The Boys of Everest

by Clint Willis

  Chris and Ian finished the Flatiron, and set off up the Third Ice Field. The ice was steep here; it required them to cut steps, which took them up to a sheltered rock gully known as the Ramp. This was cozier. The world narrowed down to a chimney of rock and then to a steep, ice-glazed pitch that on a warmer day would carry torrents of water; climbers knew it as the Waterfall Pitch.

  Ian led it smoothly, and led another pitch past an ice bulge. The climbing was difficult but not terribly so. Soon they were up the Ramp and across the ice field that served as its exit, searching for the stupendously exposed Traverse of the Gods. This passage would bring them back across to the center of the enormous face.

  The Traverse was not easy to find. Chris was aware that a route-finding mistake here might be hard to fix. Ground that could be traversed in one direction might prove difficult or even impossible to reverse. They couldn’t rappel sideways, so they would have to retrace their steps. This might prove impossible if a storm blew in suddenly, or if one of the climbers suffered an injury.

  A thick haze had materialized during the late morning. They were climbing in cloud. Chris noticed that the rock-studded ice that clung to the face was very dirty. This dirty ice defined their world. The cloud masked the climbers’ exposure, hiding the depths so that below their feet was only a kind of invisible tunnel; it would draw a falling climber to the bottom of all things. They imagined this tunnel and also the vastness that lurked at every angle. The earth had disappeared; it was unknown to them, as mysterious as the surface of another planet’s moon. They were obscurely glad of this.

  They had reached the most remote part of the face. Here they looked up and were amazed to see more climbers, as if the face had become a path upon which pilgrims encountered ghosts and visions from every realm—or perhaps merely stumbled across one another. Chris and Ian climbed to this new pair and a strange conversation ensued. The two climbers, both Swiss, had gained just 300 feet that day. They were settled in for the night; it was only four o’clock, but they were very tired. Bonington invited them to climb with him and Ian. The two Swiss smiled and refused. They repeated that they were very tired.

  Chris and Ian left them and hurried on. They found the Traverse of the Gods and moved across ledges. They heard sounds from the valley—a cow horn and a train—and knew that no one could help them now. They came to the White Spider, a patch of steep ice that clings to the upper reaches of the face; dark stone surrounded it to form a tilted amphitheatre in the sky. A stone ripped past Chris. The sound of it cutting the air near his head brought him up short.

  It was five o’clock. There was time to reach the summit before dark, but the risk from rockfall at this hour was too great. They stopped on a narrow, sheltered ledge—it was just large enough to sit on—and made a sort of camp. They slept and dreamed in fits and starts, waking to brew tea. The night was dry and cold; they felt the face grow hard and still around them. They accepted this good fortune as due to them in their weariness.

  Chris in the morning led into the entrance of the White Spider; the place seemed simply to hang above the valley that lay now some 4,000 feet below. It was possible to imagine the ice tipping forward, the climbers teetering backward to spin and plunge into the spectacular distance. The view that hovered just between their boots as they climbed the steep ice was strangely distant grass.

  The green of it sickened them at first and then brought them to the brink of silent tears. They had spent two nights and parts of three days on the climb, and seeing this vision of grass they were like satellites, or like the long-dead remembering the earth. The sight of grass and the recollection of it gave them pain. They regretted their life on earth; they regretted not living it with less clumsiness, more quietly. Their lives began and ended in each breath. They no longer climbed toward the summit of the Eiger; they only climbed.

  They climbed through the quiet of morning, impossibly far above alpine pastures. They climbed past stones half-buried in the ice, and Chris was again afraid. He moved slowly—too slowly, cutting deep steps that provided a beguiling but false sense of security. There was no safety here; his safety lay in speed. He knew this, and gathering himself he quit cutting steps and climbed instead on the front-points of his crampons, a more tenuous but more efficient approach. He ran out a full rope-length of 150 feet and gazed upward, stricken and quieted by what he saw. The ice field seemed vast. Ian followed, equally subdued: they were inside the Spider.

  They set themselves to their task. They kept their eyes and their minds on the work of movement, taking comfort in the grip of their hands on their axes and the press and bump of their stiff boots on the flesh of their toes and feet. They visited their various discomforts, their blisters and aches, as if gathering evidence of their own actuality—and still they felt eaten, insignificant. They might be climbing toward some vast and ancient dome, up endless, narrow stairs that led to some final result: an ushering into Paradise or a banishment to some overcrowded hell. Chris felt some of the hollow discomfort, the longing of an unbeliever who visits a huge and beautifully frescoed cathedral; creation itself threatens to compel belief, makes belief almost unbearably attractive.

  The climbers did not speak except to perform tasks at their belay anchors. A sense of urgency carried Chris forward. He lost track of time, and was surprised when he looked up from the snow at his feet and saw that they were at last finished with the Spider.

  Their hearts lifted—now there were only the Exit Cracks and the summit ice slopes to climb. Chris started up rock and the climbing seemed too easy; it didn’t seem to match the route description. He descended to try a different way. He found something that looked right—it looked hard enough—and set off in his boots, slipping on patches of verglas. The pitch was nearly vertical, with no cracks for pitons. He had committed himself; retreat was impossible.

  He took an hour to climb 60 feet. Ian from time to time peered up at him and saw the rope still hanging free. They both knew that a slip here would kill them, but Chris knew this like a piece of news or history he couldn’t manage to believe. He put it well aside and got on with standing just so or tugging cautiously at a hold; his mortality shrank to a concept. And still his knowledge of the risk colored every action he performed, lending his movements and the stillness between them a deliberate and serious quality that awoke his desire for peace, for clarity. He made a series of awkward moves that required almost perfect balance, becoming aware of his body, of his hands and his feet. He experimented with positions and shifts of posture and found that he knew what to do. He wedged his right foot in a crevice and used tiny fingerholds to stay in balance as he stood; he let go with a hand and reached for a better hold as his body stood vertical, suspended over his foot and inclined to fall backward. The hold he found was good and he was able to pull up and onto a small ledge.

  He made an anchor and Ian followed him, calling for tension on the rope. The slow-moving Swiss climbers now appeared at the foot of the pitch. Bonington dropped them a top rope—they would never be able to lead this section—and they struggled up. Chris meanwhile studied the rock above his perch and realized that he had lost the route; he could find nothing to climb from here. The four climbers reversed the pitch; incredibly, Chris had to teach the two Swiss how to rappel.

  Chris returned to the section he’d dismissed as too easy. These were in fact the Exit Cracks. They would be difficult in icy conditions, but today they were dry. Ian and Chris unroped for a time, and quickly reached the summit ice field. Here the face swept out beneath them. A rope seemed necessary again. They finished the climb in the orthodox way, building anchors and moving one at a time.

  They came onto the Eiger’s Mittellegi Ridge and walked into a different view—there were mountains in all directions. The climbers felt their breathing change. They unroped once more and descended the ridge; the two Swiss were still climbing, but would be off the face soon. The descent took a mere two hours.

  The innkeeper at Kleine Scheidegg had news: two climbers—t
he Scot and the German they’d met at the first bivouac—had fallen from the face. The dead men had been near-strangers to Chris and Ian. The news troubled them but it was jostled by increasingly rambunctious thoughts: that they had done the climb; that they had accomplished the first British ascent of the Eiger’s North Face. Chris in particular knew that he had done something people outside of mountaineering circles might notice; that this might be useful to him in some way; and also that he could carry this achievement with him forever, like winning a famous prize. It reassured him and unearthed hopes that had eluded his notice until now. He had lived through five attempts on the North Face. He’d seen other men die there, and had returned to finish the route. He had done all of this, and he felt dimly that in doing it he had created for himself the possibility of a life different from the one into which he’d been born.

  5

  CHRIS AND IAN returned to England as minor celebrities in the fall of 1962. The newspapers and television newscasts were filled with their exploits, which dimly echoed the Everest triumph, now almost a decade old. Harold Macmillan, the Conservative Prime Minister, sent a telegram of congratulations to the young men. Chris traveled the country giving lectures about the Eiger, and signed a contract to write a book—a memoir of his climbing career.

  He used much of the money to pay his share of costs for the Patagonia expedition. The invitation to go to Patagonia had given Chris the excuse he needed to give up his career as a margarine salesman; he had expected to be entirely broke by now. As it was, there was just enough money for Wendy to come. Chris, having cast aside his plans for a conventional career, felt a powerful need for her presence. Wendy’s unconventional notions, her accepting and serene temperament, were reminders that life could take a form warmer and more exciting than the alternative he had rejected. Expedition leader Barrie Page was bringing his wife and the Page’s small son. The two women would stay at a nearby ranch; they could look after the boy and keep each other company while the men climbed.

  Page had explored the area two years earlier as a member of a scientific expedition. He had come away with a vision of three granite spires: the Towers of Paine. Page and two of his companions from that 1960 expedition—Derek Walker and Vic Bray—believed that a strong team might manage to climb the spectacular Central Tower. They had invited John Streetley and Ian Clough as well as Chris. The Daily Express, which had covered Chris and Ian’s ascent of the Eiger, had put up money for this trip and Chris would act as expedition correspondent.

  Don Whillans was coming, too. Don had written letters to Chris and others in their circle, deriding the commercial elements surrounding Bonington’s Eiger climb. His disappointment was searing. He knew he might have stayed with Chris and done the climb. Once again, he had somehow fended off an opportunity that he believed he’d earned. He saw Bonington’s ascent of the Eiger as an act of infidelity—much as he continued to regard Joe Brown’s decision to go to Kangchenjunga seven years before. Don was wounded. The pain of it surprised and frightened him, made him angry.

  He had begun to inhabit a complex response to his disappointments. He had become more assertive; he couldn’t bear to be thwarted. He wasn’t a thief, but he wouldn’t ask or negotiate for what he wanted. He would forgo it—or simply take it—rather than risk a rebuff.

  Chris and some others understood and tolerated his behavior—to a point—because he was a genius in the mountains and because he was an old friend of the sort difficult to love but nearly impossible to abandon. He knew how to behave himself as part of a team when it mattered most. And Don’s anger was authentic; it made other climbers’ lives more difficult, but they sometimes admired him for it. Whillans sometimes reminded them that they were angry, too.

  The Patagonia Expedition departed England on November 11. The climbers traveled by passenger liner to the city of Valparaiso in Chile. A plane carried them down the length of the Andes to Punta Arenas, a small town on the Straits of Magellan. They had been traveling for three weeks when they boarded a truck for the final leg of their trip to the Paine Massif.

  They huddled among boxes in the back of the truck, rumbling through a wilderness of dead trees, the carcasses sun-bleached, buffed by the wind. The world seemed to grow larger and emptier; one afternoon a single pink flamingo rose from a lake. The jolting of the truck colored this vision; Chris watched the creature rise into the empty sky and felt something give way within him. This feeling was accompanied by another feeling, which he recognized as envy. He felt stuck in his mind, in his ambition.

  The expedition established Base Camp at a small ranch, a two-story stone house amid a scattering of sheep-pens and primitive outbuildings. The climbers that first night got drunk with the ranch owner—a tall, heavy man whose brother managed the place. The brother was a lean, sad-faced cowboy who cooked for them, roasting lamb on an open fire. They ate under the stars—there had been a long spell of fine weather—and drank wine from skins. They slept late, and one by one awoke to hideous hangovers.

  They aimed to establish Camp One at the start of a glacier that ran almost to the base of the Towers. This morning they packed slowly, talking in low voices, beginning now to suspend their ordinary ways of thinking—their ordinary beliefs—so that the route could become the center of all that mattered.

  Three of them had seen the Central Tower, and they had told the others what they’d seen. It was huge and sheer, a monster with no obvious weakness; it might not be possible to climb it. The climbers had heard about the weather, too. The winds here appeared without warning and seemingly from nowhere; they swept like a wall of water across the earth, their power evidence of God or of his absence.

  This morning as they prepared to approach the route some of the climbers came into the presence of their fear; it edged over the horizon like the fiery rim of some anxiously awaited dawn, spilling its hue on the landscape. Chris was learning that his version of fear was patient. It didn’t lurk or cast shadows; it took its ease or went about its hidden business as conditions unfolded, allowing him to forget that it lived in him at every moment, and then it arose to sicken him.

  They set off. The weather was hot; the sky was still. The wind’s utter absence pressed at them. They were physically miserable as they trudged uphill with their burdens of tents and gear. The wine and the lamb were sour in their stomachs; sweat ran down their foreheads, and flies buzzed at their faces. This unpleasantness and the uncertainty of their position made them still more anxious. Each man from time to time asked himself with a half-authentic, momentary despair whether any of this was necessary or even in any way useful.

  They came to the top of a rise and stared down at acres of scree: a shambles of rock fragments, good ground for twisting an ankle. The slope led down to a forest of low, wind-tortured trees. Three previous expeditions had been here to climb or explore but it occurred to Chris that this ground remained innocent of men and their doings, their foolishness.

  The climbers dumped the day’s carry at the base of the glacier and stared up and across to the Central Tower. The monolith rose 3,000 feet from the start of the real climbing. They looked away and found shade and sat for a time, feeling better for their walk. Their talk died and someone stood up; the others rose and the party returned to Base Camp. The walking was easier and very different, moving downhill without loads—Chris was pestered by a dim sense that he’d forgotten something—and they talked as they moved, discussing plans for their campaign. They would establish Camp Two above the glacier, at the foot of the Tower, and take turns making the route.

  Don and Barrie went first, taking three days to establish Camp Two and work their way above it to a notch between the Central and North Towers; this gave a view of the Central Tower’s West face. They descended to Base Camp with news that a crack seemed to run most of the way up the face. There was a gap, but they believed that a person might cross it by delicate climbing across a blank-looking slab.

  Chris and Ian left Base Camp on December 5. They passed Camp One and stru
ggled up through dense, low forest and then across a wilderness of boulders and rock fragments to Camp Two at the foot of their Tower. They woke the next morning to a gray world: the weather had turned. They made the final approach to the climb across rocks damp with new snow; big wet flakes slapped gently at their cheeks and a sharp wind brought tears to their eyes. They reached ledges that led across the bottom of the North Tower, and moved carefully across them to a gully that rose to Don and Barrie’s high point.

  The gully spared them the wind’s full impact, but only until they reached the col between the two towers, with its view out to the Central Tower’s West Face. Here they emerged into a hideous gale; it forced them to crouch, and they lost their balance and fell to their knees, surprised when even this posture of supplication was barely sufficient to keep them from toppling and rolling across the rock and over some edge to a fall that would kill them. The view to the other side of the col was spectacular and alien—a great expanse of green, set with lakes of different colors: blue, gray and brown. It appeared to Chris and Ian as a wind-scoured map of itself. They shivered squinting into the wind to inspect their wall: soaring sheets of brown and yellow granite, seeming as wide as the sky behind them.

  The Towers’ sheer size made them something beyond monsters. Their shapes seemed manifestations of something impersonal and dark, beyond judgment or seeing. Chris and Ian felt the cold sap their strength and with it their ability to smother their fear. Their ambition rose to counter their anxiety, taking shape as a commitment to a task that might be beyond them. They had traveled weeks to reach this place and now they gazed upon ground that no one had touched and the idea thrilled them. It appealed to their wish to be set apart, as if traversing virgin ground would restore their own purity, would make them part of this beauty. They felt afraid, but they felt that they must climb the Central Tower or else suffer and risk so much in their efforts that turning back would not shame them.