A Soldier of the Great War (25 page)

"As you ascend, you remove the pins I've driven and knock out the chocks. Unclip the carabiners and loop the runners over your head. Should you fall, you won't fall. I'll be holding you on a taut rope all the way up. When you join me at the belay ledge, you tie in to the tree, give me the stuff you've collected on your way, and off I go, repeating what we've just done. The space between belays is called a pitch. Three pitches, here," he said, looking up and shielding his eyes, "and we're at the top."

"What happens if
you
fall?"

"I can only fall twice the distance of the length of the rope between my last setting of protection and the point where I start to fall. If the holds are poor, I'll be putting in protection frequently, so if I do fall, it won't be far. Then I gather my wits and begin to climb again, like a spider."

"And if you're injured or unconscious?"

"Lower me."

"The first tree is forty meters..."

Alessandro stepped back to re-estimate. It seemed that in the mountains his head was always bent back and he was always squinting. "More or less."

"The rope is fifty meters long. How am I going to lower you down to me? I would need forty more, or you'd be hanging in the air and I'd have no rope to play out."

"That's one of the reasons the second man carries another rope, the other being that the first man, by the time he gets to the belay point, may already be carrying the entire weight of the rope that's tied to him. Why make him carry two, especially when he's more exposed to falling because he isn't top-roped like the second man?"

"I would tie them together, then."

"In a fisherman's knot, a double fisherman's knot, if you please,
before
you take the first rope from around your waist, of course."

"It's an ingenious system," Rafi stated.

"It's a beautiful system," Alessandro said.

"The refinements are even better. For example, I don't tie the rope around my waist.
Instead, I use some runners and attach myself to the rope with a figure-eight knot and a carabiner. And wait until you see how we rappel down. It's like flying."

"I hope this doesn't turn out to be like the cathedral, Alessandro."

"There were practically no holds at the cathedral. I couldn't drive any pins, and we had to climb in the dark."

"I know."

"And here no priests are going to run out to scream at us, because the Church didn't build these mountains, God did. I'm going to climb. Don't pull on the rope, or you'll pull me off the rock. Watch me. If I fall you'll see it before you feel it on the rope. You can be prepared for the uptake."

Rafi looked very serious.

"I'll see you up at the first tree." Alessandro stepped to the base of the wall and pushed a rack of carabiners and pitons around to his back. A wide crack went almost all the way to the first belay point. Halfway up, it disappeared at a series of ledges that looked like they might offer good holds. Then it resumed, tapering off a meter or so below the tree. The rock there was completely smooth. Rafi didn't know how Alessandro was going to get past it.

Alessandro started smoothly and slowly. At first he breathed hard and was conscious of the ground. Then, as he rose, he forgot about the ground, forgot about his breathing, and forgot about everything in the world except the route and his strategy for climbing it.

He stopped only to hammer in a piton after he had gone about ten meters. The crack was both wide and deep, it had many good handholds around the edges, and his momentum had carried him quickly and far.

"I'm putting in a pin here," he shouted as he hammered it into a narrow crack paralleling the larger one, "because the cracks getting more difficult and I'm high enough to want insurance." When
the singing of the alpine hammer against the iron reached a very high pitch, Alessandro holstered it and clipped a carabiner through the hole in the piton. "I'm not using a runner here," he called down. "The crack is relatively straight, so even without a runner the rope will follow a vertical line. That's what you want: if it zigzags from place to place you get a lot of friction at the angles, which translates into weight as you pull the rope up after you. When your protection or the route itself goes to the left or right, you use a runner to stretch out to a center line where the rope can run unimpeded. Understand?"

"Yes!" Rafi called up.

Alessandro clipped the rope into the carabiner. "If I fall I can only fall twice the distance that I go from this piton. Climbing!" he shouted, and continued up after leaning out and tilting his head to see where he was going to go and what he was going to do to get there. The handholds became footholds, and, as he rose, everything ahead and above was a promise fulfilled.

Alessandro had been following a fissure into which he was able, when he wanted, to insert half his body from head to toe, after which he had simply to bend his knee and sit back, and he was completely wedged in, free to drive a piton, rest, or survey the route above. As the crack narrowed he had to turn his feet sideways, and he found himself searching the rock face alongside for handholds for his left hand as the right worked the main fissure. Even then, he could rest simply by letting his body lean to one side and torquing his feet solidly into the crack. He did this to put in a piton and, subsequently, five meters above it, while setting a chock in the narrow crack itself.

A chock was an iron bolt into which several holes had been drilled to make it lighter for a climber's use. Where the crack was narrow, or where he could slip it into a little hole and turn it so it was blocked, he could put a runner through it, attach a carabiner, and clip the carabiner around the rope. When the crack began to
fade as he was coming up to the ledges, he set a chock and told Rafi what he had done.

Then he moved over the ledges, as if they were a ladder, to the beginning of the next crack. He put in a piton relatively early, and soon found himself almost at the top, about a meter below the tree.

The tree was very obliging. As little trees on rock walls often do, it dipped down in a U shape before it rose again, as if it were attempting to meet him. He was still an arm's length short of it.

The rock between Alessandro and the tree was completely smooth. From the ground, he had thought that the chances were good that he might find a handhold visible only from up close. It did not need to be too solid, as he required only that it help him pivot upward in one cavalier motion and leap for the tree.

The rock looked polished. "I'm a meter under the tree," he called down, "and the rock is as smooth as glass. I'm going to do something that's really out of order, but I have no choice. I hadn't planned to show you artificial climbing today. Now you'll get to see it."

He jammed his feet into the crack, held on with his left hand—thirty-five meters above the ground—and removed a piton from the rack. "I'm going to drive in a pin as high as I can." He moved his left hand up the crack until it no longer fit, and put the piton over it with his right hand, pushing it in until the tip held, and balancing it on his left hand's upturned index finger.

He delicately unholstered his hammer and tapped the head of the piton until he was able to drop his left hand to a more solid hold and swing hard at the piton, which went in and stopped at its neck, with the characteristic singing noise.

"It's solid," he said, testing it by hitting it sideways with the hammer. He holstered the hammer, removed a carabiner from the rack, clipped it through the eye of the piton, and attached the rope. "Now I'm protected, but I still have to get up, so I'll take another carabiner and clip it through." Then he took two runners and
looped them together into what the French call an
étrier,
and affixed one end to the carabiner.

Grasping the piton, he climbed the two-step ladder until he was standing on the higher step, bending over in a bowed position so as to keep hold of the piton, which was now only a short distance from his left foot. He was so badly balanced that he didn't dare look up. Rafi held his breath.

In slow motion, Alessandro raised his right arm as high as he could, but it was still two hand-lengths away from the curve in the trunk of the tree. He turned his head upward just as slowly, stopped, and lifted his eyes to the top of their sockets so that, without further endangering his stance, he could see how far he had to go.

Then he simply stood up straight, as if he were standing on the floor of a cafe in Trastevere, and caught the tree like a trapeze artist. In two seconds he was sitting on the ledge, fussing with his equipment.

When he had tied himself to the tree, pulled up the slack in the rope, and passed the rope around his body into the belay position, he called out to Rafi: "Climb!"

The minute Rafi's hands touched the rock, he knew that everything had changed. The sun had come around the cliff now and the air was warmer, even hot. He could smell pine resin on the updrafts that brought the sound of the steadily thundering waterfall. The world and the blue sky were behind him, and he walked up the crack as if it had been a ladder. A shock ran through him and he feared to trust what he felt so strongly. He had not been born, it seemed, to be either a butcher or a lawyer, but to do this. The length of his arms and legs, the strength of his hands and fingers, and his extraordinary and newly discovered balance saw him up the first pitch.

When he wedged himself in to knock out Alessandro's well placed pins he did not shiver or shake the way new climbers often do, and he was happy all the way up. He didn't ask for advice, he
needed no tension on the rope, he climbed twice as fast as Alessandro had expected, and at the stretch below the tree he absolutely astounded his teacher.

Instead of using the
étrier
and abandoning it on the piton, he knocked out the piton, racked it, and looked up.

"Now what are you going to do?" Alessandro asked. "I'll have to pull you up."

"No," Rafi said as he began to climb, using an almost imperceptible handhold. When his hands had moved as high as they could inside the narrow crack, he began to bring up his feet. Soon he had formed himself into a bow, with his hands and feet sharing the same nearly impossible hold. "No tension," he said as Alessandro looked on in amazement. Then, just as Alessandro had done, Rafi stood up, but in the inhospitable crack rather than in a solidly anchored
étrier.

He began to fall, but as he did he caught the bent tree with his fingertips, and soon thereafter he, too, was sitting on the ledge.

 

I
N TEN
days the pupil had begun to outdistance the teacher and was leading the most difficult and precipitous pitches, the ones that had to be climbed artificially because they offered not a single hold. These were the walls upon which climbers developed their immense strength, driving fifty bolts into the rock in an afternoon.

Five hundred meters in the air, with nothing beneath him, Rafi felt entirely at ease and would peg his way up an impossible hairline crack, never seeming to tire.

They rappelled off many a spire, almost flying, spending a whole day's hard climb in one joyous hour. They climbed ice and snow and reached the top of peaks where the light was doubled by reflection. They accomplished several extraordinary glissades, skiing without skis for kilometers and kilometers down couloirs of untouched powder.

Though they ate prodigiously, they lost weight as the altitude and exercise whittled them down. They were asleep before dark and up before the light. Just as the sun was beginning to set and they had come in from a climb, they would wash, devour a few packets of biscuits, cheese, and dried meat, and surrender to oblivion. They slept without dreams, and jumped up every morning, when the moon was sinking into Switzerland, full of energy, stronger than they had ever been, able to run up the steep meadows in the half light and push themselves eagerly into the vertical world where, by midday, hawks glided in dizzying circles below them.

As Rafi grew more competent, his passion for climbing and Alessandro's diverged. He was interested in passing beyond his limits, in doing what neither he nor anyone else had done, and because the limit was, by definition, danger itself, he was always courting risk.

He enjoyed standing at the very edge of a cliff, sometimes with only his heels on the rock, like a mountain guide impressing clients, or staring into an abyss so profound that, had he fallen, Alessandro would not, without a telescope, have been able to have seen where he had come to rest, and would not, without a microscope, have been able to have found him where he had fallen. They dropped boulders from these heights, and many seconds later, if they were looking in the right place, they would see a soundless puff of smoke.

Rafi said that the iron he pounded into the rock, and the ropes that were lithe and beautiful as they flew from a rappel point, were far better than indexes and citations, and Alessandro understood, for he knew that the beauty of climbing is that at times the failure of things to go exactly right subjects even ordinary men to saintly tests that elevate them far beyond what they have expected, and that a climber's return to camp can sometimes be like the footless gliding of the angels who cross the pits of hell.

Rafi was suited perfectly to the mountains, for when he was tested and worn down to practically nothing, his soul was unencumbered, and it rose, drawing him closer to where he wanted to be. He cared little for safety, and noticed less and less the small things that were for Alessandro the most important reasons for climbing. Alessandro loved the smell of the plants that grew on the vertical rock. As they were crushed by a boot or the horizontal motion of the rope they gave off a sweet and resinous perfume that took to ones clothes, and when Alessandro made a fire, the fragrant smoke worked its way into everything he possessed and was with him pleasantly all day. The morning sun glinting off huge lacquered agglomerations of rock far above, where clouds and mist scudded and sparkled, was a divine explosion that rushed through the eyes to capture the heart. And best of all was the thunder.