Touching The Void - Dialogue Transcript
Touching The Void Script
We climbed 'cause it's fun.
And mainly it was fun.
And we were fairly anarchic
and fairly irresponsible, and we didn't give a damn about
anyone else or anything else,and we just wanted to climb
the world. And it was fun.
It was just brilliant fun.
And every now and then it went
wildly wrong. And then it wasn't.
To climb mountains that have not been
climbed before, or a new route at a mountain is what my climbing life
had been moving towards.
There's a great unknown there.
What's so compelling is
stepping into that unknown.
I got to know Simon quite well.I don't know whether it was
because of his personality, or whether it was because he
was more forgiving towards me,
being a non-climber in that environment.
But I found it very
hard to get to know Joe.
I was much more ambitious
about doing it than Simon was.
Siula Grande meant a lot.
We knew, a number of
expeditions had failed on it.
If no one had tried, it
wouldn't be quite the same.
It was the the fact that people had
tried and failed, so we knew it was hard. And my feeling was, "Well, we'll
just do it. We're better than them."
This is what we live for. I love the actual movement of climbing. When you're climbing well
it just feels brilliant. It's like a combination
between ballet and gymnastics. It's that mixture of power and grace.
Simon - For me, mountains are the most beautiful places in the world. When I go into these places I
feel an amazing sense of space, an amazing sense of
freedom, when I get away from all of the clutter that we have in the world.
means that you put an immense amount of trust in someone else's skill and ability.
If your mate falls off then all
this gear rips out, you're dead, you're gonna go with him. If you're gonna do that sort of climbing
at some point you're gonna have to rely wholly on your partner.
DAY 2
There's not a lot of risk
in our lives normally now. And to put an element of risk back
into it takes us out of the humdrum. In that sense, it makes
you feel more alive.
Not only is it technically difficult
and unstable and frightening,
It is some of the most precarious, unnerving
and dangerous climbing I've ever done.
"Oh sod it, we've done the face," "now I can't really be bothered
to go all the way up there" And then we thought, "Hang
on, we've come all this way,we might as well stand on the top"
I don't particularly like summits,
because % of accidents happen on descent.
It all got a bit out of
control. That stage of things. Half an hour to an hour after
leaving the summit, we were lost.
"I found the ridge, Joe!" (after falling down it)
And that night, as we made
a brew, the gas ran out.
Day 3
And I was pretty confident that we'd
get back down to the base camp that day.
And I swung, and the pick
went in, and it just made a... just a strange sound. And I thought, "Well, I'll take
it out, make a good placement."
The pain is... came
flooding down my thigh
and my knee was very, very very painful
The impact drove my lower leg
straight through my knee joint.
As the bone went into my tibia it
split the tibial plateau straight off and carried on up.
Quite wild, the pain now. I
couldn't cope with it at first.
and I just thought, "fuck,
I can't have broken my leg"
"If I have broken my leg I'm dead."
And I thought, maybe I
was being a bit whacked…
I tried to stand on it I felt all the bone go, all grating and
everything and I knew it was broken then.
The look that he gave
to me sticks in my mind.A look of shock and desperation
and a sort of terror.
Simon "If he slips off the side of the mountain now, then I can just clear off,
"and leave him and get myself down and I don't have to have all the hassle, of trying to deal with him and with the situation we're in".
He gave me these painkillers which
were effectively headache tablets.
And he didn't really
talk about anything.
It was almost as if he...
He knew, what this meant.
He knew, and I knew, that he
was going to have to leave me.
I didn't think we really seriously
thought that there was any choice
Even "If one of them is dead", not
"which one do I want to be dead", but if one comes back,
who do I want it to be? It's kind of, quite cold
to say it, but I guess I would rather have it
would have been Simon.
The Lower - Excruciatingly painful.I can remember feeling angry with
him because he was hurting me,and I was thinking "do it slow", and I also knew that he had to do
it this fast. He hadn't got a choice. And he was very grim faced,
I remember looking at him,
off with the whole thing.
I couldn't take too much notice
unfortunately of these cries of pain, because we got to go down.
Joe - What he did was quite extraordinary, and I've never heard of any single
handed mountain rescue like that.
And we just lost control at this point because we couldn't dig a snow cave, and risk getting trapped by
a storm that didn't break.
It was all starting to look up in many ways
at that point, as we were virtually down.
"maybe after this one we will have
one more, and we'll be on the glacier".
And suddenly all got hard
on my elbows, and icy, and it got steeper, going down a
slope and suddenly it's steeper, and I just was full of alarm. I was screaming at Simon to stop as loud
as I could, and he just couldn't hear me.
I did notice that more
weight came onto the rope,
but didn't really think a lot
about this. And I just thought Well, he's going over
some steeper ground"
'cause I knew, that there wasn't
enough rope to get me to the bottom.
Nothing I can do, and I
felt completely helpless. And really angry. There was nothing I could do.
Simon - I couldn't get the weight off the rope, I was just there, and this went
on for maybe an hour and a half, during which time my position
became more and more desperate. I was struggling to maintain the,
sort of shivery seat that I sat in, and the snow was gradually
sliding away from under me. So my position was getting desperate.
I think psychologically I was beaten.'Cause there was nothing I could do, so I just hung on the
rope and waited to die. And I think I would have died pretty soon,
actually. The wind chill was very low.
Simon - I was expecting him to come off,
and couldn't do anything about it.
he just didn't know. But he knew, I
think, pretty sadly, that he was gonna die. Then I remembered that I've got a
pen knife in the top of my rucksack. I took the decision pretty quickly. To me, it just seemed like the right
thing to do under the circumstances.
Because there was no way that
I could maintain where I was, sooner or later, I was going
to be pulled from the mountain.
It was an awful night. My mind was plagued with the
thoughts of what had happened to Joe. It took a long time to warm myself
up. And I didn't properly, I guess. Had a very, very cold night. The overriding memory is just feeling
desperately, desperately thirsty.
To the point where I felt I could
smell the water in the snow around me.
Joe - I was pretty surprised to be alive.
The head torch beam just
went down, and down, and down, and the darkness just ate it, just gone. I felt very unnerved,
very very vulnerable.
But I felt sure he was dead.
And it didn't mean anything.
As soon as I saw it,
I knew it had been cut. I thought, "you're gonna die in here". I had a pleased feeling, that
it meant that Simon was alive.
You don't die of a broken leg.
It was dark, and it began to get to me. There is something about crevices, they have a dread feel, not
the place for the living.
I turned the light on again,
'cause I didn't like it in the dark.
I felt very, very alone. And I was very scared.
This is childish. I
just cried and cried.I thought, I'd be tougher than that. It was getting light, as it was or .
Just a horrible feeling of dread.
Simon - By this stage, I strongly felt that
Joe had been killed the previous day. And that now I was going to
die, as some form of retribution.
But rather than just sit here,
feeling sorry for myself or whatever, "I'll get on with it and
I'll die on the way down".
should have gone and looked…
I was just convinced he was dead.
Joe
Absolutely convinced, by totally
convinced, that I was on my own.
I was brought up as a devout Catholic. I had long since
stopped believing in God. I always wondered, if things really hit
the fan, whether I would, under pressure, turn around and say a few Hail
Mary's, and say "get me out of here". It never once occurred to me. It meant that I really don't believe. And I really do think that when you die,
you die. That's it, there's no afterlife. There's nothing.
It was only when I got off the glacier,
I realized that I was going to get down, I was going to get out of it, I was gonna live.
Joe I can't really describe how
scary the night had been. I thought, it would
be like that, for days. You gotta make decisions, you gotta keep making decisions, even if they're wrong decisions.
If you don't make
decisions you're stuffed.
The other option was
to just to sit there, blindly hoping that somehow it might get better, and I just knew it wasn't going to get better.
I was horrified at the thought
that it was just empty down there.
Simon - There werre all these sort of thoughts swirling around in my mind, guilt, worry, thinking about how on earth am I going to explain this to Joe's parents, my friends, to Richard.
The thought did cross my mind that
maybe I could think up a decent story, that would make me look better. And I did quite think about
that, for quite a while.
But he looked absolutely horrendous. You wouldn't recognize him.
And I said, "Where is Joe?"
And he just said, "Joe is dead".
I told him the whole story, as we walked back to the camp,
I told him the whole story of what had happened.
Joe
I think it's as big as the
St. Paul's dome in scale.
And it was shining, just this
big beam of sunlight coming in. This was the way out
I'd been looking for!
But I inevitably went
onto my broken leg. I feel the displacement go, the bone move, so every hop I nearly faint. It was just excruciatingly painful.
And it was a bright sunny day. Wow, the whole world has come back. I was Iying on the snow, just laughing. That was the relief of
getting out that place.
Just no way, just no way
you're physically gonna do that. And then it occurred to me that
I should set definite targets. I started to look at things and think, "right, if I can get to that
crevice over there in minutes", "that's what I'm gonna do".
If I got there in minutes I
was hysterically happy about it, and if I'd gotten or minutes, I
was upset almost to the point of tears,and it became obsessive.
I don't know why I did it, I think I knew the big picture of what had happened to me, and what I had to do was so big I couldn't deal with it.
All these huge mountains
around you, big mountain walls. And they do make you
feel small and vulnerable. And you wonder whether there's some malign presence out to get you.
It was like somebody was just teasing an ant, and putting something
in its way all the time, and eventually gonna stand on it.
And I started to get very desperate.
I carried on crawling in the dark, a stupid thing to do on the slope of the glacier. But I was frightened and I was just trying to see Simon's tracks.
Day 5
It was probably me, who brought
up the subject of leaving.
Partly 'cause I was worried about Simon. I just felt it was best to get as far away
as possible from where it had happened. I didn't want to leave immediately,
Simon - I felt I needed a day or two
just to collect my thoughts, and to regain some strength. Spend a long time washing myself. That felt good, to wash my hair and to wash my face, to have a shave, to...get the... get the remnants, the mountain out of my system.
Joe - I'd fallen virtually every hop, and it's just like having your leg broken about every time, and I remember looking back where I'd come from, it was just over m,
I can be insanely stubborn. And I do like to have things my way. And things were seriously not
going my way over these days.
Once I decided I was going to
get that distance in minutes, I bloody well was gonna do it.
It seemed like there was a very cold, pragmatic part of me that was saying"You have to do this, this and this, if you're gonna get there".
It was quite insistent, and quite clear. It was almost like a voice or a separate part of me, telling me to do something. Very uncaring. No sympathy,no acknowledgement of the fact that I might be tired or hurt. It was very, very odd.
That part of me kept saying, "Keep
moving, stop resting, keep moving",
and the other part of me, my