Far, Far The Mountain Peak

by John Masters

  Gerry said sharply: ‘Peter will decide that---‘ But Peter waved to him to be quiet.

  He lay back, thinking. If they were allotting marks to these routes, and ten was the highest level of difficulty or danger that could be accepted, even in perfect weather, then the rim and the Bowl were ten each; the left side of the Needles and Walsh’s Fault--probably nine each; anything else, eleven or more.

  He made up his mind. He said: ‘Tomorrow, Harry, you and Lapeyrol have a real go at your fault. Gerry and I will try the left, west side of the Needles. Let’s get off by five, now that we know the ridge.’

  The others agreed, and after a few more moments of idle talk, mostly about new combinations of food, they separated to their own tents. Lying there, six inches from Harry Walsh, Peter thought: He seemed surprised that those last orders were the only sensible ones in the circumstances; he still thinks I am merely rash and dictatorial. If it had not been for Gerry he would probably not have accepted the invitation to join the expedition, much as he must have wanted to take part in the climbing of Meru. There was more than just the different views they had on mountaineering to explain his latent hostility, though those differences had been plain enough even when they last met, in Zermatt in ‘09, just after Peter and Emily became engaged. No, the thing to remember was that this was Peggy’s husband. Peggy must be full of bitterness--a depth of it far greater than Peter would have thought it possible for her to contain. He had been wrong in his estimate of her character, and she had been pouring that bitterness into Harry’s ear for three years now. He went to sleep.

  The next day was as clear and harshly brilliant as the one before, but by the time he and Gerry came off the Needles at half-past four in the afternoon clouds were blowing about the upper cone of the mountain and a light snow was drifting across the great south-east ridge below, obscuring all downward visibility. Cadez had come up, Camp II was established, Harry and Lapeyrol were here, and everything was in order.

  Lapeyrol seemed to be affected by the height, so Peter decided to send him down at once to join Lyon in Camp I, while Cadez stayed up here at Camp II. The same mixture of cocoa and jam was ready, but today it didn’t taste good, and before they began the conference the four of them, now jammed into one of the tiny huts, had a brief, heated exchange of words about that. Couldn’t someone think of something new for a change? Then, wearily, feeling that he was having to whip himself even to take the trouble to find out what had happened, Peter asked Harry to give his account of the day’s work.

  Harry said that he and Lapeyrol had taken four hours to get four hundred feet up Walsh’s Fault, and had then been defeated. ‘There’s a section there, near the top,’ he said, ‘where all hand- and foot-holds simply vanish. The side walls spread back to twelve feet--too far for chimneying, and the fault itself actually overhangs. I mean the whole cliff leans out, and the fault in it, for fifty feet.’

  Lapeyrol had said the same thing before he started down the ridge. ‘Ne va pas, monsieur. Absolument--ne va point!’ He was dead beat, and his and Harry’s clothes in tatters. It was obvious that they had pushed themselves to the limit--their limit.

  Peter followed with his own story. He and Gerry had spent the day on the Needles. The climbing consisted in getting up each Needle in turn until a point was reached where there was some chance of making a traverse round it. They had got past two--One (which was large), and Two (which was small--comparatively). On Two they had had to go over the top, but on One had found a traverse, about a hundred and eighty feet up. It had taken them five hours to achieve an advance in height of some two hundred and fifty feet (from the foot of Needle One to the foot of Needle Three), and three hours to get down again. Three more large Needles, one small, and Cleopatra’s, remained. They hadn’t found more than a dozen good holds in all. The rock was rotten, and at one point on Two, after a really severe climb, they had had to put in fifty feet of fixed rope, anchored to rocks, in order to get down again. They had spent those eight hours hanging by fingertips and tricounis over the Bowl, and he had not been able to stop his muscles trembling for over an hour after reaching camp.

  Gerry had gone magnificently again, but his eyes were unnaturally bright, and at a couple of places his judgement had been at fault, though not seriously. They both had violent headaches all day, and considerable signs of nausea. Harry was the same; only Cadez, just up from Juniper, seemed in anything like good shape.

  They crouched in a despondent, wordless huddle for a time when Peter had finished speaking. Peter thought any moment now they’d all agree to go down the mountain. ... By God, someone must keep on at the Needles; but at the present rate of progress Cleopatra’s would not be surmounted for two more days, and the weather showed signs of breaking again.

  He must see for himself whether the fault was impossible. He said: ‘Cadez and I will try the fault tomorrow. Harry--I want you and Gerry to keep on at the Needles.’

  There was silence for a moment. Cadez looked at him. Peter remembered that he and Lapeyrol had been talking before Lapeyrol went on down to Camp I. Obviously Lapeyrol had been giving an account of the horrors of Walsh’s Fault. Harry began to speak; he was trying to control himself, but he had as bad a headache as the rest of them, and his voice shook. He said: ‘The fault’s impossible, Peter. Do you think Lapeyrol and I didn’t try?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘but I must see for myself.’

  ‘Just see?’ Harry said. ‘You’re not just going to “see,” you’re going to go all out to make it go, and I tell you it won’t! Didn’t you hear me tell you--it widens, it’s too wide for chimneying. When the sun’s up, though the fault’s always in shadow, stones and pieces of rock begin to fall down it. Twice small avalanches swept it from top to bottom, and we only managed to hang on because we were in good places each time--places that had three-inch foot-holds, I mean!’ He stopped, panting. After a while he said: ‘It’s murder to take anyone up the fault, now that we’ve told you what it’s like. It’s suicide to go alone.’

  ‘Do you think it’s any better than the Needles?’ Gerry suddenly blazed out. ‘Good God, Harry, are we climbing Meru or going on a picnic up Monte Rosa?’

  Harry turned slowly and stared as though Gerry had suddenly turned into a rhinoceros.

  This wouldn’t do.

  Peter said to Cadez: ‘Do you want to come with me tomorrow, or would you prefer to go with Mr Walsh?’

  Harry said shortly: ‘Cadez must go with you. I’ve got to have Gerry to show me the way up what you’ve already done on the Needles.’

  Cadez was much the same build as Harry, strong and square, but darker. His brown eyes glittered, and he said: ‘I will come with you, mon general! Doubtless you will make provisions for my children in the usual way.’ Then he crawled out of the tent, quaking with fury. Peter caught Gerry’s eye, and Gerry shrugged.

  Peter did not go to sleep. The time had come to show these people what was meant by the phrase, ‘at all costs.’ In an unlabelled sack among the pile outside there were a hundred very large flat-sided nails, or steel pegs. They were about six inches long. Some of the German climbers had been using them for a year or so. You drove them into the rock with a special small hammer you carried with you when you were expecting to use them. When you got to a bad place you hammered one into a cleft or fissure of the rock as high or as far as you could conveniently reach. Then you slung the rope over it, or even used the protruding end as a hold for the hands or feet. So placed, you could hammer in another peg; and so on across traverses and down holdless pitches that would otherwise have been impossible. They were apparently usually used for difficult descents, but why should you not go up with, or on, or by them?

  The English gentlemen-climbers would have nothing to do with them. But they wore boots, didn’t they? It was no use talking logic to people like that. He had been sure that neither Walsh nor Lyon, nor any other English mountaineer, would come with the expedition if he had known that pegs would be used. He himself would have preferred n
ot to use them, but-- ‘at all costs.’ He at least knew what he meant when he said that. He had had the pegs and a pair of wrist-thonged hammers sent privately from Munich. That was where some of Emily’s money had gone.

  So in the morning he waited, delaying his preparations, until Harry and Gerry had set off. Then he turned to Cadez and said: ‘We are going to take pegs. And the camera, to prove to the world that there was need for pegs.’

  Cadez was a guide, a professional, and he had no particular love for English gentlemanliness as such. He made his living by climbing mountains, and he also liked to do it. The sight of the bright steel pegs and the two hammers in the sack did not shock him as much as it would have shocked Harry or Gerry. His expression altered all right, and he showed strong emotion, but it wasn’t because the use of pegs basically shocked him; it was because it ought to shock Peter. He realized in that moment that Peter had secretly obtained them, secretly had them transported up the mountain, and meant to use them, in spite of the well-known aversion of the English milords to them. Peter was suddenly revealed to him as a new kind of animal altogether, a dangerous one.

  Cadez, with that name, probably had Gascon blood in him. For a moment the revelation frightened him, and then anger brought out the Gascon fire. They set off, reached the foot of Walsh’s fault in forty-five minutes and, without a pause for breath, set to work.

  The fault gave them all that Harry and Lapeyrol had promised, and more. Cadez led most of the time, working like a madman, taking risks he would never have countenanced in the

  Alps. The sun shone eerily through the cornice of snow that vaulted out over the top of the fault, and every now and then stones and spears of ice bombarded them. They surmounted the overhanging fifty feet which had stopped Harry and Lapeyrol, by hammering the pegs into the rotten rock and looping the rope over them, or by walking up the pegs themselves--like flies on a steep-pitched, crumbly ceiling.

  Surely it was beaten now? But above the overhang the fault narrowed again until it was less than half an inch wide--no room for Cadez’s gloved fingers, and he could not take off the gloves without getting frostbite.

  Peter took the lead. To the right the verglas glittered evilly on the Mirror Wall. To the left--an ice wall, then the Needles. Standing on a peg, six thousand feet above the Great Chimney Glacier, the wind shrieking at him and the light failing as the sun sank behind the other side of the mountain, he took a last look upward, searching with a sudden enormous anger for some smallest break in the rock where he could hammer in another peg. There was none.

  But there must be! His arms burned like fire, and he knew he could not hold his position for long. A thin trail of powder snow began to trickle down from the vaulted underside of the cornice far above. It increased quickly in volume. For a few moments the wind blew it away across the Mirror Wall to his right, but soon its weight would send it cascading straight down on to his head. He stepped down quickly and jammed himself above Cadez into a wider part of the fault. The avalanche fell on and over them for a minute and a half, and when it had finished a single stone hit him on the forehead. For a time he was semi-conscious, held there only by the pressure of Cadez’s shoulders under his boots and an instinctive pushing outward of his own arms and back.

  ‘Are you sure it won’t go?’ Cadez whispered venomously when he came to.

  He ground his teeth together and looked up again. Cadez said: ‘Now would you like me to take a picture?’

  The avalanche had gone; but the fault would not go, not by any means. Not only was there no hold for a peg within close reach, there was none within twenty-five feet. He pointed down, and slowly they began the descent, at his insistence hammering out and taking back with them all the pegs they had so carefully, so breathtakingly hammered in. He would be using them again.

  Lyon was at Camp II when they got there. He had come up from Camp I to get orders and to report, curtly, that the porters down at Juniper were bordering on open mutiny. Harkabir was having a hard time preventing them from setting out at once for Rudwal--three weeks’ march across deserts and mountains inhabited only by a few Tibetan bandits and vast herds of kiang.

  After a moment’s silent thought, while Lyon waited in the same hostile silence, Peter told him to go on down to Juniper himself and use any necessary means to keep the porters at their work. He might remind them that Savage Sahib was the Deputy Commissioner and District Magistrate of the area where their homes were. Their families in the Northern Tehsils were at his mercy. Lyon looked at him strangely but Peter felt no need to tell him whether he would or would not carry out his implied threats, and merely urged him to get a move on, as it was late, and to tell Lapeyrol to come up the following day. Lyon set off down the ridge. Peter thought, as he had done before, that the day wireless sets were made portable half the difficulties of ‘big’ mountaineering would be over.

  Gerry and Harry returned at dark. After a cheery greeting Gerry crawled straight into his tent, humming. Peter looked after him in surprise: you didn’t hear much humming, or cheeriness, at 23,600 feet. He was about to follow when Harry Walsh touched his arm. ‘There’s something wrong with Gerry.’ Peter asked: ‘Did he fail?’

  Walsh said: ‘Just the opposite. He’s tireless--but I don’t like the look of him. Can you try and give him a day’s rest? Or send him down to Juniper and bring up Lapeyrol or Lyon?’

  Peter thought; that would be difficult. He shook his head noncommittally. Walsh said: ‘Go in and talk to him. You’ll see.’ He knew what Walsh meant as soon as he got inside the tent and saw Gerry’s face in the yellow glow of the lantern. It showed no trace of strain, yet Gerry had done more, perhaps, than any of them. His eyes were rather too bright, and of course he had a scruffy beard, like the rest--but, apart from that, he might have been sprawling on Cader Brith under a harvest moon, after a four-hour walk up from Llyn Gared.

  Peter stared at him in perplexity. It was damned strange. But he would have to decide about Gerry later. First he must get the latest information.

  So, when Harry had eaten--Gerry said happily that he wasn’t hungry--the conference began.

  Harry said briefly that he and Gerry had surmounted the next three Needles--two large and one small--so that now only one large and Cleopatra’s remained; but it was not feasible to continue on that route. The difficulties already overcome were of such severity that the slightest change in the weather, when climbers were already on the Needles, would bring disaster.

  Peter waited for the effect to sink in, and then pulled a peg from the place in the corner of the tent where he had hidden it and said: ‘We got over the overhang. With these.’

  There was a silence. Peter could have gone straight on to tell them that, in spite of the pegs, Walsh’s Fault wouldn’t go. But it was necessary to bring this particular matter to a head first. So he held the now battered peg in his hand and said: ‘I take it you don’t disapprove, then?’

  After a time Walsh said: ‘They must be very useful. Wouldn’t it have been a good idea to tell us that you intended to bring some?’

  He said: ‘Would you have come?’

  Walsh said: ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Walsh shrugged. ‘If you don’t know, I can’t explain. You got over the overhang? With them?’

  Peter nodded. He said: ‘It would have been impossible without them. Wouldn’t it, Cadez?’

  Cadez nodded.

  Peter said: ‘Will you agree to use them now?’ He kept his eyes remorselessly on Walsh’s. Walsh was in a turmoil, or as much as anyone could be when his reactions and thoughts were as sluggish as they are after a day or two at such a height. He said slowly: ‘I think--on Meru--perhaps, if there is no other way--to get down.’

  ‘To get up, too? If there’s no other way to get to the top?’ Peter said with brutal insistence. ‘Even to make a dangerous but possible pitch less dangerous?’

  At last Walsh nodded.

  Peter turned his head. Walsh was broken. There had been no need to use the
other arguments, and there were many. Meru spoke for itself.

  He began to tell them about his day with Cadez on the fault. When he had finished he said carefully: ‘Tomorrow I would like Cadez and Gerry to finish the Needles, if Cadez thinks he can be of use, while Harry and I rest here for an attempt on the summit the day after.’

  Cadez was staring at him with the same kind of look, mixed of hatred and awe, that had turned Christian Holz from a guide into a man; but Cadez was much younger, about Peter’s own age--thirty-two--and there was that Gascon blood to be put to use. Peter’s plan succeeded.

  Cadez said viciously: ‘Bien, bien alors!’ and turned over to lie on his back and stare at the flapping, jerking canvas a few inches above his head. The wind droned, and from out in the pit to right or left, they heard the roar of an avalanche.

  After a long silence Harry said: ‘I don’t think we ought to keep on at the Needles. There’s one particular thing against it--it’s worse coming down, when you’re dead beat, than it is going up, in spite of everything we’ve done.’

  Peter said: ‘They’ll have pegs tomorrow.’

  Harry said: ‘They’ll help. Not enough to make it possible.’

  ‘Have you got any other suggestions?’ Peter asked, and added: ‘That will take us towards the summit?’

  ‘No,’ Harry said slowly. Then, with a weary but growing emphasis: ‘I think we ought to go down and give up for this season. We’ve done marvels. You and Cadez must have done the finest climbing of the century when you got up that fifty- foot overhang in the fault, pegs or not. But we’ve got to give up and try another approach another year. This one will not go.’