The Beckoning Silence Read Online Free PDF Page B

when you are talking ice cliffs. It doesn’t take much “small stuff” to kill you.’
    ‘It’ll be fine.’ He turned and strode back towards the stoves. ‘I’ve got the tea to make. Sort it out with Pira.’ He seemed remarkably blasé about my worries. Then again, he had just announced that his impending fever had ruled him out of guiding on the summit attempt.
    I turned and studied the seracs again. Maybe he’s right? Maybe it’s just me? I thought. I’m getting too cautious for this game. Most often you simply have to accept a degree of objective danger in the mountains. You can try and minimise it by being fast, or climbing at night when it is freezing and the loose rocks are bonded safely together by ice and the seracs are not subject to the expanding heat of the midday sun. But the danger can never be eliminated and if you are unlucky there is nothing you can do about it.
    Only three years before, two friends, Paul Nunn and Geoff Tier, had been killed on Haramosh in the Karakoram when a seemingly stable serac had collapsed. Their two companions, who had reached their high camp on the glacier before them, heard their voices chatting in the distance. As they prepared a brew of tea the heavy rumble of the ice avalanche broke the afternoon calm and the voices fell silent. Paul and Geoff had disappeared.
    Paul Nunn was a big man in so many ways, not simply in stature and legendary physical strength, but in the breadth of his climbing experiences. He had climbed in an era when the accident and fatality rates were frighteningly high. Paul had come through it all unscathed with a wealth of experience, close shaves and dramatic tales to tell. At the time of his death he was the President of the British Mountaineering Council and the former Vice President of the Alpine Club. Widely respected and admired throughout the sport, he was just as happy in the company of young and ambitious climbers as he was with grizzled old-timers. I counted him as a friend but he was also a man I admired and respected immensely. The combination of experience and sheer physical presence made him seem indestructible. A dangerous notion, I know, but it felt true of Paul. I remember thinking that of another friend and wondering whether it might be tempting fate to think in such terms. Then he was killed in a plane crash in the hills surrounding Kathmandu.
    The news of Paul’s death was starkly sudden and incomprehensible. It left a lasting impression on me and I wondered at the time that if someone like Paul, who deserved to live into a long and disgracefully happy old age, could be killed so easily, then what of the rest of us? I remember Geoff Birtles, the editor of High Mountain Sports magazine, saying, ‘White stuff kills, end of story,’ and he was right. It comes down to probability in the end. If you keep putting your head in the lion’s mouth one day he’s going to shut it and it won’t matter how good or strong or lucky you think you are. It was the way that Paul could be wiped from the face of the earth without leaving a trace after climbing a relatively safe mountain that shook me to the core. Once that thought had wormed its way into my mind I began to find it increasingly difficult to psych myself up for this climbing game. The news of Alison Hargreaves’s death in a sudden violent storm high on K2 a week later was another blow.
    I was no stranger to the random dangers of rock-fall and avalanches but I had always felt that good judgement and experience could hugely minimise the risk. Even after Roger Baxter Jones was killed with his client on the north face of the Triolet when the serac bands avalanched, I still reasoned it was a risk that could be accepted. When I triggered an avalanche in 1981 near the summit of Les Courtes in the French Alps the experience had been terrifying but had left me convinced that it was my fault. I had been tired, dehydrated and consequently not paying sufficient attention to the potential