Conquistadors of the Useless (8 page)

During my four summers at Les Houches I had not stopped climbing, despite the strenuousness of my work in the fields and the small amount of spare time it left me. It was in fact during this time that I progressed from the stage of doing the major classic ascents to doing exceptional ones. By contrast to my gradual evolution up to that time, this happened all of a sudden – or, to be more precise, in one climb. During April and May 1942 I had done two or three climbs, notably the first ascent of the short but difficult west face of the Aiguille Purtscheller. Throughout June and July my farm absorbed every minute of my time, but around mid-August I was at last able to take a day or two off. My desire for the big climbs, so long frustrated, had been exacerbated by the daily sight of the mountains to a point where I was ready for no matter what mad project.

Happy to find me at last in a fit state of mind to carry out one of his grandiose plans, Rébuffat involved me in one of the most chancy adventures of my career: the first ascent of the north-east face of the Col du Caiman, with a return via the Pointe de Lepiney and the south ridge of the Fou.

Our route to the Col du Caiman has never been repeated, so I cannot tell how far our inexperience contributed to the great difficulty we encountered. But even today, when one looks at the narrow, almost vertical ice-gully we climbed, its appearance is so frightening that everything leads one to think that, in spite of the progress in technique and equipment, it would remain an extremely serious proposition. One thing is certain. Neither Gaston nor I had at that time sufficient climbing experience, especially on ice, to carry out such an ascent with satisfactory margins of safety. But ‘he who survives is in the right'
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, and we lived to tell the tale.

In those days I used to jot down my memories and impressions, sometimes amounting almost to articles, and it is largely due to these that today I can remember not only my actions but the feelings they gave me at the time. I still possess my contemporary account of the first ascent of the Col du Caiman, and although its ornate style makes it rather heavy reading, its lyrical tone and the passion which can be felt behind the words seem to me to give a clear impression of the state of mind in which I undertook my first great climbs, which is why I now reproduce it virtually unchanged:

Where can these two strange-looking people be going? After hurriedly crossing the Pèlerins glacier and literally charging up the moraine, they took no more than a few steps up the path before turning suddenly off it, jumping from boulder to boulder in a direction which leads nowhere. The first, tall and broad, sways slightly under an enormous rucksack. His breeches are heavily patched, his sweater more ragged still, and he brandishes an extraordinarily short ice axe in one hand. His eyes are burning with a strange flame. His more carefully-dressed companion, by contrast, has something noble and calm in his great strides: yet the same flame is in his glance. So where can they be going? Do they even know themselves? They are seeking adventure. They are looking for hours of intense suffering and happiness, for battle and conquest. Far from the refuges and the popular summits, they want to revive in themselves the doubts and excitements of the first mountain pioneers.

The Alps have been thoroughly explored and all their summits climbed. The adventurous spirit of man has even led him up the most inaccessible mountain walls. In our time there is little left to be done: only a few of the coldest and most hostile faces remain to be conquered. By a paradoxical trick of fate, far from being hidden away in the most secret and remote corners of the Alps, some of these last bastions can be seen from one of the most popular climbing centres. The ring of wild crags between the Peigne and the Fou contains a few of them, and this was the destination of the two friends we saw just now. They had in fact no clearly defined objective, but were simply determined to have a try at something big. To this end they were carrying food and climbing equipment for three days and felt ready for anything.

The weather was fine and they felt in their bones that it was going to last. It was a bit late to be setting out, perhaps, but they were prepared for bivouacs, no matter how uncomfortable. They were ideally happy to be at last putting into action one of the fabulous pipe-dreams elaborated during long evenings over the fire the previous autumn. They wondered whether to attack the dark, imposing north face of the Aiguille des Pèlerins which now rose in front of them, one of the finest of the unclimbed faces. After a rapid colloquy, however, they hurried on to the foot of the hanging Blaitière glacier, above which remained other still inviolate crags. From the Col du Caiman, in particular, a narrow gully of ice descended among walls of vertical granite, throwing down a challenge to the most daring, and it was there that they finally decided to attack. But I have forgotten to tell you that the two companions were none other than Gaston Rébuffat and your obedient servant.

We tied on to a doubled two-hundred-foot rope, obtained almost miraculously in those days of shortages. Our rule was for Rébuffat to lead on rock and myself on snow and ice, and as today it was a case of the latter I led off at once. The first obstacle was the hanging glacier. Very few people had ever been around here, and its reputation was as terrifying as its appearance. There was of course no information on the best route to follow, and our vague memories of the epics we had read, far from helping us, weighed heavily on our minds. As we got closer to it, however, the wall of ice framed in smooth granite began to seem less redoubtable, and shortly we could see a solution in a line of ledges on the Blaitière side of it, followed by a climb straight up where the ice and rock met each other. Two vertical steps were going to be a serious problem, but our optimism made little of them.

At the foot of the difficulties we stopped for a moment to look at the imposing scenery. Never had I been in any place so utterly inhuman: everything was terrible and beyond our scale. Swallowed up in the icy shadow of those grey, cold walls, we felt ourselves tiny and alone, and were recalled to a forgotten modesty.

But from the Blaitière suddenly came the friendly sound of the voices of another party breaking the harrowing silence. We turned to look at the valley. Down there everything was bathed in sunlight, and in a moment we were cheered up by these distant manifestations of life, and felt ready to go on.

We reached the foot of the first ice step without any great difficulty, and had a quick second breakfast while fastening on our crampons. The Aiguille du Peigne rose opposite us like an elegant dolomitic spire. After a rope's length on a slope of no more than average steepness, I came to a vertical section of perhaps twenty-five feet. A few stones whirred over our heads, no doubt to give us the authentic north-face atmosphere. The wall of ice above me was pocked with holes of all sizes like a huge piece of Gruyère. Cunningly but as it turned out wrongly, I reasoned that these holes would make good natural holds and spare me a lot of hard work with the axe. With a great deal of trouble I did in fact manage to get half way up in this manner, but at that point the ice-pocks, which were already very smooth, became outward-sloping. The verticality of the wall was pushing me backwards, and, beginning to feel rather ill at ease, I tried to get my ice axe out of my waist-loop in order to improve the holds and cut a few extra ones. Clumsily I let it escape from my hand in the process, and it fell into the abyss with a sound like the ringing of sarcastic laughter. There was no alternative but to get down. With a good deal of difficulty I got back to Gaston, whose impassive features revealed nothing of what he must have been feeling during this pitiful exhibition.

So there we were, short of an ice axe, the lack of which could not fail to hold us up considerably and might even cost us the climb. Fortunately we also had a short piton-hammer-cum-ice-pick which would serve to take its place in an emergency. I finally got up the wall by traversing to the left with the aid of an ice-piton, and then climbing an awkward corner between the ice and the rock. The second step looked as hard as the first, but a mysterious intuition led me to cross a steep slope to the right towards some reasonably safe-looking séracs, or ice-towers. At the top of one of those I found to my joy that I was at the level of the flat-bottomed bowl formed by the upper part of the glacier, which we reached by jumping a few little crevasses.

The scene now before us was so grandiose as to give us rather a shock, and we gazed round entranced at the semi-circle of rock walls and spires. The mineral chaos, a last relic of the youth of the earth, found a sort of harmony in the contrasts of its lights and shadows, the aesthetic balance of rock and snow. I had never seen anything to compare with it. It would have seemed the most beautiful place in the world if it had been more isolated from the sounds of the valley which rose up to us, recalling a world we had sought to leave behind for a few hours.

But we had to be getting on. This was easily said, but we were now on completely unknown ground. We hesitated between two possibilities: Gaston wanted to get straight into the ice-gully descending from the Col du Caiman, whereas I thought it looked quicker and easier to start off in the direction of the Col de Blaitière and traverse back to the right a bit higher up. In the end I won the day by the weight of my longer experience. We started off up the edge of the Reynier Couloir or gully, but after a few reasonably easy pitches we were forced back towards the centre of the wall. And there the fight began in earnest!

Above us was a triangular slope of ice inserted like a giant wedge between walls of polished granite. Fortunately an inch or so of hard snow lay on top of the ice, which greatly speeded our progress. The angle was not great to begin with, but rapidly increased. In spite of this, in order to gain time, we climbed straight up one behind the other without taking any security measures or cutting any steps. In these conditions the least false move by either of us would have sent us both down, and it goes without saying that our smallest gestures were made with extreme care. As I still had our one remaining ice axe Gaston had to be content with the hammer, but seemed to make out perfectly.

Quite soon the slope became steeper than anything we had met with earlier. Our crampons gritted on the ice, and I felt my nerves becoming stretched to the maximum. We had gained a lot of height, and below us the glacier-basin gleamed like a frozen lake. Between my feet I could see Gaston's severe features rendered almost pathetic by intense concentration. How strange it all seemed – there we were suspended between heaven and earth on two little crampon points. The least slip on the part of my companion and I should be dead … yet I was more worried about my own possible clumsiness than his. Confidence is a wonderful thing.

The angle was now so great that the pick of my ice axe did not give me sufficient purchase to move up, and it became necessary to cut some small holds for my left hand. From time to time the snow would give slightly under my crampon points, and a shiver of fear would go through me. My calves started to get cramp. The whole business was becoming frightful. At last I spotted a tiny eight-inch ledge above me, at the foot of a band of rock, that would do for a rest. It was high time. I was pretty well at the limit of balance. With an almost desperate heave-up I got on to the ledge: what a relief! Gaston followed immediately, but the ledge was so small there was barely room for us both.

With the rope belayed over a small spike of rock, I began to traverse to the left. Some handholds on the rock and a detached spillikin enabled me to make some progress without having to cut steps, though at the cost of some acrobatic moves – but then what confidence even a mediocre belay can give. After a few yards I was able to get on to the rock entirely, but the holds were all iced-up and had to be cleared with the axe. My fingers were absolutely freezing and my progress snail-like. At last I managed to wedge an ice-piton in a horizontal fault in the rock, and I took advantage of this anchorage to bring up Gaston.

Our way now lay up a slope of bare ice interrupted by short rock steps. There was nowhere one could get a rest, and I was periodically forced to go in for a bout of step cutting. The ice was as hard as plate-glass, so we got on terribly slowly. The slopes leading to the Col de Blaitière were now away on our left, and to the right we had a good view into the ice gully of the Col du Caiman, practically in profile, so that we were finally able to judge its exact angle. Without any exaggeration this varied from sixty-five degrees to the vertical, the whole effect being that of a frozen waterfall. Surely we must be possessed to put our heads voluntarily into such a trap … for a moment we seemed to hear the voice of caution in our ears: ‘It is getting late. The couloir is appalling and you won't get up before nightfall. You are already frozen stiff, and after a bivouac spent hanging from pitons in such conditions you will be too enfeebled to carry on. Tomorrow you will have to make a highly problematical retreat in all the bitterness of defeat. You must be mad to do such a thing when by traversing to the left you can soon be basking on the sunlit slabs of the Col de Blaitière.'

But opposite us the Lagarde-Ségogne couloir pitilessly recalled the example of our elders, who, armed with nothing but ice axes and their own courage, had dared to attack an objective scarcely less formidable than our own. We were filled with shame at our momentary weakness, and once more steeled our wills. Why shouldn't we do as well as our forefathers? Certainly the problem in front of us was more redoubtable, but then we had other arms. If necessary we would just have to climb the whole thing with pitons, and if this involved a bivouac we would carry on next day no matter how tired we were. We had come here for an adventure, after all, and now we had one we might as well make the most of it. The cards were down.

I began to hack my way forward again into the unknown, feeling refreshed. A few feet above there seemed to be a ledge where we could rest, but when I got to it, it turned out to be no more than a slight relenting of the angle shining with water-ice, and we had to go on again along the icy, outward-sloping shelves. My fingers were so cold I could no longer feel them, and I had to stop every six or eight feet to warm them up. I hacked and cut, I wriggled, I even crawled on all fours, taking advantage of the tiniest roughnesses. At the foot of a chimney we at last found a minute platform where, by means of some gymnastic contortions, we were able to take off our sacks and have a badly-needed snack.