The following is an article written by Steve when he took a small part in a climbing expedition in the Himalaya in 1987 with Richard Hazsco and a then young Andy Cave. This article was provided by Steve's Uncle, Maurice Ralph, from two typed pages, the originals can which be seen here as page 1 and page 2
A long Walk off a Short Pier
We stood on the side of the road. Our driver was on his back in front of the vehicle. Great leader was saying he should stay there for at least another four hours, but our driver was of the opinion was that no sleep for two days was no problem. Brightly lit vehicles moved up and down the artery, the bright patterns on their flanks liek an arcane genetic code. A thousand or so feet below, the waters of the Indus waited greedily for a driver to make one last mistake.
We stood on the side of the road. Our vehicle arrived ("it's a good one" Great Leader had said). One hour from Islamabad there was a great crunch and it broke down. The driver went back to Islamabad to get a part. We went for breakfast, but found a Buddhist temple instead. The Muslims had knocked the heads of the Bhuddas. We concluded that we didn't want to be mistaken for Buddists, and temples didn't do eggs. Our driver returned with a new transmission link. We knew this one was okay because it didn't have a welded fracture down the middle.
We progressed towards the mountains through a strange land where everybody wore the same clothes and there were no women in the streets, and it was hotter than Skegness. Our driver's technique began arousing interest. Foot on accelerator, hand on horn, it is the will of Allah if you don't move.
After a tea stop in a place called Beshum, things changed abruptly. The road along the bottom of the pleasant valley with steep sides suddenly became the road half way up the mother of all gorges, with a dizzying drop below and huge crumbling slopes above. The road twisted and turned like a demented python. Our driver's technique,(foot down, horn on, if there's anything there it is the will of Allah) began to cause serious concern, as did his tendancy to race anything that overtook. Ocassionally, he would stop, point down and say "ten men" or "five men". I wondered why women were never driven off the Karakoram Highway.
The Indus Gorge is huge by our standards. The initial section of the Karakorum Highway travels up this immense feature for maybe one hundred miles. It has a distinctly temporary (in geological terms) feel to it, and in many places we encountered landslips. The sharp blade of the Indus, swollen with glacial melt, has sliced through the mpraine rubble to leave this great chasm to drain the Western Karakorum, then somebody decided a road along its walls would be a good idea.
Respite came as we found ourselves at a village. We stopped and went into the restaurant. "Ah" said Uncle Tom, "It's the restaurant at the end of the universe." We got our curries and chappatis. Some very fierce men with big guns came in. They left them at the counter. The curry was delicious, the culture shock was setting in. After little sleep on the plane and a day in Islamabad, and the British Embassy Club, the last bubble of Utopia in a strange land - we had hardly acclimatised. Gunshots from the hills reinforced the growing sense of strangeness.
We set off again (foot down, horn on etc). We told our driver to drive more slowly, he agreed. He accelerated. The next hour is indeliably etched in my memory. The highway has a rythm. An experienced driver sense the rythm and will drive safely at a good pace. Ours was going too fast. The motion was becoming too unstable. Each swing, each last second braking, each overtaking brought us closer to the final point of instability. Somebody's comment that a good launch we could expect between five and ten seconds of free fall before impact did not help. The drop to our left took on the aspect of the reaper's scythe. Each of us was in a private hell, convinced we would never see our beautiful peak, let alone climb it. Slow down we said, yes he said. He accelerated. We careered around a double bend to meet a lorry like a squat brightly coloured bug coming towards us. The resulting manouvre made the back of the van drift. The string snapped, and as one we leapt up in our seats screaming "STOP!". He refused. Suddenly there was an awful noise from the back. Rickets, the retired (at 19) coal miner from Barnsley (Andy Cave) was obviously in severe pain. His features contorted, he grapsed his stomach in agony and made awful wretching sounds. This convicned the driver to stop. Rickets recovered and leapt out. We followed. Things tghen got very fraught. We refused to travel further until the driver rested - it emerged he hadn't slept for two days and he said he was goign with or wirhout us. We saw him consume a huge lump of local 'medicine'.
We reached a compromise. We would travel in a lorry we had flagged down. The van would travel behind us. The survivor, being brave, would stay in the van for security's sake. Everybody was happy except the driver. Ten sconds after starting, he overtook, with the survivor screaming for help out of the window. "No worry" said the lorry driver, "soon he sleep". We inquired as to the source of this insight. "We give him opium cigarette."
A few miles later we found a shakey survivor, a van, and the driver trying to mend the fan belt with a piece of string. This is impossible, but he refused to be beaten. A spare from a passing van cured it. We were leaving the gorge now and entering a strange desert plateau, ringed with arid mountains. The free fall time was now down to half a second. We were too numb to feel any more terror.
He pulled in to the side of the road, "I sleep". He was out for five hours. We dozed in the desert watching the miracle of the dawn we had scarce expected to see.
Arriving in Gilgit we parked in the main street. We saw a fierce man come towards us, he grabbed our driver by the throat and pulled him out. The last we saw of him he was being punched and kicked down the street. The fierce man drove us carefully, sedately and with consummate skill to the refuge of the Hunza Inn. The story of how the Sahibs went on strike had travelled ahead of us.
Well, Rickets and the Cowboy made the first ascent our our beautiful peak, and the Sheffield Markhum Karakorum Expedition went with a resounding success, but that is another story.
We're flying to Gilgitt this year.
ENDS
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