Conquistadors of the Useless (52 page)

On our return to Nepal we benefited from a long spell of clear, calm weather, and the conquest of the mountain almost turned into a text-book exercise. There was no need for any searching. The teams relayed each other like a well-trained corps de ballet, five camps went up in practically no time at all, and a ton and a half of food, kit and oxygen bottles were stock-piled at Camp Five. Thanks to these reserves and the almost uninterrupted system of fixed ropes linking it to Camp Three, this advanced outpost became a place where one could remain in comfort and safety, secure in the knowledge that one could retreat in any weather.

Franco chose Couzy and myself for the first assault. We left Camp Five with three hand-picked Sherpas, and after traversing some steep snow slopes which the heavy frost had made safe we found an unexpectedly easy way through a bar of dangerous séracs. Camp Six was installed at around 25,600 feet, after which the Sherpas went back down, leaving us alone in our eyrie. In spite of a temperature of minus-thirty-three degrees Celsius inside the tent, a slow rate of oxygen enabled us to spend a reasonable night.

We left camp at seven o'clock, and less than two hours later reached the foot of the rock wall which had looked so formidable from our previous distant viewpoints. This was at about 26,900 feet. In the event the face turned out to be steep but far less difficult than we had expected. The shattered granite offered plenty of holds and, no doubt due to the force and frequency of the wind, there was astonishingly little snow or verglas. We switched the oxygen flow to maximum, and an hour's climbing at what would have been a rapid pace at half the altitude brought us to the final ridge. Three-quarters of an hour later, having surmounted one genuinely difficult step on the way, we stood on the pointed summit of the fifth highest mountain in the world.

The disconcerting facility with which we had vanquished this giant, to which I had devoted a year of my life, came as a slight anti-climax. Shortly after our return, while the feelings I experienced at that moment were still fresh, I was to write the following words.

‘Victory must be bought at the price of suffering and effort, and the clemency of the weather combined with the progress of technique had sold us this one too cheaply for us to appreciate it at its true value. How far it all was from the proud ecstasy I have sometimes felt as I hauled myself on to some more modest summit after a life and death struggle. In my dreams I had foreseen it all quite differently: coated thickly with frost I was to have crawled the last few yards to the top with my final strength, worn out from the mortal combat to which I had given my all. Instead I had got here not only without having to fight, but almost without fatigue. There was something disappointing about such a victory. And yet … I stood at last on the perfectly-formed summit of the noblest of all the great peaks. After so many years of perseverance and toil, so many mortal risks willingly accepted, the wildest of all my dreams had come true. Was I completely stupid, to be feeling like this? Madman, for whom there is no happiness but in desire, rejoice for once in reality, exult in this moment when, half borne up by the wind, you stand over the world. Drink deep of infinity: below your feet, hardly emerging from the sea of cloud that stretches away to the horizon, armies of mountains raise their lances towards you.'

Like a wound-up spring the mechanism which had raised us load by load and camp by camp to the summit continued to function. The same evening, Franco, Magnone and the sirdar Gyalzen took our place at Camp Six, going to the top in their turn the next day. The following day Bouvier, Leroux, Vialatte and Coupé made the third ascent. For the first time in the history of mountaineering a whole expedition had reached the summit of an eight-thousander, a spectacular demonstration of our mastery of the situation.

Analysing these events in a remarkable article, Jean Franco prophetically concluded:

‘In our hearts we felt a little bit let down. Given the perfection of our tools and the continuity of our good luck, one might even have wished for a slightly tougher adversary. Be that as it may, the ascent of Makalu, in its comfortable security, will always remain one of the happier pages in Himalayan history.

‘Just as, in our over-explored Alps, the last and hitherto forbidden routes are being climbed amid the overthrow of classical traditions, the Himalayas are yielding up their last eight-thousanders. The Golden Age of the highest range on earth will only last a few years. The ascent of lesser-known summits by routes of extreme difficulty, however hazardous they may seem today, will then begin. There are ‘Aiguilles Vertes' waiting beside the ‘Monts Blancs', and ‘Drus' beside the ‘Vertes'. It looks as though the weapons are forged.'

It was even so. In 1957, following our example both as to equipment and to methods, a Swiss expedition made the first ascent of Lhotse with amazing ease, simultaneously bagging the second ascent of Everest into the bargain. All but one of the eight-thousanders have now fallen,
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and if some of them, like Dhaulagiri, gave their conquerors a good deal of trouble, this was primarily because the latter lacked financial resources really adequate to the job in hand. The Himalayan ‘Drus' began to succumb at the same time. By a particularly striking irony the Muztagh Tower, once considered the type of the unclimbable, was conquered in the same year by two different parties attacking from opposite flanks.

We had no professional cinematographer with us on Makalu. Coming after Annapurna and Everest it seemed unlikely that we would succeed in attracting really large audiences with another Himalayan epic. Nevertheless, if we could film the arrival on the summit and a fair amount of the more exciting parts of the climb, it might interest enough people to pay its way. Filming of this sort could only be carried out by members of the assault parties themselves, however, and the expense of a professional was therefore hardly justifiable. In the end it was decided to trust the job to an experienced amateur.

Since I had done a good deal more filming than anyone else in the party Franco asked me to take on the responsibility. My films on Huantsan and Mont Blanc had given me a certain reputation and understanding, but personally I was still uncomfortably aware of my lack of mastery. However, I did have a couple of more or less original ideas in my head which I was anxious to put into practice, and in spite of the extra work and responsibility involved I accepted Franco's proposition.

It was obvious to me that the photographer could not hope to be present every time something interesting happened, and I therefore asked Franco, Leroux and Magnone to carry a light camera with them the whole time. They shot numerous sequences, and thanks to their collaboration I was able to bring back a complete and interesting record of the expedition right from the Indian frontier to the summit of Makalu.

Convinced that the life and customs of the Sherpas and other Himalayan peoples would be of wide interest, I asked Franco, on our return to Base Camp, for permission to go off and film in the Sola Khumbu valley. Magnone and several Sherpas came with me, and we had a wonderful trip. Three days' march over a couple of 20,000-foot cols took us to the tiny capital of the Sherpas, Namche Bazar. At last I could observe our happy, faithful companions in their natural surroundings. For two days there was a continual round of singing, dancing and brotherly libations of buttered tea and millet beer.

At this point word came that a religious festival was about to begin at the monastery of Thami, situated half a day's journey from the Tibetan frontier at an altitude of around 14,500 feet. Such a chance was not to be missed, and in the event its interest exceeded even our expectations. The splendour of the costumes, the strangeness of the symbolic dances, the monstrosity of the masks, the barbaric and disconcerting music of the giant horns, the whole seen and heard against a background of savage mountain grandeur, gave a sensation of witnessing scenes from another planet. The monks gave us complete freedom to film as we wished, and as Magnone was also able to record the music on tape we produced a most unusual documentary, which had a considerable success. After being much applauded at lectures it was transferred to 35 mm. and commercially distributed in numerous countries.

The festival came to an end, and it was time to think about getting back to the outer world. An unbelievable path over a 20,000-foot col took us through to the lower hill country in three days, whence a week's forced march brought us to Kathmandu. This raid into the most beautiful part of the Himalayas had enabled me to broaden my knowledge of Nepal, and, still more than the approach marches to Annapurna and Makalu, had given the feeling of living in another age. But the loveliest dreams come to an end, and now we had to plunge back into the swarming furnace of India.

The lectures given in Germany and the Low Countries by my friends Egeler and De Booy, plus those I had been able to give in France during my periods between expeditions, had now put sufficient funds into the coffers of the Dutch Foundation for the Exploration of High Mountains for them to envisage another trip to Peru in 1956. As with the previous one, the majority of its time was to be spent on research into the formation of certain kinds of rock, and only two out of its total duration of six months could be devoted to mountaineering.

It seemed to me rather silly to go so far for such a short time, so I decided to prolong my stay by making a film on the life and customs of the country, and also by getting up a second, private expedition to follow on the first. With this in mind I began to contact some of my better-off climbing friends. On hearing of my project, however, Lucien Devies suggested that I abandon it in favour of a French national expedition to attempt one of the three or four unclimbed Peruvian ‘six-thousanders', which appeared to be more difficult than anything so far attempted at that sort of altitude. It was a wonderful proposition and I accepted it at once. We quickly settled on the Nevado Chacraraju, a magnificent summit of 20,046 feet.

The mountain had been explored before the war by two powerful Austro-German expeditions, and since 1945 had been selected as main objective by several American parties as well as another German one. None had been able to discern a weak point anywhere in its defences, since all its flanks are festooned with almost vertical columns of ice over a height of more than two and a half thousand feet. Its appearance is so discouraging that all of them had turned away on reaching its foot, without even a real try. Some, and not the least among them, had gone so far as to declare it impossible, and the leader of one American team had written publicly that the mountain ‘would require siege or suicide, or probably both'. Erwin Schneider, one of the most famous pre-war Austrian mountaineers, who had been among the first to reconnoitre the peak, wrote that he was unable to advise me which side to attack it from, since ‘none of the faces appeared to offer any serious hope whatever'.

Everyone who had seen Chacraraju was full of praise for its beauty, and all seemed in agreement that it would be one of the finest objectives one could choose. The rock climbing seemed likely to be of a standard rarely attempted at such altitudes, and the ice work more difficult than anything normally found in the Alps. These opinions plus the splendid photos we had been able to obtain convinced us that Chacraraju was much the most interesting unsolved problem in the central and tropical Andes, and an ideal object for our expedition. The project having been officially adopted by the Himalayan Committee, set to work. I had to see to all the preparations entirely by myself and at the same time help my Dutch friends get ready for the earlier expedition, which we had been planning now for four years.

After three months of paper work everything was in readiness. I landed in Cuxco in April, where I was met by Egeler, De Booy and the surveyor Hans Deckhout. A few days later the brilliant young Genevese climber Raymond Jenny, who had been invited to join us, arrived from Bolivia, where he had been earning a living for the last six months as a skiing and climbing instructor.

This expedition was to take place in the Cordillera de Vilcabamba, 625 miles south-east of the Cordillera Blanca which contains Huantsan and Chacraraju. Since none of its summits exceeds 20,341 feet it will be seen that the range as a whole is noticeably lower. The massif projects into the endless Amazonian jungles like the prow of a vast boat, condensing all their humidity on its icy flanks and so receiving a quantity of precipitation that makes climbing difficult. By way of compensation, however, the area was comparatively little explored. So far only one major peak had been climbed. This was Salcantay, ascended by a Franco-American party some years previously.

After a training period, during which we did the first ascent of the very difficult Veronica (19,029 feet) in a neighbouring range of mountains, we went for the second highest peak in the chain, Soray. The exact height of this summit, which is also known as Humantay, has never been properly determined, but is in the general region of 20,000 feet. It had been reconnoitred by several expeditions and seriously attacked by an Italo-Swiss team, and to judge from their comments it was likely to be an extremely difficult proposition.

All the faces of Soray are exceptionally steep, but the north face, although made up of a succession of ice and rock walls, has the advantage of being shorter and more open to the sun; thus it was by this face, in spite of grave danger from toppling séracs, that we chose to attack. Parts of the ascent involved very delicate ice climbing, but the mountain fell more quickly than we expected. For something to do in the few weeks that remained we therefore decided to try the second ascent of Salcantay.

Two victories in succession, both won at the charge between spells of bad weather, had put us on exceptional form. Our morale was equal to anything. The giant of Cuzco was treated with no more respect than an ordinary Alpine peak. Several days of rain and snow having confined us to base camp, we were beginning to run short of time, and resolved to attack without any preliminary reconnaissance at the first sign of a dear spell. Whereas our predecessors had spent nearly three weeks putting up camps and hundreds of feet of fixed ropes, our ascent followed the Huantsan model in being done all at once. The first day took us to five hundred feet below the top. After an uncomfortable bivouac with four of us crammed into one two-man tent we reached the top early the following morning. Except for one short rappel we descended entirely on crampons, getting back to base towards midnight.