Dark Shadows Falling By JOE SIMPSON

About The Book

In 1992, an Indian climber was left to die alone high on the South Col of Mount Everest by other climbers who watched his feebly waving hand from the security of their tent thirty yards away. Some film footage of his corpse was later shown on television. Why did these onlookers not hold the dying man's hand and comfort him? The answer appalls Joe Simpson, who was himself left for dead in a crevasse at the foot of Siula Grande in Peru in 1985. It is an uncomfortable ethical question that he is forced to confront as he attempts a difficult new route on Pumori, with a clear view of the whole South Col from close to the vantage point where Eric Shipton first spotted the way up the south side of Everest taken by Hillary and Tenzing in 1953. Now that Everest has become the playground of the rich, where commercial operators offer guided tours to the top up fixed ropes, camping amidst the detritus and unburied corpses of previous less fortunate climbers, Simpson wonders if the noble, caring instincts that once characterized mountaineering have been irrevocably displaced as in other facets of today's society. On investigation, he finds it a less black and white issue that at first it seemed. "I shall never forget the horror of dying alone, the awful empty loneliness of it," he says. Yet his empathy for the victims of storms, altitude sickness, or misjudgments, is tested time and again as he explores anecdotally and in conversations with his companions on Pumori, the moral climate of mountaineering in the 1990s.

Editorial Reviews

"Simpson writes better on the darker side of mountaineering than any man alive" -- Paul Johnson * The Times *

"His concern is that the strong ethics and selfless instincts that have characterised mountaineering in the past are being eroded by modern-day ambition, selfishness and greed" -- Audrey Salkeld * Sunday Times *

"Simpson is an elegant stylist and as usual his prose is laced with humour"* Daily Telegraph *

"An astonishing first chapter describes thoughts and feeling of a mountaineer slowly dying on Everest, while other climbers relax in a tent a few feet away. They know he is dying but ignore his feeble wave. Simpson is horrified that such selfishness should gradually invade the mountaineering fantasy" -- Brian Masters * Mail on Sunday *

About Author

JOE SIMPSON

JOE SIMPSON is the author of the bestselling Touching the Void, as well as four subsequent non-fiction books published by The Mountaineers Books: This Game of Ghosts, Storms of Silence, Dark Shadows Falling, and The Beckoning Silence. The Beckoning Silence won the 2003 National Outdoor Book Award. The other three published by The Mountaineers Books were all shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Award.