Our adventures on Sangay were far from over. That night we got back to the camp in the woods, where our long-suffering but faithful porters were awaiting us. The following day we dropped back into the bottom of the gorge of the Volcan river, but by now it had rained almost non-stop for a week, and the entire bed of the gorge was filled with boiling brown waters.
‘We’ll have to wait for it to subside a bit and then make a dash for it,’ I decided.
‘But what if the rains don’t let up?’ asked Sebastian. ‘I’ve known them to go on for weeks at a time.’
‘Well, we’ll then have to cut our way out, along the top of the gorge.’
‘If we don’t make it, I suppose we could always make a second Fawcett story,’ said Sebastian. ‘Do you think John Anstey’d send anyone out to find our bones? I’ll keep a diary to the very end, with a last, loving message to Laetitia and the children.’
We sat it out, on a lava sprit at the end of the gorge, for another day. On the second morning, the level seemed to have dropped a little and we made a hurried descent of the gorge, fording a couple of torrents which had been little more than trickles on the way up. In the process, we very nearly lost Don Albino, who, frail as he was, let go of the rope I had taken across the torrent, and was on the point of being swept away into the main stream when Sebastian, with great presence of mind, and considerable courage, dived in and saved him. The Indians, indifferent to death, just looked on and, I suspect, would have let him drown.
This proved altogether too much for Don Albino, who sat down and told Jorge that he would go no further – we could leave him where he was and once he had rested he would continue the journey. I felt it impossible to abandon him, and ended up by carrying him, piggy-back fashion, down the river bank. He was little more than a skeleton held together by a few sinews and a bit of skin. At first he seemed to weigh nothing, but as the miles crept by, his weight increased, and at the end of the day I felt exhausted.
We had now reached the end of the Rio Volcan, where it joined the Upano. The gods were undoubtedly mocking us, for the weather had cleared, rewarding us with our first cloudless day since leaving Macas. Sangay, conical, serene, eternal, lay just ten miles up the valley down which we had fled the previous day. There was no question of returning, however, as we had to get more food before we could tackle the volcano once more. But determined to tackle it I was – I put it to Sebastian:
‘Look, I know you’ve got a superb story – the trouble is, I haven’t any pictures to back it up. My whole future depends on this story. Will you come back with me?’
‘But how can you guarantee it won’t be just the same, all over again?’
‘There’s no need to go in from this side again. We’ll go in from the other side, where it should be a hell of a sight easier. If we take more food, we can sit it out until we get a good day. Do you mind?’
‘My dear Christian, all I ask is a single hot bath in Quito, and I’ll go to the ends of the earth to help you get your pictures.’
Sebastian, although a master of superlatives, really meant what he said, and so we trekked all the way back to Macas. On the last night, before reaching the town, we went to bed at dusk, as was our usual custom. We were told the next day that we had slept through the most spectacular eruption of Sangay in living memory. Had I only been awake, I could have photographed the perfect volcano firework display. Everything about Sangay seemed ill-fated.
We flew back to Quito, where we spent a week collecting food, sending for some money, and living it up in the aseptic luxury of the Intercontinental Hotel. There were letters from Wendy, full of love and her own adventures in the Lake District. She was, at last, beginning to gain confidence in her folk-singing – had sung at a folk festival and was full of plans for the future. I longed to get home to her, and dreaded the thought of going on to Peru to join the expedition to Alpamayo. I had had enough of adventure for the time being, and had become a homing bird. But first, I had to get my pictures on Sangay. From the west, it would be as if approaching a different mountain, on a different continent, for we would approach it from the High Andean Plateau: no jungle, no slimy forests of Sachapalma, just shoulder-high grass, spread over a switchback of sharp, knife-edge ridges, that guarded Sangay with an intricate network of ramparts, as if it were the citadel of an eighteenth-century fortress.
The road-head was at a hacienda called Alloa, set in an upland grassy valley which could have known little change in the past 300 years. One man owned the entire valley, and though theoretically the feudal system (with the Indians being treated as serfs) had been abolished, in practice the system remained. If the Indians wanted to stay in the valley, they had to work for the landowner on his terms – and these seemed fairly harsh. The homes of the Indians, resembling mouldering hay-stacks, were huts made from bunched grass, without windows, doors or chimneys. Each had a small patch of land for his own crops, and much of his pay was in kind – food and grain. For escape, he could go to the cities, but found little prospect of work, and a life which could be even harsher. At least on the hacienda some measure of security was provided, and the hardship of the life was made bearable by alcohol.
We arrived at the Hacienda Alloa on the second day of one of the many religious feasts which grace the Ecuadorian calendar. In the morning all the peasants went to church – a dark, windowless barn of a place, with none of the gold and glittering ornaments of the churches of Quito – just a stark wooden cross on a battered old table. But the room was packed to bursting, with an overflow standing around the threshold and the walls outside. There was a constant babble of voices, cries of children, as the priest celebrated Mass. At the end of the service they held a procession in two long parallel columns round the field immediately outside the church. One of these columns was formed by the major domo of the hacienda leading the menfolk, whilst his wife led the women in the other. There was something infinitely sad in the stoic, melancholy cast of their features, all of which seemed weakened and debauched by a life of hardship relieved only by alcohol and drugs.
At the end of the procession they all flocked to the village tavern, a bare mud hut and compound, which was soon packed with Indians – men, women and even children, all of whom proceeded to get more drunk than I have ever seen anyone before or since. The scene was Hogarthian – with a soldier lying flat in the gutter, blind to the world, his rifle beside him – a man offering his wife or lover a draught from his half-full bottle of Aqua Diente, in the middle of the street – a mother giving her eighteen-month babe a slug of the fire-water, to stop it crying.
The binge lasted three days, during which time I had no choice but to wait patiently until the porters we had been promised had recovered from their hangovers. When, eventually, they did, we set off on our journey, the first leg on horseback to an outlying ranch about fifteen miles from the foot of the mountain, followed by two days’ march through the long, near-impenetrable grass, to the base of the volcano.
Away from the bottle, our porters proved wonderfully reliable – much stronger and more self-sufficient than our brave little bunch of lads from Macas, who were so much out of their element once in virgin forest. These men had spent their childhood and working lives wandering the sierra, in search of game or stray cattle. Dressed for the part, with broad, heavy felt hats, thick woollen ponchos and well-made boots, they knew how to make effective shelters by cutting the long grass and building little thatched huts – mini-replicas of their own hovels by the hacienda. They never complained of the incessant rain, nor of the heavy loads, nor the hard going through the pathless maze of grass-clad ridges.
Reaching the base of the volcano on the third day, we waited there for another couple of days, and then moved a camp up the side of the mountain, to an altitude of about 15,000 feet, on a shoulder immediately opposite a lava run. It was a strange, rather frightening place. By day the lava blocks, which were pushed down the slope by the remorseless power of the volcano, looked like dull, black coke. But at night these glowed a rich cherry red as they rattled and rumbled down the slope. Every few hours there was an eruption from the main crater. We could not see anything, for the entire summit was wrapped in cloud. We could, however, feel the mountain tremble beneath us, and it was all too easy to imagine a great river of molten lava, poised somewhere out of sight, above us in the clouds, ready to sweep down and envelop us.
We had some trouble persuading the Indians to help carry our tent so high on the volcano, and when they left us there, they had shaken our hands with a fervour which seemed to imply that this was the last time they ever expected to see us. Having lived in the shadow of Sangay all their lives, they had a healthy and perhaps superstitious respect for the mountain. In the two nights and days that Sebastian and I spent high on its flanks, we began to share both their fears and their respect.
And then, at last, I had one clear day. I raced to the summit, tailed by Sebastian, and took my pictures, which had a peculiarly anticlimactic quality. Although the crater was vast, it was filled with a dense steam and you could see nothing – you could only hear a steady hiss from its depth – a hiss which, to my untutored ears, sounded exceptionally sinister. I spent an hour on the brink of that crater, hoping for a clearance – even half-hoping for an eruption – to get some truly spectacular photographs, yet at the same time fearful of my own prospects of survival in such an event.
An hour went by. Nothing happened, and with a sense of relief, feeling I had done my duty, I fled down the slope, back to our camp. Our Indians welcomed us as if we had returned from the halls of the dead, but still I wasn’t happy. I was worried in case I had not succeeded in getting sufficiently dramatic photographs of the volcano. Paradoxically, on the day of our return to its base, the weather once again cleared into a series of perfect, cloudless days, when even the interior of the crater seemed free from steam. I had just persuaded Sebastian – ever loyal and patient – to return with me to the summit for yet another attempt to get the perfect definitive picture of a volcano. We were to go up first thing in the morning, and I was sorting out my gear for what would be our third ascent of the mountain, when an Indian came running into the camp.
The moment I saw him I knew there was something terribly wrong. He had a message addressed to me. I dreaded opening it – fearing something might have happened to Wendy. I had an instant, appalling sense of relief that it was not Wendy – although it was Conrad. He had been killed in an accident. It was like a physical blow, instantaneous, believable and real – dreadful in its finality. I collapsed on to the ground and cried, with the Indians standing silent, sympathetic around me. Sebastian, holding my shoulder, gave me all the sympathy and strength that he could.
I did my best to pull myself together, knowing that I had to get home without delay. The accident had occurred over a week before, and the fact that I learned of the tragedy as soon as I did was entirely due to an old climbing friend, Simon Clark, who was now working in Ecuador. We had met in Quito on our way out, and later he had seen a mention of the accident in The Times. The Daily Telegraph had already cabled to the British Embassy, but there was no way in which they could get the news to me, since they had only a vague idea of our whereabouts. Simon knew even less than them, but immediately made inquiries about our route into Sangay. He drove to the Hacienda Alloa, and would have carried the message in person but for the fact that he had vital business commitments. He sent an Indian with a note to tell me of the tragedy, and I shall always be grateful to him for his efforts. He left a Land-Rover with a driver to take me to Quito, and this must have saved Wendy from several days’ unmitigated hell in our loss, compounded as it was by my own absence on the other side of the earth.
I started back that afternoon, knowing that I could not sleep until I reached home. Our Indians, whose own lives are full of death, held a silent compassion that I shall never forget. We walked through the dusk, and as night fell I looked back at Sangay, that dark conical silhouette, against a star-encrusted sky – a flaming red snake of molten lava coiling down its slopes. Even in my grief I was aware of the intense beauty and peace of the scene. I walked and walked, drugged by fatigue, yet telling myself over and over again that I should never feel and see Conrad again.
They had horses waiting for us at the outlying station and we rode on through the night, over the hairpin path which led to Alloa, reaching it at dawn. I shook hands with the Indians – their leader, a fine, grizzled old man, crying as he waved his farewell – and we drove on through the dusty little town of Riobamba, past Cotopaxi, snow-capped, conical and pink in the early morning sun, and into Quito. There, I was taken to some friends of Simon who were infinitely kind, and we held to that tight brittle edge of small talk that enables one to keep grief private. Then the plane to New York; long hours of waiting for the connection, longing for Wendy, keeping going till we could hold each other close, worrying about whether she was all right. And Heathrow, Immigration, baggage collection, Customs, then Wendy broke through and we just clung and clung together, isolated from the world in the totality of our grief and love for each other.
Wendy had been staying with Mary Stewart, and Conrad had gone playing with Mary’s four children. At the bottom of the field abutting the garden was a stream. Normally it was little more than a trickle, but there had been a cloudburst. Conrad, ever independent and adventurous, had strayed from the others and must have fallen into the swollen waters. Wendy herself had found him. It was one of those one-in-a-million chances that you can never guard against. Mary’s and countless other children had played by the banks of the stream all their lives, and then, for some unknown reason, by some chance, this had happened.
Now we have two fine children, and time, and the love of our children, has eased our grief, but it will always be with us in a closed quarter of our minds. There will always be the nagging questions; the asking of what Conrad might have done with his life – how he would have developed. He had a rare quality of gentleness tempered with intrepid independence. His was a happy, intense little life, lasting only two-and-a-half years, without any of the sorrows and disillusion that inevitably accompany the joys and challenges of a life which is allowed to follow its complete course.
Wendy had endured a hell that I could never know; for the fact that the news was a week old, that the accident had occurred so far away, meant that I had known only thirty-six hours of solitary grief compared with the long days of Wendy’s suffering. Her parents and a host of wonderful friends had been a tower of strength to her, but neither of us felt whole without the other. Together we could admit our sorrow and Wendy was able to release, slowly, some part of the pain of our loss.