Читать книгу Summit Fever - Andrew Greig - Страница 6

The characters who appear in this book may bear only a passing resemblance to any actual persons living or dead. On a long mountaineering expedition each member becomes a myth to the others, grotesquely enlarged like a Brocken Spectre projected on the mist. Each member has his or her own expedition. This is an account of mine.

Until the November evening when Mal Duff banged on my window, I was purely an armchair climber, happy to enjoy mountaineering from a comfortable distance. (After that, common sense deserted me.) But I’d found that most climbing books left me vaguely dissatisfied in the same way as the freeze-dried meals we were to eat on the Mustagh Tower – something was always left out.

Climbing books are written by dedicated climbers, people for whom mountaineering has become second nature and habitual. The result is there is much they have ceased to consciously notice, and an equal amount that they notice but don’t think to mention. They also have to observe the general ethos of mountaineers, and so adopt a certain style towards danger, fear, loneliness, endurance, ambition, exultation – usually jokey exaggeration or complete suppression in favour of purely factual accounts.

The upshot is that, as with those cursed freeze-drieds, the contents are there but the whole juice and inner substance of the experience is missing. So I have tried to write about this adventure freshly, as it all happened to me for the first time. Having nothing to prove as a climber, I can afford to be honest about how it felt.

There is a very narrow ridge to walk between honesty and tact. My companions on this adventure have allowed me generous access to their diaries, time and inner lives. I have tried not to abuse their trust, but without glossing over (as many books naturally do) the emotions, irritations and incidents contained there. Himalayan climbing is an intense experience, and the mountains intensify rather than dissipate emotions. A small group of people are living and striving together in isolation for a long period under a great variety of stresses. Little generosities, selfishnesses and tensions become magnified. One gets it in proportion later, but an honest account of the experience necessitates recording how it felt at the time.

All climbing, and Himalyan mountaineering in particular, is not just about the final summit push. The preparations, the walk in, the mountain villages, vacant slog, arguments, the porters singing and the stars at night, food, fantasies, memories, personal relations, summit fever, the walk out – all are part of it. It is the totality of the experience that I have tried to pack between the covers of this book.

Andrew Greig South Queensferry February 1985