1. Joe and Simon seem to be like a well oiled team, that they work well together and don’t talk a lot they just know what each others going to do or about to do. ‘I appreciated his caution, for I would be swept away it suddenly parted company with the wall.’ This proves that they know what each other is doing as they both knew that Joe might die if he was not cautious. This quote also shows that the are very aware of each other and are interdependent. Joe and Simon are interdependent as they need each other to get to the peak of the mountain because they need each others knowledge of the mountain and mountaineering, for example if one of them were to want to go on a path that was very dangerous and he did not know that it was but the other knew it was life threatening then if the other person were to go on that path then they could have died but with the knowledge of the other they did not risk their life.

2. The environment in this chapter is in a icy glacier with a lot of steep ice cliffs that Joe and Simon have to lead climb up the ice cliffs. This requires a lot of energy and endurance from Joe and Simon as they also have heavy packs on and are climbing about 1000ft which is about 304 meters up a very steep hill. They do not seem to react in scared ways as they are experienced climbers and have done stuff like this many times so are just doing what they are used to. Although when it becomes dark and they need to find a shelter to sleep in they become a lot more worried and cautious about what they are doing as they find it hard to see and could easily step on something unstable and fall down the cliff.

3. We as the reader learn that Joe has been through a traumatising experience up in the mountains it also shows how scary and shocking it would have been as it made his friend that was the other person in the catastrophe quit mountaineering and stop climbing altogether. This piece of text also indicates that Joe must love mountaineering to have come back after his experience and even do mountains tougher than ones in his past. This piece of text is important as it is foreshadowing what is going to happen later in the text when every thing goes wrong for Joe and Simon. The author Joe Simpson would have used this language technique purposefully as it sort of hints to the reader about the future and what is going to happen so when we get to that section in the text we are ready for it but not fully ready for the severeness of the event.

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