Dark Shadows Falling

In 1992, an Indian climber was left to die alone high on the South Col of Mount Everest by other climbers who watched his feebly waving hand from the security of their tent thirty yards away. Why did these onlookers not hold the dying man's hand and comfort him? The answer appals Joe Simpson, who was himself left for dead in a crevasse in Peru in 1985.

Now that Everest has become the playground of the rich, where commercial operators offer guided tours to the top up fixed ropes, camping amidst the detritus and unburied corpses of previous less fortunate climbers, Simpson wonders if the noble, caring instincts that once characterised mountaineering have been irrevocalby displaced - as in other facets of society. In this exciting and challenging book, he explores anecdotally and in conversations with other mountaineers the moral climate of mountaineering in the 1990s.