The Beckoning Silence (20 page)

After years of reading guide-books and the exploits of my heroes I found myself delighted and awe-struck to be cautiously following in their ghostly footsteps, sharing the same storm-swept bivouac ledges, fighting up ice-filled finger cracks, perched over the same airy, sweeping ice fields and all the while intently conscious of how much greater they were than I could ever be. It happened by accident, not design, and I am keenly aware that I have no right to stand anywhere close to the memory of these pioneers who were my true inspiration.

It was the words of my heroes that inspired me to climb. Hermann Buhl’s
Nanga Parbat Pilgrimage
, Riccardo Cassin’s
Fifty Years of Alpinism
, Walter Bonatti’s
The Great Days
, Lionel Terray’s superbly titled
Conquistadors of the Useless
and Kurt Diemberger’s evocative
Summits and Secrets
were my bibles. These were their memorials and my motivation. Head and shoulders above them all stood Heinrich Harrer’s
The White Spider
– not because it was a particularly masterful piece of literature but because it was a story so fearful that when I finished it at the age of fourteen I sat and wondered at the awful experiences these men had put themselves through. I vowed then and there that I would never be a climber.

I often wondered if these heroes of mine ever climbed with quite such a baggage of fears and dark terrors as I did. I was convinced that heroes do not feel such emotions. I, on the other hand, seem beset with nightmare thoughts of how it will all end. It is as if some dark, hooded crow squats on my quaking shoulders muttering dire warnings of calamities to come. I never asked if any of my climbing companions ever felt the same way. Shame at my weakness and fear of their scorn were deterrent enough. There were moments, often in the fraught hours of a stormy bivouac, when my nemesis, the crow, wafted in with an icy beat of its wings and bent its beak to my ear.
You shouldn’t be here, boy, this is not your place, tell him now, go on, tell him that you want to go down.

And I would shiver on through the long dark bivouac hours waiting for the edge of dawn to creep up and make black-humoured jokes to my companion in a pathetic attempt at bravado. I never once suspected that he might have been thinking exactly the same things. I would never have dreamed of asking.

Then a burning sun rose through a morning sky and we climbed on and up, dancing over sun-heated golden granite, tip-toeing along the filigreed ribbon of a knife-edged ridge of snow towards a distant summit, and I wondered why I had ever thought to ask such foolish questions. I watched Alpine choughs playing acrobatic games dancing on the thermal winds, and entirely forgot the foul crow.

I shook my head and tried to stop thinking about the Eiger.
Damn Ray!
I leaned forward to place the Mallory book on the bookshelf and spotted a copy of Daniel Anker’s
Eiger: The Vertical Arena.
On impulse I pulled it out and flicked through the pages of text and photographs. It was an updated history of the mountain with a wealth of old and new photographs. Part of the book was divided into a blow-by-blow description of the salient features on the north face: the Difficult Crack, the Hinterstoisser Traverse, the Swallow’s Nest bivouac site on the edge of the First Ice Field; the Ice Hose and the great sweep of the Second Ice Field leading up to the Flat Iron and then the forebodingly named Death Bivouac. Then the Third Ice Field, the Ramp, the Traverse of the Gods, the White Spider itself and the fearsome Exit Cracks. Wonderful, evocative names drenched in the history of tragic accidents and bold fighting victories.

At the start of each section there was a page of text opposite a full colour photograph of the salient features. The book fell open to a photograph of the face during a storm with the great buttress of the Röte Fluh, a thousand feet high and yet lost within the immensity of the vast amphitheatre of rock buttresses and stone-fall blackened ice. Huge waterfalls were coursing down the face, leaping into space in bursting geysers from the edges of the ice fields. It was an impressive photograph. I could imagine how unpredictable a monster the mountain could be. The face was streaming with water but it didn’t take much imagination to see the infernal fusillades of rocks that would be whistling down flushed loose by the thunderstorm, avalanches spewing out of gullies, as if the mountain was self-destructing.

I turned the page and there was the chilling photograph of Toni Kurz hanging in space, slumped from the waist, frozen to death. On the opposite page there was a photograph of him taken just before the ascent – young, happy, smiling. Again I was reminded of the photograph of Mallory and the clear direct gaze of his eyes staring out from the past. I looked at Toni Kurz sitting amid alpine flowers smiling at the camera with the unruly curls of dark hair framing his boyish face.

The faces in the photographs, particularly the eyes, seem to reach out from the past as if trying to pull you into their lives. Looking out from that moment in an alpine meadow sixty-four years ago oblivious of his impending fate the youthful Toni Kurz seemed to be speaking to me. ‘I am gone but I pass on to you my liveliness and my life, for you too will be taken, as once I was, and you will be as still and content as am I, for whom centuries are not even seconds.’ Now immortalised in mountaineering history, he lived on frozen in two moments within the pages of a book; alive on the left-hand page, dead on the right.

As I flicked idly through the book from the grisly photograph of Edi Rainier’s body crushed into the screes at the foot of the mountain to the dark cleft of the Ramp I was enticed and intimidated in equal measure. One moment I stared in dread, the next I leaned forward fascinated, wondering how hard it might be. Could I climb it?

The phone rang and I placed both books on the shelf and picked up the receiver.

‘Have you been thinking about it?’ Ray asked conspiratorialy.

‘About what?’ I blustered.

‘About the ’38 route on the Eiger …’

‘Don’t mention the bloody Eiger.’

‘Well, have you?’

‘No, of course I haven’t,’ I lied. ‘You only told me a few hours ago …’

‘I’ve been looking at the videos again,’ he said.

‘I’ve been working,’ I replied defensively.

‘It looked dead easy, you know.’

‘I think the “dead” bit is the pertinent part,’ I complained, remembering the photographs I had just been looking at.

‘No, I mean really easy, flat almost,’ and before I could interject he rushed on. ‘I’ve sent you the videos. They should be there on Wednesday. There’s five of them.’

‘Five?’

‘Well, they are German, very long-winded you know.’ He laughed and I heard the suppressed excitement in his voice. ‘They made a live outside broadcast with film crews all over the place, and helmet cameras and palmcorders, the lot. You get a really clear sense of what the face is like and I thought, hey we can do that.’

‘We?’

‘Why not? You always said you had wanted to do it and here’s our chance.’

‘Ray,’ I said patiently, ‘you seem to have forgotten a few salient points here. I grant you, it can be easy in perfect, dry and cold conditions, which presumably it was when they made this film.’

‘Oh yeah, it looked immaculate. No verglas, and I can’t remember hearing any rock-fall. It was in September which probably took advantage of the colder nights …’

‘So what happens if we don’t get these perfect conditions?’

‘No problem,’ he announced, confidently. ‘We’ll run away. Just like we always do.’

‘Not so easy if we’re stuck in a Föhn storm halfway up the Exit Cracks. They come screaming in with winds strong enough to destroy tents down in Alpiglen. These then turn the face into a moving mass of avalanches and waterfalls. When it’s over it freezes, hard …’

‘Ah,’ he said, less exultantly, ‘not good, then.’

‘And now you’re trying to climb Scottish grade 5 or 6 mixed climbing with no protection and non-existent belays to boot.’

‘Right, that wouldn’t be good news.’

‘Quite. Remember Brendan and Rob? Remember what happened?’ There was a pregnant silence from the receiver. Ray was remembering the time when Rob Durran and Brendan Murphy had been pinned down in the Exit Cracks in a winter storm, fighting for their lives. Rob had been leading, unable to find any protection when he fell. He knew that Brendan had no belay to speak of and in that instant he knew he was about to fall the length of the 6000-foot face beneath him. As his axes skittered down the icy rocks they suddenly held and he stopped, poised above the abyss as he scrabbled to set his crampon points. The terror of the moment had made him void his bowels.

‘But that was in winter,’ Ray protested.

‘Yeah and don’t forget that Brendan had made the first winter ascent of Divine Providence on the Eckfeiler,’ I said. ‘At the time it was one of the hardest routes in the Alps. They were that good and the Exit Cracks nearly killed them,’ I said pointedly.

‘Right, good point …’ Ray muttered.

‘How do you fancy leading the Exit Cracks in those conditions?’

‘Ah, well, you see this is where the cunning part of my plan comes in,’ he said, cheering up. ‘I thought you might like to lead that bit.’ And with a slightly deranged note in his laugh he put the phone down.

I let out a long sigh and tried not to think about it. But the worm was in and turning frantically. The Eiger. Just the word got my heart pounding. All these years I had dismissed it and here it was back again and the hooded black crow was flapping in towards my shoulder with a sibilant rush of wind.
Do you want to die then, kid? Do you really?

‘Bugger off!’ I muttered and stood up, wandered downstairs and ran a bath. Settling back into the warm water, luxuriating in the heat soothing the aches in my injured knee and ankle, I read a magazine on fly fishing and fly tying, thought about taking up golf, and tried to forget I had ever heard of the Eiger. It didn’t work. The clever part of Ray’s plan lay simply in the fact that he had suggested the idea. As the words came out the plan emerged fully formed and undeniable.

The phone rang. It was Ray again.

‘One last thing,’ he said, abruptly. ‘Just remember that you’d really kick yourself, Joe, if you looked back from a grand old age and realised that you had never even just gone and had a look at it. I mean, if we at least get onto the lower face and decide for whatever reasons …’

‘Cowardice,’ I interjected.

‘Yes, I’ll accept that, cowardice is good with me. But if we then decide we want to back away, well, at least we’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that we tried. We got close up and personal and then made our own decisions. We won’t regret the fact that we just went and looked. How about we just go and take a wee look? Better by far than never to have even dared to try, eh?’

‘Quite,’ I thought as I lay in the bath, ‘and very cunning, Ray.’

Despite my misgivings I kept thinking of reasons why his plan was less stupid than I had first thought. When Simon and I had returned from Peru Simon went to the Alps and climbed the Eiger whilst I went to hospital. After six operations on my smashed knee the doctors told me that I would never walk without a limp and most certainly never climb again. I ignored them and after years of physiotherapy, aided by falling downstairs when drunk, I eventually managed to get considerably more flexion. It forced me to become a better climber. I had to think of my foot work far more than I used to and consequently became technically superior. Years of using crutches had increased my upper body strength and with the advent of the development of indoor climbing walls I found that I could climb at grades far higher than I had ever attained before.

The physical struggle to fitness was simply a matter of hard work and stubbornness. Psychologically, however, the accident in Peru had left me deeply traumatised. A great deal of success in climbing is down to confidence, mental commitment and motivation. For a long time I was happy to bumble around on fairly easy routes well within my ability but I was not prepared to commit myself to a technically hard and potentially dangerous climb. In the back of my mind there were shadows of doubt and fear that I never seemed to be able to shake off.

In the ensuing fifteen years of painful and often depressing attempts to regain my fitness I eventually climbed in Nepal, Peru, Pakistan, Africa, India, Bolivia and Ecuador. I even managed to climb a couple of first ascents alpine-style in Peru and Nepal, but never at the extreme level of difficulty that we had committed to on the west face of Siula Grande. However, I hadn’t realised as the years had passed how much better a climber I had actually become. It was a gradual progress judged most often by the standards of other friends who climbed at far higher standards and because of that I hadn’t really been aware of how much I had improved.

When Ray suggested we try the Eiger my first thought was whether I was technically capable of climbing such a route, especially if conditions turned bad. I had no intention of starting up the face blindly, hoping that the weather would stay fine and relying on the rescue services if things became too difficult. I would only consider an attempt if I felt sure I was up to the challenge.

I thought about the standards that I had been climbing at in the 1980s just prior to going to Peru. To be able to climb at an E 1, the lowest of the extreme rock grades, wearing big mountaineering boots and carrying a rucksack was pretty good going at the beginning of the 1980s. I had climbed grade 5 water ice in Scotland and made ascents of complex and objectively serious routes in the Alps. I was confident climbing Extrème Difficile (denoted ED in the alpine grading system), and at the time this was the hardest grade of alpine routes.

By the time we set off for Siula Grande I was an experienced mountaineer, whether it was on technical rock routes in the Dolomites or big mixed north walls in the French and Swiss Alps. Ascents of the difficult mixed climbing on the Dru Couloir above the Chamonix valley or the harsh conditions found on the north face of Les Droites in winter had given me the confidence to believe that I could attempt a hard first ascent in the greater ranges.