Authors: Slavomir Rawicz
‘Try it,’ bawled Zaro. ‘It’s the easiest way down.’
I sat myself down in Zaro’s track and let go. It was an exhilarating slide down with the wind whistling past my ears. I finished up like Zaro, bellowing with laughter. One after another,
Kolemenos, Mister Smith and Paluchowicz came whizzing down.
The incident remains with me because it was the only part of the whole long journey we covered other than on our feet.
T
OWARDS THE
end of March 1942 we were convinced that at last we were very near the sanctuary of India. Barring our way
ahead reared the tallest and most forbidding peaks we had yet seen. We told one another that one final effort must bring us to the country where we were sure ultimate freedom, civilization, rest
and ease of mind awaited us. Individually we needed all the assurances and encouragement we could get. I was tortured with the fear that the exertion of one more great climb would finish me. I
feared the onset of the insidious sleep on the heights from which there was no awakening. All my fears were sharpened by that shared conviction that after four thousand miles we were near success.
I could not now banish the spectre of bitter failure. With all of us the resources of body and mind were drawn out thin. One shining, incalculable asset remained – the tight, warm friendship
of men together in misfortune. While we remained together hope could not be quenched. The whole, in terms of spirit and resolution, was greater than the sum of its parts.
We sat around a fire made of the last of our hoarded scraps of fuel and ate the last crumbs of our rations. We got out the rawhide rope, the axe, the knife, the wire loops, the slim spikes,
examined them and tested them. We gave ourselves a couple of hours before dark for repairing footwear. When we had finished we were as well prepared for the last assault as we could be. The fire
burned down and became ashes before midnight and we spent a pacing restless night until the first glimmer of dawn. Zaro wound the rope about him, took the axe from Kolemenos and started off. I was
relieved to be on the move.
We were blessed with fair weather. The wind was cold, but the sun shone strongly enough to attack the top layer of snow so that it melted sufficiently to re-form in the freezing night
temperatures into a skin of crisp, treacherous ice. We climbed more surely, more cautiously, than ever before, Zaro double testing every foothold and hand-hold as he led the way upwards, chipping
away with the axe, steam issuing in little clouds from his nose and mouth beneath the mask.
At the beginning of the third day we were over the top, only to find ourselves confronted with another peak. It was the stuff of which nightmares are made. Always it seemed there was another
mountain to block our way. Two days were spent scrambling down the south face from our exposed high perch and I found it more wearing on the nerves than the ascent. Down in the valley we made
ourselves a snow shelter out of the whip of the wind and managed to get ourselves an uncomfortable few hours sleep in preparation for the next ordeal.
This next mountain was the worst in all our experience. From valley to valley its crossing occupied us six days and taxed our endurance to such a degree that for the first time we talked openly
of the prospect that we might all perish. I am certain that one blizzard of a few hours duration would have wiped us out.
Two days up and the top hidden by swirling white clouds, I dug my knife into a crevice to give myself extra purchase in hauling myself up from a narrow ledge. With my body pressed close against
the rock, I loosened each hand and foot in turn so that I could flex my cramped fingers and wriggle my stiff toes. Then I reached for the knife handle above me and began to haul on it with my right
arm. Suddenly the knife sprang like a live thing, leapt from my hand and flew over my head with the steel singing. I took fresh hold and, digging in with fingers and toes, dragged myself to safety.
The knife was gone. There was no sign of it. I felt as though I had lost a personal friend.
Near the summit on the third day the climbing became easier, but we began to doubt seriously whether we could make it. The cold was terrible, eddying mist dropped down about us and lifted,
dropped and lifted again. The effects of high altitude were draining from us what slight reserves of stamina we still had. Every step was a fight against torturing lassitude, making one want to sit
down and cry with weakness and frustration. I could not get enough air into my bursting lungs and my heart thumped audibly, hammering against my chest. Will-power became a flaccid thing. Any one of
us, alone, could have given up thankfully, lay down happily, closed his eyes and drifted into death. But somebody was always crawling on, so we all kept moving. A final refinement of misery was
nose-bleed. I tried to stop mine by plugging the nostrils with bits of sacking, but the discomfort of breathing only through the mouth was too much and I removed the plug. The blood poured down
into my beard, freezing and congealing there.
We knew we should have to spend the night in this rarefied atmosphere and the knowledge did our spirits no good.
‘We must keep going while there’s light,’ Zaro said. ‘We must try to get over the top before dark.’
So we went on and on, painfully, like flies struggling through a pool of treacle. We made long traverses to right and left to avoid the impossible extra exertion of a frontal assault. I do not
remember going over the summit. I remember only the point at which I noticed with vague surprise that Zaro, leading, was slightly below me. We climbed again a little and then we knew with certainty
the descent had begun.
That night was the crisis of the whole enterprise. On a broad, flat ledge where the snow had drifted and piled, we axed through the hard crust of the surface and dug laboriously through a few
feet of snow to make ourselves a barely adequate refuge against the rigours of the night. We had no fire. We were so bone-weary we could have slept literally standing up, but we knew it would be
courting death even to attempt to doze.
It was the longest night of my life. We huddled there standing, with our arms about one another. Sleep lay on our lids like a solid weight and I found myself holding my eyes open with fingertips
pressed against the eyeballs under my mask. Three times Kolemenos, the arch-sleeper, let his chin sag on his chest and began to snore, and each time we punched and shook him back to consciousness.
Each man was his brother’s keeper, watching for drooping eyelids and the nodding head. At intervals we would stamp slowly around in a close ring. Even during this grotesque dance I began to
swim down into beautiful, velvet sleep, but the American dragged me back by gently cuffing me, pulling my beard and shaking me. There came that awful pre-dawn period when fatigue and cold together
combined to set me shivering in an uncontrollable ague from head to foot.
‘Let’s get going,’ said someone. ‘Let’s get down to some place where we can breathe again.’
Paluchowicz spoke. ‘I could not last another night like that.’ He was voicing the thought of us all.
It was barely light, but we broke out and started on our way, Paluchowicz leading and Zaro and I in the rear. Even now I could not convince myself we would make it. Once, around noon, we were
marooned for fully an hour when the track of our descent ended abruptly on a foot-wide shelf over a terrible drop. We inched our way back, climbed upwards in our old tracks and tried again in
another direction. This time we succeeded, but not without great danger and frequent use of the rope and axe.
In about ten hours of gruelling toil we must have come down about five thousand feet before nightfall. Breathing became easier, morale improved, hopes rose a little again. We dragged on through
another depressing, wakeful night and continued the descent the next day until we were able to see the valley below quite clearly.
In the afternoon Zaro said to me, ‘Do you notice anything peculiar about this valley?’
I looked around. ‘No,’ I answered. ‘Why?’
Zaro pointed to a long ridge thrown out from the main body of the mountain away to the west. ‘It is a similar formation to the ridge in which we found the shepherd’s cave.’
I laughed. ‘You don’t think we shall meet another shepherd and his flock?’
‘No,’ said Zaro. ‘But we might find a cave in which we can get a night’s sleep.’
We called the others over and suggested swinging away down the ridge to look for a cave. They agreed readily.
The extraordinary feature of this venture was not that, after a couple of hours search, we found a cave. But the cave was indeed a herdsman’s winter retreat. Unlike the other, it was
untenanted, but there was a stack of brushwood near the entrance and a cached pile of untreated fleeces against the wall at the back, about twelve feet in from the opening. If we had needed a sign
that Providence was still on our side, this was it.
Hanging from a peg in the roof was something parcelled in soft lambskin. Someone lifted it down and unwrapped it. Inside was a leg of goatmeat, partly smoked and nearly black. We were too hungry
to be fastidious. We decided to get the fire going and cook it.
What a fire that was. We stoked it up until the dancing flames lit up the far corners of the cave. Watching the meat cooking, we thawed out for the first time for weeks. Without the knife we had
to do some crude carving with the axe, leaving half the joint to be eaten in the morning and tearing up the rest in strips. Toothless Paluchowicz, without the knife to help him, took longer than
the rest of us to eat his portion, but we all managed to take the edge off our hunger.
In this cave, for the only time since we left Siberia, we helped ourselves to another man’s belongings. We broke out fleeces from the cache and made ourselves a sleeveless surcoat each.
For this I hope we may be forgiven, but our need was great for something which would keep away the mountain cold from our hard-used bodies. We slept the night through in a great communal bed of
warm, smelly sheepskins, and when we awoke the day was already a couple of hours old and the fire had long since died out. Hurriedly we replaced the skins which had made the bed, ate the rest of
the goatmeat cold, and left.
It was profitless to speculate any further on how near we might be to our journey’s end. Not even now were we out of the mountains. The lesser peak we set ourselves to surmount two days
after the cave episode was, had we known it, the last outpost of the Himalayas, beyond which the foothills led down into Northern India. I do not remember any of the details of this last climb, but
I know we pulled ourselves up the northern face for two days without attaining the height that induced altitude sickness. When we started down the other side the sun was shining and the air was
startlingly clear. Far off to the west I could see snow-covered giants which made a modest hill of the eminence on which I stood. Southward the country fell away dramatically. I knew I was looking
at India.
In all our wanderings through the Himalayan region we had encountered no other creatures than man, dogs and sheep. It was with quickening interest, therefore, that in the early stages of our
descent of this last mountain Kolemenos drew our attention to two moving black specks against the snow about a quarter of a mile below us. We thought of animals and immediately of food, but as we
set off down to investigate we had no great hopes that they would await our arrival. The contours of the mountain temporarily hid them from view as we approached nearer, but when we halted on the
edge of a bluff we found they were still there, twelve feet or so below us and about a hundred yards away.
Two points struck me immediately. They were enormous and they walked on their hind legs. The picture is clear in my mind, fixed there indelibly by a solid two hours of observation. We just could
not believe what we saw at first, so we stayed to watch. Somebody talked about dropping down to their level to get a close-up view.
Zaro said, ‘They look strong enough to eat us.’ We stayed where we were. We weren’t too sure of unknown creatures which refused to run away at the approach of men.
I set myself to estimating their height on the basis of my military training for artillery observation. They could not have been much less than eight feet tall. One was a few inches taller than
the other, in the relation of the average man to the average woman. They were shuffling quietly round on a flattish shelf which formed part of the obvious route for us to continue our descent. We
thought that if we waited long enough they would go away and leave the way clear for us. It was obvious they had seen us, and it was equally apparent they had no fear of us.
The American said that eventually he was sure we should see them drop on all fours like bears. But they never did.
Their faces I could not see in detail, but the heads were squarish and the ears must lie close to the skull because there was no projection from the silhouette against the snow. The shoulders
sloped sharply down to a powerful chest. The arms were long and the wrists reached the level of the knees. Seen in profile, the back of the head was a straight line from the crown into the
shoulders – ‘like a damned Prussian’, as Paluchowicz put it.
We decided unanimously that we were examining a type of creature of which we had no previous experience in the wild, in zoos or in literature. It would have been easy to have seen them waddle
off at a distance and dismissed them as either bear or big ape of the orang-outang species. At close range they defied facile description. There was something both of the bear and the ape about
their general shape but they could not be mistaken for either. The colour was a rusty kind of brown. They appeared to be covered by two distinct kinds of hair – the reddish hair which gave
them their characteristic colour forming a tight, close fur against the body, mingling with which were long, loose, straight hairs, hanging downwards, which had a slight greyish tinge as the light
caught them.
Dangling our feet over the edge of the rock, we kept them closely under observation for about an hour. They were doing nothing but move around slowly together, occasionally stopping to look
around them like people admiring a view. Their heads turned towards us now and again, but their interest in us seemed to be of the slightest.