ALWAYS THE SUN - One Day as a Tiger - page 141

Far below, Alex's headtorch sways dimly in the blowing snow, like a distant
freight train, shunting upwards. Three hours later, at midnight, I finish making
soup with powdered potato and then make hot chocolate, passing a final drink to
Alex in his hammock. Aching with cold, I place a single 'Friend' in a flared slot in
the rotten overlap above and hang my hammock from it, there being no possible
piton placements. This is the first time I have ever placed a Friend. [3] It seems a
miracle tool. It takes thirty minutes to arrange the hammock, set the flysheet, and
then carefully transfer all my hopes for comfort and survival - my sleeping mat,
my bag, my spare clothes - from my sack into the canoe-like hull. Once I have
manoeuvred inside, the hammock seems warm and secure, held open by hollow
spacer-tubes. Over the next few nights, these tubes are sometimes dropped during
assembly and go ping-ping-pinging down the face. Expletives, either in Polish or
English, tell us which hammock occupant has lost a spacer. Fortunately, this is all
we drop. A boot, a stove or crampon would spell disaster.
Day six: We emerge like misshapen storks from our eyrie. I have had a bad night of
stomach pains, but Krzysztof is worse. Alex and I head up a chimney, the obvious
route that we all agree on. Alex leads a pitch of very steep ice, graded Scottish V or
VI, which takes him into a shattered hole. Voytek shouts up concern as plates of ice
accelerate past the jumar rope like circular saw blades. As he is placing a peg, the
sharp pick of his ice hammer unexpectedly shatters and like a bullet rebounds into
his face just missing his eye. He is lucky. When I reach the belay, we look up at the
overhanging brown dyke of shattered rock. It is a dead end. I remember the thin
crack I had spied through binoculars a week or so before and teeter across the un-
supported flakes to the right and break out onto a pocketed wall of perfect granite
complete with just enough holds.
A thirty-foot traverse brings me to the crack and we follow it upwards for 300
feet before it is absorbed into a confusion of overlaps on a near vertical wall. The
next pitch is the critical one.
Wishing I had rock-climbing shoes rather than clumsy double boots, I manage to
force the first hundred feet, a mixture of free climbing at around E1 and aid on
RURPs, crack tacks and skyhooks. [4] I fall off three times, held twice on the same
tied-off small peg. The other pitons rip and slide into my lap when I stop. Much
higher up the pitch, I have a final huge fall when I run out of strength trying to free
climb up a very difficult scoop. A small angle piton tapped an inch into a crystal
pocket somehow stays in place and holds me.
'John you must be very careful.'