Free Touching the Void by Joe Simpson Page B

in two footsteps and the inevitable rushing slide. When he turned and followed my steps I could see the tension in his face. The day was neither enjoyable nor funny, and when he reached me the fear was infectious. We chattered out our alarm in quavery voices; quick staccato curses and repeated phrases tumbling out before we calmed.

FIVE
    Disaster
    We had left the snow hole at seven thirty, and two and a half hours later I could see that our progress was painfully slow. Since leaving the summit the previous afternoon we had descended no more than 1,000 feet instead of getting all the way down to the glacier in the six hours which we had reckoned. I began to feel impatient. I was tired of this grinding need to concentrate all the time. The mountain had lost its excitement, its novelty, and I wanted to get off it as soon as possible. The air was bitingly cold and the sky cloudless; the sun burnt down in a dazzling glare on the endless snow and ice. As long as we were back on the glacier before the afternoon storms I didn’t care a damn what the weather chose to do.
    At last the twisting mayhem of the upper ridge eased, and I could walk upright across the broad level ridge which undulated away in whale-backed humps towards the drop at its northern end. Simon caught up with me as I rested on my sack. We didn’t speak. The morning had already taken its toll, and there was nothing left to say. Looking up at our footsteps weaving an unsteady path down towards us, I vowed silently to be more careful about checking descent routes in future. I shouldered my sack and set off again, with no qualms about being in front now. I had wanted Simon to lead on the last stretch but had been unable to voice my apprehension and feared his response to it more than I feared another sickening fall. Deep snow had built up on the wide, level saddle, and, instead of anxiety swamping my every move I was back to the (frustration of wallowing through powder snow.
    I had run out the rope, and Simon was getting up to follow when I stepped into the first crevasse. In a rushing drop, I suddenly found myself standing upright but with my eyes level with the snow. The shallow fissure was filled with powder, so that however hard I thrashed about I seemed to make no upward movement at all. Eventually I managed to haul myself back on to level ground. From a safe distance Simon had watched my struggles with a grin on his I face. I moved farther along the ridge and sank down again I neck-deep in the snow. I yelled and cursed as I clawed my way I back on to the ridge and, by the time I had traversed half-way across the plateau above it, I had fallen into another four small crevasses. However hard I tried, I could not see any tell-tale marks indicating their presence. Simon was following a full rope’s-length behind. Frustration and the mounting exhaustion maddened me to a fury which I knew would be vented on Simon if he came close enough.
    Then, crouching beside the hole I had just made, trying to regain my breath, I glanced back and was shocked to see clear through the ridge into the yawning abyss below. Blue-white light gleamed up through the hole from the expanse of the West Face, which I could see looming beneath it. Suddenly it clicked in my brain why I had fallen through so many times. It was all one crevasse, one long fracture line cutting right through the enormous humping cornices that made up the plateau. I moved quickly away to the side and shouted a warning to Simon. The rolling ridge had been so wide and flat it had never occurred to me that we might actually be standing on an overhanging cornice, one as large as the summit cornice, but stretching for several hundred feet. If it had collapsed we would have gone with it.
    I kept well back from the edge after that, leaving a healthy margin of fifty feet. Simon had fallen with the smaller cornice collapse when he was forty feet back from the edge. There was no point in taking chances now that the flutings on