The Fall (39 page)

Something was different. I listened. The figures beside me shifted in their sleep. I sensed that something had changed in
the world, some factor of wind and temperature and humidity. Cautiously I slid a window open to look out.

“What’s that?” Jamie mumbled.

“Nothing. Sleep.”

Outside the van the night air was cold and dry. The cloud had vanished as completely as though it had never been there. Craning
upward I could see stars, thousands of them scattered like crystals of ice across the luminous sky. And something else: a
dense black wedge thrust up above us to cut out a third of the visible universe. For the first time, I was looking at the
North Face of the Eiger.

Two points of light gave some kind of perspective to the dark mass, like two lone stars in the midst of a great black nebula.
They were the lights from the railway tunnel that lies buried in the heart of the mountain.

I shivered, not from cold but from anticipation and fear. There was a lot to be afraid of. There was fear for Jamie and Ruth
and me. There was the irrational fear of the night and the rational fear of the Face itself. I slept in this fear, and dreams
merged with memory so that when I finally awoke in daylight I was unsure what I had seen and what we had said and done and
what I had dreamed. Ruth was still beside me. I touched her, as though to confirm the reality of her presence there. She moaned
and turned away, presenting the long snake of her spine toward me. But where Jamie had lain there was just a mess of sheets
and sleeping bags, and when I opened the door, I found that he was standing beside the van, staring up at the North Face through
binoculars. Without turning, he said, “There it is.”

I pulled on some clothes and climbed out. The morning was cold and clear, brilliant with frost. I stood beside him, looking
up at the Face. The features were familiar from a thousand photographs — the strata of the lower slopes, the rock bands, the
slopes of white that are the ice fields, the wedge of the Flatiron standing out from the Face like the prow of a ship, and,
high above all those, the funnel of white ice that is the Spider. From this angle the wall seemed to lean back from the vertical,
its steepness mollified by the presence of that dimension that is always missing from the photographs — the dimension of depth.
It looked almost as though it was inviting us in. A drift of vapor was wrapped around the West Ridge and across the summit
rocks like a chiffon scarf around the neck of an old, raddled woman. There was a flush of dawn, pink on the summit.

“What’ll we do, Jamie?” I asked.

He didn’t take his eyes from the binoculars. “Looks a piece of piss, doesn’t it?”

“About Ruth, I mean.”

“Of course, if the weather holds up, technically the thing is precisely that: a piece of piss.
Technically”'

“I asked about Ruth.”

“The second fact is that seen from down here it’s foreshortened. What you’ve got to bear in mind is that the Northeast Face
of the Ben would fit into that little number about four times. That’s
four
times. So if you do the Orion Face in a day, then doing this is going to take you four days.”

“Jamie.”

He looked around from his binoculars. “Mathematically speaking. The third point, of course, is that the weather won’t hold
up for four days in a row. It probably won’t hold up for three. Not unless we’re bloody lucky. Now let’s go and climb the
fucking thing, Rob.”

So we had some breakfast and packed our gear. Ruth watched us silently as we went over what we would take and what we would
leave. You want to take everything, just in case, but you have to compromise — only so much rope, only so many carabiners and
pitons and ice screws, only so much fuel and so much food and so much water. Everything measured out, the sacks put on to
feel their weight, sleeping bags argued over, one stove left behind, one entire meal abandoned.

Later that morning, the three of us took the mountain train up to Kleine Scheidegg. On the train there were mothers with their
babies, old men and women in their retirement, and young men and women in the first years of their parenthood. Our rucksacks
jammed the aisle, and the Japanese smiled and nodded as though somehow they understood. Jamie stared out the window, trying
to see up the hillside where bits of the Face could be seen through the trees. “We should have walked,” he said. “We should
be out on the hill.”

At Kleine Scheidegg Station, we clambered out among the holiday crowd. There was a young man with an alpenhorn on the steps
of the hotel. People stood beside him to have their pictures taken. Occasionally, as long as the price was right, he put the
horn to his mouth and blew a few notes. “Like a cow in labor,” Jamie remarked. There was a coin-operated telescope through
which you could peer at the North Face, but at the moment there was no notice to tell the watchers that there were climbers
in action. For the moment the greatest public stage in the whole theater of climbing was empty.

The tourists headed for the cafés and the souvenir shops. We picked up our sacks and set off to walk up the final stretch
of the line to Eigergletscher. Ruth would come with us and then go back down to the bunkhouse at Kleine Scheidegg to wait.
“Just a day or two,” Jamie said. “Or three,” he added, knowing that it might be four or five, but if it were any more than
that, then it would be forever.

The sky had that hard enamel blue that altitude gives it, a blue that promised what the forecast had claimed: three days of
settled weather, maybe four. Enough. We said our farewells on the narrow platform as one of the trains dragged itself up and
into the tunnel that burrows through the bowels of the mountain. Tourists stared out of the windows at us. “Now don’t you
cry,” Jamie told Ruth.

“I wasn’t,” she replied.

He smiled a bitter little smile. “We should be well into the Ramp by midday tomorrow. And we’ll probably bivvy again before
the Traverse of the Gods. Then we’ll climb out the next day. See you back down here Thursday evening. Day after tomorrow.
Could be late.”

What did she feel? Impossible to tell from her expression. She gave each of us a kiss and then turned back to go and get something
from her bag. Her camera, that battered Nikon that had accompanied her to Egypt and Libya and the Aïr. “A photo of the conquering
heroes,” she said with an ironic downturn of her mouth, and we stood there self-consciously for a moment while she aimed the
lens. The shutter fired, once, twice, three times, a patter of metal leaves. She gave a little smile and tucked the camera
away.

“You ready, Rob?” Jamie asked.

I agreed that I was, as ready as I’d ever be, and we turned away from her and went up the path that leads from the platform
around to the shoulder of the ridge. Just before we turned the corner into the shadow of the Face, I glanced back. I’d made
a bet with myself whether she’d still be there. I reckoned that she wouldn’t be, that she would have shrugged her shoulders
and gone back to the café. But she was still standing there when I looked, and when she saw me glancing around she waved.
The gesture seemed almost hieratic, a mixture of farewell and blessing.

It was cold in the shadow of the North Face, the deep cold of a place that has never seen the sun. I trudged along behind
Jamie. Below us the meadows sloped steeply down to the chalets of Alpiglen. Above us rose the ragged vertical mile of snow
and ice and rock that was the Eigerwand. On its far side the Northeast Ridge was touched with sunlight, but the whole concave
precipice of the Face itself was in shadow. Tamed by foreshortening, it leaned back almost in welcome, like an old whore who
knows her business and wants to make things as easy as possible at first because the real experience, the actual seduction,
the caresses and the climax, will not be as pleasurable as it might seem at the start.

There were some walkers on the path in front of us — a young couple with their two children. They stopped and watched as we
branched off for the foot of the wall. The adults pointed and talked to each other and explained to the kids. They were telling
a kind of fairy tale no doubt, of heroes going off to pit themselves against the Ogre. One of the children waved. Perhaps
he had been prompted by his parents. I raised a hand in acknowledgment, and the essential irrationality of the whole undertaking
crowded in on me. That little family would stroll down to Alpiglen in the sunshine and catch the train back to the town far
below. They’d return to their hotel, have dinner in comfort, sleep the sleep of the just. Their lives would not be any less
fulfilled for not having climbed the Eigerwand. I felt a mixture of emotion, the logic of fear and the illogic of an absurd
ebullience, as though there was nothing difficult ahead of us, no pain, no fear, nothing that would not succumb to Jamie’s
ability and my own brand of stubbornness. And Ruth was suddenly nowhere. It was going to be a piece of piss, Dewar.

At the first snow slope the going became easier, and we began kicking our way up toward the first pillar and the first rocks.
The family group had fallen into proportion now, a cluster of tiny and irrelevant figures behind and below, creatures of another
world. Ahead were the rising tiers of shattered rock and the swaths of white. We went on up, kicking steps in the old snow
and pausing occasionally to get our breath, while the meadows fell below us. Without fuss, without any drama, the Face enveloped
us, took us into its embrace, wrapped its cold arms around us, while the breeze whispered to us treacherous murmurs of reassurance.

“Over here!” Jamie called. He had found a boot. It was an old and wrinkled boot, a relic of some distant and nameless disaster.

It seemed to give him immense pleasure, this boot.
“Ist ein Boot!”
he exclaimed in a ghastly German accent.

“I think
Boot
is boat.”

“Ist ein Boot von Bergführer tot!”
he cried. The idea — the boot of a dead mountain guide — seemed to bring him some kind of delight. For a moment he toyed with
the idea of keeping his trophy — “Perhaps
ist der Boot von Hinterstoisser”
— but I convinced him to throw it away. As we continued, we came across other relics: old slings, a rusted tin can, an abandoned
glove, an ancient canvas rucksack. We were on a haunted mountainside; we were surrounded by ghosts and tripping over their
possessions.

At the Entry Chimney we put on helmets. The climbing was deceptively enjoyable and straightforward. “You okay, Dewar?” Jamie
called down. “V Diff all right for you?” The ledges were littered with fragments of rock. There were stretches of scree up
which we slithered and struggled. The Shattered Pillar passed easily, as well as the runnels and gullies that lead upward.
Everywhere there were the signs, the rusted pitons, the slings of bleached and brittle rope abandoned by climbers rappelling
off the Face. Eventually we reached the tunnel window, a metal shutter sunk into the rock through which you could escape into
the troglodyte world of Swiss railways. Below our heels, empty space had appeared, unfolding itself out of green alpine meadows
like a clever piece of trickery.

Jamie stood on the ledge and looked around with a thoughtful expression. “This is it,” he said. “This is where he turned back.”

He meant his father. I tried to picture Guy Matthewson there on that scrappy ledge, his nailed boots crunching over the shards
of rock, thrilling to the situation and no doubt disappointed that he couldn’t continue. Who had his companion been? A fellow
Englishman? A German? What had held them back? It would have been the second ascent if he had been successful. Perhaps his
partner wasn’t up to it. Perhaps the weather was too uncertain. Or did they just look upward at the rising tiers of rock above
them, at the runnels of ice and the dark grooves going on and on above their heads, and think that it was beyond them? Climbing
is all in the head, Jamie used to say. Most of it anyway. But not here, not on the face of the Ogre.

Jamie shrugged and patted me on the shoulder, as though I were a kid, as though we were kids together once more and there
was no Ruth. “Come on, lad.”