We are climbing up Nanga Parbat, my daughter Hildegard and I, entering the Great Couloir of the Diamir face. Behind us rear the wild summits of the Mazeno ridge, a fiercely serrated wing of blue ice and steep rock jutting from high on the main body of the mighty mountain. Way below glints the green of the Diamir valley.
Here, all is steepness and shadow. We keep plunging our axes into the snow, and of course, we are wearing our crampons. Hildegard – blonde, twenty-five years old – is a confident climber, even if, as an ethnologist, her deeper interest lies with the people of the mountains. She has come with me this time to the peak that was Hermann Buhl’s dream – and, who knows, the two of us may reach as far as 6,000 metres. Perhaps, in a few days, I might even go to 7,000 metres, but I am not pinning my hopes any higher. I have no idea how my K2 frostbite will bear up at altitude. It was only just before Christmas that I had the amputations to my right hand – and with my damaged toes I cannot entertain any hopes of the summit. Yet neither can I accept the prospect of staying down. There is no way I can give up climbing mountains.
Below us, on the slope, Benoît has just come into view, the young French speed-climber attached to our expedition … tack, tack, tack, tack … his movements are like clockwork, as is the rhythmic throb of his front-points and his axe in the steep ice of the couloir. He wants to climb the 8,125 metres of Nanga Parbat in a single day. But not today – today he is only practising.
Quickly he draws nearer.
‘Who goes slowly, goes well – who goes well, goes far … ’ Whatever became of that old proverb? The wisdom of the old mountain guides, it seems, is now out of date. Tack, tack – tack, tack, tack, tack – tack, tack … Benoît is a nice guy and has remained refreshingly modest, despite his prodigious skills; he is small, fine-boned, gentle. I like him, even if some of his opinions send shivers down my spine. Others I have reluctantly to accept (not wanting to start any arguments up here! But what is the point in all this running? What good are records up here?). It must make some sort of sense to him.
Here he is! Benoît Chamoux. The speed artist, the phenomenon! He pants a little, greets us, laughing, and we exchange news; then I fish in my rucksack for the sixteen-millimetre camera. My job is filming, but it’s my pleasure, too. Showing other people what the world is like up here … that is part of what mountaineering means for me. Not this alone, of course …
Still, I want to bring down truth, not fiction! And if, for some bright spark, happiness is running up mountains – then he, too, is part of this world of Nanga Parbat. (My daughter, I must say, has thought so for quite some while – perhaps that’s an ethnological observation?)
I film the young sprinter: well, it looks fantastic, I think, eye to the viewfinder, the way that guy comes up! So I have him do it three times more, up and back again – the way film-makers do, and he is in training, after all.
Before I can dream up further variations, big clouds start rolling in. A change in the weather? Nothing unusual for Nanga Parbat. We descend.
Base Camp, down where it’s green …
Only the Spirits of the Air know how this will turn out for me. I contemplate my discoloured toes – all red and blue – as I swish them round in a bowl of water. Our cook, the good Ali, has tipped at least half a kilo of salt into the water, anxious to do what is best for me. How long will it take till I am fit again? Months, or years?
This is not the first time I have felt all is nearly over, that I am stretching life thinly: coming down from Chogolisa after Hermann’s death, or during the emergency landing I made with Charlie – what I call our ‘second birthday’. But this time? This time it is different.
Do I still enjoy climbing? It can never be as it was before.
And I will never come to terms with what happened on K2. Up on our dream mountain I lost Julie, lost my climbing companion of so many years, sharer of storms and tempests, joys and hopes on the highest mountains of the world. How often did we count the stars together, or look for faces in the clouds?
And then, suddenly …
So many people died on K2 that summer. Julie and I had been in such fine form, we were perfectly acclimatised – we ought not to have lost a single day! But I’ve no wish to set off that spinning wheel of thoughts again … It’s over. Nothing can be changed. The dream summit was ours – and then came the end.
Life, somehow, goes on. The mountains, like dear friends, have always helped me before. Whenever it was possible. Where is the way forward now?
Agostino da Polenza, our expedition leader on K2, was here at Base Camp until a few days ago. Then he dashed off to get another project under way, one on which I am again to be cameraman: re-measuring Everest and K2 for the Italian Consortium of Research (CNR) – or, more accurately, for Ardito Desio, the remarkable ninety-year-old professor who, as long ago as 1929, pushed into the secret valley of the Shaksgam beyond the 8,000-metre Karakorum peaks till he was stopped by the myriad ice towers of the Kyagar glacier. Yes, it’s true, the secrets are not only to be found on the summits …
They wait also behind the mountains. And I think of years that have long past, adventures in the jungle, in Greenland, but in more ‘developed’ areas, too, places like Canada; or the Grand Canyon with its rocky scenery – where time is turned into stone. I remember Death Valley. And expeditions to the Hindu Kush … that first glimpse into hidden corners of the glacier … the first circuit of Tirich Mir.
There was an eighteen-year gap between my second 8,000 metre peak and my third. But I have no regrets about that: it was time well spent. Many chapters of this book bear witness to that.
‘Guarda lassu – there they are!’ Hildegard turns her head excitedly from the camera tripod, swinging her long blonde hair, ‘Look!’ She points up at Nanga Parbat, which even from this distance fills the sky above the treetops. ‘They’re almost up!’ Her eyes are shining. We are in a small summer village in the Diamir valley, surrounded by cattle-sheds, herdsmen, women, many children … and goats, goats and more goats: two or three hundred of them! You can scarcely hear yourself speak over the sound of bleating. There are millions of flies, too, but they do not seem to bother Hildegard. I flick them irritably from my forehead and press my left eye to the viewfinder to peer through the 1,200-millimetre lens: yes, I see them! Three tiny dots, and a fourth one, lower down, right in the middle of the steep summit trapezium. They are going to make it!
We are beside ourselves with joy. Those lucky sods – lucky mushrooms, as we say in Austria – just the right day they’ve picked for it! And I feel a twinge of sadness not to be up there with them. But not for long: as we watch our companions inch higher, happiness suffuses every other feeling. But one dot is missing up there. It worries us at first, then we tell ourselves it must be Benoît. He will not have left Base until the others reached their high camp.
He is bound to catch up with them before long!
Then the clouds swallow everything.
We scoop up our belongings and hurry away, anxious to get to Base Camp before the others come down; we want to prepare a welcome-home party, a summit feast.
Two days later: they are all down. Soro, Gianni and Tullio all made it to the summit – shortly after the clouds cut them from our view. Only Giovanna, the lowest dot, turned back before then. And Benoît? He had a real epic up there …
At first all went well. He reached the summit as planned in a single day from Base Camp. (Normally – if you can speak of normality in terms of Nanga Parbat – it takes at least three days for an ascent.) But then began a chain of misfortune: during the descent, Benoît was overtaken by darkness and lost his way in the giant Bazhin basin. All night long he wandered backwards and forwards up there at around 7,000 metres because, with his lightweight equipment, he dared not sit down for a bivouac. He did not discover his companions’ final camp until morning …
Benoît looked thin and drawn, almost transparent, as he staggered finally into Base … but an incredible willpower still burned in his eyes. We flung our arms round him, so happy to have him back.
***
The sun is shining, its light reflecting off the small stream which runs across the sloping meadow on which our base camp stands. A good place: protected by a moraine bank from the air blast of the many enormous avalanches which thunder down from the upper slopes and teetering ice balconies of Nanga Parbat and the Mazeno peaks. Here, at 4,500 metres, frost binds our little brook every night, covering it with an embroidery of wonderful ice crystals. But in the morning, when the sun appears behind the inky blue bulk of the mountain, it flashes and sparkles everywhere and, as the crystals and plates of ice crackle and split, gradually the murmur of the little stream starts up again between the tents. Gianni and Tullio, inseparable as ever, stroll across the grass and kneel on its bank, dipping their hands in the icy water and splashing it over their faces … they chatter and laugh; Soro and Giovanna stretch out in the sunshine; Hildegard, lost in thought, wanders over the moraine, and Benoît sleeps, and sleeps, and sleeps. He has earned it. The good Ali prepares breakfast, and Shah Jehan, our liaison officer, squints lazily into the sun above his enormous beard and tells again of all the ibex he has bagged in the Karakorum. This is the man we know could never hurt a fly. In the summer of 1982, on my first expedition here, I climbed with him to 6,500 metres on the Diamir face. Next time – 1985 – he was unfortunately not with us. That was when Julie and I went to 7,600 metres: only another 500 metres or so would have seen us on top, but when we came to make our final attempt the weather turned against us …
I am looking up at the dark blue trapezium, in shadow now: some day I’d love to go up there. It will have to wait till I’m better, and that could be years yet. But look, there it is, the summit that Julie and I were so close to.
Will I get another crack at it?
Will I ever stand on the top?
And, if I do, will I come down again – or stay up there for ever?
Even if I never make it up there, I have to have the experience again, this moving up between the clouds …
Once you have started that …
‘I climb mountains for such moments,’ Julie had said, ‘not just to reach the top – that is a bonus!’
I will go up again.
Then my thoughts turn to Makalu.
Many years ago that was, when I faced the question of whether or not to make one last try – knowing that, on whatever I should choose, would depend my whole future.
Strange eddies of cloud spill over the summit of Mount Everest, twisting veils, transparent fans, mysterious phantoms. Catching the light, they shimmer in all the colours of the rainbow – deep purple, radiant green, yellow, orange – a swiftly changing kaleidoscope.
Does it herald a storm?
As I watch, some of the clouds take on a mother-of-pearl lustre, others drain of all colour. It is a strange cavalry, galloping, multiplying, gradually filling the whole sky. The red granite summit of Makalu, just over 3,000 metres above me, wears a wide-brimmed hat, like a gleaming fish. I have often seen such clouds in the Alps, on Mont Blanc, and again I’m prompted to wonder if a storm is on the way. Down here in Base Camp the air remains very still, with only an occasional limp flutter from Ang Chappal’s prayer flags. He hung up two strings of them when we first arrived to keep favour with the mountain gods and spirits. I look beyond them and out over the stone cairn on its little hill to the side of camp: what should I do? Should I attempt Makalu? What hope have I got of reaching the summit? It is eighteen years since I last climbed an eight-thousander.
The prayer flags stir weakly, while high above, the wild clouds charge in every direction. The rainbow colours have disappeared, but light and shadow animate the spectacle. The sun – one minute a fiery ball, the next a pale disc – sinks slowly towards the ridge of Baruntse, the great seven-thousander on the far side of the valley. Down here it is still warm, even though we are above 5,400 metres.
So what’s it to be? Shall I give it a try, make a start?
Not today, certainly. But soon I have to come to a decision; we have already ordered porters for our return march. On the other side of the campsite Hans and Karl are sprawled on the ground. They staggered into camp two days ago with Hermann and the Sherpas, completely whacked after an incredibly painful descent from the mountain. They were changed men. Hans, who is usually so cheerful, wore a bleak, dead look behind his double goggles.
‘I wish you luck for the top, Kurt,’ he said gruffly, in a voice barely above a whisper, ‘but no bivouac!’
All the toes on one of his feet are frostbitten, and Karl is in almost as bad a way. He can scarcely hobble, or even accept support from his friends because four of the fingertips on his left hand are blackened as well. He muttered something, too, but I can’t now remember what it was. Those must have been horrific days, coming down from their bivouac at 8,250 metres, step by painful step, down through four high camps. Later, helping Karli with his bandages and medicines, I asked him whether the top had been worth all the anguish. He was silent for a while, then said, ‘Oh, yes, it was worth it … ’ and, indicating his swollen foot with a bitter smile, the old Karli-smile, added, ‘We’ve got this under control now, haven’t we?’ Certainly, it won’t be long till the porters come, but Hans and Karl are in for a miserable journey back.
If I do still want to go for the summit, I dare not delay any longer. I should start tomorrow, or the day after at the latest. I sink back into the soft sand near our tents and gaze up at the chasing clouds. How many men, like me, have wondered what their tomorrow would bring, and known that on the decision of the moment, all the rest of their lives depended? Perhaps they have known that the decision could be avoided – perhaps they did sidestep it, but what is that for a solution? You never know what you’ll encounter tomorrow. Only the Spirits of the Air know that … So what’s to do? Looking up, I ponder that age-old question, and it is as if, while I am losing myself in the whirling clouds, an answer gradually reveals itself: an answer not in words, but in certainty. And I continue gazing at the weaving veils, follow their courses, their variations, while all questions dissolve away. I can feel the motion of the wheeling shapes, and if I surrender to it, I am no longer here, but there …
The Spirits of the Air: with what power they rise from nothing, secretively, and as quickly vanish once more. Rolling mists, tumbling cascades, weightlessly dancing on their way, multiplying as they go into strange new figures that reach out to embrace each other with their fluttering arms, sometimes succeeding in bringing an evanescent new creature into existence, but mostly melting away before they can touch. Spirits of the Air? Can they really know what tomorrow will bring? Where do they hide when the air is cold and clear, and when in the icy stillness mountains stand like blue crystal in the morning sun, when a pale full moon floats in the daylight sky until, sapped of all strength, it sinks to a mountain ridge and you imagine it rolling, like a barrel, down the hill.
Are they behind the mountains then? Somewhere they must be continuing their ballade. Where is certainty? The secrets are on the summit and beyond. ‘Only the Spirits of the Air know what awaits me behind the mountains.’ So runs the old Eskimo proverb. ‘But I go on with my dogs, onward and on.’ Some days ago, when I was lying sick, down below in the rainforest, I fully believed there was no future for me on big mountains, that my fate lay away from them, somewhere behind.
But now I know: it is up there, on the summit of Makalu. If I don’t try this climb, I have no future. And if nobody wants to come with me, then I shall have to go alone. Sometimes there is no way forward for a man if he does not find the answer to his question.
The Spirits of the Air told me: Go up!