The Beckoning Silence (25 page)

Ostentatious lightning, the colour of burnished gold, burst in white-bright flashes flaming along the crenellated ridges. Thundercracks colliding in sheets of sound rattled the air and trembled the dark underbelly of the storm as fire lit the menacing skeins of racing clouds. The wind rose to a shrieking venomous pitch in its furious battle with the mountains, bursting through the passes like flood water through bridge arches so constricted that it roared in furious retaliation, harrying the nervous clouds, pressing them forward until they convulsed skywards into the angry blue, black and purple of the storm wall. The dying sun flashed bright and quick from the boiling thunderheads. The storm pounded against the flanks of the mountains, tearing at their obdurate solidity.

Then the sky ignited in a painful, killing flash leaving sudden blackness on my quickly shuttered eyes followed by the crimson intensity of blood seen pulsing through my closed lids. Ragged breaths rasped through my gritted teeth and my fingers trembled in the staccato light. I clenched a fist to hide my fear. The storm hammered at us for an age and the air stank of shattered stone and the ammoniac reek of sweated fear.

We stood cowering in the heart of this cataclysm with fire and light and flame all around. Yet I felt blessed. We were mute spectators, impotent and awed. The world exploded around us and we stood still and quiet until it seemed we too were spinning wildly in the storm, twirling helplessly in space, no longer human, non-sentient, absorbed by the tempest, elemental. I gazed spellbound as the tremendous forces erupted around us: I was in the midst of an exploding shell watching as white-hot shrapnel rent the air. Somehow I knew without question that I would not be harmed; as if I had earned the right to witness this moment, to live it to the end. Boulders blasted skywards by bolts of flame seemed to slow-tumble darkly against the searing light. The crashing roar of thunder, like the storm surf of some titanic sea breaking on a stony beach, muffled the cracking reports of shattering rocks.

Hail washed over us in waves of stinging needles. Ice formed on the narrow rocky shelf where we stood, crunching under our feet as we winced and slipped on the sliver-thin shards of raw glass. Ice water slid down my neck in rivulets, frigid veins lancing across the warmth of my back.

Then it was silent and the storm passed into the horizon, bickering and snapping angrily as butter-coloured lightning stabbed in exasperation and I smiled, released to life. A tranquil rain flooded away the storm, cleansing the sky as thunder rumbled in muted barrages like heavy guns on a distant half-remembered battlefield. The light died softly and the passing violence left the air ice bright, and a wonderment, sharp as crystal, remained in my memory. The setting sun painted the emptied clouds with glowing pastels. The storm was over. Night followed, swiftly dark, and I took a final refreshment from the light then drank in the glory of emerging stars scattered like carelessly discarded gems across a velvet black sky.

I stood up and braced my shoulders, straightening the cower from my spine. I blew a long exhalation of breath in a plumed smoky vapour. I felt wondrously alive. I thought I should be dead and shivered. My memories may have changed the reality of that storm but it is all I have and I must believe it. I remember the beauty and the awe. I do not recall the terror.

‘Penny for your thoughts?’ Ray asked, disturbing my reverie.

‘Oh, nothing,’ I said. ‘I was thinking about bad weather.’

‘Yeah, we could do without it,’ he replied.

I put the binoculars on the table and glanced over at Ray who sipped reflectively at his beer and gazed fixedly at the Eiger. I wondered what we would find up there.

11 Heroes and fools

I rolled onto my side and glanced out of the door of the bivi tent. There was a slithering sound and a handful of wet snow slid from the angled roof of the tent and struck the back of my neck. I swore and tried to flick it off before it melted and dribbled down my back. Snow clung to the rocky buttresses and rubble-covered ledges outside the tent. In the swirling grey clouds darker shadows were occasionally visible, a few rock walls soaring skywards would coyly reveal themselves and then the mist would wrap them from view. I knew it was the imposing flank of the Röte Fluh, a 1000-foot high overhanging limestone wall that reared up out of the north face to the edge of the west ridge of the Eiger.

For acclimatisation and the chance to get a view of the face we had climbed tiredly up to the west flank the previous afternoon. I had quickly regretted the decision to walk all the way from Grindelwald and avoid the comfort of the train ride to Kleine Scheidegg. It would get us fit, I had announced confidently, and three hours later I had felt half-dead as I staggered into the station bar at the end of the line.

As we had climbed up the initial ledges and scree slopes of the west flank the weather had steadily worsened. By nightfall it had begun snowing heavily. Our plan to leave the tent and make a fast ascent of the west flank the following morning was quickly abandoned. We had hoped to learn the descent route down the west flank that we knew could present tricky route-finding problems in poor conditions, particularly after an ascent of the north face. It would have the added advantage of getting us fit at the same time and perhaps we could look across the Second Ice Field and into the Ramp from the top of the Röte Fluh, giving us a clearer idea of the conditions on the upper part of the face.

‘What’s it like?’ Ray asked, from the depths of his sleeping bag.

‘Not too crisp,’ I said and wiped the cold wetness from my neck. ‘No point continuing,’ I added.

‘Oh, I thought we were going to check out the descent route.’

‘We’d be lucky to find the bloody thing in this stuff,’ I said as I placed a pan of half-frozen water on the stove and lit the gas. It purred comfortingly. ‘It’s a total white-out, snow everywhere. May as well have a brew and bugger off,’ I suggested. ‘Did you sleep okay?’ I asked as I handed a brew of tea to Ray.

‘When you weren’t snoring, yes.’ He sipped at the tea. ‘Is this the first time you’ve been to Grindelwald?’

‘Yeah, I nearly came here twenty years ago but it all went belly up.’

‘How come?’

‘Oh, it was my second season, a good one mind, and I was stupid enough to think I could climb the face. My partner said otherwise.’ I drank my tea and told Ray how Dave Page, my climbing partner at the time, had decided at the very last minute that I wasn’t experienced enough to try the Eiger and how disappointed and humiliated I had been.

We had climbed the Walker Spur together on my twenty-first birthday and of course I had immediately thought of the Eiger. We had heard that the conditions on the face were good that summer and when Dave had mentioned it to me a surge of excitement and dread rushed through me. I could scarcely believe that I had already succeeded on the Walker Spur, one of my most coveted routes. To do the Eiger as well in only my second alpine season seemed too good to be true.

Unfortunately, I had sat in a tent in Snell’s Field in Chamonix and listened despondently as Dave Page patiently explained why he thought I was too inexperienced to attempt the Eiger. We argued long and loud and I felt humiliated to be pleading with him so audibly to everyone else on the camp site. I remembered the sense of bitter disappointment when he elected to climb with a complete stranger and set off for the Swiss Oberland.

In a fit of pique I teamed up with a Canadian climber, Doug Pratt Johnson, and headed for Zermatt, praying that Dave would return after an ignominious failure on the Eiger. Doug and I climbed the heavily snowed-up Schmidt Route on the north face of the Matterhorn, enduring a freezing bivouac without sleeping bags 200 feet below the summit. One of the two pegs holding us in place on the steeply angled slab we had bivouacked upon fell out during the night. Luckily the second peg, the one I thought to be the weaker of the two, held our combined shivering weight for the rest of the night.

On the train returning to Chamonix I was torn with guilty thoughts about Dave’s attempt on the Eiger. I didn’t want him to die but a temporarily incapacitating stone-fall injury would have been useful. In truth I wished him no harm but prayed that he would have failed, fallen out with his companion, or been driven back by storms. He just might, I reasoned, decide on a second attempt with me now that I had proved my competence on the Matterhorn. To my utter despair he was waiting in his tent in Snell’s Field beaming broadly. He congratulated me on my success and then told me how well it had gone on the Eiger.

He and his companion had joined forces with a pair of climbers from Newcastle at half height on the route and completed the climb without incident and in good weather throughout. He actually mentioned that the climbing wasn’t as hard as he had expected and I had to restrain myself from throttling him. He said that he almost regretted that they had not been through the classic epic battle of an Eiger storm. I wanted to yell at him to shut up. Instead I murmured reluctant congratulations and thought bitterly of what could have been – three of the six classic north faces in only my second alpine season.

Calmly, Dave described how the four-man team had been tentatively descending the west flank of the Eiger. At no point was it especially difficult but it could prove deceptively treacherous. The descent route wove a complicated line down the west ridge in places straying out onto the broad west flank. The four climbers moved down confidently, un-roped, making the occasional abseil on the steep upper section of the ridge. Horrified, Dave watched as one of his new-found friends lost his balance, slipping to his death from the top edge of a short rubble-strewn wall. It was a sobering moment, the first of many deaths I was to be told about in the following decades. I thought about the Eiger and decided then and there to cut my losses and head for home.

Gaston Rebuffat in his book
Starlight and Storm
had named the six classic great north faces of the Alps: the Eiger, the Grandes Jorasses and the Matterhorn were the hardest to climb, followed by Les Drus, the Piz Badile and Cima Grande. There were many other routes in the Alps that were just as imposing, often considerably more difficult and very committing. Rebuffat’s choice, however, was based on a period in alpine mountaineering that could justifiably be regarded as its Golden Age; an era when the sport came of age and which signalled the birth of extreme mountaineering.

These ascents were at the forefront of what was deemed possible at the time. They were achieved using rudimentary equipment – weak hemp ropes, inadequate clothing and bivouac equipment and exceedingly heavy hardware. Ice screws were crude and unreliable. They had no harnesses, abseil devices, metal wedges or chock-stones. They didn’t even use helmets. Torches and stoves were bulky and liable to failure. They had little to rely upon other than their astonishing fitness and strength of will boosted by sausage, bread, coffee and cigarettes. The famous ‘heart pills’ consumed by Heckmair on the Exit Cracks, most likely a form of amphetamine, were a rarity. A Dr Belart of Grindelwald had pressed Heckmair to take them on the climb, saying: ‘If Toni Kurz had only had them along, he might even have survived his ordeal.’ Dr Belart had counselled that the little phial of ‘heart drops’ were only to be used in
direst need
. At the time, in the midst of a vicious storm, Heckmair had just fallen off the Exit Cracks, ripping his protection pitons out. His fall had been held by Wiggerl Vorg’s outstretched palm – punctured by Heckmair’s crampons in the process – and the heavy impact ripped out their belay pitons. They fell 4 feet below their stance only to stop miraculously on steep ice perched over a 5000-foot abyss. Having got much closer to their Maker than they had planned they decided that ‘direst need’ had been reached. Heckmair studied the label on the bottle with the careful and precise instructions recommending a maximum dose of only a few drops:

I simply poured half of it into Wiggerl’s mouth and drank the rest, as I happened to be thirsty. We followed it with a couple of glucose lozenges and were soon in proper order again.

These brave pioneers were my heroes, even though I am sure they would have hated such an emotive sobriquet. The
Oxford English Dictionary
defines the essence of heroism as:

A man who exhibits extraordinary bravery, firmness, fortitude, or greatness of soul in any action, or in connection with any pursuit, work, or enterprise; a man admired or venerated for his achievements and noble qualities.

I have always nurtured heroes in my soul and been challenged and inspired by their deeds. The great American mountaineer, Thomas Hornbein, answered the question of ‘who needs heroes’ with admirable insight:

Who needs heroes? … I think we all do … Where do heroes fit in? In a way they are the stuff of dreams. For me, they occupy a special summit a bit less accessible, a mountain peak that in my mind’s eye has grand walls of rock and brilliant ice, clouds veiling an elusive, lonely summit. It is not a mountain I can climb, and never will, but one I nonetheless dream I might.

I was an unashamed hero-worshipper and I still am. The great pioneers of the 1930s and the early post-war years inspired me with their style and boldness. I had been fascinated by the exploits of men such as Comici, Cassin and later the likes of Hermann Buhl and Walter Bonatti.

Much to my astonishment I managed to climb the classic Comici Route on the north face of the Cima Grande in the Dolomites in my first alpine season. I had never been on anything so huge and intimidating – 1600 feet of overhanging and vertical limestone. The scale of the wall was overwhelming. We had only climbed a few short multi-pitched routes in Britain. The thought of being trapped on that immense wall with no hope of retreat or rescue quite unnerved us. We climbed the route slowly and incompetently, stunned by our audacity.

The Comici line on Cima Grande had gained its classic status after its ascent in 1933 by Emilio Comici. It was Comici, considered the ultimate stylist, who had taken the Dolomites by storm in the early 1930s. The great Riccardo Cassin, first ascensionist of the north-east face of the Piz Badile and the Walker Spur on the Grandes Jorasses, was happy to be led and influenced by this maestro of Italian climbing.