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- Herausgeber: Vertebrate Digital
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
'When an accident occurs, something may emerge of lasting value, for the human spirit may rise to its greatest heights. This happened on Haramosh.' The Last Blue Mountain is the heart-rending true story of the 1957 expedition to Mount Haramosh in the Karakoram range in Pakistan. With the summit beyond reach, four young climbers are about to return to camp. Their brief pause to enjoy the view and take photographs is interrupted by an avalanche which sweeps Bernard Jillott and John Emery hundreds of feet down the mountain into a snow basin. Miraculously, they both survive the fall. Rae Culbert and Tony Streather risk their own lives to rescue their friends, only to become stranded alongside them. The group's efforts to return to safety are increasingly desperate, hampered by injury, exhaustion and the loss of vital climbing gear. Against the odds, Jillott and Emery manage to climb out of the snow basin and head for camp, hoping to reach food, water and assistance in time to save themselves and their companions from an icy grave. But another cruel twist of fate awaits them. An acclaimed mountaineering classic in the same genre as Joe Simpson's Touching the Void, Ralph Barker's The Last Blue Mountain is an epic tale of friendship and fortitude in the face of tragedy.
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Vertebrate Publishing, Sheffieldwww.v-publishing.co.uk
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‘We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go Always a little further: it may be Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow …’
James Elroy Flecker
Contents
Introduction to the 2020 Edition
Several years ago, I sat in a London crown court listening to a barrister explain to a judge what it was like to be trapped high on a big mountain in the Himalaya in worsening weather, making decisions that would impact not just on one person’s safety but that of a whole team in circumstances of extreme physical hardship and danger. Even after a good night’s rest at sea level, he argued, the brain could be a fickle mechanism. Was it possible to pass judgement on one fatigued by days of effort with minimal rest?
Gradually the court was hushed as the barrister filled out the picture of his client’s situation: the strengthening wind, the snow stinging his face, the fight for breath, the numbing of feet and hands, the psychological pressure of a remote situation, far from the help of others. We were no longer in London but high in the Himalaya, in desperate trouble. I was startled to feel the hairs on the back of my neck prickle with fear and almost laughed: up until then, I thought that was simply a figure of speech.
After the day’s proceedings, I asked a friendly solicitor if the barrister was a climber. He seemed to understand viscerally the situation he was describing; he must have been in similar situations himself. The solicitor laughed. ‘Him? I’m not sure he ever leaves the city, let alone climbs mountains.’ What I’d heard was simply a supreme act of the imagination, the ability to think through the consequences of such a hostile environment on a weary, desperate and vulnerable human being, and communicate that experience with a simple intensity that was almost unbearable.x
Ralph Barker did something similar in The Last Blue Mountain, his memorable account of an attempt in 1957 by a group mostly of students from Oxford University on the Karakoram peak of Haramosh, an adventure that ended in a protracted and ultimately fatal misadventure whose twists and turns heaped agonies on top of each other. That anyone survived it at all is testament to the courage, resilience and good luck of the two who escaped: the medical student John Emery, and the soldier Tony Streather, an experienced hand brought in to win approval for the enterprise. Streather’s ascent of Kangchenjunga two years earlier had made him something of a celebrity. Barker’s version of their story, told for a general audience, is in the same genre as Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void, now a much more famous book, which in the 1980s helped reinvigorate a similar strand of narrative non-fiction that Barker was drawing on at the end of the 1950s. Think of Paul Brickhill’s The Great Escape.
Joe Simpson of course was his own subject, had lived through his own epic and could look hard into his own soul for the meaning and direction of the story he was telling. Ralph Barker hadn’t been on Haramosh or any other mountain; like the barrister in court he had to rely on his own imagination, judgement and empathy to unravel the contrasting motivations and personalities of the climbers and the complex sequence of events on the mountain. The first three-quarters of The Last Blue Mountain moves along crisply, setting the scene, offering concise portraits of the climbers and their mountain; but it is all preparation and context for the intense conclusion as these climbers we have come to know and like are faced with unimaginable odds. The book’s great strength is the way Barker, without ever drifting from his fast-paced narrative, shows how character and fate intertwine.
Some aspects now feel a little dated. It is unquestionably a male book: inevitably given that all the protagonists are men. And the author does on a few occasions dip into language that will make some modern readers flinch a little. But despite how tight-lipped 1950s England was supposed xito have been, Barker had a liberal rein to use diaries and letters to lift the tough carapace on these men and expose a more complex version of themselves: their frailties as well as their strengths. He does this with an unfailing sympathy that prevents him from being too abrupt in his judgements. Men have died, and he is respectful of the loss others have suffered. If mistakes were made, then they were understandable and are more than offset by the sacrifice and courage of all involved. It is this combination of openness and respect that has secured the book’s survival, as much as its thrilling tale.
All the protagonists are well drawn: the hugely likeable Kiwi Rae Culbert, the not-so-quiet American Scott Hamilton and the impressive John Emery. (All those I have spoken to about Emery, all old men now, speak of him with great fondness and respect.) But Barker zeroes in, correctly I think, on the differences between the expedition’s leader, Tony Streather, an Army officer with immense stamina, and the project’s driving force, an ambitious young climber from Huddersfield, ‘very much of the Buhl temperament’, called Bernard Jillott, whose climbing partners at Oxford included the young educationalist Colin Mortlock. Streather had come to prominence in a series of expeditions to big mountains, starting with the first ascent of Tirich Mir in Chitral, where he had ‘stayed on’ after independence and the risks he faced daily on the frontier gave him a depth of experience that his teammates, who weren’t that much younger, couldn’t possibly match. He loved Pakistan, and the expedition to Haramosh was an opportunity to renew friendships. He also understood the Hunza men who worked as porters on the expedition, their limitations and expectations, in a way that Jillott, who was driven and impulsive, did not. These two, with such different backgrounds and temperaments, would chafe against each other.
Barker may not have had experience of mountains but he understood men under pressure. After a stint on the Sporting Life, he had gone into banking before joining the RAF. He served as a wireless operator and gunner in a Beaufort torpedo bomber squadron attacking Axis shipping xiiin the Mediterranean that was resupplying Rommel’s Panzers in the Western Desert: a notoriously risky occupation in such an unreliable aircraft. When Barker’s crashed, killing the pilot and navigator, he returned to Britain and spent the rest of the war flying transport aircraft.
Demobbed in 1946, Barker struggled to find meaningful work and consequently re-enlisted in the RAF two years later. He was sent to Berlin during the airlift as a press officer and spent a few more years in Germany with the British Forces Network before returning to work on official war narratives at the Air Ministry. What he learned there would nourish his later career as a full-time writer. A chance remark from a colleague about the Goldfish Club, founded to reunite those serving airmen who had crash-landed ‘in the drink’ and survived, gave him the idea for his first book. His next described the wartime role of the torpedo bomber squadrons he had served.
How Barker swerved from military history to write The Last Blue Mountain, his third book and on an entirely new subject, is something of a mystery. Bernard Jillott, Barker tells us, was planning to write a book, so perhaps Barker inherited this project. Perhaps his military service made the connection with Streather, but that is simply a guess. Why the climbers trusted him is also intriguing. There was, and to some extent remains, a deep-seated antipathy among climbers to non-climbing third parties writing about mountaineering tragedies. In later life Barker concentrated on military aviation, survival and his other great passion, cricket, which he played for Adastrians, a team for ex-RAF servicemen, and El Vino’s. He died aged ninety-three in 2011.
Of course, Barker’s version of this extraordinary expedition is simply that: a version, albeit a compelling one. As someone who has also written about other people’s mountaineering tragedies, I’m only too aware that for a general audience in particular, even a well-informed one, narratives are sometimes simplified, or someone’s strongly held views contradicted. When John Emery, having qualified as a doctor despite suffering appalling xiiiamputations to his hands and feet, died in a fall from the Weisshorn in 1963 aged just twenty-nine, his obituarist in the Climbers’ Club Journal observed that the best account of the Haramosh expedition had come from Emery’s own lips. None of which detracts from this classic of climbing literature: it is an epic story well told.
Accuracy is one thing, truth another. The title of the book, The Last Blue Mountain, was the suggestion of Tony Streather’s wife Sue. The phrase is drawn from the final lines of James Elroy Flecker’s play Hassan and spoken by a pilgrim; it captures the romance of mountaineering. (An earlier phrase from the same verse, ‘Always a little further’, was the title for Alastair Borthwick’s classic memoir of climbing in Scotland in the 1930s.) The closing lines of the play, however, add a more thoughtful perspective. The watchman at the gate the pilgrims have just passed through tries to console the women who watch them go. ‘What would ye, ladies?’ he says. ‘It was ever thus. / Men are unwise and curiously planned.’ One of the women then says: ‘They have their dreams, and do not think of us.’ Except that Tony Streather spent long days in his tent on Haramosh, sheltering from the foul Karakoram weather, thinking of Sue and their young son, and questioning the wisdom of their enterprise and the choices they had made. Such questions would haunt him until his death, aged ninety-two, in 2018.
Ed Douglas
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Foreword to the 1959 Edition
We are living in an age which, more than ever, judges an enterprise by the tangible result; judged by this yardstick the attempt by British climbers on Haramosh in 1957 was a tragic failure. That those who reach their goal and return safely have, in an immediate and obvious sense, succeeded is not disputed; but what of others who make the journey without, in the analogy of Cervantes, reaching the inn? What of the Polar party in 1912, and of Mallory and Irvine on Everest in 1924? Did these men, and many others, necessarily fail?
The matter deserves a deeper scrutiny. The true result of endeavour, whether on a mountain or in any other context, may be found rather in its lasting effects than in the few moments during which a summit is trampled by mountain boots. The real measure is the success or failure of the climber to triumph not over a lifeless mountain but over himself: the true value of the enterprise lies in the example to others of human motive and human conduct.
Accidents are never to be sought in mountaineering. I am not encouraging them by saying that the greatness of this sport rests mainly in the risk of their happening. If we ever succeed in making climbing safe from danger, we had better give it up for something which retains the element of hazard. When an accident occurs, something may emerge of lasting value, for the human spirit may rise to its greatest heights. This happened on Haramosh.
From this truer viewpoint, this story is not one of failure but of triumph.
Lord Hunt KG, CBE, DSO Leader of the British expedition to Everest in 1953 and author of The Ascent of Everest
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Author’s Note
To write the story of an expedition of this kind is to feel the growth of a deep admiration and affection for the men who took part in it. To be entrusted with such a task was a great privilege. I was allowed to see and study the personal diaries of the climbers, in which from day to day they recorded their innermost thoughts about the expedition, about each other, and about themselves. I was able to discuss every aspect of the expedition with two of the survivors, and to correspond fully with a third.
I would like the reader to know of and share my admiration for their courage in deciding, within a few weeks of their tragic and terrible experience, that a non-mountaineer, unknown to any member of the expedition, should tell their story.
Ralph Barker
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– CHAPTER 1 –
Haramosh
It had been easy, back in England, contemplating the Himalaya from a distance, with the bigger peaks of Everest, K2 and Kangchenjunga jutting into their minds, to think of their mountain, the 24,270-foot Haramosh, as being something within their compass, a mountain just about their size. And even now, as they camped in the hairpin arena of the high Kutwal Valley, 11,000 feet above sea level, hemmed in on all sides by mountains like a monstrous dry-dock, it was impossible to realise that facing them, a mile across the boulder-strewn Mani glacier, the north face of Haramosh, four miles long, soared and tumbled a further 13,000 feet into the sky.
Confronted by such a giant, surrounded by its kind if not by its equals, one’s eye had no point of reference with remembered heights.
To Bernard Jillott, twenty-three-year-old organiser and deputy leader of the expedition, it seemed that some of those rock ridges that crinkled up from the base of the mountain like the pleats of a skirt might be climbed in a morning, before the sun loosened the chaotic ice cliffs that overhung every inch of the north face and sent avalanches of snow and ice billowing down the mountainside on to the glacier, destroying anything that loitered in their path. His mountaineer’s eye, unaccustomed to the Himalaya, saw the problem momentarily on an Alpine scale. He ran his eye up the most 2prominent ridge until it reached the forehead of ice cliffs below the summit. It looked a climb of 3,000 feet, no more. But from the known height of the summit above the valley it must be about 8,000 feet, needing at least three camps on the ridge itself, each one of which would be swept away from above almost before it was pitched.
And yet it looked easy. It seemed that the eye, like the camera lens, could not focus on so immense a subject without taking a metaphorical step back to get the whole in its aperture, reducing it as it did so to snapshot size.
For Jillott, the sight of Haramosh piling up in front of him was very much more than a challenge, real and urgent as the challenge was. It was the fulfilment of an ambition that had been conceived more than a year earlier, in 1956, when he was still president of the Oxford University Mountaineering Club. It was the realisation, though, of very much more than a single ambition. It was the fulfilment of his whole being.
Although tall and lithe, he had never been much of an athlete at school. In his work, of course, he had always been top, right through his grammar school days. Never anything but first. He got used to it and he liked it. But he had had no ability or zest for team games, and this coupled with his superiority as a scholar had tended to isolate him. An only child, inclined to be quiet and shy, he did not make friends easily. The only game he played well was tennis, which suited his liking for a personal struggle. He relished the opportunity for short, sharp conquest, complete in itself, that each point offered.
Exercise and companionship, and the beauty of mountain scenery, had been his early incentives to climb. At school he had organised parties to the Lake District, walking rather than climbing, and these episodes had become more and more important to him. Then, during National Service in the Army, stationed at Inverness, he had started rock climbing. Soon he was getting an elation from success in a hard climb that nothing else in life had ever given him.3
When he won his scholarship to Oxford, he had joined the mountaineering club. He had given all his spare time to climbing. It had become a religion. He began to attempt the more difficult rock climbs. Soon he was making a name for himself. He was impatient to attempt new routes, to solve fresh problems, to know the explorer’s excitement in untrodden ways.
He discovered that climbing, supposedly non-competitive, could be among the most keenly competitive of sports. Soon he had two Alpine first ascents to his credit. He began to hear his name mentioned as one of the most promising rock climbers in the country. There was only one major field in which he was still untested – the Himalaya. It was inevitable that thoughts of an expedition – his own expedition, but with an experienced Himalayan climber invited to lead – should press themselves upon him.
It was then that he had thought of Tony Streather. To get the right backing for his expedition, moral and financial, he must capture some big name in mountaineering as leader. Yet he had to choose a man whose approach to climbing was essentially amateur – someone who would be interested in taking a small expedition to an unclimbed but little-known peak just for the fun of it, without the publicity which accompanied a big expedition to a famous mountain.
Streather, he had decided, would satisfy both these requirements. He was without doubt in the very front rank as a Himalayan climber. He had climbed Tirich Mir with the Norwegians in 1950, and had been with the Americans on K2 in 1953, standing up to the disastrous fall better than almost anyone else, and subsequently helping to lead the exhausted party down. In 1955 he had gone to the top of Kangchenjunga, then the highest unclimbed peak in the world, inferior in height only to Everest and K2. And as a regular Army officer, his amateur approach to climbing was sure. The shunning of publicity and heroics would be ingrained in him.4
These were the sort of thoughts that had passed through Jillott’s mind during the summer of 1956. He had sought advice at Oxford on the possibility of gaining support for a University expedition, combining the mapping and exploration of a little-known area with the scaling of a significant peak. From several suggested possibilities he had selected Haramosh, mainly because of its accessibility. Although Haramosh was nearly a thousand miles north-east of Karachi, they could travel by air as far as Gilgit, forty miles west of Haramosh, leaving a day’s ride by Jeep to the road-head at Sussi and then two days on foot to the Kutwal Valley and the Mani glacier. They could encompass the journey, the survey, and a worthwhile attempt at an ascent, in the long vacation.
Jillott had invited Streather to Oxford to talk to the mountaineering club about K2, and he had broached the subject after the lecture. Streather was just the sort of man he had expected – modest and reserved but free from shyness or diffidence, tremendously compact, and exuding physical and mental fitness. For all Streather’s gentle manner there was an unmistakable vitality and robustness about him. His reaction to Jillott’s proposal had been one of quiet but genuine interest, and Jillott was enormously encouraged. He felt at once that he could take Streather at his word.
Then there was the question of finding a team. Jillott’s years in mountaineering had changed him from an unknown young man with few friends to a popular climber with many. Modest and unassuming, he had a great ability for getting on with people. Even so, in the choice of his team he was restricted to those members of the mountaineering club who could find both the money and the time. Each member of the team was asked to subscribe £100 to the expedition fund.
Eventually he settled on five men: Streather and himself; Rae Culbert, a twenty-five-year-old New Zealander; John Emery, a twenty-three-year-old medical student from St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington; and Scott Hamilton, an American from Little Rock, Arkansas. All apart from 5Streather were fellow members of the OUMC and personal friends with whom Jillott had climbed.
He had set about the preparatory organisation with what had seemed at the time to be inexhaustible energy and enthusiasm. Throughout the early months of 1956 he had been working hard for his finals, and then had followed a year’s concentrated research. But the mass of detail necessary to the planning of such an expedition was meticulously attended to. By October 1956, plans were ready for submission to the Pakistan Government, without whose permission the expedition would be stillborn. Then there was the money side. The blessing of the Oxford University expedition council was needed, since the magic name of the University meant everything to their requests for financial support. With it, they could hope for a sizeable grant from the Everest Foundation. He remembered now the thrill of pleasure and relief when the Foundation’s promise of help to the tune of £1,200 was made.
Other grants, coupled with book and press contracts, and the generosity of manufacturers in giving supplies of their goods, had more than covered their original budget, so that, apart from Emery, who had accompanied the baggage by sea, they had eventually been able to fly out, saving a commodity even more precious to them than money – time. Streather had only two months’ leave from Sandhurst, where he was an instructor, and the whole expedition had to be accomplished in this time.
But the last few months before the scheduled departure date had been agonising. The most shattering of many frustrations had come when the Commonwealth Relations Office in London had informed them of the Pakistan Government’s refusal to admit an expedition this year. Financial worries had beset them throughout, right up to the signing of the press contract. There had been the doubts raised by the stalemate in the Kashmir dispute. It had been many months before Streather had finally been able to confirm that he could come – and until his name could be put at the head of the climbing party it had been no use writing to 6anybody. Then had come the Suez crisis. Short of time as they were bound to be, the blocking of the Canal meant that they would have to sail round the Cape, a delay that was almost insupportable. It was only at the last minute that the press contract had enabled them to travel by air.
Jillott had borne the brunt of all these frustrations; and although the Pakistan Government had been prevailed upon to change their mind, and all their other difficulties had somehow been resolved, towards the end the keenness of his enthusiasm had been blunted. He was apt to be intolerant of anything that interfered with his plans; and he had been tempted to change his plans altogether rather than endure these endless frustrations. Other climbing friends had made up a party to go to Norway, and at one point he decided that if Haramosh was going to be as tantalising as this, he would give up the whole idea and go to Norway.
But the merest reference to such a possibility had excited such disapproval from the others, all of whom were now determined to go to the Himalaya this year, that he had had to retract at once. He had started something that he couldn’t possibly abandon. The momentum of the expedition, which he himself had begun and largely helped to accelerate, was too great for him to jump off now.
Besides, it was his expedition, a stupendous achievement, and he must stand by it. This dull feeling was only reaction from his strenuous efforts at work and play of the last three years. Once the expedition was underway, the old excitement would return.
And, of course, so it had. Although he had suffered a bad attack of dysentery on the way up from Gilgit, sufficient to delay him for two days, together with John Emery as doctor, he felt fit now and intensely stimulated by the challenge of the mountain before him.
He couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was that gave him the terrific boost he got from climbing. He knew that it would always be the first thing in his life. It dwarfed everything else – home, education, ambition. The hills were home, education was a means to an end, something that 7would ultimately give him the time and opportunity to climb. That was his only ambition. Everything in life he would subordinate to it. He knew that such singleness of purpose on such an issue might be censured. But he was used to having his way.
At first he had tried to keep his passion for climbing from his parents, but inevitably it had come out. He was not of a secretive nature and, although he disliked hurting them, or indeed anyone or anything, he had been glad when they knew. His mother had done everything to dissuade him, naturally enough, since he was the focus of her life and of his father’s. Their last battle had been just before he left home for Haramosh.
His mind went back to that last day, saying goodbye to his family at his Yorkshire home. Everyone had come to see him off. He hadn’t known how the sunlight had glinted on his fair hair, how they had caught him in an unguarded moment looking away into something remote that they had known they would never see. He had seemed to be looking beyond this world altogether. All he had been aware of was his mother’s last entreaty, still troubling his conscience.
‘There’s nothing I can say to stop you, Bernard, is there?’
‘I’m afraid not, Mother.’
‘When are you going to give it up?’
That was something he knew he would never be able to do.
‘People still climb at sixty. Even older than that. I shall always climb.’
He knew that his mother was baffled, perplexed, hurt by his intractability. He wanted desperately to explain it to her, to make her understand.
‘When I’m on the mountain, something happens to me inside.’ He spoke slowly, and with a sort of wonder. ‘I know an exhilaration that’s past all describing. It’s a part of me. I can’t change now.’
8For almost the whole of its five-mile length, the Kutwal Valley was dominated by the hideous beauty of the north face of Haramosh, rising almost sheer in tumbled masses of glittering ice, in intricate complexities of pinnacles and ridges and gullies and hanging glaciers, topped by the long line of ice cliffs, and emerging at either end into a well-defined summit. The ice cliffs formed the chain which linked the twin peaks – Haramosh II towards the head of the valley, and Haramosh I to their right. This was the challenging peak, leaning a little back from the valley, and even from its own terrible precipices, almost as though it didn’t have much of a head for heights.
But as the mountain crept to its highest point, it pursed itself, and smoothed its contours, suddenly conscious, like a mountaineer, of the approach of the moment of truth. The slopes up to the foot of the final cone were smooth and feminine. So vast was the scale that Haramosh II, four miles distant towards the head of the valley, was its natural twin.
To stand in this narrow gorge of a valley, and to feel the propinquity of mountains – facing one, beside one and at one’s back – was to pull the Himalaya round one like a cloak. A cloak of ebony and white. These were the Karakoram mountains, the north-west part of the Himalaya, and Karakoram meant ‘black rock’, a hardy rock that stood straight and sheer and refused to be wholly clothed by snow. They were harsh mountains but there was poetry in their grandeur.
John Emery, the young medical student, was himself a mixture of poet and mountaineer. The climber in him saw the mountain as an inanimate thing, something with which he would be grappling for the next six or seven weeks. But the poet in him recognised the beauty of Haramosh.
Like Jillott, an only child, Emery had experienced the closer contacts of boarding school and was more deeply involved with his fellow men. He had a highly developed critical faculty, to the point of fastidiousness, but he was quick and generous in his admiration. He was perhaps the only one of the party capable of feeling that depth of affection for another 9man which amounts to love. Others in the party might develop it, but in John Emery it was already there.
Younger than Jillott in many ways, he had started climbing later and therefore developed later. He was now just about Jillott’s equal, and the two men climbed together with tremendous rhythm and purpose. Even so, Emery had never quite forgotten that Jillott had once been ahead of him, and he still looked upon him as the senior partner. But emotionally and aesthetically Emery was the more mature person. Jillott, he knew, had little time for women. But Emery, warm and affectionate by nature, was easily involved. Although he had felt attracted to several women, none of them had seriously vied with climbing as his first love. Not, anyway, until the voyage out from England.
At sea, travelling with the ton or more of expedition stores, Emery had been completely dissociated from reality. Events past and future seemed to lose all significance, and he had existed in a vacuum, a charming and fairyland present. Everything near seemed to be magnified by its sheer proximity; everything distant seemed impossibly remote. Then for the first time he had seen something which seemed to him to be perfection in a woman. The attachment that resulted was one which for various reasons could not possibly develop beyond its context, but he had sensed that her feelings for him were more than mere friendship. It had been a significant experience for both of them, he was sure, and not a mere shipboard flirtation. They were constantly together, and they had been amongst the happiest hours of his life.
His first few days in Pakistan had been almost unbearable. He could not share the enthusiasm of the rest of the party, although he was as keen to get to the mountain as they were; and for the moment he had a strange feeling of being outside the expedition, watching it as a spectator. Soon he would shake this off, but for the moment it was hard to find a meeting point with anyone. He could not talk about the woman from the ship yet, but he could concentrate on nothing else. Jillott wasn’t interested in 10women anyway, so he couldn’t talk to him. Scott Hamilton, good-natured and voluble as ever, suddenly seemed trivial and immature. He thought he might talk about it later with Tony Streather, but Streather’s calm self-sufficiency was a barrier for the moment. Only Rae Culbert’s quietly delivered witticisms, often broad and debunking in tone, were in tune with his mood.
Then, in Sussi, with only two days’ march ahead before they reached Haramosh, Jillott had gone down with dysentery, and as expedition doctor Emery had had to stay behind in Sussi to treat him while the others went on. At last Jillott had been fit enough to walk the twenty miles to the Kutwal Valley. There had followed two days of suffocating heat, of dust-laden throats, of constant consideration for a still half-sick man. He began to understand why people quickly became impatient with the illness of others. But his own patience was fortified by Jillott’s determination to press on in spite of the debilitating effects of the dysentery.
And at every village Emery had been reminded of the duty he had accepted by studying medicine, so that he could never be completely carefree. There they sat, rows and rows of apathetic but exasperatingly patient villagers, determined to be cured by the ‘Doctor Sahib’. To him they were an insidious personal reproach and an indictment of his calling.
He could see that they would wait for ever, and that he could almost treat them for ever. What did one do? Tell them, ninety-five per cent of them, that they were chronically diseased and that there was nothing a medical student and a box of pills could do for them? Or hand out a pill here and there and hope that faith might work miracles? What a mockery they had made of his first-class honours! And how irritable he had felt with them, and even more so with himself, because he knew how unworthy it had been. He had been obsessed with the idea of reaching the mountain and starting the climb, to scarify his being against the rugged mountain.
So climbing this time was to be an escape. Or was it? He had always 11argued that it gave him perspective, a self-awareness, a reassessment of values. Perhaps once on the mountain he would be able to relate the deep emotional experience that still lay heavy on him to the larger scheme of things.
Climbing had always done that for him. Difficulties had piled up: exams, the hospital, people; and he had always known that he could go to the hills and step out of life’s abrasive underwear, feeling a great sense of release and freedom. In the same way that, as you gained height, the immediate topography fell into perspective, so did the world of the mind.
Worry, disappointment, dissatisfaction – all fell away when you were on, say, the last leg of an ice climb in mid-winter, faced with thirty feet of vertical ice, with perhaps only an hour’s daylight left. It was blowing a gale, snow was pouring down the pitch on to your face, and halfway up you felt that all your strength was leaving you, your arms and your legs were limp, you didn’t know how to go on. It was a stark and personal struggle with the elements and with yourself. Trivialities dropped away, you found untapped reserves of strength and willpower you hardly knew you possessed, you overcame the physical difficulties of the climb, and you conquered the weakness of self. The elation when you’d done it was like a shot of adrenalin. You felt pulsatingly alive.
You went back to your problems to find them sorry creatures, easily disposed of. You were the master of yourself again, not the easy prey to idle fears. You had wrested from the mountain something of its own inviolability and peace. Like the mountain, you were satisfied just to be.
And to add to all this, and to intensify each part of it, was the comradeship. That was something the sense of which he’d lost for the moment, but it would return. It was the most solid, the deepest thing of all. Up there on the mountain you faced the ultimate danger. There was no sense in denying it; that was what lent the magic to it. Anyway, that was how it was for him. People called mountaineering a sport. It wasn’t a sport for him. The difference was fundamental.12
One felt a bond with those with whom one had fought a winning or losing game of rugger, soccer, hockey, cricket – the bond of shared ability, physical effort, the fluctuations of fortune, adversity, victory and defeat. But the strongest bond was that of the danger shared, strongest of all when that danger was the ultimate one. He imagined that it might be indistinguishable from the bond of danger shared in battle.
This was the bond he shared with Bernard Jillott. He had spent two seasons climbing with Jillott in the Alps, and they had climbed together a lot in Wales, the Lakes and in Scotland. He knew Jillott as a bold and determined climber and leader, absolutely trustworthy and returning his trust, a man who only gave up if the odds were overwhelmingly against him.
