A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush Read online

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Quite sure. You know it’s got those poles shaped like a V, that you slip into a sort of pocket in the material. Well, they haven’t made any pockets, so you can’t put it up.’

  ‘It’s lucky you found out. We should have looked pretty silly on Mir Samir.’

  ‘You’re going to look pretty silly at any rate. I shouldn’t be surprised if they’ve done the same thing to your sleeping-bags.’

  ‘Have you telephoned the makers?’

  ‘That’s no use. If you send it back to them, you’ll never see it again. I’ve sent for the little woman who makes my dresses. She’s coming tomorrow morning.’

  We continued to discuss what we should take to Wales.

  ‘I should take your Folboat,’ said Hugh. ‘There’s bound to be a lake near the inn. It will be a good chance of testing it BEFORE YOU PASS THROUGH THE GORGES. The current is tremendously swift.’

  I had never had any intention of being either drowned or ritually mutilated in Mahsud Territory. I told him that I hadn’t got a Folboat.

  ‘I was almost certain I wrote to you about getting a Folboat. It’s a pity. There’s not much time now.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘there isn’t.’

  It was nearly midnight when we left London. Our destination was an inn situated in the wilds of Caernarvonshire. Hugh had telephoned the proprietor and explained to him the peculiar state of ignorance in which we found ourselves. It was useless to dissemble: Hugh had told him everything. He was not only an experienced mountaineer, but was also the head of the mountain rescue service. It is to his eternal credit that he agreed to help us rather than tell us, as a more conventional man might have done, that his rooms were all booked.

  We arrived at six o’clock the following morning, having driven all night, but already a spiral of smoke was issuing from a chimney at the back of the premises.

  The first thing that confronted us when we entered the hotel was a door on the left. On it was written EVEREST ROOM. Inside it was a facsimile of an Alpine hut, done out in pine wood, with massive benches round the walls. On every side was evidence of the presence of the great ones of the mountain world. Their belongings in the shape of ropes, rucksacks, favourite jackets and boots were everywhere, ready for the off. It was not a museum. It was more like the Royal Enclosure. Sir John and Sir Edmund might appear at any moment. They were probably on the premises.

  ‘Whatever else we do I don’t think we shall spend much time in the Everest Room,’ said Hugh, as we reverently closed the door. ‘For the first time I’m beginning to feel that we really do know damn all.’

  ‘EXACTLY.’

  At this moment we were confronted by a remarkably healthy-looking girl.

  ‘Most people have had breakfast but it’s still going on,’ she said.

  The only other occupant of the breakfast room was a compact man of about forty-five, who was eating his way through the sort of breakfast I hadn’t been able to stomach for ten years. He was wearing a magnificent sweater that was the product of peasant industry. He was obviously a climber. With an hysterical attempt at humour, like soldiers before an attack, we tried to turn him into a figure of fun, speaking in whispers. This proved difficult, as he wasn’t at all comic, just plainly competent.

  ‘He looks desperately healthy.’ (His face was the colour of old furniture.)

  ‘Everyone looks healthy here, except us.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s real tan.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s making a film about mountain rescue.’

  ‘How very appropriate.’

  ‘Perhaps he’ll let us stand-in, as corpses.’

  After breakfast the proprietor introduced us to the mystery man. We immediately felt ashamed of ourselves.

  ‘This is Dr Richardson,’ he said. ‘He’s very kindly agreed to take you out and teach you the rudiments of climbing.’

  ‘Have you ever done any?’ asked the Doctor.

  It seemed no time to bring up my scrambles in the Dolomites, nor even Hugh’s adventures at the base of Mir Samir.

  ‘No,’ I said firmly, ‘neither of us knows the first thing about it.’

  We had arrived at seven; by nine o’clock we were back in the station wagon, this time bound for the north face of the mountain called Tryfan.

  ‘Stop here,’ said the Doctor. Hugh parked the car by a milestone that read ‘Bangor X Miles’. Rearing up above the road was a formidable-looking chunk of rock, the Milestone Buttress.

  ‘That’s what you’re going to climb,’ said the Doctor. ‘It’s got practically everything you need at this stage.’

  It seemed impossible. In a daze we followed him over a rough wall and into the bracken. A flock of mountain sheep watched us go, making noises that sounded suspiciously like laughter.

  Finally we reached the foot of it. Close-to it didn’t seem so formidable. The whole face was scarred by the nailed boots of countless climbers.

  ‘This thing is like a by-pass,’ said the Doctor. ‘Later in the season you’d have to queue up to climb it. We’re lucky to have it to ourselves.’

  ‘If there’s one thing we don’t need it’s an audience.’

  ‘First of all you’ve got to learn about the rope. Without a rope climbing is suicide. It’s the only thing that justifies it. Chris told me what you’re planning to do. If anything happens on that mountain, it may not get into the papers, and at least no one else will have to risk their necks to get you off if anything goes wrong. If I thought that you were the sort of people who would take risks, I wouldn’t have come with you today.’

  He showed us how to rope ourselves together, using the proper knots; the bowline for the leader and the end man; the butterfly noose, a beautifully symmetrical knot, for the middleman; how to hold it and how to coil it so that it would pay out without snarling up, and how to belay.

  ‘You never move without a proper belay. I start to climb and I go on until I reach a knob of rock on to which I can belay. I take a karabiner’ (he produced one of the D-shaped steel rings with a spring-loaded clip) ‘and attach a sling to the loop of rope round my waist. Then all I have to do is to put the sling over the knob of rock, and pass the rope under one shoulder and over the other. If possible, you brace your feet against a solid block. Like that you can take the really big strain if the next man comes off.

  ‘When the second man reaches the leader, the leader unclips the karabiner with the sling on it, and the second man attaches it to his waist. He’s now belayed. The second man gives his own sling to the leader who goes on to the next pitch. Like this.’

  ‘What I don’t see,’ I whispered to Hugh, ‘is what happens if the leader falls on the first pitch. According to this he’s done for.’

  ‘The leader just mustn’t fall off.’

  ‘Remind me to let you be leader.’

  The Doctor now showed what I thought was a misplaced trust in us. He sent us to the top of a little cliff, not more than twenty feet high, with a battered-looking holly tree growing on it. ‘I want you to pretend that you’re the leader,’ he said to Hugh. ‘I want you to belay yourself with a sling and a karabiner to the holly tree. On the way up I am going to fall off backwards and I shan’t tell you when I’m going to do it. You’ve got to hold me.’ He began to climb.

  He reached the top and was just about to step over the edge when, without warning, he launched himself backwards into space. And then the promised miracle happened, for the rope was taut and Hugh was holding him, not by the belay but simply with the rope passed under one shoulder and over the other. There was no strain on the sling round Hugh’s waist at all, his body was like a spring. I was very impressed – for the first time I began to understand the trust that climbers must be able to have in one another.

  ‘Now it’s your turn,’ said the Doctor.

  It was like a memorable day in 1939 when I fell backwards off the fore upper topsail yard of a four-masted barque, only this time I expected Hugh to save me. And he did. Elated we pra
ctised this new game for some time until the Doctor looked at his watch. It was 11.30.

  ‘We’d better get on to the rock. We wouldn’t normally but there’s so little time and you seem to be catching on to the roping part. Let’s go. We’ll take the Ordinary Route. You may think it isn’t much but don’t go just bald-headed at it. I’m going to lead. It’s about two hundred feet altogether. We start in this chimney.’ He indicated an inadequate-looking cleft in the rock face.

  It seemed too small to contain a human being at all but the Doctor vanished into it easily enough. Like me, he was wearing nailed boots, not the new-fangled ones with rubber vibram soles. I could hear them screeching on the rock as he scrabbled for a foothold. There was a lot of grunting and groaning then he vanished from sight.

  Hugh went next. It was easier for him as he was very slim.

  Then it was my turn. Like a boa-constrictor swallowing a live chicken, I wriggled up it, with hideous wear and tear to my knees, until I emerged on a boulder slope.

  ‘Now we begin,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘What was that, if it wasn’t the beginning?’

  ‘The start. This is the beginning.’

  ‘How very confusing.’

  The worst part was what he called ‘Over the garden wall’, which entailed swinging round a projection, hanging over a void and then traversing along a ledge into a cave.

  ‘I wish he’d wear rubbers,’ I said to Hugh, as the Doctor vanished over the wall with a terrible screeching of tricounis. ‘It’s not the climbing I object to, it’s the noise.’

  There was still a twenty-foot chimney with a tree in it up which we fought our way and, at last, we lay on the top panting and admiring the view which was breathtaking. I was very impressed and proud. It wasn’t much but I had done my first climb.

  ‘What do you call this?’ Hugh said, warily. ‘Easy, difficult or something in between?’

  ‘Moderate.’

  ‘How do they go? I’ve forgotten.’

  ‘Easy, moderate, difficult, very difficult, severe, very severe, exceptionally severe, and excessively severe.’

  ‘Oh.’

  While we were eating our sandwiches the Doctor began to describe what he called ‘The Free Rappel’. More than a year has passed since, for the first and last time, I practised this excruciatingly painful method of descending the face of a mountain. Even now I am unable to remember it without a shudder. Like the use of the bayonet, it was something to be learned, and if possible, forgotten for ever.

  ‘You first,’ said the Doctor. In dealing with him we suffered the disadvantage that he wasn’t retained at some handsome fee to teach us all this. He was in fact ruining his holiday, in order to give us a slightly more than even chance of surviving.

  ‘Put a sling round the tree and run the double rope through it; now pass it round your right thigh, between your legs; now up the back and sling it over your left shoulder so that it falls down in front. That’s right. Now walk backwards to the edge, keep the rope taut. Now keep your legs horizontal and walk down.’

  I walked down. It would have been perfect if only the face of the cliff had been smooth; unfortunately it was slightly concave, which made it difficult to keep my legs at right angles to the face. I failed to do so, slipped and went swinging backwards and forwards across the face like a pendulum, with the rope biting into my groin.

  ‘Well, you’ve learned one lesson,’ Hugh said cheerfully, when I reached the bottom after disengaging myself from the rope and swarming down in a more conventional manner.

  ‘If it’s a question of doing that again or being castrated by Mahsuds, I’ll take the Mahsuds. My groin won’t stand up to much more of this.’

  ‘You must be very sensitive,’ Hugh said. ‘Lots of girls do it.’

  ‘I’m not a girl. There must be some other way. It’s impossible in thin trousers.’

  After a large, old-fashioned tea at the inn with crumpets and boiled eggs, we were taken off to the Eckenstein Boulder. Oscar Eckenstein was a renowned climber at the end of the nineteenth century, whose principal claim to fame was that he had been the first man in this or any other country to study the technique of holds and balance on rock. He had spent his formative years crawling over the boulder that now bore his name. Although it was quite small, about the size of a delivery van, his boulder was said to apparently embody all the fundamental problems that are such a joy to mountaineers and were proving such a nightmare to us.

  For this treat we were allowed to wear gym shoes.

  Full of boiled egg and crumpet, we clung upside down to the boulder like bluebottles, while the Doctor shouted encouragement to us from a safe distance. Occasionally one of us would fall off and land with a painful thump on the back of his head.

  ‘YOU MUST NOT FALL OFF. Imagine that there is a thousand-foot drop under you.’

  ‘I am imagining it but I still can’t stay on.’

  Back at the inn we had hot baths, several pints of beer, an enormous dinner and immediately sank into a coma. For more than forty hours we had had hardly any sleep. ‘Good training,’ was Hugh’s last muffled comment.

  By this time the waitresses at the inn had become interested in this artificial forcing process. All three of them were experienced climbers who had taken the job in the first place in order to be able to combine business with pleasure. Now they continued our climbing education.

  They worked in shifts, morning and afternoon, so that we were climbing all the time. We had never encountered anything quite like them before. At breakfast on the last day, Judith, a splendid girl with auburn hair whose father had been on Everest in 1933, told us what she had in mind. ‘Pamela and I are free this afternoon; we’re going to do the Spiral Stairs on Dinas Cromlech. It’s an interesting climb.’

  As soon as we could get through our breakfast we looked it up in the Climbing Guide to the Snowdon District, Part 6.

  ‘Dinas Cromlech,’ said the book,

  is perhaps the most impressive cliff on the north side of the Llanberis Pass, its massive rhyolite pillars giving it the appearance of some grim castle … all routes have surprising steepness … on the whole the rock is sound, although on first acquaintance it may not appear to be so.

  Spiral Stairs was described as ‘Very difficult’ and as having ‘an impressive first pitch with good exposure’. At the back was a nasty picture of the Cromlech with the routes marked on it. Besides Spiral Stairs there was Cenotaph Corner, Ivy Sepulchre and the Sexton’s Route. It sounded a jolly spot.

  ‘I wish we were doing Castle Gully. It says here, “a pleasant vegetable route”.’

  ‘They might have decided on Ivy Sepulchre,’ said Hugh. ‘Just listen to this. “Two hundred feet. Exceptionally severe. A very serious and difficult climb … loose rock overhangs … progress is made by a bridging type of lay-back movement, an occasional hold of a doubtful nature appearing now and then.” He doesn’t say what you do when it doesn’t.’

  ‘What’s a lay-back?’

  ‘You were doing a lay-back when you fell off the Eckenstein Boulder.’

  ‘This is only the beginning, it gets worse. “At this point the angle relents …”’

  ‘Relents is good,’ I said.

  ‘“… to a small niche below the conspicuous overhang; no belay. Start the overhang by bridging. The climbing at this point is exceptionally severe, strenuous and in a very exposed position.” It goes on and on! “A short groove leads to the foot of an old rickety holly tree and after a struggle with this and the crack behind it, a good hold can be reached on the left wall.”’

  ‘I wonder why everything seems to end with a rickety old holly tree.’

  We decided to have a quiet morning. Just then the other two girls appeared loaded with gear.

  ‘Hurry up,’ they said, ‘we’ve got to be back by half past twelve. We’re going to take you up The Gauge. You made a nonsense of it, the Doctor said. And you’ve both got to lead.’

  That afternoon, as Judith led the way up the s
cree from the road towards the base of Dinas Cromlech, we felt that if anything the guide book, in spite of its sombre warnings, had not prepared us for the reality. It was as if a giant had been smoothing off the sides of a heap of cement with a trowel and had then lost patience and left it half finished. Its most impressive feature was a vast, right-angled wall, shiny with water and apparently smooth.

  ‘Cenotaph Corner,’ said Judith, ‘Hundred and twenty feet. When you can do that you really will be climbers.’

  It seemed impossible.

  ‘Joe Brown led it in 1952, with Belshaw. Joe’s a plumber in Manchester. He spends every moment he can here. You remember how awful it was last winter when everyone’s pipes were bursting? In the middle of it he left a note on the door of his house: “Gone climbing. Joe Brown.” People nearly went mad.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘In the Himalayas.’

  We looked at what he had climbed with awe.

  There were already three people on Spiral Stairs. I could see what the book meant by ‘good exposure’. At that moment one of them was edging his way round the vertical left-hand edge of Cenotaph Corner.

  ‘That’s the part that always gives me a thrill,’ said Pamela, the other girl. ‘Pity. Let’s not wait, let’s do Ivy Sepulchre instead.’

  ‘Oh, Pamela, do you think we ought to? It may be too much for them.’

  She made us sound like a couple of invalids out on the pier for an airing. Nevertheless, this was no time for stubborn pride. I asked Hugh if that was the climb we had been reading about at breakfast. He said it was.

  ‘I think Judith’s right,’ I said. ‘It may be too much for us.’

  As we waited in the cold shadow under the lee of the Cenotaph, Judith explained what we were going to do.

  ‘The beginning’s rather nasty because of that puddle. It makes your feet slippery just when they need to be dry. We’ll climb in two parties. Pamela will lead Hugh, I’ll lead you. The first part’s seventy feet; round the edge of the Cenotaph it’s very exposed and you’ll feel the wind. Don’t come on until I shout and you feel pressure on the rope. I’ll be belayed then. Even if you come off you won’t fall far.’