Free The Beckoning Silence by Joe Simpson Page A

new world of adventures at exotic sites all over the world. One of the things I knew I would miss if I stopped mountaineering was the sheer fun of travelling off with a group of close friends and having an adventure together. It seemed to me that the essence of these trips was not necessarily the climbing or the summits reached but the laughter and friendship and story-telling that they generated. Paragliding might be the sport that could fill the emptiness that giving up mountaineering would leave. Having said that, I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to give up mountaineering. Why not cut back on how much you do?  I reasoned. Just climb a few selected routes you always admired. Make a sort of tick list of the last few objectives you feel you should experience. It had the advantage that if the day came when injuries or doubts meant that I did stop climbing I would have the flying to take its place. I’d always wondered about being unable to climb. What on earth would I do with myself? Well, now I knew. I’d take to the air. I would fly over the mountains instead of climb them.
    It was hard to accept that I was seriously contemplating giving up the mountains after all I had experienced in them, but it seemed that with the deterioration in my legs it was a decision I would inevitably have to make some day. I had osteo-arthritis and in the winter the knee hurt. In fact my left ankle, shattered on Pachermo, was now causing more pain than the knee. I knew that some day soon I would have to get the ankle fused.
    I had had fourteen years of climbing all over the world which the doctors had said I would never have, so I could afford to be philosophical about giving up something that had been at the centre of my adult life. It had enhanced it immeasurably, defined who I now was, something for which I would always be grateful. It would be very hard to leave.
    In my heart I knew that I was less enthusiastic about climbing than I had ever been and Tat’s decision had made me think about why I was doing it. Simply to be asking myself such a question was an admission that much had changed. On a practical level there were fewer and fewer friends of mine still in the climbing game. Those who hadn’t died had taken up paragliding. Apart from Ray Delaney, and more recently Bruce French, there were no other climbers I especially wanted to go away with.
    When I wrote This Game of Ghosts in 1994 it had been an attempt not simply to explain why climbers climbed but also to explore the strange paradox that climbing presents. It was, after all, a passion for me, something I loved fiercely, and yet it had hurt and unnerved me so much and had killed so many friends. I tried without much success to understand this conflict between pleasure and attrition. I recalled a conversation with John Stevenson about the attrition rate and he had guessed that it was about a death a year.
    When I had finished the book I had thought that perhaps this was an exaggeration and that the passing of the years would prove me wrong. Sadly, it was, if anything, a conservative estimate. In the six intervening years seven more friends had died.
    In the same period three people, whom I had met briefly, also died. Although not close friends they were inspirational role models for whom I had immense respect. I was in awe of their climbing achievements yet all three were killed by the sudden, random rush of avalanching snow slopes. In 1996, when I was trekking into the Annapurna base camp with Tom Richardson to attempt the south ridge of Singu Chulu, I met the famous French mountaineer Chantal Maudit. There had been a time when Chantal and I were to be filmed climbing together in the French Alps for one programme in the six-part television series called The Face which was aired on BBC2 in 1997. Her work commitments meant that this never happened and I climbed instead with Ed February in the Cederberg range in South Africa. Richard Else, the producer for Triple Echo