He finally appears below me, plodding up the hill looking puffed and not very pleased. ‘Dropped my glove belaying that wazzock, it slid right to the bottom of the gully.’ I ask what had happened to the man he’d rescued. ‘Gripped,’ he says shortly and indicates our next line. A traverse right across a distinctly steep snow slope. He sets off. Looks like I’m not going to be belayed. I’ve had a lot of time to get nervous and don’t like the look of it, but follow on gingerly, thinking about avalanche, about falling …
I reach his stance, a narrow ledge beside a boulder, panting hard. Nerves, mostly. ‘Right, better clip in now, Andy.’
I put him on belay through the descendeur as we rehearsed on his stairway a lifetime ago. He checks my gear, goes over the call sequence and disappears round the corner. One day all of this will seem normal. I peer round to see where he’s making for and find myself looking down the throat of an apparently sheer snow chute. I look away, feeling ill. How did we get so high? This fear is like seasickness, invading mind and body. Hands tighten, stomach lurches, legs feel weak, stare fixedly in front … ‘Gripped’ is the right word for it. One grips and is gripped by an enormous fist of fear. I can’t do this. I’ll have to cry off the Expedition. What a farce. Then angry at myself, at this instinctive fear and revulsion. A clinking sound drifts faintly back. He must be putting in a runner. Good man. Put in a dozen. Stare at the weave in my gloves, the powder snow caught in the cuff of the windsuit. All sharp and vivid, too clear. ‘I’ll put you in controlled freak-out situations,’ Mal had said. ‘You freak out and I’ll control them.’ He knows what he’s doing. You trust him, don’t you? Yes. So nothing to worry about, just don’t make an ass of yourself …
The rope stops paying out. I start untangling myself, take off the descendeur and clip it to my harness. The slack’s taken in, then tugs come down the line. If only we had to face just one moment of truth, not many. Here goes …
‘Good enough, youth.’
I arrive at Mal’s stance and subside, jittering with adrenalin. I’ve just learned that waiting is worst; climbing itself is too novel, too demanding and intense to leave much room for anxiety. Or for memory. Already the last twenty minutes are reduced to a floundering through whiteness, stinging knuckles caught between axe shaft and rock, a flurried impromptu tango when my crampons interlocked, a hurried pull-up, the surge of satisfaction when the pick thuds into frozen turf. All so clumsy and unfamiliar, but something in this lark, perfectly safe really …
Then I look down and that anxiety that is like drowning rushes up to my throat. We’re poised out on the edge of space. Horrible. Unnatural. I shrink back into the slope. Mal points out matter-of-factly that the crampons can’t grip properly this way. Clinging to the slope actually increases the likelihood of falling. I point out this may well be true and would make a sound Buddhist parable, but every instinct in my body shouts at me not to stand upright.
By now the weather’s deteriorating fast; a greenish-grey sky and each gust fiercer than the last. And the pitch above us isn’t filled in with snow and ice – Mal points it out, I shudder and try to sound regretful when he decides we’ve done enough for today. And oddly enough, I suddenly am. He belays my descent along a ridge and down the sheerest slope yet. Perhaps because down is the right direction, I enjoy it and even find the blinding spindrift exhilarating. Then turn outwards and step-plunge down, feeling positively elated. Great to be in the hills, feeling oneself so physically immediate, so simple … And there’s something pleasing in the essence of winter climbing; a rope, axes, crampons, things to wedge in cracks, and with these one can go almost anywhere, in reasonable safety. Pointless maybe, but satisfying. And I like the way in which, quite unlike rock climbing, routes appear and disappear, may only exist for a few days every other year, are never the same twice.
In the valley we find an ice slab and mess around on that, reluctant to pack in for the day. Vertical and all of 12 feet high. My first fall of the day leaves me dangling helplessly from one axe wrist-loop, unable to go up or down, feet six inches off the ground, cursing a Duff helpless with laughter.
As we plod back, the wind redoubles. The combination of spindrift and fresh snow forms drifts in minutes. A couple of gusts simply knock us over. It’s exhilarating. We do not know this is the beginning of the worst blizzard for years in the Highlands and that five climbers will be dead before it’s through.
That evening in the Clachaig the sense of siege and drama mounted like the storm outside as one group after another staggered in, red-faced, dazed, plastered from head to foot, head torches making them look like negatives of miners. I floundered through chest-high drifts to our chalet, passed two tents reduced to mangled poles and shreds of material. And this on the sheltered floor of the valley. Rumours spread rapidly. All roads out blocked … sixteen head torches still on the hill … Mountain Rescue team on four calls at once … Hamish MacInnes stranded in his Land-Rover … someone’s taken a fall, broken his collarbone … We drank on, increasingly aware of Tony and Terry’s absence. They’d left at 5.00 a.m. to go to Ben Nevis. Mal was quite confident in them, but still kept glancing at his watch.
Finally, round 10.30, a small and a tall figure pushed wearily through the door. They looked as if they’d been tested in a wind tunnel, a mangle, a car wash, then hit repeatedly over the head for hours with a particularly substantial edition of Being and Nothingness. Which turned out to be pretty much the case as, drinks in hand, eyes still unfocused, they recounted their epic day. They’d succeeded in doing Vanishing Gully in appalling conditions (‘Very vertical,’ said Tony, eyes wide at the memory of it, ‘very’), abseiled off Tower Ridge where their lowered ropes flew straight up in the air like snakes charmed by the banshee howl of the wind, and made it to the CIC hut, mostly on hands and knees. There, unbelievably, they were refused shelter because they were not members of the Scottish Mountaineering Club, so they had to continue. From the hut to the road, normally an hour’s walk, had taken them six and a half hours of tumbling, rolling, swimming, crawling, through a world gone berserk. ‘I once took two and a half hours on that walk,’ Mal said, ‘and the conditions were desperate. For Tony to take six and a half hours …’ He shook his head. Terry was slumped back, pale now, staring into his pint, completely drained. Tony was starting to recover, and entertained us with the absurdity of nearly being wiped out crossing the golf course (‘Thought we might set a new record’), finally being slammed up against the fence (‘I thought I was going to come out the other side as mince!’), getting to the car and realizing they’d have to dig it out. Then they’d driven through the blizzard, abandoned it on the road, and battered their way through to the Clachaig on foot.
A definite epic, a tale worth surviving for the telling of it. And sitting in that besieged inn in the wilderness, packed with dripping, excited, exhausted climbers, thinking back on the day and listening to the stories go round, I began to see something of what brings them there. Anxiety, adrenalin, physical endeavour, the surge of exultation; a day locked into the mountains, evening in the company of fellow nutters – after this, any other way of spending the weekend would be simply dull.
And one doesn’t have to be a top-level climber to feel this. At any level the rewards and apprehensions are the same. This is what makes them risk life and limb, scrape, borrow, hitch, neglect work, lovers, family, the future. The moment you commit yourself to the next pitch all those ghostly chains of everyday worries fall away. Lightness in the midst of fear; all that exists is the next move, the mountain, and your thudding heart.
Come closing time we are invited into the Snug bar among the late drinkers. Something of a ceilidh starts; guitars come out and the songs go round. And looking round I suddenly see how this was the original bar I’d walked into sixteen years before. The door must have been here, the fireplace there. I see again the dartboard, the Pale Ale, my Glasgow nurse, myself singing out my teenage years into the hubbub of men. The place is recognizable though overlaid with changes. Me too. For a moment I long to go back, to have that night again, though I know