Touching the Void Read Online Free PDF

up to a rock wall and arranged a belay in the loose cracks and blocks.
    Simon joined me, breathing hard. ‘You took your time,’ he snapped.
    I bristled. ‘It was bloody hard, and I was as good as soloing it. I had no screws with me.’ ‘Forget it. Let’s find a bivi.’
    It was ten o’clock, and the wind had got up, making the minus-fifteen temperature seem a lot colder. Tired and irritable after a hard fifteen-hour day, we had dreaded the hour or so it would take us to dig a snow hole.
    ‘Nothing doing here,’ I said, eyeing the slope critically. ‘Not deep enough to dig.’ ‘I could try that dollop up there.’
    Simon indicated a huge golf-ball of snow, fifty feet across, which clung defiantly to the vertical rock wall thirty feet above us. He moved up to it and cautiously started prodding it with his axe. On my shaky belay, I appreciated his caution, for I would be swept away if it suddenly parted company with the wall.
    ‘Joe!’ Simon yelled. ‘Wow! You’re not going to believe this.’ I heard a piton being hammered into rock, and a few more squeaks of joy, and then the call to come up to him.
    I felt dubious, and gingerly poked my head through the small hole Simon had made. ‘Good God!’
    ‘I said you wouldn’t believe it.’ Simon sat back comfortably on his sack, belayed to a good strong peg, and waved regally at his new domain. ‘And it has a bathroom,’ he said with glee, all tiredness and bad humour gone.
    The snow was hollow. Inside there was one large chamber, almost high enough to stand in, and beside it another smaller cave. Here was a ready-made palace!
    Yet, as we got organised and settled into our sleeping bags, I could not help turning over in my head my usual dislike of bivi sites, trying to assess the safety margin. I had good reason to be alarmed about the precarious state of this one, and Simon knew why, but there was no point in harping on about it. There was nowhere else.
    There had been no alternative, as I remembered all too vividly, two years earlier when climbing on the Bonatti Pillar on the south-west side of Les Petits Drus. I was elated to have made such fast progress with Ian Whittaker up the 2,000-foot golden-red granite spire which dominates the view from the Chamonix valley. The architectural magnificence of its lines drawn sharply by the shadows of the sun against the softer backdrop of the whole range of the French Alps had made this climb one of the most aesthetically pleasing routes in the Alps. We had climbed well that day to establish ourselves by nightfall just a few hundred feet from the summit, though still on very steep and difficult ground. There was no possibility of reaching the top that night, nor was there need for haste in seeking a ledge on which to sleep, for the weather was clear and settled, and we would certainly reach the top the following day. It would be another warm night, and this high up, at 17,000 feet, the sky would be brilliant with stars.
    Ian had climbed above my small stance overlooking the airy sweep of the precipitous walls below. The corner he was following was relentlessly steep and failing light made him painfully slow. I waited, shivering in the chill evening air, hopping from foot to foot, trying to regain circulation despite my cramped position. I was tired after the long day and yearned to lie back and rest in comfort.
    At last a muffled shout told me he had found something, and soon I was cursing and struggling in the gathering dusk up the corner Ian had just led. Even before it had darkened I had spotted that we were slightly off route. We had climbed directly up a steep crack splitting a vertical wall instead of traversing to the right. This had placed us beneath a huge overhang about 150 feet above us. No doubt we would have to resort to complicated diagonal abseiling in the morning to get past it. For now, it had its advantages: at least we would be protected from any rockfall during the night. I found Ian sitting on a