So we kept walking — until Vince really started going down. ‘Wait for me,’ he called. ‘You’ve got to wait…’
We did wait a few times. But then I decided that shock tactics were necessary. I knew that at home he had two young girls and a little baby, and that he was nuts about his family. So I gripped him by the arm and said, ‘Vince, if you don’t keep going, you’re never going to see your kids again. Think about your home. Think how they’ll want you back. Now — get your finger out and start moving.’
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I want to go to sleep. I’m too tired. I’ve got to sit down.’
‘Vince, we can’t sit down. If we stop, we’re going to die. Get that? If we lie down and sleep, we’ll freeze to death, and never know anything about it.’
We carried on walking for a bit, and then he shouted at me, ‘Chris!’
‘What?’
‘My hands have gone black.’
My first thought was: frostbite. My own fingers were still numb, and I wondered what state my hands were in under my gloves. I walked back to Vince and found him staring down at his hands. He was wearing black leather gloves.
‘My hands have gone black,’ he repeated. ‘My hands!’
I realized his mind was wandering, so I just said, ‘OK, Vince, put them in your pockets. Get them warm, and the colour will come back to them. Come on now: keep up with me and Stan, mate. Keep going.’
At that point I can’t have been thinking straight. What I should have done was to keep hold of him, or actually tie him to me. But that didn’t occur to me, and I just kept walking. Stan and I would move on for a bit, then wait for Vince to catch up. Then the same again. I tried to be sharp with him one moment, kind the next. One minute I’d shout, ‘Get a grip!’ trying to spark him into action. Then I’d become comforting, tap him on the shoulder, and say, ‘Come on, Vince, keep walking. Everything will be all right. We’re going to get out.’
Vince’s behaviour was now swinging wildly. Several times he started yelling out loud — which of course was bad for our nerves, as anybody could have heard him from hundreds of metres off. Stan hissed, ‘Vince — be quiet!’ and he shut up for a while.
Because hypothermia was setting in, our navigation had become erratic. For some time I’d had the feeling that I was drifting away from reality. The map was saying one thing, and what was happening on the ground seemed to be quite different. We wanted to head north-west, but we kept drifting to the north-east. I saw what was happening, and began to wonder — quite illogically — if I had a tendency to head north-east because I’d been born in the north-east of England. It was just the hypothermia talking.
Every few minutes Stan would say, ‘Eh — we’re coming off. We’re coming off.’ Then the clouds would open, and we’d get a glimpse of the Plough, and we could bring ourselves on course again. Then more snow flurries would come in, the stars would be blotted out, and we’d veer off once more.
Struggling as we were, we cracked on for a while — but then, as we stopped once again, we realized that Vince was no longer with us. When Stan shouted back for him, there was no answer. ‘Chris,’ he said, ‘we’ve lost him.’
‘We can’t have,’ I answered. ‘He must be just behind us.’
We started back on our tracks. Naturally I was worried, but I felt bad-tempered about having to retreat. Where snow was lying, it was easy to follow our footprints; but then there were long stretches of bare rock from which the snow had been blown clear. Whenever we crossed one, we had to cast about on the far side, working forward and back to pick up our trail again. Now we realized how much we’d been zigzagging all over the place.
After twenty minutes there was still no sign of Vince. We called as loud as we dared, and we could see a reasonable distance — but I suddenly realized that our quest was hopeless. It was half an hour, at least, since we’d seen him, and we had no idea what he’d done. He might have walked off to the right; he might have walked off to the left; he might be walking straight backwards; he might have lain down in a hollow and gone to sleep. This last seemed the most likely; that was all he’d been wanting to do for hours. If he had curled up somewhere out of the wind, we could spend all night walking in circles and never find him, probably killing ourselves in the process.
‘Stan,’ I said, ‘I’m making a decision. We’re going to turn round and leave him.’ I could feel my companion’s hesitation, so I added, ‘I’ll take the responsibility. We’ve got to leave him, or we’ll kill the pair of us.’
‘OK, then,’ said Stan. ‘Fair enough.’
It was a terrible decision to have to take, but I saw no alternative. We had nowhere to take refuge, nowhere to escape from the wind and snow, nowhere to dry our kit and warm up, nowhere to find food. I felt certain that if conditions were the same in the morning, Stan and I would die as well. There was no way we would resuscitate ourselves with no shelter and absolutely nothing to light a fire with.
So with heavy hearts we turned round and cracked on again, and left Vince on his own.
CHAPTER 7
Looking Back
Our only hope was to get down off the high ground into warmer air, and gradually, as we tabbed on, we did seem to be descending. Not steeply, but it felt as if we were losing height. I hoped to God that Vince was doing the same — that he would reach low ground somewhere, get his head down in a hollow, and wake up in the morning.
Our map showed a line of pylons running across our front, and another line that stopped in the middle of nowhere. We thought that if we hit the first set of masts, and then the second, we’d know exactly where we were. But it didn’t turn out like that. We only hit the one line of masts, and couldn’t find any more. Later we discovered that the second line didn’t exist except on the map.
But at least we seemed to be coming down. The snow flurries died out, and the wind became less bitter. Through the night-sight I saw another main road. We approached it, then lay in a hollow to observe it. The hollow turned out to be full of mud: somehow, in the middle of the arid desert, we’d chosen a place like a miniature peat bog.
Ten metres beyond the road we saw a chain-link fence running parallel with it. The fence shone faintly in the moonlight. Beyond it was something pale. It looked like a strip of concrete, and we thought we’d come across some form of installation. It looked like it went on for ever. Then, at the last minute, we realized what it was: a railway line, fenced to keep animals off the track.
The fence was only about two metres high. Any other time, we’d have scaled it in seconds. But we were so cold and helpless we just couldn’t climb it. Stan brought out his set of folding Leatherman pliers and, with an all-out effort to make his hands work, cut a vertical slit in the mesh. We knew we were going against the SOP, because anyone who came along and saw the gap would realize that somebody had been through there. But it was the only way we were going to cross the track.
We squeezed through the gap and found ourselves on the railway line. Should we walk along it? It would have been easy going, tabbing on the concrete sleepers. A check on the map showed that it ran straight to a town on the Syrian border. But then we reckoned that the line would probably be patrolled, or that someone on a train would be bound to see us. There was nowhere to hide near the track, and if a train came along, we’d be caught in the open.
We decided to continue northwards. At the fence on the far side of the line Stan gave me the pliers and said, ‘Your turn.’ My fingers were so numb that I could hardly grip the handles, and putting pressure on them really hurt. But wire by wire I cut a slit, and we wormed through, pulling the chain-link back into place behind us so that the gap wasn’t too obvious. With any luck it would be days before anyone noticed the damage.