Free Touching the Void by Joe Simpson Page A

see that there was a long section of tortured cornices and knife-edge powder to negotiate. My hope that we might have bypassed it all the day before evaporated. I shouted a warning down to Simon and he agreed to follow me, moving together, once all the rope had run out.
    Though we moved with exaggerated caution, we couldn’t avoid slipping and falling, only half in control, down the worst sections. I stayed close to the top of the ridge, which kept curling back on itself and dropping suddenly in short steep walls. The possibility of a cornice collapse gradually faded from my mind as I moved, and I became resigned to the helplessness of our situation. The flutings lower down the East Face would almost certainly be a worse proposition. As great a danger as the cornices was the risk of a fall. Any fall requiring a rope to stop it was going to be fatal; neither of us would stand a chance. Yet every time I approached a steep section and was forced to back-climb facing into the snow I usually did so by a combination of falling and climbing. The powder was so insubstantial that, however hard I kicked my legs, I would whoosh down a few feet as soon as I got my weight off my arms. Each sudden heart-stopping slide seemed somehow to halt of its own accord. Where I would stop would be no more solid than where I had fallen from. It wore one’s nerves ragged.
    I slipped again, but this time yelped out in fright. The short steep slope I was descending bottomed directly on to the edge of the ridge, which had curved back on itself. I had seen as I turned to face into the slope that a huge powdery cornice bulged out beneath this curve, and falling away below it the West Face plunged thousands of feet down to the glacier. Simon, moving a full rope’s-length behind me, was out of sight and would have no warning; no idea which side I was falling down. I rushed down in a flurry of powder so fast that my yelp came out more as a squeak of alarm than an attempted warning cry. Simon didn’t see the fall, and heard nothing.
    Then, just as suddenly, I stopped, with my whole body pressed into the snow, head buried in it, with my arms and legs spreadeagled in a desperate crabbed position. I dared not move. It seemed as if only luck was holding me on to the slope, and feeling the snow moving and sliding down past my stomach and thighs just made me cringe in deeper.
    I lifted my head and glanced sideways over my right shoulder. I was on the very edge of the ridge, exactly at the point of the curve. My body was tipped over to the right so that I seemed to be hanging out over the West Face. All my thoughts became locked into not moving. I gasped fast breaths, scared sucks at the air, but I didn’t move. When I looked again I realised that I wasn’t actually off-balance, although the brief glance before had made me think I was. It was like discovering the trick behind an optical illusion, suddenly seeing what you had really been staring at all the time. The curve of the ridge away back to my left, and the glimpse of the bulging cornice under its arc, had confused me so much that I had thought I was leaning over the fall line. In fact I found that my right leg had punctured straight through the cornice and, though my other leg had stopped me, it had also pushed me over sideways. This explained why I felt unbalanced, right side down. I scrabbled and clawed at the snow on my left, trying to pull my weight over to that side, trying to get my right leg back on to the ridge. Eventually I succeeded and moved away from the edge, following the curve of the ridge again.
    Simon appeared above me, moving slowly, looking down at his feet all the time. I had moved to a safer place and shouted a warning for him to descend the slope further to the left, and realised as I did so that I was shaking violently. My legs had gone to sudden jelly, quivering, and it took a long while for the reaction to fade. Long enough for me to watch Simon face into the slope and descend it