Conquistadors of the Useless (9 page)

The chimney did not yield without a real battle. A bit farther on, a sloping gangway we were traversing altered gradually into a kind of steep diagonal ramp. Although the rock looked loose and plastered with snow and ice, it seemed to offer plenty of holds, and all in all it did not appear particularly fearsome. I went up a few feet, clearing off the holds with my axe. As I went on, it became more and more difficult to let go with one hand even for a moment, and the axe was getting in my way. Finally I managed to jam it behind a flake of rock. Now I tried to insert a piton, but found I had almost run out of them. To go right back down to Gaston for some more would have wasted too much time; I had to find my own salvation. Finally I managed to get in a rather dubious-looking ice-peg. It would just have to do, and I went on again, greatly embarrassed by the ice on the holds. I was having to apply every ounce of technique I possessed. Inch by inch I was nearing a ledge: three feet more and I would be there, but there was ice all over everything. I tried everything I knew without success. I could feel that I was starting to tire, that I was trembling all over, that a few seconds more and I should be off. It was all or nothing. For lack of any better hold I lunged at a large icicle, and by a miracle it held! A few frantic movements and I was there.

A good sound piton as anchor enabled me to bring up Gaston in perfect safety. I watched him like a hawk, anxious to know if my difficulties were due to the actual terrain or to my own lack of technique. He came up slowly, frowning with the effort. As he fought his way up the crux I heard him mutter: ‘What the hell did he do here?' But thanks to his longer reach he finally found a good hold. When he finally stood beside me he said with a beatific smile: ‘That, my friend, was genuine VI.'
[6]
Shortly after this we reached a little snowy saddle where we were able to move around freely for the first time since leaving the hanging glacier.

No doubt a bivouac here would not have been too dramatic. We were now only a few yards from the coveted gully which it had given us so much trouble to reach. The great question now was whether we could get up it at all, or if we should be forced to try to climb down. I descended a few feet in order to turn a bulge of granite, and there I was at last. In front of me was a vertical frozen waterfall, and any idea of climbing it direct was out of the question except possibly at the cost of a whole day and innumerable pitons. But happily I saw at the first glance that on my side of the gully its confining wall was well-equipped with holds and cracks, and I gave a shout of joy to let Gaston know that all was going well. Without more ado I banged in a piton and cut a large step in the ice as high up as I could reach. Pulling shamelessly on the peg, I got my feet up on to the hold and then, by leaning back against the gully wall, I was able to free my hands to cut another step at waist level and a little pocket for my right hand. By a sort of chimneying movement I was able to get my feet up again, after which the whole performance could be repeated; and so it went on, slowly but surely.
[7]
A piton here and there made the whole thing almost easy, and it was just a question of proceeding carefully and in the right order.

After a while it began to get more complicated. The gully steepened up to the vertical, the left wall began to join it at a less acute angle and at the same time became smoother, so that it no longer helped. Was I to be beaten so close to the end? Some fifteen feet away on the other side of the gully I could see new possibilities of progress, but the problem was how to get there. The crossing of the vertical ice in the back of the couloir looked extreme, but as there was no alternative I had to go for it. Planting a last piton in the rock, I started to cut both steps and handholds with the hammer-axe, but I had only gone six feet when the rope jammed somewhere behind me, so I climbed back to the piton and shouted to Gaston to free it. It seemed as though he was never going to manage it. I began to freeze up through lack of exercise, and my teeth chattered as I contemplated the yawning gulf below my feet and mused on the pleasures of mountaineering. Finally Gaston's voice floated up to say that it was all right again, but the ice hadn't got any softer or less slippery in the meantime and its high angle made it very difficult to hold on, so I had to move with extreme delicacy. In order to get a proper grip on the handholds I had to take off my gloves, and my fingers were giving me hell. A few feet more and I began to feel most unsafe. I had never done such acrobatics on ice, and the piton was now a good six feet below and off to the side. I wouldn't have believed that an ice slope could be so difficult! I couldn't go on much longer like this: it was absolutely essential to get in an ice-peg. My left hand, with which I was holding on, was rapidly weakening with the cold. At last the peg seemed to be going in all right … but no, damn it, the ice was too shallow and it had brought up short against the underlying rock. Never mind, no time to waste, my hands were giving out altogether: quick, a karabiner … phew! Only just in time.

It took me more than a quarter of an hour to get the circulation going again in my poor hands, after which the rest of the traverse seemed mere child's play by comparison. Once again I jammed myself between the ice and the rock and hammered in a piton, hacking out a veritable platform to stand on. Then I hauled up the more enormous of our two rucksacks, and Gaston came up hand over hand on one of the ropes while I protected him with the other. Above us smooth slabs of rock formed an open corner with the ice slope. It all looked very difficult. The struggle was far from over, particularly as the light was fading and darkness was not going to make things any easier, but not for a moment did we contemplate a bivouac. I felt a great surge of confidence at having overcome the main obstacle of the wall. Nothing could stop us now!

But we should have to be getting on with it if we were not to be overtaken by night. I chopped furiously at the ice to try and find holds underneath, and luck was with us. By taking a few risks I quickly got up twenty feet, and then a welcome crack enabled me to hammer in a peg. The angle, while still steep, began to lessen slightly, and the holds which I hacked clear were better. Night had now fallen, but the stars diffused a dim light, and I was able to move faster all the same. Sensing that the col was not far away now I threw all my forces into the battle. A rocky spike gave us a last good belay, and after thirty or forty feet more of strenuous climbing the slope gave back. I cut my way through the cornice with a few blows of the axe, and with a last heave I mantelshelfed up on to a terrace so horizontal that I had forgotten that such things existed.
[8]
Gaston was quickly at my side, and, flinging our arms round each other, we shouted our joy to the moon like a pair of madmen.

Philistines may think that we were madmen indeed to go through such suffering and danger to arrive at this lonely spot. What did you hope to find up there, they may ask. Glory? Nobody cares about young fools who waste their best years in meaningless combats far from the eyes of the world. Fortune? Our clothes were in rags, and next day we would go back down to a life of slaving for the barest essentials. What we sought was the unbounded and essential joy that boils in the heart and penetrates every fibre of our being when, after long hours skirting the borders of death, we can again hug life to us with all our strength. Nietzsche defined it thus: ‘The secret of knowing the most fertile experiences and the greatest joys in life is to live dangerously'.

The conquest of the north face of the Col du Caiman was my first really great climb. Nothing that I had done up to then had called out every ounce of physical and moral force in my being, by which experience alone mountaineering is raised above the level of mere sport and enables us to discover unguessed-of forces in ourselves. I had been up all sorts of mountains, big and small, easy and difficult, but I had never really tried to rationalise what it was that drew me towards them. Like Mallory, I climbed them ‘because they are there'. When all was said and done I climbed as I skied, simply because I liked it, and the main difference between the two sports seemed to me to be that one was a question of going uphill and the other down. I am sure that the majority of climbers seek no further justification for their sport. Of course I had always known that mountaineering involved grave dangers, and on more than one occasion I had seen how thin was the borderline between life and death. But anyone who is prepared to ski straight down the steepest slopes at flat-out speed also runs grave risks, and several of my racing friends had flattened themselves against rocks and trees.

But on the icy flanks of the Caiman I had had to employ all my resources for hours on end, and had only just avoided disaster on at least two occasions. Never before had I given so much of myself or run such risks. Safely back in the valley I remained profoundly affected by the experience, which seemed of a different nature from all I had known up to then.

I began to question the unconscious motives which had impelled me to prefer certain books and certain courses of action. I began to realise that the mountain is no more than an indifferent wasteland of rock and ice with no other value than what we choose to give it, but that on this infinitely virgin material each man could mould, by the creative force of the spirit, the form of his own ideal. ‘There is not just one but a hundred different kinds of mountaineering,' said Guido Lammer. For some, as Henry de Ségogne has suggested, ‘the flanks of the sterile peaks become the ideal of an aesthetic, even an embodiment of divinity'. For others they are ‘simply the background of their favourite sport', for others still ‘a gigantic opportunity to flatter their own vanity', and for yet others, like Maurice Herzog, ‘a bit of all that and something more besides': one of the few doors the modern world has left open on adventure, one of the last ways out of the armour-plating of humdrumness in which civilisation imprisons us, and for which we are not all very well adapted.

From that time on, my passion for the hills took a more precise direction, and bit by bit I worked out for myself an ethic and a philosophy of mountaineering. But, in practice, the risk and suffering involved in picking the roses that grow on the borders of the impossible call for exceptional moral strength. Doubtless, for some, it is always present; but for others it can only be summoned at rare intervals and in exceptional and perhaps fortuitous circumstances, and it is to this latter breed that I belong. In fact it was to be many years before I again committed myself to a fight as total as that which won the narrow ice-gully of the Col du Caiman.

Despite the farm work which took up far more of my time than I could have wished, I got in a number of technically difficult climbs during the course of the following seasons, both on rock and ice. Some of these, carried out with a variety of companions, were repetitions of routes which then had a big reputation, others were first ascents, though not of major importance.

After his short and unhappy try at farm labouring, Rébuffat had found a job better suited to his tastes and capacities. The Central School of the J.M., which had moved to Montroc, close to Chamonix, had taken him on as a civilian instructor. He enjoyed quite a lot of spare time, and occasionally we managed to do a big route together: among others, in 1944, the east-north-east buttress of the Pain de Sucre, now become a classic, and more especially the north face of the Aiguille des Pèlerins, one of the last big unclimbed faces in the district. Some of these ascents were really quite hard by the standards of the day. It must be remembered that equipment was still primitive by comparison with what is now normal – for example we used to climb everything up to grade V in enormous nailed boots which had to be taken off and stuffed in our rucksacks for the hardest pitches, for which we wore gym shoes scarcely any better suited to the job. Ropes were of hemp of such poor quality in those wartime days that even when doubled they would rarely stand up to falls of more than about twelve feet. Pitons were very limited in variety and the use of wooden wedges quite unknown, so that a good half of the cracks one came across were no use for artificial climbing. And all this to say nothing of the various lesser aids since developed, such as twelve-point crampons, duralumin karabiners, light-weight bivouac equipment, étriers, head-torches, and so on.
[9]

Taking everything into account, our tools and methods were much closer to those of the original alpine pioneers of the golden age than to those of the modern sixth-grade climber with his muscles full of vitamins and even dope, his feet encased in special boots designed to take advantage of the tiniest holds, tied on to a nylon rope able to withstand the most incredible loadings, not hesitating to drill the rock if necessary and even, thanks to ingenious pulley systems, to get his sack hoisted by groups of friends waiting at the foot of the face – because this is really what we have come to.

But in spite of their difficulties and their scale, none of the climbs I did between 1943 and 1945 gave me the same feeling of total commitment I had known on the Col du Caiman. This may have been partly due to the gradual amassing of technique and experience which, by increasing my possibilities of success, made the uncertainty of adventure harder to recapture. But the real reason was probably that my morale was insufficient to impel me towards the most heroic exploits of all. It was not as though they did not exist, either in the form of the most daring ascents that had already been done, or in new types of problem. Several narrow and indeed almost miraculous escapes were certainly responsible for my relative lack of audacity during those seasons. They had the effect of shaking my nerve and reminding me of the need for caution, which my youth and natural impetuosity had tended to make me forget. The disappearance of some of my dearest friends also played its part in this semi-cautiousness. Human nature is full of contradictions. My spirit longed for dangers and ‘the toil without which existence would be a dreary and boring thing, well-calculated to make you disgusted with life',
[10]
yet my animal instincts made me fight shy of them.