Conquistadors of the Useless (2 page)

But to tell the truth, although at this very young age I already had an interest in mountains remarkable for its spontaneity, I only had the most muddled ideas about what they were really like. In a town like Grenoble, situated in the heart of the Alps, there are lots of climbers. There were even a few among our neighbours and relations; but with the exception of Dr Couturier, well known not only for his hunting exploits and books on alpine game, but also for first ascents in the Mont Blanc range with the guide Armand Charlet, none of them had ever carried out any really big climbs. Having no means of comparison, I listened with the most fervent passion when these heroes related their exploits, and my spirit was exalted by their fabulous courage and strength. Furthermore I had discovered in our library a number of climbing books containing adventures which seemed to me of unexampled heroism. Without always understanding them very well, I devoured the lot in a frenzy. An imaginary world began to form in my childish mind, made up of terrible peaks constantly shaken by giant avalanches, of labyrinths of ice where crevasses kept opening with appalling crashes all around, of supermen who triumphed over all these obstacles in a series of non-stop adventures. Such a mass of grandeur, mystery and danger almost turned my young head, full of its dreams of adventure. Though I never imagined for a moment that I could ever join the select band of alpine heroes, it seemed that there could be no more marvellous destiny than to become one of the least of their accomplices.

Our baker's son had done a few climbs in the foothills around Grenoble. Boastful and talkative, he liked telling about his exploits and enlivened them a bit in the process. Carried away by his fluency, I literally worshipped this perfectly insignificant youth. He seemed to me a sort of demigod, and I spent hours listening to his tall tales. When I begged him to take me with him on one of his outings, he replied with disdain:

‘Certainly not, you're nothing but a kid. You've got to be tough to go climbing, and have nerves that'll stand up to anything'.

I was also great friends with Georgette, our housekeeper's daughter. She was fifteen or sixteen, and went out each Sunday with a group from the ‘Société des Grimpeurs des Alpes'. The expeditions of this group were limited to local minor summits, which they reached by routes really little more difficult than steep paths. No doubt because there was not much danger about them, I had little difficulty in persuading Georgette to take me along with her on one of these trips, unknown to my parents. Thus it was under the pretext of innocent bicycle excursions that I climbed my first peaks. These ascents enraptured me, and the impression they made on me was so deep that even today the memory of those enchanted hours is fresh and alive.

For all that, the summits themselves were about as modest as they could be while still meriting the term. The first was the Aiguille de Quaix, a little limestone spire. A Rabelaisian legend had it that it was in fact no more than one of the droppings of Gargantua. Nevertheless the ascent kept me interested from beginning to end. On the way up we got into the wrong gully, and we floundered about for a long time among screes and brushwood. My life in our family park had made me a master of this art, which I showed off to my companions with naive pride. The climbing itself did not strike me as very difficult, but terribly vertiginous. One young girl almost fainted from giddiness and had to be revived with a cordial. On the way down our leader conducted us with hardly a mistake through what seemed to me a maze of smooth walls, ledges and chimneys. I was filled with admiration for his skill in route-finding. The imagination of an eleven-year-old can turn the simplest climb into the most gripping adventure.

I was twelve years old when something happened that was to play a crucial part in the development of my half-formed mountain vocation. My young brother fell ill, and the doctor recommended a holiday in the mountains. My mother decided to take us off to spend our school holidays in the Chamonix valley, where she had already stayed some years before. Up to that time the only mountains I had known had been the Préalpes, with their walls of grey rock dominating cultivated valleys. Only from afar had I admired the eternally white summits of Belledonne and the Oisans. This first contact with really big mountains was a revelation: to this day I keep absolutely intact the memory of my wonder at the sight of those masses of ice, shining against a sky of unearthly purity, and those rock needles which seemed to fling down a gauge to the daring of men.

At this time I was a boy of such size and energy that one might easily have taken me for fifteen or sixteen. Under this athletic exterior, however, was hidden an extreme sensitivity and a spirit in torment. The meanness, vulgarity and monotony of the world were already painfully obvious to me, and I dreamed passionately of a nobler, freer and more generous existence. At the first sight of the high mountains, ‘I sensed at once all that they offered of joys to taste, of dreams to hoard, of glory to be won'.
[1]
In a way at once undefined and yet quite definite I divined every possibility of this world of ice and rock where there was nothing to be plucked but weariness and danger, I was the measure of the full savour which these useless fruits, plucked not from the mud but from a garden of beauty and light, could hold.

As soon as the first vision was over, I began to cast about for ways of getting closer to the marvel. In company with some boys of my own age I clambered up several of the belvederes of the Aiguilles Rouges, then crossed the Mer de Glace in the charge of one of the old guides, who, in those days, used to tout around the edges of the glacier, offering to take tourists to the other side. But on the Bossons glacier, emboldened by experience, I disdainfully rejected the services of the moustachioed and bemedalled ‘pirate' who insistently warned us against the dangers to which we would be exposed in crossing the ice without his aid.

These gentle afternoon strolls hardly satisfied my appetite for adventure or my growing ambition. With all my soul I longed to penetrate to the very heart of these mountains, and to tread their summits. The passion with which I pleaded my cause must have helped to convince my mother, who eventually let me go on the collective parties organised by the Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix. My first expedition was to go up to the Couvercle hut via the Paroi des Egralets, returning by the Talèfre Glacier and the Pierre a Béranger. The emotions I felt in jumping my first crevasse and crossing my first snow-bridge were hardly less intense than those with which I later stood on the virgin summits of the Pico Fitzroy or Makalu. And with what pride I showed my mother, on my return, a postcard of the Paroi des Egralets which I had just conquered, though in fact it was as banal an exploit as you could hope to find, since all the steep bits are equipped with cables and ladders! But quite soon these collective courses in their turn began to seem too tame to appease my aspirations. What I wanted was real climbs with ropes, crampons, ice axes, rappels – the lot.

But for all her usual kindness, my mother obstinately refused to let me risk my life on such adventures. Fortunately one of my cousins, who was a regular officer, happened to be stationed at this time at the Ecole Militaire de Haute Montagne. He was a good climber with a reputation for being safe and sound. My mother was reassured by the guarantee offered by such a guide, and ended by letting me accompany him in the ascent of the Aiguillette d'Argentière. On this infinitesimal point, which hardly merits the name of a summit, I did my first rappel.
[2]
Although physically easy, this exercise is impressive to a beginner. At the moment of letting themselves slide towards the abyss quite a lot of women and children cannot restrain themselves from whimpering with fear. Although I didn't whimper, my heart was in my mouth and my muscles were paralysed with fear. For the first of a great many times, my will drove me where my body was unwilling to follow. In view of the evident and profound joy I got out of these climbs, my cousin soon realised that nothing was going to change my passion for the mountains, and that it would be wiser to educate it than forbid it. On his advice my mother eventually decided to entrust me to a good professional guide, who took me for a first trial on the Clocher and Clochetons de Planpraz. As we completed this short but quite difficult climb very quickly, he took me the same day up the giddy south-east face of the Brévent. During this first alpine season, I also climbed the Grands Charmoz and the Petite Aiguille Verte.

Back in Grenoble after these promising beginnings, I reckoned I was fit to lead climbs for myself without the help of any guide. As soon as spring came along, I managed to persuade my friend Georgette to come with me to try and climb the Dent Gérard, in the Trois Pucelles, by the ‘Grange Gully' route. Now without being really difficult, this climb, situated in a range of foothills near Grenoble, does demand a certain technique which I had not yet sufficiently mastered. It turned out to be one of the most dramatic of my career, and perhaps I have never come so close to death as I did on that day. We were very badly equipped, and one particular aspect of this state seems quite inexplicable to me today: although the Vercors range is formed of an extremely smooth and slippery limestone, we climbed in boots shod with clinker nails. This amounts to saying that we had about as much adherence to the rock as a horse trying to get up a very steep cobbled street!

The first bit, a traverse, was effected amid horrible scrapings of nails, which struck sparks from the rock as they skidded. Several times I was left hanging by my hands, and it was a miracle that I did not fall to the screes some sixty feet below me. When I finally arrived out of breath on a welcome ledge, a group of five climbers had been watching me with their hearts in their mouths offered to let me join on to their rope, no doubt thinking that it would be better to drag living bodies to the top of the mountain than to have to carry down dead ones. My vanity was somewhat wounded by this proposition, but when I thought how risky the first bit had been discretion seemed the better course. After this, with the assurance of the rope above me, I followed the others quite easily. Unfortunately their party, which was too big in the first place, contained three girls who were almost beginners. The leader was obliged to hoist them like sacks up each rope's length or, as climbers say, ‘pitch'. All this haulage took up a lot of time, and our centipede of a party advanced very slowly. It was already well on in the day when we arrived at the foot of two vertical cracks. The leader tackled the left-hand one, known as the ‘Dalloz' crack, which was reputed to be quite difficult. He was a good climber, and aided by his gym shoes a few cat-like movements brought him to the top of the pitch. But things took a turn for the worse when it came to getting up his heavy and clumsy companions. The crack went diagonally up across a vertical slab of rock as polished as a dance floor. The first girl did not know how to jam her hands and feet in the crack, and lost her hold as soon as she started to climb, swinging across the wall. After flailing around like a carp on a line for a few seconds, she let herself hang with limply swinging arms, so that the leader had to hoist a dead weight of a hundred and twenty-five pounds. After some minutes of sweating blood the poor fellow succeeded in getting the girl up to him, but was so exhausted by the exploit that he proved quite incapable of pulling up the next, whose abundant bosom and backside gave promise of a weighty matter. So the other man had to be got up to lend him a hand. All this took up so much time that the leader began to realise the risk of being caught by night on the crags.

Hoping to gain time, he asked me if I could climb the right-hand crack alone. This was called the ‘Sandwich' crack, and he assured me it was less difficult than the Dalloz. This sign of confidence in my abilities was balm to my pride, and without hesitating a second I started up the narrow, vertical chimney, without a rope from above. This pitch, though not really very difficult, none the less needs a bit more technique than I possessed at that time, and I was terribly impeded by my nailed boots, which kept slipping. However by means of desperate energy and grim determination I succeeded in wedging my way slowly upwards, panting like a seal, amid the horrid scraping of my boots. In this way I got quite close to a ledge, but unfortunately at this point the crack, which had been vertical, became slightly overhanging. In order to get up the last few feet I had to free my body from the crack as much as possible, and give up the relative safety of my wedging, in order to reach holds which would make possible the final move on to the ledge: what climbers call a ‘mantelshelf' movement. Pretty well exhausted by my efforts, I hesitated a long time before making up my mind. Finally, summoning up all my determination, I went at it with the energy of despair … but at the very moment my fingers gripped the coveted holds my feet shot out from under me and left me swinging from my hands. Never since that day have I experienced so vividly the feeling that my fingers would open, that I would inexorably be dashed to death on the rocks below. Only those unsuspected reserves that one learns of in the most desperate situations enabled me to make that saving mantelshelf.

Well, so I had got up: but we weren't much better off as a result. When you play at being guides, you've got to get your clients up too. How was I going to help my heavy, clumsy companion, who would not be able to climb an inch of the pitch on her own? It was a horrifying problem for an exhausted boy of less than thirteen.

Very fortunately for us, a small tree had been so good as to grow close to the top of the crack, and thanks to this we were able to get ourselves out of a scrape which otherwise had no apparent solution but a bivouac and a rescue party. Each time I managed to hoist Georgette a few inches by a ferocious burst of strength, I was able to block the rope from slipping back round the trunk of the tree. This would give me sufficient rest to recover the energy for another pull of a few inches, and so, inch by inch, despite the sobs and protests of my half-suffocated companion, I finally got her up to me. The difficulties were now all over, the other party was joined, and the descent effected uneventfully.