Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man's Miraculous Survival

by Joe Simpson

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. - T.E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

I became aware of the silence and the solitude of our position.

I knew what it meant to be isolated from people and society. It was wonderfully calming and tranquil to be here. I became aware of a feeling of complete freedom - to do what I wanted to do when I wanted to, and in whatever manner. Suddenly the whole day had changed. All lethargy was swept away by an invigorating independence. We had responsibilities to no one but ourselves now, and there would be no one to intrude or come to our rescue…

It was healthy to be a little scared, and good to sense my body responding to the fear. We can do it, we can do it… I kept repeating like a mantra whenever I felt that hollow hungry gap in my stomach.

I carried on above him, sweating now, the morning cold driven off. Head down, keep looking at your feet, swing, swing, hop, look at your feet, swing swing… all the way up a smooth 150 feet, no effort, no headache, feeling on top of the world. I drove in the screws, seeing the ice crack, split and protest - drive in, solid, clip in, lean back, relax. This was it! I felt the flow, the heat and blood and strength flowing. It was right.

A giddy, dragging sensation urged me to lean further out over the drop, pulling me down at the snow-ice sweeping away below. Looming over, with my stomach clenched, and a sharp strong sense of danger, I enjoyed the feeling.

Simon was grinning broadly. I needed no explanation for his good humour. It was one of those moments when everything came together, and there were no struggles or doubts, and nothing more to do but enjoy the sensation.

We took the customary summit photos and ate some chocolate. I felt the usual anticlimax. What now? It was a vicious circle. If you succeed with one dream, you come back to square one and it's not long before you're conjuring up another, slightly harder, a bit more ambitious - a bit more dangerous. I didn't like the thought of where it might be leading me.

in some strange way, the very nature of the game was controlling me, taking me towards a logical but frightening conclusion; it always unsettled me, this moment of reaching the summit, this sudden stillness and quiet after the storm, which gave me time to wonder at what I was doing and sense a niggling doubt that perhaps I was inexorably losing control - was I here purely for pleasure or was it egotism? Did I really want to come back for more? But these moments were also good times, and I knew that the feelings would pass. Then I could excuse them as morbid pessimistic fears that had no sound basis.

My good humour vanished, to be replaced by worry, when he showed his fingers to me. One fingertip was blackened and three other fingers were white and wooden in appearance. Funny how my anxiety seemed to have more to do with whether he would be able to carry on climbing after we got down rather than concern for his injuries.

The possibility of a cornice collapse gradually faded from my mind as I moved, and I became resigned to the helplessness of our situation.

In a rushing drop, I suddenly found myself standing upright but with my eyes level with the snow. The shallow fissure was filled with powder, so that however hard I thrashed about I seemed to make no upward movement at all. Eventually I managed to haul myself back on to level ground. From a safe distance Simon had watched my struggles with a grin on his face. I moved farther along the ridge and sank down again neck-deep in the snow. I yelled and cursed as I clawed my way back on to the ridge and, by the time I had traversed half-way across the plateau above it, I had fallen into another four small crevasses. However hard I tried, I could not see any tell-tale marks indicating their presence. Simon was following a full rope's-length behind. Frustration and the mounting exhaustion maddened me to a fury which I knew would be vented on Simon if he came close enough.

He told me very calmly that he had broken his leg. He looked pathetic, and my immediate thought came without any emotion, You're fucked, matey. You're dead… no two ways about it! I think he knew it too. I could see it in his face. It was all totally rational. I knew where we were, I took in everything around me instantly, and knew he was dead. It never occurred to me that I might also die. I accepted without question that I could get off the mountain alone. I had no doubt about that.

He shuffled across the slope, head down, completely enclosed in his own private struggle. Below him I could see thousands of feet of open face falling into the eastern glacier bay. I watched him quite dispassionately. I couldn't help him, and it occurred to me that in all likelihood he would fall to his death. I wasn't disturbed by the thought. In a way I hoped he would fall. I knew I couldn't leave him while he was still fighting for it, but I had no idea how I might help him. I could get down. If I tried to get him down I might die with him. It didn't frighten me. It just seemed a waste. It would be pointless. I kept staring at him expecting him to fall…

It was tempting to think I could survive falling down it, yet I knew that despite there being evenly angled snow all the way, the speed of the fall would rip me to shreds long before I reached the bottom. I thought of falling down it anyway, but it meant nothing to me. I felt no fright at the idea. It seemed such an obvious and unavoidable fact. It was academic really. I knew I was done for. It would make no difference in the long run.

The trench made it easier, but it still needed total attention. It struck me that we were both avoiding the issue. For over two hours we had acted as if nothing had happened. We had a silent agreement. It needed time to work itself out. We both knew the truth; it was very simple. I was injured and unlikely to survive. Simon could get down alone. While I waited on his actions, it felt as if I was holding something terrifyingly fragile and precious. If I asked Simon to help, I might lose this precious thing. He might leave me. I remained silent, but it was no longer for fear of losing control. I felt coldly rational.

I wondered whether to unrope. I didn't want to, even though logic told me the rope wouldn't save me now. If I fell I would take Simon with me, but I couldn't bring myself to dispense with the comforting reassurance of the rope.

I could do to bring the agony to an end. Howling and screaming for Simon to stop achieved nothing; the blame had to lie somewhere, so I swore Simon's character to the devil.

He was still grinning, and his confidence was infectious. Who said one man can't rescue another, I thought. We had changed from climbing to rescue, and the partnership had worked just as effectively. We hadn't dwelt on the accident. There had been an element of uncertainty at first, but as soon as we had started to act positively everything had come together.

I forgot about it ending, and gave myself up to the pain.

He let me down with a rush and I cried out as my boot caught in the snow. I was looking at him when I cried out. He remained expressionless, and continued to lower me. He had no time for sympathy.

I wondered how often it had occurred to him that the seats might collapse at any moment. I was beyond caring about such things, but Simon knew all the time that he could descend alone quite safely if he chose. I began to thank him for what he was doing, and then quickly stopped myself. It would only emphasise my dependence on him.

As he spoke he reached out and caught hold of my waist, tugging me gently towards him. He was careful, almost tender, in the way he spun me round so that I was facing out from the slope when I came to a stop beside him. He clipped me into a second ice screw that he had placed beside the one on which he was hanging, and directed my uninjured leg to a foothold that he had hacked from the ice. I realised then that he had been fully aware of the pain he had been putting me through, and this concern was a quiet way of saying, it's all right. I wasn't being a bastard. It just had to be done.

I want never gets, I told myself, but it didn't work.

I was interested in the sensations, wondering idly how it would take me. At least it wouldn't hurt - I was glad of that; the hurting had worn me out and it felt so calm now that it was over.

Each thought of death, of mine or his, came quite unemotionally - matter-of-fact. I was too tired to care.

Eventually I dozed and spent a few troubled hours lost in sleep between waking hours of thinking. Thinking blind in a dark, storm-swept cave. Thinking because my mind refused to sleep, or because I was so pumped-up on strain and fear and dread. Thinking, Joe's dead, I know he's dead, in a monotonous litany, and then not thinking of him as Joe any more, only the weight gone off from my waist so suddenly and violently that I couldn't fully grasp it all.

With the coming of day I thought of what I must do. I knew I wouldn't succeed. It wasn't right for me to succeed. I had thought it all through. This was what must happen to me now. I was no longer afraid, and the dread in the night had gone with the dawn. I knew I would attempt it, and I knew it would kill me, but I was going to go through with it. There would be some dignity left to me at least. I had to try my best. It wouldn't be enough, but I would try.

So! It ends here. Pity! I hope somebody finds us, and knows we climbed the West Face. I don't want to disappear without trace. They'd never know we did it.

Everything slowed and softened. Thoughts became idle questions, never answered. I accepted that I was to die. There was no alternative. It caused me no dreadful fear. I was numb with cold and felt no pain; so senselessly cold that I craved sleep and cared nothing for the consequences. It would be a dreamless sleep. Reality had become a nightmare, and sleep beckoned insistently; a black hole calling me, pain-free, lost in time, like death.

The rest of me went quietly mad while this calm voice told me what was happening and left me feeling as if I were split in two - one half laughing, and the other looking on with unemotional objectivity. After a time I realised it had all stopped, and I was whole again.

I thought carefully of the end. It wasn't how I had ever imagined it. It seemed pretty sordid. I hadn't expected a blaze of glory when it came, nor had I thought it would be like this slow pathetic fade into nothing. I didn't want it to be like that.

In a peculiar way it was refreshing to be faced with simple choices. It made me feel sharp and alert, and I looked ahead at the land stretching into distant haze and saw my part in it with a greater clarity and honesty than I had ever experienced before.

I looked at their show of grief. They angered me. What right had they to feel sad? I had been through all that, and didn't like to be reminded.

I had burnt myself out completely. It occurred to me that I was nearer to death than when I had been alone. The minute I knew help was at hand something had collapsed inside me. Whatever had been holding me together had gone. Now I could not think for myself, let alone crawl! There was nothing to fight for, no patterns to follow, no voice, and it frightened me to think that, without these, I might run out of life.

Ultimately, we all have to look after ourselves, whether on mountains or in day to day life. In my view that is not a licence to be selfish, for only by taking good care of ourselves are we able to help others. Away from the mountains, in the complexity of everyday life, the price of neglecting this responsibility might be a marriage breaking down, a disruptive child, a business failing or a house repossessed. In the mountains the penalty for neglect can often be death.

Ninety per cent of accidents are down to human error. We are fallible, and accidents will happen. I suppose the trick is to anticipate all the possible consequences of what you set out to do so that, if things do go wrong, you are better able to stay in control.

I wanted to run away. I sat down and tried to calm myself. Externally I appeared quite normal. Inside I was feeling hysterical.

Then I saw the West face of Siula Grande and felt a tremor of fear. It was bigger and meaner and so much more threatening than I remembered. It made me wonder at the person I had been all those years ago. I must have been bold, ambitious or even a little crazy to have considered such an undertaking. I traced the line of our ascent and watched the snow pluming off the north ridge in the strong high-altitude winds. It scared me. Where had all that drive and passion gone? How had I lost that sense of invincibility, the confidence born of youth, too much testosterone and too little imagination? As I turned from the face and trudged up the jumbled moraine fields on the glacier I consoled myself with the thought that at least I was here; a little greyer round the temples, only a little wiser, but at least I was here.

I had always been a little sceptical about the very idea of post-traumatic stress disorder. It seems that everyone gets it nowadays and I was suspicious that it had become a catchall to provide exculpation from the past and a convenient way of suing for compensation. Why were not millions of people paralysed by post-traumatic stress disorders after the first and second world wars, both soldiers and civilians alike who bore witness to the most appalling experiences imaginable on a scale never before encountered? Certainly by the Second World War 'shell-shock' had been recognised as something other than 'lacking moral fibre'. Perhaps the difference then was that people did not live in the ghastly blame and compensation culture that we do today. So it came as some surprise to be told on my return from Peru that I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Apparently it is common practice for psychotherapists to make a victim recount as vividly as they can the full horrors of their experience. With each telling of their real story it gradually becomes a fiction, becomes someone else's experience, and they can separate themselves from the trauma. In short the hard-wired neural pathways to the amygdala, the fear centre, are blocked or at very least by-passed.

Life can deal you an amazing hand. Do you play it steady, bluff like crazy or go all in? I'll never know.