“Paul … Paul … Wake up. It’s 3.30.”
“Huh. Waaah?”
“It’s 3.30 The stars are out and the pressure’s still pretty high.”
At that moment nothing matters. The whole world could go to hell. I wasn’t bothered about climbing the North Tower of Paine anyway. My dream! There was somebody there I knew from back in Wales. Come back! Now see what he’s made me do. I’ve lost the thread of my dream – if I look around every pebble-dashed corner, up and down the dark Welsh street, I might be able to find it again, under the orange cone of a street lamp in the mizzle. No. Gone.
“The Italians have already set off. Here, have some porridge.”
The Italians! High pressure! The North Tower! My eyes sprang open and I wriggled out of my oily pit on the soil floor of the cabin. I looked at the altimeter, smiled, and forced cooling, pasty porridge down me with urgency, gagging.
“Don’t they teach you how to make porridge in South Africa, Phil?”
Our footfalls upset a dark, cavernous forest and the rebounding stillness upsets me. It wasn’t normal. A third day of high pressure and no wind. I had grown used to the wind and its rhythms and the creaking of the forest. Now in the stillness I could hear whispers, whispers of conspiracy. I stepped up my pace to keep up with Phil. Yesterday we had relaxed in the sun on the edge of the forest, by the river where we could get a good view of the towers. A hot, calm day and we were too tired to go to our peak of ambition. The day before that we had climbed Planet Earth to Pisco Control, a silly name for what might one day become a classic climb on Paine Chico. We climbed that apron on friction and then hand cracks through leaning corners up the tower above, all free, and topped out at 10 p.m. The next morning, with our fingernails lifting from the dehydration, we couldn’t get out of our pits. But today we had a dream. An unclimbed peak – just like Bonington and Whillans in ’63, and again, twenty-nine years later, we were racing with Italians for the first ascent. But the Italians were an entertaining, noisy, laughing bunch whom we could never begrudge getting to the top first.
I struggled to keep up with Phil, a hard glob of porridge in my throat and my halogen pond of light bobbing, making shadows dodge behind trees or silently edge backwards. The Japanese camp was deserted. The cabins that the woodworking mountaineers had built whilst sitting out month-long storms were now like a ghost town on a spaghetti western movie set. I moved like an engine, too fast for my lungs, up the gully bed. The trees shrank until only knee-high and the world of towers opened out in the half-light. Only five or six of the shiniest stars still sparkled above Fortaleza and Escudo.
Phil stepped up the pace and I sweated. I couldn’t curse him – like I couldn’t envy him. His strength, his blond Viking looks, his educated conversation should have been all a pale, scrawny, uneducated Brit would want to be. But he was too big-hearted to inflame envy. And, of course, to be jealous of anything would be to make a mockery of this place we were in. Anyway, the deal was that he’d carry the heavier sack and I’d show him how it was done on the hard free pitches. You see, he’d seen my name in the magazines and was under the impression that I was some superstar free climber. And, what made it worse, I didn’t try to side-step this compliment. I stood fast and preened my fame feathers. My free climbing renown, however misguidedly represented by the press, was my Dutch courage to tell confident anecdotes to, and teach techniques (from the safety of our cabin) to this, to me then, near perfect man. Over the weeks of waiting, for the rain to stop falling and the forest canopy to quieten down, I would feed him tales of dynos and long run-outs above RPs at Gogarth or other loose and overhanging British crags. Through the successive waves of storm there seemed little chance that I would have to prove my mettle – though I wanted to. And now we were panting with hot, wet backs and brows toward a pillar which draped down from its virgin summit like a princess’s gown dragging on a boulder-strewn floor.
The Italians were above us in the snow gully and they had made good steps for us. Hanging back always pays. But they also had a head start on the wall – another Italian team had already attempted a line and had left ropes fixed on the face. I dragged my legs ever upwards, lagging further always behind Philip and I came across a tangled mound of wood with shreds of canvas skin hanging from its skeleton. I rooted around and found the words ‘Paine Hilton’ painted on what must have been a door – it was the original Whillans Box tent I had stumbled across almost three decades after its construction. As I collapsed at the base of the pillar our friends were already jumaring. We had chosen a route to the right, not the easiest way up but we thought the most beautiful – an enormous, bottom-heavy hourglass, it seemed now, of worm-holed and wind-finished granite, beginning as a slab and becoming overhanging 600 metres above.
To go extra fast we carried nothing except a litre of water, a small bag of dried fruit and our jackets in a small sack which the second would carry. We left our plastic boots at the base and set off sprinting. The deathly cold of the rock seeped into our hands and they too died, became brittle, so the skin would tear off the backs of white knuckles in gritty finger cracks. We arrive at a squeeze coffin, an empty iron maiden, leaning over us, nearly horizontal. The rope-ends are passed to me. I set off shaking with cold bones and, maybe, the fear of having to prove myself. But good gear appeared in the recess and, as I back and kneed out towards La Fortaleza, I mellowed and grinned, and hot joy poured to my guts. We both had that feeling as we climbed, the one that comes with those alpine starts, that you are still wrapped in your early morning dream. Not fully awake but a lifetime away from being asleep, feeling as though you know where the next hold or jam is without bothering to look up. We shouted across to Fabio, Mario and Danny. They were at the top of the ropes and had begun a nailing pitch. We were level now. The sun rolled out from behind the Central Tower and massaged our faces with its prickly radiation. We sat on a square ledge and nibbled stony dried peaches. Elephant-bum cracks and tower-block corners fell rapidly behind us and we moved well together. We could hear, but were blind to, the explosions of rock as El Escudo shed some shale over the edge of its table top, in a penny-pushing arcade game, at the other end of our arena. Over here, right now, our mountain seemed harmless, in a lighter shade of silence.
Then came a wall, the crux for sure, sheer and split by a thin crack. I moved towards it on edges, sandpaper-rough, and slotted my fingers, bony, into its positive locks. I keyed in a good hex just in time for the first strong breath to come, like a sigh, off the icecap, rustling nylon and flicking tapes. El Hielo Sur, as they call it here in Magellanes, exhales after holding its breath for three days. You expect it to come some time, it’s just that now we had another contender in our race for the summit. I moved as quickly as my body, waking up to the strains of the day, would allow, placing my left slipper on the uptight edge of the crack and my right crushed into crystalline dishes which offered more stick, like squashing a beetle, than the steep wall around. My fingers slipped and skin ripped. Thick dark blood bubbled up on my chalky hand and I sucked at the iron taste. I knew I couldn’t fall and I milked the crack for all it was worth, like some demented maid grappling with uncontrollable udders. Phil’s shouts of encouragement echoed around the walls (or in my head) and I whooped out loud when I grabbed big jug holds. I got safe, hanging, and looked out west. Clouds poured like a mad scientist’s experiment over the brims of our giant neighbours. But it couldn’t be far now. We had to see how near we could push it. That shallow shame would always be there in the recesses of our minds if we bailed out now and the Italians climbed on. We egyptianed up wafer corners amidst ice-cream cornets for a few more comfortable lengths and arrived at a sundae ridge. We waded in our slippers, hugging the back of the mountain in defiance of the wind, which blew up the skirts of our jackets, up towards our summit …
A flash of red, and some gagged shouts. The team from Trento had just squeezed onto the top a couple of minutes before us. Oh well, es la vida! We hugged, shook and tried to smoke. Later, the photos made it look like we were gurning; the wind didn’t show up on celluloid, only our struggles against it.
“Just like Bonington. A new tower!” shouted Fabio, happy in the storm.
They invited Philip and me to share their descent. It wasn’t far down to the fixed lines, six rappels perhaps. We slinged a block, and with four ropes we dropped faster than the SAS, over roofs and down flat walls in the ventilation shaft updraught. At the lines we felt safe and began to clean them down, so the route would be left, unlike so many other Patagonian walls, free from never rotting threads, tempting future climbers to miss out the crux pitch and trust to unseen threadbare edges … Then the ropes were snagged by some unseen hand. The Italian trio were below us in the funnel-webbed corner. “Give it a good pull,” I said, in what became the conclusion of the urgency with which we had started and spent our day. The way we led our lives.
One tug on this bell rope was all it took to peel away our good fortune and ring in the bad. The rope loosed and fell and in a baffled moment a house-brick rock followed. We pasted ourselves into the wall and screamed impotently “Piedra!” First Fabio took it on his head, then Mario clutched his leg and swung around silently. For a long moment all went still. It’s funny how catastrophes don’t always seem so catastrophic at the time. No flashing lights or flares shooting off, no screams of terror or fountains of blood – just an image, like a newspaper photo of an earthquake or something. You can choose to glance past it, move on to the crossword. It has all the impact you choose to attach to it. The two spinning in the wind could have been having a cheery chat or taking the piss out of us for, as so often happens, nearly wiping them out. But with rationale, the moment accelerated into urgency. No time for guilt just yet, we slid down to them as fast as friction would permit. Fabio giggled in his hysteresis and held up his broken helmet for our inspection. Mario moaned as we lowered him 300 metres. He was a big guy, mild-mannered and strong.
At the foot of the wall it was raining. Danny and Fabio, whose head, astonishingly, was not marked, eased off Mario’s plastic boot to Italian cries of pain. Philip and I watched with sickly stomachs as the lower leg swung around wherever the boot did, like a second knee. Once the plastic shell was off and the bloody sock peeled back, Philip sighed to see the tibia thrusting up out of the front of his shin. When the leg was nudged a thick lump of dark blood would glop out and slither down his calf. He shook. We all did our bit; one put the emergency tent up, thoughtfully packed by Danny, others dressed the wound and splinted the leg with ski poles, and Fabio ran down to call a helicopter rescue. That would take him six hours if he kept moving. Philip, his chores done, held his head in his hands. I watched him silently torture himself with his very own herculean earth of guilt at what he had done.
But it was only your hand that pulled the rope down, Philip. I was the one who said to give it a good tug. I was the impatient one. And didn’t Mario tell us he knew the risks that mountains offered, after all he’d climbed all over Paine. I just wish you were around to receive a postcard from him, cranking in Peru or on the Marmolada or the Cirque of the Unclimbables. I just wish you were here so we could go together and visit those mad Italians on their own mountains.
We slid down the slushy gully later to bring food and dry clothes up the following day. Philip was swifter than I and so I was alone again in the dark forest. Now the voices of the wood devils were clearer and I halted to hear what they were saying. Troubletroubletrouble the river muttered incessantly, and from the tree tops the leaves whispered death … death in rustly gusts. I cracked ribcage twigs and trod on skull boulders. From the mountains I could hear stranded climbers wailing from eternity. I had heard it all before in this magic forest but tonight it made my spine hunch up in protective spasms.
It should have been the sleep of the just but Philip couldn’t calm himself. He had broken a man’s leg and so now would not rest (only silently score patterns in the dark earth of the hut floor) to purge the guilt he felt. We abandoned our cosy cabin, with log fire and refried beans, before dawn and (I begrudgingly) returned through the cloud base. Midday we turned up with sleeping bags, mats, gas and nice food. Mario was loitering within his tent. In his own place with sticky drops of morphine. Danny’s good humour was leaching into the wet snow. We waited … Like long-suffering statues in a blustering, wet winter town centre, we stared out blankly into a prematurely induced twilight. Someone points out a useless fact.
“Can you hear that!”
“What?”
“Helicopter.”
“Nah. It’s a rock.”
Boom. And a giant rumble comes from over by the Torre Centrale.
“It’s a rock.”
Minutes turn to hours turn to days turn to weeks turn to hours again in a didgeridoo wind of hypnosis.
Again. A pulse – to a different beat – very faint at first but getting nearer. Then like a flower-burst of hope over the ridge opposite a chopper surfaced, a tiny thing. The little black insect slalomed around the gusts as we shouted with clenched fists, thumping invisible tables – “Yes” and “Yes”, and encouraged Mario. The hovering bubble with the one big compound eye rocked violently, and once dropped like God had cut its string. It struggled to free itself of the fat cherubs’ great puffs for a little longer and then, to our dismay, turned and fled. We pricked our ears and scanned the milky sky, searching for a sign, like four unholy prophets waiting for a door to open in the clouds through which might stampede the Devil’s horses to our salvation.
You can hear it again. Rotor blades. This time coming from below. There it is, just above the glacier’s bad complexion. Barely moving and wagging its tail. But it turns tail and deserts us. The wind punches us in mockery, left hook, upper cut. Below the belt. There would be no helicopter rescue – so we made our own plans. I picked my way down the thousand-metre snow gully, which was now a series of waterfalls, to guide up any rescuers, whilst Philip and Danny prepared to lower Mario. Back in the trees, the mosses and bark were electrified with colour, I sank up to my ankles in the shagpile floor.
I arrived at the cabin to find the Chilean army grazing through our supplies, leaning on their guns, all in fatigues and jack boots. They had come to help with the rescue and, initially, I was grateful. In my tent snored another soldier, clutching his rifle, just in case. I shook hands with Fabio who chattered, with wild eyes in a too fast mix of Castillano and his own tongue, about the roller-coaster helicopter ride he had survived. He had a mission in those eyes and was gone – followed by Dad’s Army. I tried to keep the same pace but my plastics turned to concretes and I dry heaved. It was like someone had pulled the plug on my record – I ground into the ground and couldn’t play anymore. I curled up and snoozed in a four-poster gully bed, pulling a leaf quilt around me. Just a few minutes. Just a few …
“Heh, huevon. Que pasa?”
I jump out of my dream, angry to have to leave Celia in that same orange lit, murky Welsh street. I was being shaken by Capitan Mainwaring and a group of journalists with big lenses who wondered if I was dead, they said. I guess I did look a sight. I don’t bother to brush myself off, or explain my behaviour, before I regain my zombie strut in the tedious gully, followed by an excitable herd. I joined a growing team of helpers and spectators camped out at the base of the melting snow couloir. Fabio, Phil and Danny were lowering and sliding a green chrysalis, helped by other worker ants, Paula and Flavia, Italian partners. The Chilean army refused to go on the snow in their Doc Marten boots (which made the rescue much simpler), preferring to direct operations from below and throw the packing from our food around the moraine. I clambered up to my friends, sheepish for having been gone so long, though I had lost days somewhere. Phil turned and smiled briefly, but I didn’t think he really noticed me in his strain of thought. I made myself useful by rolling a fag and sticking it in the pupa’s mouth. It smiled back at me in a drunken sort of way. But it shouted out when we man- and woman-handled it down greasy crags, slipping and bumping. Fabio, who was close as a brother to Mario, took the rope at the head of his bound and bagged friend and dragged him through the snow, taking on himself as much weight as all us others would give. Like Gulliver and the Lilliputian ships, but he had a face full of agony. Mario was then passed onto the moraine shoreline from the ocean of snowy danger, into the hands of our fatigued lifeguards. Our corpse in a carpet suddenly became weightless as our testosterone-fueled friends eagerly proved their worth to us, passing him around like an antique Russian doll and marching off in a scrum, with a song, along the rubble ridge. Phil and I backed off while the others answered a hundred stupid questions, and the action was snapped that would be frozen on the front pages of tomorrow’s nationals. But these badly shod paparazzi were an OK bunch, just a little out of their depth up here. But weren’t we, also, doing a little more than mere paddling?
The Japanese camp welcomed us with open branches and spotlights from the beech leaf canopy. Tea was already brewing. The river played xylophone rhythms now and chatter and laughter competed with the mantra of the wind. Mummified Mario’s ceremonious unwrapping was observed by an audience of faces all squeezed in. Flashguns flashed, questions were fired and notes were scribbled. Phil and I sat by the water, leant against an old mossy beech. He tossed pebbles into a green pool, occasionally glanced back at the throng.
“But it was a good route, Phil.”
“Eh, it was.” He threw another pebble with more force.
“What shall we call it?”
“El Caballo de Diablo.” Slow, deliberate and well pronounced. A little girl we knew called Columba, Pepe the horsepacker’s daughter, had shown us a Devil’s coach horse one day and told us what it was called here in Chile.
“Sounds good.” I meant it but perhaps, in my exhausted state, didn’t show it. We both understood.
To our ears the familiar wind metamorphosed into the throb-throb of the little insect chopper and down it settled on the shingle beach, blowing on our faces. I got a lump in my throat. We all held Mario’s hand before they slotted him into the black bubble to fly him off to Punta Arenas, eighty miles away. The insect lifted off and the trees leaned to let it through. They swayed back in to prevent a long goodbye and the sound was soon stolen back by the wind. We were left to mill around. It was late February and, for us, the end of the climbing season.
The Italians returned home to their jobs and tight families. Philip and I went to Argentina for more adventures before I went my own way on my nine-month wander of South America. Mario got an infection in his break but recovered within a year, so he could continue his work as a Dolomite ranger.
