The Alps

  Although my daughters informed me on the phone last night that a Grindelwald, namely Gellert Grindelwald, was an evil wizard second in power only to Lord Voldemort, that is not why I have come here. My destination is the Jungfraujoch, home to the most elevated train station in Europe. I cannot even see it for the moment, as a threatening peak blocks it from view. This is the Eiger, the mountain first summited solo in 1963 by Michel Darbellay, the man whose funeral I witnessed in Orsières.

  The first stage of the cog-railway journey begins in the valley below Grindelwald. The train moves at remarkable speed up a gentle slope and soon the rumpled green expanse below us is swaying pleasantly and becoming smaller and smaller. The large chalets now appear to be toy houses. Opposite me sits an excited Hindu woman clad in a colorful sari, the bindi on her forehead a dark scarlet. She cannot contain herself. “Why, this is perfect!” she exclaims. “Perfect!” Her teenaged son, carrying several thousand dollars’ worth of photographic equipment, points his cameras out the train’s panoramic windows and fires the shutters like a machine gun.

  The train’s terminus is Kleine Scheidegg (Little Watershed), a pass where a second train must be boarded to continue the ascent. I alight on the platform and look southward.

  This, then, is the Bernese Oberland in all its glory. Towering before me is an Alpine sight as iconic as Mont Blanc or the Matterhorn, a threesome of menace known to mountaineers everywhere. From east to west, I see the Eiger, the Mönch, and the Jungfrau—or, as we would say, the Ogre, the Monk, and the Virgin. These mountains stretch to the heavens, gray rock and white snow in a stirring melodrama of nature. It is no coincidence that composer Richard Wagner came often to Grindelwald and its environs.

  The great triangular north face of the Eiger is one of the six great north faces of the Alps (the five others, as mentioned earlier, are Les Grandes Jorasses and Le Petit Dru at Mont Blanc; the Piz Badile and the Matterhorn on the Swiss-Italian border; and the Cima Grande di Lavaredo in the Italian Dolomites).† The Eiger is also the biggest—and the deadliest. Since the 1930s, more than sixty climbers have died trying to get atop it. There is, then, an aura of fear surrounding the mountain. German for north face is Nordwand; in German mountaineering circles, the Eiger’s face is habitually called the Mordwand (the Murder Face). One of its ledges, to take another example, is called the “Death Bivouac.” Added to this fearsome reputation is another particularity of the mountain: Its killer rockface, more than 1,800 meters from base to apex, can be seen in its entirety from Kleine Scheidegg. Thus, with a pair of powerful binoculars, onlookers could follow the various catastrophes as they unfolded, stick figures falling to their doom or motionless on a ledge, frozen to death. There is, as usual in Switzerland, a luxury hotel at Kleine Scheidegg—Hôtel Bellevue des Alpes—with a terrace conveniently sited for following the progress (or failure) of climbing expeditions. The mountain is a theater.

  There is a rail tunnel piercing the Eiger. This is the route of the train that I will take later in the day on the second leg of the journey up to the Jungfrau. In the 1930s, when the race to summit the Eiger was at its deadliest, a gallery leading from the rail tunnel to the rockface was used frequently as a means of egress for rescue parties dispatched to help climbers in trouble.

  To understand the frenzy for “bagging” the Eiger’s north face, it’s crucial to evoke the interwar period in Germany. The 1920s and 1930s saw the flowering of a genre of cinema there, the Bergfilm (mountain film). Silents, then talkies, glorified the beauty of mountains and the heroism of those who conquered them in an expressive, exaggerated style. Leni Riefenstahl, for example, got her start in the Bergfilm. With the rise of the Nazis, and their bowdlerized interpretation of the Alps and Wagner and Nietzsche, the conquest of mountains became an Aryan duty, a sign of racial superiority, a token of purity far removed from the degeneracy of other Europeans. (The museum in Zermatt screens a clip of an old Bergfilm depicting the Matterhorn disaster, Der Kampf ums Matterhorn, in which Edward Whymper comes off as a fairly foppish Englishman.) Thus, a mix of nationalism and ideology spurred many Germans and Austrians to be the first up one of the toughest ascents in the Alps.

  The contest began in earnest in 1935. Two Bavarian climbers had a crack at the Eiger Nordwand in August of that year. Bad weather forced them to bivouac for four consecutive nights. They froze to death at the Death Bivouac. The following year, ten climbers came from Germany and Austria. One quickly died during a training climb, and the weather closed in, inducing five to abandon any attempt. That left two Bavarians and two Austrians. Theirs was to be the most dramatic catastrophe on the Mordwand for thirty years.

  They began climbing on 18 July 1936, watched by crowds at Kleine Scheidegg. Considerable progress was made on the first day, but storms moved in on the second, leaving them stuck on the mountain. When a rockfall seriously injured one of the Austrian climbers, the foursome decided that they would have to give up their goal. Unfortunately, however, they had removed the rope from a particularly difficult traverse (thinking, no doubt, they would descend from the summit on the easy western face), so they were forced to abseil (rappel) dangerously down the steep face. They passed the entrance to the gallery of the rail tunnel and told the guard there that they were fine and would get down with no problem.

  Then an avalanche hit. One man, unclipped, was swept off the mountain to his death. Another, swinging wildly on his rope, crashed directly into rockface and crushed his skull. The weight of his body caused another climber, to whom he was attached by rope, to die of asphyxiation. That left one survivor, Toni Kurz, dangling in the air, helpless, exhausted. Two courageous Swiss rescuers climbed out of the railroad gallery in the rockface and made their way to the beleaguered young Bavarian. He had been on the mountain, exposed, for four days. The Swiss tied two lengths of rope together and threw it to Kurz. By some malediction of fate, the knot joining the two lengths would not go through Kurz’s carabiner (metal clip), so he did not have enough play to make his abseiling descent to the Swiss waiting below, who could not ascend farther because of an overhanging spur of rock. Kurz tried for hours to get the knot through, but his fingers were frozen. One Swiss guide climbed on his colleague’s shoulders, reached up with an ice ax and managed to touch the sole of Kurz’s crampons. But it was too late. Kurz croaked, “I can’t go on any longer,” then died. He was twenty-three.

  The literature of mountaineering contains many heart-stopping tales of danger courted and overcome. The unlucky Kurz did not live to tell his tale, but other great Alpinists escaped death repeatedly—and some turned out to be accomplished, even philosophical, writers. Their books have fired imaginations for decades. Three of the classic memoirs are (in their English translations), Gaston Rébuffat’s Starlight and Storm: The Conquest of the Great North Faces of the Alps, Walter Bonatti’s The Mountains of My Life, and Lionel Terray’s Conquistadors of the Useless: From the Alps to Annapurna and Beyond. To which a fourth must be added: Heinrich Harrer’s The White Spider: The Classic Account of the Ascent of the Eiger.

  Following the 1936 disaster, another attempt was made in 1937. Two climbers got into trouble on the Eiger but did manage to make their way off the face safe and sound, which ranked as something of an accomplishment. In June of 1938, two Italians promptly died on the rockface. The following month, Harrer, an Austrian, decided to try his luck. In his memoir, he snorts indignantly at the accusation he had Hitlerian motives (the Anschluss had occurred a few months earlier): “Nobody dangled Olympic or other medals before our eyes, nor did we receive any. As to the report we climbed on the orders, or even at the wish, of some personage or other, it is absolutely off the mark.”

  After about twenty hours into the ascent, Harrer and a fellow Austrian were joined on the north face by two more experienced German climbers. They decided their chances were better if they stuck together. What followed was an epic struggle against the elements, with bivouacs pitched on the edge of the abyss. Observers at Kleine Scheidegg gave them up for dead on seve
ral occasions, only to have the clouds clear to reveal the four doggedly inching their way up the rock. At last they reached the White Spider, a starfish-shaped ice cliff near the summit. The weather turned awful, they could hear people who had scaled the easy western slope shouting indistinctly down to them, asking if they needed rescue. Just as progress resumed, Harrer writes:

  The howling of the wind increased, gathering a very strange note—a banging and swishing, a whistling hiss. This wasn’t the voice of the storm any more coming down out of wild dance of ice particles and snowflakes, but something quite different. It was an avalanche, and as its harbingers, rocks and fragmented ice!

  I snatched my rucksack up over my head, holding it firmly with one hand, while the other gripped the rope which ran up to my companion. I jammed myself against the ice cliff, just as the whole weight of the avalanche struck me. The rattle and hammering of stones on my pack was swallowed up by the clatter and roar of the avalanche. It snatched and clutched at me with fearful strength. Could I possibly survive such pressure? Hardly … I was fighting for air, trying above all to prevent my rucksack from being torn away and also to stop the endless stream of rushing snow from building up between me and the ice slope and forcing me out of my footholds.

  The avalanche increased in intensity, then abated. All four men had survived, clinging to the White Spider. And, at 3:30 in the afternoon of 24 July 1938, in a howling blizzard, they trudged onto the summit ridge of the Eiger. The news spread quickly around the world.

  As the second train heads toward the tunnel bored through the mountain, it is impossible not to think of Harrer and his ilk with a great measure of respect. Or of his successors. Many have since climbed the face—and many have died—all of them drawn by the challenge. The first woman to summit the Eiger via the north face continued Marie Paradis’s tradition of female firsts with delightful names. In September 1964, a German woman achieved that distinction: Daisy Voog.

  This second train, the Jungfraubahn, is smaller than the first but just as comfortable, and modern and red. Once in the steeply pitched tunnel, we ascend slowly as the cogs strain to do their work. We are inside the Eiger now. Ads for Tissot watches hang like laundry from the ceiling and video screens inform us that the railway celebrated its centenary in 2012. What is not said is that Swiss entrepreneurs one hundred years ago realized that English tourists were crazy enough to pay a fortune to go up to the Jungfrau. And they were right. The train is now a babel of excited visitors, loudspeakers making announcements in eight languages, each followed by the trademarked phrase, in English only, for the locale: “The Top of Europe.” We were all given Swiss chocolate after buying our round-trip tickets. It is the most expensive chocolate bar of my life: $185.25.

  The train makes its first underground stop at the Eigerwand station. We passengers, a sort of United Nations of Tourism, dutifully troop through the gallery carved out of the rock and behold, through a reassuringly sturdy plexiglass wall, the rocky view from the middle of the north face. It was from this gallery that the valiant attempt to save Toni Kurz was launched—and from which Clint Eastwood was rescued in The Eiger Sanction, a 1975 thriller with superb mountaineering scenes marred by a dog’s breakfast of a plot down in the valley.

  Underway again, the video now turns its attention to a music festival held every year in Grindelwald. This features a Vladimir Putin lookalike singing Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds.” The performance is riveting. We soon arrive at another underground stop, this time at the Eismeer (Ice Sea) station. The view from this gallery lives up to its billing: The Grindelwald-Fiescher Glacier is a frozen white pandemonium lying between the Mönch and the Jungfrau.

  At last we reach the topmost station at the Jungfraujoch. This “Virgin Yoke” is actually a glaciated pass between the Jungfrau and the Mönch—we have traversed the Eiger—although, given its elevation (3,466 meters) and its extreme conditions, not many travelers in the past must have made use of it, as opposed to the other Alpine passes I have visited. Duty trumps the growing sense of giddiness in my head and I take a lift a further hundred meters to the Sphinx, a scientific observatory high in the sky. From its viewing deck, I look down on my old friend, the Aletsch Glacier, flowing east into Wallis/Valais. I can also see scores of tall peaks playing with the clouds—in Switzerland, Italy, France, and Germany. The view is truly stupendous, humbling. I begin to feel less grumpy about the cost of the train ticket.

  Once back down at the Jungfraujoch complex, I wander dazedly through various glossy exhibits about Alpine derring-do, one of which, with admirable self-deprecation, deals with the strange business of selling the Alps to tourists. But my real goal is to participate in that absurdity by consuming a chicken tikka masala. Finally I come across it—the Bollywood Restaurant. Alas, there are no seats available, and dozens of Indians outside its doors wait patiently to join their countrymen within. A sign reads:

  INDIAN BUFFET

  32 EUROS

  NO SHARING

  The reason for this extraordinary sight stems from Indian cinema. In the 1980s and 1990s, almost all big-budget Bollywood musical romances included what it is called a “Cut to Switzerland” scene. This entailed either a dream sequence or just an unexplained stand-alone transition that had the two romantic leads cavorting in Swiss mountain meadows, with a backdrop of wildflowers and glorious scenery. The filmmakers of Mumbai had once used the Kashmir for this technique, but that area grew too geopolitically dicey—hence the Cut to Switzerland. Once millions of Indians grew familiar with distant Switzerland—in much the same way the Japanese came to know Heidi—the country became a destination of choice for the affluent of the subcontinent. And the Swiss, experts in tourism since the invention of tourism, started to learn how to make curry.

  Unable to wait for the buffet, I board the train and leave India behind. Everywhere I go, I seem to bump into fiction. Opposite me this time are three sleepy Gangnam-style Korean kids, plump, sporting colorful shades and hair dyed various hues of red. The video above them shows footage of the famed local hero, Ueli Steck, a speed mountaineer. In 2008, Steck climbed the Eiger’s north face solo, in the astounding time of two hours and forty-seven minutes. I watch, fascinated, as the Swiss climber races up rockfaces around the world.

  On the second stage of the train journey, my companion is a fellow from County Kilkenny, who, on learning of my Alpine book project, categorically pooh-poohs the idea.

  “The mountains, the magic, they’ve already been done.”

  “By Mann?” I say, trying to catch his drift.

  “Who?”

  “Thomas Mann. The Magic Mountain.”

  “No, by Tolkien.”

  The Irishman turns out to be a full-on druid lover. The rest of the trip down to Grindelwald becomes a disquisition on runes, standing stones, mysterious powers, oracles, and the like. Perhaps, I think as the Celtic seer continues his explanations, my daughters were right after all—­Gellert Grindelwald of Harry Potter fame does belong here.

  He’s sitting beside me.

  _______

  * Near Lake Geneva, a long wall of triangular slabs built as a defensive fortification at the same time is now jokingly known as The Toblerone Line.

  † The three most difficult of these faces—Les Grandes Jorasses, the Matterhorn, and the Eiger—are known in climbing circles as The Trilogy.

  PART THREE

  INNSBRUCK TO TRIESTE

  8. FERN AND SUDELFELD PASSES AND BERCHTESGADEN

  CUT AWAY FROM SWITZERLAND—to Innsbruck, Austria, where the sky has opened and what seems to be a microburst pours down on the old town, as though Zeus or some other mischievous god has just emptied a celestial bucket of water. I take shelter from the deluge at a recessed storefront in the company of about a dozen Japanese people. Most carry a black tote bag emblazoned with a kangaroo road sign with a red slash through it. Large lettering declares: NO KANGAROOS IN AUSTRIA. The language barrier between my companions and me appears insuperable until one smiling old fellow
nods at me—I must have been staring at his bag—and says, “Austria, no Australia.” This is greeted by an appreciative titter from the others.

  When the storm passes, I stroll the gleaming cobbles of Tyrol’s capital and admire its collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century buildings, a legacy of the days when the city was an important administrative center of the Habsburg holdings in central Europe. A fuller explanation of the kangaroo mystery comes from the owner of a souvenir shop. The Austrians are tired of being mistaken for Australians. This happens a lot abroad when an Austrian reveals his nationality to a stranger, only then to hear how Sydney is such a beautiful city and how the beaches are the best in the Pacific. Hence the tote bag.

  I drive out of the city the next morning. The daylight reveals a remarkable feng shui of mountains. To the north rises the towering screen of the Nordkette range; to the south, a ski jump seems pointed at the heart of the town. Small wonder then that Innsbruck has twice hosted the Winter Olympics, in 1964 and 1976, though the latter one landed in its lap when the city originally chosen, Denver, backed out of its commitment.

  The River Inn flows quickly—Innsbruck means “Bridge on the Inn”—through its broad valley on its long route to meet the Danube at Passau, Germany. Another watershed has been crossed, as the waters of the Inn will flow into the Black Sea. Off to the left, a truly massive baroque building rises in differing hues of yellow. This is the Cistercian monastery of Stams, founded in the thirteenth century. One of Tyrol’s baroque jewels, Stams also has the distinction of being, I believe, the only monastery anywhere to run a snowboarding school.