Bright Air - Barry Maitland [45]
We continued in this way, stage by stage, through the day. Our climbing styles were very different, Luce free and confident, swinging out into space on the end of a sling, while I stuck as close to the wall as I could. Anyone studying us would have wondered what a natural climber like her was doing with a dunce like me, but at least, slowly and doggedly, I was getting there. At each belay point the views became more breathtaking, and the sense of being suspended on a vast white vertical surface more intoxicating. By the time I climbed up to join Luce at the head of the fifth pitch we were three-quarters of the way to the top, and I was finally confident that I was going to make it, weak as my body felt, and terrifying as the void beneath me looked. She said something about leading the next pitch again, but I felt it was time I showed some initiative, and I waved her aside and moved to the first hold. She spoke again, but there was a singing in my ears and I didn’t hear her properly. It was late afternoon now, and the wind was sharper up there, and cold. She repeated something about a tricky corner about fifteen metres above us, and I nodded and set off, muttering to myself, ‘Balance and rhythm, focus and momentum …’
When I came to the tricky corner I suddenly realised what she’d meant. I looked down, and saw that it was bottomless. I had to step from one face to the other across a thousand feet of void—the height of the Empire State Building. I hesitated, trying to clear the giddiness from my head, and then my legs began to shake violently. They call this ‘sewing machine leg’ or ‘disco leg’, when your weight concentrated on the edges of your feet causes the leg muscles to spasm and convulse uncontrollably. Afterwards Luce told me that as soon as she saw it she knew I was going to fall. I urged myself to move forward, but I simply couldn’t. For a breathless moment I was suspended there, and then, gripped by sick panic, I felt my feet give way, my fingers drag across the rock, and my body topple backwards off the wall.
Once I realised that I was gone, that there was absolutely nothing I could do, my terror faded. In a kind of appalled calm I watched the cliff face accelerating past me and then jerk to a violent stop as my rope caught in the highest of the three wedges I’d driven in on my way up. But the brutal force of gravity wasn’t going to give me up so easily, and with a sickening ping the wedge flew out of its crack and I continued down, moving faster. The rope snagged the next wedge and it too failed—ping—and the next—ping. All my protection was gone now, ripped out of the rock by the accelerating momentum of my fall and I was tumbling free, past Luce who was desperately trying to haul my rope through her belay brake. Too late, I thought, the belay anchors will go and then she’ll be pulled off too. We’re going to die together on Frenchmans Cap.
But the belay anchors, solidly implanted in the rock by Luce, didn’t give way. My rope jarred abruptly tight and I bounced and spun and smacked my head against the rock, and finally was still, dangling fifteen metres below her. I’d dropped the height of a ten-storey building.
I hung there, dazed and shocked, and gradually became aware