Survivor's scripts fill the void after the Fall

Keith Duggan talks to author and mountaineer Joe Simpson about his horrific experience that was brought to life in Touching the Void, and why he is infuriated by some Everest expeditions

Twenty-one years on, Joe Simpson is sometimes asked in a roundabout kind of way if "The Fall" was worth it. Two decades after plunging into a crevasse on the untouched Siula Grande mountain in Peru, shattering a leg and crawling for four days across hostile terrain through conditions in which he should have perished and fast, Simpson marvels that people still want to know.

The Cúirt Literature Festival was in its very first year when Simpson survived that nightmarish, epic struggle through nature that profoundly altered the direction of his life. Recently, he was one of the star attractions of the Galway festival, drawing a packed house in the Town Hall Theatre on a beautifully sunny Saturday by the Corrib.

Simpson has recounted the story brilliantly in his book Touching the Void, a classic of mountaineering literature that has been translated into 14 languages and sold over a million copies. A new generation became familiar with those dark hours through Kevin McDonald's harrowing drama-documentary of the same title.

But there is nothing so immediate as seeing the survivor himself, pacing around a stage with an intimidating photograph of Siula Grande as a backdrop. Simpson delivers a riveting reconstruction of his plight, a lone man, defenceless and trapped at 6,000 feet upon one of nature's most awesome and unforgiving treasures.

IT IS A PERFORMANCE now, the tension made tolerable by the deadpan, Sheffield humour Simpson uses to poke fun at that guy on the mountain. To all intents and purposes he was the only man on Earth for those few days. People see him tanned and well and reliving that near-death experience and sometimes conclude that bad and all as those four days might have been, they facilitated his passage to becoming an acclaimed and successful writer. So in a polite way, people sometimes imply that Peru was worth it.

"That is the implication. And I would say, yeah, I would never have written a thing without the accident," Simpson admits over a pint of stout on crowded Quay Street, rolling a smoke as he goes: he may have authored one of most celebrated feats of endurance in the history of mountaineering but tobacco, he admits, has him licked - so far.

"But what that question does not take into account is: it was real," he continues. "You have to go through that not knowing if you will pull through. You do not have the benefit of hindsight. I am constantly amazed and I suppose gratified that people want to hear the story. And it has been fabulously lucrative in terms of motivational talks. I was doing 20 and 30 talks initially and now I might do five or 10 a year and live relatively comfortably. I have financial security and so now I want to write novels.

"And I am well aware that it is easy to fall flat on your face in the fiction market - or even be quite successful and still need a second job. So I do feel lucky about that. And I still get nerves before the talks. And at the end - it is not the flattery of them clapping you but if you can see they were moved by it, it is quite a rush. But the idea that was it worth it as some kind of trade: God. It is kind of insulting because it conveniently forgets that I had something to do with actually surviving. But the main thing is that you are up there not knowing if you are going to come out and that is the most terrible feeling.

"And I would not," he says with sudden seriousness, "go through five minutes of that."

After a late night in Galway, Simpson intended driving south to a secluded cottage, outside Waterville, he bought not long ago. "Nothing too fancy but I love it there."

He rejects the idea mountaineers crave, by definition, remoteness, laughing that on an appearance on Desert Island Discs, his selection of tunes belonged to the genre of dance and rave, not the typical choice for the man of nature. But he likes bursts of solitude for writing and reading.

At the moment, he is championing Lyn McDonald's They Called It Passchendaele, an account of the years on the Western Front. "My grandfather fought in those trenches; he was in the Black Watch. He got an eye wound in the Somme and then they found out he enlisted at the age of 15. So they sent him home and he went straight back when of age. And he went all through Ypres and the whole lot and then he volunteered for the Second World War even though he had passed the age of active service.

"I can never get over that generation and when you stand before the Menin Gate and think of a quarter of a million young people disappeared, Known Unto God, it is hard to get your head around. And I am almost in tears," he says, leafing through Passchendaele, "reading this bloody thing."

Wartime valour is something he can understand. Bravery on the mountain is something more difficult to explain.

"It is a fairly pointless thing to do, climbing a mountain," he reasons. "You don't actually achieve anything. And what you do get is an enchanted experience that fades, so you have to go back again. There is no winning post. If you lose a football match, you lose. If you screw up what we do, you may well die. It is an obsession and probably an unhealthy one at that."

AND NO LAND MASS has the allure of Everest, the highest of them all. Simpson has never summited the Nepalese wonder and doubts he ever will. In fact, the commercial market that has dictated mountaineering on Everest over the last decade was the subject of Simpson's 1998 book Dark Shadows Falling, a ferociously angry commentary on the distant tragedies and the casual deaths that have occurred because novice climbers paid handsomely to be there and were desperate for a snapshot from the summit. He all but groans when a copy of the book is produced, admitting it was the book he found most difficult to write and left him feeling confused. "It was a rant," he says now.

If so, it was not without reason. Like many people, Simpson was appalled by Karl Huyberecht's 1989 photograph of Everest's South Col littered with hundreds of used-up oxygen tanks and discarded climbing gear and, covered in a sleeping bag, the frozen body of a Sherpa named Lapka Dorje who had died the previous year. That image presaged a decade of callous behaviour that suggested that above a certain altitude, standard ethics were abandoned.

In May 1992, a Dutch expedition bivouacking on the Lhotse face of Everest made the decision not to go to the aid of a lost Indian climber who had collapsed near their tents. The man was undoubtedly in the grip of irreversible hypothermia but he had at least the faculties to signal for help. After discussion, the Dutch team decided they could not help the man and so left him outside in the howling night, where he died.

Simpson's experience has left him acutely sensitive to the horrific realms of loneliness brought about by the nearing of death on the mountain. He found the lack of compassion unforgivable. But it was hardly an isolated incident. During May of 1996, a red-letter date for Everest when 11 people would die during one terrible storm, two Japanese climbers would walk past three dying Indian climbers near the Hillary step as they made their way to the summit.

In 1995, a November snowstorm claimed six westerners caught on Nepal's Ama Dablam peak but it also highlighted the indentured servitude inflicted on the Sherpas, the invisible heroes of all climbing expeditions. One Sherpa was found slumped in the snow, barefoot, carrying in his backpack a spare set of boots belonging to his client. Two other westerners, airlifted off the slope by helicopter, elected to leave their weakened Sherpa to die in their tent rather than try to haul him to the rescue craft. When asked about it down in the safety of Namache, they admitted they were in a hurry, that they had not wanted to miss their international flight connections.

"Climbing is based ona very strong set of ethics and it seemed to me that it was all being sold down the river," Simpson says. "When those Japanese climbers came down and said above 8,000 metres you cannot feel morality as they walked past three dying Indians . . . that is absolute bullshit. Now, there are limits, do what you can do in that situation - but not to even stop and comfort them, it seems something is lost there.

"You certainly don't die to get a body off the mountain or to rescue a fellow climber. But this idea of walking past a corpse and not even walking over to drop it into a crevasse is a huge lack of respect. And it becomes a photograph in somebody's album to show how tough they are by walking past a corpse. And this is a holy mountain. Treated like a whore."

And yet the climber in him understands why Everest continues to fascinate some 50 years after Hillary conquered it. It probably lit his imagination when he was a novice climber in Sheffield. "But we were all dirt poor then and on the dole: we didn't think we would see Everest."

AT HIS BEST, Simpson's preference is for climbing unexplored ranges "in the traditional alpine style by a more ascetically beautiful route." He grimaces when he says this, knowing it sounds elitist - a charge that was levelled at him by friends after the publication of Dark Shadows Falling.

"I am no saint. Had I been offered a trip on Everest, I might have gone. But I honestly don't see the point in being the 1,000th person to climb Everest and in a worse style. But I don't want to diss people for climbing it either. Because it is a bloody hard thing to do. But somewhere along the line, it has changed.

"I suppose when I started climbing, we felt we were serving an apprenticeship. We started on rocks in Scotland, then headed to the Alps and cut our teeth. So we had done a huge amount by the time we went to Peru. But the idea that a stockbroker aged 25 can pick up GQ magazine, see an article about commercial trips to Everest and decide to do it . . . well, fair play to him, he might well summit. But if things go wrong, he has no experience to fall back on.

"And another thing, in all the celebration photographs, you never see the Sherpa who carried all the food and put the tents up. And that is bloody dishonest. So I don't know, I guess I was pissed off that something I loved was being trashed."

He has not climbed seriously for three years now, content to leave the peaks to a new generation. Simon Yates, who attempted to lower Simpson down the Siula Grande before infamously cutting their connecting rope after Simpson was lowered over a sheer drop, remains a friend.

In his talk, Simpson repeatedly stressed that Yates had gone far beyond the borders of normal climbing etiquette and selflessness in trying to rescue him. The cutting of the rope, though, electrified the climbing world because it had never before happened in such dramatic circumstances. After finally making it down from the mountain and back to Sheffield that year, Simpson had nothing better to do but wait for his leg to heal and party hard, still freaked out by what happened. As Doug Scott, the famous British mountaineer murmured to him at a party one night: "You unlucky youth."

"And that's how I felt," he says quietly. "I always wanted to be the best I could. And Peru screwed everything. Because I was never quite the same."

That was true in many respects. When Simpson was 14, the product of a strongly Irish Catholic matriarch (nee Maguire) he considered the priesthood. But the idea of blind faith bothered him. Yet, he was half surprised during the most haunting periods of his great adventure - after the rope was severed, he fell into a pitch-black ice chamber the size of an airport hangar with creaking ice the only sound - that he felt no urge to turn to the religion of his youth.

"I just knew there was nothing beyond, that I was on the edge of it. Course, when I got home and told my ma all this, she was beating tripe out of me because she had been getting the priests to say Mass and lighting candles. I am spiritual in that I believe in the circularity of the planet working. Like, in climbing, one of the things you can do is climb 20,000 feet and put your head down to sleep on a rock ledge and see 10-million-year-old fossils in the rock and realise this was once the sea. And then you turn on your back and see stars on the mountain the way only airline pilots get to, this light from millions of light years away. And if that doesn't end that notion we have that we are somehow important, nothing will."

Conversation turns to the 1996 Everest disaster, chronicled in Jon Krakauer's best-selling book Into Thin Air. A Russian climber named Anatoli Boukreev was not portrayed in the most flattering light in that book but to Simpson, he was one of the few people to emerge with credit, heading back out into the raging storm to guide and haul five stricken climbers to the safety of the South Col. But he speaks of Boukreev in the past tense and it becomes clear he, too, paid the price for his love of mountains.

"Anatoli? Course he's dead. They're all fucking dead, mate."

Both Boukreev and the English mountaineer Alison Hargreaves brought out books, which they signed for Simpson. Both were dead within months of writing their little notes on the publishing page. He is still angry at the public treatment of Hargreaves, lionised for her solo summit and then lambasted after her death as an irresponsible mother. Now, she is just another statistic: when Simpson published Dark Shadows, there had been 156 deaths to 932 ascents on Everest. Some of those were Simpson's friends and some are still up there, locked into that frozen beauty for all time.

The chances are Simpson ought to have died in Peru 20 years ago. He always maintains his will to survive was an innate human instinct but that his knowledge of the mountain made the difference.

"You would have tried just as hard in that situation," he said cheerfully at the end of his talk, the crowd in the palm of his hand by now, "but you all would have died, because you're not mountaineers."

It seemed at odds with the general tone, that sharp and subtle rebuke, a reminder that even though his dramatic re-enactment was full of jokes, it was no joke. The humour, he admits, is a way keeping those traumatic memories at a distance. "I don't want to end up like someone on the Jerry Springer Show, crying all over the stage."

When he returned to Peru a few years ago for the documentary reconstruction, he was instantly pitched back to the hopelessness of those few days on the mountain and the effect, he says, "was like hallucinogenic drugs". And he does not allow himself to imagine it into life again. "I don't go there. I just don't."

Inscribing his book, he used a quote from Jeremy Bentham's writings on the gambler's impulse, which he feels is as succinct an explanation as any of why people climb high mountains and risk death: "Deep Play: What you stand to lose far exceeds anything you can possibly win." "So, you see, you have to do it," Simpson explains with a grin.