by Clint Willis
Chris and Layton reached the Death Bivouac that evening. They woke the next morning to gray skies and very high winds. They did no climbing that day. Chris lost himself in a comic novel, Modesty Blaise. Layton napped. They scooped spindrift out of the cave and talked about the weather.
The sky cleared overnight. They rose early and climbed the fixed ropes to the bottom of the Central Pillar. Layton led left and up across rock, smooth and brittle. He found shallow cracks for piton placements; he clipped his etriers to the pitons to create a wobbly bridge past the most difficult sections. The sky loomed at his back; he would pause from time to time and stand in his nylon steps and take note of the yawning drop at his feet. The immensity of space seemed alternately to press him into the rock and gently pluck or tug at him, its rhythms confusing yet comforting. He carried on with his work for three hours, and found his way at last to a belay around a corner. He peered up into an ice gully; it led up another 250 feet to the potential bivouac site at the top of the Central Pillar.
Chris followed Layton across the traverse, dangling anxiously from each peg as he groped for the next one. Layton’s long arms and legs had let him space the pitons well apart. It was difficult for even the lanky Bonington to reach from one to the next.
Layton now set off to lead the first pitch of the ice gully. His experience in Yosemite had taught him how to climb difficult rock, but he had little technique on ice. He was very slow. He placed three ice screws low on the pitch, thrashing and muttering and scaring Chris, whose belay was by no means bombproof. Layton’s screws—no matter how many of them he placed—were next to useless in the thin ice. A leader fall here would be disastrous, perhaps fatal to them both.
Chris convinced the American to back off of the pitch, and set out to lead it himself. The ice was steep. Rock showed through it in places. This climbing—difficult, poorly protected—required precision. He cut handholds as well as footholds, careful not to shatter the ice with his chopping. He placed his crampons with particular care, and tested each handhold before weighting it. He understood that every move and judgment was critical—that he was dealing with information that was uncertain, that any mistake or bad luck might kill him.
He was entirely absorbed. He found that he had climbed 30 feet above his last gear. The ice here became even thinner, with no chance for another screw. The rock that lay beneath the ice offered no crack wide enough for one of his pitons. He was aware of his body and a thought rose like a muddy bubble to the surface of his thinking mind: his weight might peel the entire sheet of ice from the face.
The ice had melted out from the rock in places to form a blurry, see-through casing. He gently hammered two holes in it and clung to their fragile edges, which made him think of broken windowpanes. The holds and his purchase on them calmed him even as he knew that this sense of refuge was a lie. He would keep his grip even if it all collapsed; he would sail and tumble with the massive plates of ice. He brushed some switch as if with his elbow or body and the world went quiet. Whispered or even unspoken questions became briefly audible; abstractions were illuminated, visible. He rested on the brink of discovering or remembering some secret.
The silence stopped his thinking. He climbed on in a crystalline fog of concentration. An interior light occasionally flickered; this was his fear. His eyes seeking solace lit upon a snow slope some 20 feet away—the snow might mean he could kick steps. He glanced down between his feet. If he fell he would travel 160 feet before his weight came onto a piton. The piton would fail and he would fall another 40 feet and blow out the anchor. He continued to climb, each step seeming to yield itself to him. He reached the snow and found it was frozen sufficiently for crampons; he’d worried that the stuff would collapse beneath his weight. His relief at this reprieve seemed a betrayal: he had turned away from something. He cut steps in the snow, moving carefully across to a spot at the edge of the Pillar. He built an anchor and savored his rising elation. Layton followed him up the pitch, but it was very late. They descended to the Death Bivouac, reaching it in darkness.
Jörg Lehne approached Chris the next morning to propose that the two teams join forces. Chris hesitated. The Germans weren’t making progress on their side of the Pillar. This meant the Harlin expedition would have first crack at establishing a campsite above the Death Bivouac, where the options for sites still appeared very limited. For the first time, Harlin’s team had an edge on the Germans. Chris thought John might not want to share credit for the route—but a joint effort would free Chris to concentrate on taking photographs, since John would no longer need him for the actual climbing. Chris had climbed well the previous day; he could back away feeling that he’d contributed something. And he felt strongly that he’d pushed his luck far enough on this climb.
He accepted Lehne’s proposal, subject to John’s approval. Layton set off up the fixed ropes with one of the Germans—Karl Golikow. Chris would follow later; he stayed behind for the morning radio call and gave John the news. John was concerned about appearances: he didn’t want the world to think that the larger German team had hauled his own party up the climb. He agreed to think over the proposal.
Layton and Golikow meanwhile surmounted a final barrier of crumbling ice blocks to reach the top of the Central Pillar. The German was a big, cheerful man who claimed to have 750 meters of climbing falls to his credit. He took obvious pride in sharing this fantastic statistic with Layton, who watched horrified as his new partner led an entire pitch protected by a single, wobbly piton; at one point the German lost his footing, scrabbling and sliding for several meters before somehow stopping himself. The pair dropped a rope to Chris; he climbed up to take pictures as Layton led another pitch of loose, rotten rock.
The climbers were approaching the White Spider, with its ice field and its leglike gullies. Amid the politics and the climbing, the face retained its power, not merely as an icon but as an actual place. One climber or another would notice a smell or a sound and would enter a sort of spell and forget the others. He would emerge from his spell like a person cured of fever—his questions not answered but for the moment gone.
The day was ending. The climbers returned to the Death Bivouac. Chris continued down, descending the highway of fixed rope, checking and rechecking his set-ups at the top of each rappel. This was just routine, but he remained subject to a dim surprise at finding that a particular rope held him. The vast empty drop at his back seemed to add its burden of weight to the slender cord that supported his own. He knew that each rope—exposed to the elements and to the repeated stress of climbers jostling their way higher and lower—was an element in a system vulnerable to failure. He told himself that this was his last journey up or down the face.
John and Dougal, down at Kleine Scheidegg, had recovered from their five-day stay in the snow cave at the Death Bivouac. They meant to join Layton on the face for a final summit push—perhaps in company with a pair of Germans. Chris meanwhile laid his own plans. He had recruited his friend Mick Burke to replace Whillans as his climbing partner and photo assistant. Chris and Mick would climb the Eiger by its easy West Ridge; from there Chris would photograph Layton and the Germans as they reached the White Spider. Chris and Mick could then dig a cave near the top of the North Face and wait there to photograph a successful summit party.
John and Dougal left Kleine Scheidegg soon after midnight on March 20. They crossed the snow slopes to the fixed ropes in silence. They made good time to the first snow cave, and stopped there to brew tea. Harlin drank his gratefully; he had a persistent, racking cough, a relic of the bronchitis he’d developed at the Death Bivouac.
John was happy. He was living up to the image he had cultivated. The Eiger Direct would make him more difficult to ignore or dismiss. And there was something deeper. He was losing himself and his ambition in the intensity of this work, in these moments. The cold, the glint of moonlight on snow, the effort of coming up the ropes—all of it helped him to forget the man he thought he should become. He became instead somethin
g small and sweetly particular in this immensity.
He thought of his children—little blond creatures, more beautiful than himself. He had married young out of a vague but intense need. He had at times experienced the children and the marriage as distractions from what seemed the more important business of building and living inside of his notions of himself. Other times he had understood that Marilyn and the children were central to whatever meaning he might discover. A clumsy and intermittent pursuit of clarity had led him here to this mountain wall. The ache and intensity of the pursuit suggested possibilities of love, of happiness, of peace.
The children were such slight, perfect-looking creatures—he was proud of their looks and their obvious intelligence. He took credit for them even as he loved them for the proof they offered that the world was beyond his understanding. He didn’t know what to make of his children. He told himself that he was still young—he was thirty—and that he might come to know them. Meanwhile they were growing up in ways partly determined by his confusion. He had been too confused and too young to father them as he wished he might.
He had scribbled a note to his family from the Death Bivouac five days earlier. He had written that he hoped to reach the top of the climb in a few days; that he was being very careful, that he loved them all. He would write when this was finished—when there was this achievement to report.
Dougal went first on the fixed ropes above the first snow cave, sliding his jumars up the slender rope—they were using 7-millimeter cord. He dangled awkwardly over the abyss that in the dark felt empty and without boundary as if nothing would contain the void; it threatened to envelop the face and the climbers with it. He felt sorry for Harlin this morning; John’s cough was getting worse as they climbed.
John waited at the bottom of each rope until Dougal reached the top and unclipped. Then John reached as high as he could to pull on the cord to get the stretch out of it. He clamped his jumars to the rope and heaved and shouldered his way up the pitch. The rope had held Dougal; it would hold him, too.
The two climbers arrived at the Death Bivouac in the late morning. The weather was still fine. The place had the alien but familiar quality of any abandoned shelter—forlorn and welcoming at once, as if their presence recalled it to being.
John and Dougal discussed their next move. They would climb the remaining fixed ropes the next day to put themselves in position to try for the summit. For now they could look up at the face and see Layton on the White Spider; he had climbed the gully that formed one of the spider’s right legs.
Their immediate plans seemed to disintegrate during the next morning’s radio call. Peter Gillman reported that a cold front was approaching the region, bringing a storm with it. John and Dougal decided to remain at the Death Bivouac in hopes of a better forecast. Layton left the Germans and descended from the Spider to spend the night with John and Dougal; the next morning, March 22, he continued down to Kleine Scheidegg for more supplies.
John and Dougal stayed put until the noon radio call. Gillman now reported that the Germans were making good progress overhead. They had reached the Fly, the small ice field above the Spider. The climbing must have been easier than expected. Better yet, the cold front had stalled. They probably could count on two more full days of good weather—perhaps just enough time to reach the summit.
John and Dougal prepared to set off up the fixed ropes. They could catch the Germans and make a joint summit attempt the next morning. Another German—Sigi Hupfauer—arrived at the Death Bivouac on his way up with supplies for his teammates. Hupfauer continued up the fixed ropes. Dougal, eager to be off, followed him. John would come last.
Dougal as he moved up the ropes thought of Layton; too bad he had gone down that morning, before this good news about the weather. He could come back with some of the other Germans to make a second summit party. Dougal reached the rope that hung down the side of the Central Pillar. He heaved his way up, hanging completely free of the rock for most of the pitch. The rope was badly worn by usage and weather—but he was going for the top; with any luck, he wouldn’t have to climb this rope again. He was relieved to reach the lower-angled section that led to the Spider. He climbed it and found two of the Germans. A third German was already on the fixed rope that led to the Fly. An hour passed as Dougal waited for his turn on the rope. He began to wonder what had become of John.
PETER GILLMAN STEPPED onto the terrace of the team’s hotel, the Villa Maria, where the proprietor kept a telescope for the benefit of curious guests. Peter peered through the lens, tracing the route from the Death Bivouac to the Spider, seeking blots of color. He wanted to know how quickly John and the others were moving up the face. A red figure fell past his line of vision; it turned slowly as it fell, and disappeared behind a buttress.
Peter crouched frozen for a moment and then stood, momentarily bewildered. He backed away from the telescope and shouted for Chris, whose room overlooked the terrace. The hotel’s owner, a gentleman by the name of Fritz von Almen, ran to the telescope and quickly scanned the base of the route. His eye fell upon a dark heap in the snow, below the lowest of the fixed ropes. The snow held scattered bits of color: gear and clothing and a rucksack the same blue as John’s.
Layton and Chris set out from Kleine Scheidegg a half-hour later on skis. They reached John’s body just after 4:30 in the afternoon. They sat down near it in the snow. Chris radioed Peter Gillman at the hotel. Peter agreed to call Don Whillans, who had returned to his work at Harlin’s mountaineering school in Leysin. Don would carry the news to Marilyn Harlin.
Chris sat in the snow and sobbed. It seemed to him that death might be forgiven for taking an interest in them. He had been afraid trusting his life to those ropes, and here it was—he had been entirely right to be afraid. He hadn’t been comfortable with John, hadn’t believed his stories, had found him wearing and even dangerous. Still, Chris knew that people invented themselves. Most people were simply less clumsy about it, more cunning than John.
THE GIRL ANDREA and her brother Johnny looked up when their mother entered the room full of children. The two of them saw the look on her face before she asked them a frightening question: What’s the worst thing that can happen to this family?
The girl knew at once. The boy had to be told. Johnny already was an accomplished skier—better than his father. He wanted to know—but he didn’t ask—if his father had made the mistake that had killed him.
The boy would remember that moment later, and also the funeral, where he stood holding his mother’s hand and looking up at people standing in the snow that fell among the tombstones, everyone pale in dark overcoats, a scene of soothing white and gray and black except for the freshly cut flowers, piled everywhere in what struck the boy as huge mounds, strange and somehow cruel in the winter landscape. It was good to be outside after the ride to the cemetery in a car that followed the hearse that carried his father’s body. The Germans, kind men, had made a wreath that hung on the back of the hearse; they had laid a banner across the wreath and Johnny had stared smitten at the words on the banner: Good-bye John.
The girl had believed that she was closest to her father. Her brother and the neighbors’ children cried at the news; she pretended to cry but she was not sad. She was furious, filled with anger that felt like an inheritance, a souvenir of her bond with her father. He had understood this about her—the storms that rose in her, the sense of opposition to the others and to the world at large.
She would decide later that her father had faked his death. Her theory explained some of the mystery and surprise surrounding the event and also why no one had wanted her to look upon the body. Her father had always run off to the mountains. The family would ski up to see him at the base of a route—Andrea was frightened of the glaciers, afraid of falling into a crevasse as people sometimes did. And when the family arrived John would be glad to see them but he received them as visitors who would soon depart.
He had run off again, only this time for good—it made sense
. Andrea waited seven years for her father to contact her—perhaps to invite her to visit him or to come to live with him in his new hiding place. She imagined it must be far away, perhaps in the Arctic or somewhere like that. She was sixteen years old—a junior in high school back in America—before she decided to believe that her father had after all fallen to his death on the Eiger’s North Face in the winter of 1966. It was a painful decision not only because it meant she would not see him again but also because it meant she might never forgive him.
THE GERMANS ON the face got the news on their radio, and they told Dougal. He saw that they were moved. They had liked John—had perhaps seen him as he needed to be seen, a figure in a good story. Dougal didn’t know what to feel. He had been just ahead of John, and he had noticed the rope’s poor condition. He might have said something; instead, he had played the child’s game—the climber’s game—of pretending not to notice. He was surprised again by the irrevocable nature of things and by his own incompetence to countenance facts, endings. He thought of Robin Smith, and of the boy killed on the road in Scotland.
He spent the night on a ledge near the top of the Spider with two of the Germans, Roland Votteler and Karl Golikow. Three other Germans—Jörg Lehne, Sigi Hupfauer and Günther Strobel—were bivouacked higher, at the Fly. The climbers had resolved among themselves to finish the route; quitting now would be too dreary—unbearable.
Karl Golikow descended in the morning to inspect the remaining fixed ropes between the Death Bivouac and the Spider. He found them badly frayed in places. The Germans decided that only four of their team—the climbers who remained above those ropes—would continue to the summit. The rest would go down. Layton Kor had been making his way up the route to join Dougal; he retreated with Golikow and the other Germans.
Dougal couldn’t imagine going down to the others. He climbed the fixed ropes that led to the Fly—an almost unbearable task, physically strenuous and utterly terrifying. It was like a punishment, like being forced to live John’s penultimate moments. The Germans received him with bread and chocolate and tea. Dougal joined two of them to dig out platforms for the night. The other two Germans went up to climb further, fixing rope almost to the summit ice fields.