A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (3 page)

‘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.

Then Pamela was gone, soon to be followed by Hugh.

After what seemed an eternity it was Judith’s turn. I had her belayed but at this stage it wasn’t much use: I remembered the Doctor’s warning. ‘The leader must not fall off.’ Then she vanished. I continued to pay out the rope. There was a long interval and I heard her shout very distantly to come on and the rope tautened.

It was impossible to get on to the rock without getting at least one foot wet.

Very slowly I worked my way out to the corner of the
Sepulchre.
As I edged round it into what seemed to be empty space I came on to the part with good exposure, the part that always gave Pamela a thrill. Below me was a huge drop to the rocks and as I came round the wind blew my hair into my eyes.

Two more pitches and we were on the top. I felt a tremendous exaltation. Sitting there on a boulder was a man in a bowler hat and white collar smoking a pipe.

‘Early closing in Caernarvon,’ Judith said.

‘He looks like an undertaker to me.’

‘We shall have to hurry, it’s Pamela’s day to serve tea.’ We went down a wide gully, then raced down the scree to the car. The others were waiting for us. The girls were pleased, so were we. Only the man with the bowler hat weighed on my mind. I asked Hugh if he had seen him.

‘Which man? We didn’t see a man.’

‘Now you’re making me feel like one of those school-teachers at Versailles.’

‘We saw the other party, but we didn’t see a man in a bowler hat.’

As we were leaving for London, Judith gave me a little pamphlet costing sixpence. It showed, with the aid of pictures, the right and wrong ways of climbing a mountain.

‘We haven’t been able to teach you anything about snow and ice,’ she said, ‘but this shows you how to do it. If you find anything on the journey out with snow on it, I should climb it if you get the chance.’

‘I wish we were coming with you,’ she added, ‘to keep you out of trouble.’

‘So do we,’ we said, and we really meant it. Everyone turned out to say goodbye. It was very heart-warming.

‘You know that elderly gentleman who lent you a pair of climbing boots,’ Hugh said, as we drove through the evening sunshine towards Capel Curig.

‘You mean Mr Bartrum?’

‘Did you know he’s a member of the Alpine Club? He’s written a letter about us to the Everest Foundation. He showed it to me.’

I asked him what it said.

‘He wrote, “I have formed a high opinion of the character and determination of Carless and Newby and suggest that they should be given a grant towards the cost of their expedition to the Hindu Kush.”’

Eleven days later I arrived with Wanda in Istanbul. As we drove along the last long stretch of road, lurching into the potholes, the Sea of Marmara appeared before us, green and windswept, deserted except for a solitary caique beating up towards the Bosphorus under a big press of sail. Our spirits rose at the thought of seeing Istanbul when the sun was setting, but when we reached the outskirts it was already quite dark. We had planned to enter the city by the Golden Gate on the seaward side, for it sounded romantic and appropriate and we had been stoking ourselves all the way across Europe with the thought of it, not knowing that for several hundred years the gate had been sealed up. Instead we found ourselves on an interminable by-pass lined with luminous advertisements for banks and razor blades. Of the wall constructed by Theodosius there was no sign. It was a fitting end to an uncomfortable journey.

We left the car in the courtyard of the old Embassy and changed our money with one of the gatekeepers. We asked him where we should stay.

‘Star
Oteli
, clean
Oteli
, cheap
Oteli
, good
Oteli
,
Oteli
of my brodder.’

‘Is it far?’

‘Not so far; take taxi, always taxi. Bad place, at night bad menses and girlses.’

‘Order a taxi.’

He uttered some strange cries. As if by magic a taxi appeared. It was driven by a huge brute with a shaven head; sitting next to him was another smaller man. They were a sinister pair.

‘What’s the other one for?’

‘He is not for anything. He is brodder.’

‘They don’t look like brothers.’

‘He is brodder by other woman.’

With a roar the taxi shot forward. After fifty yards it stopped and the brother opened the door.

‘Star
Oteli
.’

With sinking hearts we followed him up a nearly vertical flight of stairs to the reception desk. I prayed that the hotel would be full but it wasn’t. We set off down a long brilliantly lit passage, the brother of the gatekeeper leading and the brother of the taxi man bringing up the rear to cut off our retreat. The doors on either side were open, and we could see into the rooms. The occupants all seemed to be men who were lying on their beds fully clothed, gazing at the ceiling. Everywhere, like a miasma, was the unforgettable grave-smell of Oriental plumbing.

‘Room with bed for two,’ said the proprietor, flinging open a door at the extreme end. He contrived to invest it with an air of extreme indelicacy, which in no way prepared us for the reality.

It was a nightmare room, the room of a drug fiend perhaps. It was illuminated by a forty-watt bulb and looked out on a black wall with something slimy growing on it. The bed was a fearful thing, almost perfectly concave. Underneath it was a pair of old cloth-topped boots. The sheets were almost clean but on them there was the unmistakable impress of a human form and they
were still warm. In the corner there was a washbasin with one long red hair in it and a tap which leaked. Somewhere nearby a fun-fair was testing its loud-hailing apparatus, warming up for a night of revelry. The smell of the room was the same as the corridor outside with some indefinable additions.

After the discomforts of the road it was too much. In deep gloom we got back into the taxi. The driver was grinning.

‘Pera Palace!’

As we plunged down the hill through the cavern-like streets, skidding on the tramlines, the brothers screwed their heads round and carried on a tiresome conversation with their backs to the engine.

‘Pera very good.’

Never had a city affected me with such an overpowering sense of melancholy.

‘No.’

‘Very good Istanbul.’

‘Very good taxi.’ We were heading straight for a tram that was groaning its way up the hill but passed it safely on the wrong side of the road.

I asked if anyone was ever killed. ‘Many, many, every day.’

‘How many?’

‘Two million.’

At the Pera Palace we took a large room. Originally it must have had a splendid view of the Golden Horn, now there was a large building in the way. We sent our clothes to the laundry and went to bed.

There had been no news of Hugh at the Embassy, but before sinking into a coma of fatigue, we both uttered a prayer that he would be delayed.

Early on the following morning he was battering on our door. He had just arrived by air and was aggressively fit and clean.
Between his teeth was a Dunhill pipe in which some luxurious mixture was burning; under his arm was a clip board full of maps and lists. His clothes had just the right mixture of the elegant and the dashing. He was the epitome of a young explorer. We knew what he would say. It was an expression that we were to hear with ever-increasing revulsion in the weeks to come.

‘We must leave at once.’

‘We can’t, the wagon’s got to be serviced.’

‘I’ve already arranged that. It’ll be ready at noon.’

Like survivors of an artillery bombardment we were still shaking from the spine-shattering road we had taken through Bulgaria. What the pre-war guide had described as ‘another route’.

‘It’s been rather a long drive.’ We enumerated the hardships we had undergone, how we had been stripped by customs officials on the Yugoslav frontier, the hailstones as big as pigeons’ eggs in the Balkans, the floods, landslips, mosquitoes, all the tedious mishaps of our journey; but lying in our splendid bed we were not objects for obvious sympathy.

‘I shall drive. You two can rest.’

‘You don’t seem to realize,’ I said, ‘there’s no rest in that machine, there’s so much stuff in it. After a bit we were fighting one another to drive. Besides, damn it, we want to see Istanbul.’

‘You can always see Istanbul some other time. It’s been here for two thousand years.’

‘You mean
you
can always see it another time.’

He looked at his watch reluctantly.

‘How long do you want?’

Only Wanda had the courage to answer. ‘Three days,’ she said.

We grew fond of the Pera Palace; the beds had big brass knobs on and were really comfortable. Our room seemed the setting for some ludicrous comedy that was just about to begin. Probably it
had already been played many times. It was easy to imagine some bearded minister of Abdul Hamid pursuing a fat girl in black stockings and garters round it and hurting himself on the sharp bits of furniture. In the bathroom the bath had the unusual facility of filling itself by way of the waste pipe without recourse to the taps. We watched this process enthralled.

‘I think it’s when the current’s running strongly in the Bosphorus.’

‘It can’t be that. It’s warm.’

‘Why don’t you taste it?’

‘I can’t remember whether the Bosphorus is salt or not. Besides it’s a very curious colour sometimes.’

It was Wanda who discovered the truth. I found her with her ear jammed hard against the wall of the bathroom.

‘It’s the man next door. He’s just had a bath. Now he’s pulled out the plug. Here it comes.’

For the second time that day the bath began to fill silently.

By contrast the staff were mostly very old and very sad and, apart from our friend in the next bathroom, we never saw anyone. There was a restaurant where we ate interminable meals in an atmosphere of really dead silence. It was the hotel of our dreams.

Three days later we left Istanbul. The night porter at the Pera Palace had been told to call us at a quarter to four; knowing that he wouldn’t, I willed myself to wake at half past three. I did so but immediately fell into a profound slumber until Hugh arrived an hour later from his modern
Oteli
up the hill, having bathed, shaved, breakfasted and collected the vehicle. It was not an auspicious beginning to our venture. He told us so.

There was a long wait for the ferry to take us to Scutari and when it did finally arrive embarkation proceeded slowly. Consumed by an urgent necessity, I asked the ferry master who bowed me
into his own splendidly appointed quarters, where I fell into a delightful trance, emerging after what seemed only a moment to see the ferry boat disappearing towards the Asian shore with the motor-car and my ticket. At the barrier there was a great press of people and one of three fine-looking porters stole my wallet. It was the ferry master himself who escorted me on to the next boat, ‘
pour tirer d’embarras notre client distingué
’ as he ironically put it. For the second time in my life I left Europe penniless.