Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man's Miraculous Survival

Simpson dreamed that he was back in the crevasse and awakened screaming. In the dream, a voice recited lines from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: “Ay, but to die and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot” (202). Simpson memorized the quotation for an English literature exam when he was 16 but had not thought of it since. He laughed and recited the lines again in the snow hole.

Having had no water for three nights and two days, Simpson was severely dehydrated. Although he had been eating snow, it was insufficient for his body’s needs. He remembered the water at Bomb Alley, which was still miles away, and realized that after all his struggles, he would likely die of dehydration. He set off crawling, aiming to reach the moraines by midday. With no tracks to follow, he intermittently stood to orient himself but still felt vulnerable, recalling the circuitous route he and Yates took to avoid crevasses on the ascent. Attempting to walk, Simpson collapsed from the pain. By the time he had crawled to the moraines, his vision was blurred and he realized that he was going snow-blind. The lyrics of “Brown Girl in the Ring” by Boney M. (a song he had always disliked), repeated in his head.

Simpson started crossing the moraines at one o’clock in the afternoon, leaving him five and a half hours before dark. He could not negotiate the large boulders by crawling, so he cut up his foam sleeping mat and strapped a strip around his broken leg to make a splint. Using an axe as a walking stick, he hopped, falling repeatedly. He continued to time himself and eventually stopped screaming from the pain since no one was there to hear him. Under the rocks, Simpson could hear water, but he could not access it. Finding a thin trickle, he ingested more grit and mud than water, and the source dried up.

When Simpson reached the ice cliffs, he shuffled down in a seated position. He slipped and fell, bumping his head and jarring his leg. At this point, he stopped timing the stages of the journey, aiming only to reach Bomb Alley before dark. He ignored the voice that told him to stop and sleep and continued in the dark. However, he finally obeyed the voice after a bad fall.

The text shifts to Yates’s account. At base camp, Yates felt physically improved but resisted Richard’s suggestion that they should return to Lima. However, Richard insisted on going to see Spinoza to organize the donkeys for their return trip. Yates agreed to leave the following morning. He thought of how he would have to inform the British Embassy and Simpson’s parents of his death. Gloria and Norma visited the camp, and Yates assumed that they wished to pay their respects to Simpson. After Richard spoke to them in Spanish, however, he angrily revealed that the girls expected a gift before they left. Yates shouted at the teenagers, and Richard ordered them to go.

The text shifts to Simpson’s perspective. His leg pain kept him awake during the night, and he stared at the stars. In the morning, he struggled to summon the energy to move but was spurred on by the fear that Yates and Richard may be leaving camp. Simpson realized that traveling in the dark the previous day was futile: He had made little progress. Setting off at eight o’ clock in the morning, he gave himself until noon to reach Bomb Alley, again breaking the journey into timed stages. After hopping along, he had a nasty fall and laid there, stunned, wanting to give up. However, the voice urged him to keep going.

Simpson reached Bomb Alley and, after gorging himself on water, felt somewhat revived. He realized that it was eight days since he had been there with Yates. Seeing footprints, he became increasingly confused and believed that Yates and Richard were following behind him. Simpson reached the lake by his target time but fell and realized that he was too weak to hop. He lost control of his bladder and began to crawl, stopping and dozing often. As he got closer to camp, Simpson started to dread the possible discovery that Yates and Richard had already gone. Shouting Yates’s name, he made his way down in the dark.

The voice in Simpson’s head disappeared. In the dark, he could not orient himself until he crawled through feces and realized that he had reached the camp latrine. He shouted weakly, cried, and saw lights as Yates and Richard approached him. Yates picked Simpson up and dragged him to a tent, where he received food, hot tea, and medication. To inspect Simpson’s leg, Yates cut open his trousers with the penknife he had used to cut the rope. The leg was swollen, discolored, and more distorted than Simpson had imagined. His heel was also broken. Yates admitted that they burned Simpson’s clothes because they thought he was dead.

Richard went to tell Spinoza to bring a saddled mule for Simpson. Yates ignored Simpson’s argument that he was too weak to travel on a mule, insisting that his leg needed treatment as soon as possible, and they must get to the hospital in Lima. When Simpson told Yates that he saved his life by making the right choice, his friend cried, saying he wished he had not assumed that Simpson was dead.

In the morning, Spinoza and his sisters arrived with the donkeys. Richard and Spinoza engaged in a heated negotiation in Spanish about the price of the donkeys. Simpson drifted in and out of consciousness, realizing that his body had finally given out and he was on the brink of death.

The day’s journey on a mule was painful for Simpson, but Yates took care of him. In the Peruvian village of Cajatambo, Richard negotiated with the police to hire a pickup truck and driver. When the vehicle arrived, Simpson laid on a mattress in the back, and villagers climbed in with him, trying to hitch a lift to Lima. When Richard tried to eject the final villager from the truck, an armed policeman asked them to take the old man to the hospital. The old man removed the sacking covering his legs and revealed that both legs were broken and distorted by infected open wounds. Horrified, Simpson agreed.

The drive to Lima took three days. When they arrived, the group learned that the old man could not afford the “good hospital” they had driven to. Yates and Richard paid the truck driver to take the man to a cheaper hospital and gave him the last of their medication. In the hospital, Simpson discovered that he now weighed seven and a quarter stone. He received no treatment for two days until his insurance company contacted the hospital to confirm payment. When the hospital staff prepared to operate, Simpson became hysterical, insisting that he did not want the surgery. The staff did not speak English and anesthetized him regardless.