Conquistadors of the Useless (43 page)

Our lack of experience and our determination to get the better of an adverse fate had thus cost us five days of fine weather, perhaps even the ultimate victory. Narrow ledges and little couloirs seemed to have been waiting since the beginning of time for the exact purpose of conducting us without the smallest difficulty among these vast grey boiler-plates. When we reached Camp One the sun was still on the north face. Decidedly the gods were with us – there hadn't been a clear afternoon for several weeks, and now, by a special dispensation, we could survey the mountain at our ease. After days of nothing but thousands of feet of verticality Annapurna's north face looked positively hospitable, and for a time we let our optimism run away with our judgement, but a closer examination quickly brought us back to reality.

To form a just opinion it was necessary to forget our Alpine methods of estimation. Only our recent experiences could help us to understand the colossal scale of the slopes before us. By this process of adaptation we finally came to realise that what appeared to be no more than an inclined snow field was in fact a complicated face, bristling with monstrous séracs and interrupted by bands of rock three hundred feet high. The frequent rumblings of avalanches were a constant reminder of the objective dangers, but we thought we could make out two credible, if somewhat difficult and dangerous routes. After a certain amount of argument we agreed on the right-hand one as being the easier and less sustained.

Even the discomfort of being three in a two-man tent did not stop us getting a good night's sleep, and in the morning we felt ready for anything. Maurice gave Sarki a deliberately rhetorical message to carry back to Tukucha ordering the attack, and the devoted fellow ran day and night, showing phenomenal stamina, to cover in less than thirty-six hours a journey which had taken us over three days. We then struck camp completely, leaving only a sleeping bag and some food behind. Our loads were really much too heavy for seventeen thousand feet – some people's sacks weighing as much as sixty pounds – but we accepted the situation with good grace because it might save us a vital day or two. With less than two weeks to go before the monsoon it was no time for half measures. After a heavy drag across the plateau we clambered up a band of rock overhung by menacing séracs. The rucksack straps cut into my shoulders and I had to keep stopping to get my breath, but each time I looked up at those enormous tottering blocks of ice I was impelled forward. At last we came out on to long, safe snow slopes, only to be enveloped in cloud as the usual afternoon storm blew up. Maurice and I took turns with breaking the trail. Fortunately we only sank in a few inches, for by now I was trudging on like a sleep-walker, just as on those occasions when I had shot my bolt by doing too many climbs in succession as a guide. But for all that I was in no mood to give in, and could still find the energy to curse the others when they slumped down exhausted.

We had heard the yodels of Schatz and his party as they forced a difficult way up the left bank of the ice fall, and now they joined us. Thus we were seven when we found a good shelf for a camp at around twenty thousand feet. We quickly decided that my four companions should stay there the night in order to take on a tent and some supplies as the nucleus of an upper camp, while the Sherpas were to go down to Base for more food and equipment. Since it seemed imprudent to let them climb down on their own I was to go with them as far as Camp One, where the sleeping bag we had left would enable me to bivouac. In this way I would avoid tiring myself pointlessly by a return trip to Base, and after a rest could rejoin the Sherpas on their way back up next day, provided always that their amazing stamina enabled them to do without a day off.

At Camp One, then, while the Sherpas carried on down towards the valley, I set about arranging a layer of flat pebbles to insulate me from the ice. By the time I had dressed up in every stitch of clothing I possessed and pulled the waterproof cape and elephant's foot over the sleeping bag I seemed all set for the most comfortable bivouac of my life. But before long a violent wind sprang up and it came on to snow, turning the night into a continual fight. If I opened my hood to breath my face would be withered by the cold and snow; if I closed it to get warm I would start to suffocate. After several hours of this sort of thing sheer exhaustion made me drop off to sleep with my head jammed between two stones.

A clear dawn revealed me buried in new-fallen snow, shivering despite all my warm equipment. I curled up in a ball and waited for the sunlight to descend to my level. Interminable hours went by. For the first time in several days I had something to think about other than the next action, and my mind flew back to Europe, reviewing the whole of my past life. I felt no regrets. On the contrary, I blessed the providence which had vouchsafed me to experience this marvellous adventure. In my wildest dreams I have never imagined so much beauty and grandeur. My whole lifetime of platitudinous mediocrity seemed as nothing beside these hours of perfect happiness and total absorption in action.

At last the rays of the sun reached me, and before long it became unbearably hot. I tried fruitlessly to assuage my hunger by swallowing raw the little tsampa I had left.
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I felt utterly weak and exhausted. Finally I literally dragged myself over to a tiny patch of shade under a boulder, where I curled up again. From here I could make out the new base camp which Couzy had pitched near the end of the valley.

A scrunching of pebbles announced the arrival of the Sherpas. Adjiba, his balaclava all askew and his face running with sweat, rummaged in his sack for some food for me to be going on with. By the time I reached camp the tents were up and a meal ready. Bit by bit strength began to return, running through me like a warm current, and my anxiety abated. I was certain now that I would be all right tomorrow.

Shortly before dark Herzog, Lachenal, Rébuffat and Schatz passed through at whirlwind speed. They rapidly explained that after hours of ploughing waist-deep through the snow they had forced a difficult barrier of séracs, but that shortly afterwards Schatz had had a fall and this, combined with the arrival of bad weather, had led to their decision to beat a retreat after gaining only about twelve hundred feet. A high altitude kit and some food had been left attached to an ice piton in an obvious place.
[13]
They were now going down to Base Camp and would come back up as soon as they felt fit enough. The fantastic up-and-down ballet which leads load by load and camp by camp to the highest summits in the world had begun.

On the 24th I left with Panzy and Aïla, Adjiba being condemned on account of his herculean strength to carry the loads between Base and Camp One. His conscientiousness in carrying out this dull and obscure mission was admirable, and there is no doubt that the mountain would not have been climbed but for his efforts in transporting hundredweights of food and equipment, all in the space of a few days. Thanks to an early start we got to Camp Two just after ten o'clock despite our loads, which consisted of two high altitude units and twenty-five pounds of food. I felt famished but still fit, so after a rest we decided to carry on, hoping to profit from the remains of yesterday's steps despite the snow which had fallen during the night. With the intention of picking up the tent Herzog had left I only took one unit and a small amount of food.

There was no way of avoiding a seven-hundred-foot avalanche-couloir. I tried in vain to hurry, but the steps had been filled in by the previous storm and were practically no use even when one could see them. We were up to the knees in snow rendered glutinous by the hot sun. At last we succeeded in getting out of danger. Avalanches came down the couloir every day, and in view of the fact that it was also used by several parties each day for a fortnight it was a miracle that there were no accidents.

We were able to get a short rest on a ledge among some séracs before struggling on. I had to sweep the powdery stuff away with my hands, then stamp it down with my feet. Digging out a veritable trench in this way we advanced at no more than three feet a minute. Labour of this sort is extremely exhausting at such an altitude, and despite the necessity for haste I kept on having to stop and pant.

A fixed rope helped me to scramble quickly up the difficult wall which had cost Herzog an hour's fight the previous day, but I reached the top in the state of semi-asphyxiation with which I was already familiar from the hard pitches on the spur, and which can scarcely be imagined by anyone who has not climbed at great heights. The Sherpas proved so clumsy at this gymnastic sort of exercise that I was forced to pull like a galley-slave to get them up at all. The track now led to a steep traverse, then I lost it again. Once more I had to plough my own furrow. The high altitude unit left by my friends seemed to have disappeared completely, but the daily afternoon blizzard was now upon us and there was no time to be lost in pitching the one small tent we had carried up. I found a little ridge of snow relatively sheltered from avalanches. It was not the moment to be choosy, and as we hacked out a platform and erected the tent we were already staggering in the force of the gusts.

Three men in a two-man tent is a hellish state of affairs. The smallest gestures have to be planned. Hungry as I was, I was too worn out to take the trouble to eat. We had only two sleeping bags, and it was Panzy who made the sacrifice of wrapping himself up as best he could in three down jackets, then snuggling down between us. We spent a night of terror listening to the avalanches that thundered down the couloir less than fifty feet from our tent, which shook with the wind of their passing. The Sherpas never closed an eye all night, but just sat there smoking cigarette after cigarette. As for myself, my teeth were chattering so much from fever and the lack of my down jacket that Panzy and I sounded like a pair of castanets, but eventually I doped myself so heavily with sleeping pills that I dozed off.

In the morning I climbed the wall of ice that had protected us even before the tent was packed away. Breaking the trail through fresh snow a yard deep was both slow and exhausting, and only a short sixty-degree ice slope interrupted the monotonous toil. Deep inside me, I was beginning to doubt. If it went on like this every day we should all be worn out long before reaching the summit, even if an avalanche didn't settle the matter before then. Only several days of unqualified fine weather could save the situation.

I forced the pace as much as I could across an ugly-looking couloir, but the effort used up my last remaining strength, and at the far side I slumped down in the snow. Panzy now took up the task for a while, but I was at my last gasp and the Sherpas seemed in little better case. Though we had gained barely six hundred feet there could be no question of going farther. I staggered across to a sérac where I made fast all the kit and provisions we had brought up. The sunbeams were glittering like tinsel on the snow, so we stretched out luxuriously and devoured some food, making the most of the moment.

Far from getting better on the way down, I felt increasingly ill at ease. Not until Camp Two, where we ran into Maurice, Ang Dawa and Dawatondu, did I recover sufficiently to laugh and talk as we rested. The same evening I went on down to Camp One, hoping to recuperate by losing altitude. The bulk of the team were there, fully rested and ready to slay dragons. I was too done in to share their optimism and paid little attention to anything but culinary matters. We were in fact now beginning to get short of food, and I spent most of the next day sampling our high altitude supplies, especially the fruit blocks, chocolate and biscuits. We seemed to have rather a surplus of these last. The Sherpas therefore devised a vast dish of crumbled biscuit and chocolate, and I confess I did my fair share towards demolishing it.

Plenty of food and rest soon revived me. On the 27th I fairly bounced up to Camp Two, arriving in time to follow Herzog and his Sherpas through the telescope as they descended from installing camp Three the previous day a few yards above the highest point I had reached. It seemed probable that they must have also set up a Camp Four, but I was unable to make it out. I did notice, however, that they didn't seem to be following the easiest line, and later this piece of observation was to come in handy. As Camp Three was already occupied by Couzy, Lachenal, Rébuffat and Schatz, Herzog had to carry on down to Camp Two.

We spent the evening analysing the situation in extreme detail. Maurice was very put out by the poor physical and moral state in which he had found the others. Although he had spent no more than a few minutes in their company he considered them sick, discouraged, and altogether incapable of effective action. His own form at around twenty-three thousand feet, by contrast, was very hopeful, and he still felt confident of victory as long as the daily snowfalls did not exceed six to eight inches. He also seemed satisfied with my own physical and mental state, and wanted me to husband my forces for the final assault. His plan was for me and the Sherpas to take a load up to Camp Three next day while he rested, and to rejoin him the same evening. Next day the four lightly-loaded porters could clear the trail for us up to Camp Four, and, we would take this on as high as possible in order to go for the summit on the following day.

Once again I spent a rotten night in order to be awake at the right time. The organisers of the expedition, needless to say, had failed to provide us with anything so simple as an alarm clock. The journey up to Camp Three was still tough, but not so bad as the first time. The snow was somewhat less thick and the tracks left by Couzy and Lachenal in their descent helped us considerably. We met them half way. They explained that they felt too weak to carry any loads up to Camp Four, and were going down for a rest in the hope of recuperating. Shortly before arriving we encountered Schatz and Rébuffat coming down through the cloud, but they decided to go back up with us. No sooner had we reached camp than I fell on the provisions like a bird of prey, after which I felt ready to review the situation.