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Автор Joe Simpson
TOUCHING THE VOID
Joe Simpson
In presenting Joe Simpson with the 1988 Boardman Tasker Award, Janet Adam Smith said that Touching the Void was ‘a story far beyond what any respectable fiction writer would dare to invent. It’s all true but the telling has all the force of imaginative fiction, with a gathering momentum and suspense that makes one read on and on, even though one knows the story must have a good ending because Simpson has lived to write it. ’
Magnus Magnusson, presenting it with the 1989 NCR Award, said: ‘It is not just a book about mountaineering. Ultimately it is about the spirit of man and the lifeforce that drives us all. ’
BY JOE SIMPSON
Touching the Void
The Water People
This Game of Ghosts
Storms of Silence
Dark Shadows Falling
VINTAGE
Published by Vintage 1997
10 9 Copyright © Joe Simpson 1988
The right of Joe Simpson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, 1988
Vintage
The Random House Group Limited 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA Random House Australia (Pty) Limited
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Papers used by Random House are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
Joe Simpson
TOUCHING THE VOID
With a Foreword by Chris Bonington
To
SIMON YATES
for a debt I can never repay
And to those friends who have gone to the mountains and have not returned CONTENTS
Foreword by Chris Bonington
Beneath the Mountain Lakes
Tempting Fate
Storm at the Summit
On the Edge
Disaster
The Final Choice
Shadows in the Ice
Silent Witness
In the Far Distance
Mind Games
A Land Without Pity
Time Running Out
Tears in the Night
Postscript
Epilogue: Ten years on …
Acknowledgments
FOREWORD
by Chris Bonington
I first met Joe in Chamonix last winter. Like many climbers he had decided it was time to learn to ski, had no intention of taking formal lessons and was teaching himself. I had heard and read stories about him, of desperately narrow escapes on the mountains, particularly his latest escapade in Peru, but they had made only a limited impact.
Sitting beside him in a bar in Chamonix it was difficult putting the stories and reputation to the person. He was dark, with a slightly punk hairstyle, and there was something abrasive in his manner. I found it difficult to take him in my mind from the streets of Sheffield into the mountains.
And I didn’t think much more about him until I read the manuscript of Touching the Void. It wasn’t just the remarkable nature of the story — and it was remarkable, one of the most incredible stories of survival that I have ever read -it was the quality of the writing that was both sensitive and dramatic, capturing the extremes of fear, suffering and emotion both of himself and his partner, Simon Yates. From the moment Joe slipped and fell, breaking his leg on the descent, through his solitary agony in the crevasse until the moment he crawled into their base camp, I was riveted, unable to put the book down.
