Summit Fever. Andrew Greig

in the 1920s, seeing the colossal Grey Man of Ben MacDui, the early days of the Scottish Youth Hostel movement, escapades in Ardnamurchan, taking the first motorcar over the old drove road to Applecross, hurrying five miles across a snowbound moor in the dead of winter to deliver a baby in an Angus bothy …

      And vitality came back to him like a fitful companion as he talked, and I sensed it was all happening again for him, behind the eyes of this most unsentimental of men. It had been these tales, together with his recollections of dawns in Sumatra and hurricanes in the China Seas, that had first made me long for my own adventures, for those experiences of youth that nothing, not even extreme old age, can take away from you as long as you breathe.

      Listening to him confirmed in me what I’d always known. When it came down to it, I’d take the chance.

      ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Kath?’

      ‘Yes.’

      Pause. Me leaning on the door frame, her grinning on the settee.

      ‘We’re going then?’

      ‘Yes.’

      And that was the decision made, in an instant, on an impulse. The impulse of life that says, ‘Why not?’

      Mal had just gone out the door, and taken most of my reservations with him. He’d filled us in on more details, and they were largely reassuring. He’d promised my Glencoe initiation would not be terminal. I was very aware that my life would depend largely on his priorities and his judgement; in the end, on his character. I’d been watching and listening to him closely. I’d liked him from the start for his great enthusiasm for life. He was interested in practically everything, not just climbing. Now I sensed behind the casualness considerable determination. Behind the romantic was a hard-nosed realist. Behind the restless energy that kept his fingers tap-tapping a cigarette and his right knee jumping as he sat, there was a sense of self-possession. These were not nervous mannerisms, but those of someone who revved his way through life. The sardonic grin, the offhand climber’s humour, the thoughtful frown into the mug of coffee – they all seemed in balance with each other.

      He struck me as the kind of person who might get you into scrapes but would probably get you out of them again. (And how prophetic that turned out to be!)

      I’d trust him.

      A deciding factor was Kathleen’s inclusion. She asked if she could come along with the trekking group who were to accompany us on the walk-in to Mustagh, and cover her costs through writing articles about her trip. Just flying a kite … Mal took it quite seriously and said he saw no reason why not, subject to Rocky’s agreement.

      We hadn’t actually said Yes to him but, grinning wildly at each other, we knew we’d decided.

      The world was transformed. Being alive felt dramatized and vivid, vibrant with challenge. We couldn’t sit still. Adrenalin propelled us outdoors into a mild November night. We walked fast and aimlessly past moonlit stubble fields, dark cottages, a hunched country church. An owl glided between us and the moon. An omen? The night felt huge and elating as we talked, half giggling, spilling out plans, images, anticipations and fears.

      It was like being a teenager again. The same pumped-up energy, the fancies and fantasies swirling through the body, the sense of the world being wide open and there to be explored. The ordinary things around us seemed vivid and precious, shining as the map Kathleen drew with a finger dipped in beer on a polished table in the Hawes Inn that night. ‘Here is Pakistan,’ she said, ‘and here’s Islamabad where we fly to.’ She wetted her finger again and drew a squiggly line. ‘And here, I think, are the Karakoram.’

      We sat and stared at the table, silent for a minute as the crude map of our future shone then faded.

       2

       A Glencoe Massacre

      A novice is initiated 20–26 January 1984

      As we head north on icy roads in mid-January, Mal enthuses about the conditions. A substantial fall of snow, a slight thaw, now freezing hard. ‘Glencoe will be crawling with climbers this weekend.’ I’m less enthusiastic; if anyone will be crawling this weekend, it’ll be me. The van heater is broken so I huddle deep in my split-new climbing gear, watching our headlights skew out across deepening snow. We don’t speak much, each absorbed in our own thoughts.

      I’m keyed up, anxious yet oddly elated. To shut out the cold I mentally run through everything Mal had shown me about the basic mechanics of snow and ice climbing, in the warmth of his flat a day before. It had been quite bewildering – the knots, the principles of belaying, the extraordinary array of ironmongery, the pegs, pins, channels, screws, plates, nuts, crabs, slings … An evocative litany but especially confusing when everything seemed to have several alternative names. This was starting truly from scratch.

      I try to review it all logically. First, the harness. I smile to myself in the dark. With our harnesses belted on and the full armoury of the modern climber dangling from them, we’d looked like a cross between gladiators and bondage freaks. Then the rope; I tried to picture again the basic figure-of-eight knot used for securing the rope through the harness loops.

      Then the basic sequence of events for climbing. The leader climbs up, more or less protected by his second, who’s on a hopefully secure stance at the other end of the rope. When the leader reaches a secure position somewhere near the rope’s full extent, he in turn protects the second who climbs up after him. Simple and reasonably safe. At least, I hoped so.

      We’d rehearsed it on the passage stairs. We stood roped together at the bottom of the stairs. Mal tied a ‘sling’ – a loop of incredibly strong tape – through the bannister and clipped it to my harness with an oval metal snaplink, the karabiner or ‘krab’. This secured my belay stance. Then he took the rope near where it came from his harness, threaded it through a friction device, a descendeur, and clipped that to my harness. Then with a ‘see you at the top, youth’ he solemnly walked up the stairs while I paid out the rope through the descendeur. About 20 feet up he stopped and pointed out that if he fell now, he’d fall 40 feet in total before the line between us came tight. ‘So I put in a “runner”.’ He looped another sling round a bannister rail, then clipped a krab to it, with the rope running freely through the krab. If he fell now, he’d only go down twice the distance he was above the runner till he was brought up short by the tight rope between us being looped through the karabiner.

      I thought about it a couple of times till the logic of it sank in. Yes, it made sense. The runner was there to limit the extent of the leader’s fall.

      It was at this point a woman came bustling up the stairs and gave us a very strange look.

      With the merest blush, Mal continued on up, putting in a couple more runners till he got to the top. There he tied himself securely to the rail. ‘On belay!’ The cry floated down the spiral staircase. I unclipped the descendeur, tried to remember the appropriate call. ‘Take in slack!’ I shouted. He took in the rope till it came tight between us. I waited as he put his descendeur onto the rope. ‘Climb when you’re ready!’ With some difficulty I unclipped myself from my belay stance, shouted ‘Climbing!’ and set off up after him.

      Some 20 feet up I was going great guns, then was suddenly brought up short with a jerk. I couldn’t go any further. ‘Try taking out my runner,’ Mal called down. Of course, the first runner was preventing me from continuing above it. I unclipped the krab, untied the sling and continued.

      At the top, we shook hands most movingly.

      And that seemed to be the basic principle and practice of belay climbing. I hoped I’d remembered the calls correctly. I mumbled them over a few times in the freezing van. The rest of the gear – the pitons in various shapes and guises, the screws and nuts – were for use when there was nothing convenient to loop a