Sir Ran puts his heart into Everest

High on Kilimanjaro he thought he was having one. “I felt weird,” he says. “Oddly emotional, which is rare.” He found himself thinking about death, and about his wife, Ginny, who died in February after her stomach cancer was diagnosed on the day of his return from the seven marathons. He made it to the top of Kilimanjaro and descended quickly. The tight chest and the morbid thinking left him and he chalked them both up to altitude. Those who know him would have expected nothing less; Fiennes is an expert rationaliser of his own dire straits. But he also knows what’s really at stake, even if he prefers not to talk about it. Chest twinges are not a classic symptom of altitude sickness. Splitting headaches are. Furthermore, he kept a diary of his ascent in which he noted without comment on August 5: “Two South Africans dropped dead (separately) of heart attacks. One near summit and one in the West Breach.”

Fiennes has also talked through his Everest attempt with the medical consultant to the British guiding firm that has undertaken to help him with it. In a follow-up e-mail, the doctor, David Hillebrandt, noted: “I did tell you of one recent client who had a heart attack on top of a 6,500m peak about six months after having an apparently successful stent operation on his coronary arteries. He was passed as fit by myself, his cardiologist and his GP and climbing partner, and 20 other high-altitude doctors later agreed with our advice at a conference. Life has risks.”

Everest is more than two kilometres higher than that 6,500m peak. Fiennes is planning to attempt a northern route from China that requires spending more time above 8,000m — in what the Everest hype industry now calls the death zone — than the southern one from Nepal.

Conquering the world’s highest mountain can seem routine. Thanks to bottled oxygen and kilometres of route-bashing by entrepreneurial sherpas, a 70-year-old Japanese man has managed it. So has a 15-year-old girl and a certain Erik Weihenmayer, from Englewood, Colorado, who is blind. But in Fiennes’s case the plain truth is that an Everest climb could very well kill him.

It may be to take his mind off this that he has conceived the project as a deeply personal effort to conquer something entirely unconnected to his heart: his fear of heights. He defines this fear in terms that some people will find ridiculous. As a schoolboy, he would scale Eton’s domes and lightning rods at night, fearing not the long drop to the ground but the risks of being caught. As a young man he joined the SAS (“the airborne people”), for which he had to learn to parachute, free-falling with his eyes open so as not to hit his comrades.

He is ashamed, he says, to admit that he kept them shut. Thirty-odd years ago he even climbed the Matterhorn by the legendary Hornli ridge and says that he found it easy. But still he insists that he’s scared of heights, and it takes a while to understand that in the Fiennes lexicon this means that he is not yet completely, inhumanly unafraid of them. Which is why, last Saturday, he strode into a bar in Zermatt after a week’s training in the southern Swiss Alps complaining that he had not been scared enough.

Torrential rain and snow in neighbouring Saastal had confined him to a climber’s hut on orders from the Swiss Alpine Club when the plan had been to teeter along one of the sharpest, highest ridges in Europe. He had pleaded to be allowed “to get cold, wet and frightened”, but to no avail. Now, over a cardiac-friendly Apfelsaft, he begged one of his British guides to arrange for him to be “looking a really long way down, vertically, between my legs”.

It is 22 years since the Transglobe Expedition that covered both poles and made Fiennes famous; 11 years since the The Guinness Book of Records called him the world’s greatest living explorer; and ten months since he gave a metaphorical middle finger to all those urging caution on him after his heart attack.

In normal circumstances even his loudest cheerleaders might be expecting him to ease off now and start planning a dignified retirement. Yet his circumstances are far from normal. He is a widower, and cannot (will not?) get used to it. Lady Fiennes was his immediate family. She reared a herd of thoroughbred Aberdeen Angus at their farm on Exmoor, and loved them dearly, but never had children. During her lifetime Fiennes himself was often mistaken for a loner. Her death has left him truly alone. “Friends told me the passing of time would help,” he says. “They may be right, but time is not doing its magic yet for me.”

In the meantime his strategy has been to work flat out — on book tours, speaking engagements and peculiarly masochistic ultramarathons, including a recent non-stop 48-hour slog entirely within Edinburgh that required competitors to run into Debenhams carrying mountain bikes, take a lift to the roof and ride over the sponsor’s brand new off-road vehicles which had somehow been positioned there. Fiennes fell twice.

“There was a lot of blood,” he comments. But not much genuine distraction from loneliness. He’s sticking to constant work as a way of organising his time partly because he disdains the self-absorbed emoting that a psychotherapist might require of him, partly because he hasn’t thought of anything better, and this goes at least some way to answering “Why Everest?” He volunteers another reason. “I think Ginny would have been very worried,” he says. “She got used to knowing that polar things were very unlikely to end up with any problem. However, she somehow shared my fear of mountains and thought of them as hostile.”

She will, then, be spared the anxieties of a climber’s spouse. But has her death also flipped a switch within him that means he no longer recognises any limits to his risk-taking? For a long, long minute, Ran — which is what everyone who’s met him calls him — cannot speak.

Eventually, swallowing hard, he goes back to his fear of heights, not so much to change the subject as to approach it from another angle. By this time we’re in Italy, in the dining room of an Italian mountain hut flanked by tumbling glaciers, 3,700m up on a spur of black rock beneath the two peaks with the best names in the Alps: Castor and Pollux. We got here from Zermatt via a frontier ridge made entirely of snow and ice with an overhanging crest the width of a coin. (The guides had obliged.) Had Ran fallen back into Switzerland, the rest of us, attached to him by rope, would have had no option but to leap down into Italy and hope that the knots held. The route was the width of two boots and it snaked along the ridge just over a metre from the crest. “Last year,” he says, “there’s no way I would have managed that. Now you find yourself thinking ‘Yeah, that steep bit doesn’t matter’. And that’s enormously helpful . . . to have something new, something dreadful in my case — which makes you think, ‘So what . . . if by chance you did slip and fall, what the hell?’ ”

Fiennes is deeply worried about saying anything that might give the impression he’s being driven up Everest by a recklessness born of bereavement. And yet this is undeniably part of his motivation; if not recklessness, then fatalism. He might get scared. He might even slip.

It doesn’t matter. This being so, he has decided that he might as well confront something more frightening than an audience on his well-trodden lecture circuit. Finding backers for Everest hasn’t been straightforward, however, partly because the outcome is so uncertain.

Half his costs are being met by Paul Sykes, the millionaire bankroller of the UK Independence Party, even though Fiennes has been cool to suggestions that he should seek office as a UKIP MP. And Jagged Globe, one of Britain’s two biggest Himalayan-guiding firms, insisted he take a crash course in 21st-century mountaineering to be considered for a £35,000 place on one of its Everest trips, and for the insurance he must buy along with the place. This past fortnight in the Alps has been stage one of that course. He is surprisingly deferential to his guides, but maniacal about his own fitness. On Monday, after getting up at 4am to climb Castor and Pollux by elevenses, he returned to Zermatt, eschewed beer, and went on a two-hour run. Stage two will take place in October on the flanks of two giant Ecuadorean volcanoes, gaining vital experience of ice-climbing at altitude.

If his guides give him the nod, he will head next spring for Tibet, and one of the sternest tests ever devised for the human heart. He will be accompanying Sibusiso Vilane, a park ranger from Botswana who last year became the first black person to conquer Everest. Vilane did it from the South and now wants to complete the double by doing the northern route as well. They will be guided every step of the way. Their heavy equipment will be carried by Sherpas.

There are now fixed ropes, like guide rails, to the very top of the world. The South Pole this is not, but for Fiennes it may still be the most dangerous thing he’s ever done.

DEBATE

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