Touching the Void Read Online Free PDF Page A

you were hit.’
    ‘Only by small stuff. Get moving, I don’t like it here.’
    I climbed the last few feet of the cascade, and moved quickly right to the shelter of the rock. Simon grinned when he reached me:
    ‘Where did that lot come from?’
    ‘I don’t know. I only saw it at the last moment. Too bloody close!’
    ‘Let’s get on. I can see the gully from here.’
    Boosted with adrenalin, he climbed quickly towards the steep icy couloir visible in a corner of the main buttress. It was four-thirty. We had an hour and a half of light left.
    I went on past his stance for another full rope length but the couloir seemed no nearer. The flat, white light made it hard to gauge distances. Simon set out on the last short pitch to the foot of the couloir.
    ‘We ought to bivi here,’ I said. ‘It will be dark soon.’
    ‘Yeah, but there’s no chance of a snow hole, or any ledges.’
    I could see he was right. Any night spent here would be uncomfortable. It was already getting hard to see.
    ‘I’ll try and get up this before dark.’
    ‘Too late…it is dark!’
    ‘Well, I bloody hope we can do it in one rope length then.’ I didn’t like the prospect of blundering around on steep ice in the dark trying to sort out belays.
    I made a short traverse left to the foot of the couloir. ‘Jesus! This is overhanging, and the ice is terrible!’
    Simon said nothing.
    Twenty feet of rotten honeycombed ice reared up in front of me, but above that I could see it relented and lay back to a more reasonable angle. I banged an ice screw into the good water ice at the foot of the wall, clipped the rope through it, turned my head-torch on, took a deep breath, and started climbing.
    I was nervous at first for the angle forced me backwards, and the honeycombs crunched and sharded away beneath my feet, but the axes, biting deeper into harder ice, were solid and soon I was engrossed. A short panting struggle and the wall was beneath me, Simon no longer in sight. I stood on tiptoe on glassy hard water ice, blue in my torchlight, curving up above me into shadows. The dark night silence was broken only by my axe blows and the wavering cone of light from my torch. The climbing held me completely, so that Simon might as well not have been there. Hit hard. Hit again—that’s it, now the hammer. Look at your feet. Can’t see them. Kick hard, and again. On up, peering into shadows, trying to make out the line. The blue glass curves left, like a bob-sleigh run, the angle steepening under a huge fringe of icicles on the right. Is that another way up, behind the icicles? I move up, under the ice fringe. A few icicles break away, and thump tinkle down, chandelier sounds in the dark, and a muffled shout echoes up to me from below—no time to answer. This way is wrong. Damn, damn! Get back down, reverse it. No! Put a screw in. I fumble at my harness for a screw but can’t find one—forget it, just get back below the icicles. I shouted down to Simon when I reached the couloir again, but I couldn’t hear his reply. Spindrift powder rushed down in a burst from above. Unexpected, it made my heart leap.
    I had no ice screws. I had forgotten to take them from Simon and had used my only screw down at the bottom. I did not know what to do, 120 feet up very steep ice. Go back down? I was scared of the unprotected drop beneath me, and of the idea of needing an ice screw for a belay if I couldn’t find any rock. I shouted again but there was no reply. Take a few breaths and get on with it! I could see the top of the couloir fifteen feet above me, the last ten feet rearing up steeply, tubeshaped, the good ice giving way to mushy powder. I bridged across the tube, legs splayed against yielding snow. I flailed my axes, dreading the 240-foot fall below me on to one ice screw, and thrashed about me, breathing quick, frightened gasps of effort before I could pull myself out on to the easy snow slopes above the couloir.
    When I had regained my breath, I climbed