A Walking Guide Read online

  SCAFELL PIKE, THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN IN ENGLAND

  formerly “The Pikes” or “The Pikes of Scawfell”; “Scafell Pikes” on Ordnance Survey maps

  Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster eBook.

  * * *

  Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Simon & Schuster.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  or visit us online to sign up at

  eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks are best if kept brief and heartfelt—even at the risk of failing to give all credit where it is due. So here goes.

  Two British neurologists, Nigel Leigh and Lionel Ginsberg, helped in a way that can’t be quantified—unless miracles can be weighed and measured. Professor Leigh provided a diagnosis that changed my life, enabling me to contemplate writing a novel, and took time to read parts of the manuscript concerning his specialized field. Dr. Ginsberg and the wonderful staff of the King Edward Ward of the Royal Free Hospital in London kept me going and keep me going. I also turned to Dr Ginsberg’s ‘’Lecture Notes on Neurology” for guidance. Any errors are mine.

  To Neil Dowie of the Keswick Mountain Rescue Team I offer apologies for bending his standard operating procedures to the requirements of fiction. I hope, though, that I have preserved the spirit of the remarkable, life-saving work performed by the Keswick team and others like it.

  Thanks—again—are due to my indefatigably optimistic agent Michael Carlisle and his colleagues at Carlisle & Co., particularly Kathy Green. And at Simon & Schuster, Michael Korda did me the great honor of guiding this book as Gabriel Weiss oversaw its emergence into its final form.

  I wrote this book while on assignment as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times in London, and I drew on reporting in the field for much of the backdrop to the story. I would need to thank so many people at The New York Times to make a comprehensive list of those who, over the years, have sent me to work in exciting places. So I’ll confine myself here to offering my thanks to the publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., and to the editors past and present who offered support and understanding.

  Above all, I want to thank my family—my wife, Susan Cullinan, for her inspiration and companionship, and daughters Sarah, Rebecca and Amanda for putting up with a double dose of absenteeism on my part as a news correspondent and would-be novelist. At least, though, we managed now and then to set foot together on the Lake District hills, and for that I am forever grateful.

  For all my girls

  Prologue

  . . . Summit close. Feel it, sense it. Fall didn’t help. Slipped on boulders and my leg hurts. Bad leg, of course . . .

  . . . Sitting, see ice form on rocks. September, for Chrissakes. Know it’s there, the summit—only have to get up and push on and I’ll get there. Started from Camp Two—haa haa—at first light. Weather awful. Big wind coming up over the col. Horizontal sleet. Barely drag myself out of the sleeping bag. But soldier on. Right? What we do. Soldier on, take it on the chin. So out of the tent. Compass bearing from the map. Tricky, because I wasn’t sure I’d camped in the right place. Weather indescribable. Freak storm. If I hadn’t fallen, it would have knocked me over. But I fell. I did. Just when I needed my leg to work, it didn’t. And it’s cold.

  . . . No one else around. But I wanted it that way. Solo bid. Dawn start. Summit alone. And there won’t be anyone else around. Not up here. Not in weather like this. Color note: gray rock, encrusted with ice like salt deposits. No. Like crystals. Visibility zero. The cloud has descended like a blanket. No, scrub that. The cloud has fallen here and come to rest, wrapping my world in its frigid grayness. Even worse.

  . . . in the middle of the boulder field. Ice Fall. Khumbu Glacier. Ice crystals look as if they have been here forever. But I have to move . . . get frostbite. Or hypothermia. You slip away in a dream world, feel warm and happy and your eyes start to close. Want to sleep. Should sleep. In the cradle of the angels.

  . . . more scared than I ever was. More scared than Beirut, Sarajevo, Grozny, Gaza . . . in the war zones, you could hide in a cellar or a bunker or behind a wall. You could call in on the sat-phone and hear a voice, even if it was a clerk at the comic back in New York. Home base. But there’s nowhere to hide up here. No one to talk to. Wind always finds you. And cold.

  —

  The woman clicked off the small tape. She emptied its cassette onto the plush, red sofa in the hotel suite he had insisted on reserving before—what had he called it?—his expedition. It fell among the others, five of them annotated in smudged handwriting that had become almost illegible: location, date and time; curios amid the floral upholstery, the mock-antiques. She had spent the night with his tapes. How typical of him to mold their content to the image he wished to project as his testament. And how galling that his confession should sow the seeds of so much pain.

  The woman called for coffee as soon as the kitchen staff arrived, introducing hints of life into the still hotel by the lake, like an ocean liner making ready to sail—a muted clatter of pots and pans, a half-heard telephone, doors hissing open and closed, voices kept theatrically low. She uncapped a small, gold-nibbed fountain pen and wrote a single sentence in a black notebook whose cover was held in place by a thong of elastic. She placed it among the tapes, next to a folded, smudged fax message.

  Pulling back the heavy, lined drapes, she saw a sky whose rage had gone, cauterized by the same storms as had made the final tapes so indistinct. The locals said the storms were the worst in memory. Was that supposed to turn back the days since he had walked off alone into the mountains? Restore him to her? She mussed her hair in a vanity mirror. The whisky had deepened the dark stains under her eyes.

  Outside, the lake mirrored the foothills—indigo water, emerald slopes, sky losing dawn’s rose-glow to a hard azure. But there was nothing to stay for, least of all the view.

  Chapter One

  TORVER, ENGLAND. SEPTEMBER 2000

  The night before the expedition Joe Shelby and Eva Kimberly spent the countdown hours in a comfortable hotel converted from a substantial country house—a place of some grandeur, with high-ceilinged, corniced rooms, heavy, chevroned drapes and gas fires built to resemble hearths of live, glowing coals. From afar its whitewashed gables rose in pristine splendor against the somber greens of the lakeside. From within, the tall sash windows offered an oblique view of water and mountain across tiered lawns guarded by pines, partially obscured by the floral curtains of a four-poster bed in hand-carved oak. They found its solid presence and hint of depravity somehow embarrassing, but neither of them said so.

  Driving north he had ventured that they should, perhaps, overnight in the small tent he had purchased—with much attention to weight and ease of assembly—to acclimatize for his uncertain, solo pilgrimage to the high ground. But she demurred, saying the only kind of tent that interested her was the large type with polished floorboards and mosquito netting and en suite facilities, as deployed on the more discerning safaris in the African savanna, with retainers to bring shaving water or pink gin, as appropriate to the hour. And, in his condition, she said with what she hoped was a fond smile, the less time he spent in imitation of Mallory and Irvine the better, considering what happened to them.

  Over drinks in a bar adorned with horse brasses and small, framed lithographs depicting the peaks and slate-roofed farmhouses of the district, he challenged her, saying maybe—and, mark you, no one to this day could prove otherwise—those two British mountaineers had actually reached their objective, the summit of Mount Everest, before they disappeared back in 1924, so victory had been theirs after all.

  Death was quite a price to pay for a mountaintop, she persisted, and
that silenced them both until he said, low and rapid and in one angry breath: but it’s better than a paralyzed death in a sickbed, stuck with catheters and evacuation tubes and electronic monitors; better to be frozen to death on a mountain than immobilized by the terminal failure of your own body.

  In the end of the light, they took a gentle, halting stroll—a limp for him, a slow-motion promenade for her—around the graveled pathways cutting through the grounds, down to the stony shore where a dark, chill wind coaxed shivers from sightless depths. Their breath steamed and not just from recent whisky. Up there, on the high ramparts of granite and fellside rising from the opposite shoreline, the cold would be more intense, and impossible to flee for a hotel lounge or a four-poster bed bathed in the luscious glow of a phony fire.

  Later, in the small hours, with a crackle of autumn rain on the windows, cocooned in the four-poster, they reached for one another in the way of people seeking comfort through familiar sequences and levers of arousal. Both were on their best behavior. Behind the drawn curtains, neither wanted fights or ghosts to spoil the farewells. One phantom in particular stalked them both and they thought that, if they did not name her, then she would not appear to haunt them.

  —

  Now, under a low, damp sky pebble-dashed with cloud, they stood together at the point where they would part, he for the mountain, she, reluctantly, to wait.

  His destination, Scafell Pike, was not, essentially, a big mountain, but it was England’s highest—the best, most rugged, least forgiving that the land could offer at a coy 3,210 feet, littered with vertical crags and treacherous boulders and plain hard going. By the route he had devised in hours with maps and guides and memory, it lay two days hence—at his pace—beyond intermediate ranges of hills and passes where he would make camp. Drawn as a straight line, the distance from where he stood to the summit was a mere ten miles. But counting the twists and turns from start to finish, he would, if successful, cover over twenty miles, with 5,650 feet of steep ascents and 4,350 feet of tricky descents (where, as on Everest, accidents often happened) over uniformly unforgiving ground, vulnerable to rapid-fire changes in weather and temperature, where the rocky trails could turn to rivers of water or ribbons of frost. And, once at the summit, he would need to plod down to the valley of Borrowdale when his limbs were at their most fatigued. The descent would take him across the pass at Styhead, where the mountain rescue team kept its stretcher, prepositioned for upsets on the forbidding central massif of the Lake District, the hub from which the valleys radiated like spokes. Quite recently, an older man had gone missing in September and the rescue team had found his body in January on a rugged bluff of rock called Great End, one of the final markers on his own itinerary.

  One last time, Joe Shelby went over the checklist—he liked checklists—that tallied his gear: tent, sleeping bag, specialized walking poles, an aluminum bottle filled clandestinely with whisky (water would come from the streams and tarns of his beloved English Lake District, whatever people said about nuclear irradiation from the Sellafield plant or lingering microbes from stricken sheep), GPS satellite navigation aid, ultra-lightweight stove with minimal fuel, dehydrated meals, halogen headlamp, old-fashioned oil-filled compass, laminated maps at 1:25,000 scale cut into manageable sections, spare socks, waterproof gaiters, gloves, toothbrush, bandages and liniment in case of slips or blisters. He balanced carefully on his good, right leg as he reached into the trunk of the car for his rucksack, hefting it with his better, right arm, maneuvering his dead left arm awkwardly. He had parked the car next to a field at a junction where a small road led north with a wooden signpost proclaiming: Walna Scar and Coniston Old Man. Another rusty signboard offering “Horseriding” had come loose from its metal anchorings and swung in the wind.

  As he pulled on his waxed Austrian mountain boots, he recalled old army surplus footwear, with leaky uppers and laces prone to snapping—the boots he had worn, once, to assail the same mountains in the time before doubt and affliction when all things were possible and had proven to be so. Ambitions, conceived as he strode these mountains, had been fulfilled. From this small corner of rock and hill, his horizons had stretched to the broad vistas of Africa and the Middle East, Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent—his Great Game. He had served his apprenticeship in his chosen craft as a local reporter covering small courts and inquests and scandals, but had always known that far-flung events would lure him. As a junior reporter, consuming the national newspapers, he coveted the datelines with a fierce hunger—Cape Town and Hong Kong, Dili, Jerusalem; he craved initiation into the mysteries of gunfire at close quarters. On the television news he watched men and women no different from himself standing in front of the cameras, against backdrops of bombed buildings or blazing hospitals, superconfident in their flak jackets. He knew he could handle those places himself if only someone would pay his ticket and publish his articles. And he knew he could humble those familiar TV faces by taking one step further, beyond the point where the satellite dish functioned and into the real maw of battle. When he thought those thoughts, his gut burned and his throat caught and, sensing his hunger, sponsors came forward to subsidize third-class tickets and fourth-class hotels in first-rate hellholes.

  As an itinerant freelancer, owning little more than a laptop and a sleeping bag, he hitchhiked and bussed himself across Anatolia and the Levant and southern Africa, accumulating a sheaf of articles about unpleasant events in unsavory places that became his portfolio, established his credentials. Simply by traveling on the cheap he saw things the bigtime reporters did not see in their business class airplanes and chartered trucks. It gave him cachet but did not make him popular with his peers. He did not care: every modest triumph brought the goal of his raw ambition closer. Finally, through the intercession of an old-timer encountered in the Congo, a prestigious American weekly news magazine hired him full-time onto its staff, offering a salary and expenses, and sent him to chronicle gunfire in Gaza, earthquakes in Turkey, war in the Persian Gulf, mayhem in Crossroads and Rwanda and Kabul and Tashkent. He witnessed the pain of people who had come to learn that collateral damage was the military term for the sudden death of children, lovers, husband or wife or parents. He won the titles he craved—foreign correspondent, war correspondent—and the job took him to many places, far from any definition of home: he was an Englishman, writing for American readers from countries that wiser people on either side of the Atlantic would happily avoid. Once, he tallied his score like some men counted their sexual victories—eighty countries, eighty names from the map, but only three that had been visited without the need to write for the weekly magazine, which he referred to privately as the comic. (His sexual scorecard reflected lower numbers than his reputation suggested.) But those journeys now seemed irrelevant—episodes glimpsed through the filter of professional detachment. Here, on the approaches to Scafell Pike, with his limbs weakening, lay his true battle, to be fought on this home turf—the only place on earth where he could gauge whether anything of the teenager in leaky army surplus boots had survived to sustain the man in his fancy, Austrian footwear.

  Above the village of Torver, where he made his farewells with Eva Kimberly, the great, gray battlement of Dow Crag rose above a skirt of scree three and one quarter miles to the north—his first objective at 2,555 feet. Beyond that he imagined his route unfolding through mysteriously named landmarks: Camp One at Wrynose Pass, Camp Two at Esk Hause, before the final push to the summit of Scafell Pike. Already, ahead of him, he could imagine the rocky, steep trails and the granite outcrops pulling tendrils of mist to pale smears of lichen; the dark mirror-stillness of the high tarns; the summits, marked by the protrusion of single cairns and the cumulative traces of countless bootprints, an army of spectral memories, some of them his own, from long ago.

  Eva Kimberly linked her arm through his bad, left arm, massaging the flaccid muscle that had once grappled Windsurfers, swung rackets, hauled a way up mountains, steered motorcycles along rutted trails. Now, the
arm hung true as a plumb line, just as useful to his current intention.

  “You don’t have to go,” she said.

  “That’s why I’m going.”

  “Not because it’s there?” Even as she smiled, she shivered inside the black sheepskin coat they had bought together during a vacation in Rome. In the store just off the Piazza di Spagna, he joked about her susceptibility to the merest hint of a chill in the air, her phobia of what the Italians called a colpa d’aria, a malignant draught. But, she said, if you were born and raised near the equator as she had been as a native of Africa, if your days had been framed by the rapid dawns and dusks of Africa, heralded by the pampering of servants with drinks—tea in the morning, sundowners in the evening—then you would, of course, be more sensitive to the rude, northern climate that had molded him.

  “You could at least wait until your test results from the neurologist.”

  “They won’t really make a difference. Let’s not argue.”

  “I’m not arguing. All I’m saying is that, for all you know, it could suddenly get worse while you’re up there.”

  “Then I’d better get going before it does get worse.”

  “Shouldn’t I come with you?”

  “We talked about that.”

  “And what about the weather? The forecast isn’t great.”

  “It never is up here.”

  She disentangled her arm from his and lit a cigarette. The smoke curled blue in the early morning stillness. In his backpack, alongside his maps and miniature tape recorder, he had stashed tobacco and Rizla cigarette-rolling papers, wrapping them carefully in Ziploc plastic to keep his supplies dry. But while he still had the chance to simply flick a cigarette from a pack, without the complications of one-handed rolling, he would do so. Before he could protest his own ability to do so, she lit one for him and handed it to him.