by Clint Willis
It was too cold to climb today. Ian put Chris on belay, and Chris climbed 12 feet and hammered in a piton: a gesture. He lowered himself from the peg, and the climbers descended to Camp Two for the night. They carried on down to Base Camp in the morning. This ugly turn in the weather might last; there seemed no point in spending days at their cramped and windy high camp. It was better to go down, leaving the supplies intact for the next pair of climbers.
The weather kept the climbers off the mountain for almost a week. The wind tore through the heights above Base Camp; it was wicked in its constancy, and strong enough to rip a tent to pieces. The climbers made brief forays to the Tower later in the month, but the breaks in the weather were too brief to allow real progress.
Christmas came. The climbers had been away from home for almost two months. The pile of empty beer bottles near Base Camp grew daily, a sort of living monument to the expedition’s futility. Chris had almost nothing to report to the Daily Telegraph, a fact that made him increasingly anxious. He had begun to entertain the notion of making a career as a photojournalist covering climbing and other adventures, and he had hopes that this assignment would lead to others.
A group of Italian climbers arrived. They established their Base Camp a half mile from the British, who sauntered over to greet them. The Italians were slightly older men. They wore matching sweaters and shared an air of single-minded purpose that annoyed and worried the British, who found themselves slightly ashamed of their own shabby clothing and casual approach to camp chores and expedition strategy. The Italians spoke little English and the British had virtually no Italian. Nonetheless, it was soon evident that the Italians had come to make their own attempt on the Central Tower of Paine.
The British returned to their Base Camp for a council of war. For all of their contempt for traditional standards and rules, they were patriots; they took it more or less on faith that a single British climber was worth any number of foreign ones. Don especially was appalled at the idea of losing the route to a bunch of bloody Italians. He snapped out of his beer-induced stupor and proposed a strategy: the British would build a windproof hut to install at their high camp and would maintain a pair of climbers there. Those climbers could then go to work on the route as soon as the wind died, stealing a march on the snooty and (contrary to all appearances) decadent Italians.
Don went to work on New Year’s Eve. He enlisted Ian Clough, John Streetley and Vic Bray as helpers. They built the hut at Base Camp, then took it apart and carried the pieces to the foot of the Tower; all told, the structure’s components weighed roughly 250 pounds. The hut once assembled was some seven feet long and five feet wide, with a four-foot ceiling. This was the first version of the Whillans Box—the squat, ugly and near-indestructible shelter that would play a crucial role on this climb as well as future ones. They called it the Hotel Britannico, and they posted a sign over the door: Members Only.
They still needed a break in the weather. The wind continued to frustrate their attempts to climb higher on the Tower. Chris and Don until now had avoided climbing together, but both were increasingly impatient with the team’s lack of progress. One night, drinking at Base Camp with the others, the two men rose and left the mess tent together to have a piss. They had been drinking for hours. The talk had been the usual—other climbs, women, food, the Italians, the weather. Chris and Don emerged into the night from the smoky fug of the mess tent, and stood in the bright, moonlit darkness. They were woozy from the liquor, and the air felt clean and cold on their faces. Chris felt a curious drunken lightness of being, a sense that what mattered wasn’t obvious—that he had missed some critical point. He experienced this as good news; he felt in a kind of drunken clarity that it was better to be lost than to believe in a world of trivial and heavy consequence. The clouds sailed across a backdrop of bottomless sky as each man gazed up, gauging the weather. Don remarked on the wind pushing those clouds; it meant another day would pass with no progress on the Tower.
They stood for a moment longer, growing cold in the night air. Chris, acting on impulse, suggested that maybe it was time the two of them took a turn together out front. Don agreed, said he’d been thinking the same thing.
Chris felt enormous relief. He had become a figure by climbing the Eiger, and he knew what Don had missed: a chance to become someone who had less to prove. Chris half-believed that he had colluded in Don’s loss. He was aware of his own losses and regrets and failures. This shared affliction—this melancholy—made the connection between them more difficult to sever.
They walked up to the Whillans Box the next day. John Streetley and Barrie Page went with them. The wind had dropped, and the climbers were able to pitch a tent next to the Box. They watched a spectacular sunset; Bonington, taking it in, was a little ashamed of the rivalry with the Italians. The climbers went to bed and listened to black silence, the sound of no wind. Chris and Don were to start up first in the morning; John and Barrie would follow in support. The silence allowed the four men to pursue their thoughts about the coming day and then to sleep.
Bonington put his head outside just before three o’clock. He found what he only half-hoped to find—winking stars in an inky sky, a cold and windless quiet. He woke the others, and the party made breakfast and finished their preparations for the Tower. They trudged to the foot of the fixed ropes, and began to climb.
Whillans went first. He pulled himself hand-over-hand up the fixed rope that led to the expedition’s current high point. Chris belayed him on a separate rope, but Don placed no gear to stop a fall. He simply hauled himself up the rope that crossed the blank slab near the bottom of the route. He had climbed some 90 feet when the rope snapped.
He should have toppled over backward and fallen past Chris, pulling Bonington from his unanchored stance and killing them both. Instead he clutched at both pieces of the broken rope and teetered on a pair of small footholds—tiny features on the vast slab—long enough to regain his balance. He stood for a moment and tied the two frayed pieces of rope together and continued to climb.
Bonington had watched all of this from below. He was momentarily frightened but near misses of this sort were becoming familiar to him; he was learning to file them away quickly. And this reminder of Don’s resourcefulness, his sheer ability to stay alive, heartened Chris. He followed his partner up the fixed ropes to the start of new ground. It was his turn to lead. He looked up and found a groove that led to an overhanging roof. The rock was warm and dry and he started up the groove toward the roof, placing pitons for aid as he went.
The Italians meanwhile arrived at the base of the route and took note of Chris and the others, already high on the wall. Appalled, the latecomers gave chase, rushing up the fixed ropes that the British had left to create a line of retreat. John and Barrie, following Don and Chris, had intended to leave ropes in place all the way up the route. Now they began pulling the rope up at the end of each pitch. The Italians would have to climb the pillar for themselves.
Chris was still making his way up to his roof, taking more than two hours to climb 150 feet. He could conceive of no other line up the face—he saw nothing but steep, blank granite to either side. He reached the overhang and stood and searched for a crack that might take a piton. He found a suitable slot and rummaged through the gear that hung from a sling looped across one shoulder until he found a piton that seemed the right size. He fitted the tip of the piton into the crack and reached for the hammer that hung from his waist. He found the tool and hammered at the piton until the metal sang; when the tone reached a certain pitch he knew that the placement was solid.
He placed a second piton as insurance and clipped slings to both of the pegs and stood in the slings to reach for holds that would take him past the roof. He moved too quickly and his feet came out of the slings. He tumbled through emptiness to finish upside down, some 15 feet below the roof, not unhappy but surprised, as if awakened roughly from a dream or born full-grown into an unfamiliar world.
He rested for
a moment. His body spun slowly at the end of the gently swaying rope. He was sore and queasy and winded, but curiously at peace. The world moved far below in empty, quiet circles; he was afloat. His fear rose up in him and he swallowed it; he hung for another moment, and the aftertaste of his fright blended with a muffled jubilation. He was aware of the sky that loomed in all directions.
He was trembling and at first he couldn’t get his breath but he was not hurt. He reached across and pulled himself back onto the rock and went back to work. He tapped in an extra peg and this time clambered up and past the roof to finish the pitch; it wasn’t difficult. The size of everything—the Tower itself; the Patagonian Ice Cap that receded into the distant west; the immense vault of the sky, still windless—made the climbing seem at once effortless and irrelevant. Chris lost any sense of himself, any notion that what he said or did mattered. Such foolishness fell from him like guilt from the newly baptized. His self-importance spun at first like a leaf, gained heft as it traveled, and clattered stonelike across slabs so far distant that the echoes of its clatter faded instantly to nothing.
John Streetley’s voice came floating up from below, where he and Barrie Paige had come to a halt. They had decided to turn back, figuring Chris and Don could move more quickly as a single team. The Italians came into view, but Chris had lost any sense that they mattered. He was alone with this place and with Whillans, who followed him up and over the roof. Don took the lead now, bridging up an imposing corner—an acrobat at work, a precarious, strenuous dance.
The two men climbed on as daylight faded. They were struck by this alteration and by how this vast change did not in any way disturb the stillness in which they labored. They came two hours before sunset to a prominent shoulder on the Tower. The shoulder marked the beginning of a long ridge that led toward the summit. The climbing here looked easier, but they would have to move quickly to reach the top before dark. They could instead bivouac now and try to finish the route in the morning, but the weather might change overnight; they might have to retreat without finishing the route. The possibility had become almost unthinkable.
They dropped their bivouac gear at the shoulder and carried on quickly up lower-angled rock. The cracks here were filled with ice, and ledges were piled high with snow. They had crossed a line; they must finish their work here and skitter back across as soon as they could. Don led a pitch up ice-smeared rocks, placing no pitons and moving at a speed that astonished Chris, who followed at a more deliberate pace; he saw that he would take a long, pendulum-like fall if he lost his footing on the rock, which in spots was slick with ice.
They came to a gap in the ridge and rappelled onto the face below it. They moved across snow past the gap and then climbed back onto the crest and climbed another pillar as light bled from the sky. This metamorphosis bathed them in beauty but they were unaware of it; they moved still more quickly now, intent upon their goal. They climbed two more pillars, and then Don led across a short wall to disappear around a corner. He shouted and Chris followed to find his friend sitting on a block the size of a table; there was nothing else to climb.
Night drifted up at them like smoke from some enormous distant fire. Each man considered the possibility that he had stumbled into a trap; that some force had arranged things to puzzle him and draw him onward. It was possible. They had come here to satisfy their curiosity, and in doing so had uncovered precise and secret patterns. The patterns blurred and faded into mystery even now; fear and grief leaked into the enterprise.
The sun had sunk almost into the ice cap. There was still—by what seemed a miracle—daylight. They looked upon glaciers and peaks that seemed new to the world. They knew there was nowhere to keep this; it would never again be as real to them. Even now their awareness sputtered and lapsed between moments of astonishment. The wind had dropped entirely away. It was as if the wind had died in a literal sense; as if the wind would not return. All around them was the peace they had sought without knowing they sought it.
Chris understood that it was time to leave. Don knew it, too. They had been on the summit for ten minutes and already the tide of unthinking courage that had brought them here had begun to ebb. They must get down to their bivouac gear; otherwise they would die if the wind returned during the night.
They made a series of rappels to the shoulder that marked the bottom of the summit ridge. They found the gear where they had left it. The light grew yet thicker and still there was no sign of storm or wind. They were thirsty—John and Barrie had descended with the stove, so it wasn’t possible to melt snow for drinks. Don found matches, though, and happily smoked his cigarettes into the night.
The wind did not return. The two climbers slept some and woke early to a pink dawn, and began their descent of the steep face. They were tired, and they were distracted—by memories of the climb; by their wish to preserve certain of those memories, by their relief at having it done. Chris reminded himself to be afraid. He reviewed the risks: a rappel anchor might fail; a sharp edge might saw through a rope; he might let go of the rope with his brake hand; the rope might dislodge a rock or jam behind a flake. They passed the Italians two rope-lengths down from the shoulder; the party had spent the night on the route and would finish the climb today. The climbers exchanged wry looks and greetings, and the British continued down.
Ian and Derek and Vic were waiting at the col between the North and Central towers. Don tossed the doubled ropes down for another rappel, which deposited him and then Chris on a pedestal some 15 feet above their friends, who were shouting and waving a bottle of whisky at them. Don tugged on the rappel rope one last time; it plummeted past to slither into a crack below his stance. It was stuck there; he couldn’t work it free quickly enough to suit his impatience. He picked up the fixed rope—the rope that had broken under his weight at the start of the climb—and lowered his body the last few feet. Chris followed and as his weight came onto the rope it broke again. He fell like a stone and hit snow that didn’t stop him and slid onto rock; here he began to tumble, rolling and snatching at passing bits of ground as his friends looked on in horror. His body skidded to a stop at the brink of a 500-foot drop.
He took some time to find his feet. He felt guilt at his unforgivable foolishness. He had in his haste trusted to luck and luck had nearly failed him. He realized as he stood that he had sprained his ankle or perhaps broken it.
Ian and Derek lingered for a few moments and left to make an attempt on the North Tower. Chris and Don made their way down to Camp Two. Bonington, still in a state of near-shock, wrote a report for the Telegraph. Don asked him to make spaghetti. Chris set about the task as mindless for the moment as a weary child.
The peace he had found on the Central Tower soon dissipated. He took another two days to hobble down to Base Camp. Ian and Derek had climbed the North Tower. The rest of the team was now planning an attempt on the South Tower in hopes that the fine weather would persist. Chris and Wendy left for a hospital in Punta Arenas, where Chris learned that his ankle had suffered a hairline fracture. He spent a boring and uncomfortable week in the hospital, a plaster cast on his ankle. He played Scrabble with Wendy. She often beat him at the game; once he threw the board out of the window.
One day a quiet, silver-haired character poked his head through the doorway of the hospital room. Chris recognized the man at once. He was the great English explorer and mountaineer Eric Shipton, still lean and vigorous in his late fifties. He had just returned from two months of grueling exploration in South Patagonia.
That sort of thing was routine for Shipton, who had made path-breaking expeditions in the ’30s, often in the company of another great explorer, Bill Tilman. The two of them had explored huge tracts of difficult ground in Asia and Africa, and had climbed high peaks on both continents. They planned their expeditions on the backs of envelopes, subsisting for months on tea and dried meat, accompanied by tiny teams of porters. Shipton also had climbed with several Everest expeditions, and he had been the original choice to lead the
1953 trip to the peak—the one that finally climbed the mountain. He’d lost out on that job, in part because he was more interested in exploration than in summits. He had since faded from the scene. He’d had financial problems, and had become a rather sad character in the eyes of his contemporaries.
The young Chris Bonington and others of his generation saw Eric Shipton differently—as a shining figure, an exemplar of a simpler and cleaner approach to mountain exploration. Chris and his comrades would rediscover Shipton’s lightweight approach in the years to come. They would help to redefine its limits, once they had exhausted the potential of the traditional siege-style expedition.
All of that lay ahead. Chris for now was struck by the older man’s apparent happiness; Shipton seemed well content with the unsettled life he’d pursued. He told Bonington of his most recent adventure. He’d gone off to investigate a volcano—wanted to know if it was active—and had spent seventeen days on the move in appalling weather, circumnavigating the peak without finding a way to its summit, living mostly on porridge and meat bars. Someone had forgotten to bring salt for the porridge but Shipton told Chris it hadn’t really mattered—he proposed to leave it behind on the next trip as well.
Chris and Wendy returned to England as winter ended. Chris continued to lecture, traveling the countryside in his van. His fame had not entirely faded. Audiences were still eager to hear about the Eiger, and the Patagonia venture had made a small stir. He enjoyed the attention and he was glad of the money the lectures brought in. But he felt at certain moments swamped by his ambition and troubled by the nature of it. He understood that he wished to achieve great things so as to be beyond the world’s reproach, and this seemed a poor motivation.
