The Beckoning Silence Read Online Free Page A

against a flake of rock. In the past I might have felt that this was what it was all about. This was where you defined yourself, balanced tenuously between life and death. As I stood shakily on a fragile ledge of frozen vegetation all my justifications for climbing seemed suddenly meaningless.
    It had been nothing more than a gamble. And for what? The right to say we had climbed a grade V ice route in a dangerously unstable condition. We could justifiably claim that it was grade VI, even grade VII. Technically we had both climbed harder routes but never at such risk. Accidents happen because we are all fallible. We make mistakes, we misjudge conditions, we overreach ourselves, but after all the years of accidents and deaths and mountains climbed, we should at least have learned when to back off. It wasn’t as if the situation suddenly engulfed us and we had no choice but to deal with it. We knew everything was wrong and yet we came back, ignored our intuition, and did it anyway.
    It wasn’t worth our lives. The whole notion of ‘Deep Play’ – the gambling theory of extreme risk-taking when the gambler stands to lose far more than he could ever possibly win – may well be an apt description of some levels of climbing, but playing the game in reality now seemed a conceited and ridiculous enterprise.
    However, when I reached Tat’s stance it was difficult not to be infected by his bubbling enthusiasm and pleasure.
    ‘Hiya, kid,’ Tat smiled and gave me a vigorous one-armed hug that nearly knocked me off the stance. I grabbed at the belay slings to steady myself.
    ‘Good lead, bloody good lead,’ I said.
    ‘It was thin.’
    ‘The wire fell out,’ I said bluntly.
    ‘Thought it might,’ Tat nodded cheerfully.
    ‘I thought you were off, you know?’
    ‘It was close,’ he agreed. ‘But the placements felt good. You climbed it pretty fast.’
    ‘Two pints of adrenalin helps,’ I retorted. ‘As does having a rope above you. I don’t think we should have done that. We nearly died.’ I looked hard at Tat and he was suddenly serious.
    ‘Maybe.’ He seemed defensive, as if recognising that we had gone too far.
    ‘I thought you were tired of risks. You said dying wasn’t worth it.’
    ‘Never has been.’ Then he shrugged and couldn’t suppress the grin. ‘But we’re not dead and we have done it, so what’s the problem, eh? Come on, let’s do the rest of it.’ He handed me the wires, pitons and ice screws, impatient to get on. ‘Up and to the left and then it curves round into that narrow rocky gully.’ He pointed across a short ice flow leading into an obvious rocky gash.
    Forty-five minutes later I was abseiling from a tied-off ice screw back down to where Tat was belayed. A shower of ice particles was sweeping the gully. The sun had hit the top of the face.
    ‘Sorry, Tat,’ I said feeling ashamed of my second retreat in two days. ‘The ice ran out. It was good at first then became wet and thin. After that there was nothing – just a 15-foot-high, smooth rock gully. No cracks, no wires. I couldn’t climb it.’
    ‘Right,’ Tat smiled at me, still buzzing from his success. ‘Better get out of here.’
    ‘Eh?’ I was taken aback. ‘But don’t you want to try it?’
    ‘No.’ He began sorting the tangle of ropes into two separate coils. ‘If you couldn’t do it, I probably couldn’t. Come on, let’s go.’
    We abseiled swiftly back down to the safety of the snow cone. As we trudged down to the car I marvelled at Tat’s equanimity. I had expected a repeat performance of yesterday’s moody disappointment. At very least I had expected some criticism about letting him down again. As we bundled the gear into the boot, Tat stopped to look up at the route.
    ‘We’ll do it next year,’ he announced.
    ‘If it’s in condition,’ I qualified warily.
    ‘Of course.’
    I knew there was no ‘of course’ about it. Knowing Tat as I did, we would be back the next year and we would do