‘I’d rather not think about it,’ Ray said and stopped smiling.
‘Any blood?’ I asked. Ray hastily dropped the trousers with a fastidious gesture. I laughed.
‘You shouldn’t joke about it,’ he said shaking his head.
‘It’s the only thing we can do,’ I said seriously. I threw the coiled abseil ropes into space and watched them knot themselves into a tangled mass on the first ledge they hit. I cursed silently under my breath.
As I tried to untangle the ropes my eye caught sight of a chillingly familiar shape and colour half-buried in the rubble. I swung forward and reached towards the ivory white bone, feeling squeamish. Then I was laughing loudly; too loudly.
‘What is it?’ Ray called and I held the bone up towards him. His expression changed immediately.
‘A chicken drumstick,’ I said. ‘I thought …’
‘I can guess,’ Ray said.
As we packed the tent in the meadow nestling at the foot of the Eiger we monitored the progress of the French climbers. They were moving with incredible speed. They climbed the entire route in twelve hours, reaching the summit at seven o’clock in the evening. We were flabbergasted and felt a little aggrieved at our own snail-like progress on the verglas-covered rubble of the lower face – the easiest part of the route. Apparently the climbers reported that one of the trickiest sections was a heavily iced section near the Hinterstoisser Traverse. It was encouraging to learn that the rest of the climb seemed to have dried out far better than we could have hoped for. There was no mention of heavy icing in the Exit Cracks, which we took as a good sign. The weather now seemed to be settled and warm. Luck seemed to be on our side.
‘They must be good to climb that fast,’ I said to Ray as we climbed up the grassy slopes leading to the railway station at Kleine Scheidegg.
‘There are a lot of them about.’
‘Makes me feel a bit silly, thinking this is such a big deal.’
‘It is a big deal – for us. And that’s all that matters. Hell, I’m not even sure I would want to climb it in a day, even if I could.’
‘No, me neither,’ I agreed. ‘It would be a waste of the whole experience, wouldn’t it?’
‘Exactly,’ Ray said. ‘I want to enjoy it all. I’m looking forward to bivouacking at the Death Bivi or on the Traverse of the Gods. I don’t want to just charge past it.’
‘Yeah, I know. It reminds me of the time I was in the Louvre looking at the Mona Lisa,’ I said. Ray looked confused. ‘There were few people around and I kept staring at it, trying to like it,’ I continued.
‘Did you?’
‘Not much, no. I didn’t get the enigmatic smile at all. She just seemed slightly disapproving, even bored. I wondered how long she had sat there while Leonardo did his stuff. I knew she had a name. She was real. Mona Lisa Gherardini, wife of a Florentine nobleman …’
‘Gherardini?’ Ray said. ‘Same as the climber?’
‘Well, yes, I suppose so, but I doubt they were related,’ I said. ‘Apparently her husband didn’t like it and refused to pay for it.’
‘So he had taste then, did he?’
‘Yeah, maybe. Anyway as I stood there gawping at it I imagined Leonardo having tantrums and starting all over and throwing his paints around and minions in his studio scurrying about keeping their heads down, and her worrying about whether her bum was too big …’
‘You’re a philistine,’ Ray chuckled.
‘Not at all, I was just staring at it, thinking of its significance today and how she would never have known she would be immortalised in such a way for so many centuries. She was probably bored out of her brains and dying for a pee, hence the lopsided smile.’ Ray raised his eyebrows as we approached the station.
‘Anyway,’ I continued, ‘while I was having these deep thoughts about a hundred Japanese tourists rushed up to the Mona Lisa brandishing their cameras and camcorders paparazzi-style. Hundreds of flash lights went off and three minutes later they wheeled away and zoomed off like a flock of sheep to photograph something else. I was stunned. I mean, I might have not been getting much out of it, but at least I was trying.’
‘And that’s why you don’t want to do the Eiger in a day, is it?’
‘Sort of,’ I said. ‘I want time to absorb it all. I want to remember the stories, and the people, and what they went through. I want to touch history – if only for a moment.’
‘Yeah, but there’s a fine line between doing that and spending so damn long on it that it absorbs us,’ Ray said as we were suddenly surrounded by a horde of Japanese tourists chattering busily as they streamed off the train from Grindelwald, snapping photographs as they were marshalled by their tour guide straight into a restaurant for lunch. I don’t think they noticed the Eiger.
As we stepped from the train in early afternoon sunshine I saw a figure on the platform.
‘Simon?’ I said cautiously and the man turned round.
‘Joe! How are you? Good to see you. I heard you were here,’ Simon Wells said in his familiarly enthusiastic way.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Oh, we’re making a film about climbing the Eiger.’
‘Who’s we?’
‘It’s for Channel 4. Chameleon Films are doing it for them.’
‘What’s your role then?’
‘I’m the producer. You two look as if you’ve been climbing.’
‘Yes, we just had a look at the lower face. It’s coming into condition nicely. We’re going to check the meteo at the guides office now and see if we’ll have a weather window.’
‘Oh well, good luck, and here – take my mobile number and stay in touch. We must have a beer some time. Look us up at Kleine Scheidegg.’
‘So when are you boys thinking of going up?’
‘Oh, we’ll talk to Hanspeter first. He’s one of three guides we’ve employed. He climbed the Eiger when they made that Eiger live video last year. He’s done it several times so he’ll know what conditions are like and we’ll go on his say-so.’
‘Right, well we’ll stay in touch then. We could do with some inside knowledge.’
‘That’s a bit of luck,’ I said to Ray as we wandered up to the guides office and I explained that I had known Simon for nearly fifteen years. He lived near me in Sheffield, working as a researcher and film producer for Chameleon Films in Leeds. I’d always had a soft spot for Simon. He was a genuine, sensitive, caring person which seemed oddly out of fashion nowadays. He also had an enquiring and creative mind and was wonderfully argumentative.
‘But they might get in the way; five people, and helicopter re-supply and all the shenanigans that go with filming a climb.’
‘Well, we’ll just liaise with them and slot in before or after they set off. But the info we’ll get from the guides will be invaluable. They’ll know where belay stations are, which is the best line, and they’ll have intimate knowledge of the face. Brilliant.’
There was also good news posted in the window of the guides office – a stable weather forecast. The synoptic charts showed steadily improving weather, offering the prospect of five clear sunny days. I felt enthusiastic about attempting the face as soon as possible. We no longer felt alone.
The following morning we returned to the Hintisberg and, to my delight, I noticed that Ray’s climbing had improved immeasurably. The recce had obviously cleared out a lot of skeletons from his cupboard. We sat in the warm sunshine at the foot of the crag gazing at the Eiger through our binoculars.
‘You know, kid, I think we should go for it.’
‘What?’ Ray said, looking startled. ‘I thought we were going to do the Mittellegi Ridge first?’
‘The guides said it was out of condition. There’s too much powder up there. We can’t just spend this good weather rock climbing.’
‘I don’t know,’ Ray said hesitantly.
‘If we go up on the first train tomorrow we’ll have all day to reach the Swallow’s Nest bivi. We can stop there for the night and k
eep an eye on the weather. If it’s good and we’re happy about it we’ll head up the next day. We’ve got to do it some day. Anyway I’m sick of staring at the bloody thing all the time like some Sword of Damocles hanging there waiting to fall.’
‘I suppose you’re right, although I don’t like the simile,’ Ray agreed. ‘How much further was it from your high point to the Swallow’s Nest?’
‘A couple of hours, three at the most, depending on the verglas.’
‘Remember there’s no fixed rope on the Difficult Crack,’ Ray pointed out. ‘In wet, cold conditions it can sometimes be the hardest bit of climbing on the face, especially first thing in the morning.’
‘We’ll just take it one day at a time, eh? We can back off whenever we like.’
‘Yeah, you’re right,’ Ray smiled at me. ‘It’s a bit sudden, that was all. You caught me off guard.’
‘You do want to do it?’ I asked and stared hard at him.
‘Yeah, I do. Come on, let’s go down, buy some food and sort our kit out.’
‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘I just want to ring Pat and tell her our plans. I told her that I would keep in touch.’
‘Won’t it worry her unnecessarily?’ Ray asked.
‘No, she’s pretty understanding about this sort of thing,’ I said. Pat was encouraging when I told her our plans but I could hear the well-disguised concern in her voice. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll look after each other. I’ll ring when we get down.’
When we returned to the chalet laden down with hill food supplies Frau Alice Steuri was waiting for us in the hallway. She was a kindly lady who had looked disturbed when we had unloaded the mass of climbing gear from the car on our arrival ten days earlier. Ray had booked the room through the Internet knowing nothing about Frau Steuri, although I had mentioned to him that it was a famous name in Grindelwald mentioned frequently in The White Spider.
There was a Fritz Steuri senior, an outstanding Grindelwald guide and ski racer, who, in the company of two other guides, Samuel Brawand and Fritz Amatter, had guided a young Japanese climber, Yuko Maki, on the first ascent of the Mittellegi Ridge in 1921. Years later in 1936 when Max Sedlmayr and Karl Mehringer had been swallowed by the prolonged storm that was to trap and eventually kill them during the first attempt on the Eigerwand, Fritz Steuri had accompanied Ernst Udet, one of Germany’s ace pilots of the First World War, on an aerial search of the face.
In a strange twist of fate Udet had first been introduced to mountain flying in 1928 by Dr Arnold Fanck during the filming of The White Hell of Piz Palu. In the film script Udet had to fly close to an icy mountain face to try to locate a stranded party of climbers and so effect a successful rescue.
Seven years later Udet and Steuri were doing it for real but there was no question of a rescue. They were simply looking for bodies. Max Sedlmayr and Karl Mehringer had last been seen on Sunday 25 August 1935 during a break in the weather on the fifth day of their climb. They had been seen moving slowly up the immense shield of the Second Ice Field towards the distinctive arête called the Flat Iron.
The gale had returned with a vengeance. The men disappeared from sight. The guides watching their movements knew why the two men were continuing up, despite four bitterly cold bivouacs exposed to avalanches, rock-fall and the full fury of the wind. The ground below the pitifully weakened men had been turned into a terrible trap, constantly swept by avalanches and stone-fall. The rock bands were either cascading waterfalls or plastered in snow and ice. Their only hope was to try and fight their way to the top or climb until they died.
A rescue attempt organised by Sedlmayr’s brother was abandoned two days later at the foot of the wall. Nothing could be heard of the climbers – no calls for help echoed down from the wall. They saw nothing from the summit and the ramparts of the west ridge. Heinrich Harrer wrote:
A gale whipping against the rocks, the thunder of avalanches, the splash of waterfalls, in which the staccato rattle of falling stones mingled shrilly – these were the melody of the Eiger’s Face, the funeral organ-voluntary for Max Sedlmayr and Karl Mehringer – no human sound interrupted the grim voice of the mountain.
Three weeks later on 19 September 1935 Udet flew his plane to within 60 feet of the face in an bold display of flying skill. Acting as the spotter, Fritz Steuri saw one of the men still standing upright in the snow, frozen to death, near the top of the Flat Iron at a point ever since known as Death Bivouac.
It was always thought that the Death Bivouac was the highest point that the two men reached, but in 1952 the Viennese climber Karl Reiss and his companion Siegfried Jungmeir tried to force a direct line up to the Spider from Death Bivouac. It was thought that no one had tried this line before so they were baffled to find some ancient pitons on the extremely steep rock of the central pillar. They could only have been left by Max Sedlmayr and Karl Mehringer. The traverse across the Third Ice Field to the Ramp would have been suicidal. To climb directly up towards the bottom lip of the Spider was hardly a better choice. They would have been virtually blinded, in constant danger of being swept away, and contending with some of the hardest technical climbing attempted on the Eiger during the following thirty years.
It is remarkable to think how expert these first suitors of the wall were, considering the unendurable conditions they must have experienced during their attempt to escape, trapped directly beneath the Spider, which at the time would have been swept by a constant stream of avalanches and rocks. The pitons testify to the incredible strength and tenacity of Max Sedlmayr and Karl Mehringer. This direct line was only eventually climbed by the famous joint British and German team completing the winter ascent of the Harlin Direct route in 1966.
Max Sedlmayr’s body, swept from the face by avalanches, was found the following year during the search for the remains of the Hinterstoisser party. Karl Mehringer’s was not found until 1962 when his desiccated body emerged from the Second Ice Field twenty-seven years after his death. Fourteen years later, on 21 June 1976, a Czech team came across a cigarette tin. Inside was a last message from these incredibly brave climbers, probably written by Mehringer, since he had misspelled his companion’s name.
Bivouac place on 21/8/35. Max Sedelmajr, Karl Mehringer.
Munich H.T.G. (High Tour Group)
This weathered note, written in pencil on yellowed paper, must have been an eerie reminder from the past for the two young Czech climbers.
That date – 21 August – was the date of Max Sedlmayr and Karl Mehringer’s first bivouac on the face. The next day they were observed slowly climbing the 300-foot rock band separating them from the lower edge of the First Ice Field. By late afternoon they had reached a cramped bivouac ledge at the upper rim of the ice field, having spent the day ducking and sheltering behind their rucksacks from heavy fusillades of stone-fall.
On 23 August they tackled the second rock band, a long and arduous climb, so technically difficult that it forced them to haul their rucksacks – a time-consuming process. The watchers below may not have realised it at the time, but Sedlmayr and Mehringer were putting on a virtuoso display of climbing skill, despite their slow progress. Having overcome the second band the two men headed towards the top left-hand end of the Second Ice Field. Again they were battered by stone-fall and ice fragments and forced to stop frequently and take shelter, hiding behind rocks and holding their rucksacks protectively above their heads.
Three days of climbing and they were less than halfway up the wall. A curtain of cloud descended on the face. That night the storm broke about them in a chaos of thunder cracks, hailstones, rain, snow and tremendous blasts of wind. The next day, Saturday the 24th, the storm continued unabated and there was no sight of the climbers. The night had been murderously cold down in the valley; what must it have been like enduring their fourth bivouac with such rudimentary equipment?
On Sunday the 25th they were spotted during a break in the weather, inching their way towards the Flat Iron, climbing towards a death they probably realised was inevitabl
e.
Three years later, in the summer of 1938, just one month before the first ascent of the wall, two Italian climbers, Bartolo Sandri and Mario Menti, were swept to their deaths in a storm – probably from a point close to where Mehringer had left his pencilled bivouac note. Once again Fritz Steuri led a search party and found Sandri’s body at the foot of the face. Menti’s body was extracted from a deep crevasse a few days later.
Years later, when Claudio Corti was rescued from high on the face by a winch cable rescue system, Harrer mentions that Hermann Steuri, another Grindelwald guide, had been instrumental in developing the steel cable rescue technique. It was the first successful rescue by cable from the face, although in tragic circumstances. Claudio Corti and his companion Stefano Longhi had started up the wall in early August 1957. At some point, probably near the Hinterstoisser Traverse, they had joined forces with the German team of Gunter Northdurft and Franz Mayer. The Germans had dropped a rucksack of provisions and Northdurft was feeling sick so the strengthened party moved as a foursome until they made a fatal route-finding error high on the face.
Mistakenly climbing 300 feet higher than the Traverse of the Gods, they attempted a far more difficult traverse line across to the edge of the Spider. Stefano Longhi fell over 100 feet from the traverse to hang helplessly in space. Despite three hours’ labour the two Germans and Corti were unable to haul Longhi back up to the traverse.
He was roped down to a small ledge. Corti lowered his bivouac sack and some provisions and assured his friend that he and the Germans would race for the summit and alert the rescue services. High above the Spider near where the Exit Cracks angled up towards the summit ridge Corti was hit on the head by a rock and fell 100 feet. The Germans gave Corti their only bivouac sack since he was concussed and unable to continue. They secured him to a small ledge atop a pillar of rock. They climbed to the summit despite a thunderstorm but then died of exhaustion while descending the west flank that night. They were found four years later in 1961 still linked by their ropes, lying side by side, less than 30 minutes’ walk from the safety of the Eiger Gletscher station. Disorientated and tired from the stormy descent, they had sat down to wait for morning and fallen asleep for ever.