ABSTRACT
In his younger days, the Dutchman Tom de Booij was an elite athlete—his sport was mountaineering. In the early 1950s he set out, with fellow countryman Egeler and Frenchman Terray, to climb the Nevado Huanstán, over 20,000 feet high and the highest unclimbed mountain in the Cordillera Bianca range in the Peruvian Andes. Their attempt to climb the Huanstán was successful, but not before de Booij had a perilous 300-foot fall down a steep wall of ice. Luckily, when he fell he was not injured, but he was left hanging upside down on the end of a rope over the abyss. His own account of his psychological reactions, as Terray tried to rescue him, is worth recounting here (Egeler & de Booij, 1955, pp. 106–107).
All I heard was an agonized French oath, then a panting voice urging me to have patience for another five minutes. It was then, at that precise moment, that I fully realized that as soon as my feet and the rope parted company, I would irrevocably plunge into the void. It was a strange sensation, to become conscious that I was going to die. Oddly enough, I felt calm and untroubled by pangs of fear. Death seemed so inevitable that I simply accepted my lot. Thus it was that, suspended head downwards, I was able to remark to Egeler: ‘This is it Kees! It's all over with us!’
If there had been the slightest chance of surviving, I should no doubt have been terribly scared. But I felt no apprehension; only a feeling of relief, coupled with curiosity as to what death would be like.
