into the sun
It took us a full day to reach the screes below the first line of slabs so we pulled out the bivi-bags and settled down for the night. With the dawn we padded up the slabs to a narrow ridge, which grew to a pointed summit. The route wandered back and forward along ledges and up short walls, not difficult but awkward, debilitating because of the rarefied air.
The summit was something of an anti-climax, its place in the scheme of things a preliminary to the problems we would face on Huascaran, but, nevertheless, a peak, something to celebrate. The down climbing through loose rock was time consuming involving a couple of abseils.
Darkness was closing around us again when we arrived back at the bivouac. Red smudges of light burnt through the blackness below us, a flickering light that covered the hillsides. The Quechua Indians were burning stubble. Down in the valley it must have seemed as though the whole world was on fire.
Two days later, as we rested up in the Hotel Barcelona, tragedy struck. Colin hadn’t slept. He pulled back the bed covers to show me his leg. It had swollen to twice its normal size, a huge bloated piece of flesh.
He gave an involuntary shudder.
Downtown, in a tin shack of a hospital, the sick and the injured lay along the corridor walls. A man with part of his leg torn out by a wild dog sat smoking a cigarette … and waited. He had been waiting two days. I helped Colin hobble through the crowd. We were European and had money that would buy us a place at the head of the queue. The man squinted through the smoke.
They injected Colin in the knee with a large needle and syringe to draw off the fluid before writing down what drugs we had to buy in the pharmacy on the high street. "Give it time," they said "Manana."
Always "Manana"! Colin could do nothing but wait, crawling to the overflowing toilet where the large doses of penicillin made him sick. I was charged up with nervous energy and couldn’t take the tension while we were waiting. I had to try another peak, a straight forward snow and ice peak, Nevado Pisco rising to some 19,000ft in height. Reluctantly we agreed that I would give it a go.