A mountain called Freedom (3)

Concluded: a disquisition (crux pitch) on liberty and climbing literature

The next pitch was mine. Easing up foot by foot, I strove to weld the rubber of my Scarpa rockshoes onto the smooth limestone; handholds weren’t much on offer. The negative energy left behind by our departed fellow-climbers was palpable: it dragged more heavily than the weight of our twin 9mm ropes.

Allan's lead: the crux pitch of Freiheit Südwand

Doubt festered: this must be the “smooth slab” mentioned in the topo, but signs of human passage were lacking – no friendly crampon scratches and, more to the point, few pitons or gear placements to stop a fall. I carried on until I found two old pitons in a corner. This had to be a stance. When Allan came up, we reviewed the topo. Now we understood why the Swiss crew had bailed; the cliff reared up in our face like a barrier.

Without barriers, of course, alpinism would be void of meaning. Still, one can have too much of a good thing. Few climbers have faced as many barriers as did those trapped within Poland’s post-war command economy. Even their path to mountaineering was enmeshed in bureaucratic restrictions. Aspirants received an official card stating where and when they could climb, almost like a driving license.

For expeditions, hindrances mounted to Himalayan proportions. First, climbers had to obtain a passport, ideally without agreeing to spy for the security services. Then they had to get hold of hard currency, to pay for the trip. In Katowice, home to one of the country’s most activist alpine clubs, they abseiled down factory chimneys for a living, paint-brush in hand. Others smuggled whisky into Pakistan.

These stories are recorded by Bernadette McDonald in Freedom Climbers. For once, a publication more than justifies the blurb on its cover: “One of the most important mountaineering books to be written for many years”. The paradox of the Polish climbers is that, the more obstacles they met with, the harder they climbed, and the better they became.

A line: West Face of Gasherbrum with the Kurtyka/Schauer route
(photo: Freedom Climbers)

For more than a decade, Polish climbers made a specialty of hard winter climbs on big Himalayan peaks. The lines they put up were awe-inspiring, as was the casualty rate. McDonald estimates that some eight out of ten of Poland’s top expedition climbers died in the mountains during that period.

Memorial plaque to Polish climbers below Lhotse
(Photo: Freedom Climbers)

When they summited Everest in February 1980, the first-ever ascent in winter, Pope John Paul II congratulated the expedition members, urging them to “Let this sport, which demands such a great strength of the spirit, become a great lesson of life, developing in all of you the human virtues and opening new horizons of human vocation.”

Hardly by coincidence, it was in the same year that the famous strike at the Lenin Shipyards broke out, the first step towards Poland’s liberation. But when, later in the decade, Poland did rejoin the free world, the effects on its alpinists were ambiguous. They shared in the generally increased prosperity, they could vote their governments in and out, and they could travel freely. They were free. Yet something went missing.

In her epilogue, McDonald quotes an article written by Voytek Kurtyka in 1993: “Almost physically I sense in Poland the subsiding of the great mountain inspiration. I believe it is being replaced by the onerous awareness of a new era and the necessity of meeting its demands.” The great age of winter alpinism in the Himalaya was over.

Climbing above the Fählensee (Altes Südplattli, top pitch)

“Climbing is not a symbol or poetic metaphor of life – it is life itself,” wrote J A Szczepański, a Polish climbing author. At times, Allan and I might have agreed with him. Right now, though, we just wanted this climb to end. Unfortunately, an awkward little wall, almost overhanging, blocked our upward progress. This, in a most unmetaphorical way, was clearly the crux of our climb.

“Would you mind leading the next pitch too?” Allan asked. Actually, I’d rather not, I replied – fighting the negative energies of the third pitch had sapped my resolve, or so it seemed. “OK,” said my partner, a man of few words, “then give me some gear.” And, for one last time, Allan got us out of a jam. Backing up an old peg with a chock, he scrabbled his feet upwards and onto a ledge. The key to the climb had been unlocked.

View from the Südwand

The first party to come this way had no sticky rock slippers to help them, or ingenious chocks. Climbing in the summer of 1928, they moved up the smooth slab and mastered the crux pitch in nailed boots, trusting their lives to a hawser-laid hemp rope. Walter Pause records their names as Ernst Holdenegger, Robert Hollenweger and companions. I’m unable to find anything more about them. But they were the first to win the freedom of this wall.

It seems that they didn't name it, though. A record from 1873 shows the master of the Fählenalp – we could see the roofs of its huts sprinkled like confetti on the meadow far below – explaining to a visitor, perhaps a local official, that they’d always known that beetling crag as the “Freiheit”. By this, they meant simply a summit that rises free of its neighbours, like a master cheese-maker among cowherds.

One afternoon in the Alpstein

So this Freiheit marks no victory or political démarche, still less a feat of alpinism. Instead, it was named by the men, to borrow the words of the alpine traveller James Forbes, “who live during all the finest and stirring part of the year in the fastnesses of their sublimest mountains, seeing scarcely any strange faces, and but few familiar ones … so accustomed to privation as to dream of no luxury, and utterly careless of the fate of empires or the change of dynasties.” This freedom is untainted.

Utterly careless as to how our crag got its name, Allan and I sprawled on a cramped belvedere of tussock grass. What mattered, on Freiheit's summit, was to free our feet from our sweaty climbing shoes, pull on hiking boots, and coil the ropes. And surely we’d earned a minute to take a swig of water and eat our neglected sandwiches. Only a minute, mind. Already, the slanting sunlight hinted that we should set about finding a way down.

Envoy

Auf den Bergen ist Freiheit! Der Hauch der Grüfte
Steigt nicht hinauf in die reinen Lüfte;
Die Welt ist vollkommen überall,
Wo der Mensch nicht hinkommt mit seiner Qual.

On the mountains is freedom; no clammy breath
Mounts there from the rotting caves of death!
Blest is the wide world every where
When man and his sorrows come not near.

Friedrich Schiller, The Bride of Messina (1804), Act IV, scene vii; translation by George Irvine (1837).

References

Freiheit Südwand in Walter Pause, Im schweren Fels: 100 Genussklettereien in den Alpen, 1967

Benjamin R Barber, The Death of Communal Liberty: A History of Freedom in a Swiss Mountain Canton, Princeton University Press (reprint 2015)

Interview with Yvette Vaucher in Patricia Purtschert, Früh los: Im Gespräch mit Bergsteigerinnen über siebzig, Hier und Jetzt, 2011

Felice Benuzzi, No Picnic on Mount Kenya, originally published as Fuga sul Kenya, 1947

W H Murray, Mountaineering in Scotland and Undiscovered Scotland, Baton Wicks

W H Murray, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (autobiography), Baton Wicks, 2002

Robin Lloyd-Jones, The Sunlit Summit: The Life of W. H. Murray, 2014

Bernadette McDonald, Freedom Climbers, Heritage House, 2012

New York Times, Scaling the World’s Most Lethal Mountain in the Dead of Winter, May 2017

A mountain called Freedom (2)

Continued: a disquisition (alpine III/IV+) on liberty and climbing literature

The only way out is up, we decided. Quite a few mountaineers have felt the same way, and not only about the pitch in front of them. Yvette Vaucher, looking back on her career as one of Switzerland’s top alpinists, spoke for many when she said:

What attracted me is the freedom. There's so much freedom in the mountains. You choose where to go; there are no instructions. We're free. Nobody tells us you can't go here, can't go there. We trust the mountain. And it's only we ourselves who can decide whether we can get up something or not. That's freedom. And freedom is important for your whole life, whether you climb or not.

Yvette Vaucher: she chose to climb
(photo: courtesy of Schweizer Illustrierte)

In the Switzerland of the 1960s, women had to overcome a mountain of social barriers if they went climbing. None of these, in July 1966, could stop the husband-and-wife team of Michel and Yvette Vaucher putting up a breath-taking direct line on the Dent Blanche’s north face. Even so, some hindrances proved insurmountable. Women couldn’t become guides, for instance, because at that time only men serving in the Swiss army could qualify for the necessary training courses.

Camp on Mt Kenya: an illustration from No picnic on Mount Kenya

Some mountaineers have faced more literal constraints on their liberty. When the Italian alpinist, Felice Benuzzi, was interned by the British in a wartime camp in East Africa, with no hope of escape to a friendly country, the effects of imprisonment threatened his sanity:

Forced to endure the milieu we seemed almost afraid of losing our individuality. Sometimes one felt a childish urge to assert one's personality in almost any manner, shouting nonsense, banging an empty tin, showing by every act that one was still able to do something other than to wait passively. I have seen normally calm people suddenly rise from their bunks and climb the roof poles of the barrack, barking like monkeys. I felt I understood them, and they had my full sympathy.

The route and the mountain (from No Picnic on Mount Kenya)

Until, that is, he had the idea of climbing nearby Mt Kenya. Just to plan the feat was a release of sorts: “Life took on another rhythm; it had a purpose.” In January 1943, Benuzzi stole out of the camp at night with two companions. They were laden with two weeks of hoarded food, a home-made tent, and ice-axes improvised from two hammers purloined from the prison workshop. After climbing high enough to gaze down on the camp from above, the change of perspective went beyond a mere shifting of sightlines:

"Look there! Isn't that the railway line?"
"Must be. And there's the wood by the church of Nanyuki. And further on ... Yes, it's our camp!"
"Wrong! It is not our camp that you see. It is the camp where we were prisoners."
"I apologise," I answered studying the scene with the aid of the binoculars: "I can see the big black barracks of Compound E!" I added. "Would you mind pulling that branch towards you, so that I can see better? ... Thank you. It is Compound E!"
"I can hardly believe that we were ever there!"

A forest camp (from No Picnic on Mount Kenya)

After planting the Italian flag on a subsidiary summit, they returned to the internment camp. There was nowhere else to go; their rations had run out. They’d achieved what they wanted though, as the original title of Benuzzi’s subsequent book makes clear: Escape on Mt Kenya – 17 days of liberty!

Unlike the bold Italian trio, we hesitated to turn back – the descent path from the Freiheit’s south wall is known as the Mörderwegli, we’d heard, which about sums up its hiker-friendliness. Then again, the wall above us betrayed no hint of weakness. Walter Pause must have mis-stated; he gives the hardest pitch as IV minus.

Allan volunteered to take the first rope-length, a trivial 3c according to the topo. But the shattered limestone flakes, resembling a vertically arrayed bed of knives, did not reassure. Nor did the lack of protection. Yet our leader mounted the pitch as unperturbed as an aristocrat ascending the scaffold.

The epithet is borrowed from W H Murray, the very doyen of prisoner/alpinists. After taking part in a restoration of climbing standards in his native Scotland during the 1930s, Murray joined the Army, was commissioned as an officer, and shipped out to the Middle Eastern theatre, where he was captured in June 1942.

To relieve the tedium of an Italian prison camp, he started to write up his pre-war climbs, relying only on his memories – far better for the quality of writing, he later said, than recycling old climbing diaries. In these efforts – although he was much too modest to make the comparison himself – he joined a select band of incarcerated authors, Boethius and Cervantes among them, who have penned classics from a prison cell.

Much of the book was already written, partly on repurposed toilet paper so legend has it, when the prisoners were moved to a camp in German territory. There the Gestapo found Murray’s manuscript and confiscated it. Undaunted, Murray set to work again. The second version, he thought, was better than the first.

The book may also have absorbed elements of the mystical creed, based on meditation, that a fellow officer introduced to him at the second camp. Finally published in 1947, Mountaineering in Scotland has never been out of print since. And, although Murray went on to become a prolific author, his writing never again reached such heights as it did behind the barbed wire fences of Marisch Trubeau Oflag VIII-F.

Murray gives his years in captivity no more than two short chapters in his autobiography, and rarely spoke about them afterwards. Yet they left their imprint throughout his writing. Describing a stalker’s cottage in remote Glen Affric, he wrote in Undiscovered Scotland, his second mountain book:

A house standing alone in wild country always appeals profoundly to Mcintyre and me. It suggests to us peace, beauty, the perfect freedom from interruption that gives a chance of understanding the things we love. … My unaided imagination could conceive no more delightful home. However, such a picture of freedom from worldly concerns is a symbol, not to be mistaken for reality. I often meet people living amid scenes of peace and beauty whose hearts share neither attribute. At first I used to be puzzled, dismayed, and even made miserable at finding them not only dissatisfied with their lot and disgruntled with society, but worse still, given over to disparagement of their neighbours. The breeding of ill will had become a chosen task. But true peace, that blessed by-product of an integrated heart and mind and will, depends on no scenery. It can be had everywhere - when the means are known.

That’s an unusual reflection to find in a book of climbing reminiscences. One wonders if it could have been written by an author who hadn’t experienced what it means to lose your liberty. "Into the heart of mountain literature," says Robert Macfarlane, “Murray smuggled the spirit." And, one might add, some exceptional insights into the meaning of freedom.

Up on Freiheit, the second pitch brought us onto a small ledge. Suddenly we had company. Two Swiss climbers were just pulling their ropes down; evidently, they’d just rappelled in from above. “We couldn’t find the route,” they explained.

In hindsight, we might have asked them how this crag got its name. But too late: having rigged their next abseil, our interlocutors vanished down the cliff.

(Continued)

A mountain called Freedom (1)

Investigating the links between life, liberty and climbing literature

Preoccupied with the abseils, we took our crag’s name on trust. The last rappel slid us out of a stone-raked slot and away into free air. While the ropes untwisted and our boot-tips described a slow downward spiral, the corrugations of Switzerland’s Alpstein massif scrolled by, viewed as if from a well-sited revolving restaurant. Then the wide-screen panorama cut to a close-up of an ice-choked recess in the cliff we were descending. To my relief, I touched down on the rubble glacis below our wall before another rotation could start. “Ropes free,” I called up to Allan. And so we arrived at the foot of Freiheit Südwand.

Pendant: abseiling into the Freiheit Südwand

The crag’s name had leapt out at me from an old book. Surfing a second-hand shop in Tokyo’s Kanda district a few years before, I’d lit on a copy of Im schwerem Fels (On hard rock), a compendium of alpine climbs by Walter Pause. Opening it, I happened on a dramatic black-and-white photo of a limestone wall, somewhere in eastern Switzerland. Freiheit! The idea of a mountain called freedom somehow resonated.

The Freiheit and Hundstein cliffs (photo from Im schwerem Fels)

After I moved to Zurich, Allan dropped by on a world tour. We’d already climbed together in the Alps of Japan and New Zealand; now it was time to sample the grand originals. I showed my visitor the topo in Pause’s book – Grade III/IV, yep, we should be able to manage that – and without ado, we drove down Switzerland’s A3 autobahn and up a forest track. Leaving the weatherbeaten Subaru at the end of the road, we walked over a pass and down to a guesthouse at the end of a lake. The valley reminded us of a Norwegian fjord, its walls soaring up at an alarming pitch.

Fjordland: or the Fählensee one summer morning

When you think about it, this part of the Alps is where you’d expect to find a mountain called Freiheit. Mountains are the “house of freedom God hath built for us,” says William Tell in the play by Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805). Granted, Tell lived in another canton, if he ever existed, which the savants say he didn’t, and Schiller intended his play for a German audience. Still, the myth has taken root. Every year, at Interlaken, an extravagant open-air production of this play perpetuates Tell’s memory.

Montesquieu (Wikipedia)

As for the mountains, serious scholars have attributed Switzerland’s unique brand of democracy to them. Liberty, says Montesquieu (1689-1755), “reigns, therefore, more in mountainous and rugged countries than in those which nature seems to have most favoured”.

And this seems convincing until you look over the border at, say, Austria, whose political culture has developed quite differently. Take, for example, the late Jörg Haider, a controversial politician with a liking for Lederhosen. Worryingly, the right-wing party he used to lead bears exactly the same name as the mountain we now planned to climb.

Was it for some victory of the Swiss confederation, perhaps against those less democratic neighbours, that our Freiheit was named? This wasn’t the moment to speculate. The abseil had landed us on a slanting terrace of limestone fragments – and more of this stuff, it seemed, might come shattering down at any moment. Let’s admit it; we were impressed with our surroundings. Far below, as if seen from a BASE jumper’s perspective, the green waters of the Fählensee glittered; above beetled the cliff we’d come to climb. We edged carefully across the stony ramp to the start of our route.

One thing was clear; the only way out was up.

(Continued)

The accident in “And then”

How Japan’s most famous modern novelist borrowed from a real-life mountain disaster

Natsume Soseki

Few would argue that Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916) was greatly into extreme sports. So it’s all the more surprising to happen on a reference to modern alpinism in his novel Sore kara (ably translated as And then by Norma Moore Field). This occurs in Chapter XV, when Daisuke, a typically perplexed and troubled Sōseki hero, is leafing through a “certain popular foreign magazine”:

In one number, he had come across an article entitled "Mountain Accidents" and had been alarmed. The article recounted the injuries and mishaps that befell those adventurers who crawled up high mountains. There was a story of a climber lost in an avalanche whose bones appeared forty years later on the tip of a glacier; another described the plight of four adventurers who, about to pass a flat, vertical rock that stood halfway up the side of a peak, had piled one on top of the other like monkeys; but just as the highest was about to reach for the tip of the rock, it had crumbled, the rope had broken, and the three, doubled one upon the other, had plunged headlong past the fourth into the abyss. In the midst of these accounts were inserted several illustrations of human beings glued like bats to a mountainside as sheer as a brick wall. Daisuke, imagining the wide sky and distant valleys that lay beyond the white space beside the precipitous cliffs, could not help re-experiencing the dizziness brought on by terror.

On reading this account, Daisuke reflects that “in the world of morality, he stood on the same ground as those climbers”. At the same time, he is unwilling or unable to break off the budding liaison with a friend’s wife that is leading him towards moral and social destruction. For the fate that Sōseki has in store for his hero will be every bit as annihilating as the accident that befell the “four adventurers” in the fictional magazine.

Or was that magazine really fictional? Except for the number of people involved, the accident it describes closely resembles the one in August 1899 that ended the career of the English rock-climbing pioneer Owen Glynne Jones (below) and three guides on the Ferpècle Arête of the Dent Blanche.

The original O G Jones in action (photo by George D Abraham)

In that notorious episode, the lead guide tried to surmount a rocky obstacle by standing on an ice-axe held firm by his colleagues. When he slipped, he pulled Jones and two other guides to their deaths. The fifth member of the party, a Mr F W Hill, survived only because the rope joining him to the others snapped under the strain. A detailed post on OG Jones’s life and death can be found on Summitpost.

Could Sōseki have heard of this accident? The dates seem to work. In 1901, only a few years after the Dent Blanche disaster, he was sent to England on a Japanese government scholarship to improve his knowledge of English literature. During his stay, Sōseki unquestionably fulfilled his mandate, spending most of his time closeted in libraries or his lodgings, reading voraciously. It seems possible that he also stumbled across a magazine – but which one? – containing an account of Dent Blanche accident.

The Dent Blanche, as featured in "And then"

Sōseki’s English sojourn was the making of his career. Returning to Japan, he took up an appointment at the First National College in Tokyo and later became the professor of English literature at Tokyo Imperial University. Novels started to tumble out at a rate of one a year. Yet his memories of England were more bitter than sweet: ”The two years I spent in London were the most unpleasant in my life. Among English gentlemen I lived in misery, like a poor dog that had strayed among a pack of wolves.”

A few of Sōseki’s English friends did their best to alleviate his misery. His last set of landladies, the Leale sisters of Clapham, “successfully urged him to get out more and take up cycling”, or so Wikipedia asserts. Had the sisters been a bit more successful, one could imagine a kind of alternative history in which Sōseki parlays his newfound cycling fitness into a general enthusiasm for the outdoors, returning to Japan just in time to join the nascent Japanese Alpine Club, as quite a few other contemporary writers would do.

You know, it might almost have happened – in Sōseki’s Kusamakura, published in 1906, the year after the Japanese Alpine Club was founded, the narrator opens his account walking down a spring mountainside towards a remote hot spring village. We learn that he is a painter on a hiking tour, not unlike the real-life artists Nakamura Seitarō and Ibaraki Inokichi, who both became keen Sangakukai men.

At least one caution is in order here. A novel's narrator is not necessarily the same sort of person as his author. Thus, although the protagonist of Kusamakura may have been a likely candidate for Japan's new alpine club, this doesn't mean that his creator ever considered joining. Come to think about it, it’s a mercy that Sōseki didn’t sign up as a pioneer alpinist. Japanese literature would in all probability be much the poorer for it.

“I noted the situation was serious”

Investigating the literature of near-death experiences in the mountains

“Up and About”, Doug Scott’s recently published autobiography, shows that the Himalayan veteran still wields a deft pen. Within the first pages, there’s also more than a hint at why so few of Scott’s peers got to write their own life stories:

"This reminded me of when I was avalanched on Mazeno Peak in Pakistan. Rattling down a 500-metre gully, with time suspended, I found myself observing everything I experienced, as though from a bubble. There was no fear, just a series of impressions: tumbling down over rock and ice cliffs, wondering at how resilient the human body is and that I was still alive, turning this way and that, my whole weight bouncing off my right ankle. There was no pain, but I noted the situation was serious. I was then in space, clearing a step, sliding with the snow but unaware of the speed of my descent; I had time to register it was like being up with Leo Dickinson in his hot air balloon, not aware of the wind because we were moving at the same speed. I bumped gradually to a halt, partially buried on the glacier below but able to clear the snow away from my face, release the waist belt on my rucksack and breathe more easily."

"Aufstieg I" by Ferdinand Hodler, Swiss Alpine Museum, Bern

Unlike many a hard-climbing contemporary – Dougal Haston, Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker are just a few names that come to mind – Doug Scott has survived to tell his tale. With the passage quoted above, he therefore becomes the latest contributor to a select genre – the corpus, if that is the right word, of mountaineering near-death experiences.

“Time suspended … no fear, just a series of impressions … no pain”: the essential elements of Scott’s experience on Mazeno Peak are widely confirmed in this literature. Take, for example, the accident that befell Albert Heim (1849–1937) on the Säntis, a mountain in eastern Switzerland, in 1871. Then a doctoral candidate in geology, Heim was leading a party down a steep snowfield when he lost his footing and slid over a cliff. During a fall of more than sixty feet, he felt no pain – that came later – yet all his thoughts remained coherent and very clear. And time slowed to a crawl: “What I felt in five to ten seconds could not be described in ten times that length of time”.

Albert Heim

Heim had ample leisure for practical decision-making on his way down. He chose to keep hold of his alpenstock, as it might still be of use, and he thought of taking off his glasses, in case they shattered. He also decided to call out to his companions immediately, should he survive the fall, so that they wouldn’t unduly hurry their own descent down the dangerous cliff. But that was by no means all:

"My next thought was that I would not be able to give my inaugural university lecture that had been announced for five days later. I considered how the news of my death would arrive for my loved ones and I consoled them in my thoughts. Then I saw my whole past life take place in many images, as though on a stage at some distance from me. I saw myself as the chief character in the performance. Everything was transfigured as though by a heavenly light and everything was beautiful without grief, without anxiety, and without pain. The memory of very tragic experiences I had had was clear but not saddening. I felt no conflict or strife; conflict had been transmuted into love. Elevated and harmonious thoughts dominated and united the individual images, and like magnificent music a divine calm swept through my soul. I became ever more surrounded by a splendid blue heaven with delicate roseate and violet cloudlets. I swept into it painlessly and softly and I saw that now I was falling freely through the air and that under me a snow field lay waiting. Objective observations, thoughts, and subjective feelings were simultaneous. Then I heard a dull thud and my fall was over."

After the impact, Heim lay unconscious for half an hour. His companions had to carry him down to the nearest alp huts. Yet, five days later, he gave his inaugural lecture on schedule, and apparently to good effect.

Two years later, at an extraordinarily young age, Heim was appointed professor of geology at the Zurich Polytechnic (now the Federal Institute of Technology). His approach to science would be far from blinkered. Besides elucidating the structure of the Alps, he found time to investigate topics as diverse as water-divining and sky colours. And, in due course, he returned to the subject of consciousness during near-fatal mountain accidents.

"Absturz IV" by Ferdinand Hodler, Swiss Alpine Museum, Bern

The question Heim asked was, quite simply: in a mountaineering fall, or similar accident, what did the victim experience in the last seconds of his life? After collecting the experiences of other accident survivors, he presented his findings to the Swiss Alpine Club’s Uto Section in Zurich on February 26, 1892. The paper was subsequently published in the club’s yearbook as “Notizen über den Tod durch Absturz”. An English translation, “The experience of dying from falls”, appeared in a 1972 edition of Omega, a journal that is somewhat lugubriously dedicated to “the psychological study of dying, death, bereavement, suicide and other lethal behaviors”.

Heim's conclusion was remarkable: in practically all individuals who faced death through accidental falls, a similar mental state developed:

“There was no anxiety, no trace of despair, no pain; but rather calm seriousness, profound acceptance, and a dominant mental quickness and sense of surety. Mental activity became enormous, rising to a hundred-fold velocity or intensity. The relationships of events and their probable outcomes were overviewed with objective clarity. No confusion entered at all. Time became greatly expanded. The individual acted with lightning-quickness in accord with accurate judgment of his situation. In many cases there followed a sudden review of the individual's entire past; and finally the person falling often heard beautiful music and fell in a superbly blue heaven containing roseate cloudlets. Then consciousness was painlessly extinguished, usually at the moment of impact, and the impact was, at the most, heard but never painfully felt. Apparently hearing is the last of the senses to be extinguished.”

Whymper on the Matterhorn: alpinism's first NDE?

Most of the case histories examined by Heim were drawn from Switzerland or nearby. Mentioned but not quoted are two British exponents of alpinism’s “golden age”. These are the physicist John Tyndall, who was avalanched on Piz Morteratsch in 1864, and Edward Whymper, who fell 200 feet down an ice-gully while exploring the Matterhorn’s south side two years earlier. In describing this latter accident, Whymper produced what may be the Magna Carta of mountaineering near-death literature – although, in keeping with the buttoned-up conventions of the Victorian era, he demoted the experience to a mere footnote within his best-known book:

“As it seldom happens that one survives such a fall, it may be interesting to record what my sensations were during its occurrence. I was perfectly conscious of what was happening, and felt each blow; but, like a patient under chloroform, experienced no pain. Each blow was, naturally, more severe than that which preceded it, and I distinctly remember thinking, “Well, if the next is harder still, that will be the end!” Like persons who have been rescued from drowning, I remember that the recollection of a multitude of things rushed through my head, many of them trivialities or absurdities, which had been forgotten long before; and, more remarkable, this bounding through space did not feel disagreeable. But I think that in no very great distance more, consciousness as well as sensation would have been lost, and upon that I base my belief, improbable as it seems, that death by a fall from a great height is as painless an end as can be experienced.”

In a sense, Heim had no need to call Whymper to the witness stand. For the Englishman’s experience tallies almost exactly with the patterns later identified by the Swiss scholar. The absence of pain, the “multitude of things” rushing through the victim’s mind and Whymper’s conclusion all accord with Heim’s analysis. Only the radical compression of time mentioned by Heim and perhaps his “blue heaven containing roseate cloudlets” are missing from Whymper’s account.

Speaking of those roseate cloudlets, is it possible that Albert Heim was guilty of overselling death by falling? He presented his findings to a section of the Swiss Alpine Club that had been founded less than a decade before. By encouraging more people to participate, the activities of mass-membership clubs such as the SAC unavoidably raised the mountain accident rate, even as they strove, in many ways successfully, to improve safety standards. In concluding his paper, Heim mentions that his observations had been a comfort to a mother who had lost two sons in falls. So it would have been only natural for Heim to emphasise the consolatory aspects of his findings.

"Absturz III" by Ferdinand Hodler, Swiss Alpine Museum, Bern

Or it may be that different people experience things in different ways. After all, Heim himself said only that his findings applied to “95 percent of victims”. That leaves some room for variation.

Frank Smythe

Half a century after Heim published his paper, a young English mountaineer by the name of Frank Smythe scaled a difficult overhang in the Dolomites. Perhaps carried away by the euphoria of the moment, he then failed to set up a safe belay before allowing his companion to start climbing. Thus, when a hold broke away under the second climber, Smythe was dragged off his stance. As he fell into the void, he assumed that he was “as good as dead”. Yet he found himself insensible to bumps and blows, “as though all life’s forces were in the process of undergoing some fundamental evolutionary change, the change called death…”

So far, Smythe’s account cleaves closely to Heim’s findings – almost as if underlining how well these have stood the test of time. What follows, though, departs in some details from the Swiss scholar's playbook, or even goes beyond it:

“For how long I experienced this crescendo of power I cannot say. Time no longer existed as time ... Then, suddenly, this feeling was superseded by a feeling of complete detachment, indifference to what happened to my body ... Had the tenant already departed in anticipation of the wreck that was to follow? Was it merely a mental effect due to a sudden and intense nervous strain? It is not within my province to discuss that which only death can prove; yet to me this experience was a convincing one; it convinced me that consciousness survives beyond the grave.”

In hindsight, Smythe was better qualified than most to describe a near-death experience in the mountains. Surviving this youthful mishap almost unscathed, he went on to become equally prolific as an alpinist, writer and photographer. Among other feats, he put up two hard new routes on the south side of Mt Blanc, made the first ascent of a Himalayan peak that was then the highest mountain ever climbed, and took part in three of the pre-war attempts on Everest.

On one of these expeditions, climbing at his physical and psychological limits close to the summit, Smythe saw hovering above him two bulbous objects with “what looked like squat, underdeveloped wings, whilst the other had a beak-like protuberance like the spout of a teakettle. They distinctly pulsated... as though they possessed some horrible quality of life."

"Absturz I" (detail) by Ferdinand Hoder, Swiss Alpine Museum, Bern

This was not the only occasion when Smythe met with mysteries that are not revealed to ordinary mortals. His biography notes an episode of automatic writing and, during a visit to a Scottish glen, a vision of ghostly figures which convinced him that he had been “vouchsafed a backward glimpse into a blood-stained page of Highland history”.

If Frank Smythe brought a greater-than-average sensibility to the experience of falling, it should be no surprise that he got more out of it than others have done. In this respect, the literature of near-death experiences resembles any other branch of travel writing – that what you see and hear depends a great deal on what you take with you on the journey.

References

Doug Scott, Up and About: the hard road to Everest, Vertebrate Press, 2015.

Albert Heim, “Notizen über den Tod durch Absturz”, Yearbook of the Swiss Alpine Club, 1892, translated as “The experience of dying from falls” and introduced by Russell Noyes and Roy Kletti, Omega, vol 3, no 1, February 1972.

Edward Whymper, Scrambles amongst the Alps in the years 1860-69.

Tony Smythe, My father, Frank: Unresting spirit of Everest, biography of Frank Smythe, 2013.

Masters of the Mittellegi (2)

Continued: an attempt to follow Maki Yuko up the Eiger's northeastern ridge

“A storm is coming,” says the junior guide, though it’s not actually raining yet. Do we really have to give up so soon? I pull out my mobile phone but, with the dispatch of a patented Bergführer, Martin Burgener is already looking at his. The radar picture shows that the storm is an isolated cell and moving northwards. With luck, it’ll miss. We carry on, keeping a weather eye out.

Maki’s party was climbing a gully towards the ridge when the three-metre pole slipped from Brawand’s shoulders. The young guide launched himself after it, losing his footing just as he managed to grab the falling pole. Steuri, in turn, managed to arrest his tumbling colleague on the rope. Bravand was recovered intact, except for a scraped arm. Maki scolded him for risking his life, but they were all aware that without their secret weapon, the clawed pole, they had no hope of success.

Just getting to the ridge was a struggle – in one or two places, the leader had to stand on a colleague’s shoulders to get past an overhang. It wasn’t till shortly before five in the evening that they found a bivouac site, a cranny on the south side of the ridge, not far from the present hut. Ice-axes were used to rake gravel into a ledge. After supper, Maki lay down at the back of the recess while the three guides took it in turns to sit outside – only one of them could lie down at a time. The night was cold.

At six in the morning, they roped up again, leaving the blankets and bivouac gear in the rock niche. There was no point starting earlier; you had to see what you were doing. Now their way led out over a rocky knife-edge, views plunging into the abyss on both sides.

Again, ‘combined tactics’ were used – standing on each other’s shoulders – to get over rock steps. Scaling a 30 metre-high gendarme, they clambered into a notch at 3,500 metres. In front of them, the ridge reared up into the near-vertical “Aufschwung” that had so far rebuffed all attempts on the Mittellegi.

Full light now, the sunlight already playing on the summit snows – two small figures are striding down the ridge on the far side. They must have bivvied up there, says Martin. The sky is blue now – no trace of that pre-dawn storm – but strange waves and bars of vapour are forming. The foehn wind is strengthening.

Maki’s party took a break in the notch, bracing themselves for the struggle ahead. Three alpine jackdaws sailed past on an updraft, their unlovely screeches bringing home the rock barrier's rebarbative loom. As gusts of wind whirled spindrift in his face, Maki noted how the limestone strata tilted inimically downwards.

The men got to their feet. Now it was time to put the wooden pole to work. Steuri, the second man, drove the twin spikes at its foot into a crack and bore down on the shaft with his full weight to wedge it in place. Amatter, who was leading, looped the climbing rope through the hook at the top of the pole, to give himself some protection from above. Then, using his axe to chip out tiny footholds, he inched himself upwards.

Stone splinters rained down on the waiting trio below him, peppering their hands and faces with scratches. When the leader had found a stance, he brought the others up, and then the whole process started again. As the last man, Maki had to climb with one hand – with the other, he had to drag the pole after him. Often he dangled on the rope, looking past shreds of mist down to the green valley far below. By then, he’d lost all sense of time; fear too had long since faded away.

Like Maki’s party before us, we come to the foot of the 30-metre tower. The wind finds us now, blowing the rope’s slack into a billowing arc. Over my shoulder, while we wait for another party to clear the pitch, I glimpse a silvery UFO hovering over the Schreckhorn. Instead of snow, the gusts fling flakes of grit into our faces; our teeth grate on them...

The guides had just started on an almost vertical, 50 metre-high wall when – catastrophe! – a dark shadow flitted through the air, tumbling past Maki into the abyss. He grabbed the rope in alarm, only to hear Amatter’s calm tones: “Not to worry, Herr – I just dropped my sack, that’s all.” And then the guide got back to work, as if nothing had happened.

The wind is buffeting, trying to shoulder us bodily off the mountain. Overhead, the sky is bright blue, except for a long bar of cloud that lies athwart the ridge. Despite the gale, it stays magically fixed in place, cresting an invisible wave of air flowing over the mountain.

At last, the rock’s angle started to ease. They’d taken eight hours – from nine in the morning to five in the evening – to wrestle themselves upwards by just two hundred metres. And yet, to Maki and his guides, no more than an hour seemed to have passed, so intense had been their concentration.

Scrambling onto the top of the steep section, they realised they’d won. Yet nobody had the strength left to cheer. Without a word, Steuri scratched the date onto a rock – 10.9.1921. Then he snapped the wooden pole in two and tied his headcloth onto the shorter section. Amatter took the makeshift flag and thrust it into a cairn that he’d piled up in the meantime.

We realise we’ve lost when we cross a narrow gap between two towers. Stepping onto the tightrope fillet between them I feel the wind catch my pack and tilt me towards Grindelwald’s airspace. I grab a projection on the far side before I topple. Strictly speaking, you can’t take the so-called tour of the north face from here, because we’re not yet above that yawning declivity. But the difference will be academic if we get blown off the mountain. “The wind will be much stronger on the summit ridge,” says Martin, pointing out the obvious.

Moving like robots now, Maki’s party continued up the snows of the summit ridge, reaching the top shortly after seven in the evening. The cold drove them onwards after a five-minute pause. Roping up in a new order, Brawand bringing up the rear, the party started carefully down the western ridge – the day’s snowmelt had already frozen, glazing the rocks with ice as hard as enamel.

Amatter led downwards, lantern in hand. The light reached back only to Maki, leaving Steuri and Brawand to grope their way in the dark. After a while, they realised they’d gone astray – on one side was a sheer cliff down to the Eiger Glacier, on the other an equally sharp drop towards Grindelwald. Arduously, for an hour and more, they had to retrace their steps upwards and downwards, without making any real progress.

They were hungry: most of the food had tumbled off the mountain in Steuri’s rucksack. The water too was gone; only a little brandy was left. Steuri suggested licking butter to slake their thirst. To Maki’s surprise, and slight revulsion, the ploy worked.

In pitch-darkness, they stumbled onto the moraines of the Eiger Glacier, almost at the limits of their strength, reaching the Eigergletscher station at three in the morning. To their surprise, people poured out of the nearby restaurant to welcome them – they’d been expected.

Some hours after turning back, we’re sitting under a parasol on a café terrace at Kleine Scheidegg, sipping coffee with whipped cream, and looking up at the sombre recess of the Eiger’s north face. Shreds of cloud are scouring the summit ridge. If we’d gone on up there, we’d have been crawling across on hands and knees. “So how about it then – same time next year?” Martin asks. I nod.

On returning to Grindelwald, Maki was hoisted onto the shoulders of two Englishman, a tribute that the modest Japanese alpinist would probably have preferred to decline. For there was much to do. First, he had to write up testimonials for his guides: “When we were climbing on the Mittellegigrat from the side of Kallifirn,” Maki recorded in Sam Brawand’s Führerbuch, “he lost the wooden pole which was most important instrument for this climb. At this moment, he threw himself after the pole and got it back. Not thinking of a bit after his own safety! I couldn't keep from the tears came down.”

Then Maki invited his companions and their wives to a celebratory dinner in the Hotel Adler. And, to pay for the construction of the first refuge on the Mittellegi Ridge, he made a handsome donation to the local guides’ association. The new hut opened in 1924. The bill came to sixteen thousand Swiss francs, of which Maki provided the lion’s share.

A new hut, with twice the capacity, replaced the old refuge in 2001. It is still owned and operated by the Grindelwald guides. Maki’s old hut was helicoptered off the ridge and is now a tourist attraction at the mountain’s foot. As for the Mittellegi, climbers no longer need to take along a three-metre pole; fixed hawser-laid ropes take the sting out of the steep sections. The Eiger is still the Eiger. A week after our failed attempt, lightning struck a party of Czech climbers near the hut, killing one and injuring another.

Maki also set about purchasing top-quality alpine gear – ice-axes, crampons, rucksacks – for his university mountaineering club in Japan. The investment paid off. Inspired by Maki’s example, Japan’s alpinists raised their sights to big ridges that required technical climbing skills. Less than a year after the Mittellegi ascent, parties from Waseda and Gakushūin universities raced each other up Yari’s Kitakama ridge, opening a new decade of climbing exploration in the Japan Alps.

Alpinistic enthusiasm percolated up to the pinnacle of Japanese society. Maki returned to Switzerland in 1926, to organise a mountaineering summer for Prince Chichibu, the emperor’s younger son. Sam Brawand helped guide some of the warming-up climbs, although military duties prevented him joining the Prince’s traverse of the Matterhorn. Maki went on to make the first ascent of Mt Alberta in 1925, again with Swiss guides. After the war, he crowned his alpine career by leading the successful expedition to Manaslu, Japan’s 8000-metre peak, in 1956.

A year later, he was at Haneda Airport to welcome his old friend from Grindelwald. Brawand had meanwhile become a local politician and sat on the old Swissair’s board as the cantonal representative. In this capacity, he seized the chance to fly on the airline’s inaugural flight to Japan in 1957. The DC-6B took off from Geneva on 1 April and arrived in Tokyo on the fifth.

And there to greet him was a delegation of alpinists headed by Matsukata Saburō and Maki Yūkō. More old friends came to meet him at a reception hosted by the Japanese Alpine Club. Even Princess Chichibu was there, widow of the climbing prince. Brawand was so moved that the words in his old Führerbuch floated into his mind: “I couldn't keep from the tears came down”.

Memories of the Mittellegi linger in Maki’s homeland. On a recent count, there were at least 14 businesses with the name “Eiger” in Japan, including a maker of stained glass. And, for quite a few years after Maki himself passed on – this was in 1989 – Japan’s mountaineering traditionalists still favoured a distinctive kind of broad-beamed pack. These were known as “Kissling”, after the eponymous workshop in Zermatt that supplied the rucksacks for Maki’s student climbers. It's been years since I last saw one, though.

References

Prime source is Maki Yūkō’s account in his memoir, Sankō (“Mountain journeys”), which is still in print from Chuō Kōronsha.

A summarised version of Maki’s account was translated by Miyashita Keizō into German for Daniel Anker’s mountain monograph, Eiger: die vertikale Arena (AS Verlag, Zurich, 1998, revised 2000).

Additional reminiscences of the climb and subsequent events come from Samuel Brawand's memoir, Erinnerungen an Yuko Maki. Incidentally, Maki (and Miyashita) give the length of the wooden pole as six metres; Brawand, more credibly, says three metres.

Masters of the Mittellegi (1)

Following a pioneer of Taishō-era alpinism up the Eiger’s northeastern ridge

Pink is not my favourite colour, least of all when it lights up the night sky. Against this flickering glow, the Eiger brandishes his switchblade profile. We’re only an hour out, and already a fiasco looms, if not worse. Now, how did we get ourselves into this mess?

Ultimately, I'm inclined to pin the blame on Walter Weston - even if I have go back a ways to do so. In 1918, the mountaineering missionary was back in England after his Yokohama stint, but he kept in touch with mountaineering friends from Japan. One day, a student from Tokyo called to ask where he should spend his first season in the Swiss Alps. That was an easy question: Weston had fond memories of Grindelwald, where he’d done quite a few climbs in his pre-Japan days ...

Somewhere out beyond Grindelwald, a pink bolt stabs from cloud to ground. No accompanying rumble yet, but I stop trying to kid myself that a power line has shorted, or that somebody is letting off an early-morning fireworks display. This really is a thunderstorm. Now what?

The young Japanese mountaineer was Maki “Yūkō” Aritsune (1894-1989). The son of a Sendai newspaper proprietor, he grew up with both the will and means to climb. After travels with his parents introduced him to mountain scenery, he started his own climbing career with the big volcanoes. Mt Fuji was ascended in 1906, Yōtei-zan in Hokkaidō in 1909 and Aso-san in Kyūshū the following year.

Maki Yuko

In 1912, now in middle school, he made his first visit to the Japan Northern Alps. That ascent of Shirouma hooked him. After going up to Keio in 1913, he founded a university mountaineering club, Japan’s first. In the same winter, he went to Taguchi to take ski lessons – this just a few years after Major von Lerch had introduced the sport to Japan. Now Maki was a man with a mission.

In 1918, he crossed the Pacific to continue studying at Columbia University. At least, that was the plan. Unfortunately, Maki found the atmosphere on campus so frenetic, after America’s entry into the war, that he couldn’t concentrate on study. So, counterintuitively, he kept going eastwards and sailed to England.

Mountains probably influenced this decision. Not long after his arrival in London, Maki dropped in on Walter Weston, who was always ready to help fellow members of the Japanese Alpine Club, and asked about a good base for climbing.

At last, Maki was there, lodged at the Hotel Adler at Grindelwald. In July 1920, he climbed several of the big peaks in the Bernese Oberland and made a traverse over from the Mönch to the Eiger’s summit via its west ridge. Already, though, it was the ridge on the opposite side of that mountain that interested him – the Mittellegi.

By this time, all the major alpine summits and most of the Bernese Oberland’s big ridges had been climbed. If there was a Last Great Problem, it was the Eiger’s Mittellegi. The ridge had been descended, using long abseils, but so far nobody had managed to climb up the steeper sections. From the grassy meadows of the Faulhorn, Maki studied the serrated ridge through a telescope and planned his campaign. A victory would greatly enhance the nascent traditions of Japanese alpinism…

Yesterday, I’d met up with Martin Burgener at the Eismeer Station, a railway stop hollowed out inside the Eiger. We walked with ducked heads through dripping tunnels to a portal blasted into the mountain’s south face. A delicate move down a corner of wet limestone saw us onto the glacier. A fine afternoon outside, though big bales of cloud were blowing off the peaks across the valley.

We roped up and set off eastwards across the snow. Let’s move smartly here, Martin said, tilting his helmet to explain why. I looked up – a block of avalanche debris, ponderous as a delivery van, clogged a gully above us. Yes, I agreed, that lot doesn’t seem to have our best interests at heart. Martin laughed, but set off at a swift pace. Welcome to the Eiger. 

We took off our crampons under a wall of compact limestone. Martin led a short chimney and then, short-roped, we meandered, carefully, across a series of ledges up towards the ridge, as if taking a slantwise stroll across a tiled roof, easy but aerily exposed. Thank goodness we don’t have to come back this way, I thought.

The Mittellegi Hut squats athwart the ridge, braced with steel cables to stop it blowing away. We dropped our gear and went in. The hut warden, bald and bearded, had a genial twinkle in his blue eyes. I didn’t notice for a minute or two that he was wearing a steel leg brace. When we came in, he ticked Martin’s name off on a slip of paper pinned on the back of the door. Only the guides were listed by name – Burgener + 1, Brunner + 1, Andermatten + 1, Bomio + 1, Brawand …

Samuel Brawand, Yuko Maki, Fritz Steuri, Fritz Amatter

Brawand! Sam Brawand would have to be the man. Maki’s 1921 season had started badly. His usual guide, Emil, went down with appendicitis and then, after Maki had done a few training climbs in Zermatt, the weather turned bad. When he returned to Grindelwald, the Eiger was dusted with new snow. Conditions looked hopeless, but he’d give it a go.

Maki had known Brawand since the winter of 1919, when the young guide had given him German lessons. And they’d climbed several high mountains together the previous summer. Now Maki invited him round to the Hotel Adler and explained his plan. They’d need some help, and so the two Fritzes, Amatter and Steuri, were signed up too. These were Grindelwald’s top men; Steuri had guided more than 400 ascents of 4,000-metre peaks while Amatter had made the first ascent of the Finsteraarhorn’s precipitous east face.

On September 7, Maki met with the guides in the hotel garden to discuss the final arrangements. Apart from the usual climbing gear, they’d need something extra and the village blacksmith was commissioned to knock one out the next day. This ‘secret weapon’ was a three-metre pole with a grappling hook at the top end and spiked feet at the other (see right).

They also amassed about thirty pitons, as well as two thirty-metre and one sixty-metre rope, each braided with the red cord that showed it met the standards of Britain’s Alpine Club. Bivvy gear had to be considered too – a spirit stove, two blankets, extra clothing, and sheets of newspaper for insulation. As for food, there would be raw eggs, roast chicken, ham, sausage, biscuits, bread, butter and jam, and brandy.

On the evening of the 8th, they went round to the blacksmith to collect the climbing pole. Now the tension started to build. From his room in the Adler, Maki watched the sunset steep the Eiger’s north face in roseate light and wondered if it was vainglory or ambition that was driving him into this venture. But, no, that wasn’t it. It was just that the mountain’s attraction was so strong, he had to climb it. Once he’d worked that out, his peace of mind returned, as it always did …

The evening sunlight flooded straight into the hut, untainted at this altitude by any reddish tinge. The western sky was clear; banner clouds still tumbled from the Schreckhorn’s summit opposite. The föhn wind was still blowing hard. We shovelled down macaroni cheese with apple sauce while Martin explained the plan – up at 4am, away half an hour later; no point going earlier, as you need to see what you’re doing when the ridge starts to steepen.

September 9th dawned bright; no clouds in the sky, just a wisp of snow pluming from the Eiger’s summit. The slanting light hinted that autumn was on the way. Maki and his guides stuffed gear into their packs, laced up their tricouni-nailed boots, and double-checked the kit-list.

The Adler’s landlord shook Maki’s hand forcefully; his wife said to come back in one piece, and the maid promised to say a prayer for him. They all came to the station to see him onto the 8.15am train.

At the Eismeer station, the party met up with Steuri, who’d come on an earlier train with the three-metre pole, and made their way down the tunnels. Then they roped down onto the snow and set off across the glacier.

Nobody notices when the stars fade out – we’re too busy watching our footwork as we scramble up and down small rock towers. At 4.30am, we’d left the hut under a starry sky. The air was warm, the rock dry and the plan still looked good. Sign up with a guide – expensive, yes, but this is the Eiger, famed for its suboptimal outcomes – and follow in the footsteps of a pioneering Japanese alpinist. It's a sound plan - what could possibly go wrong?

Now, there it is again – that pink flicker, guttering out beyond the switchblade ridge. A young guide comes clattering down the ridge towards us. Probably an aspirant, he’s yet to master the hallmark imperturbability of the patented Bergführer. “A storm's coming in,” he says breathlessly …

(To be continued)