The Beckoning Silence

by Simpson, Joe

  Three days later Corti was hauled to safety using the cable system that Hermann Steuri had been perfecting. The ledge he had waited on has since been dubbed the Corti Bivouac. Hanging on the cable, Riccardo Cassin heard Longhi’s mournful cries rising up from far down the precipice but he was too far down the face to be reached.

  Longhi lasted from Thursday 8 July until the night of Monday the 12th when another viciously cold storm overwhelmed him. As the rescuers were lowering Corti down the west flank on the Sunday evening someone shouted across the face to Longhi, reassuring him that they would return the following day and attempt to reach him. Longhi shouted back two despairing but shatteringly clear words: ‘Fame! Freddo!’ ‘Hunger! Cold!’ I remember seeing the photograph taken from a passing plane of Longhi hanging from his rope waving forlornly at the pilot.

  When they returned they saw Longhi hanging dead on the rope. His body hung there for two years, a grotesque and macabre tourist attraction for the Eiger watchers at the telescopes in Alpiglen and Kleine Scheidegg.

  Clearly the Steuri name had a lot of connections with the Eigerwand. When I told Ray about its fame he was astounded by the sheer fluke of booking an apartment through the Internet and finding it owned by the same family. We had both wondered whether this piece of luck might provide us with some useful information about conditions on the mountain.

  When Alice Steuri had asked us what we intended to climb and we had pointed towards the north face of the Eiger looming behind the chalet her reaction was fervent and unexpected.

  ‘Oh, no, not the wall. You must not try it. It is dangerous, very dangerous,’ Alice said earnestly.

  We were quite taken aback by her reaction and did our best to assure her that we knew what we were doing. During the following days she took solicitous care of us, enquiring about our climbing plans, letting us use her warm, dry storage rooms, and proudly mentioning our intentions to her other guests. As we struggled with doubts about trying the climb she was telling all and sundry that we were soon to set out for the wall. It became a little embarrassing.

  When we came back from the Hintisberg that day and found Alice Steuri waiting for us, we assumed she had a message from Simon Wells.

  ‘My mother, Anna Jossi, would like to show you something. Do you mind?’ Alice asked.

  ‘No, not at all,’ I said, wondering what it might be about. ‘Now?’

  ‘In a moment I shall bring her down to the garden,’ Frau Steuri replied.

  An hour later Anna Jossi appeared in the front garden where we were sitting with cold drinks reading books and occasionally gazing reflectively at the Eiger.

  ‘Would you like to see this?’ she said holding out a large book. ‘I think it may interest you.’

  As we gathered around the table she carefully opened the pages of the book which proved to be a hotel register. The date at the top of the first page was 1930. I glanced at Ray.

  ‘My father owned the Hôtel des Alpes at Alpiglen in those days,’ Anna Jossi explained. ‘And here, do you recognise these names?’

  There, written in a bold italic script in the visitors’ book on a page headed August 1935 were the names of Max Sedlmayr and Karl Mehringer. I was flabbergasted and reached out to touch the words with my fingers. Alongside the entry Mehringer had penned a personal comment in German which Ray translated.

  ‘We are deeply indebted to Frau Jossi for her hospitality. She was always there with a helping hand. From two poor climbers, with our warmest thanks.’ He read the words aloud and then looked up at me in amazement.

  ‘Frau Jossi?’ I asked and Anna Jossi beamed at me. ‘You knew Max Sedlmayr and Karl Mehringer? You actually met them?’

  ‘Oh yes, indeed. They were wonderful men. So charming and friendly. Good men. Strong men.’

  ‘Did they stay with you?’ Ray asked.

  ‘Yes, yes, they stayed in the hotel and then for the last few days in an old shepherd’s hut near the face. They were always polite, always kind to me. They were always helping, cutting wood, doing chores. I was very young, of course, only sixteen. Here, look.’

  She opened a second book, a scrapbook of photos and press cuttings, and pointed to a black and white photograph. Young, handsome and smiling, Max Sedlmayr and Karl Mehringer stood on either side of a young woman with their arms around her shoulders. Her hair hung down in long dark plaits and she wore a short, dark traditional jacket over a white smock and calf-length black skirt.

  ‘That is me,’ Anna said proudly. ‘I liked them very much. They were kind to me.’ Ray and I stared at her in some wonder and then back at the photograph.

  ‘You knew Sedlmayr and Mehringer,’ I said in a disbelieving whisper. History had suddenly come to life. I leafed through the album of photographs and press cuttings. I glanced again at the portrait with Anna. They looked so cheerful and confident. They were only days from lingering, lonely deaths.

  Another photograph showed Sedlmayr and Mehringer standing in a meadow with a small building in the background. They wore climbing boots and puttee-like gaiters wrapped around their baggy trousers. Mehringer’s rucksack was stylishly covered with his raincoat. Both men wore Trilby hats at jaunty rakish angles. Peering closely, I could just make out the words ‘Hôtel des Alpes’ printed on a white board on the building in the background.

  ‘I can’t believe this,’ I said to Ray. ‘What’s the probability of us accidentally booking in to this chalet?’

  ‘I know, weird, isn’t it?’

  ‘My father did not want them to attempt the climb,’ Anna said looking grave. ‘He told them many times that it was a dangerous place. He had heard the rock-fall. He knew what happened to the face in bad weather but they would not listen.’

  ‘Did you watch them climb?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Anna seemed torn between pride and sadness. ‘At first they climbed very fast, so strong, and then they went slowly, very slowly. My father had arranged with them to shine their torches at us each night. My father built a fire every night for them to see so they knew we were looking for them and then the storm came in and they did not reply to our fire. It was terrible, terrible.’ She shook her head, saddened at the memory.

  ‘After two days of the storm we knew they were gone,’ she said and paused. ‘And we cried and we cried and we cried,’ she added simply and tried to smile. I felt a chill run through me.

  Anna had brought them suddenly to life and given us a melancholy sense of how much they had lost. When she spoke of their long-drawn-out death she shook her head sadly and when she said ‘and we cried and we cried and we cried’ I felt chastened by her pity.

  I thought of all the hopes and ambitions that had driven them to this place to meet, however fleetingly, with Anna and touch her with the brilliance of their lives, and then they were gone, and Anna’s life was for ever coloured by the memories of their kindness and humanity.

  We live within such a tiny capsule of time yet it seems vast until death rudely makes it so insignificant. It humbles us. I glanced up at the Eiger bathed in warm afternoon sunshine and thought of those terrible storm-torn days sixty-five years ago and a young girl staring up at the face hoping against hope that the young men would return.

  ‘Did you know Hinterstoisser and Toni Kurz?’ Ray asked and Anna shook herself from sad memories and smiled in recognition.

  ‘Oh, of course,’ she said. ‘In the early years we met many of the climbers coming for the wall.’

  ‘You met Toni Kurz?’ I was aghast.

  ‘Yes, yes, he was a fine boy.’

  ‘Who was the leader? Was it Hinterstoisser? He was supposed to be the master climber.’

  ‘Yes, perhaps he was, but it was Rainer who was the leader. He was so strong, like this.’ Anna broadened her shoulders to mimic a body-builder’s physique. ‘A strong man. He was the leader.’

  ‘And Hinterstoisser?’

  ‘Yes, he was good but not the leader. We watched them climb,’ Anna said. ‘I saw Angerer hit by the rock-fall. Rainer bandaged his
head.’

  ‘How?’ Ray asked in amazement.

  ‘We had a big telescope outside the hotel. I was always watching. It is upstairs if you wish to see it. We took it down from Alpiglen when we decided to sell the hotel.’

  ‘Yes, that would be good to see,’ Ray said.

  ‘What was Angerer like?’ I asked feeling a little guilty at interrogating Anna so insistently but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to hear about these men at first hand. I knew the story of their lives and deaths so well that I wanted this chance to know them more intimately, to have them brought vividly to life by the fond and melancholy memory of an old lady who had witnessed their passing.

  ‘Oh, Angerer,’ Anna said with a fond smile. ‘He was so pretty. He was like a girl, so slim, and his face, very smooth just like a girl. And always he was looking at his sweetheart. He had a photograph of her hanging around his neck and always he was looking …’

  It was an poignant detail that neither of us had ever considered. After all they were simply names on a page. It had never really occurred to us that they had loved ones. I thought of the three long bitterly cold bivouacs that Angerer had endured after being struck on the head by a rock. When they had reached the Flat Iron it became apparent that his condition was worsening. By the time they had retreated to the Swallow’s Nest and Hinterstoisser was desperately attempting to reverse his Traverse, Angerer was observed to be slumped to one side, no longer taking any part in the proceedings.

  ‘And Kurz? How was he?’ Ray asked.

  ‘He was young. They were all so young,’ Anna said. ‘His was a terrible death, very sad.’

  I thought of a boyish Kurz sitting in a meadow with alpine flowers at his feet, shelling a boiled egg, staring back at me from that old photograph. It was he who had brought me here. His life and his death, insignificant, I suppose, given the countless tragedies that had ensued in the intervening years, had stayed with me from the moment I had first read about him. Anna’s story had suddenly made him as real as if he had sat by me only days before.

  The world has a life of its own. Nothing we do affects it. It goes on and on, never looking back, unaware of a past, oblivious to the future, never hesitating in its inexorable progress through time. If life were not to have death at its end and had death not been preceded by life, neither would have any meaning. We need to die or our lives are meaningless. The poet, Yasar Kemal, seemed to sum it up when he wrote:

  Anybody, whether a novelist or not, must have purpose in life. And that purpose is to understand human reality in the face of death. Death only exists because there is life. That is the great poetry of the world. That is its reality.

  If Toni Kurz had not died on the Eiger, if Max Sedlmayr and Karl Mehringer had not passed this way then nor would I. They gave meaning to my actions.

  ‘Did they stay in the hotel?’ Ray asked.

  ‘Oh no, they were very poor. We let them stay in the wood shed. One franc a night,’ she added chuckling. ‘They cut wood for us, always helping out.’

  We spent an hour listening to Anna’s reminiscences, avidly looking through her extraordinary scrapbook of history. When at last she left we sat back and stared at each other in amazement.

  ‘Well, that’s made the holiday,’ I said. ‘Whatever happens, it won’t beat that.’

  ‘No,’ Ray agreed and stood up. ‘I’m going to sort out my kit for tomorrow. What time’s the first train?’

  ‘Seven, I think,’ I said. ‘I’ll set the alarm early and get a good breakfast on for us. We should be on the face by eight-thirty. Anyway, there’s no rush. We’ll have all day to reach the Swallow’s Nest.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s true.’ Ray turned and walked back to the room. I rang Pat Lewis, my long-suffering partner, to tell her the great news about the forthcoming climb. She seemed a little less enthusiastic than me. She started to tell me to be careful and then stopped. We had been through that scenario too many times. ‘Take care of Ray for me,’ she said. She had a soft spot for Ray and I promised I wouldn’t let him out of my sight.

  ‘I’ll ring you as soon as we get down. I won’t have the phone on to save the batteries. Don’t worry about us. We’ll be having fun.’

  I opened my book and tried to read, but the setting sun was painting the mountains in crimson light and distracting me from the words.

  I put my book down and glanced up at the mountain as the sun angled across the ice fields illuminating the Ramp in a wash of gold. We were making an attempt on the face the following morning but the combination of sunshine, a strong gin and a second reading of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin had helped drive the prospect clean from my mind. It was a wonderful, hypnotic novel of fabulous scope, swinging between joy and bleakness: lyrical, angry and earnest. I felt calm and relaxed as I watched an isolated cumulus cloud drift in to the great amphitheatre of the face. A breeze scattered it into tendrils of mist that hung around the icy rim of the Spider until the sun burned it from existence.

  I read for an hour, struggling with the fading light, completely enthralled by the words, forgetting for the first time in weeks the insistent, mesmeric pull which the Eiger had been exerting on me; I had escaped its shadow. As I returned to the book it occurred to me that the only reason I was here was because of reading; it was the reason I began to climb.

  There is something about reading that takes you beyond the constrictions of space and time, frees you from the limitations of social interaction and allows you to escape. Whoever you encounter within the pages of a book, whatever lives you vicariously live with them can affect you deeply – entertain you briefly, change your view of the world, open your eyes to a wholly different concept of living and the value of life. Books can be the immortality that some seek; thoughts and words left for future generations to hear from beyond the grave and awaken a memory of another’s life.

  Climbing taught me how to look at the mountains, how to read their secrets and survive on their heights. More recently, particularly since I began to write, it taught me how to look at people – myself included – to see how we behave, how climbing changes us. I feel that the frontier of climbing is no longer technical or geographical but ethical. This is what climbing should be about: using the tradition, ethos and passion of our sport to arouse greater responses within ourselves, echoes of what we would like to be.

  After having climbed a great classic route I always thought that I never wanted to repeat it. It was unique, intensely personal, and I never wished to lose that perfect sense of it or the passion which had driven me to climb it.

  It had always seemed to me that passion, like love, should never fade. I had read that in love you should not do things by halves, that if you love a woman you should love her entirely, give everything. You don’t make love to other women, you don’t take her for granted. It is something I am painfully aware that I have always failed to do. The mountains had made me selfish and I could love no one entirely because of them, or so I told myself. Then again I had once thought that I loved mountains in this way, unequivocally, selflessly: once this was true to the loss of everything else. With the eroding passage of the years I now sometimes think that even here I failed.

  As I sat reading in the sunshine, sipping an iced drink and glancing occasionally at the looming majesty of the Eigerwand rearing out of the meadows in front of my chalet, I realised that I was finding it difficult to leave the mountains. In a way I had come back to my roots, but with the passing of the years and of so many friends I suspected that my passion had been eroded.

  The wildest dream:George and Ruth Mallory.

  Moon rises over the Walker Spur. Grandes Jorasses, Chamonix. Photo by Bradford Washburn.

  Chris Bonington cutting steps into the Spider on the first British ascent, 1962.

  Don Whillans climbing the First Ice Field using an ice dagger.

  Brian Nally retreating across the Second Ice Field after the death of his partner, Barry Brewster.

  Carruthers and Moderegger on the Second Ice Field
before they fell to their deaths.

  Karl Mehringer and Max Sedlmayr waiting for good weather at the Hotel des Aples, Alpiglen, August 1935.

  'We are deeply indebted to Frau Jossi for her hospitality. She was always there with a helping hand. From two poor climbers, with our warmest thanks.' Entry in the visitors' book of the Hotel des Alpes, Alpiglen.

  'Bivouac on 21/8/35. Max Sedelmajr, Karl Mehringer, Munich. Munich H.T.G. Section Oberland.' In June 1976 a Czech rope found a cigarette tin with this yellow note on the Second Ice Field, 41 years after it was written. It was probably Mehringer who wrote the note, since he misspelled the name of his climbing companion.

  A youthful Toni Kurz smiles back at us from the past. Alpiglen, 1936.

  'If only the weather holds,' said Andreas Hinterstoisser to the photographer, Hans Jegerlehner. Unluckily for Hinterstoisser and Kurz, the weather did not hold. But that was only one reason for the disaster.

  Austrians Heinrich Harrer and Fritz Kasparek and Germans Anderl Heckmair and Ludwig Vorg (left to right) on 24 July 1938 after the first ascent of the North Face of the Eiger.

  Stefano Longhi, trapped above the Traverse of the Gods, waves to a passing plane. 'Fame! Freddo!' were his last desperate words.