Gapped text

The following spring I went back, this time with a larger team and an earlier start, and reached the summit at eleven in the morning in perfect weather. I stood there for twenty minutes, looking down at the spot where the photograph had been taken a year earlier, and felt, to my considerable surprise, almost nothing at all. The relief, it seemed, had been the real summit.

What I could feel was the pull of the ridge. I had trained for two years for this climb and spent more on it than I care to admit, and the summit was close enough for me to make out the prayer flags left by an earlier team. My two companions, Rafael and Ingrid, were silent; I suspect each of us was waiting for one of the others to speak first.

Those qualities are, after all, largely forms of stubbornness. Nobody reaches the high camps of a big mountain without a capacity to ignore discomfort, to keep moving when every part of them wants to stop, and to treat their own doubts as obstacles to be overcome. The trouble is that the same capacity which carries you up is what makes it so hard to come down.

The question usually comes in one of two forms. People who do not climb want to know how we could bear to come so close and not finish. People who do climb tend to ask, more quietly, what exactly went wrong, as if turning back must imply some failure of equipment, weather or nerve. The truthful answer to both is a good deal less dramatic than either would like.

I do not offer that fact as proof that we were right; mountains are not so obliging as to settle arguments. Climbers have ignored their turnaround times and survived, and others have kept to them and died anyway. Good decisions and good outcomes are not the same thing, and a great deal of nonsense is talked about the mountains by people who confuse the two.

Two years ago, one of them sent me a picture taken on the same ridge, from almost exactly the same spot. In the background, the summit looked unchanged. In the foreground were four figures, and beneath it she had written a single line: ‘One o’clock. Turned round.’ It is pinned beside mine.

Every expedition sets a turnaround time, and every expedition knows it is the rule most likely to be broken. Ours was one o’clock, agreed in the comfort of base camp three weeks earlier, when the summit was an abstraction and stopping short of it seemed merely prudent. At half past one, with the top in plain view, it seemed something else entirely: an arbitrary number dreamt up by people who had never been there.

The descent took nine hours, two more than we had allowed for. Somewhere above the top camp, Rafael’s oxygen regulator froze and had to be thawed inside his suit, a delay of forty minutes that, had we gone on to the summit, would have left us on the steepest part of the ridge after nightfall. We reached our tents at a quarter to eleven, and I remember very little of the rest of that night.