Читать книгу Extreme Survivors: 60 of the World’s Most Extreme Survival Stories - Collins Maps - Страница 51

As soon as Simon saw the damage, he knew Joe was going to die too. On his own, Simon could probably get down, but if he tried to help Joe then he might also die. Their eyes confirmed all that with each other in an instant.

But they acted differently. Joe wasn’t going to lie back and die. Simon wasn’t going to abandon his friend.

Joe began half dragging himself, half hopping on his ice axes across the slope towards the end of the ridge. Simon moved ahead and kicked out a trench to make Joe’s job easier.

They inched themselves along for 180 m (600 ft) to the col. From here the West Face dropped away steeply in a giddy 900 m (3,000 ft) plunge of ice and rock. At the bottom, the fractured glacier led back to the base camp they had left five days before. It was four in the afternoon, it would be dark soon. It was getting colder; the men were losing feeling in their fingers. A storm was coming. They had no fuel or food. They had to keep descending.

Simon knotted their two ropes together. This gave them a length of 90 m (300 ft). By digging a seat in the snow, Simon could lower Joe straight down, slowing his descent with a belay plate. When the knot came to the belay plate, Simon would have to untie the rope to feed it through. Joe would be holding his own weight at that point.

Joe slid down the first 45 m (150 ft) quickly. Occasionally his crampon tips dug into the snow causing him to yell out in pain, but he felt amazingly positive – this was going to work!

Simon changed the rope over. If Joe fell now, he would tear Simon off the mountain too. Intense, nauseating bursts of pain wracked Joe as he was lowered. Night came and the snow howled around them, but they stuck to their routine. It was working.

With eight belays and two abseils under their belts, they had covered 825 m (2,700 ft) of the 900 m (3,000 ft) down to the glacier. They might only have two more lowers to go.

The slope had been easing, but now, as Simon paid out the rope he felt his friend rushing faster away from him. His harness bit on his flesh. What was happening?

‘Then, what I had waited for pounced on me. The stars went out and I fell.’

Joe knew: he was being lowered over a cliff. He tried to yell but his voice was swallowed by the thick snow clouds. Then in an avalanche of spindrift powder, he stopped, spinning on the end of the rope.

Joe looked up. The rope disappeared over the lip of an edge 4.5 m (15 ft) above. An ice wall was 2 m (6 ft) from his nose. He was dangling over the edge of an overhanging cliff that swept away from him all the way down to the glacier 30 m (100 ft) below. Directly beneath his feet was the yawning darkness of a crevasse.

There was no way Simon could pull him up. Even with a solid footing it would have required an incredible physical effort. With an unstable snow base it would be suicide. A couple of minutes of frantic yelling established that the men couldn’t hear each other.

Simon wouldn’t know what he had gone over. The other cliffs had been shorter. He might try to lower him further, but he would only jam when the knot reached the belay plate. Joe had to climb up – and fast.

He fished out a couple of loops of rope to tie onto the main rope with Prussik knots. These would grip the rope and enable him to climb up it. He got the first one on. But he needed two, and his fingers were now so cold they were immobile; the second loop fell tumbling into the darkness below. There was no way he could climb up now. He had been hanging for half an hour. In two more hours he would be dead; he could feel the cold was creeping over him.

‘Cold had long since won its battle. I accepted that I was to die. Sleep beckoned insistently; a black hole calling me, pain-free, lost in time, like death…’

Joe was jerked out of his contemplation of death. Up above, Simon was being dragged down the mountain. He had tried lowering Joe, hoping he might make it to the bottom, but there was no more rope to lower. The snow seat he was in was disintegrating. He couldn’t hold Joe’s weight indefinitely and he couldn’t release the rope or he would be ripped from the slope too. His fingertips were black with frostbite. If he didn’t fall he would freeze to death. He had to cut the rope.

It exploded at the first touch of the knife blade.