A Walking Guide

Book by Cowell Alan S

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...