The Beckoning Silence (24 page)

The long, cold hanging had ravaged his body. Ice plated his jacket and trousers. His left hand, exposed when he lost his mitt in the terrifying fall, had been quickly frozen. By morning his entire left arm was grotesquely congealed into a solid, immovable claw. His core temperature was critically low, yet he had stoically hung on, waiting for the faint glimmer of dawn, praying for the sound of friendly voices.

Despite the benefit of daylight the guides attempting the rescue could climb no nearer than 130 feet from where Kurz hung out over the abyss – a single rope length from rescue. The cliff was so overhanging that they could not see Toni Kurz swinging freely in the wind. Attempts to fire a rope up to him using rockets failed as they whizzed futilely into space. Kurz was weakening fast. The guides insisted that he try to descend the rope beneath him as far as possible and cut away Angerer’s body. Then he had to climb back up and cut free some of the loose rope connecting him to Rainier’s contorted, lifeless form.

Despite a useless, frozen arm Kurz completed this exhausting manoeuvre, clinging tenuously to the rope with the hook of his frozen limb, as he cut the rope with his axe. He expected to see his friend’s body wheel down into the chasm. Angerer didn’t fall. During the night his body had swung against the wall and become frozen to the rock. When Kurz gathered the freed rope he painstakingly untwisted the triple hawser-laid strands and knotted them together. It took five hours of unbelievably frustrating toil as Kurz struggled to untwist the stiff, wire-like rope with an incapacitated arm and numb, blackened and swollen fingers. He tugged desperately with his teeth and fought to knot the stiffened rope into sections of cord. Eventually he had a thin cord just long enough to reach the arms of his dispirited rescuers.

As the hours passed Kurz’s strength was ebbing fast. By the time the fragile cord came snaking down the guides knew there was very little time left.

He had displayed phenomenal endurance, strength and mental stamina in his struggle to live. That was all it had become – a lone figure fighting for his life, able to draw on nothing but his will power.

An avalanche thundered down, battering Kurz’s decrepit body and almost sweeping the waiting guides to their death as they attempted to fasten a climbing rope and a sling equipped with karabiners, pitons and a hammer to the cord. Suddenly a boulder spun down through the air, almost decapitating one of the rescuers. Then came the frightful rushing noise of a body plunging towards them. Angerer’s body – torn free from the grip of the ice – plummeted to the foot of the wall.

Kurz barely had the strength to haul up the heavy rope with the hardware swinging and clattering against the rock wall. Still the rope was not long enough. The guides spliced on another rope and at last they could see that Kurz would be able to reach them. Unfortunately the knot joining the two ropes together hung in space just out of their reach. Somehow Kurz would have to by pass the blockage. They said nothing.

Kurz’s body appeared over the rim of the impending wall, legs dangling and spinning in the air as he slid painfully down the rope. Slowly, he inched down towards the knot joining the two ropes. He had threaded his abseil rope through a karabiner clipped into his waist belt to increase the friction on the thin rope. Gripping it with one glacial, insensate hand must have been appallingly difficult yet he managed to creep down towards his rescuers. Inch by inch the tortured figure came swinging down until the knot came up against the vice-like grip of his frozen hand and then caught against the karabiner. It would not pass through the snap link. He was hanging in space, unable to get his weight off the rope, and it was now impossible for him unclip the karabiner. He was locked into the system.

He thumped helplessly at the hardened knot, uttering pitiable groans of agony. He bent forward in a pathetic attempt to bite the knot down to size as his grotesque left arm pointed stick-like into the sky. He mumbled incomprehensibly through bleeding lips, his face blotched purple from frost-bite and emotion. The guides strained to hear him.

Then in a firm, lucid voice he spoke aloud. ‘I’m finished,’ he said and lolled forward, his body tipping so that he hung from the waist, arms dangling by his legs, swinging gently in the breeze. He had died at the very point of rescue, almost within arm’s reach of the guides. The piteous photograph of his corpse hanging in space with icicles growing from his fingers and the points of his crampons will remain in my mind for ever. Days later, the guides used a knife tied to a long pole to cut him free.

Rainer had been prophetically quoted in the press before the ascent saying, ‘We don’t want to die, we’re still young and want to live. We always leave our way down open. We know that it takes luck and we have to count on that.’ Then he added ominously, ‘If it is possible to do the Wall we’ll do it – if not, we’ll stay up there.’

His luck ran out. Rainer’s body was found crumpled on the screes at the foot of the face, melded into stones as if he had become assimilated into the very fabric of the mountain. He was carried home to be buried in Salzburg. During the search for their bodies the guides found Max Sedlmayr, who had died the previous year. His companion, Karl Mehringer, frozen into the ice at the edge of the Second Ice Field, would not be found for another twenty-seven years.

A month after the tragedy Kurz’s twisted body was eventually found in the icy depths of a bergschrund at the base of the wall, extracted, wrapped in a tarpaulin and carried down to Grindelwald. The following year Hinterstoisser’s body was found by Matthias Rebitsch and Ludvig Vorg during their first unsuccessful attempt on the wall. So ended one of the most powerful and poignant episodes ever to be enacted on the Eiger.

From the mumbled, fragmentary and incoherent sentences that Kurz had uttered, the guides managed to piece together what had happened to the retreating party. Hinterstoisser was off the rope when hit by stone-fall, perhaps because as the best climber he was trying to fix a secure piton placement for the next abseil, and he fell the length of the face. A second volley of rocks then knocked the remaining three men from their stance, trapping Rainer and strangling Angerer. Tattered scraps of bandage found wrapped around Angerer’s skull proved that he had suffered a serious head injury.

For the helpless guides it was a terrible experience. When Sedlmayr and Mehringer had died the previous year they had done so alone, hidden within the maelstrom of the storm that had pinned them down in the centre of the wall. Toni Kurz, however, died in the full pitying gaze of his fellow guides. Arnold Glatthard, one of the guides, said, ‘It was the saddest moment of my life.’ I have always been haunted by the story of this brave young man’s vain but heroic fight for life. As Heinrich Harrer wrote in
The White Spider
,

… it was one of the grimmest tricks of fate which left Toni Kurz uninjured at the outset, so that he was forced to endure his agony to its uttermost end. He was like some messenger from the beyond, finding his way back to earth simply because he loved life so well.

Thirty years later, when Chris Bonington and Don Whillans were struggling to retreat down the face when rescuing a dazed Brian Nally, Don Whillans remembered the fateful lessons of the Kurz party.

Brian Nally and his partner Barry Brewster had reached the far left upper edge of the Second Ice Field. Brewster was climbing the difficult rock pitch that led up from the ice onto the distinct triangular rock buttress called the Flat Iron when he was struck by a fusillade of rocks. He fell 200 feet and the impact bent Nally’s belay piton to the point of breaking. Nally attempted to help his paralysed friend lying exposed on the ice field. He dug a ledge in the ice for Brewster to lie on secured to one of the ropes, despite continuous rock-fall.

Early the following morning Brewster died of his injuries as Whillans and Bonington were climbing across the ice field towards the distant figures. Suddenly another barrage of rocks swept Brewster from his perch on the ice. Whillans and Bonington watched mesmerised as the body flew clear of the Second Ice Field and plunged 5000 feet to the foot of the wall. ‘It was like being hit hard in the stomach,’ Bonington later wrote. ‘I just hugged the ice and swore over and over again.’

When Nally, Whillans and Bonington reached the foot of the Ice Hose at the top of the First Ice Field Don Whillans displayed his genius as a mountaineer. He noticed a stream of meltwater washing down to the right of the Ice Hose to plunge over the overhanging walls of the Röte Fluh. From his previous knowledge of the face Whillans knew that this plume of water often flowed from the rock wall above the start of the Hinterstoisser Traverse. Instead of descending to the First Ice Field, as countless retreating parties had done before, he led down to the right as a deluge of hailstones and rocks clattered down the wall. He followed the stream to a point where he could hammer in a secure abseil piton. In one abseil the three men found themselves at the start of the Hinterstoisser Traverse. Whillans’s brilliance as a mountaineer had saved them the effort of having to reverse the Hinterstoisser Traverse. If only Toni Kurz and his party had known this they could have retreated safely instead of being forced to make the intimidating and critical decision to abseil the rock band beneath the First Ice Field.

These were lessons to be learned and easily remembered because of their grisly nature. Ignorance is the greatest source of fear. With foresight and common sense we could reduce the face to a set of distinct climbing problems routinely overcome.

‘Bloody hell!’ Ray blurted out and I glanced over at him. He was staring through the windows, eyes wide in astonishment. I looked forward and there it was. The Eiger. My heart leaped. I was transfixed.

‘Watch the bloody road,’ Ray yelped and I hauled on the steering wheel and swerved to avoid an oncoming lorry. ‘Jesus, I’m scared enough as it is without you killing us both.’

‘I’m not scared, you know?’ I said and looked again at the Eiger as a sweeping corner brought us up into the open meadowland surrounding Grindelwald. ‘I’m excited, mate. Thanks.’

‘Thanks?’ Ray asked looking puzzled. ‘What for?’

‘For suggesting that we have a go at it,’ I said. ‘You were right. I feel great about it.’

‘Not scared, then?’

‘No, not really. Nervous anticipation, maybe …’ I trailed off, lost for words. ‘I haven’t been back to the Alps for fifteen years.’ I grinned at Ray. ‘This is where it all began for me. Not just the Alps but the Eiger. The first route I ever heard of, the one I always dreamed about. Maybe the dream will come true.’

‘Well, if it all goes belly up it just goes to prove what I’ve always thought.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Our sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others. Whoa!’

I laughed and swerved the car quickly out of the way of an oncoming bus.

‘Stop staring at that bloody hill,’ Ray shouted and grabbed at the dashboard as the bus loomed by.

‘Look, we’re going to have to stop for a beer and have a good look at her or I’m going to crash this damn car. I can’t take my eyes off her.’ I swerved again and a Landcruiser towing a caravan beeped its horn angrily as it swept past. I smiled at the irony of being killed in a traffic accident just outside Grindelwald.
That would be just typical.

‘There! On the right,’ Ray said, pointing at a classic Swiss chalet-style restaurant. There was a wooden balcony at the side with tables set and the Eiger loomed up in the background.

‘Have you got your binoculars there?’ I asked as we closed the car doors. Ray held them up.

We sat on the terrace drinking beer and eating goulash soup. The sun was shining from a clear blue sky and the green meadows in the sweeping valley below Grindelwald were dotted with picturesque chalets set amidst manicured grasslands. Cow bells clanged lugubriously in the distance.

‘It’s plastered,’ Ray said as he peered at the Eiger.

‘Yeah, it does look rather white,’ I agreed. ‘Maybe it’s just powder snow?’

‘Could be,’ Ray muttered. ‘But the upper face looks bad. The Ramp is crested with what looks like ice. I can’t even make out the line of the Exit Cracks.’

‘I wonder how fast it clears,’ I said.

‘Here, take a look,’ Ray said, handing me the binoculars. The face suddenly reared into view and I jerked back. Binoculars gave a very distorted image. Everything seemed plumb vertical and all sense of scale disintegrated. ‘Jesus!’ I gasped and heard Ray laughing. At first I was completely lost as the eyepieces seemed filled with immense rock bands, sweeping ice fields, columns of hanging icicles and vast yellow overhanging walls of limestone.

I gazed at the Eiger.
How would it change me?
Past experiences had shaken me to the core, storms both real and metaphorical had raged through me, leaving an indelible sense of vulnerable fragility. Afterwards I was filled with a strength I had never experienced before, an exultant confidence born from standing unharmed within the tempest. I had lived through it. When the fear ebbed it was replaced with a mounting wonder at the beauty I had witnessed. The mountains were contradictory, in equal measure. I could remember their beauty, yet could never fully recall the fear. Perhaps that was because you could see beauty while fear crept in unseen. It was easier to recall the aesthetic that had been so fiercely photographed onto my mind.

I remembered a time trapped on the south face of Les Drus. We had crept past the summit, feeling our hair rising in static on the backs of our necks as the air grew tight and we sensed the awful dread that it was going to explode at any moment and we would be in the centre of it all. In near panic we had scuttled blindly out onto the face away from the ridge lines and the twin pointed summit. The storm, like a living thing, surged against the ramparts of the peaks eating inexorably into the fabric of the mountains. The tension in the air increased to a pressing, ominous urgency. There was a fizzing crackling feel in the air around us as we pulled frantically on the ropes and our jackets rustled in the electric atmosphere. It became unendurable. I felt like weeping, scared and frustrated at our helplessness. Then it was upon us in a colossal explosion of thunder. The pressure released around us. We stared in mute amazement.