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This man, who was so shocked at the idea of my writing a book about the North Face of the Eiger, was akin to a certain type of climber, who plants himself on a pedestal of extreme exaltation and merely smiles superciliously at the nonsensical idea of writing for the layman about climbing. But one cannot ignore public opinion and at the same time expect it to judge one sympathetically and intelligently.
No less an authority than the late Geoffrey Winthrop Young, one of the Grand Old Men of British climbing and outstanding in its literature, recognised the demands of the age and dealt with them in his article “Courage and Mountain Writing”.
(#ulink_a925508b-8420-52b3-af87-2fea1921e711) He understood well enough the general public’s thirst for sensation, but he faced it squarely and yet refused to give in to it.
“The modern lay-public,” he writes, “is now ready to read mountain adventures among its other sensational reading. It still demands excitement all the time. The cut rope is no longer essential, and the blonde heroine has less appeal, now that she has to climb in nailed boots and slacks. It wants records, above all. Records in height, records in endurance, hair-breadth escapes on record rock walls, and a seasoning of injuries, blizzards, losses of limbs and hazards of life…. I have suggested that the writers and producers of mountain books must also take some of the responsibility….”
Responsibility with regard to the subject-matter—responsibility with regard to the wishes of the reader. The key to a proper comprehension and understanding between the layman and the climber may well lie here.
And how is the climber to write? In Young’s view: “If he is to be read by human beings, he must write his adventures exactly as he himself humanly saw them at the time. General or objective description, such as satisfied the slower timing of the last two centuries, now reads too slowly, and is dull.”
But how can he avoid becoming a positive bore, if he intends to write a whole book about a single Alpine mountain-face and the solitary route up it? Once again I will quote Young: “However well-known the peak, or the line of ascent, no mountain story need ever repeat itself, or seem monotonous. Both mountain surface and mountain climber vary from year to year, even from day to day.”
There is no mountain, no mountain-face anywhere, of which that can more truly be said than of the Eiger and its North Face. And all the men concerned—those who succeeded, or those who tried and failed—were all sharply defined personalities. No two of them were alike.
“A book about the Eiger? Whatever for?”
The question continued to rankle, though probably the man who asked it never intended to make me angry. Yet the barb persisted. And, though I needed neither an explanation nor a justification for my undertaking, I was greatly heartened to read the following words in an article by Albert Eggler, the well-known Alpine climber and leader of the Swiss Everest Expedition of 1956: “However, we Westerners more especially, who owe the improvements of our lifetime to the selfless devotion of a few exceptionally courageous and probably highly zealous men, ought not to be too hard on people who take on an assignment which in the end proves too big for them. Men who take unusual risks are not by any means the worst types. But what we could and should do is to open the eyes of young climbers in appropriate fashion to the very special dangers of the mountains. And in this direction, a great and worth-while duty still lies before the Alpine clubs and Alpine publications generally.”
But was the duty really worth while? Was it really a duty? And, if it was, dared I, could I perform it? I kept on remembering that question: “a book about the Eiger? Whatever for?” I am not usually the kind of person to dither about a selected target, or about a route, once I have recognised it as the right one. To spur me on, I had all the mass of writings and photographs, the notebooks, the letters, much of the material already sorted and arranged under the individual attempts on and ascents of the Face. But those misgivings aroused by a thoughtless remark were a poor source of driving power to start me on my work.
Then, one day, my old friend Kurt Maix called on me. In Austria there is no need to introduce Kurt. In his own country everyone who has anything to do with mountains or mountaineering knows him. His ability to describe things graphically has enabled him to interest laymen and those who know nothing of mountains in Alpine affairs, and to tell the devoted readers he has won for himself in this way everything he wants to, and everything he knows how to, about climbing and climbers. And that means plenty. For not only was he in his day a pretty sporting climber; but he continues to take a lively, indeed a passionate, interest in everything to do with mountains and mountaineers. He is no hack-writer; every report on a climb, an expedition, a successful ascent, or an accident is a living experience for him. And though Maix is a journalist and writes by profession, he has never renounced his role as the mountaineer he remains at heart.
I was delighted to see Kurt again, but it was high time I were getting on with my book. After our first joyous greetings, I said to him: “I’m sorry I haven’t much time for you. I’m up to my neck in work.”
“So I hear,” said Kurt. “They tell me you are writing a book about your African trip and Ruwenzori.”
“No, not about Ruwenzori,” I confessed.
“Then what is it about?”
I hesitated a little. Perhaps I was afraid of another answer like the one which had made me so angry a few days ago. Then I blurted out:” About the North Face of the Eiger.”
Kurt looked surprised for a moment; then he said, with obvious delight: “But that’s grand news!”
Still a little dubious, I asked him: “What’s grand about it?”
“Why, that you’re the one who’s going to write the book about the Eiger. Not only because you were one of the party which made the first ascent. But because a book of yours will have more effect on our youngsters than a thousand warnings from elsewhere. They’ll believe you.”
“Certainly, there will have to be warnings,” I said.
Kurt shook his head vigorously.” No,” he said,” I don’t mean that you will warn them in the ordinary sense. You won’t raise a minatory finger, with a superior smile. All you will need to do is to present the Face as it actually is. Its history is more than a record of mountaineering disasters and successes. It is a history of human development and human tragedies. Someone had to write this book about the Eiger some time. I would have done it myself, if—”
“If what?”
“If I were properly qualified to do it. But this is a book which can only be written by someone with personal experience of the Face. General mountaineering knowledge, imagination, reconstructions and a study of the sources, all these aren’t sufficient here.”
I remembered a broadcast I had heard, the previous year. Fischer-Karwin, the Austrian Radio’s star interviewer, had been asking Kurt Maix for his views about the mountaineering accidents of the summer of 1957. Kurt had answered: “I refuse to lump the tragedies on the Eiger Wall together with other accidents which resulted from carelessness or insufficient experience. Anyone who makes headway on the North Face of the Eiger and survives there for several days has achieved and overcome so much—whatever mistakes he may have committed—that his performance is well above the comprehension of the average climber.”
And now here was Kurt, thrilled at my determination to write the book. His enthusiasm was infectious and convincing. Had I really been annoyed a few days ago by a thoughtless remark? I had already forgotten about it. Suddenly, I saw a strange picture before my eyes. I was standing at the bottom of a high and difficult mountain face, intending to climb it solo. Then I was joined by another solitary climber who, too, stood looking up the face, just as I had stood, searching, studying, assessing. An unexpected meeting, a brief word of greeting, and a decision was born to climb the face as a pair.
Following a spontaneous impulse, I asked Kurt: “Will you help me with the book? There is so much basic material that it needs continual revision and sifting. Thoughts and questions keep on cropping up which call for definite answers. It is often very hard to provide the right answer oneself. Could you stay for a few days?”
Kurt stayed for many days. We worked like demons, from morning till night. We wallowed in reports and statements, made notes, headings, began to write things down, mostly each working on his own. But we both looked forward to the evenings, when we joined up again and shared the experiences and fresh knowledge the day had brought. Those evenings frequently extended far into the night, occupied by long conversations which always seemed too short. Everything always revolved about the North Face of the Eiger. Yet it was a focus from which our thoughts could range outwards in all directions. And from some small occurrence on the Face we often travelled directly to life’s most serious problems. Memories which I had long since thought deeply overlaid came vividly to life again. A great deal of what was eventually set down and developed in the book arose out of our nightly talks. They were good days, those, with Kurt as my companion, and both of us spiritually in the shadow of the Eiger’s Face.
I have always been disappointed when climbers who lead a first ascent on a difficult climb fail to acknowledge the support of the second man on the rope. One loses nothing by reporting that the rope moved through the safeguarding hands of one’s partner while one was mastering an overhang. And now that the book about the North Face of the Eiger is finished, I would like to shake hands with Kurt Maix, just as I would on reaching a summit.
But there are many others besides Kurt whom I must thank for their share in the completion of this book. Their role has been that of the porters and team-mates on an expedition, who pitch camps and shuttle loads, so that the assault party can push on up to the top. The late Othmar Gurtner, that great Swiss mountaineer, author and editor, provided me, out of his rich store of knowledge, with endless facts, basic sources and special Eiger-documentation. How grateful I was for my acquaintance with Guido Tonella, who wields his pen for truth and justice as bravely as any Cavalier of old his sword. How gratefully I recognised in my correspondence with Lionel Terray and Gaston Rébuffat that brotherly comradeship which unites all climbers. And what thanks I owe to all the others who helped me, by their letters and reports, in my labours of compiling this book. Anderl Heckmair, Erich Vanis, Erich Waschak, Sepp Jöchler, Karl Blach, Sepp Larch, Jean Fuchs, Karl Gramminger, Alfred Hellepart…. Technical considerations alone prevent my naming all the others to whom my thanks are due. And then there are the dead, whose memories, whose achievements and whose letters survive as living witnesses of strong and good men: Fritz Kasparek, Ludwig Vörg, Hans Schlunegger, Karl Reiss, Jürgen Wellenkamp, Hermann Buhl and Louis Lachenal.
As I write these lines, the summer of 1958 has begun. It is five years since the last party succeeded in climbing the North Face of the Eiger—the twelfth to reach the top safe and sound. So far there has been no thirteenth. I know that within the next few weeks some keen young climbers will be trying to break the barrier of Tragedy which seems to hang over the thirteenth climb of the Face. They are continually in my thoughts.
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Easy enough to say it; but I mean it in all sincerity. I mean it as seriously as I mean the warning every reader of this book can draw from its pages. Obviously I could not fail to do justice to the rare beauty and the unique size of this mighty Face and of the route which leads up it; that would have been letting myself down. But I can only hope that Kurt Maix was right when he said: “No one who reads your book can fail to know, afterwards, whether he belongs on the Face or not….”
A few days ago two climbers came to see me. One of them was young Brandler, the very same Brandler who in 1956 saw Moosmüller and Söhnel go plunging to their death near the Difficult Crack. In those two years since Moosmüller’s falling body brushed past him, a boy has grown into a man who knows what responsibility means. He has worked hard and become a good mountaineer, not only an exceptional rock-climber. This summer he wants to try the Face again. His rope-mate is to be Hias Noichl, that outstanding Tirolean mountaineer and long-distance ski-runner. Brandler asked my advice about equipment for the climb. Ought I to have dodged the responsibility, by warning him and begging him not to try the Face again?
I could see that both were well-trained and well-prepared for an attempt on the Face. I could see that the character and skill of both men would make for a harmonious rope of two. I gave young Brandler as much advice as I could. We spoke in a matter-of-fact way without a touch of sentiment. Even when we said goodbye, I refrained from voicing the hope against hope which had been welling up within me all the time—“Come back safe, my friends….”
But I watched them both for a long time, as they went further and further away down the road….
(#ulink_a0e3aa1f-03fe-5fcc-a2a0-bed799fdd1f1)Berge der Welt (Schweizerische Stiftung für Alpine Forschungen), Büchergilde Gutenberg, Zürich-Frankfurt, 1955. English edition: The Mountain World 1955, Allen and Unwin, London.
(#ulink_f5f4aa99-22a3-53c0-b3f0-19b0632a317a)The success of Kurt Diemberger and Wolfgang Stefan is described in the Epilogue.—Translator’s note.
The “White Spider” (#ulink_e735c512-cec7-5d16-a0ee-7d2eaf2cca37)
IT is common form to congratulate people on their birthdays. It is also customary to pay a suitable tribute to buildings, cities and associations when they reach a certain age. Biographies and autobiographies are written, and historical records, from the most comprehensive tomes to the smallest pamphlet. Why, then, not write a book to celebrate the birthday of a mountain, or even of a face of that mountain?
Admittedly, it is not the birthday celebration of the mountain or the face itself, but the remembrance of the day which first brought a human being into direct personal contact with it—the remembrance of the first ascent of a peak or the first successful climb of a face.
The 13,041-foot summit of the Eiger, in the Bernese Oberland, was first trodden by the foot of man just a hundred years ago, in 1858. Its North Face was climbed for the first time only twenty years ago, in 1938, and it was the climbing of this Face that first made the Eiger world-famous. Thanks to this, its name has become better-known than that of the Matterhorn or Mont Blanc. It has become familiar to millions of readers of innumerable newspaper reports; it has been mentioned hundreds of times on the radio. It became the epitome of everything tragically sensational that mountaineering had to offer the reader. When millions, who had never seen either the mountain or the Face, formed their own picture of it, it could hardly help being a caricature. What I propose to do here is to draw a true picture of it; one which will be hardly less exciting, but whose drama will be based on truth and fact, not on the uninformed imaginings of some pen-pusher. For the true story of the Eiger’s North Face is even more terrible and more glorious than men have yet been able to discover.
I am one of the party of four who, in July 1938, just twenty years ago, first succeeded in climbing the North Face. My memory of it is like a birthday celebration of my own, and has accompanied me to this day without ever diminishing in strength. Not even my great experience in Tibet, which gave such a decisive twist to my life, has ever succeeded in cancelling it out; nor did the memory ever fade during the thirteen years I spent in Asia.
I do not think any one of us who climbed that 6,000-foot bastion of rock and ice was at any time in fear of his life. But after our safe return from the venture we felt more conscious of the privilege of having been allowed to live; and this feeling of awareness has never left me since that climb of the mighty North Face. Maybe my memory of the Eiger’s Face has often given me the strength, the patience and the confidence to cope with apparently hopeless and dangerous situations, and helped me to believe in life at times when all the circumstances seemed most hostile to life itself.
Self-confidence is the most valuable gift a man can possess, but it is not a gift freely granted. The blindly arrogant possess it least of all. To possess this true confidence, it is necessary to have learned to know oneself at moments when one was standing on the very frontier of things, times when one could even cast a glance over to “the other side”. And then one had to examine oneself with unsparing clarity to establish what one felt, thought or did at such a moment.
On the “Spider” in the Eiger’s North Face I experienced such borderline situations, while the avalanches were roaring down over us, endlessly. This sector of the Eiger’s upper wall has won its name from its external likeness to a gigantic spider. Seldom has an exterior attracted a name which at the same time suits the inner nature of the object named so completely. The “Spider” on the Eiger’s Face is white. Its body consists of ice and eternal snow. Its legs and its predatory arms, all hundreds of feet long, are white, too. From that perpetual, fearfully steep field of frozen snow nothing but ice emerges to fill gullies, cracks and crevices. Up and down. To left, to right. In every direction, at every angle of steepness.
And there the “Spider” waits.
Every climber who picks his way up the North Face of the Eiger has to cross it. There is no way round it. And even those who moved best and most swiftly up the Face have met their toughest ordeal on the “Spider”. Someone once compared the whole Face to a gigantic spider’s web catching the spider’s victims and feeding them to her. This comparison is unfounded, exaggerated, and merely a cheap way of making the flesh creep. Neither the savage wall nor the lovely mountain have deserved this slur. Nor have the climbers; for climbers are not flies and insects stumbling blindly to their fate, but men of vision and courage. All the same, the “White Spider” seems to me to be a good symbol for the North Face. The climber has to face its perils on the final third of the wall, when he is tired from many hours and days of exhausting climbing and weakened by chilly bivouacs. But there is no rest to be had there, no matter how tired you are.
He who wishes to survive the spate of avalanches which sweep the “Spider” must realise that there is no escape from this dangerously steep obstacle; he must know how to blend his strength with patience and reflection. Above the “Spider” begin the overhanging, iced-up exit cracks; that is where sheer strength tells. But here the man who abandons patience and good sense for fear-induced haste will surely finish up like the fly which struggles so long in the spider’s web that it is caught through sheer exhaustion.
The “White Spider” on the Eiger is the extreme test not only of a climber’s technical ability, but of his character as well. Later on in life, when fate seemed to spin some spider’s web or other across my path, my thoughts often went back to the “White Spider”. Life itself demanded the same methods, the same qualities, when there no longer seemed to be any possible escape from its difficulties, as had won us a way out of the difficulties of the Eiger’s North Face—common-sense, patience and open-eyed courage. Haste born of fear and all the wild stunts arising from it can only end in disaster.
I remember a saying of Schopenhauer’s: “Just as the wayfarer only surveys and recognises the road he has come when he reaches some high place and can look back over it in its entirety, so we ourselves are only able to recognise and value a stage in our life when it is over.” The North Face of the Eiger and the crossing of the “White Spider” were for me an expedition and a stage in my life at one and the same time; though I only realised it a good deal later. Today I have no doubt whatever about the invaluable contribution a difficult and, in the eyes of many, an incredibly dangerous climb on a mountain can make to a man’s later life. I do not believe in a blind Fate which dominates us; nor can I unreservedly agree with Schopenhauer’s statement—” Fate shuffles the cards, we play them.” I am quite certain that we have a hand in the shuffling.
There is nothing new to be said about the behaviour of man in exceptional circumstances of danger or crisis. It has all been thought and said already. But if I had to write an entry in the autograph-album of the worshippers of blind Chance and inevitable Fate I could not find better words than those used by the Athenian, Menander, more than two thousand years ago. “A man’s nature and way of life are his fate, and that which he calls his fate is but his disposition.” This truth was brought home to me clearly for the first time on the slope of the “White Spider”. Perhaps all four of us were the fortunate owners of a disposition which was the basic factor in our successful climb; training, scientific preparations and equipment being only very necessary adjuncts.
The North Face of the Eiger was described for the first time in Alpine literature by A. W. Moore, whose splendid book The Alps in 1864
(#ulink_978f1092-edce-59cb-9d3b-1e803355a222)does full justice to its savage grandeur. Moore, with his guides and companions—among whom there was a lady, Miss Walker—made the third ascent of the Eiger on July 25th, 1864; then they climbed a little way further, along the North-West Ridge, from which they could look straight down the precipitous North Face.
“Of the thousands,” Moore writes, “who annually pass under the shadow of this magnificent wall, which in height and steepness alike excels the corresponding face of the Wetterhorn, few can have failed to be impressed with its rugged and precipitous character. But grand and striking as is the view of the cliffs from below, no one who has not looked down them as we now did can appreciate them properly. Except in the Dauphiné, I have never seen so sheer and smooth a precipice. A stone dropped from the edge would have fallen hundreds of feet before encountering any obstacle to its progress. It is rather remarkable (and fortunate) that while the northern face of this great mass of rock is cut away abruptly, in such an inaccessible manner, its western face should be so comparatively easy and practicable….”
“Inaccessible”—it never occurred to Moore that there could be even the possibility of making a way up this wall, in which the eye can detect no holds at all. E. H. Stevens, who produced the new edition of Moore’s book in 1939, added a footnote to the above description of that terrific Face. It reads: “This is the terrible ‘Eigerwand’ (the western section of the North Face) which in the last two or three years has been the scene of such shocking disasters to several parties attempting, with reckless and ill-considered daring,
(#ulink_07ebfd93-f863-5ced-b016-9a237921c12a)to solve this last and greatest of Alpine problems. The ascent was finally achieved in 1938.”
As one who belonged to the party which succeeded in the first ascent of the Face in 1938, I should like to observe—with due respect for our critic’s judgment—that I neither felt mentally deranged twenty years ago nor consider myself mad now.
It has been widely deplored that the very creed of mountaineering should have been debased by the climbs and attempts on this particular Face, in that it has become an arena, a natural stage, on which every movement of the actors can be followed. And the applause accorded to successful climbers on their return is argued as another outward sign of their inward decay….
Nobody regrets it more than the men themselves who climb on the Eiger’s North Face. They desire nothing more than peace and quiet; they do not want to be looked at. They long for the days of their grandfathers when nobody took any notice of climbers or bothered to watch them. Full of nostalgia for those good old days, I read the end of Moore’s account of his first climb of the mountain, the return to Wengern Alp. Alas, my yearnings for peace and quiet and a tranquil ending to that fine performance were not to be granted, even then. This is what I read: “Hence, running over the easy rocks and smooth snow, we got to the gazon at 2.40, and after a rapid walk over the pastures, amidst the firing of guns at the hotel, which was commenced as soon as we appeared in sight, at 3.10 p.m. once more arrived at the Wengern Alp, where we were received with an amount of enthusiasm and hand-shaking that was quite overpowering….”
That happened on July 25th 1864, at the height of the “golden age” of Alpine climbing. Am I really supposed to be disappointed because the climbers of the day were just human beings, with all the human weaknesses and follies? All I can do is to record, with a smile of amusement, that when we got back nobody fired off any guns to greet us. They certainly had more feeling for style and dramatic effects a hundred years ago!
When was the Eiger first climbed, then?
We know now that it was on August 11th 1858. But when I looked for a report about this still considerable achievement of a first ascent in the contemporary issues of the Alpine Journal, I had no luck at all. It was said that a Mr. Harrington or Harington had reached the summit with some guides. This was the only mention of the name Harrington, and small wonder; for the name of the first man to climb the Eiger was not Harrington at all, but Barrington. Mr. Charles Barrington.
It was not till 1883, twenty-five years after his first ascent, that Barrington wrote his long-overdue report in the shape of a letter to the editor of the Alpine Journal. From this article-in-form-of-a-letter we learn that Barrington—himself not even a member of the Alpine Club, which was just one year old at the time of his climb—arrived at Grindelwald early in August 1858 and engaged two celebrated guides, Christian Aimer and Peter Bohren, the latter being characterised by his nickname of the “Wolf of the Glaciers”. On August 6th they climbed to the Strahlegg and on the 9th ascended the Jungfrau from the cave in the Faulberg, returning to Grindelwald the same evening. Glacier-burn must have played havoc with Barrington’s face, for he describes, in his humorous way, how he spent the night, “sleeping with a beefsteak on my face….”
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But young Mr. Charles was by no means satisfied with his Alpine performances. With all the liberality of a man who hasn’t a farthing in his pocket, but still enquires the price of the World, he asked what else there was to do. Good advice costs little, its implementation is expensive. “You could do the Matterhorn—or the Eiger. Neither has been climbed as yet,” came the answer.
The Matterhorn was way over there in the Valais and would doubtless cost much more. At Grindelwald the Eiger was right in front of one’s nose and there was enough money for it. So the Eiger be it! About midnight on August 10th Charles and his guides arrived at Wengern Alp. Barrington lay down on a sofa and slept for three hours. At 3 a.m. on the 11th, Barrington, Aimer and Bohren left the inn and started off for the Eiger. As soon as they reached the rocks, Barrington, according to his own account, took over the lead. Thanks to young Charles’s delight in rock-climbing, they went up, not by the normal route in use today, but almost straight up the crest of the North-West Ridge, and reached the summit well before noon. On the descent, they followed the Couloir and went on down the slope over which the usual ascent route runs today. They still had a few adventures to contend with. Twice they were almost swept away by avalanches; fortunately it was only “almost”, and four hours after leaving the summit the three men were all safely back at Wengern Alp. Barrington ends his account thus: “Thus ended my first and only visit to Switzerland. Not having money enough to try the Matterhorn, I went home…. Had I not been as fit as my old horse ‘Sir Robert Peel’ when I won the ‘Irish Grand National’ with him, I would not have seen half the course….”
He was a true sportsman—a word with which the English chronicler acknowledges alike Charles Barrington’s exploits and the tone of his report. So it seems that the racing motif as one of the mainsprings of the Alpine urge is by no means the contribution of modern, decadent youth. It has smouldered unseen in the youth of every age, whenever that youth is as “fit as Sir Robert Peel”, and has always stirred mountaineers, starting with the Balmat-Paccard conflict, and continuing through the rivalry of Whymper and Carrel, to Buhl versus Rébuffat among the young men of today. The unique thing about the urge to climb is that it springs from many other bodily, spiritual and ethical motives besides its purely “sporting” basis. It is impossible to classify mountaineering, or to integrate it with a stratum of the cultural life of today. It must be accorded its own unique place, just as the waywardness of mountaineers cannot be eradicated from the scheme of things.
The history of the Eiger is a typical piece of Alpine history. First came this Charles Barrington who, in all the simplicity of his uninformed upward urge, “bagged” the peak, merely because the Matterhorn was too expensive. Just a year later we find here one of the most gifted brains and sensitive spirits which has ever climbed in the Alps, a nature as far removed from “Sir Robert Peel” as it could possibly be. This was Leslie Stephen,
(#ulink_3213dc2b-696d-5e7e-87ca-c8e6782be6bf) who traversed the Eigerjoch in 1859 with George and William Matthews and three guides.
The South-West Ridge was climbed in 1874, the South Ridge in 1876. In 1885 some Grindelwald guides succeeded in descending the Mittellegi Ridge, always the shortest direct route between their village and the Eiger’s summit, had it not been so difficult. They roped down the great rock pitch in the upper part of the ridge.
1912 brought the triumph of Science, for in that year the Jungfrau Railway was completed. The line runs for miles in the very heart of the mountain, through the Eiger’s rocky core. Only two windows open out from the tunnel into the air of the North Face; and these were destined to play their part one day in the tragedies yet to be enacted on that grim precipice.
It was not till 1921 that the Mittellegi Ridge was at last ascended. Once again the success was scored by three Grindelwald guides, Fritz Amatter, Samuel Brawand and Fritz Steuri senior, accompanied by a tourist, a very youthful Japanese, Yuko Maki. Thirty-five years later he was destined to lead a successful Japanese attempt on the eighth-highest mountain in the world, 26,650-foot Manaslu. Yuko Maki was the first to forge a direct link, so to speak, between the Eiger and the Himalaya. Later on, it was of course perfectly natural for the names of many of those who have climbed the North Face of the Eiger to appear and reappear in the story of the world’s highest peaks.
1932 saw the last great first-ascent in the classical style on the Eiger, When Dr. Hans Lauper and Alfred Zürcher, those outstanding Swiss climbers, with two world-famous Valaisian guides, Josef Knubel and Alexander Graven, reached the summit of the Eiger by the North-East Face.
Every side of this mighty peak had now been climbed, except one only: the absolutely unclimbable, the “impossible” Eiger Wall, which receives and retains the bad weather as it comes raging in on the mountain from the north and north-west; the wall, high up on which the “White Spider”, with its slender arms, hundreds of feet long, all of snow and ice, seems to be waiting, clawing the rocks.
Waiting?
It was not the “Spider” which was waiting. It was men who were waiting—the young men. They were waiting and biding their time. For now there was no longer a Matterhorn to be climbed for the first time, there were no more virgin summits such as the pioneers of the “Golden Age” could select at will. The last of the great faces had gone, too. In 1931, the brothers Schmid had scaled the North Face of the Matterhorn and in 1935 the North Wall of the Grandes Jorasses had fallen to Peters and Maier.
But what about the great Face of the Eiger—the wall over which the “White Spider” brooded?
Was it really impossible, or was there perhaps, after all, a way to its top?
No one who had not tried could answer that question. Someone had to come and be the first to try it.
And in the summer of 1935 someone came.
(#ulink_d1f20de0-a01a-5313-bd6b-406a3192c916)The Alps in 1864, by A. W. Moore, edited by E. H. Stevens. Basil Blackwood, Oxford, 1939.
(#ulink_ee982d51-bda0-570e-8f13-567d12f2aeab) The author in his original has rendered these words as “resulting from a sick mind”.—Translator’s note.
(#ulink_4f7ba3e7-f0a6-5103-94aa-3a43f6e98c58) A.J., February 1883.
(#ulink_f9f310a8-b087-5b6d-9c12-95a45017277b) Leslie Stephen, The Playground of Europe.
The First Attempt on the North Face (#ulink_5e6cae36-eb46-5da6-b6b4-cab3184f5e66)
IT is not only the young who are “ready with words”. The broad mass of the public is ever ready to express a glib opinion about events and matters which it does not and cannot understand. It passes judgment and condemns, giving the descriptions of “folly” and “a gamble for life” to what are in truth “a love of adventure” and “the preservation of life”. Modern science and psychology have also provided a phraseology in support of its criticism and condemnation. “Inverted inferiority complexes”, “Self-justification of the maladjusted”, “Mock-heroism of failures in life”—one could produce a list, pages long, of the expressions which have been used to delineate at once the good sense and the nonsense of mountaineering and to damn it at the same time.
But, are we really supposed to believe, for example, that in 1888 Fridtjof Nansen set out to cross the inland ice of Greenland on skis because he was suffering from an inferiority complex? Or that the great Norwegian explorer and campaigner for peace undertook that remarkable journey simply to serve the cause of Science? What lured him on was, of course, the great adventure, the eternal longing of every truly creative man to push on into unexplored country, to discover something entirely new—if only about himself. In that lies the detonating spark, the secret source of strength, which enables men to achieve the extraordinary. Is it good sense or nonsense? Who can decide? Who dares to deliver judgment? Should the adventurer outlive and survive his adventure, and should it result in a tangible, easily comprehensible success, the Public is generous with its applause. It is only too ready to haul into the glare of publicity and set upon a hero’s pedestal—after he has succeeded—the very man it previously scorned, condemned to ridicule, accused of irresponsibility. Contempt and hero-worship are equally unhealthy and both can lead to mischief. But ever since men have existed, the enterprising and daring men have had to translate their “out-of-the-ordinary” ideas into deeds somewhere between the two extremes of scorn and rejection on the one hand and recognition and adulation on the other. And it will always be so.
Where mountaineering is concerned, there is an additional difficulty. With the best will in the world no one can inject a secret element of general usefulness to mankind into a climb of the Eiger’s North Face. Such a climb must remain a personal triumph for the climber himself. And however many considerations of material weight one may adduce, they do not bear comparison with the risk, the indescribable labours and difficulties, which demand the very uttermost ounce of physical, spiritual and mental resistance. To win fame at the expense of that horrific wall? Of course ambition plays a great part in such a venture. Yet, a mere fraction of the energy evoked, coupled with the cool judgment required, would lead to outstanding success, to fame and an assured livelihood in any calling, or any less dangerous form of sporting activity, you may name.
Self-examination? Compensation for an inferiority complex? A climber who dares to tackle the North Face of the Eiger must have examined and proved himself a hundred times in advance. And suppose he has at some time suffered from complexes—and where is the man who has not, unless he is satisfied with the dull existence of a mere vegetable?—he must have found the right adjustment long before he gets there. A climb of the North Face as a counterbalance to hysteria? A hysteric, an unstable character, would go to pieces at the very sight of the Wall, just as surely as every mask of the kind men wear before one another in the daily round of life falls away in face of this menacing bastion of rock and ice.
Let us grant courage and the love of pure adventure their own justification, even if we cannot produce any material support for them. Mankind has developed an ugly habit of only allowing true courage to the killers. Great credit accrues to the one who bests another; little is given to the man who recognises in his comrade on the rope a part of himself, who for long hours of extreme peril faces no opponent to be shot or struck down, but whose battle is solely against his own weakness and insufficiency. Is the man who, at moments when his own life is in the balance, has not only to safeguard it but, at the same time, his friend’s—even to the extent of mutual self-sacrifice—to receive less recognition than a boxer in the ring, simply because the nature of what he is doing is not properly understood? In his book about the Dachstein,
(#ulink_9c541bac-8fc3-5c86-84ce-f678c4c01b52)Kurt Maix writes: “Climbing is the most royal irrationality out of which Man, in his creative imagination, has been able to fashion the highest personal values.” Those personal values, which we gain from our approach to the mountains, are great enough to enrich our life. Is not the irrationality of its very lack of purpose the deepest argument for climbing? But we had better leave philosophical niceties and unsuitable psycho-analysis out of this.
First, let us take a glance at the two men who in mid-August 1935 took up their quarters in a cow-hut among the meadows of Alpiglen, which they proposed to use as their base—the first two ever to dare an attempt on that mighty Face, Max Sedlmayer and Karl Mehringer. They were wiry, well-trained types, men with frank, wholesome faces. Not theirs the steely iron-hard features of legendary heroes, or of filmstars of a certain stamp. One would hardly have noticed them in the ordinary way, probably because they were just that little bit more reserved, quieter and likeable than the average young man. Their calm and relaxed demeanour marked them out as people who had a firm standing in every-day life, men who had no need either to justify themselves by an unusually perilous venture, which might cost them their lives, or to await the applause of the masses to tell them who they were.
The very way in which Sedlmayer and Mehringer went about the reconnaissance of the Face spoke volumes for their character. They approached their mountain calmly and without fuss. There was no challenging smile on their faces, no show of conceit. They knew well enough the measure of their undertaking and went about their preparations in all seriousness. Of course the real preparation, the spiritual mentality, the long years of hard training, the sober assessment of their own capabilities, all these already lay far behind them. They were not world-famous; only a narrow circle of friends knew them. These sternest of critics, all members of the climbing élite, knew that Sedlmayer and Mehringer were among the best, the most careful, the toughest and most penetrative of climbers, tested and tried a hundred times over on the severest of climbs.
But even if you choose a herdsman’s hut as your base, you cannot keep your most secret plans secret in a tourists’ centre. The rumour filtered through that there were two men intending to attempt the North Face of the Eiger. There were plenty of well-intentioned, warning voices. But what is the use of warnings and advice? Nobody knew anything about the Face, then; all that was known was its grim, ever-changing countenance—ice, rock, snow… avalanches… volleys of falling stones. An unfriendly, merciless countenance. All anybody could say was: “Don’t climb the Face, it is horrible.” But was its horror stronger than Man’s will-power, than his capacity? Who could answer that question? Nobody had yet been on the Face. Sedlmayer and Mehringer would be the first. And they were preparing themselves for this climb as for no other climb in their lives. They knew that this was no mere case of a difficult first-ascent, but of a positive irruption into the Vertical, which the two of them were making. How long would it last? Two or three days, or more? They took provisions along for six days. Their equipment, too, was the best yet seen at that time. The worst of it was that they didn’t yet know what was most essential for the Eiger’s North Face; was that Face of ice, was it of rock? Not even long study through a strong telescope could answer that question, for the Face continually altered its appearance from day to day, nay from hour to hour. The only unalterable features were its pitiless magnificence and its utter unapproachability. All experience won from other mountains seemed useless here. Experience of this gigantic wall could only be gained on the Face itself.
The weather would be the decisive factor. The two Munich men knew that only too well. But they also knew that the famous period of settled weather for which they ought, by the strictest of basic climbing rules, to wait, apparently didn’t exist where the North Face of the Eiger was concerned. It might be perfectly fine for miles around; the Eiger and the North Face have their own particular weather. Quite a small cloud, caught in the huge perpendicular upthrust of the Wall’s concave basin, can kindle a fearsome storm of hail, snow and raging winds, while the visitors in Grindelwald, just below down there, are comfortably sunbathing on their chaises-longues. Every shred of weather working up from the plains fights its savage opening engagement on that Face. Even the clouds which have already dumped their load of rain on their approach to the Hills, join up again on the Eiger’s Face with redoubled strength, to fight a last desperate rearguard action before drifting off to float about the other summits as exhausted, harmless tatters of mist. Or else the mere contrast between the cold air trapped on the Face and the sun-warmed air external to it forms a cloud pregnant with tension of its own making, to whip rain, snow and ice into the Eiger’s flanks.
These two men, who believed they had spotted a route—probably the only possible one—up the Face, had noted all this. The lowest point of the Face was at about 6,900 feet. The first 800 feet of the climb—although steep and exposed to falling avalanches and stones—looked difficult but not impossibly so. With field-glasses it was possible to distinguish some holes in the rock up there—the windows of Eigerwand Station on the Jungfrau Railway, which winds its upward way for miles in the heart of the mountain. About 400 yards to the west there is yet another such gallery-window in the Face, the window at the 3-8 kilometre mark from which, during the construction of the line, they used to dump the rubble down the outside of the mountain. Of course, one could take the train to Eigerwand or the window at Kilometre 3-8 and start the climb from there; but one might just as well climb the Eiger by the normal route and only look at the Face. No, the railway inside the mountain was meant for the rest of the world. For the men interested in the climbing of the Face, only one thing counts—a climb, unquestionable in the eyes of sporting and climbing circles, from the lowest point to the 13,041-foot summit of the Eiger.
Sedlmayer and Mehringer studied the Face for days on end, prepared their gear for the climb, lay there for hours on the Alp, looking through field-glasses. Above the railway-window in the Face a vertical rock-step went surging up for more than six hundred feet. Could it be climbed? That could only be decided once you got up there. Above the step gleamed an ice-field, the First Ice-field, as it is now called. How high was it? How steep? Very hard to decide those questions from down below.
Above that again a second rock pitch, followed by a huge sheet of snow and ice, which one would have to ascend diagonally to the left. Then there was a third ice-field, whose rock and ice outlines had a strange shape, almost that of a huge hawk beating upwards with outspread wings. To reach the beak of this hawk one would have to climb a sharp arète leaning against the perpendicular summit-wall at that point—a ridge later christened the “Flatiron” by its climbers. Could all this be climbed? From the ridge one would have to traverse leftwards across that steep, third ice-field, from whose further end an abrupt ramp goes surging diagonally to the left across the Face towards the Mittellegi Ridge. Could it be climbed right up to its top? Could one traverse off it to the right on to the huge snow-field which throws out slender snow- and ice-runnels in every direction like a huge spider crouching above the gulf 5,000 feet beneath? And finally: could one climb from the “Spider” to the Summit through the cracks and couloirs above?
Nobody who had not tried it himself could give a definite answer.
