Death Zone Page 4

  That is when Brian surprised everyone, not least himself.

  Overweight, inexperienced at altitude, seemingly hopelessly out of condition, Brian reached a high point of 7,600 metres on the North Ridge before altitude and exhaustion forced him back not far from camp five. Puffing and blowing, swearing and cursing, Brian’s ordeal was so faithfully recorded by cameraman David Breashears that you almost needed an oxygen cylinder on hand just to watch it.

  It did what very few Himalayan mountain films had ever done before: it made altitude, the enemy, real. The viewer could see with Brian’s every faltering step, with every gulping breath, the overwhelming physical and mental battle he faced. The antithesis of the cool, experienced, professional mountaineer, Brian’s performance was one that the viewer could relate to.

  Brian went high, higher than anyone had imagined he could. He was pushing his luck, and so was the film. By the time he turned back, he was right on the edge. Fortunately he had David Breashears by his side, an extremely strong Himalayan climber with two Everest summits to his name. Breashears’ cool-headed decision-making undoubtedly saved Brian from acute altitude sickness, frostbite, or worse. Painfully slowly, Brian was escorted back to advance base camp where a highly relieved John Paul Davidson waited with the rest of the team.

  Having survived the expedition, and seen for himself the sacred mountain on which his hero, Mallory, disappeared, Brian might have been expected to hang up his climbing boots and return to acting, satisfied that a lifetime’s ambition had been fulfilled. But the siren call of Everest proved too strong. In 1993 Brian went back, and this time he was going for the summit.

  For this new attempt he joined a commercial expedition run by the Sheffield-based company Himalayan Kingdoms. Along with ten other team members, Brian would attempt the southern side of the mountain, from Nepal, the same route that took Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing to the summit in 1953. The expedition would rely heavily on Sherpa support to establish high camps, where oxygen, food, and cooking gas would be waiting. Each team member paid £22,000.

  In March 1993, the expedition flew from London to Kathmandu and trekked up through the Khumbu valley to base camp where the eight-week climb began.

  If Brian’s performance on the ‘Galahad’ expedition was impressive, his effort in 1993 was truly astonishing. By far the oldest member of the team at fifty-seven, Brian made a high point of 8,300 metres, above the South Col, just 500 metres from the summit.

  During the descent from the South Col, Brian and several others narrowly escaped death when an avalanche swept down the face of Lhotse and wiped out camp five, 7,500 metres, which they had occupied just hours before.

  Back in Kathmandu the team had much to celebrate, and so did Brian. The expedition leader Steve Bell had put eight members on the summit, a record for a commercial Everest expedition, and Brian had proved once again that he had the endurance to perform strongly at extreme altitude. By pushing himself above the magic 8,000-metre mark without using supplementary oxygen, he had achieved a considerable feat … one that hinted, perhaps, of even greater things to come.

  Three years later, now in his sixtieth year, Brian had signed up for his third Everest expedition, again with Himalayan Kingdoms. This time would take him back once more to the northern, Tibetan side where the ‘Galahad’ film had been shot six years before.

  Then he had approached as an enthusiastic novice, completely unacquainted with the devastating effects of altitude and with little experience to fall back on when things got tough. Now he had the experience of two Everest expeditions to draw on, including that impressive performance above 8,000 metres on the southern side. Brian’s high-altitude curriculum, for a man of his age, indicated a real talent for going high, and there was no doubting his boundless enthusiasm for the task at hand.

  But would that be enough? Could Brian summit? Or had he reached his ceiling during the 1993 expedition – a personal best beyond which he could never climb?

  For me, this question was a vital one to resolve. I didn’t want to make a film which covered the same ground as ‘Galahad of Everest’, I wanted this film to go the whole way, right to the summit, and to bring back pictures of Brian on the top.

  Brian had no doubts. ‘This time I’m going to go for it, Matt. By God I’m going to do it!’

  Brian’s coffee sat completely untouched before him. In his hands, he twisted the venerable ice-axe to and fro like a cheerleader’s baton, knocking the business end periodically on to his kneecap with a resounding ‘clung’ to reinforce a point.

  ‘I’ll get on the oxygen much earlier. That was my mistake on the southern side, I was too fucking proud to strap that mask on. But this time I’ll use the gas, and I’ll make it, and you’ll be there with me to film it! It’ll be the greatest Himalayan film there’s ever been!’

  General Bruce’s ice-axe sliced through the air with a dramatic flourish;

  ‘What about you, Matt? Are you a bit of a man for the mountains?’

  ‘A bit, yes.’ I gave Brian my most modest smile.

  In fact for someone contemplating making a film on the North Face of Everest my mountain experience was decidedly patchy. My towering achievements so far were limited to just two summits; a Himalayan trekking peak called Pokalde, 5,700 metres, and an obscure Ecuadorean volcano of about the same height. To serious Himalayan mountaineers these are mere nodules, amusing warm-up molehills to be gobbled before breakfast.

  Climbing them had been extremely difficult.

  More alarming than these dubious triumphs were the ignominious failures that dotted my climbing curriculum. My track record wasn’t just flawed, it was criss-crossed with vast, gaping chasms, huge, shadow-filled gorges of bumbling flops and incompetent failures.

  Amongst the most astounding of these – so much so that I am almost proud of it – was a solo attempt to climb Ben Nevis in October 1981 when I was a university student at Durham.

  It started encouragingly enough. Leaving on a Friday afternoon, I hitchhiked up to Edinburgh and then across to Glasgow. As night fell, a rainstorm began, and progress ground to a halt. By 2.30 a.m., I was stuck just north of Dumbarton, soaked to the skin, and feeling very sorry for myself. Very few cars were about, and those that were showed no sign of stopping.

  Remembering a motorway service station a few miles back down the road, I decided to beat a tactical retreat south and wait there until dawn. As I walked, I put out my thumb, just on the off chance of a lift.

  To my astonishment, a vehicle stopped. It was a motorhome converted from an old fish-and-chip van. A family welcomed me inside, and commiserated on my plight. When the driver heard I was heading for Ben Nevis, he proposed a different plan. Climb Snowdon instead.

  The family were heading home to Flint, on the North Welsh coast. They could drop me there at first light, leaving an easy hitch along the A5151 towards Bangor, and then a quick raid down into Snowdonia from where the mighty peak itself could be swiftly and triumphantly conquered.

  It was warm inside the van and, subject to my taking off my dripping outer raingear, a bunkbed was on offer. Snowdon it was. Ben Nevis could wait. (In fact it still does. I haven’t climbed it to this day.)

  When I woke up in Flint, I found the couple’s daughter – she must have been about eight or nine – had covered me with a blanket as I slept; ‘I thought you looked cold,’ she said and then gave me a Mars bar for breakfast.

  The ‘easy’ hitch along to Snowdonia proved a lot more elusive than anticipated, and it was almost midday by the time I was dropped off at Betys-y-Coed. A low blanket of cloud shrouded the national park, reducing visibility to less than a few hundred metres. The mountain itself was sulking, nowhere to be seen, and I had no maps and no money to buy any.

  Having consulted a national park map in a car park, I set off into a fine mist of drizzle in the direction of Snowdon. For two hours I battled my way along a boggy path which stayed stubbornly in the valley floor. I kept telling myself it would surely start to rise soon.
The path then degenerated further as it entered more marshy terrain. I found myself hopping from one tussock of bogweed to another. Glutinous wallow-holes of black slime lurked on either side.

  The cloud thickened as I lost the trail completely. I began fighting my way upwards through fields of sour-faced sheep, crossing stone walls and getting snagged on barbed-wire fences. Eventually, with just an hour of murky daylight left, I collapsed against the rusting carcass of a derelict tractor and conceded defeat. Snowdon can wait, I thought.

  In my pack was a quarter-bottle of Southern Comfort. I drank it in less than half an hour, then ate a packet of Jaffa cakes and a Scotch egg. Feeling distinctly queasy, I then beat a retreat off the mountain … if indeed I was on the mountain at all … reaching the safety of tarmac as night fell.

  Having hitchhiked through the night, I arrived red-eyed and exhausted in Durham on the Monday morning just minutes before lectures began. Strangely, despite the stinging shame of having failed to climb anything, I considered it an excellent weekend.

  The one part of my mountain history which did give a glimmer of hope, and the one about which I now told Brian and Julian was my time as a trekking guide. In the summer of 1984 I ran a series of mountain treks through the High Atlas mountains in Morocco for the adventure holiday company Explore Worldwide.

  Every two weeks a new group flew into Marrakech via Paris. I would sit in the airport cafe drinking pastis with Philippe, a French guide for a rival trekking company, and watch the new arrivals walk off the plane. Philippe had a talent for spotting members of his own group and delighted in a running commentary as they emerged; ‘That’s one of mine,’ he would state confidently, each time a pretty girl emerged.

  Elderly women, or those who did not meet Philippe’s demanding standards got a: ’That’s one of yours’.

  Most infuriatingly, Philippe was almost always right. ‘Le Trekking’ was chic in France at that time, and his groups did indeed seem to include unusually high percentages of gorgeous girls. Mine had unusually high percentages of whiskery old matrons and bearded librarians from Solihull. Seen on the trail, Philippe’s groups were a glittering fashion parade of skin-tight cycling shorts and wrap-around reflector sunglasses. Mine wore moleskin britches and hairy army surplus shirts from Millets.

  At the airport Philippe would deliver a parting shot: ‘As usual, Mathieu, I have ze gazelles … and you have ze goats! See you in two weeks.’

  Then, having effortlessly manoeuvred the pick of the crop into his turbocharged Toyota, Philippe would roar off into the night with his gazelles, leaving a vapour trail of diesel fumes and Chanel behind him.

  These irritations aside, my time as a trek leader in the High Atlas was time well-spent. I learned that strange things happen when people and mountains meet. The treks were not so hard, rarely more than six hours of walking each day, but in the heat of a Moroccan summer they could be demanding enough. In the High Atlas I watched personalities change, just as the mood of the mountains changes from one valley to the next.

  Mountains peel layers away like a car being dismantled at a scrapper’s yard. They strip off veneers and shells, leaving just the distilled essence of a person behind … the chassis on which the body panels are bolted. Seemingly placid group members could burst into sudden, violent, rages. Hard-talking Glaswegian hit-men could be reduced to tears. Mousey matrons could become mountain lions, thundering up peaks and down valleysides at superhuman speeds.

  In the middle of this dynamic, shifting entity, is the trek leader, encouraging, cajoling, informing, and trying to prevent one member from ripping another’s head off when personalities clash. It was psychologically demanding, physically exhausting, and filled with the gentle, ironic humour which seems to be an inevitable consequence of the British once they find themselves in a group. I loved it, especially when a lone, and particularly lovely gazelle did finally walk off the Marrakech plane with an ‘Explore’ baggage tag on her rucksack.

  ‘Mine,’ I told Philippe. He was spitting with rage.

  But trekking is not climbing, and Toubkal, 4,165 metres – the greatest peak in the High Atlas – would be a mere ink dot on a map of the Himalayas.

  In short, I was seriously underqualified to join an Everest expedition of any description, let alone one to the technically difficult, vast North Face. As previously mentioned, I had never climbed the highest mountains in Britain, nor had I reached the summit of any peak in the Alps. I had never taken a formal climbing course or even properly learned the rudiments of ropework.

  Worse again, was my tendency to make mistakes. Unfolded maps fly from my hands in the gentlest of breezes, carabiners mysteriously drop off harnesses, water bottles leap out of rucksack pockets and hurtle down ice slopes without warning. I have set fire to tents, dropped sleeping bags into freezing rivers, and lost enough pairs of sunglasses to stock a medium-sized store. Such clumsiness is inconvenient at lower altitudes but above 8,000 metres it can kill you.

  ‘I’ll just set my sights on base camp,’ I told Brian, ‘and leave the high-altitude shooting to a specialist cameraman.’

  ‘Nonsense.’ Brian was adamant. ‘You’ll be with me the whole way. Once you get out there and see that great shining pyramid sitting at the top of the Rongbuk glacier, she’ll have you in her spell.’

  So saying, Brian delivered a knuckle-crunching farewell hand-shake and left for a voice-over session in a Soho studio.

  *

  ‘You think it can work?’ Julian poured out the dregs of the coffee.

  I had liked Brian tremendously but, looking at it as a film-maker, the project still had some major question marks hanging over it.

  ‘I think I need to do some research. There’s no point in going ahead unless we’re absolutely sure Brian can make a summit attempt. If he does, and we can find a way to shoot it, it’ll be really something. If he doesn’t make a summit attempt, we’ll be left with a remake of “Galahad” and I don’t want to do that.’

  Julian gave me a week to make up my mind.

  I began to canvas opinion on Brian’s chances. I spoke to some of Britain’s top high-altitude specialists and they all said the same thing. Based on Brian’s impressive altitude record, he could make a summit attempt if all went well with weather and logistics.

  On a professional level I was now inclined to take the offer, and there were other, more personal reasons why ten weeks in Tibet was an attractive idea at that particular time.

  My marriage, eleven years old, was cracking at the edges, in the middle of a crisis which I desperately needed to resolve. Everest, I began to realise, could give me the space I needed to sort out the mess.

  3

  I met Fiona in 1981, my first year at Durham university but it took me a while to realise how much I fancied her. I was studying Archaeology and Anthropology, she did General Arts, so our paths didn’t cross that often in the lecture halls … in fact neither of us went to many lectures anyway.

  Fiona had a cheeky smile, a cascade of unruly black ringlets and a penchant for ambitiously short skirts. She smoked Benson and Hedges cigarettes, bit her nails to the quick and drank so much gin and tonic that a friend once bought her five shares in United Distillers as a birthday present. On the tennis court, even after half a bottle of Pimms, she was still capable of smashing the best players in the university. She never joined any of the college teams, probably because she couldn’t be bothered. I thought that was very cool.

  Every time I caught a glimpse of Fiona she always seemed to be floating past on a punt polled by a brilliantined Old Etonian, or drinking champagne in the late summer sun on the university green with a bunch of people wearing velveteen cummerbunds.

  Occasionally we met at parties, and we knew each other well enough to say hello in the street, but I was very wary of Fiona’s ‘Ra’ friends and that was a problem no matter how much she made me laugh. My social world revolved around the exploration society which, in the second year at Durham, I was now running. My friends were travellers a
nd wanderers and dreamers who spent every last waking moment of the day poring over maps depicting places they could not possibly afford to visit. Fiona’s world revolved around the college drama scene and the laddish beer-swilling fringes of the university rugby team – a social set which I absolutely went out of my way to avoid. We didn’t have a single mutual friend.

  There was another barrier between us at the time we first met. Fiona was involved with someone else, and I was involved with several someone elses. My personal life was going through one of its periodic entanglements in which a long-term relationship, a medium-term relationship and a couple of extremely short-term relationships were variously, and simultaneously, collapsing, reigniting, climaxing, imploding, or simply grinding to an ignominious halt.

  Given all the above, the chances of a relationship with Fiona were looking shaky to say the least, but all that was to change unexpectedly with a three-minute conversation we had after a chance meeting in the street. I think it was the only time I ever saw her carrying a book. We walked together across one of the city’s many bridges and, on a sudden impulse, I asked her if she wanted to come to the Lake District for a weekend camping in the mountains with some friends. To my surprise she said yes immediately.

  And that was how it began.

  I fell for her in a big way. Some weeks later, on Midsummer’s Eve, we shared our first kiss halfway through a bottle of Theakston’s cider on a hilltop overlooking the soot-encrusted spires of Durham. The sun was setting and the air was filled with pollen and dandelion fluff. I was suffering from a violent attack of hay fever. Midway through the kiss I had a sneezing attack.