The Beckoning Silence

by Simpson, Joe

  … 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.

  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 thu
nderheads. 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 t
o 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: