THEIR over-night celebration did not prevent our fellow-travelers from getting up about four o’clock so as to get a good start over the pass. We told Biner we would arise later and that he need not serve our breakfast till after the others had gone. They finished their breakfast, but still did not start. At last it dawned upon us that they were waiting for us.
We called Biner and expressed our sentiments. We thought we had been sufficiently emphatic before, but we left no doubt in his mind this time that no earthly consideration would induce us to make the trip in such company and that if he felt unable to take us over the pass in safety alone as he had agreed to do, we would give up the trip and return to the Grimsel.
He started to tell us that the men were entirely sober this morning, and were excellent mountaineers, but I cut him off with a “Ganz und gar unmöglich.” We added that the weather was more than doubtful and that last night’s fall of snow would make the trip more dangerous and more difficult. In that case, we said, we would wait over till the next day and see if conditions improved. Biner sighed and returned to the next room, where he made known our decision, and the trio of objectionables started, the irrepressible barber being the only one who had the nerve to bid us farewell.
We now emerged and had our breakfast. We had pretty much decided to stay at the Pavilion till next day, sending Biner back to the Grimsel for firewood and provisions. It had stopped snowing, but the sky was black and the clouds hung low. However, about eight o’clock it lightened up a bit, and Biner said he thought it would do to start. It was late, but there was always the Schwarzegg hut in case we could not make Grindelwald.
We were glad enough to escape a day of inaction. So we bundled ourselves up and started. My costume included winter flannels, heavy shoes, high gaiters, corduroy jacket and skirt, a flannel shirtwaist, a jersey of Frater’s, buckskin gloves, and my broad-brimmed felt hat tied down over my ears with a veil. This had the double advantage of keeping it from blowing away in some precarious spot where I could not use my hands and of keeping my ears from freezing. My costume, however, was inadequate. I should have had woolen or fur-lined gloves and fleece-lined shoes. My fingers, toes, cheeks, and nose were all frost-bitten before the day was over, and the suffering caused by the cold was intense.
Biner was the only one who had woolen gloves, and he shared them with us, keeping one hand gloved in order to have the use of it, the other glove circulating among us three. I do not think we could have kept the use of our hands through the day had it not been for this periodical thawing out of one hand at a time. But how it did hurt! Biner should of course have seen that we were provided with these things before starting, but I fancy he credited us with more knowledge of mountaineering than we had.
A short distance from the hut we were roped, Biner first, I next, as interpreter, Frater next and Belle Soeur bringing up the rear. We walked up the Unteraar Glacier to its origin, where the Lauteraar Glacier and Finsteraar Glacier come together, then followed this latter to the outlet of the Strahlegg Firn, up which we turned.
The snowfall of the night before made it necessary for Biner to sound each step ahead of him with his ice-pick. It happened several times that the pick encountered no resistance, and Biner, kicking aside the loose snow would uncover a fissure or air-hole in the ice which had been completely covered. This delayed us somewhat, but the air was so cold and thin, and we were in such poor condition, comparatively, after our almost sleepless night, that I doubt if we could have gone much faster had the surface of the ice been clear.
The Strahlegg Firn is a great snow pile, very steep of surface, flowing between huge walls of rock, on the right the Lauteraarhörner, on the left the Finsteraarhorn and Fiescherhorn. Down this gully, as we turned up it, swept a bitter icy wind that almost took our breath away. We had been ascending rapidly since leaving the Dollfus Pavilion and were now not far from the ten-thousand foot level. The thinness of the air made it seem almost impossible to get enough oxygen to walk with. Each breath was a labor, each step forward a triumph of mind over matter. And it seemed each minute as if that terrible wind would blow our flickering life-force out like a candle flame.
It would have been sensible, of course, to turn around and go back. But who likes to accept defeat? And we kept hoping, with baseless optimism, that we had done the worst and would soon strike something easier.
At noon we had climbed nearly to the top of the firn and stopped in the shelter of a big bowlder for lunch. Ahead of us loomed a perpendicular rock wall eight hundred feet high, as we subsequently learned from one of Tyndall’s Alpine books. It looked higher. At its summit was the alleged Strahlegg Pass, which we knew lacked just five feet of eleven thousand. There was no sign of a path or any way of getting up, but we knew human beings went over there quite frequently, and we supposed that on nearer approach some sort of a trail would disclose itself. We did not question the guide about it. The atmosphere did not lend itself to extended conversation. We kept our breath for the serious business of life.
It was a great relief to get out of the wind, but the snowdrift we sat down in was by no means warm, and our feet were by now extremely painful. Just here Belle Soeur had an attack of mountain sickness and had to lie down flat in the snow and couldn’t eat her share of the bread and cheese. If she was going to do it, though, it was mighty fortunate she chose lunch-time rather than a little later. The luxury of this meal did not tempt us to linger long, and we were soon under way again. We had not even unroped.
In the midst of this primeval solitude we suddenly saw a human being. Nothing could have surprised us more. It was a little black speck of a man appearing on the upper brink of the rock wall and starting to climb down. Was it one of the party who had gone on ahead of us, turning back to seek help after an accident? Biner said not. Biner also said that unless he was a professional guide, it was very foolhardy of him to try to get over alone, and that no guide who knew the route would ever try to come down where he was starting to make the descent. Presently his interest increased to the point of saying that the man would infallibly be killed if he didn’t turn around and go back. We were horrified. But it was impossible to warn the man at such a distance, even by gesture.
It shows how absorbing our own peril soon became that we presently forgot all about him, and when we thought of him some hours later could only hope he got through all right. As we heard nothing subsequently of a fatal accident or of anybody’s disappearing, though we made numerous inquiries, I suppose he escaped.
He made things unpleasant for us for a time by detaching stones and rock fragments in his climbing which hurtled downwards with destructive force. We made quite a detour to the right to get out of the danger zone.
We were now at the foot of our rock wall, and there was no path, no trail, no ledge, no deviation from the vertical. Still we might have turned back, but we did not. The very preposterousness of the thing held us. It was impossible that there shouldn’t be some way of getting up this cliff, which was not yet apparent!
We started. Biner felt above his head with the point of his ice-pick till he found a crack which held it firm. Then, with surprising agility for a man of his age and build, he drew himself up till he could reach it with his fingers, having previously located some little protuberance or incision where he could rest his toe. Keeping his grip with one hand, he leaned over and helped me up with the other. Frater climbed to the place I had just vacated and pulled Belle Soeur up as Biner had pulled me. By the time we realized the horror of it, we went on because it seemed on the whole easier than to go back.
All the way up that eight hundred feet of rock wall, there was never a ledge large enough to rest on with the entire two feet at once! I had read of such things in mountaineering books, but had cheerfully supposed the descriptions exaggerated. And we had believed the Strahlegg Pass was hardly full-fledged mountaineering anyhow—just something a little more strenuous than the Gries or Rawyl.
I don’t know what thoughts passed through the minds of the others, but mine beat a sort of tattoo in my head like this: “You fool—fool—FOOL! You’ve got two little children in Grindelwald and a husband in the Philippines. And you are going to break your neck within the next ten minutes. And you aren’t accomplishing anything under heaven by it. It’s just sheer futile idiocy.”
The numbness of my hands was so great that my control over them was most uncertain. My life and that of my companions depended on the grip I should keep with those cramped, aching fingers, but though I concentrated my will-power on them I felt no certainty that the next minute they would not become rigid and refuse to obey me.
Every once in a while the distance from ledge to ledge would be too great for me to reach, and Biner would lift me by the rope around my waist. During those instants, when I had loosened my own hold of hand and foot and swung clear into space with nothing but an inch of manila hemp and a man’s grip on it between me and a horrible death, I thought of the daily Alpine accidents I had been reading about in the papers, I thought of the frequency with which the rope parts at the critical moment, I thought of my children in Grindelwald—and I called myself names. The faculty to do a very extensive amount of thinking seemed to be concentrated in those instants, the phenomenon probably being akin to that so often chronicled of the last moment of consciousness by those resuscitated from apparent drowning.
I am more particularly relating here my own sensations because I am most familiar with them. Those of the others, with the possible exception of Biner, were undoubtedly equally vivid. Each of us was perfectly conscious that if any one of us slipped, all four would go down. In the nature of things, we had none of us a grip or foothold sufficiently secure to resist a sudden jerk such as would come if one were to fall.
After the first few minutes, I never looked downward. I was not inclined to dizziness, but the drop was too appalling. The others told me afterwards that they also abstained from looking down. We concentrated eyes and thoughts on the few feet of rock immediately around and above us.
Several times on the way up, puffs of biting wind would come down the face of the cliff which it seemed must surely blow us loose. At such moments we stopped climbing and flattened ourselves against the rock, clinging as we loved our lives.
Once we got all four on a little ledge not as wide as the length of our feet, but solid enough to stand on without balancing. We paused there to take breath, and somebody said “Cognac.” Now our experience in the Alpine hut the night before had nearly made teetotalers of us. But at this moment we decided that stimulants might have a legitimate use. Frater produced his silver pocket flask and handed it around. We took a swallow in turn, and it was like liquid life running down our throats. I never experienced anything so magical. (Here I am describing my own sensations again!) I was at the very last point of endurance. I had lost faith in ever reaching the summit of the cliff. I had no more physical force with which to lift my sagging weight upward. I had lost the will-power that lashes on an exhausted body. My numb hands were stiffening. My lungs were choked and laboring. I could neither go on nor go back. Then those two teaspoonfuls, or thereabouts, of fiery cognac that burned down my throat sufficed to give me back my grip on myself, physical and mental. I moved my cramped fingers, and they answered. I took a deep, long breath and felt strengthened. A hope, almost a confidence, crept into my heart, that with God’s help we might reach the top alive.
Then we went on and on and on. The same thing, with our eyes always upward, but not far ahead. At last Biner clambered on to what was evidently a broad ledge, for he knelt on it and, leaning over, gave me his hand to help me up. It was a long reach, and as I got one knee on the ledge and started wearily to lift the rest of my weight, he gave me a pull and push that rolled me lengthwise over the brink, and to my wonderment I found a resting-place for my whole body.
“This is the summit,” said Biner. I had not known we were within five hundred feet of it.