Joe Simpson, Jonathan Cape

An hour later Rick caught up with me as I sat on the edge of the snowslope leading up out of the chaos of the moraines. I had sat down in the sun and was thinking about the refugees and what I was doing here. It seemed that whatever clever excuses I devised to justify what I was doing, they all sounded hollow and contrived. At home the excitement of the climb, the chance to visit Tibet, the adventure, everything in my past had conspired to make it easy to believe my excuses. Now, feeling sick and frustrated and out of love with the mountain, I felt shallow and hypocritical.

It was almost as if these people were not real. Until then Tibet"s tragedy had been no more than words on a page to me; now seeing it stumble blindly past me, it was hard to comprehend.

It made me angry that I should be made to appear so heartless. They were an indictment of my selfishness. They made me feel uncomfortable in the one arena where I felt most at home. At least I was there to witness it. I repeated my most frequent justification. It didn't seem a good enough reason.

Climbing Cho Oyo appeared suddenly to be an absurdly pointless and selfish thing to do. Faced with the Tibetan boy's obvious distress and poverty, I couldn't help wondering at the immense extravagance we were exhibiting in our attempt to scale this huge lump of rock and ice. My glacier glasses alone were probably worth more than they had ever earned in their lives. There we were, with warm double boots, expensive rucksacks, luxurious hi-tech clothing systems, sleeping bags worth a small fortune and all manner of fancy gadgets to help us climb the mountain and they had pathetic clothbound bundles, baseball boots and thin cheap western-style Chinese-produced clothes for their attempt to escape from their mother country. That was all that they could possibly take on their journey into exile in India or Nepal.

For us, crossing the Nangpa La was one small event in a great adventure. To them, it was a once in a lifetime's commitment--a poorly equipped arduous struggle into exile, fraught with the potential of death or worse, capture, imprisonment and torture. I had thought climbing one of the world's highest mountains was a significant achievement. Set against this tide of sad and weary people leaving their homeland forever, it was a shallow waste.

I wondered how much they had sacrificed to pay the guides to take them across the pass. I had heard that some of these so-called guides were making thousands of dollars. An American team witnessed three guides dividing up between themselves roughly $25,000 in rupees after one mass crossing. Knowing how impoverished most Tibetans were, and how the best jobs and wages were reserved for Chinese settlers, it made me wonder how many years they would have saved to attempt the difficult night crossing of the Nangpa La with no certainty of making it to freedom, if exile in a refugee camp can be called freedom.

I knew that there was nothing we could have done; that they would safely reach base camp and escape down to Thami and beyond. Yet the logic didn't help my sense of betrayal. I had always thought that, faced with such circumstances, I would willingly help and yet twice in a few days I had failed to do so. Once more and I'd start feeling like St. Peter at the Garden of Gethsemene with his three betrayals before the cock crows.

"Hey, Joe. How you doing?" Rick squeezed my shoulder and sat down on his rucksack.

"Better than them," I muttered and looked out over the sea of barren rocks. I liked Rick. He was a genuinely nice guy. There was nothing hidden about him. I felt embarrassed to have vented my angry petulance on him.

"Yeah, that's for sure," Rick said. "Hey, you were right man, he was okay once he got going again. I mean, he was slow, but they helped him, and he was making it. I gave him some headache pills in the end," he added, and I winced, remembering that I had pain killers in the top pocket of my rucksack. Strike three, I thought, and the cockerel crows!

"Look I'm sorry I was so abrupt," I said. "They just made me angry, you know. It's like ... well, I wish they weren't there, spoiling it all." "Yeah, but it's not their fault."

"Oh, I know that. It's just that there really isn't anything we can do for them, and that makes me feel bad, and so I resent them, get angry with them being here. I shouldn't have taken it out on you.

"That's real cool," Rick beamed cheerfully. "Hell, it's not easy to watch. So don't feel guilty. I'll help if I can but I don't feel guilty. Not seeing them come by don't mean they're not there."

"It's my old Catholic guilt, I suppose," I said ruefully. "I had thought that because we're not paying the Chinese authorities, not supporting the regime, we wouldn't be harming anyone."

"Hey, this is too heavy, Joe. Lighten up. What more can you do? We're just going to climb a mountain and go back home. It's no big deal."

"Maybe, but I don't think it's as simple as that. They're still running away from some serious shit and we're just walking past them, just playing games."

"Listen, those guys will be okay. They'll be on the way to Ari by now." Rick stood up and shouldered his rucksack. "It's getting cold. I'm heading on."

I watched him stride off up the stony ground protruding from the ice and join the wet sludgy trail through the snow. I knew he was right. My guilt feelings were about me, not about the plight of the Tibetans. I was using their pain as an excuse for my own poor performance, my own weakness. The thought only made me feel worse.

I had always held a candle out for the idea of the freedom of the hills, the notion that the travelling climber knew no boundaries of politics or religion, there were no borders constraining his world. Now I felt a chill wind beginning to gutter that weakened candle flame. There were no borders for us because we wanted it that way. It was a convenient ideal that allowed us to continue playing egotistical games in distant countries. If there were no political or religious borders then there were no moral ones either.