The Beckoning Silence (35 page)

In moments we were alone and suddenly a blast of wind began hurtling up the tunnel. Hanspeter had pushed open the small trap door set within the main wooden door. The wind was strong enough to suck me off balance. I saw Ray say something but couldn’t hear the words in the rush of the wind. A grey light glimmered into the tunnel, silhouetting him against the morning sky.

‘This is bloody ridiculous!’ I heard Ray exclaim as I poked my head out of the door. He looked nervous. Hanspeter smiled.

‘What a way to start the day!’ I exclaimed turning to Hanspeter and Ray. ‘This is weird.’ I dumped my sack on the broad ledge outside the door and looked straight down 2500 feet to the meadows below us. ‘Hell, it’s not every day we get a chance to do something like this, is it?’

‘Thank God,’ he said and began to step into his harness. I quickly sorted out the rack and tightened the harness around my waist.

‘I’m glad we’ve done this, you know,’ I said as I uncoiled the green 60-metre rope. ‘I thought I would feel guilty about missing out the bottom bit, but we’ve already climbed it once and this is the scene of so much history. Just imagine all the people who have come this way.’

‘Yeah, usually trying to save their lives,’ Ray said sharply and handed me the end of the blue rope.

‘You have company,’ Hanspeter said, pointing towards a triangular rubble-topped pillar about a hundred metres away. Two men sat side by side on the rubble. One was smoking a cigarette and his companion chewed on a sandwich. Thirty-one-year-old Matthew Hayes from Hampshire and Phillip O’Sullivan, twenty-six, a New Zealander living in Britain, had started up the face early that morning. We never talked to them on the climb but heard enough shouted commands to know that they were Brits.

‘Damn,’ I swore despondently. The last thing we wanted were people in front of us.

‘They must have started at first light,’ Ray said as he clipped a sling through a shiny new bolt set into the rocky mouth of the tunnel.

‘Ah well, we’ll have to see how they’re going,’ I said. ‘There will still be room for us at Death Bivouac if that’s where they’re headed.’

I glanced at the sky, making a quick weather check. There was a line of greyish white on the western horizon. The forecast for the day was for some overcast cloud cover in the afternoon which would clear during the night to be followed by three, possibly four, days of fine weather. I checked my Casio barometric altimeter, which gave altitude readings and more importantly, air pressure changes every hour.

As I stepped around Hanspeter and onto the face proper he clapped me on the shoulder and wished us well. At the last moment I asked if I could take a quick look at the Difficult Crack through his binoculars.

The black rock sprang into focus and I twirled the dial to adjust it to my eyesight. The first thing I noticed was the sheen of water dripping down the buttress of rock that the Difficult Crack cut through.

‘It’s streaming with water.’

Suddenly a figure appeared, clinging to the rock.

‘Damn, there’s another climber,’ I said, and looked more closely. ‘He doesn’t seem to have a partner,’ I added, as I examined the first and final stances of the Difficult Crack.

‘God! He’s soloing,’ I added, feeling despondent. I didn’t want to be anywhere near a soloist on the Eiger. ‘And what’s more he’s not using a back rope and he’s wearing bloody rock shoes.’

‘Bugger!’ Ray said pointedly.

‘I just hope he’s good,’ I said fervently, thinking of Adi Mayr. ‘And lucky.’

‘Okay, guys, I had better get going,’ Hanspeter said. ‘I have to run up to the Gallery station before the next train comes. Good luck.’

When I turned to run a rope length out horizontally across from the Stollenloch to the rubble-topped pillar I saw that the two resting climbers had hurriedly started climbing. Clearly they wanted to stay ahead of us. I imagined that they were pretty annoyed to see two climbers pop out of a window in the face and almost get ahead of them. Still, I wasn’t about to start racing them. We wanted to do the climb in our own time, in control, and not get ensnared with another party. I was happy to let them go first.

The terrain was easy but deceptively dangerous and I was very aware of the sucking gulf on my left side. Above the pillar I found a large sling clipped to an old peg and a shiny new bolt. A hurriedly discarded half-eaten sandwich and the butt of a cigarette lay near by. I watched Ray as he moved nervously across the ledge and began climbing the pillar. He moved with an exaggerated caution that betrayed his tension.

‘How are you feeling, kid?’ I asked, when he hauled himself up beside me.

‘A bit freaked out to tell the truth,’ he said. ‘I’ll need a while to get comfortable with this place.’

‘I might as well just keep leading until you settle down. What do you think?’

‘Fine by me,’ Ray said, and grinned. ‘Bloody hell, this thing’s big,’ he added, as he peered up at the immense wall of the Röte Fluh that blocked any view of the rest of the face. A flurry of powder snow rustled out into space hundreds of feet above us and over to our left.

‘That must be the solo climber,’ I said, pointing at the snow drifting away on the breeze. ‘God, I hate being on this with him above us.’

‘Forget him. It’s his choice,’ Ray said emphatically.

I glanced up, searching for the two climbers ahead of us. I saw a red rucksack and white helmet moving leftwards beneath a yellow band of rock.

‘That must be the Wet Cave bivouac,’ I said and Ray nodded. I could look down from where I stood to the top of the Shattered Pillar and several thousand feet below the distinctive rounded tumuli of the First Pillar marked where we had started up the face four days earlier. We climbed up a faintly defined rib, moving together, carefully keeping several pieces of protection clipped on the rope between us. Most of the gear was of dubious quality, old rusted pitons hammered into downward-sloping cracks and bent over against the rock. We moved slowly, trying to get a feel for the terrain. The hand- and footholds were disconcertingly smooth, downward-sloped, and verglas and wet snow made otherwise easy scrambling an alarming experience. I would find myself unexpectedly tip-toeing around smears of ice desperately looking for some protection with a 100-foot fall lurking beneath me.

Ray took over the lead and climbed a series of slabby white limestone rock walls, then stopped for a long time. I began to feel impatient at our slow progress. A few irritated shouts elicited a pregnant silence. A stone clattered by, making me duck for cover as the ropes began to move through my hands.

When I reached the point that had slowed Ray I felt bad about my impatience. He had been perched a long way above a frail piton runner faced with delicate balance moves made desperately hard by large weeps of verglas. I thought about putting my crampons on and then decided that it would waste too much time. As the Vibram rubber sole of my left boot was skittering across the glazed slab I regretted my impetuosity. Hooking an axe pick against an icy nubbin of rock saved me from falling in a long sweeping swing across the wall. I arrived beside Ray breathing heavily and a little shaken. I moved up to a rectangular low-roofed cave burrowed into a rock buttress.

‘Hey, Ray, this is the Wet Cave bivouac!’ I yelled down excitedly. ‘And I can see the Difficult Crack now, directly above us. Those lads are at the belay. I’ll see if I can catch them up.’

Finding these sites that I had only ever seen in books had filled me with elation. It was a confirmation that we were on the route we had dreamed about for so long. I felt a childish, irrepressible joy just at being there. I wanted to shout down to Ray that we really were on the 1938 route but I decided he had probably already worked that one out.

As I traversed left towards a short vertical chimney I looked up and saw ropes snaking up over a jutting roof. It was Matthew Hayes and Phillip O’Sullivan climbing the Difficult Crack. Slings clipped to protection pitons slapped against the rock as the rope came tight. A voice shouted a familiar English climbing instruction. The second climber appeared by the overhang and began to reach his hands into a soaking wet crack cutting through the roof.

‘Climbing, Matt,’ he yelled in response and then glanced down at his feet. I waved to him and held my thumb up.

‘All right, mate?’ I shouted. He said something in reply which I couldn’t understand. I had hoped that I might have reached his stance before he began climbing. The thought that he might take one of our ropes up with him and fix it for us had been playing on my mind but that possibility was gone. In a way I was secretly quite pleased. I wanted a go at leading the Difficult Crack and felt uncomfortable about relying on another climber’s help, even if it would have saved us a lot of time.

I edged across the traverse, my rucksack bumping against the roof and forcing me out over the drop to my right. I began crawling across the ledge, hampered by the friction of the ropes dragging heavily behind me. At its furthest end I found an old ring peg and clipped myself securely in place. I shrugged my rucksack from my back and pushed it to the back of the cave.

There was something familiar about the cave. and then I remembered a photograph in Chris Bonington’s book
I Chose to Climb,
of Ian Clough stirring a pot of stew at a bivouac. The roofed cave was the one they had used during their first British ascent of the Eigerwand in 1962.

Although most of my climbing heroes came from the generation of the 1930s, Chris Bonington’s career and his many books had been a major influence on my climbing development. It was his first autobiography,
I Chose to Climb,
that really inspired me to go and climb routes like the Eiger and the Walker.

I had always admired Bonington’s tenacity and determination to climb the Eiger. In 1961 he had arrived in the Alps directly from a 7000-mile road trip from Kathmandu after a successful attempt on the south face of Nuptse. He and Don Whillans had planned a protracted summer of Eiger-watching, determined to be the first British climbers to scale the north face.

On their first attempt they reached the Difficult Crack before retreating from the threat of bad weather. This was the highest point yet reached by British climbers. After a period of bad weather Bonington and Whillans headed off for Chamonix and, teaming up with Ian Clough and the Polish climber Jan Djuglosz, they made the first ascent of the Central Pillar of Freney. It was a significant coup made all the more impressive by the fact that the terrible tragedy on the Pillar experienced by Walter Bonatti had occurred only two months before.

The Italian party of Bonatti, Roberto Gallieni and Andrea Oggioni had joined forces with a strong four-man French team lead by Pierre Mazeaud, with Robert Guillaume, Antoine Vieille and Pierre Kohlman. In early July they reached the foot of the Chandelle, a distinctive 400-foot high rock obelisk that stands atop a 2000-foot plinth of broken granite. Bad weather moved in and the party was pinned down on a cramped ledge for three days and nights. Pierre Kohlman was struck by lightning in the first day of storm and severely weakened. With ineffective plastic sheets and no bivi tent the group huddled together for warmth.

On the fifth day of their climb they attempted to retreat down the Pillar, across the Col du Peuterey and down the Freney glacier. Hoping to reach the safety of the Gamba hut, they soon found themselves wading through chest-deep snow. After sheltering for a night in a crevasse they continued down. Antoine Vieille collapsed and died of exhaustion. Hours later Guillaume also succumbed. Bonatti’s great friend Oggioni was the next to collapse at the foot of a couloir leading up to the Col de l’Innominata, still 2000 feet above the Gamba hut. Pierre Mazeaud bravely chose to stay with his companion while Bonatti forged ahead.

Shortly thereafter Kohlman, deranged by the insidious effects of hypothermia, displayed signs of delirium and tried to attack Bonatti and Gallieni. They were forced to untie from their ropes and flee down to the hut. Of the seven who had set out only Mazeaud, Gallieni and Bonatti survived and the story became one of the most renowned and harrowing accounts of survival and tragedy in alpine mountaineering.

Undeterred by its serious reputation Bonington, Whillans, Djuglosz and Clough raced a competing French team of René Desmaison and Pierre Julien to the summit of the Central Pillar of Freney.

The Freney, the Walker and the Eiger had always inspired me. I had climbed the Freney early in my alpine career and stopped at the ledge where Bonatti’s party had been storm-bound. I then kept a sharp and wary eye on the weather. I remembered Whillans’s hand-jamming his way over the roof at the top of the Chandelle as I hung in that same upside-down, exposed position with 4000 feet of clear air sucking at my struggling body.

Whillans and Bonington then returned to Grindelwald for yet another attempt on the Eiger, this time accompanied to the foot of the face by a photographer from the
Daily Mail
which had agreed to finance their attempt. They retreated from the Swallow’s Nest and Bonington decided to call it a day and return to England. As he packed his gear in Alpiglen, intending to get the next flight back to England, they heard that a climber had been seen falling down the north face. They set out for the foot of the face to confirm their worst fears. A pompous German tourist was standing guard over the corpse, proudly pointing out the terrible head injuries suffered by the victim. Chris and Don covered the climber with a blanket and tried not to hit the tourist.

The following summer Chris was back on the Eiger with Whillans again fighting for their lives as they went to rescue Brian Nally after Brewster’s death on the Second Ice Field. Having then gone on to climb the north face of the Badile with Whillans, Bonington went to Chamonix and joined Ian Clough. Less than forty-eight hours later the pair were in Alpiglen. On the rubble-strewn lower rocks Bonington was disturbed to notice blood trails and a piece of flesh attached to some bone. He chose not to tell his partner. Later Ian told Chris that he hadn’t mentioned it for the same unspoken reason.