A French mountaineer rescued from Pakistan’s “Killer Mountain” has described how she was forced to abandon her weak climbing partner, descend alone in darkness and wait more than 24 hours for help while suffering altitude-induced hallucinations that made her take a shoe off in freezing conditions.

Elisabeth Revol, 37, returned to France after she was rescued on Sunday from Nanga Parbat, the world’s ninth-highest peak at 8,126 metres. She is being treated in a hospital in the Haute-Savoie region, where doctors are assessing whether she will require amputations because of frostbite in her hands and left foot.

In an interview with Agence France-Presse she recalled how rescuers urged her to leave her weak and bleeding fellow climber, the Polish mountaineer Tomek Mackiewicz, behind – something she said was “terrible and painful” to do. Rescuers were unable to reach Mackiewicz, a father of three, who had made six previous winter attempts to scale Nanga Parbat. There is almost no chance of him being found alive.

Revol was the first woman to scale the mountain in winter without oxygen or a sherpa. She told AFP: “We had hardly a second at the top. We had to rush to get down.”

Mackiewicz, who hadn’t worn a mask, said he could no longer see and by nightfall he had developed an eye inflammation. With him clinging to her shoulders, Revol began the hazardous descent in darkness. “At one point, he couldn’t breathe,” she told AFP. “He took off the protection he had in front of his mouth and he began to freeze. His nose became white and then his hands, his feet.”

They huddled overnight in a crevasse, but Mackiewicz’s condition was worsening. Revol said he had “blood streaming from his mouth”, a sign of a build up of fluid in the body, the ultimate stage of acute mountain sickness. She had sent several messages for help, and rescuers told her to descend to 6,000 metres. She said to Mackiewicz: “Listen, the helicopter will arrive late afternoon. I must go down, they’ll come to get you.”

Further down the mountain, when rescuers didn’t arrive, she spent another night sheltering in a crevasse. This time she had no tent or duvet, which she had left behind, but she was more worried for Mackiewicz.

“I had hallucinations during the night. I imagined that people were bringing me hot tea. A woman asked me if in return she could take my shoe. At that moment I automatically got up, took off my shoe and gave it to her. In the morning when I woke up I was only in my sock.”

Her shoe was nowhere to be seen. She had been without it for five hours and developed severe frostbite.

She heard helicopters but rescuers couldn’t land because of the wind. Facing what she feared was a third night in the open, she began to make a final descent, with wet gloves and frozen feet. She managed to reach one of the camps at around 3am, where she was found by elite rescue mountaineers who had been climbing in the dark to reach her in a hazardous operation.



Asked if she would ever climb again, she told AFP: “I think I will. I need this.”