The Fall (43 page)

There was wind sound and snow sound, the battering of air around the cliffs, the sweep of snow streaming over the rocks all
around me. I tried to see down, but Jamie was out of sight, around the angle of rock. “The rope’s jammed!” I screamed at his
invisible figure.

The sky went dark. It was as though I had said something to offend the monster of the place. Snow came down at me like a snake,
hissing with cold. The snake grew, darkened, and engulfed me with its jaws. There was a tremor in the darkness like a great
animal shaking itself. I prayed. Quite who I was praying to was not clear — the gods of the mountains, perhaps, the Ogre himself,
maybe. Spread-eagled on the rock, perched feet above my fragile piton with the snow streaming over me, I prayed that I would
stay on. Just that. I prayed that my picks would stay notched into the ice, that my claws would grip, and that I would stay
on. Prayer and fear are intimately linked. The snow pummeled me, swept over me, through me. “Please let me stay on,” I prayed.
“Please,” I begged. “Please.”

My left hand was snatched from the rock, and then my right. I went over backward into space, plummeted down, hitting the rock,
slithering down a short slope, plunging free. I remember taking it as a blessed relief. I no longer needed to struggle, no
longer needed to hope. There was the simple thought: All this will stop. Somewhere, somehow it will come to an end. And then
I will find out.

No past flashed before my eyes, no revelation was bestowed on me, no truth was perceived. I just fell.

When I stopped, I was hanging upside down with my face against the rock. The Hanging Man. I was clearly and somehow not unexpectedly,
alive. After the crazy motion of the fall, there was now a terrible stillness. I righted myself and scrabbled to some kind
of ledge. I discovered that when I put weight on my left leg, it collapsed. There was no pain, but it wouldn’t support any
weight. I bent down and felt through my gaiters and found a swelling on the surface: a bruise, I thought.

“Jamie!”

I looked around — at the pall of cloud around me and the gloomy cliffs dropping down into darkness below and rising up above.
Hell in shades of gray. My lifeline stretched above, woven red and yellow, disappearing upward over my horizon of rock.

I wasn’t frightened, but I knew that in all probability I was going to die.

“Jamie!”

The wind flung my voice back at me like an adult pushing away a child’s punches.

“Jamie!”

There was pain now, emerging from the depths of shock, an exquisite agony deep in the marrow of my left leg.

“Jamie!”

But the only sound was the wind, battering against the edges of rock. Solitude was a substance all around me, a thing made
of black rock and gray ice and the keening of the wind.

“Jamie! Jamie!”
The sound of my voice was nothing: a mere breath in the midst of this orchestration of storm.

How long? Time is a malleable dimension, as plastic as Dali’s ridiculous watches. It seemed like hours before movement came
from above. A rope, weighted by two carabiners, clattered down toward me. Before he appeared, I heard him shouting, his voice
dismembered by the wind. And then he was there, blurred by the cloud, hanging fifty feet above me at the lip of rock, looking
down. “You all right?” he yelled. “What the hell…Rob, are you all right?”

“I think so.”

“Then get the fuck up here!”

The pain in my leg had grown. It was a constructed, complex thing, with layers and meanings, with shades and colors. Sometimes
it was strong enough to bring a moment’s insensibility. More often it was mere agony. I shouted up: “Something’s wrong with
my leg.”

“What?”

“My leg!”

He slid down the rope, his figure hardening as he came nearer, like an image being brought into focus. His crampon points
bit and tore at the cliff. “What’s up?”

The pain came fully now, as though it had finally made up its mind: a swelling, burgeoning agony, something coming out of
the very core of my being, something possessing me as though there was no room for anything else — no personality, no Robert
Dewar, just the plain fact of pain. “My leg. My fucking left leg.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Bruised. Don’t know. Just hurts. I can’t put any weight on it.”

He came farther down and was there beside me on what passed as my ledge, tying off the rappel rope and looking around. “Well,
we’ve got to get you up. Fucking hell, we’ve lost time. You’ll have to prusik up.”

“Where are we?”

“God knows.” He leaned out on the rope and craned to see down below us. “Somewhere above the Traverse of the Gods, I think.”
I could see him thinking, counting minutes and hours, estimating distances, looking for ways out.

“My leg,” I said. “I can’t use it. Can’t bloody move it.” I think I said that. That’s what I intended to say, but my mind
was blurred by pain and the words came out mangled. He crouched down and pulled at my gaiter and my socks, and swore when
I screamed. For a moment my shin was exposed, with a long swelling down the front of it, like a tumulus, a burial ground of
all our hopes.

Jamie looked up at me and said the words that had been going through my mind but had never been allowed to come to the forefront,
never allowed to take precedence over the pain: “It’s broken,” he said flatly I was cold after that. Could his words have
brought the cold, or was it just the effects of shock? I was cold and shivering and tired at the same time, like someone with
a fever. I wondered whether I could just crouch down here on this exiguous ledge and sleep.

“You’ve got to keep warm, Rob,” he said.

“How’ll we get off?”

“You’ve got to keep warm. I’ll try and get some pegs in.”

“How’ll we get off?”

He began to search around for likely cracks, but the rock was friable and compact at the same time: a dangerous combination.
He hammered and swore. Bits of rock splintered away and skittered down the cliff.

“How’ll we get off, Jamie?”

“I don’t know how the fuck we’ll get off!” he shouted. “I don’t know, all right?
I’ve no fucking idea!”

I remember apologizing, as though the situation were my fault, as though I had willed the avalanche, as though it was a weakness
of mine that my leg had snapped. “I’m sorry, Jamie,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”

He ignored me, pulling bits of rock away from the cliff, trying to drive some pegs halfway home. Eventually he tied on and
then began rifling through my rucksack to get my down jacket out. “You’ve got to keep warm and keep awake. Put your duvet
on and see if you can sit down.”

I struggled into the jacket. I was like a child in an adult’s hands. Even sitting required his help, as though I hadn’t learned
the trick properly. I screamed like a petulant child as he lowered me down. It was cold. My left leg was laid awkwardly across
the uneven ledge. My right hung over the edge. Like a kid sitting on a windowsill, one leg cocked up to the side, the other
dangling in space. I shifted myself to get more comfortable. Pain shot up through my groin, like a fire, like a sword buried
deep in the marrow and turned with exquisite skill. “What’ll we do, Jamie?” I asked, when the pain had subsided a bit. “What’ll
we do?” I felt like a child asking an adult for words of wisdom.

He looked down at me. I couldn’t read his expression. I think there was fear there; there was some kind of misery and some
kind of pain, but the overriding expression was one of fear. He crouched down beside me. “We’ve got a choice, Rob. We could
try and get you down, but that would mean four thousand feet of abseiling. I don’t know if you could manage that…”

“Or what?”

“Or you bivvy here, and I climb out and get help.”

“Leave me?” There was a treacherous bubble of panic in my chest, a tremor of fear. “Leave me alone?”

He licked his lips, like someone trying to formulate his words exactly. His lips were cracked and broken, and he seemed to
have difficulty getting them to move properly. “I don’t see much alternative, Rob.”

“You’d have to climb solo. It’d be safer to descend, wouldn’t it? Abseil. Christ, Jamie, quicker, far quicker.”

“I could protect myself a bit going up. A dozen more pitches to the top…”

“Or we could both stay here.” There was pleading in my tone, the nagging of a child. “Sit it out until there’s a break in
the weather. There’s Ruth. She’ll get help. They know we’re up here. We could sit it out.” Ruth was suddenly no longer the
object of our conflict; she had become our savior.

“We could be here for days,” he said quietly. “We’d die. We’d die like the others, like Longhi and Sedlmayer and all of that
lot. Like Toni Kurz on the end of his rope.”

“You can’t leave me, Jamie.”

But he was already going through the gear, portioning it out like a thief going through the loot after the getaway. “It’s
our only hope, Rob. Our only hope. I’ll leave you all the food. And the spare gas cylinder. I’ll get help to you as quick
as I can. The sooner I get on with it the better. I’ll leave the rope in place. It may help them see where you are —”

I begged. I can still hear the whine in my voice, the imprecation. Some fragment of personality that was still left loathed
the sound and the person who had uttered it. “Jamie, please. For God’s sake, don’t leave me. Jamie, I beg you.”

He paused in his work. The wind howled around the edges of rock. A flurry of snow swirled into our faces. “I’m not leaving
you,” he said. “I’m going to get help.”

He tried to arrange me as best he could. He slackened off the laces of my boot to allow the blood to circulate and tried to
immobilize the leg, strapping my ice ax against it with nylon tape. He did that. Then he pulled the bivouac sack up around
me and attempted to fit my injured leg into it. It was awkward moving around on the tiny ledge, but he tried something. “You
must keep warm,” he kept saying. “You must try and keep awake and try and keep warm. Massage yourself. Hug yourself. Try and
get a brew going, can you do that? Keep your liquids up, keep your fingers warm. Keep awake.”

A few minutes later I was watching him going back up the rope above me, jerking up on prusik loops, his crampons grating against
the rock like bone on bone. He reached the horizon of rock and turned and looked down for a moment. “See you, youth!” he shouted.
“Just hang on there.” And then he had disappeared above the lip of rock. Bits skittered down for a while — stones, chips of
ice — and then they too ceased. I was alone.

The question is, what should he have done? That’s what was argued over in the press, mulled over in the bars and pubs, analyzed
in climbing huts and bothies, discussed in the journals. What should Jim Matthewson, son of the good and the great and the
legendary, have done? And, what if…? Always,
what if?
Because you don’t just judge by outcome, do you? You judge by a whole plethora of other, less clearly defined things. Under
the circumstances that held at the time, what was the right thing to do? Climb up to the summit and descend the West Flank;
or rappel down the whole Face below us; or just stay with me and wait.

Look, I survived. I wouldn’t be telling the story if I hadn’t. But Jamie didn’t know that at the time and neither did I, sitting
in agony on my miserable little ledge of rock with pain grinding in my leg and the clouds swirling around me and the cliffs
plunging down below me in precipices difficult to imagine for the non-climber. The solitude. Difficult to imagine that too.
The sense of isolation, desolation. It is the closest thing to death without actually dying. That’s what I believe, anyway.

The cloud around me darkened. The wind had dropped and it was no longer snowing, but the cloud was still there, blanketing
off the world. I struggled to stay alive. Trivial things matter: whether your fingers are cold, whether your boots are too
tight to allow the blood to circulate. Better that you take them off so that you can massage the toes, but I couldn’t reach
my foot as it was, and Jamie had left the boots on for insulation. I fiddled with the stove and managed to get it alight at
the cost of taking off my gloves. My fingers stuck to the metal. You gain one thing, and you lose another. There was some
snow that I could melt, but it disappeared into almost nothing and I couldn’t reach any more. I added some of my precious
water, like a miser measuring out scruples, and then some soup powder, and made myself something lukewarm to drink. I fumbled
some chocolate into my mouth. I lived with my fears. Pain was a constant percussion beneath the discord of my misery. When
I looked at my watch, the hands seemed to have stopped.
Tissot.
Twenty-one jewels. Swiss-made. Time was no longer plastic: it was ice-cold rock, immovable and immutable. I wondered where
Jamie was, whether he had climbed out or whether he had been forced to bivouac, or whether, silenced by the wind and hidden
by the cloud, he had fallen the five thousand feet of the whole wall and lay crumpled and broken on the scree slopes at the
bottom of the Face. The stone of time eroded, crystal by crystal. Time and death are the great parameters of the Eigerwand.