Fiva by Gordon Stainforth

Author:Gordon Stainforth
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781594858475
Publisher: The Mountaineers Books
Published: 2012-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

About an hour later

We’ve now climbed three shortish pitches from the bivvy boulder, varying in length between about seventy and a hundred feet. We’ve been climbing like complete automatons, with all our emotions, if not completely switched off, pushed to one side as irrelevant. It has all passed in a blur of determination. We are totally focussed. We have scarcely spoken a word. The only sounds have been the chimes of the peg hammer pinging off the huge side walls.

I’ve managed to construct a good belay in the crack between the snow and the rock of the left wall at the top of the third pitch, just below the steep section where it all went so horribly wrong last night. Near the beginning of this pitch I passed a distinct scoop in the icy surface of the snow, a strange dent, like a bash in the side of an egg shell. Obviously that’s where my first bounce was.

“OK, I think it’s time now for me to take over,” John says when he reaches me.

I’m only too happy to hand over the lead. I’ve restored my nerve, and feel that to some extent I’ve redeemed myself. I can see that John’s rather keen for me not to lead the next pitch. I suppose because it would be a bit like tempting fate. He’s probably also thinking there’s a risk I might be tempted to use an ice-axe belay again, or something. As a twin, of course, I can read his mind perfectly.

So I give him the ice axe, holding it sideways in both hands with my arms extended, as if I’m presenting him with a special gift. It’s very precious, this talisman of all our hopes, this key to our survival. It might as well be the Golden Bough. In return, I take his peg hammer, which he thrusts at me with considerably less formality. With its ridiculous little spike. (No wonder he fell off climbing with that!) It certainly doesn’t deserve any pomp or ceremony.

John wastes no time and sets straight off, keen to get it over with, it seems – and knowing that, from where I’m belayed, he will be able to reach easier ground at the top of this pitch. But he’s not taking any chances. Just below the scene of his fall, visible as a great pear-shaped hole in the surface ice, he manages, rather boldly, to lean across the fragile left edge of the snow and get a peg in the rock wall for a running belay. Ping – ping – ping – ping – ping! It really is a most reassuring sound at this point. Then, without further ado, he makes some new steps to the left of the hole, and in a matter of minutes he’s following my previous steps, and making it look for all the world as if he’s walking up stairs. The myth of his alleged inferiority at climbing on snow and ice is dispelled with few brandishes of his ice axe.

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