Conquistadors of the Useless (29 page)

At dawn, while we were making tea, the Germans sent a man down on reconnaissance, and soon afterwards the news spread along the ridge that he had made contact with the survivors. It seemed they were at the top of the Spider, and an attempt was to be made to hoist them up without further delay. It looked as though providence was about to recompense the generosity which had assembled so many men here on an apparently hopeless mission by seeing that their efforts were not in vain. But although there was now a hope of saving some of the party we were still very far from the actual realisation. Many problems remained to be overcome, and the key factor was the weather. In mountains anything is possible while this is in your favour, but once it turns against you everything becomes a hundred times more difficult. In fact the prevailing signs gave cause for both hope and fear. The previous day's icy gale had dropped, and it had even become quite warm, but by contrast the blue sky had given way to a heavy ceiling of cloud. At present it was well above us, but it looked so black and menacing that we could hardly doubt it would snow eventually. Our success or failure depended mainly on the respite it allowed us.

Eventually Friedli sent down the young German climber Hellepart, chosen for his herculean physique and strength. He was armed with a walky-talky so that he could keep in touch with those at the winch about things as they happened. After the steep summital snow slopes he continued without incident down the gullies and chimneys above the Spider, only the occasional vertical step slowing up his progress. The cable was wound round a wooden drum which made it easy to regulate his speed at will. Every three hundred feet he had to be stopped so that another length of cable could be bolted on.

After about a thousand feet Hellepart announced that he was getting close to one of the survivors who seemed to have climbed much higher than the others, whom he could hear but not see. Two hundred feet lower down he reached the man, who turned out to be the Italian Corti. Incredibly enough he was still fairly fit. Hellepart gave him various injections, then loaded him on his back in a special ‘litter' harness.

Theoretically we now only had to turn our windlass to get the two men up again, but Friedli was not sure whether it would be highly-geared enough to overcome the friction of the cable against the wall, and made us prepare a haulage track along the two hundred feet of crest. He was soon justified. A few fruitless efforts showed that the windlass was not powerful enough to do the job on its own. Without any signs of emotion he made us lay the cable along the prepared track, then attached haulage loops to it every twenty feet by means of ingenious couplings which could be taken off and put on again in a moment. Each loop was long enough for four or five men, so that in the end more than thirty of us could pull on the cable at once. But despite the enormous force thus deployed we did not succeed in budging it an inch at the first trial. Presumably one of the bolts linking the sections of cable had got jammed in a crack, which made the situation rather serious. Our fine optimism began to give way to a slight panic. If we couldn't hoist the two men on the cable we should be forced to abandon Corti, and would probably have great difficulty in getting Hellepart back up with ropes tied end to end.

Reinforcements were called up, and one of the Bernese with a stentorian voice directed our efforts. The better co-ordination of effort thus achieved finally did the trick, and after stretching alarmingly the cable began to come in. Each time we hauled in twenty feet or so Friedli would hold the cable on the winch while we moved our couplings forward, then the manoeuvre would be repeated again. Twelve hundred feet of cable at twenty feet a time represents a long job, particularly as Hellepart's enormous muscular efforts obliged him to rest quite often. It took more than an hour and a half to get the two men to the base of the final slopes, but thenceforward we knew that nothing could stop us recovering them. A life was to be saved against all reason by the generous impulses which still survive in the hearts of men in this age of steel.

Quite soon after, the weary Hellepart was able to set down his burden on the arête. Corti had stood up to his eight-day ordeal in the most extraordinary way, though at first his emaciated face and contracted pupils were rather horrifying. He was nowhere seriously frostbitten, and could not only stand up on his own but also chatter and gesticulate excitedly. Unfortunately it was impossible to extract any clear picture of the situation from him, and in fact he seemed more interested in whether this would be counted as the first Italian ascent of the Eigerwand than in the fate of his companions. He incessantly contradicted himself, but it did appear that the Italian Longhi was still alive somewhere on the Traverse of the Gods. This tallied with the information given us by Cassin and Mauri, who had been able to exchange a few words with him from the north-west ridge the previous evening. The fate of the two Germans remained a mystery. So far as one could make out Corti had climbed with them as far as the top of the Spider, at which point he had fallen off and had been left by the others with some bivouac kit pretty well at the place where Hellepart had found him.

Since Hellepart had seen no trace of any other party, it seemed that the Germans must have fallen off. Whatever had occurred, somebody else now had to go down as far as the foot of the Spider to look for them and to help Longhi. Friedli and Gramminger asked me if I was still willing to do this, and I accepted at once.

The cloud ceiling, which had stayed high all morning, was now descending, and I put on all my clothes in case of bad weather. Somebody wedged a crash-helmet on my head to protect me from falling stones, and the walky-talky was strapped on my chest. Then the indefatigable Friedli gave me a bit of advice on the gentle art of giving injections and I was off down the snow slope, accompanied by the encouragements of my friends. At the point where the angle changed to the vertical I could see grooves worn nearly an inch deep in the bare limestone by the action of the cable. Here there was a halt of several minutes while a new length of cable was bolted on, then the descent started again, down the same gullies and chimneys I had climbed with the energy of desperation ten years before.

I had never expected to see the place again, but nothing seemed to have changed. Snow and verglas coated the outward-sloping holds in just the same sort of way, and menacing clouds were shrouding the summit. As snowflakes began to drift past I relived those moments with amazing intensity. Even Lachenal's chaff came back to me, and I could see him emerging from a chimney, supple as a cat, his eyes shining with malicious pleasure as he called out:

‘Well, Mr Guide, did you find it an interesting climb?'

All of a sudden the cable stopped. I called the summit to find out what was happening but got no reply – instead, there was a conversation in German between the summit and Kleine Scheidegg. Finally the summit called me:

‘Hallo Terray, hallo Terray. Are you receiving me? Over.'

I replied:

‘Hallo, summit. Receiving you loud and clear. Why have you stopped me here? Are you receiving me? Over.'

They didn't seem to be able to hear me. There were calls in German and in French, with long silences in between. The thing seemed to be going on indefinitely. In my bosun's chair I yoyoed quite comfortably at the end of the line, but time began to weigh rather heavily. For something to do I pendulumed to the left in order to have a look at the chimney where I had got cramp bridging in 1947, and even succeeded in spotting the crack where the final piton was hammered in. After a few swings back and forth, however, I noticed that the cable was grinding heavily against the rock, and suddenly its quarter-inch diameter began to seem rather thin.

Snowflakes continued to waver past, and occasionally a small slide from the slopes above would envelope me in its cloud. Finally I heard a voice:

‘Hallo Terray, hallo Terray. This is Scheidegg. Are you receiving me? Over.'

In the course of the long conversation which followed I gathered that the radio on the summit was still transmitting perfectly but that it could no longer receive. Occasionally vibrations came down the cable, or I would be lowered or hoisted a few inches. To pass the time away I shouted to a party which could be seen on the north-west arête, but in reply came cries from the depths below me. It was Longhi, still hoping against hope.

The chances of saving him were getting less and less with every minute that went by. Soon it would be four o'clock, and the weather had now definitely broken. It was impracticable to do anything more that afternoon, in any case. If conditions got really bad it would be not only unreasonable but humanly impossible to put enough men on the Spider to carry Longhi across the thousand feet from his present ledge to a point below the winch, and then get them all up again. Even in fine weather such an operation would take a whole day at least. We had enough good climbers to make the thing possible, and I felt sure that, given a sporting chance with the weather, several of us would be willing to spend several days on the face to save Longhi from the death he had so courageously resisted. But in a storm it would be another matter; with the best will in the world we should be powerless. Presently the cable tightened and I began to walk back up the face. Friedli had decided that to descend farther without either visibility or radio contact would be too dangerous, and was hauling me back again. Soon Tom was greeting me on the ridge.

It was now after four o'clock, and I was surprised to see that Corti was still there. Despite the care he had received he seemed much more subdued than at the moment of his arrival, and it was obvious that if possible he should be spared the ordeal of a ninth bivouac. Still excited from my abortive adventure and somewhat exasperated at this display of Germanic ponderousness, I proceeded to shake everybody up in no uncertain terms. Gramminger, Friedli and I drew up a plan of campaign. Friedli's Swiss team was to remain where it was, ready to start operations very early if conditions justified the attempt. The rest of the party was to get Corti down the same evening and come back up at dawn, weather permitting.

A few minutes later Corti was strapped on my back. At the top of the north-west arête we rolled him in sleeping bags, then lashed him to a special stretcher. The first part of the descent was awkward. The cables had remained on the summit, and the stretcher had to be lowered on a couple of two-hundred-foot ropes. Each time they ran out we planted new pitons and started again. Unfortunately the going consisted of outward-sloping ledges of rotten limestone plastered with ice, on which lay a blanket of crumbly snow. Worse still, the lie of the land forced us to traverse diagonally rightwards rather than go straight down. It didn't look in the least spectacular, but in fact it was really delicate and called for great experience in the art of rope management. In order to make any speed on such ground every member of the party would have had to be completely at ease, which was far from being the case. Most of them were all gripped-up and could only move with extreme care for all their good will. Some of them were in fact more of a hindrance than a help, and I half dreaded another accident. One Polish party did in fact slip, and were only saved thanks to Tom's quick reactions.

After a few pitches the five or six best climbers took charge of the whole operation, and from then on we did succeed in establishing a certain method. As we got lower the falling snow became mixed with rain, so that before long we were all soaked to the skin. Just before nightfall Friedli's team caught up with us. After helping for a short time they carried on down. They had rightly thought that after another bivouac in such conditions they would not be in a fit state to do anything very effective the next morning, so they had left their gear in position and gone down to sleep at Eigergletscher. If the weather changed during the night the idea was to go up early with fresh reinforcements. It grew darker and darker. The wind blew with increasing violence, whirling the snow up into our faces and blinding us. To have gone on any longer would have been to run the risk of an almost certain accident.

Gramminger and I, who had directed the whole descent between us, decided to stop at the first half-reasonable site. We were all worn out from two days and a night of hard work, low temperatures and high wind, and this second bivouac was extremely trying. None of us had eaten much for a long time, and all were sodden. The majority were short of bivouac kit into the bargain. After we had anchored Corti to a vaguely level section of ridge I found myself all alone beside him, exposed to the full force of the gale. All the others, of whom Tom had been the last to leave, had taken shelter where they could find it. After an hour or so Corti dozed off and I crept away to look for some shelter of my own, but after less than half an hour curled up in a little hollow I heard him cry out heart-rendingly. Waking alone on the ridge amid the hurly-burly of the storm, no doubt he thought himself abandoned. I went back and gave him something to drink, then, frozen to the marrow, returned to my wretched shelter. No sooner had I got there than more cries called me back to the stretcher, and so it continued.

At daybreak several more parties were seen climbing towards us. By the time they reached us we were ready to start, and the lowering began again at once. The newcomers were mostly elderly guides. Unfortunately none of them had any crampons and consequently they were not really much use, with the exception of one whose amazing agility made up for his lack of equipment and even for his grumpy nature. The snowed-up ledges began to give place to a series of vertical and overhanging walls, a formation which could hardly have been more awkward for the diagonal lowering of a loaded stretcher. It was particularly tough on the rescuer harnessed to the stretcher as its guide, but fortunately the excellent guide Hans Schlunegger soon arrived and performed this task to perfection. Next we met a likeable party from Chateau d'Oex, one of whom was the well-known climber Betty Favre. They had brought thermos flasks of hot drinks with them which gave us renewed strength. Soon we were literally surrounded with helpers from all over the place, and at last Friedli and his group arrived and took turns on the rope, thereby speeding our progress considerably. In spite of this it was three o'clock in the afternoon before we finally got to Eigergletscher.