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Show in .'( OufooA: ; Death on the Eiger sneer again. 8erI"t By JENKIN LLOYD JONES Jungfraujoch, Switzerland-Above Switzerland-Above the pretty village of Wud-erswill Wud-erswill with its flower-decked chalets, the Black Lunchine boils and leaps down the narrow valley b-tween the Mannlichen and the Faulhorn. High on the stream, looking east toward the massive . Wetterhorn and southwest to the dazzling white crown of the Jungfrau, lies Grindelwald, the sparkling ski resort so often in the winter newsreels. ABOVE GRINDELWALD there is a broad meadow, on its lower reaches forming a steep but smooth slope that climbs 3,400 feet to the cog railway sta-;ion sta-;ion at Kleine Scheidegg. In the mow months this is rated as the finest ski run in Europe. But as the slope nears the mountain it steepens. It is studded by huge boulders and scored by deep ravines. Above that there is the area of fallen rocks, hundreds of feet of crushed rubble hurled down from the crags and ledges by frost and thaw, wind and avalanche. And above all that begins the North Face of the Eiger 6,000 feet of nearly sheer rock wall. SOMEWHERE up there are two little mounds of snow, new to the mountain. They mark the bodies of two Spanish climbers, trapped in June. Somewhere, also, for the past six years, have lain the remains of Gunther North-durft North-durft and Franz Mayer. All the rest of the climbers of the Eiger are accounted for. It has been 28 years since Max Sedimayer and Karl Mehringer decided to smash the universally-held universally-held conviction that the Eiger's north face was unclimbable. In that time 114 men have hurled themselves against that wall. Seventy-nine have either made it to the top or been successfully rescued. Twenty-five are dead. THE PIONEER, Seidimayer and Mehringer, led the parade of death. Crowds of sightseers queued queu-ed up before the First Pillar, made their way up the difficult Crack, crawled under the overhanging over-hanging Rote Fluh and bivouacked bivouack-ed for the night near the Swallow's Swal-low's Nest. But the next day in a bombardment of falling ; rock they only inched 300 feet up the Second Ice Field. On the third day they semed hesitant. You can study a mountain through a valley telescope or pore with a magnifying glass over an aerial photograph. But on Hi? face st i never the same. What seems a mere shadow from a distance may be an impossible outthrust. What looks like an inviting ledge from a swift-moving plane may prove only a stratum strat-um of rotten rock. Pioneers are not armed with answers Thev come only with questions' ON THE FOURTH and fifth Sf5 )eTJ Cl0uds shrouded the ate of the climbers. The mo sleet Ind iraSed by blizzs, sleet and lightning. But on the sixth day the mists parted for a moment and there they e MM.? a0Ve the ThTd Held. That night the greatest storm of all scoured the face of the Eiger. A year later two frozen bodies were lowered from what is still known as the Death Bivouac. In 1936 the great Bavarian guide, Anderl Hintersoisser, found the key to the lower part of the climb in what is now known as the Hintersoisser Traverse. But he and two companions were swept down in an avalanche. The fourth member of the party, Toni Kurz, had lowered himself to within 50 feet of his rescuers when a knot jammed in a cleat. He died swinging. BUT THE CHALLENGE had been voiced. Now the bravest climbers in Europe began to slip into Grindelwald to study the Eiger. Most of them were poor and unheralded clerks, masons, students, factory workers. But practically all were master rock men. Some came by motor bike. Some, too poor to afford sleeping rooms, camped in the meadow. Karl Winter started up the Eiger with five Swiss francs in his pockets. Only a few exhibitionists exhibition-ists (who rarely got above the Ice Hose) boasted of their intentions. inten-tions. In the pre-dawn hours the good men just quietly left for the mountain. And in 1938 the North Face was climbed. Andreas Heckmair, Ludwig Vorg, Fritz Kasparek and and 'Heinrich Harrer made it in four days, and Harrer's book, "The White Spider," is a mountaineering moun-taineering classic. Nine years later two Frenchmen got up, a month later three Germans. Ger-mans. With each success the interest in-terest increased. The year 1952 was "the good year." Nineteen men reached the top. THEN THE mountain turned. In July '53 Korber and Vass were swept away during a storm and the next month Wyss and Gonda fell from the summit ice-slope. In '56 it was Sohnel and Moosmuller and in '57 the Corti disaster. One body, held by a belt, swung grotesquely gro-tesquely for two years before it was cut down. But still they come, and last month a young Swiss went up all by himself in 30 hours. 'Why? The safe wiseacres at the valley val-ley telescopes talk of "thirst for glory." The amateur psychiatrists suspect that these climbers are misfits trying to prove that they are conquerors. But the face of the Eiger seems to be no place for neurotics, and in their normal lives climbers rarely display personality per-sonality problems. So why, again? Heinrich Harrer tries an answer: an-swer: "I DO NOT think any one of who climbed that 6,000-foot bastion bas-tion of rock and ice was at any time in fear of his life. But after our safe return we felt more conscious of the privilege of having hav-ing been allowed to live. The Eiger's face helped me to believe in life when all the circumstances seemed most hostile to life itself." Or, as old Kurt Maix put it: Climbing is the most royal irrationality ir-rationality out of which Man has |
