The two of us left at five o’clock the next morning to find a way to the east ridge. Abdul Ghiyas, still wearing his windproof suit and labouring under the delusion that he was a sergeant, produced green tea for us brewed as strong as the army sort, and very nasty it was. We both harboured a determination to reach the ridge and, if possible, the summit, that in retrospect I find unbelievable. Our drivers watched us go sadly and Abdul Ghiyas asked us what he should do if we failed to return. (All our impulses were to tell him to head a search party but this seemed unfair.) Apart from telling him to go home, it was difficult to know what to say. The air was full of the promise of disaster. I had not felt it so strongly since the day I embarked on what was to prove my last voyage in a submarine and the wardroom orderly had come running down the mole waving my unpaid bill.
After an interminable climb through a wilderness of black rock we reached the moraine at the foot of the glacier. A few minutes on the moraine convinced us that we would be better on the black rock, however unstable, and we moved back on to it close under the ridge, leaping from plate to plate as they see-sawed underfoot. Here we met our first snowfields, so tiny that it seemed hardly worth while putting on crampons, but they were frozen hard and we fell several times, hurting ourselves badly, so we roped ourselves instead.
At 17,000 feet we were high up on the approaches to the ridge, following a narrow ledge. Above our heads a sheer wall rose a thousand feet to the ridge itself, below it fell away five hundred to the head of the glacier. It was a charming spot; the wall overhung the ledge in a bulge and under it there was a little earth in which giant primulas were growing. Farther under still, in perpetual shade, columns of ice and hard snow stretched from roof to floor.
But this was something seen only as we clumped by; soon we were out in the sun again, which was now very hot, and were crossing another snowfield, no bigger than a football pitch, that some strange action of wind or weather had forced up in stalks four feet high set together, like a forest of fossil trees, through which we battled our way sweating and swearing horribly.
Up another ledge, this time less friendly than the first and up to now the property of the ibex whose droppings littered it, and we were on bare rock with streams of melting snow pouring over it. It was not a particularly impressive face but there were hardly any projections to belay to, the handholds either sloped downwards or else were full of grit, a sort of shiny mica that poured ceaselessly down from above and had to be picked out of each handhold in turn, as lethal for the fingers as powdered glass.
I had never seen such a mountain. It was nothing like anything we had seen in Wales. To someone like myself, completely unversed in geological expressions, it seemed to be made from a sort of shattered granite; ‘demoralized’ was the word that rose continually to my lips while, as the thaw continued and progressively larger rocks bounded past us on their way to the glacier, the childish ‘it isn’t fair’ was only repressed with difficulty.
To cheer one another in this hour, when the first intimations of fatigue were creeping up on us and while whoever was leader was scrabbling awfully with his feet for a possible foot-hold where none existed, we pretended to be Damon Runyon characters trying to climb a mountain. Hugh was Harry the Horse.
‘Dose Afghans soitinly build lousy mountains’ was what he said, as a particularly large boulder went bouncing past us over the edge and on to the glacier below with a satisfying crash.
At eleven we reached the foot of a gully and, with the help of the pamphlet, which we consulted unashamedly in moments of crisis, ascended it.
By this time, by the application of common sense and without the help of the book, we had evolved a far swifter method of roped climbing than we had ever practised before. Previously if Hugh led he had waited for me to come up to the place where he was belayed and, when I had hooked myself on, repeated the whole ghastly process. Now, instead of halting, I went straight on up to the full extent of the rope; in this way we moved much faster. Like Red Indians made cunning by suffering, we were learning by experience. That what we were doing is common mountaineering practice is a measure of our ignorance.
In this way we ascended this nasty gully, the head of which was jammed with loose rocks, all ready to fall, and at eleven-thirty came out on to snow on top of the east ridge.
It was a tremendous moment. We had reached it too low down and further progress towards the top was made impossible by a monster pinnacle of extreme instability. Nevertheless, the summit looked deceptively close. The altimeter after a good deal of cuffing read 18,000 feet.
‘That’s about right,’ Hugh said. ‘Splendid, isn’t it!’
‘I’m glad I came.’
‘Are you really?’ he said. He sounded delighted.
‘I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.’ And I really meant it.
Two thousand feet below us, like an enormous new frying-pan sizzling in the sun, was the east glacier. Away to the east the view was blocked by a bend in the ridge in which we sat, but to the south the mountains seemed to surge on for ever.
Hugh was full of plans. ‘In some ways I’m sorry we didn’t try that,’ he said, pointing to the impossible slopes that swept down to the east glacier, ‘but perhaps it’s all for the best. What we’ve got to do now,’ he went on, ‘is to put a camp on that second ibex ledge, just below the smooth rock, at about seventeen thousand with enough food for two nights. Then we must hit the ridge farther up, beyond this pinnacle. Unless there’s something extraordinary between here and the top, we ought to be able to make it in one day.’
‘What about dead ground?’ I said. It was my stock objection but only put up half-heartedly. At 18,000 feet in the rarefied atmosphere Hugh’s enthusiasm was infectious. Like him, I could now think of nothing else but getting to the top.
‘We’ve been six and a half hours from the valley to the ridge but only an hour and a half from the ibex ledge. It shouldn’t take us much more than that to reach the ridge beyond the pinnacle. It’s just a matter of choosing another couloir.1 From there it can’t possibly be more than three hours to the summit, but make it five and a half at the outside – that’s seven hours. If we leave at four in the morning, we’ll be on the top at eleven o’clock. It can’t take up longer to come down. We’ll be at the ibex camp before dark.’
‘We’re really going to do it this time,’ I said: both of us were entranced by this nonsensical dream of planning.
After drinking some coffee and munching Kendal mint cake that seemed the most delicious thing we had ever tasted, we began the descent. Going down was a good deal more horrible than going up and I regretted that so much of our meagre formative training had been concerned with getting to the top and then walking down.
Two hours later we were once again shoving our way through the snow forest; four hours later, very tired and cross, we dragged ourselves into the camp, surprising Abdul Ghiyas, who was lying on his back watching the ridge through the telescope and giving a kind of running commentary on our progress to Shir Muhammad and Badar Khan. They all seemed pleased to see us.
While we were waiting, flat out, for tea to arrive, Hugh held his hands towards me.
‘Look at these,’ was all he could croak. They were raw, red and bleeding and looked like some little-known cut of meat displayed in a charcuterie. The rock of Mir Samir is granite long past its best that comes away in great chunks with points as sharp as needles and edges that tear the fingers to shreds.2 For today’s climb I had worn wash-leather mitts. They were already worn out. Hugh had been bare-handed. I set to work to bandage his hands. Before I was finished he looked as though he were wearing boxing gloves.
‘How the hell do you expect me to climb like this?’ he said gloomily.
‘They’ll be better tomorrow.’
‘No they won’t.’
‘I’ll cook,’ I said, feeling heroic. Each night, unless we were eating Irish stew, we took it in turn to prepare some primitive delicacy. It was really Hugh’s night. This evening I chose Welsh rarebit.
Fascinated by this dish that was outside their experience, the drivers gathered round me whilst I assembled the ingredients, opened the tins of cheese and started the primus. Soon, just as the mixture was turning from liquid to the required consistency, the stove went out. It had been snuffing out all the time in the wind but this time it went out for good because it had run out of fuel. Abdul Ghiyas rushed off and returned with a can of what I soon found, when he started to pour it into the stove, to be water, and Badar Khan, on this the only recorded time during the entire journey that he ever did anything that was not in his contract, produced another containing methylated spirits that would have blown us all to glory. Faced with the failure of the Welsh rarebit and the rapidly cooling stove I got up to find the paraffin can myself, caught the trousers of my windproof suit in the handle of the frying-pan and shot the whole lot over the rocks.
At this moment, looking sleek and clean, Hugh returned from the stream where he had combed his hair and put on a clean shirt and thick sweater.
‘Ready?’ he asked pleasantly.
‘It—well isn’t.’
‘Taking a long time.’
Was it possible that he couldn’t see us all trying to scrape it off the rocks?
‘You’ll have to wait a long time for this one. I should go to bed.’
Both of us were temporarily done in. The effort that we had made to put ourselves on the ridge had cost a lot in terms of energy; other more experienced climbers would have done the same expending less. This, and the mental effort of probing and finding a way on an unknown rock face, had been as much as we could take in one day.
As the sun went down behind Mir Samir in a final blinding blaze of light, the wind rose and howled down on us from the screes. But in spite of it, huddled together over the smoky fire chewing Abdul Ghiyas’s abominable bread, speaking of pilgrimages to Mecca and similar things, we began to feel better. Although there had been no Welsh rarebit, inside us was the best part of a packet of Swiss pea soup, a tinned apple pudding and a pound of strawberry jam eaten straight from the tin with spoons.