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also without a sack. The mountain is now completely still; all the angels have
fallen. Once on top of the big chockstone, I haul the two heavy sacks up hand-over-
hand. Voytek shouts down to leave them for Alex. I explain this will save time
rather than Alex needing to jumar three times with each one. He understands and
takes the sacks up to his stance twenty feet higher.
It is getting dark when I reach the stance and lead through. A bulging, narrow
chimney ends in a hand-jamming crack filled with ice. I nearly fall off the final
overhang, but don't, because I am forty feet up and there is no protection. Now a
forty-five degree rocky ramp leads right. A couple of hundred feet above, like look-
ing through a gun sight, I can see the last of the evening light.
We scramble and climb our way up the exit ramp with headtorches spraying light
left and right, to escape the muzzle of the cyclotron. At the top we emerge into a
planetarium - the stars are spread above us. We have cracked the main difficulties
of the wall. We take renewed care, as we do each night, dig into our sacks, drop
nothing, put sleeping bags behind perched blocks, boil up borscht and noodles,
settle in, try to get comfortable.
Day four: When I open my eyes in the clear dawn, I discover why it has been a
draughty night. An icy breeze is venting upwards from a 4,000-foot hole in the
world just over my left shoulder. Above us, like a golden ice cream cone, 3,000 feet
of new wall awaits, basking in the morning sun.
The climbing is pleasant, up a mixture of slabs, short rock walls and melting ice
fields. At times, we scramble together unroped to increase speed. In this way, we
gain 2,000 feet and stop in the late afternoon to take an early bivvy on a comfort-
able and safe ledge. It is time to catch up on eating and sleeping, which have been
in short supply the past three days. Once again we share our three-man bivvy sack.
Day five: The weather remains perfect, but the wall steepens into more technical
ground. At breakfast, I bandage my fingers with tape to cover the deepest lacera-
tions. Once again Alex takes up the rear and jumars as Voytek and I take three
leads each before swapping over, repeating the routine as the mountain falls away
beneath us. We are rising above the surrounding peaks. The seemingly endless
ridges of the Hindu Kush march in ranks toward the two main peaks at the eastern
end of the range - Noshaq and Tirich Mir, eighty miles away as the eagle flies.
We still can't see the final ice field and the fearsome summit cornices. They are
hidden behind a 200-foot wall that caps the lesser ice field we are now climbing.
The sun swings away; the rock cools noticeably in my hands. We pull down jackets
