by Dan Simmons
A slightly wider “knife-edge ridge” of snow, a vertical snow cornice, as it were, would have readied us for what Jean-Claude liked to call “a game of jump rope.” We’d probably be tied together on such a snowy knife edge, and if the climber directly ahead of or immediately behind you slips off one side, your immediate reaction (since there’s little hope of belay from such a snowy knife edge)—an “immediate reaction” made instinctive only by many drills—must be to jump off the opposite side of the ridgeline, both of you now dangling over 4,000-foot or greater emptiness, in the desperate hope that (a) the rope does not break, dooming both of you, and (b) your weight will counter his weight in the fall.
It does work. We practiced it numerous times on a snowy knife-edge ridge on Mont Blanc. But it was a ridge where the punishment for failure—or a rope break—was a 50-foot slide to level snowfields, not a 4,000-foot drop.
I was 6 feet 2 inches tall and 220 pounds, so when I played “jump the rope” with poor Jean-Claude (5 feet 6 inches tall, 135 pounds), logic would dictate that he’d come flying up over the top of the snowy ridgeline like a hooked fish, sending both of us sliding out of control. But because Jean-Claude had the habit of carrying the heaviest pack of any of us (and was also the quickest and most skilled with his long ice axe), the balancing act usually worked, the heavily stressed hemp rope digging into the vertical snow cornice until it found either rock or solid ice.
But as I say, this long summit ridgeline of the Matterhorn is a wide French boulevard compared to knife-edge ridges: wide enough to walk upon, at least single file in some places, and—if you’re very brave, supremely skilled, or totally stupid—to do so with your hands in your pockets and other things on your mind. The Deacon has been doing precisely this, pacing back and forth along the narrow line, pulling his old pipe from his jacket pocket and lighting it as he paces.
The Deacon, who could be taciturn to the point of silence for days, evidently feels expansive this late morning. Puffing on his pipe, he gestures for Jean-Claude and me to follow him in single file to the far side of the summit ridge, where we can look down on the Italian Ridge that saw the majority of the early attempts on the mountain—even by Whymper, until he decided to use the seemingly more difficult (but in truth somewhat easier due to the angle of the huge slabs) Swiss Ridge.
“Carrel and his team were there,” says the Deacon and points to a line a third of the way down the narrow, rock-steepled ridge. “All those years of effort and Whymper ends up making the summit two or three hours ahead of his old friend and guide from Italy.”
He’s talking, of course, about Whymper and his six fellow climbers’ first summit ascent of the Matterhorn on July 14, 1865.
“Did not Whymper and Croz throw rocks down upon them?” asks Jean-Claude.
The Deacon looks at our French friend to see if he is joking. Both men smile.
The Deacon points to the sheer face on our left. “Whymper was mad to get Carrel’s attention. He and Croz shouted and dropped rocks down the north face—nowhere near the ridge where the Italians were climbing, of course. But it must have sounded like cannon fire to Carrel and his team.”
All three of us gaze down as if we could see the heartbroken Italian guide and his companions staring up in shock and defeat.
“Carrel recognized his old client Whymper’s white slop trousers,” says the Deacon. “Carrel thought he was an hour or less from the summit—he’d already led his party past the worst obstacles of the ridge—but after he identified Whymper on the summit, he just turned around and led his party back down.” The Deacon sighs, inhales deeply from his pipe, and looks out over the mountains, valleys, meadows, and glaciers below us. “Carrel climbed the Matterhorn two or three days later, still from the Italian Ridge,” he says softly, almost speaking to himself now. “Establishing Italy’s secondary provenance to the mountain. Even after the British chaps’ clear victory.”
“Clear victory, oui…but so tragic,” says Jean-Claude.
We walk back to where we’ve stowed our rucksacks against some boulders along the north end of the narrow summit ridge. Jean-Claude and I begin unpacking our lunch. This is to be our last day on the Matterhorn, and it may be our last day climbing together for some time…perhaps forever, although I desperately hope not. I want nothing more than to spend the rest of my European Wanderjahr climbing in the Alps with these new friends, but the Deacon has some business in England soon, and J.C. has to return to his Chamonix Guide duties and an annual assembly of Chamonix Guides in that tradition-haunted Chamonix Valley, with its sacred brotherhood of the rope.
Shaking away any sad thoughts of endings or farewells, I pause in my unpacking to take in the view yet again. My eyes are hungrier than my belly.
There is not a single cloud in the sky. The Maritime Alps, 130 miles away, are clearly visible. The Écrins, first climbed by Whymper and the guide Croz, bulk blankly against the sky like the sides of some great white sow. Turning slightly to look north, I see the high peaks of the Oberland on the far side of the Rhône. To the west, Mont Blanc rules over all lesser peaks, its summit snows blazing with reflected sunlight so blinding that I have to squint. Swiveling slightly to face the east, I can see peak after peak—some climbed by me during the last nine months with my new friends here, some waiting to be climbed, some never to be climbed—the stuttered and irregular array of white pinnacles diminishing to a mere bumpy horizon wreathed in the haze of distance.
The Deacon and Jean-Claude are eating their sandwiches and sipping water. I snap myself out of my sightseeing and romantic reverie and begin to eat. The cold roast beef is delicious, the bread rich with a crust that makes me work at chewing. The horseradish makes my eyes water until Mont Blanc becomes even more of a white blur.
Looking south, I celebrate the view that Whymper wrote about in his classic book Scrambles Amongst the Alps in the Years 1860–1869. I can clearly recall the words I read only the evening before, read by candlelight in my tent above Breuil, the words describing Edward Whymper’s first view from the summit of the Matterhorn on July 14, 1865, this view that I’m devouring in late June of 1924:
There were forests black and gloomy and meadows bright and lively, bounding waterfalls and tranquil lakes, fertile lands and savage wastes; sunny plains and frigid plateaux. There were the most rugged forms, and the most graceful outlines—bold, perpendicular cliffs, and gentle, undulating slopes; rocky mountains and snowy mountains, sombre and solemn, or glittering and white with walls—turrets—pinnacles—pyramids—domes—cones—and spires! There was every combination that the world can give, and every contrast that the heart could desire.
Yes, you can tell that Edward Whymper was an absolute romantic, as were so many of the Golden Age climbers in the mid- and late 1800s. And his writing is flowery and old-fashioned by the lean, modern standards of 1924.
But as to the charge of being a hopeless romantic, I confess that I am as well. It’s part of my nature. Perhaps it is my nature. And although I’d graduated from Harvard as an English major ready to write my own great travelogues and novels—all in the lean modern style, of course—I’m surprised to find that Edward Whymper’s nineteenth-century wording—flowery prose and all—has once again moved me to tears.
So on this June day in 1924, my heart responds to the words written more than fifty years earlier, and my soul responds even more hopelessly to the view that prompted those words from the sentimental Edward Whymper. The great mountain climber was twenty-five years old when he first climbed the Matterhorn and saw this view; I’ve just celebrated my twenty-second birthday, two months before earning this view for myself. I feel very close to Whymper and to all the climbers—some of them hard-bitten cynics, but others romantics like myself—who have looked south at Italy from this very ridge, from this very throne of a low boulder.
During the autumn, winter, and spring months that I’ve been climbing in the Alps with Jean-Claude and the Deacon, there has been a question-and-answer session after each summiting, a c
atechism, as it were, for each mountain. The tone of the questioning has never been condescending, and I’ve actually enjoyed the process, since I’ve learned so much from the two alpinists. I’d been a good climber when I came to Europe from the United States; under Jean-Claude’s and the Deacon’s gentle, sometimes bantering, but never pedantic guidance, I know that I’m becoming an excellent climber. A world-class climber. Part of a very small fraternity indeed. More than that, the Deacon’s and Jean-Claude’s tutelage—including these summiting catechisms—have helped me learn how to love the mountain I’ve just climbed. Love it even though she may have been a treacherous bitch during my intimate time with her: rotten rock, avalanches, traverses without so much as a fingerhold, deadly rockfall, forced bivouacs on ledges too narrow to hold a book upright yet we were forced to cling there in freezing weather, hailstorms or thunderstorms, nights when the metal pick in my ice axe glowed blue with its anticipatory electrical discharge, hot days without so much as a sip of water and more bivouac nights when, without pitons to tie oneself in, you held a lit candle under your chin to keep from falling asleep and tumbling off into the void. Yet through all that, the Deacon and especially Jean-Claude were teaching me how to love the mountain, love her for what she truly was, while loving even the hardest times spent engaged with her.
The catechism for the Matterhorn is led by Jean-Claude and is briefer than most.
You must love something about every good mountain. Matterhorn is a good mountain. Did you love the faces of this mountain?
Non. The faces of the Matterhorn, especially the north face upon which we spent the most time, were not worth loving. They were rubble. They were constant rockfall and avalanche.
But you love the rock itself?
Non. The rock is treacherous. Friable. It lies. Drive in a piton with a hammer and you never hear the proper ring of steel against iron, of iron against rock, and a minute later you can easily pull the useless piton out with two fingers. The rock on the faces of the Matterhorn is terrible. Mountaineers know that all mountains are in a constant state of collapse—their verticality being inescapably and inevitably worn down every moment by wind, water, weather, and gravity—but the Matterhorn is more of an unstable pile of constantly crumbling rubble than most peaks. Love the rock here? Nowhere. Never.
But you love the ridges?
Non. The famous ridges of the Matterhorn—the Italian and the Swiss, the Furggen and the Zmutt—are either too dangerous, raked with rockfall and snow avalanche, or too tame, pocked with cables and fixed ropes for the lady climber and the seventy-year-old English gentleman. Love for this mountain’s ridges? There is none. At least not since Edward Whymper’s day, when all was new.
But you love the mountain. You know you do. What do you love?
Oui. The Matterhorn is a mountain that gives the climber numerous problems to solve, but—unlike the unclimbed north face of the Eiger and certain other peaks I’ve seen or heard about—the Matterhorn also gives a good climber a clean, clear solution to each problem.
The Matterhorn is a heap of tumbling rubble, but the faces and ridges are beautiful to look upon from a distance. She is like an aging actress who, beneath the sadly obvious and peeling makeup, still boasts the cheeks and bone structure of her younger self, and there are frequent glimpses of a once near-perfect beauty. The shape of the peak itself—standing alone, unconnected to other mountains—is perhaps the cleanest and most memorable in all the Alps. Ask a young child who has never seen mountains to draw a mountain, and she will use her crayon to draw the Matterhorn. It is that iconic. And with its upper north face actually bending out beyond the vertical, like a wave breaking, the mountain appears to be constantly in motion. And that sheer, overhanging face breeds its own weather, gives rise to its own masses of clouds. It is that serious a mountain.
And you love the ghosts.
Oui. The ghosts are there to love and cannot be avoided. Edward Whymper’s loyal guide Jean-Antoine Carrel’s patriotic betrayal in choosing to lead Felice Giordano up the Italian Ridge for the glory of an all-Italian first summit on July 14 of 1865. The ghosts of 25-year-old Whymper’s desperate dash to Zermatt—to try the opposing ridge—with his hastily assembled party of young Lord Francis Douglas, Reverend Charles Hudson, 19-year-old Douglas Hadow, the Chamonix Guide Michel Croz, and the two local guides, “Young Peter” and “Old Peter” Taugwalder.
The ghosts of the four dead men from that day speak the loudest from the stone to me, and any climber must learn to hear them and to love and respect climbing on the same stones they trod, sleeping on the same slabs where they slept, triumphing on the same narrow summit where Whymper’s seven shouted in triumph, and focusing hard on descending safely down the still treacherous section where four of them fell thousands of feet to their deaths.
And, mon ami, you love the view from the top.
Oui. I do love the view. It makes the aching muscles and bleeding hands all worthwhile. Better than worthwhile—forgotten. The view is all.
While I’m chewing and staring out at this view, Jean-Claude, catechism lesson for me completed, straightens out the newspaper that had been wrapped around the cheesecloth covering our sandwiches.
“Mallory and Irvine killed in attempt to conquer Everest,” he reads aloud in his soft French accent.
I quit chewing. The Deacon is in the process of tamping the embers or ashes out of his pipe before eating, batting the pipe against the side of his hobnailed boot, but he also freezes in place, boot on his knee and now empty pipe against the boot, and stares at Jean-Claude.
Our friend continues: “London, June twenty, nineteen twenty-four—The Mount Everest Committee has received with profound regret the following cablegram from…” He stops and thrusts the crumpled newspaper toward me. “Jake, it is your language. You should read it.”
Surprised, not understanding Jean-Claude’s reticence—as far as I know he’s as completely fluent in reading English as he is in speaking it—I take the paper, smooth it out some more on my knee, and read aloud.
London, June twenty, nineteen twenty-four—The Mount Everest Committee has received with profound regret the following cablegram from Colonel Norton, dispatched from Phari Dzong, June nineteen, at four fifty p.m.
“Mallory and Irvine killed on last attempt. Rest of party arrived at base camp all well that day. Two climbers who were not members of the expedition die in Everest avalanche on last day after others have left.”
The committee has telegraphed to Colonel Norton, expressing deep sympathy with the expedition. In the loss of their two gallant comrades, which must have been due to most unfavourable conditions of weather and snow, which from the first arrival at the scene of operations impeded climbing this year…
I continue reading the columns, part sorrowful report, part hagiography:
The tragic death of these two men—George Leigh Mallory, who alone of all those engaged in the present attempt had also taken part in the two previous expeditions, and A. C. Irvine, one of his band of recruits—is a terribly sad ending to the story of the assaults of the mountain that began three years ago. It is only a few days since we published Mallory’s own account of the second reverse suffered by the present expedition…
That reverse had been wind and snow, which had driven the men from their highest camps—“discomfited but very far from being defeated” was Mallory’s message to the Times. There followed several more paragraphs, summarizing Mallory’s refusal to surrender despite the cold weather, high winds, avalanches, and imminent onset of the monsoon that would end this year’s climbing season.
I pause and look at my two friends, seeking any signal that I should quit reading and hand the newspaper around, but Jean-Claude and the Deacon simply stare at me. Waiting for more.
A slight breeze has come up, so I grip the crumpled paper tightly now as I continue reading the long second column of prose.
Mallory wrote his whole dispatch in this spirit of one who was about to engage in a desperate battle. “T
he action,” he said, “is only suspended before the more intense action of the climax. The issue will shortly be decided. The third time we walk up East Rongbuk Glacier will be the last, for better or worse.” He had counted the odds and was ready to face them. “We expect,” he said in a later passage of his dispatch, “no mercy from Everest”: and Everest, alas! has taken him at his word.
I pause. The Deacon and Jean-Claude sit waiting. Far beyond the Deacon’s shoulder, a large raven hovers motionless on the slight breeze, its body poised above almost 5,000 feet of empty air.
I skip any criticism of the prose style and continue reading: Mallory’s history as a “distinguished mountaineer” and his absolute determination to summit Mount Everest (“Alas!” I think, but do not say), the contributions of General C. G. Bruce, Major E. F. Norton, and others in the past, surpassing the Duke of Abruzzi’s height record of 22,000 feet, set on a distant and irrelevant mountain named K2.
The story focuses on 37-year-old George Leigh Mallory, the determined and tested veteran of Everest, and young Andrew Irvine, only 22 years old—my age exactly!—leaving their high camp on the morning of June 8, presumably carrying oxygen apparatus, the two heroes being seen again only once more, hours later, by fellow climber Noel Odell, who glimpsed them “going strong for the top,” and then the clouds closing in, the snowstorm intervening, and neither Mallory nor Irvine seen again.
I read aloud that, according to the Times report, on the evening of their disappearance, Odell had gone all the way up to the precarious Camp VI, shouting out in the roaring high-altitude night in case Mallory and Irvine were trying to descend in darkness. Mallory had left his flare and lantern behind in the tent at Camp VI. He would have had no means to signal others below, even if he were alive in the terrible night.