The Beckoning Silence Read Online Free PDF Page A

don’t like those seracs.’ I passed him my binoculars and he scanned the serac band. At the foot of the south-east face of the mountain the glacier spilled down in a crevassed, snow-covered hump, flowing between two great rock buttresses. On the right side the rock walls towered up in a series of pinnacles and blocky towers. Directly above the rocks a beautiful conical snow summit flanked the right side of a distinct snow saddle, separating this smaller peak from the round shouldered mass of Chaupi Orco’s 6044-metre summit on the left. Where the glacier rose up to this saddle it was squeezed into a series of short ice falls interspersed with loose screes and boulders. From what Yossi had told me, we would be climbing in the dark early the following morning up through the screes and then traversing beneath the largest of the ice falls towards a spit of scree running down the right or eastern flank of the mountain. It was certainly not technically difficult and I knew that if we moved fast we could minimise the risk of a sudden avalanche. And there lay the problem. I was not confident that the group was fit enough to move that fast.
    We had spent the last two and a half weeks trekking in the remote Cordillera Apolobamba region of the Bolivian Andes. I was leading a group of trekkers and climbers on a three-week exploration of this rarely visited Bolivian mountain range for High Places, a Sheffield-based adventure trekking company. Yossi Brain, a former journalist, and now a resident of La Paz, had drawn up the itinerary for the treks and climbs. We had climbed one mountain, Cuchillo (5660 metres), a striking pyramid peak that had presented no great problems. The view across the Altiplano of the Cordillera Real had been superb and at the time I had thought our hopes for three more summits in this wonderfully remote area were not over-ambitious. Yet by the time we had made the long, heavily laden trek up to our high camp on the glacier below Chaupi Orco we had not managed any more summits.
    The trekking had been superb. There were only four villages of any size in the area and consequently we had run into a number of logistical problems on our trek, mainly concerned with re-supply of food and fuel and the difficulty of hiring sufficient donkeys, mules and llamas. The sense of remoteness had been heightened by the harsh arid conditions of the area and the grinding poverty that the local Indians endured with resigned stoicism.
    Midway through the trek I found myself crossing some high pampas, having passed by the small mining settlement of Viscachani. After crossing a pass of nearly 5000 metres with the group I went ahead towards a deserted goldmine high on a rocky bluff, overlooking the decrepit and ugly settlement at Sunchuli. I was listening to Van Morrison on my personal stereo, occasionally glancing back to mark the progress of the group. I had gone a little too fast, something I have always been guilty of, but I was happy that both Yossi and Pira were bringing up the rear, and I planned to wait for everyone at the old goldmine. Far in the distance I noticed the small figure of an Indian walking diagonally away from me with what appeared to be a strange gait. A little while later I noticed he had changed direction and was walking directly towards me at some pace. When he was about a quarter of a mile from me he began waving his arms and gesticulating towards his head in a worryingly animated manner. I glanced back, suddenly anxious at being on my own with what appeared to be the only lunatic in an otherwise unpopulated area. I slowed to a halt and warily observed the man approaching. I noted that along with the arm gestures he was sporting a disturbingly manic grin. I gripped my ski poles a little tighter. They were useful for warding off attacking dogs and I was just wondering how I could fend off the man with them when he arrived quite breathless in front of me and shook a little transistor radio at me which had