A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

‘How do they go? I’ve forgotten.’

‘Easy, moderate, difficult, very difficult, severe, very severe, exceptionally severe, and excessively severe.’

‘Oh.’

While we were eating our sandwiches the Doctor began to describe what he called ‘The Free Rappel’. More than a year has passed since, for the first and last time, I practised this excruciatingly painful method of descending the face of a mountain. Even now I am unable to remember it without a shudder. Like the use of the bayonet, it was something to be learned, and if possible, forgotten for ever.

‘You first,’ said the Doctor. In dealing with him we suffered the disadvantage that he wasn’t retained at some handsome fee to teach us all this. He was in fact ruining his holiday, in order to give us a slightly more than even chance of surviving.

‘Put a sling round the tree and run the double rope through it; now pass it round your right thigh, between your legs; now up the back and sling it over your left shoulder so that it falls down in front. That’s right. Now walk backwards to the edge, keep the rope taut. Now keep your legs horizontal and walk down.’

I walked down. It would have been perfect if only the face of the cliff had been smooth; unfortunately it was slightly concave, which made it difficult to keep my legs at right angles to the face. I failed to do so, slipped and went swinging backwards and forwards across the face like a pendulum, with the rope biting into my groin.

‘Well, you’ve learned one lesson,’ Hugh said cheerfully, when I reached the bottom after disengaging myself from the rope and swarming down in a more conventional manner.

‘If it’s a question of doing that again or being castrated by Mahsuds, I’ll take the Mahsuds. My groin won’t stand up to much more of this.’

‘You must be very sensitive,’ Hugh said. ‘Lots of girls do it.’

‘I’m not a girl. There must be some other way. It’s impossible in thin trousers.’

After a large, old-fashioned tea at the inn with crumpets and boiled eggs, we were taken off to the Eckenstein Boulder. Oscar Eckenstein was a renowned climber at the end of the nineteenth century, whose principal claim to fame was that he had been the first man in this or any other country to study the technique of holds and balance on rock. He had spent his formative years crawling over the boulder that now bore his name. Although it was quite small, about the size of a delivery van, his boulder was said to apparently embody all the fundamental problems that are such a joy to mountaineers and were proving such a nightmare to us.

For this treat we were allowed to wear gym shoes.

Full of boiled egg and crumpet, we clung upside down to the boulder like bluebottles, while the Doctor shouted encouragement to us from a safe distance. Occasionally one of us would fall off and land with a painful thump on the back of his head.

‘YOU MUST NOT FALL OFF. Imagine that there is a thousand-foot drop under you.’

‘I am imagining it but I still can’t stay on.’

Back at the inn we had hot baths, several pints of beer, an enormous dinner and immediately sank into a coma. For more than forty hours we had had hardly any sleep. ‘Good training,’ was Hugh’s last muffled comment.

By this time the waitresses at the inn had become interested in this artificial forcing process. All three of them were experienced climbers who had taken the job in the first place in order to be able to combine business with pleasure. Now they continued our climbing education.

They worked in shifts, morning and afternoon, so that we were climbing all the time. We had never encountered anything quite like them before. At breakfast on the last day, Judith, a splendid girl with auburn hair whose father had been on Everest in 1933, told us what she had in mind. ‘Pamela and I are free this afternoon; we’re going to do the Spiral Stairs on Dinas Cromlech. It’s an interesting climb.’

As soon as we could get through our breakfast we looked it up in the Climbing Guide to the Snowdon District, Part 6.

‘Dinas Cromlech,’ said the book,

is perhaps the most impressive cliff on the north side of the Llanberis Pass, its massive rhyolite pillars giving it the appearance of some grim castle … all routes have surprising steepness … on the whole the rock is sound, although on first acquaintance it may not appear to be so.

Spiral Stairs was described as ‘Very difficult’ and as having ‘an impressive first pitch with good exposure’. At the back was a nasty picture of the Cromlech with the routes marked on it. Besides Spiral Stairs there was Cenotaph Corner, Ivy Sepulchre and the Sexton’s Route. It sounded a jolly spot.

‘I wish we were doing Castle Gully. It says here, “a pleasant vegetable route”.’

‘They might have decided on Ivy Sepulchre,’ said Hugh. ‘Just listen to this. “Two hundred feet. Exceptionally severe. A very serious and difficult climb … loose rock overhangs … progress is made by a bridging type of lay-back movement, an occasional hold of a doubtful nature appearing now and then.” He doesn’t say what you do when it doesn’t.’

‘What’s a lay-back?’

‘You were doing a lay-back when you fell off the Eckenstein Boulder.’

‘This is only the beginning, it gets worse. “At this point the angle relents …”’

‘Relents is good,’ I said.

‘“… to a small niche below the conspicuous overhang; no belay. Start the overhang by bridging. The climbing at this point is exceptionally severe, strenuous and in a very exposed position.” It goes on and on! “A short groove leads to the foot of an old rickety holly tree and after a struggle with this and the crack behind it, a good hold can be reached on the left wall.”’

‘I wonder why everything seems to end with a rickety old holly tree.’

We decided to have a quiet morning. Just then the other two girls appeared loaded with gear.

‘Hurry up,’ they said, ‘we’ve got to be back by half past twelve. We’re going to take you up The Gauge. You made a nonsense of it, the Doctor said. And you’ve both got to lead.’

That afternoon, as Judith led the way up the scree from the road towards the base of Dinas Cromlech, we felt that if anything the guide book, in spite of its sombre warnings, had not prepared us for the reality. It was as if a giant had been smoothing off the sides of a heap of cement with a trowel and had then lost patience and left it half finished. Its most impressive feature was a vast, right-angled wall, shiny with water and apparently smooth.

‘Cenotaph Corner,’ said Judith, ‘Hundred and twenty feet. When you can do that you really will be climbers.’

It seemed impossible.

‘Joe Brown led it in 1952, with Belshaw. Joe’s a plumber in Manchester. He spends every moment he can here. You remember how awful it was last winter when everyone’s pipes were bursting? In the middle of it he left a note on the door of his house: “Gone climbing. Joe Brown.” People nearly went mad.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘In the Himalayas.’

We looked at what he had climbed with awe.

There were already three people on Spiral Stairs. I could see what the book meant by ‘good exposure’. At that moment one of them was edging his way round the vertical left-hand edge of Cenotaph Corner.

‘That’s the part that always gives me a thrill,’ said Pamela, the other girl. ‘Pity. Let’s not wait, let’s do Ivy Sepulchre instead.’

‘Oh, Pamela, do you think we ought to? It may be too much for them.’

She made us sound like a couple of invalids out on the pier for an airing. Nevertheless, this was no time for stubborn pride. I asked Hugh if that was the climb we had been reading about at breakfast. He said it was.

‘I think Judith’s right,’ I said. ‘It may be too much for us.’

As we waited in the cold shadow under the lee of the Cenotaph, Judith explained what we were going to do.

‘The beginning’s rather nasty because of that puddle. It makes your feet slippery just when they need to be dry. We’ll climb in two parties. Pamela will lead Hugh, I’ll lead you. The first part’s seventy feet; round the edge of the Cenotaph it’s very exposed and you’ll feel the wind. Don’t come on until I shout and you feel pressure on the rope. I’ll be belayed then. Even if you come off you won’t fall far.’

‘What happens if someone does come off? You can’t just leave them hanging.’

‘Send for the fire brigade,’ said Judith.

Both girls were shuffling their boots on the rock like featherweight boxers.