices in

the ice, and the snow covers them.

Fortunately I managed to find

a faint outline of our tracks,

from when we walked in.

It was only when I got off the glacier,

I realized that I was going to get down,

I was going to get out of it,

I was gonna live.

I can't really describe how

scary the night had been.

I thought, it would

be like that, for days.

You gotta make decisions, you

gotta keep making decisions,

even if they're wrong decisions.

If you don't make

decisions you're stuffed.

Short of dying on the

ledge, my only chance was to

lower myself deeper into the crevice.

I didn't what I would find down there.

I was just hoping there might be some

way out of the labyrinth of ice and snow.

And I really struggled to make that

decision, I was so scared of going deeper.

The other option was

to just to sit there,

blindly hoping that

somehow it might get better,

and I just knew it wasn't

going to get better.

I didn't want to look down,

I was horrified at the thought

that it was just empty down there.

I didn't put a knot

near the end of the rope,

and if there was nothing down there

I wouldn't be able to hold the rope,

and then I would fall,

and it would be quick.

And I thought "Jesus, this is big!"

By this stage I was

completely physically done in,

staggering back down these

meringues, still desperately thirsty.

There werre all these sort of

thoughts swirling around in my mind,

guilt, worry, thinking about how on earth

am I going to explain this to Joe's parents,

my friends, to Richard.

The thought did cross my mind that

maybe I could think up a decent story,

that would make me look better.

And I did quite think about

that, for quite a while.

Really the only image that sticks

in my mind from all the time in Peru,

is seeing this figure.

And it was fairly close

before I could see who it was.

But he looked absolutely horrendous.

You wouldn't recognize him.

And I said, "Where is Joe?"

And he just said, "Joe is dead".

I told him the whole story,

as we walked back to the camp,

I told him the whole

story of what had happened.

He wasn't in the slightest bit

judgemental about me or what I'd done,

he took it very well.

I must have lowered myself about 25m from

where the ice screw was at the bridge.

I was now in what seemed to

be the base of the crevice,

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