The Fall

by Simon Mawer

  “How’s your head?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve got a bit of a headache. It’s nothing.”

  I changed the dressing. Was he all right? Was his mind clouded, or was this just the exertion and the altitude and the cold? We drank tea, as many mugs of tea as we could get water for. I cooked some kind of mess of rehydrated stew and potatoes and argued with Jamie when he didn’t want to eat. We had retreated from the complexities of life to the fundamentals of a cave existence — drink, food, the need to piss, the need to huddle against each other for warmth and comfort.

  “Ruth — ” I said.

  “Ruth’s all right. She’s tucked up in some warm bed. She’s all right.”

  We pulled the bivouac sack over our heads and lay down, but neither of us slept much. I felt the warmth from his body, the cold from the rock at my back. Mountain cold is like a vacuum, a great absence that draws everything into it — heat, light, life. It is as dark as the grave. “I don’t mind, Jamie. That’s all.”

  “Forget it, Rob. Try not to think, about her or about anything. Just try to sleep.”

  But sleep was a fragmentary prize snatched in scraps from the jaws of anxiety. We had climbed an entire day — some kind of lunch snatched at Death Bivouac — and were still only two thirds of the way up the Face. Ahead of us was the traverse into the Spider, the highest of the ice fields, a hanging glacier plastered three thousand feet up the Face. We had to climb that, and then we still had to find our way out through the head wall onto the summit snowfield. Another nine hundred feet of steep climbing on iced rock. There was all that to come. It was not an easy night. There were dreams and a sense of dread, the fear of the dark and the fear of the space beneath our ledge and the fear of the space that lay between us and was inhabited by Ruth.

  I awoke some time in the small hours to find Jamie’s arm around me. Outside our sack there was a muffled silence and a faint, threatening whisper from the gods of the mountain.

  “What’s that?” Jamie had woken as well. He pulled the bivouac sack open and peered out. Our headlamps excavated pools of pale yellow into which snow intruded, a thin scattering of flakes alighting with care and delicacy all over the sack, all over the ledge on which we sat, all over the great somber rotting face that crept out of the darkness all around us.

  “Oh shit,” he said.

  We dozed until nearer dawn. By then the wind had got up and was grabbing the sack and shaking it like a dog with a rat. Snow swirled around us. The rock was glazed with ice. We muttered about taking care, and putting on crampons properly, and minding that fucking stove, and who had what gear. The terror is the fear of dropping something. Life depends on so many small things — the ice ax that hangs around your wrist, the crampons that you buckle on with clumsy morning fingers, the gloves that you must put on and take off, put on and take off. Drop any one of these things and you may well be dead. For want of a nail the kingdom of life may be lost.

  Maneuvering around each other, clumsy in our down jackets and gloves, we contemplated retreat. The argument went back and forth, my caution with Jamie’s recklessness. “A day descending this bloody pile of rock, or half a day to climb out?” That was what he said. “If we were at the Flatiron, okay. But we’re not going to descend the bloody Ramp. Not that. And then, what is this? A bit of snow. Have we ever climbed in snow in Scotland? Have we hell, and harder than this.”

  “Or we stay here and sit it out.”

  He laughed. “How many people have died doing that? They’re all there in the history books.”

  He wasn’t wrong; he wasn’t right, either. That’s the thing about the Eigerwand, wrong and right are judged by one thing only: the outcome. Climbers have retreated successfully from as high up as the Exit cracks. Others have attempted retreat from as low down as the Swallow’s Nest and still they’ve died. Many have tried to sit out storms and have ended up corpses, to be lowered down by rescuers months later.

  “To go on is impossible, to retreat unthinkable!” he cried in his guttural Bergführer voice.

  “Stop playing silly buggers. We could die getting this wrong.”

  He grinned humorlessly The snow settled on his helmet and on the rope that was draped across his chest like a bandolier. “On this fucking face,” he said, “we could die getting it right.”

  We went on, rightward across the Traverse of the Gods, which is a series of shelves, almost a path in good weather, that cuts across the top of vertical, unclimbed walls and leads into the bottom of the Spider, der Spinne, the arachnid that was spinning a web of spindrift when we got there — a white funnel with a maelstrom of snow swirling around in it. I tied on to an old peg, and Jamie led out onto the ice. The rope was frozen stiff, like copper piping that you have to bend around corners. His figure was hunched against the wind and the snow, only vaguely discernible as he chopped his way out into the ice field. I watched him blur into the murk. This, I remember thinking, is how disasters start.

  2

  HOW WOULD IT have looked that day, to people on the ground, to the tourists making their way up the mountain railway to Kleine Scheidegg to glimpse the edges of the high mountains, to the watchers at the hotel, to the railway workers or the shopkeepers down in Grindelwald? How did it look to Ruth? A reasonable spring day, a brisk and capricious cold breeze tearing rents in the cloud to let shafts of sunlight through, sudden and briefly warming. Occasionally the summit of the Eiger would emerge from the pall and be visible. The tourists came up on the train in their droves. They laughed and stamped their feet against the cold, and smiled and posed for photos beside the youth with the alpenhorn. They bought souvenirs and trinkets and generally congratulated themselves on the view.

  But up there above their heads, above the roofs and the green slopes of Alpiglen, up there in the gray funnel that was the North Face, it was different. Jamie and I crept upward through swirling blizzard, running out no more than fifty feet of rope between us. Our shouts were pulverized by the wind, torn apart, battered, and shredded into mere fragments of sound. It was cold waiting for the other to climb. Cold was a liquid diffusing into the bones, down to the marrow, down to the very core. In the normal way of things, we might have moved together, keeping two or three runners between us for safety as we climbed the ice, but not in this.

  Jamie shouted, his voice subtracted by the gale: “Get…move…on!”

  “I’m fucking moving as fast as I fucking can!”

  “What? What?”

  “Doesn’t matter!”

  Powder-snow avalanches spilled over the cliffs above and hissed like snakes down the ice. I stood in the stream and watched the snow course around my axes and over my boots. When the flow died away I continued climbing, through a world that was reduced to the limits of my body, a world contracted to this patch of dirty ice, this length of frozen rope, these thoughts of supplication and anger. The wind roared and stung. Beneath it was the sound of my breathing and the pain in my muffled hands. We kept to the right edge of the ice where there was some shelter. Gray cliffs loomed out of the pall above us, like quarry cliffs emerging from the shadows of a nightmare. Jamie was yelling into my face: “Which is it?”

  “Which is what?”

  “Exit…cracks,” he shouted against the wind. “Which gully?”

  I looked up. The cliffs were there, just there: primeval and evil. “Just get the fuck out of here!”

  “Which bloody gully?!”

  “Just follow the pegs. There must be pegs. The whole bloody mountain is littered with them. Pegs and corpses. Clip onto the pegs and climb over the corpses.”

  We traversed leftward, leftward, leftward, edging beneath rock, looking for a way out. Somewhere over the other side of the mountain, beyond the Jungfrau, there was a clap of thunder. At the foot of a possible gully, we cut a stance in the ice and hammered in a piton, and then Jamie began to lever his way up out of the Spider’s clutches. Powder snow rushed down the rocks. I mouthed obscenities into the storm, pushing the rope upward. The Spider was
like a garbage chute below us, dropping away to nothing, a gray void down which the snow flowed.

  The rope tugged at my hands. I craned up to glimpse Jamie belaying and taking in. I climbed toward him, out of the Spider and into her web. The rock was glazed with ice. Crampon claws scraped and scratched. You try to find nicks, you try to find cracks, you lever your ax pick into any cavity that will do, you depend on millimeters.

  “Piece of piss, is it, Rob?” he shouted as I went past. There was ice encrusted in the stubble around his mouth, and his eyebrows were rimed with the stuff. It made him look like someone made up as an old man for a play.

  “Piece of shit, more like.”

  “Think of the view we’re missing!”

  “Stuff the view.” I bridged up directly above him. There was a muddle of rock and ice above me, a variety of grooves, any one of which might be the best line. Somewhere hereabouts, Andreas Heckmair had come off during the first ascent in 1938. He’d hit his second twenty feet below and stabbed him with his crampons, but somehow they’d stayed on. Somehow. Otherwise it’d have been another of the Eiger’s disasters, another four deaths. Somewhere here, the Italian Corti had perched on his solitary ledge until they rescued him by lowering a man down from the summit. Corti’s partner, Longhi, waiting lower down on another ledge, had died. The Eiger was a hungry beast.

  I belayed on an old peg and brought Jamie up, and we went on. Snow hissed down the gullies around us and over us. I lost count of the pitches: somewhere there was a traverse across into another gully, but the Quartz Crack — if there was a Quartz Crack — we never saw. The rock was compact and treacherous — no place for pegs, no pegs in place, nothing. The grooves were smeared with ice and choked with snow. I led past Jamie, sweeping snow away to discover sloping holds with a thin glaze. There was the sense of eternity about the climb: like Sisyphus, we’d done the same thing before, over and over, and still the mountain kept coming at us, as though someone were adding to it above us even as we got near the top. I remembered the joke: the light at the end of the tunnel is actually the torches of the management hastily building more tunnel. I remember laughing, laughing and crying at the same time, as I crabbed leftward into the bottom of an open groove, ice in front of me, the angle about eighty degrees, my crampons grabbing at icy rock, my ax hooked up above me somewhere where there was a nub of ice or rock, I couldn’t really see.

  “This bloody thing must ease off soon,” I shouted down, but he couldn’t hear me. I worked a piton into a crack, then hammered it in an inch or two. The sound began bright and firm and reassuring, and ended with a dull finality. It’d have to do. I tied it off with a sling and clipped the rope into the carabiner. Security of a kind. I looked down again and yelled: “Reckon we’re off route?”

  His face was a pale rag amid the gray murk. “What?”

  “Is this the route? Do you reckon we’re —?”

  I paused. A stream of powder snow came down toward me. I waited, clinging. The snow swept down and over, a torrent of stinging crystals.

  “You reckon we’re off route?” I screamed.

  I think he shrugged. I think he heard me and he shrugged. I looked back above me at the foreshortened stretch of rock where I was to go. Another rivulet of snow swept down toward me, and I went up through it, the talons of my crampons clawing at the rock. There was a sense of release, as though I had been freed for the moment from the law of gravity. Reaching up, I dug the axes into whatever cracks I could find, then pulled and straightened and went up on nothing at all.

  And then the rope stopped.

  “Slack!” I yelled. Maybe it had frozen in the carabiner below me. Maybe it was kinked and the kink had jammed. Maybe. I screamed into the storm: “Give me slack! Rope! Give me rope!” I was teetering on points, wobbling on knife-edges. “Jamie! Give me some fucking slack!”

  There was wind sound and snow sound, the battering of air around the cliffs, the sweep of snow streaming over the rocks all around me. I tried to see down, but Jamie was out of sight, around the angle of rock. “The rope’s jammed!” I screamed at his invisible figure.

  The sky went dark. It was as though I had said something to offend the monster of the place. Snow came down at me like a snake, hissing with cold. The snake grew, darkened, and engulfed me with its jaws. There was a tremor in the darkness like a great animal shaking itself. I prayed. Quite who I was praying to was not clear — the gods of the mountains, perhaps, the Ogre himself, maybe. Spread-eagled on the rock, perched feet above my fragile piton with the snow streaming over me, I prayed that I would stay on. Just that. I prayed that my picks would stay notched into the ice, that my claws would grip, and that I would stay on. Prayer and fear are intimately linked. The snow pummeled me, swept over me, through me. “Please let me stay on,” I prayed. “Please,” I begged. “Please.”

  My left hand was snatched from the rock, and then my right. I went over backward into space, plummeted down, hitting the rock, slithering down a short slope, plunging free. I remember taking it as a blessed relief. I no longer needed to struggle, no longer needed to hope. There was the simple thought: All this will stop. Somewhere, somehow it will come to an end. And then I will find out.

  No past flashed before my eyes, no revelation was bestowed on me, no truth was perceived. I just fell.

  When I stopped, I was hanging upside down with my face against the rock. The Hanging Man. I was clearly and somehow not unexpectedly, alive. After the crazy motion of the fall, there was now a terrible stillness. I righted myself and scrabbled to some kind of ledge. I discovered that when I put weight on my left leg, it collapsed. There was no pain, but it wouldn’t support any weight. I bent down and felt through my gaiters and found a swelling on the surface: a bruise, I thought.

  “Jamie!”

  I looked around — at the pall of cloud around me and the gloomy cliffs dropping down into darkness below and rising up above. Hell in shades of gray. My lifeline stretched above, woven red and yellow, disappearing upward over my horizon of rock.

  I wasn’t frightened, but I knew that in all probability I was going to die.

  “Jamie!”

  The wind flung my voice back at me like an adult pushing away a child’s punches.

  “Jamie!”

  There was pain now, emerging from the depths of shock, an exquisite agony deep in the marrow of my left leg.

  “Jamie!”

  But the only sound was the wind, battering against the edges of rock. Solitude was a substance all around me, a thing made of black rock and gray ice and the keening of the wind.

  “Jamie! Jamie!” The sound of my voice was nothing: a mere breath in the midst of this orchestration of storm.

  How long? Time is a malleable dimension, as plastic as Dali’s ridiculous watches. It seemed like hours before movement came from above. A rope, weighted by two carabiners, clattered down toward me. Before he appeared, I heard him shouting, his voice dismembered by the wind. And then he was there, blurred by the cloud, hanging fifty feet above me at the lip of rock, looking down. “You all right?” he yelled. “What the hell…Rob, are you all right?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then get the fuck up here!”

  The pain in my leg had grown. It was a constructed, complex thing, with layers and meanings, with shades and colors. Sometimes it was strong enough to bring a moment’s insensibility. More often it was mere agony. I shouted up: “Something’s wrong with my leg.”

  “What?”

  “My leg!”

  He slid down the rope, his figure hardening as he came nearer, like an image being brought into focus. His crampon points bit and tore at the cliff. “What’s up?”

  The pain came fully now, as though it had finally made up its mind: a swelling, burgeoning agony, something coming out of the very core of my being, something possessing me as though there was no room for anything else — no personality, no Robert Dewar, just the plain fact of pain. “My leg. My fucking left leg.”

  “What�
�s wrong with it?”

  “Bruised. Don’t know. Just hurts. I can’t put any weight on it.”

  He came farther down and was there beside me on what passed as my ledge, tying off the rappel rope and looking around. “Well, we’ve got to get you up. Fucking hell, we’ve lost time. You’ll have to prusik up.”

  “Where are we?”

  “God knows.” He leaned out on the rope and craned to see down below us. “Somewhere above the Traverse of the Gods, I think.” I could see him thinking, counting minutes and hours, estimating distances, looking for ways out.

  “My leg,” I said. “I can’t use it. Can’t bloody move it.” I think I said that. That’s what I intended to say, but my mind was blurred by pain and the words came out mangled. He crouched down and pulled at my gaiter and my socks, and swore when I screamed. For a moment my shin was exposed, with a long swelling down the front of it, like a tumulus, a burial ground of all our hopes.

  Jamie looked up at me and said the words that had been going through my mind but had never been allowed to come to the forefront, never allowed to take precedence over the pain: “It’s broken,” he said flatly I was cold after that. Could his words have brought the cold, or was it just the effects of shock? I was cold and shivering and tired at the same time, like someone with a fever. I wondered whether I could just crouch down here on this exiguous ledge and sleep.

  “You’ve got to keep warm, Rob,” he said.

  “How’ll we get off?”

  “You’ve got to keep warm. I’ll try and get some pegs in.”

  “How’ll we get off?”

  He began to search around for likely cracks, but the rock was friable and compact at the same time: a dangerous combination. He hammered and swore. Bits of rock splintered away and skittered down the cliff.

  “How’ll we get off, Jamie?”

  “I don’t know how the fuck we’ll get off!” he shouted. “I don’t know, all right? I’ve no fucking idea!”