Chapter 1: Relief Data Incomplete

Lets climb the south face of Gunung Mandala

Although I had led several expeditions in the army, none had involved scaling a major mountain. Somewhere I had a certificate, dating from one of the first army courses I endured that declared me a 'top-roping and abseiling supervisor'. I remembered standing at the top of a crag somewhere in Wales, watching a staff sergeant inspect my knots and belays, but I had done virtually nothing since.

Bruce's Royal Marines background and a recent 'roped-access' job in Oman meant that he was more experienced. The more reading we did, though, the more we realised that any ropes we carried would be required more for crossing Irian Jaya's many rivers than for mountain-climbing. The last two books Bruce had found, both written in the early 1960s, finally told us some of what we needed to know.

One, 'The Sky Above, the Mud Below', by Tony Saulnier, told of the first crossing of 'Netherlands New Guinea', as it was then known, by foot from the south-east to the north-east. It had been accompanied by a short film of the same title that had won the 1962 Best Documentary award at the Cannes Film Festival. An internationally financed and staffed expedition, involving eighty-nine porters, dozens of air-drops and taking seven months, it had been 'stalked by death'. They lost two porters, and had had particular difficulty in crossing the rivers that frequently confronted them. Their preferred bridging method was to chop down trees until one both fell in the right direction and was not swept away. It often took several days to get everyone across one. We decided to use grappling hooks and a pulley system.

The second book, To the Mountains of the Stars, by G.F. Venema, told us that the mountain had been climbed before. This was disappointing, as all Bruce's enquiries to date - Australian, Dutch and British mountaineering associations included - had drawn a blank on Gunung Mandala. It appeared that a massive expedition had been mounted by the Dutch at about the same time as the one that had been filmed. It had been a very different style of trip. Numerous teams had fanned out across the east of the colony to hack their way through and investigate anything of interest that had been spotted from the air. The yellowing pages told of dozens of helicopter landing sites being cleared prior to research teams going in to weigh the 'natives' and take measurements. Only the two colour-plates showing the summit of Gunung Mandala kept me reading. Eventually I discovered a small sketch map that showed the two-week route that a small team had taken through the jungle and on to the rocky upper reaches of the mountain, and thence to the summit. They were photographed wearing crampons on an ice cap recorded as being 325 feet thick. One description grabbed our attention: when the mountaineers reached the top they peered over the other side into a 'stupendous abyss'.

'That's it then. We're going up the south face.' Bruce announced, jabbing a finger at one of the three maps we had acquired. 'No one's been up that!'

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