A Woman in Arabia (8 page)

During the 1899–1904 climbing seasons, Gertrude Bell became one of the most prominent women climbers in the Alps. While her traverse of the Schreckhorn was officially her most important ascent, she will always be remembered for the glorious failure of her attempt on the Finsteraarhorn. Her safe retreat under such conditions was a tremendous performance. “There can be in the whole Alps few places so steep and so high,” wrote Ulrich Fuhrer to her father, years later. “The climb has only been done three times, including your daughter's attempt, and is still considered one of the greatest expeditions in the whole Alps. The honour belongs to Miss Bell. Had she not been full of courage and determination, we must have perished.”

Her achievements are all the more extraordinary because mountaineering was just one of her interests. Seen in the context of her whole life, her climbing was little more than a hobby she took up for a while, less important to her than traveling, learning languages, archaeology, or photography but more important, perhaps, than her rock gardening, hunting, or fencing.

From childhood, Gertrude had possessed an extraordinary vitality of mind and body. Small but strong and athletic, she needed considerable quantities of exercise, the harder the better. She hunted, danced, bicycled, played golf, shot, fished, fenced, gardened, and skated. She discovered climbing as a result of a family holiday in the French Alps. The first mountain she climbed was the snow-covered ridge of the Meije, which towered over the village of La Grave and the inn where
the Bells were staying in August 1897. There Florence and her sisters sat on the balcony and drank hot chocolate, while Hugh and Gertrude got up early and bicycled or walked. They scrambled up a local peak together, the Bec de l'Homme, but Gertrude was soon going off by herself with the local mountain guides, Mathon and Marius, and beginning to climb minor peaks. Before she left, she went over the Brèche by the easy route and spent one night in the mountain refuge. It was enough to convince her of the thrill and danger of climbing, and as she ran down the last slope into the village, she resolved to come back and climb to the peak of the 13,068 foot Meije another year.

She fulfilled her promise a couple of seasons later, having been around the world in the meantime. She came on alone from Bayreuth, as much of a novice as she had been two years previously. It was not unusual at the time for male climbers, often British students on holiday, to tackle the Alps without any experience, as long as they could find good guides. Crampons would not be in use for nearly a decade, carabiners had not been invented, and without the benefit of nylon the ropes were thick and heavy, and even heavier when saturated. Women mountaineers were so rare that there were no “right clothes” for them. At first, Gertrude would take off her skirt and climb in her combinations. Later, she would wear a pair of men's trousers tightly belted under her skirt. Eventually, she achieved a blue climbing suit with trousers into which she would change at the base hut. From a written request to her sister for “two gold pins for my necktie, and thick black garters,” it is clear that her trim and masculine appearance on the mountains set the fashion for the women skiers of the next few decades.

She met up with Mathon and Marius, and they started up the Meije. She was soon supporting her own weight and managing so well that she didn't realize she had completed one of the trickiest maneuvers of the climb, the Pas du Chat. They reached the Grand Pic, fifteen feet of almost perpendicular rock, followed by a twenty-foot overhang and the summit. The way down was longer than the way up, and just as difficult.
Arriving back at the inn, she went straight to bed and slept for eleven hours.

Now she set her heart on climbing the highest summit of the southern French Alps, the Barre des Écrins. They started at 1:10 a.m. in intense cold only three days later. Accidents happened that day. She fell onto her back on the ice but was caught on the rope by Mathon. Both cut their hands, he badly. She took photographs, her numb fingers fumbling with the camera. Bitter winds drove clouds of snow around them at midday, delaying the descent from the peak. On the way down, she twisted her foot painfully.

For the climbing season of 1900, Gertrude chose the Swiss Alps and met her new guides at Chamonix. Ulrich Fuhrer and his brother Heinrich would take her on all her major climbs thereafter. She had decided to tackle Mont Blanc. At 15,771 feet, it is physically demanding and the highest summit in the Alps. Only a year after her first mountain, she succeeded in climbing Mont Blanc and two other major peaks in the range, the Grepon and the Dru. Her fame as a mountaineer began to spread, and she became overconfident. She was riding for a fall, but she was so natural and agile a climber, combining such strength and courage, that it would be some time before the reckoning.

In 1901, she met Ulrich and Heinrich again, this time in the Bernese Oberland. Her first ambition was to climb the Schreckhorn, dominated only by the immense razor of the Finsteraarhorn. From her letter home she appears to have found the Schreckhorn easy, including even the two-thousand-foot rock tower at its crest. At the summit she announced to the Fuhrers her latest ambition: to climb the Finsteraarhorn by the unconquered northeast face.

Ulrich, whatever his private doubts, now put her through an intensive period of difficult climbing in preparation for this daunting challenge. Systematically, she climbed all the perpendicular peaks of the Engelhörner range. During the course of two weeks she climbed seven virgin peaks, one of which was named after her and remains in all the literature to this day as
Gertrudspitze (Gertrude's Peak). At her personal best she undertook the most difficult ascent of the year, the unclimbed first-class traverse of the Urbachthaler Engelhorn. In a long letter to her family, she describes the key moments of what proved to be a horrific day's climbing in bad weather, which involved Ulrich standing on Gertrude's shoulders and then her upstretched hand in order to reach a small handhold. The ascent could have been fatal for all three and would have deterred almost any other climber, but in 1902 Gertrude returned to hold Ulrich to his promise to take her up the Finsteraarhorn.

She discovered that she had become famous when the train guard came to ask her if she were the same Miss Bell who had climbed the Engelhorn the previous year. However, she had rivals, and rather comically she ran into one of them, Fräulein Kuntze, in the same inn at Rosenlaui, and again when both were attempting the first ascent of the Lauteraarhorn-Schreckhorn traverse. There was, apparently, an acrimonious exchange between the two ladies, with Gertrude coming off best. Amused and on her mettle, she achieved the first ascent without much trouble, although, according to the
Alpine Journal,
the climb remains technically her most important climb.

Now she had truly earned her attempt on the Finsteraarhorn, the highest mountain in the Oberland, approaching the summit by the new and difficult route that she and Ulrich had been working up to for a couple of years. Sharp as a blade, this remote and bad-tempered mountain rises perpendicular to a razor ridge at 14,022 feet, its steeple point visible for a hundred miles. It is notorious for bad weather and frequent avalanches, and many an experienced climber had turned away from the challenge that this thirty-five-year-old woman and her guide now set themselves. This was to be Gertrude's most dangerous mountain exploit, and at her death it would still be regarded as one of the greatest expeditions in the history of Alpine climbing. It is clear from her vivid letter home afterward that she could have lost her life several times in the attempt, as the three climbers gave up the ascent in despair and struggled to descend the precipice at night in a raging storm.

After their fifty-seven hours on the mountain, the village inn and its occupants had given them up for dead. A hot bath, supper in bed, and twenty-four hours of sleep followed, but Gertrude woke up with frostbitten hands and feet. She had to delay her return to England until she could wear shoes again.

Her last climb of note was the Matterhorn, in August 1904, once more with Ulrich and Heinrich. Until she had climbed this final giant, she felt that she had unfinished business in the Alps. It was her last great mountain, and her interests were now to focus on the desert and archaeology. In 1926, Colonel E. L. Strutt, then editor of the
Alpine Journal,
wrote that there had been no more prominent female mountaineer than Gertrude Bell:

Everything that she undertook, physical or mental, was accomplished so superlatively well, that it would indeed have been strange if she had not shone on a mountain as she did in the hunting-field or in the desert. Her strength, incredible in that slim frame, her endurance, above all her courage, were so great that even to this day her guide and companion Ulrich Fuhrer—and there could be few more competent judges—speaks with an admiration of her that amounts to veneration. He told the writer, some years ago, that of all the amateurs, men or women, that he had travelled with, he had seen but very few to surpass her in technical skill and none to equal her in coolness, bravery and judgment.

La Grave, August 28, 1899
The Meije

Well, I'll tell you—it's awful! I think if I had known exactly what was before me I should not have faced it, but fortunately I did not, and I look back on it with unmixed satisfaction—and forward to other things with no further apprehension. . . .

Gertrude and her two guides, Mathon and Marius, left La Grave on Friday afternoon and walked to the inn. The next
evening, accompanied by two Germans, they arrived at the hut, where they were joined by a young Englishman called Turner and his guide, Rodier. All seven crammed in for the night.

We were packed as tight as herrings, Mr. Turner next to me, then the two Germans and Rodier. Mathon and the porters lay on the ground beneath us. Our night lasted from 8 to 12, but I didn't sleep at all!

At the Snow Line

I gave my skirt to Marius, Mathon having said I couldn't possibly wear it. He was quite right, but I felt very indecent . . . We had about two hours and a half of awfully difficult rock, very solid fortunately, but perfectly fearful. There were two places which Mathon and Marius literally pulled me up like a parcel. I didn't a bit mind where it was steep up, but round corners where the rope couldn't help me! . . . And it was absolutely sheer down. The first half-hour I gave myself up for lost. It didn't seem possible that I could get up all that wall without ever making a slip. You see, I had practically never been on a rock before. However I didn't let on and presently it began to seem quite natural to be hanging by my eyelids over an abyss. . . . There were two little lumps to hold on to on an overhanging rock and there [was] La Grave beneath and there was me in mid-air and Mathon round the corner holding the rope tight, but the rope was sideways of course—that's my general impression of those ten minutes. Added to which I thought at the time how very well I was climbing and how odd it was that I should not be afraid.

The Barre des
É
crins, September 4, 1899

The wind blew merrily, and the snow swept round in clouds. However, at last it ended in a great big enormous
schrund,
and I thought I never should let myself down round the corner of it, but I did after all. I was now in rags, so I put on my skirt for
decency—at least Mathon did, for I couldn't feel at all with my fingers. . . . We felt we had a real good day's mountaineering behind us; but it was too long—nineteen hours. . . .

Starting with the 1900 season, her guides were Ulrich and Heinrich Fuhrer. They met up at Chamonix and discussed her ambitious plan to climb Mont Blanc. Her success in managing this and the Grepon and Dru went to her head.

I am a Person! And one of the first questions everyone seems to ask everyone else is “Have you ever met Miss Gertrude Bell?”

Ulrich is as pleased as Punch and says I'm as good as any man, and from what I see of the capacities of the ordinary mountaineer, I think I am. . . . I rather hanker after the Matterhorn and must try to fit it in. . . .

[I feel] keener and keener the more I do, the fact being that I now feel a considerable amount more confidence in my power of doing things. Guess I can manage any mountain you like to mention.

In just two weeks in late August and early September 1901, Gertrude climbed seven virgin peaks, one of them first-class and two “old” peaks, all of them new routes or first ascents. She began with the thirteen-thousand-foot Schreckhorn, continued with the peaks of the Engelhörner range, and finished with the most challenging climb of the year, the first-class traverse of the Urbachthaler Engelhorn itself.

September 8, 1901
The Urbachthaler Engelhorn

We . . . halted at the bottom of a smooth bit of overhanging rock. The great difficulty of it all was that it was so exposed, you couldn't ever get yourself comfortably wedged into a chimney, there was nothing but the face of the rock and up you had to go. . . . Here we were on an awfully steep place under the overhanging place. Ulrich tried it on Heinrich's shoulder and could not reach any hold. I then clambered up on to Heinrich,
Ulrich stood on me and fingered up the rock as high as he could. It wasn't high enough. I lifted myself still a little higher—always with Ulrich on me, mind!—and he began to raise himself by his hands. As his foot left my shoulder I put up a hand, straightened out my arm and made a ledge for him. He called out, “I don't feel at all safe—if you move we are all killed.” I said, “All right, I can stand here for a week,” and up he went by my shoulder and my hand. It was just high enough. Once up he got into a fine safe place and it was now my turn. I was on Heinrich's shoulder still with one foot and with one on the rock. Ulrich could not help me because he hadn't got my rope—I had been the last on the rope, you see, and I was going up second, so that all I had was the rope between the two guides to hold on to. It was pretty hard work, but I got up. Now we had to get Heinrich up. He had a rope round his waist and my rope to hold, but no shoulder, but he could not manage it. The fact was, I think, that he lost his nerve, anyhow, he declared that he could not get up, not with 50 ropes, and there was nothing to do but to leave him. He unroped himself from the big rope and we let down the thin rope to him, with which he tied himself, while we fastened our end firmly on to a rock. There we left him like a second Prometheus—fortunately there were no vultures about!