Touching the Void - tension extract

Touching the Void – tension extract

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Joe Simpson, mountaineer, has broken his leg when descending Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. His climbing partner, Simon Yates, is painstakingly lowering him, by rope, down the mountain. It is already late in the day, and growing dark, when an unseen ice cliff threatens the two men’s safety. Joe, suspended above an enormous crevasse, realises that he is gradually pulling Simon with him to certain death.

I lolled on the rope, scarcely able to hold my head up. An awful weariness washed through me, and with it a fervent hope that this endless hanging would soon be over. There was no need for the torture. I wanted with all my heart for it to finish.

The rope jolted down a few inches. How long will you be, Simon? I thought. How long before you join me? It would be soon. I could feel the rope tremble again; wire-tight, it told me the truth as well as any phone call. So! It ends here. Pity! I hope somebody finds us, and knows we climbed the West Face. I don’t want to disappear without trace. They’d never know we did it.

The wind swung me in a gentle circle. I looked at the crevasse beneath me, waiting for me. It was big. Twenty feet wide at least. I guessed that I was hanging fifty feet above it. It stretched along the base of the ice cliff. Below me it was covered with a roof of snow, but to the right it opened out and a dark space yawned there. Bottomless, I thought idly. No. They’re never bottomless. I wonder how deep I will go? To the bottom … to the water at the bottom? God! I hope not!

Another jerk. Above me the rope sawed through the cliff edge, dislodging chunks of crusty ice. I stared at it stretching into the darkness above. Cold had long since won its battle.

There was no feeling in my arms and legs. Everything slowed and softened. Thoughts became idle questions, never answered. I accepted that I was to die. There was no alternative. It caused me no dreadful fear. I was numb with cold and felt no pain; so senselessly cold that I craved sleep and cared nothing for the consequences. It would be a dreamless sleep. Reality had become a nightmare, and sleep beckoned insistently; a black hole calling me, pain-free, lost in time, like death.

The torch beam died. The cold had killed the batteries. I saw stars in a dark gap above me. The storm was over. I was glad to see them again. They seemed far away. And bright: you’d think them gemstones hanging there, floating in the air above. Some moved, little winking moves, on and off, on and off, floating the brightest sparks of light down to me.

Then, what I had waited for pounced on me. The stars went out, and I fell. Like something come alive, the rope lashed violently against my face and I fell silently, endlessly into nothingness, as if dreaming of falling.

From Touching the Void by Joe Simpson