I moved alone, isolated in a pool of torchlight, enclosed by the heavy sound of my own breathing and the crunch of crampons biting on the frozen crust underfoot. Once again the rope jerked me forward and I shouted angrily to Dick, fifty metres ahead; ‘Slow down – I can’t go that fast!’
He slowed down and asked: ‘Is that better?’
‘Yes, thank you – that’s perfect – just keep it like that and I’ll do fine.’ We continued at a slow measured pace, settling into a steady rhythm which allowed my lungs to keep pace with my legs, stepping endlessly, repetitively up the humpback ridge. Now that I was not gasping for breath, I could start to enjoy the unique thrill of moving smoothly upwards, alone in the darkness, happy to be setting out at last on a great adventure.
We halted at the first ice cliff, peering with our torches to find the end of the fixed rope. ‘I’ll go first,’ I announced, ‘and send the jumars down afterwards.’ I had never before used jumars to climb up a rope though, like most people, I had seen television shots of famous mountaineers sliding the handles with apparent effortless ease, as they made their way smoothly up fixed ropes on some vast mountain face. But I quickly discovered, fumbling in the dark, that it is actually an exhausting process, and the final struggle over the ice overhang left me gasping for breath and sweating profusely.
On the ramp above, I clipped into the ice screw, took off my rucksack and clipped that in too, then attached the jumars to the rope with a karabiner and slid them down to Dick, waiting below. I quickly became cold and took out my duvet jacket. Having put it on, I sat down again, leaning against the slope and staring out over the valley. Dick was invisible, hidden below the cliff, and only the tension on the rope and the distant muffled clink of ironmongery hinted at his progress up the rope. The only clouds were a few benign silver wisps hanging innocently in the valley. The immense sky above was still brilliant with stars; on the far side of the valley there was again the faintest purple glow, near the Umasi La. It was one of the few occasions in my life when I have been prompted to remember lines of poetry. I have an appalling memory for words and it is usually only music that sticks, but that wonderful glow over the Himalaya did stir memories of some lines from Shakespeare – something like, ‘Look where the morn … all russet … no - in russet … in russet mantle clad … steals o’er something or other … ’ It was poignant to recall, albeit imperfectly, those lines first heard long ago at school, and to wonder whether I had then imagined that fourteen years later I might be standing alone in the darkness, tied to an ice screw on an unclimbed peak, watching the first glimmer of dawn appear over the crest of the Himalaya.
The growing noise of clinking equipment and crampons scraping on ice and the dim glow of torchlight reflected below the lip of the cliff announced that Dick was about to arrive and my sense of poetry gave way to a more prosaic concern for my cold body and a longing to be on the move again.
We stopped for a second breakfast at the terrace. While we ate our Crunchy Bars and drank orange juice laced with Glucodin, the surrounding mountains came to life and the sun burst on us, full of effulgent promise. Once again we climbed the snow arête, so reminiscent of the famous arête on the Frendo Spur on the Aiguille du Midi high above Chamonix; but there was a difference – that arête comes as the climax of the route, whereas ours on Shivling was just one more incident before the real difficulties started. We had a long way to go, but already on this first morning there was an exhilarating sense of height and space, and the birch trees of the valley, nearly two thousand metres below, looked tiny, remote, abstract, almost lost in the swirling patterns of grey river channels.
At the top of the arête we jumared up the rope which I had left two days earlier to the snow towers, and continued round the corner, edging along the narrow rock ledge. After one rope-length we belayed to a large granite block and inspected a lower ledge, poised like a balcony above overhanging rock walls. This ledge was not absolutely flat, but it was spacious and would make a reasonable bivouac site. It was only midday and rather early to stop, but already the ice cliff was starting to trickle with water, so we decided to wait here and leave the cliff for the frozen cool of the morning. We dumped our rucksacks, returned to the fixed rope, descended it to collect all the cached climbing gear, jumared back up, pulled up the rope and returned to the Balcony, to settle down for an afternoon of sunny relaxation.
There is a lot to be said for an early stop. It gives you ample time to fix a secure belay, hang up all the equipment, tie in everything (including yourself) safely, and get organised and comfortable for a good rest, eating, drinking and sleeping well before starting the next day’s work.
Later that afternoon, while drinking one of many brews of tea and eating biscuits and cheese, we discussed what to do next. I was worried that the lip of the hanging glacier might conceal a complex maze of crevasses above. I still thought that the ice wall of the lip, hanging above us, might cause long delays, and I wondered whether we ought to do two ferries to a base on the hanging glacier, before tackling the headwall. Dick was keen to be more mobile, setting off from here in one push, instead of wasting time and effort to-ing and fro-ing. As he pointed out, if we ran into desperate difficulties we could always return to the Balcony for more supplies. I began to agree that we should discard the fixing ropes and set off with just the two 9 mm climbing ropes and enough gear to get us up and down the headwall. As the sun dropped round towards the west, leaving us in shade, we worked through all the food and gear, packing a small sack with the things we could afford to leave.
‘What about the butter?’
‘Just take half the tin.’
‘Milk powder – I don’t mind going without it. We can drink black tea.’
‘No, let’s take it. It’s very light and full of protein.’
‘Twenty karabiners enough?’
‘Twenty-four.’
‘Okay, twenty-two. Do you think we can leave these three pegs?’
‘Yes, but we’d better take all the ice screws – we’re probably going to need them to abseil down the icefields.’
‘Cheese – this Edam has really improved … tastes more like Gruyere now … ’
‘We’ll have to leave some of it. Why don’t we leave the Edam for the way down and take up the smoked stuff? You know, this is still going to be quite a weight of food.’
‘Yes, but we can always dump another reserve at the next bivouac. I’m all for having meals waiting for us on the way down.’
And so it went on – a careful, methodical paring down of supplies, to bring our rucksacks down to something like an acceptable weight. Everything was organised by the evening. I climbed up to the higher ledge, taking care to remain clipped into the belay, to scoop up more water from a trickle of melting ice, then clambered back down to cook supper. It was still light when we turned in, building up the ledge with ropes to make it more level, before settling into down sleeping bags for a contented night’s sleep.
We failed to hear Dick’s alarm watch in the morning, so we were a little late and the sun had already risen when we moved off along the ledge. I led to the end of it and belayed to a screw right at the foot of the ice cliff, the second ice cliff on the route. I have always found steep ice unnerving and was glad when Dick volunteered to lead the pitch. He stepped straight off the ledge on to vertical ice, glassy, brittle and unyielding. After a couple of metres he gasped, ‘This is hopeless. I’ll have to take my sack off,’ and he came down to leave the rucksack tied to one of the ropes.
He returned to the fray, moving more easily now, battering the ice to remove loose brittle flakes and find secure placements for ice axe picks and crampons, stopping about five metres above me to hammer in an ice screw and clip in one of the ropes, leaving the other free for hauling up the sack. Later, after he had disappeared from sight, belayed and pulled up the sack, I followed on the second rope, leaning back heavily on it when I had to stop and twist out the ice screw. I continued up the unrelenting ice and as I hammered one of the axes above my head the slewing movement swung me out of balance, pulling my weight on to the rope again. Dick’s ice climbing technique, as well as his equipment, seemed to be better than mine and I was glad to be on the blunt end of the rope.
He was waiting in the middle of a fifty-degree slope of glittering snow. I stopped, took off my sack, grabbed some screws, karabiners, slings and a Deadman, and set off for the third ice cliff, wondering if I was going to cope.
It proved to be a pitch of delightful surprises. At the base of the striated cliff I found hard ice, where I could place a protecting screw before balancing leftwards to the vertical slot, a chimney wide enough to climb inside. I shouted down to Dick, ‘It’s fantastic!’ as I made my way up inside the chimney, with my back pressed against the left wall, crampons gripping on the right wall and ice picks providing handholds. The ice here was beautifully soft after the brittleness of the second cliff, and my picks stabbed easily into the smooth opaque surface like proverbial knives into butter. Higher up, the crevasse narrowed and I crawled out on to the face on the right. Now I was above the overhanging bulge, the face was only about seventy degrees and I could kick steps up the steep snow. The angle relented and I emerged over the top, on to the hanging glacier, to discover another wonderful surprise: there was no maze of séracs and crevasses, just a smooth shelf, sloping gently up and then steepening into the first ice field of the headwall. We had successfully climbed one of the main obstacles of the route and resolved one of the big question marks.
I couldn’t wait to share my euphoria with Dick, so I was disappointed when he appeared, looking cross.
‘I sometimes wonder at you,’ he said in tones of weary resignation. I smiled innocently and asked what he meant. ‘What do I mean? You know you had the rope way to the right of the chimney? It was desperate: I had to climb straight up the overhanging part and then wade up that snow, when there was a bloody great line of bucket steps four feet to the left!’
‘I’m sorry,’ I replied, suitably chastened. Luckily he quickly forgot about the mistake, dismissing it with one of his grunting laughs, and enthused about the encouraging prospects ahead. We could start work on the headwall right away and it looked as though we might find somewhere to bivouac at the top of the ice field, before moving right under rock walls to the runnel.
We walked across the glacier shelf then zigzagged up steepening snow and finally reverted to a facing-in position below the bergschrund, the big crevasse separating the hanging glacier from the steep ice field above. It was my turn to lead and the bergschrund gave some good sport, hacking and excavating my way over the upper lip and swinging up on to firm ice above. We climbed three pitches up the ice field, first following a rib of snow, then, when it became unstable, moving left into a glazed avalanche furrow, which steepened to at least sixty-five degrees. At one point, when Dick was leading, one of his crampons – smart new contraptions called Footfangs which clip on to the boots with ski-type bindings – came loose and he had a worrying few moments, balanced on one foot while he refitted the errant Footfang.
On the second afternoon we again stopped early, taking advantage of what might be the last reasonable bivouac site for a long way to come. We worked hard to create a ledge underneath a little rock overhang. Patches of snow on the granite wall above, melting in the afternoon sun, had produced a steady trickle, which seeped down into the back of the overhang, dripping on to the ledge; so we called this second bivouac Drip Ledge; but the drips could be avoided and by evening they were frozen static, so we were quite comfortable, perched on a snow ledge about three metres long by sixty centimetres wide.
We had a wonderful evening, again eating and drinking well and puffing contentedly at a cigarette, while we watched the landscape change in the shifting evening light. Immediately below us the ice field funnelled down dramatically to the hanging glacier and below that the red blob of our spare provisions bag was just visible on the balcony, perched improbably above steep cliffs. Two choughs were flying and hopping around it curiously. Across the valley, slightly to the right, I could see the meandering stream of the Hagshu Nullah, where Philip and I had been four years earlier. Dick was very taken with the monolithic flat-topped pyramid at the head of the nullah, commenting: ‘You know, that’s one of the most impressive mountains in the area.’
‘What about this mountain?’
‘You mean Shivling? Oh yes, this isn’t a bad mountain.’
Further left, we could see the Barnaj peaks, where friends of ours had been climbing a few years earlier. We could also just make out some of the rock needles above the Chiring Nullah, climbed by Lindsay Griffin, whom I had been with in Afghanistan in 1977. Sickle Moon, climbed by the Indian High Altitude Warfare School in 1975, still dominated the landscape in the north-west, massive above the complexity of deep hidden valleys. South of it, the summit of Brammah, the mountain which Vigne’s fakir attempted but which was eventually climbed by an Indo-British expedition in 1973, was now piercing through diaphanous orange clouds, glowing in the setting sun.
As the sun sank from view, the clouds evaporated, giving us hope for another day of fine weather. Dick had become infectiously optimistic, persuading me that we should aim the next day, Thursday, to climb right to the top of the runnel, to a bivouac on the shoulder of the East Ridge. On Friday, if all went well, we would travel light, climb quickly to the summit and back, and perhaps start down the same day from the top bivouac. We decided to take food and fuel for two nights, which could at a pinch be stretched to three. The bivouac tent we would leave at the ledge; if we were caught in a storm we would have either to try to dig a snow hole on the ridge or hurry back down the North Face to the shelter of Drip Ledge. Climbing gear was also slightly reduced, because we knew some of it would have to be kept in reserve to make abseil anchors back down from Drip Ledge to the Balcony. We were now going to continue with seven ice screws, two Friends (adjustable camming wedges), three small nuts, three large nuts, eight rock pegs, twenty-two karabiners, a selection of tape slings and two climbing ropes.
Now that we were approaching 6,000 metres, the air was colder and the time had come to don another layer of clothing. I had in reserve a pair of thermal long johns which I decided to put on that evening before it became impossible higher up; already changing was awkward. It was a delicate process: taking off boots and carefully clipping them into the belay; then fixing a loop round my chest to clip in so that I remained attached to the mountain while removing my waist harness; then perching, stork-like on the ledge, to remove overtrousers and the one-piece fibre pile suit, stow them carefully at the back of the ledge, put on long-johns and pull back on the outer layers; then rebuckling my waist harness, tying it back into the belay, removing the temporary chest loop and putting on my down jacket. Dick was already settled in bed, facing me from the far end of the ledge, with the umbilical cord of his belay loop protruding from his sleeping bag and clipped into a peg on the wall above. I arranged my foam karrimat on the remaining space at my end of the ledge, sat down, adjusted my belay loop for length, wriggled into my tube of goose down, and then lay down, to sink luxuriously into the warm blur of sleep.
On Day Three we were determined to leave at first light. Dick started the first breakfast brew at 1.30 a.m., waking me half an hour later with a mug of tea. Before starting a day’s work in the thin dry high-altitude air it was essential to drink plenty of liquid; so we made three large brews before leaving the warmth of our sleeping bags to get packed and ready. As always on these pre-dawn starts there was a strange juxtaposition of the sublime and the mundane: on the one hand, a Wordsworthian awareness of solitude under the immense silent starlit sky; on the other, the chore of lacing up stiff frozen boots with cold fingers, of sorting out the confused tangle of ropes and slings and the sleeping bag which refuses to fit into its stuff sack; the rumbling of a belly which has been forced into an unnaturally premature breakfast – and the need to relieve yourself, however cold and awkward it is, fumbling with buttons and zips and leaning out backwards over the dark drop, reminding yourself that it is better to get it over and done with now, rather than run the risk, later in the day halfway up some steep precarious pitch, of a sudden fear-induced loosening of the sphincter.
Dick started the first pitch at five o’clock. Dawn had not quite broken, so he moved off by the light of his head torch, traversing right across the top of the icefield.
We followed a meandering route that day, deviating from the original plan to climb straight up the runnel. The ice field was fine – three full rope-lengths of steady sideways progress, across a band of sixty-degree snow and ice, suspended between steeper rock walls, with the security of good belays on dependable tubular ice screws. On the fourth pitch I traversed round a tongue of rock and moved up into the runnel. Then we struck difficulties.
Dick continued higher, muttering things about hollow ice. There was an abortive scratching, as he searched unsuccessfully for a running belay. He led out the full fifty metres of rope, then spent an age fixing up a main belay, before I could follow.
The ice was indeed hollow, with a pocket of air between its thin skin and the smooth, ice-worn granite underneath; higher up there was unconsolidated snow and when I joined Dick he pointed out that the belay was very sketchy. He also pointed out how hard the continuation of the runnel looked: it reared up above us, a faint shallow gully, smeared with thin slivers of ice, too thin for ice screws. Where the rock showed through, it looked blank and smooth, offering little hope for pegs and nuts. The final steep bulge, plastered with the thinnest streak of ice, looked particularly repellent and the thought of attempting that kind of precarious climbing with only marginal protection was not appealing. We were also concerned, now that we were so close underneath it, about the summit cornice: just supposing it was unstable – we would be exposed in the line of fire for many hours.
It took Dick a few minutes to bring me round to his way of thinking, persuading me that the runnel was unacceptably risky, enticing me away from the direct logical line with the lure of solidity and security on the rock walls to the left, where cracks and chimneys offered the promise of safe nut and peg placements.
So we changed course, moving back left away from the runnel. I made straight away for a large rock spike, draping it with a sling and clipping in one of the ropes, to make a secure running belay. It was reassuring to have this good runner, so that if I did fall off we would not be reliant solely on Dick’s flimsy belay. I continued up a pitch of my favourite type of climbing, typical of north faces all over the Alps and the Himalaya – a mixture of rock, snow and ice, where there is sufficient snow and ice to need crampons on one’s feet, but where the rock adds a complexity and variety missing on pure snow-ice slopes. Ice axes, instead of just being whacked into ice, are used to excavate handholds on a snow smothered block, or to scrape clear a little nick on which one can stand in crampon points, or to reach up and hook a flake of rock which hands cannot reach.
I moved up into a chimney. Now the ice axes were dangling on their slings and I was climbing with gloved hands on the rock, jamming fingers in a crack and bridging up with cramponed feet on each side. The chimney narrowed and I squeezed more awkwardly upwards, my bulging rucksack catching in the constriction. It was difficult, but the ropes below were running through several karabiners, clipped reassuringly to pegs and nuts in the rock. I had almost reached a suitable belay ledge, but first I had to gain another metre of height. I strained up with my left hand, reaching for a block, while my right elbow pushed against the wall behind, right foot wedged in the snow at the back of the chimney and left foot scrabbled at the left wall, struggling to hook a crampon point on to a nick of rock. The crampon stuck and with an ungainly panting heave I pulled up on to the ledge.
After leaving the runnel we climbed four pitches, zigzagging leftward up the rock wall, following in the line of least resistance, but never quite sure where the line was leading us. First there was my chimney pitch, then Dick disappeared round a corner to the left, then I, too, continued left, evading the steepest rock and following a sloping snow-covered shelf, balancing round underneath over- hangs. By the time Dick had joined me at the end of this pitch the sun had crept round on to the wall and for a while we enjoyed its brightness and warmth.
It was already mid-afternoon and we were nowhere near the shoulder of the East Ridge. Now that we had wandered so far left we were not sure where to go next. Perhaps we should have headed straight up one of the steep cracks we passed? Perhaps we should go further left and climb up an icy chimney to one of the great towers on the East Ridge? But that would leave us with a long traverse back right along its intricately turreted crest. Immediately above us, steep granite slabs curved up out of sight. They looked very hard but it seemed that we would have to climb them and try to break back right higher up towards the summit. There did seem to be a line, starting with steep cracks leading to a chimney. Unfortunately, the chimney was capped by an overhang, which might require slow artificial climbing; but above that there was a vague suggestion of a break, which looked as though it might be a ramp leading back right. It all looked very hard and it threatened some slow technical rock climbing. We were obviously going to be another day on the wall and it was too late now to start on the overhang pitch, so for the moment all we could do was climb a steep snow ramp to the foot of the pitch and hope to find somewhere to bivouac there.
At three o’clock we started to excavate our bivouac ledge. Half an hour’s hacking at a lump of hard ice produced little in the way of a ledge, so I climbed higher, pulling strenuously up on to a rock pedestal, crowned with a blob of snow. It wasn’t much but I could dig a small ledge in the snow, thirty centimetres wide by a metre long, like a small bench seat. Dick was not impressed but agreed that it would suffice in the absence of anything better; so we spent the night there, sitting upright, with our backs leaning against the vertical rock wall behind, and our feet hanging over the sloping snow bank, resting in rope loops for support. By the time we were organised it was nearly dark. We sat side by side, in our sleeping bags, tied to two rock pegs, surrounded by festoons of climbing gear and our rucksacks, also suspended from the pegs. Dick commented that it was like sitting on a window ledge on the ninetieth storey of a skyscraper. When it became dark we flashed our torches to show Patial where we were. Far, far below we could see the tiny flash of his torch beside the yellow flicker of the fire. Further down the valley there was a light in Sumcham and we wondered what the villagers thought about our improbable lights on Shivling. Most of the Jammu wallahs had now left for home, but a few remained and we could also see their fires. Later Patial told us that one of them, a hadji who had twice made the pilgrimage to Mecca, had prayed for our safety.
We placed the stove on the ledge between us, melting snow to make a meagre supper of soup and noodles. After supper I had work to do: my overtrousers needed mending. They were a fine pair of trousers, made of Helanka, a warm, wind-and-snow-resistant fabric. They had started life in 1956, in Austria, made for my father by a Kitzbühl tailor. Then they had been the height of skiing fashion, with a tailored waist and tapered legs stretched down to heel loops. My father had used them for about twenty years before a sudden attack of fashion-consciousness forced him to discard them, whereupon I took them over, setting to work on the sewing machine, extending the waist with a sort of cummerbund and adding darts, gussets, braces and zips, to make an excellent pair of mountaineering overtrousers. With their thigh-length leg zips, they could be taken on and off over crampons, and they were bulky enough to wear over long johns and fibre pile trousers. They had done good service on many expeditions, but today one of the zips had finally broken, leaving the right leg gaping open. The zip was beyond repair, so I now had to lace up the split with a length of string. It was far too cold to get out of the sleeping bag, so the repair had to be done inside the bag – an awkward process which entailed leaning over, reaching down with my arms into the restricted tube of the sleeping bag and, working by feel alone, boring holes in the trouser fabric with my penknife and then threading through the string. The final result looked like some medieval peasant’s leggings, but it worked, keeping out most of the snow during the days ahead.
Between supper and breakfast we had about five hours’ rest on the Window Ledge. We slept a little, but never for more than a few minutes at a time, always longing to be able to lie down flat instead of leaning uncomfortably against the unyielding wall.
It was my turn to lead in the morning. I left my rucksack tied on the ledge and set off, armed just with ice axe, ice hammer, all the climbing hardware and my camera. First I had to stretch out from the pedestal to reach the start of the cracks; then I began to gain height, pulling up on finger jams in the crack. Higher up, as I moved right to another steep wall split by a crack, I started to enjoy myself. I had been very apprehensive about this pitch, but the sudden rush of action had brought warmth to stiff limbs and filled me again with enthusiasm for the climb. The rock became steeper and almost devoid of snow, so I stopped to remove crampons, hanging them on the back of my harness. Then I started up the next steep section, bare fingers wrapping round features in the cold rock, the huge unwieldy Vibram soles of my double boots gingerly testing tiny ledges. After hammering in a peg for protection, I moved left to a corner which offered more protection and a route up into the chimney. The overhang proved to be a huge flake of granite hanging out over the chimney. I hit it with the palm of my hand and it made a deep booming noise. In underneath it was a wide flared crack where I could place our largest Friend; it cammed perfectly in the slot, providing protection for the moves ahead.
We had feared that the overhang might require artificial climbing, but once again the mountain surprised us with a delightful passage of free climbing. The rock was solid and rough, covered in knobbly rugosities, wonderful to climb and suddenly reminding me of Scafell, where I had been climbing a few weeks earlier. It was possible to tiptoe sideways, with my hands underclinging the lip of the flake, until I could reach up higher to handholds and pull up on to the top of the flake. I stopped to blow on numb fingers, then climbed up leftwards over a wrinkled slab to a small footstep, where I could just stand in balance and fix up a belay. I hauled up the rucksack on the blue rope (a laborious job) and then Dick came up, carrying his sack and collecting all the runners clipped into the purple rope.
As he pulled up on numb fingers to the belay, I said: ‘Sorry I was rather long leading it.’
‘I thought you were quick.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. I thought it was hard; you’re climbing well … do you mind leading the next pitch? My fingers seem to be really cold.’ Perhaps his old Dunagiri frostbite injuries were impairing circulation. My fingers were warm and raring to get to grips with more interesting climbing, so I was glad to lead another pitch. There would no doubt be occasions later during the climb when I would be glad to rely on Dick to take over my lead.
We climbed eight pitches that day, our fourth day on the route. Once again the sky was blue and the summit snowfield, growing closer and closer on the right, was brilliant white in the sunshine. It was possibly the best day’s climbing I have ever had, giving us a succession of difficult, fascinating, wonderfully varied pitches. We could never see far ahead, so there was the continual excitement of not being sure what we would find round the next corner; but the route always unfolded with a logical continuation, obvious but never easy; each move was a new problem to be solved.
The first pitch up the overhang gave us some fantastic rock climbing. The second was more mixed, climbed in crampons up some steep cracks, then following the rightward ramp, up steep shelving snow, searching the granite wall above for handholds. The third pitch was a diedre – an open, square-cut corner – led by Dick. While I leant back in my harness at the belay, using one hand to take photographs and the other to pay out the ropes through my friction break, Dick stepped across into the corner, formed by a thirty-metre-high pillar leaning against the wall. He climbed the Renshaw Diedre with great panache, cramponed feet biting at ice on the left wall, hands searching for holds and nut placements on the right wall. Higher up the ice on the left wall became thicker and he took out his ice axe to supplement the ice hammer and complete the pitch with some very steep ice climbing. Waiting at the belay, I felt utterly content, paying out the ropes and smoking a cigarette, while I watched Dick perform above. Few things could give more pleasure than spending such a perfect day in this extraordinary vertical landscape, totally absorbed in what we were doing, living entirely for the moment.
Above the Renshaw Diedre there was more fascinating variety for me to explore: a delicate traverse right on steep snow-smothered slabs, a pause to take off crampons, then a steep wall split by a single crack, recalling the famous Grandmère Crack on the Aiguille du Plan near Chamonix; then another move right, size twelve boots tiptoeing on minute nubbins, and then a final chimney, strenuous and brutal, leading to a sort of resting place and a belay.
It was midday and the sun had swung round on to the North-West Face. Away to the south-west the usual afternoon clouds had begun to mass in the valleys, but the familiar shapes around us of Brammah, Barnaj, Sickle Moon, Arjuna, Chiring and Hagshu were all clear, and the sky above was deep blue. Far away in the north-west, beyond Sickle Moon, we could now see the two bulky summits of Nun and Kun, the highest and most famous peaks in the Kashmir Himalaya, visited every year by numerous expeditions. On Shivling we were now hanging above tremendous depths, with the headwall funnelling down to the great jutting shelf of the hanging glacier, apparently suspended in space above the dark crevasses of the main glacier much further below. Further right, the snow ridge which we had climbed on the first day now looked completely flat, distorted by a new dramatic perspective. We had come up a long way and had now almost reached the shoulder on the East Ridge, where we hoped to emerge from the North Face and find a spot, among towering snow mushrooms, to dig a comfortable bivouac ledge.
Before continuing we stopped for a short rest, sucking orange and Glucodin juice from the ice-encrusted neck of the water bottle. Then we plastered our faces with sun cream before Dick started up the fifth pitch.
We had almost worked back round to the line of the runnel which emerged on to the summit snowfield a short way below us to the right. We intended to avoid the fragile flutings of the summit snowfield, heading instead for the East Ridge directly above us. Dick led across a precarious snow ledge into a concave wall composed of granite blocks and snow. It looked short and straightforward and I imagined that we would reach the ridge above in no time at all. I started impetuously up the sixth pitch, not even bothering to collect all the gear from Dick. I quickly discovered that I was in fact moving into very steep terrain, putting in more protection than I had intended, and rapidly running out of gear. A short wall, which had looked innocuous from below, held me up for nearly half an hour, as I tried in vain to reach up and place a peg. Eventually I managed to lodge the pick of my axe, stretched high above my head, into a thin crack and pull up on it, while I flailed with my left arm and leg at a vertical snowdrift on the left, gradually heaving up past the wall and swimming up horribly steep unconsolidated powder to a little cave, where I collapsed to regain my breath. I used my last karabiner to clip into a Friend belay and brought up Dick.
He led the seventh pitch, using nuts and pegs for direct aid to climb over a steep wall and a vicious corner. While he engineered this pitch, the sun swung round the west tower of the mountain, sinking towards a gathering mass of clouds. They now looked more serious than the usual afternoon cloud – vast turbulent cumulus, with ugly missile-shaped streaks of cirrus above. Suddenly, just as we were getting really high and committed on the mountain, so close to the summit, the weather was threatening to wreck everything.
I followed Dick, struggling in the corner, where you had to step in a sling suspended from a nut, reach up high, thrust ice-axe shafts into a pile of loose snow, and pull up strenuously on to an apology for a ledge. I hurried on, racing the approaching darkness. The huge snow mushrooms of the ridge bulged out just above us, forcing me to shuffle sideways along a sloping rock ledge, driving picks into the ice above for balancing handholds, until it was possible to climb straight up through a slight break in the bulges. I managed to place one ice screw – the only protection on the pitch – before thrashing up a seventy-degree wall of snow, precarious and loose, forcing me to thrust deep with axe shafts and to lift legs high above knee level to kick steps which would not collapse. It was a strenuous athletic finish to a long day and, now that we were approaching 6,000 metres, it was hard on the lungs. The sun was sinking rapidly, deep red, into a seething mass of clouds as I kicked and shoved up the last stretch, to emerge from the North Face on to the crest of the ridge.
It had been a hard day. After the uncomfortable night on the Window Ledge, we were longing to lie down. While Dick came up, I peered through the fading light, looking around for a suitable spot to bivouac. The narrow crest of the ridge was overgrown with huge snow mushrooms, bulging out over the steep drop on both sides. A few feet away, towards the summit, the crest of one mushroom seemed quite solid and not quite so undercut as some of the more fantastic formations. When Dick arrived we put on our head torches and started to investigate. We fixed up a safety line, tying a length of rope from the rock belay to a Deadman, dug into the snow of the mushroom; then we started excavating.
The missile clouds were still spreading from the south-west in sinister dark bands reaching across the sky, and a vicious cold wind was blasting across the ridge from the north-west, so we dug down on the south-east side, making a large ledge, protected by a snow wall. When the ledge was large enough, we started to get ready for the night, spreading out karrimats and laboriously brushing snow from our clothes and boots.
Later, after poking our heads over the ridge to flash Patial, we got into our sleeping bags and I began to prepare tea, slowly melting snow to produce a full pan of water. When it began to heat, I added tea bags and sugar, then lay back to wait for it to boil. Eventually came the long-awaited bubbling noises and I turned round to pick up the pan. There was a sudden orange flash and a hiss of steam; then darkness and the tinkling sound of metal bouncing down over snow crystals; then a distant clatter, followed by silence. The stove was clutched firmly in my hand, but the precious pan full of tea had gone, knocked over the edge by a clumsy swipe of my elbow.
‘Sorry – the saucepan’s gone.’
‘You bloody idiot!’ Dick stared incredulously at me from behind the merciless beam of his head torch. What were we going to melt water in now? Without water we could not go on. I apologised abjectly, humiliated and angry with myself for ruining what had been a perfect day. Up till now everything had gone so smoothly and we were close to completing the hardest and most enjoyable climb that I had ever attempted.
Luckily there was a solution to the problem. We still had one full spare gas cylinder and the cylinder on the stove was almost empty: it would have to suffice as a saucepan. I removed it from the stove and set to with my penknife, hacking open the domed top of the empty cylinder. It was not ideal, but balanced on the stove, it did slowly melt small quantities of snow, and laboriously I produced half cups of tea, soup and orange juice.
Dick made one of his grunting laughs and said: ‘At least you didn’t drop the stove.’ Eventually he got bored with waiting for brews and fell asleep. I sat up late, working sleepily to fill the water bottle with liquid for our summit climb. I was still hoping desperately that we would be going to the summit the next day; but I had to admit that that was now in doubt. The wind was still blowing over the ridge, just above our heads; the sky was murky with clouds and there were more in the valley, lapping menacingly at the foot of the mountain. Looking out across the towers of the South-East Ridge I could see lightning flickering in the sky away to the south, illuminating more dark bands of cloud. It was sinister and depressing.