Until the November evening when Mal Duff banged on my window, I was purely an armchair climber, happy to enjoy mountaineering from a comfortable distance. (After that, common sense deserted me.) But I’d found that most climbing books left me vaguely dissatisfied in the same way as the freeze-dried meals we were to eat on the Mustagh Tower – something was always left out.
Climbing books are written by dedicated climbers, people for whom mountaineering has become second nature and habitual. The result is there is much they have ceased to consciously notice, and an equal amount that they notice but don’t think to mention. They also have to observe the general ethos of mountaineers, and so adopt a certain style towards danger, fear, loneliness, endurance, ambition, exultation – usually jokey exaggeration or complete suppression in favour of purely factual accounts.
The upshot is that, as with those cursed freeze-drieds, the contents are there but the whole juice and inner substance of the experience is missing. So I have tried to write about this adventure freshly, as it all happened to me for the first time. Having nothing to prove as a climber, I can afford to be honest about how it felt.
There is a very narrow ridge to walk between honesty and tact. My companions on this adventure have allowed me generous access to their diaries, time and inner lives. I have tried not to abuse their trust, but without glossing over (as many books naturally do) the emotions, irritations and incidents contained there. Himalayan climbing is an intense experience, and the mountains intensify rather than dissipate emotions. A small group of people are living and striving together in isolation for a long period under a great variety of stresses. Little generosities, selfishnesses and tensions become magnified. One gets it in proportion later, but an honest account of the experience necessitates recording how it felt at the time.
All climbing, and Himalyan mountaineering in particular, is not just about the final summit push. The preparations, the walk in, the mountain villages, vacant slog, arguments, the porters singing and the stars at night, food, fantasies, memories, personal relations, summit fever, the walk out – all are part of it. It is the totality of the experience that I have tried to pack between the covers of this book.
Andrew Greig South Queensferry February 1985
A near-stranger makes an outrageous offer 17–23 November 1983
Climbing was something other people did.
I was quite content that it should stay that way, until one wet November evening Mr Malcolm Duff walked in and turned my life upside down.
An evening at home in South Queensferry, idly watching television. Kathleen was reading, the wood stove hissed, the cats twitched in their dreams. Life was domestic, cosy and safe – and just a little boring. But what else could we expect? Then a sharp bang on the window made us start. Enter Malcolm: alert, weathered, impelled by restless energy. We’d met briefly twice and he’d reminded me of an army officer who was contemplating becoming an anarchist. He seemed, as always, to be in a hurry; a brief Hi and he went straight to the point.
‘It’s there if you want it, Andy.’
I looked at him blankly. ‘What’s there?’
‘The Karakoram trip. The Expedition will buy any gear you need, pay your flight out and any expenses. What you do is climb on the Mustagh Tower with us and write a book about the trip. Rocky’s really keen on the idea.’ He prowled restlessly round our kitchen. ‘Well, what do you think?’
I couldn’t think. I was running hot and cold together inside, like a mixer tap. Turning away, registering what had been offered yet unable to take it in, I went through the motions of making coffee, asked if he took sugar. That was how little we knew each other. I remembered now a drunken evening over my home-brew, how he’d said he’d liked my book of narrative climbing poems, Men On Ice, that he was going on an expedition to Pakistan. And I’d made some non-sober, non-serious remark about how it would be interesting to go on a mountaineering trip and write about it. And he’d said he would phone a man called Rocky Moss who was financing the climb …
‘Er, Malcolm … you do realize my book was purely metaphorical? I can’t climb.’
For a moment he looked taken aback. ‘I’ll teach you. No problem.’
‘And I’m scared of heights. They make me feel ill.’
‘You’ll get used to it.’
‘To heights, or feeling ill?’
‘Both.’ The sardonic – satanic – grin was to become all too familiar.
‘It’s just …’ Just what? Wonderful? Outrageous. Exciting? Stunning. I played for time and said I’d need to think about it.
‘Sure,’ he replied. We leaned against the fridge and chatted for a few minutes. I wasn’t taking in much. He drained his coffee, stubbed his cigarette and made for the door. ‘Let me know inside a week.’ Then he paused, grinned. ‘Go for it, youth,’ he said, and was gone.
Leaving me sweating, staring through the steam of my mug at a mountain I’d never seen or even heard of – the Somethingorother Tower – waiting for me on the other side of the world. A week to decide.
What does an armchair climber feel when offered the chance to turn daydream into reality? Incredulity. Euphoria. Panic. Suddenly the routines of ordinary life seem deeply reassuring and desirable. Why leave them? Familiar actions and satisfactions may at times seem bland, but they are sustaining. Armchair daydreams are the salt that gives them savour, nothing more.
And yet …
I talked it round and round that evening with Kathleen. She was torn between envy and worry. She didn’t want me to go. She wanted to go herself. I didn’t know what I wanted. If I stayed to finish a radio play – about two climbers, as irony would have it – we could afford to go somewhere interesting, hot and safe.
As we talked it out, I wondered how often this scene had been enacted. It’s the one the adventure books always omit. Conflicting desires and loyalties, leaving someone behind. Any adventurer who is not a complete hermit must go through that scene. It makes some apparently callous and ruthlessly clear about where their priorities lie.
I had none of that certainty. Yet how could one turn down an offer like this?
‘Try saying No,’ Kathleen suggested.
I phoned Malcolm the next evening to say I hadn’t made up my mind but maybe it would be a good idea for me to find out more about the Expedition. Such as what, where and who. At the end of five minutes my head was spinning and my notepad was crosshatched with names, dates and places, and some alarming vertical doodles.
The mountain was called the Mustagh Tower. It had been climbed only twice, and that twenty-eight years ago; we were going for the Joe Brown–Tom Patey route. I tried to make knowledgeable, approving noises. It was just under 24,000 feet high, in the Karakoram which were apparently part of the Himalayas, ‘third turning on the left before K2’. At least I’d heard of that.
We’d be leaving in June, for two or three months. Our second objective was called Gasherbrum 2, some 26,000 feet high. I was pleased to hear I wasn’t expected to do anything on it. That ‘gash’ bit sounded vicious, and the ‘brum’ was resonant with avalanche. At the moment there were four British lead climbers, a doctor and myself, four Nepalese Sherpas and three Americans whose experience was limited largely to being guided. One of them was the intriguing Rocky Moss who was paying for the