Читать книгу Extreme Survivors: 60 of the World’s Most Extreme Survival Stories - Collins Maps - Страница 53

When the cold woke Joe, the sun was up and he could now see that he was on a kind of ice bridge across the top of the crevasse.

Meanwhile Simon had spent the night in a snow hole then descended to look for Joe. When he saw the ice cliff that Joe had gone over and the crevasse below, Simon knew his friend had gone. He headed numbly back to camp.

Joe had a big decision to make. He could either wait on the ice bridge for death to come or abseil down into the unknown. He hammered in his last ice screw. But the blackness below terrified him, and it was an age before he could bear to look down. When he did, he was amazed to see not a black void, but a snow floor.

Some ragged holes made him realize this wasn’t a true floor, but a ceiling above a greater abyss. At the end of his precarious cavern a slanting cone of snow rose up to the sunlight above. He would reach that sunbeam, Joe suddenly knew.

Terrified the fragile floor would give way, Joe inched his way to the ramp. It was 40 m (130 ft) high and angled at forty-five degrees rising to sixty-five degrees. Ten minutes’ climbing normally. Today it was five hours before his head popped out of the ice tomb like a gopher and he took in a stunning view of sun-kissed mountains. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

But Joe was still 60 m (200 ft) above the glacier and 10 km (6 miles) from camp. He saw Simon’s rope and knew he had been left for dead. The crevasse had just been the start.