by Clint Willis
Peter Gillman, the Telegraph reporter, had become the expedition’s unofficial Base Camp manager down at the hotel. The climbers made radio contact with him in the morning. Gillman informed them the weather forecast called for two days of snow. Chris and Layton retreated to Kleine Scheidegg to sit out the storm. Don meanwhile had quit the expedition after suffering a bout of vertigo on the face; the ailment, probably caused by a condition involving his inner ear, had troubled him before. At any rate, he’d hated the circus atmosphere that had grown up around the climb—too many gawking tourists, too much rubbish in the press.
John and Dougal stayed up at the snow cave so that they could go back to work on the route as soon as conditions improved. They spent much of the day fighting off spindrift—particles of windblown snow that accumulated on their clothes and sleeping bags and gear, melting in the stale air of their cave so that everything became more or less wet. The two climbers stuffed socks and other debris in gaps at the cave entrance to block the wind, and tried to sweep out the snow that made its way into their shelter. They cooked and ate, and maintained radio contact with Gillman. A group of German climbers arrived at the ledge around lunchtime. There was an exchange of greetings—courteous but reserved—before the Germans retreated to their own snow hole, less than 10 feet away. The hours passed; between tasks, John and Dougal rested and talked.
Their snow hole was deathly quiet and surprisingly warm, in spite of the storm. The climbers enjoyed a sense that the world of bustle and confusion was far away. They lay in the quiet and thought about what was coming, but any urgency that arose with such thoughts quickly faded; they were left to contemplate some mysterious but harmless puzzle. John felt himself invited to come into some knowledge, but the invitation was gentle. He listened to the whisper of snow falling on snow. He watched Dougal sleep, and felt the rise and fall of his own breath.
The snow stopped during the night. John and Dougal left the cave in the morning; it was Sunday, March 6. The ground looked a fantastic distance away, but the face felt almost safe to them. They had been up here before; each man felt himself on familiar terrain. They climbed the fixed ropes that led to the top of the First Band. Dougal took the first lead above the ropes. He climbed on thin ice across sketchy, low-angle rock slabs, kicking tiny holds with the front-points of his crampons. There were few cracks for pitons or other protection. He dragged his trailing rope across the slabs and around corners, and the friction from this created rope drag that threatened to pull him from his stance. He had to use one or both hands to haul up slack before he took each new step. He created a makeshift anchor out of no fewer than seven dubious piton placements, and brought John up.
Dougal led another difficult pitch to a snowfield, where the climbing became easier. John led the next pitch, and stumbled on a natural snow cave at the top. The two climbers went to work with their axes to expand the shelter, and then settled in for the night. They told each other that the Second Rock Band looming just ahead looked reasonable—easier than the First Rock Band.
The night was cold but they were comfortable. They slept well and awoke to clear skies. They quickly set out again, moving higher on firm snow; they kicked steps easily and made good progress. This was one of the pleasures of a bivouac: you woke up to the climb; no approach to the mountain; less time to worry or fret. You left sleep and entered the climb like swimmers wading through shallow mud to the bank of a river and stepping ashore. Here there was no waiting for your life to begin; here you awoke to it.
Dougal had the dreamy notion that he had lived in some mystery while he slept; also that the mountain had him in its protection. This idea and this feeling made him unafraid. He would later recall the happiness that possessed him this morning as he moved up the snow. The mountains awoke his fear but swept it up into something bigger so that he understood that his fear was a mere feeling; it meant nothing.
He found a good stance and put John on belay. He glanced up to see one of the Germans, Karl Golikow, climbing a pitch just overhead. The two young men exchanged greetings. Another moment passed and Karl came off, pitching 30 feet amid a heavy rattling of gear that ended—a strange, backward interruption, sound broken by silence—when he landed in a snow bank. A beat or two passed and Golikow picked himself up, brushing snow from his clothes. The German looked up to smile at Dougal from a sun-glazed, oddly blurry tangle of fabric and metal and flesh. Dougal hesitated and returned his smile.
John arrived. Dougal led on to the foot of a gully and into it. The German and his partner also entered the gully. The two roped pairs climbed almost together up several pitches of snow and then onto steeper ice. The climbers fixed ropes at the top of the difficult pitches. They did this work carefully. A poorly built anchor could fail; a rope laid over a sharp edge could fray and part under the weight of a climber. They had all imagined it. The climber would fall thousands of feet, his legs tangled in the rope, gathering speed, the falling man spinning and wondering until a blow set off a last bright explosion; what remained would continue to bounce and slide and tumble and disintegrate. These visions flickered at unguarded moments in a kind of brown light, as if lit by a moon in eclipse.
The Germans turned around at dusk to head down to their snow cave. Dougal and John carried on. They came to a ledge near the top of the Second Band as the night gathered itself. A staring red sun slipped behind a sky half-filled with mountains; the mountains seeming fragments of the void that rose up to meet the higher emptiness of space. Dougal set out to lead a traverse. The night grew still and cold; in the silence he was aware of his position. The sheer immensity of the face was apparent even as he understood that it was very small, a fleck on the face of being. He felt dimly that his knowledge of this could swallow him.
Dougal stood for a moment on good holds and experimented even as the remaining light fled the sky. He scraped his understanding back to what he knew. He was one of two confused young men on a high mountain wall in late winter. He stared at the sunset in his ignorance and felt himself on the verge of happiness; he was alive, inhabited.
He made himself move. The traverse brought him to the top of the Second Band as the face grew entirely dark. John followed him across and the climbers rummaged for a spot to dig a new cave. They couldn’t find a suitable snowbank. They scratched out a platform in the ice and pitched their tent near midnight. They crawled into the tent to crouch awkwardly and take off boots and lay out sleeping mats and bags. They went to sleep without eating.
They rose late to yet another fine day. The two Germans from the previous day arrived at the top of the Second Band. John and Dougal watched from their tent as the new arrivals stumbled on a perfect natural snow cave. The Germans took possession of the cave and departed, carrying on up a gully toward the Second Ice Field.
Dougal and John cursed the Germans’ luck and rummaged around in the bright morning sun until they found a place to begin digging their own snow hole. Chris and Layton arrived, having climbed the fixed ropes with loads of food and gear. The cave wasn’t yet big enough for four climbers, so Layton descended to Kleine Scheidegg, taking a list of items needed on the face: radio batteries, candles, chocolate.
He returned the next morning, making his way up the fixed ropes in the hours before dawn, arriving at the top of the Second Band as the others made ready for another day of climbing. Dougal and John would lead, fixing ropes as they went. Chris and Layton would follow on the ropes, carrying heavier loads. They hoped to climb 800 feet today, to the infamous Death Bivouac; this was the spot where in August of 1935 the first two climbers to attempt the North Face had frozen to death.
The four climbers followed a German fixed rope up a gully that led out of the Second Band. Dougal and John went first, followed by Chris and Layton. Dougal led carefully across the rock below the Flatiron and onto the Second Ice Field. He moved quickly now, kicking steps in the frozen snow; untroubled by the exposure or the Eiger’s reputation—it was just climbing and he liked it. John led a pitch of rock above the S
econd Ice Field. Dougal followed him; the daylight ebbed and it began to snow.
Dougal set out to lead a final traverse that would bring him to the Death Bivouac. The traverse required a sort of sideways crawl across nearly vertical ground. He knew that if he fell he would sweep down and across the face like a pendulum, suspended from his belayer. He would gain momentum as he tumbled or swung; he would smack or brush rock; he might collide with a ledge or corner. His aversion arose in him, familiar, a kind of knowledge; he shook it off and forced himself to move.
The climbing grew harder. The ice was too thin for screws and he climbed without running belays, aware that each step made retreat more unlikely. The day was ending in a fog of snow and wind and darkness; it—the day itself—seemed to rise from the earth as if in departure. Dougal was partly bewildered—by his fear, by the shifts in the light and the view, by the strain of climbing on this ground and choosing not to fall. He was near tears when he finished the pitch, arriving at last at the Death Bivouac. He quickly found a heap of snow that would do for a cave site and began to dig. He had fixed rope across the traverse. The others—John, then Chris and Layton—followed the rope across to the new site.
They took turns digging until the cave was big enough for the four of them. They had left two loads at the start of the previous pitch, but no one volunteered to go back. Chris refused outright; he maintained that he was here to take photographs, not to climb the route for them. Dougal stood at midnight and left the others. He emerged into darkness and set off back across the traverse. He had the party’s only working headlamp—even so, he was nearly blind from the wind and cold as he fumbled his way back across the fixed rope. He tripped once, sliding 30 feet in a tangle of limbs and fabric, inexplicably calm, until the rope caught him and he felt his heart lift, his loneliness abate. He finished the crossing and collected the party’s stove and fuel and returned to the cave. John left the cave to retrieve the second rucksack while the others melted snow for tea.
John was back in an hour. The night was passing already. It was very early in the morning, still black inside the cave. Someone lit a candle. Dougal unscrewed a gas cylinder, which wasn’t quite empty. The canister caught fire and he hurled it at the cave entrance; it ricocheted off a wall and tumbled back in among the four men. Chris panicked and made a leap for the cave entrance; he was halfway out before he realized that he had nowhere to go—he clutched at snow as the darkness veered up at him.
The canister sailed by his head and disappeared, a flare falling into a night sea. John, the ex-ballplayer, had grabbed the thing on the rebound and thrown a flaming bullet: John Wayne hurling a stray grenade out of a foxhole. Harlin eyed Bonington with something like contempt as everyone settled back into the cave.
Chris was horrified. He blamed his ill-defined role on the mountain had made him fearful enough to behave badly. He was here on the face with the others, but he hadn’t made his peace with what that implied. Ordinarily on a hard route he felt exhilaration, a freedom in courting danger. This freedom taught him the taste of life in his mouth, the weight of his body, the color of the light that pooled in his head. He felt nothing like that now; he was only tired and frightened and ashamed.
The climbers brewed drinks and at last settled into their sleeping bags, sprawled half across each other in their snowy lair. They slept fitfully and then more deeply into the light of midmorning. They woke to discover that they had dug their snow cave into a cornice in the darkness of the previous evening; the cave’s outer wall overhung the lower reaches of the Third Ice Field. The terrifying view through the hole someone had punched in the bottom of the cave was part of a thicket of facts and possibilities to try to ignore.
The snow had stopped but they were tired; no one was eager to climb. Chris left to descend to the valley. He had film to get out to the Telegraph. The others spent the morning organizing the chaos of gear in the cave, and making and drinking more tea. They had climbed for twenty hours without liquid the day before; their thirst seemed unquenchable.
They needed to keep pace with the Germans. Dougal and Layton left the cave at midafternoon. They roped up and Dougal led two steep pitches to the top of the Third Ice Field. Layton led a mixed pitch of rock and ice. They caught the Germans at the base of an arête that led to the route’s next major landmark, the Central Pillar. The Germans planned to climb a crack system to the right of the Pillar. Dougal thought it looked too hard. He had his eye on a traverse that led across to a chimney; the traverse looked difficult, but feasible. It was getting late, so he and Layton descended to John at the Death Bivouac.
Snow began to fall as the three men ate their evening meal. It continued to fall as they slept. They woke to overcast skies and made radio contact with Peter Gillman, who told them that more snow was likely. The three climbers conferred, and concluded that Layton should go down. John and Dougal would remain at the Death Bivouac to resume climbing when the weather improved.
Layton set off on his descent, glad to return to the comforts of Kleine Sheidegg. John and Dougal spent much of the day clearing spindrift from their cave, tinkering with their stove—the cold made it temperamental—and chopping ice chips from the back of the cave to melt for tea. The gray, worn light in their shelter oppressed them both. They went to sleep early.
Dougal awoke to find his sleeping bag covered in snow. He fumbled in the dark, cursing, waking John. It took more than an hour to clear the spindrift from their shelter. They settled down to sleep again, and woke in the morning to brew tea and eat dried meat. Every so often, one of them poked his head out of the cave entrance to check on the weather. The storm continued. The day passed in a dank blur. John and Dougal slept and talked between bouts of coping with the snow that continued to find its way into their shelter.
They had known each other for two years. They were both misfits in a world of misfits; even other climbers found them difficult—but they made themselves useful. John’s dreams were in part dreams of virtue, as if dreamed in defense of some principle. He had his energy and his fits of manic enthusiasm; he planned and insisted until climbers found themselves engaged in some transformative project; it was as if he made himself partly ridiculous on their behalf. And Dougal had his need to do the work of climbing; once on the hill he had no interest in stopping. He didn’t occupy space that other men wanted to occupy; he stayed silent and let them talk and argue and decide.
They both had glamour that was only partly faked. They were genuinely interesting, often attractive. They had violence in them, and imagination; they took chances and showed off. Other climbers responded to them as people respond to characters in certain stories. You could admire their mistakes and wonder why you were so much more careful than they were. You could wish to be more like them even as you understood that they were in some kind of trouble.
Here in the snow cave at the Death Bivouac they made an audience for each other. They talked about climbs. They made plans for Himalayan expeditions; John had his eye on Everest’s huge and unclimbed Southwest Face. They talked about food. They fretted about the cornice that encompassed their snow cave; it might conceivably collapse. They listened to wind and to the intermittent hiss of powder avalanches.
They listened for five days and nights. Dougal dreamed three nights running of a third person in the snow hole. He awoke each time to find himself huddled against a wall of the cave, making room for this ghost. John developed a head cold and then a fever. The two of them worried about running out of food, and also about the four-man German party camped near them. John talked about the possibility of a joint summit push with the Germans. He was worried that there might be room for only one team to camp above the Death Bivouac, at a spot on top of the Central Pillar. It would be difficult to pass the Germans if they got there first.
The food ran out as the storm ended. Dougal and John left the snow cave on the morning of March 16. The world opened into something huge again. It was odd to be upright, bathed in daylight. The two men moved like prisoners stepp
ing out of a cell into an empty landscape. Their time in the snow cave was already a dream.
They had been on the route for thirteen consecutive days. They were glad to go down; it took them only a half-hour to descend the fixed ropes. Chris had come up to watch the pair descend through the snowdrifts at the bottom of the route; Peter Gillman came with him. The two pairs greeted one another with shouts and then chatter in the brilliant sunshine.
Chris took a picture of John and Dougal standing in the snow. They posed for him, gripping ski poles and facing away from the mountain. The slopes behind them looked harmless, not steep. The mountain squatted in its own shadow, which stopped at a line not far behind the two men as they struck their respective poses. John peered at the camera through his small eyes; a white headband kept his hair from his face. He looked almost boyish even with the shadow of new beard on his jaw. Dougal with his oddly-shaped head, his thick hair and his deep-set eyes, squinted and grimaced, showing his teeth as he gazed up and off to his right, refusing to acknowledge the photographer. He looked tired, but certain lines had vanished from his face as if he had been relieved of some interior burden. He had lost for the moment the look of an orphan; he looked like someone’s son or younger brother.
THE WEATHER HAD changed in a way that felt fundamental and permanent; it was cold but glorious—high, bright, blue skies—when Chris and Layton started up the route the next morning. They fought their way up the fixed ropes; it was awkward work and Chris grew frightened again as the exposure increased. He made an effort to ignore the view as it spun and shimmered at his back—he was practiced at this climber’s game of make-believe—but he was aware of the ropes themselves. They were beginning to fray in places.
