Gertrude Bell (16 page)

Now she had truly earned her attempt on the Finsteraarhorn, the highest mountain in the Oberland. The first ascent had been made in 1812, but the north-east face had never been climbed, and it was this new and difficult route that she and Ulrich had cautiously been considering for two years. Sharp as a blade, this remote and bad-tempered mountain rises perpendicular to a razor ridge at 14,022 feet, its majestic steeple point visible for a hundred miles. Solitary and far from civilization, it is notorious for its bad weather and frequent avalanches. Experienced climbers had turned away from the challenge that this
thirty-five-year-old woman and her guide now set themselves. This was to be Gertrude's most dangerous mountain exploit. For the next twenty-five years, it would be regarded as one of the greatest expeditions in the history of Alpine climbing.

For practice, she and the Führers polished off the Wellhorn arête, with intense cold the only problem. Then she went with Ulrich for an inspection walk of the rock conditions on the Wetterhorn, an unconventional approach on to the Finsteraarhorn but one that he thought might get them off to a good start. “This morning I started out at 5:30 to—well, Ulrich calls it examining the movement of rocks, it means that you go up and see if a stone falls on you and if it doesn't you know you can go up that way . . . We went under a glacier fall, where I examined the movement of a stone on my knee . . . it hurt.”

They lost twenty-four hours in trying this approach, and started again the next day. On a perfect evening, they arrived at the hut early, and Gertrude wandered off across the grass without a coat, turning over stones to admire the clumps of sweet pale violets. At 1:35 a.m. they left the hut, the first object being the unstable arête before them, rising from the glacier in a series of angled gendarmes and towers. “The great points are continually over-balancing and tumbling down . . . they are all capped with loosely poised stones, jutting out and hanging over and ready to fall at any moment.” Putting her hand into a crack, she loosened a crumbling two-foot-square rock. It fell on top of her and knocked her skidding down the ice until she managed to arrest her fall at a tiny ledge. “I got back on my feet without the rope, which was as well for a little later I happened to pass the rope through my hands and found that it had been cut half through about a yard from my waist.”

Now with a shorter rope, she toiled on up the arête, while the angle grew steeper, and below them, ominous black clouds began to boil up from the west. They could see the top of the arête still far above, and the summit of the mountain beyond. At first they were encouraged, but another hour passed without much progress, the weather getting worse by the minute. The snow began to fall, and they were still a thousand feet from the summit when the way narrowed to a single pinnacle, a terrifying prospect with a twenty-foot overhang. If they managed to climb the pinnacle, Ulrich thought, they should be able to make it from there to the summit. In any case, there was no alternative.

Meanwhile the wind strengthened, and a thick mist began to rise up from the valley. To get to the pinnacle, they had to creep along the knife edge of a col. Having managed that, they tied Ulrich's rope to a rock, then lowered him gingerly onto a sloping ledge below the overhang, from which he would attempt to climb. He tried for a few minutes and gave up in despair: not only did the rockface slope outwards as well as downwards, but it was brittle and flaky. Next they tried the far side of the tower, where an almost vertical couloir of glassy ice ran upwards from the foot. This way, too, proved impossible. Although only fifty feet from the top of the arête, they were now in a desperate situation. There was only one option left, and it was a grim one: to turn back down the precipice in what was now appalling weather. The wind was bringing down upon them a continual avalanche of thin snow, and half an hour into the descent the mist was so thick that they could see nothing beyond the rock in front of their faces. She wrote: “I shall remember every inch of that rock face for the rest of my life.”

They successfully negotiated a vertical chimney, to emerge onto a narrow ledge sloping steeply downwards. From there, they roped themselves one by one to the rock, then tumbled down eight otherwise impassable feet onto sheer and slippery snow. They had the fixed rope to hold on to, but they were blinded by fog, and they felt as if they were plunging to their deaths. It was now nearly 6 p.m. They struggled on until eight, by which time a storm was raging.

We were standing by a great upright on the top of a tower when suddenly it gave a crack and a blue flame sat on it for a second. My ice axe jumped in my hand and I thought the steel felt hot through my woollen glove—was that possible? Before we knew where we were the rock flashed again . . . we tumbled down a chimney, one on top of the other, buried our ice axe heads in some shale and hurriedly retreated from them. It's not nice to carry a private lightning conductor in your hand.

They could go no further that night, and would have to spend the hours of darkness halfway down a precipice in the thick of the storm. They had no choice. They squeezed themselves into a crack on the rockface, Gertrude finding just room enough to wedge herself into the back of it. Ulrich sat on her feet, to keep them warm, with Heinrich below,
both of them with their feet in their knapsacks. They tied themselves individually onto the rock above their heads in case one or another of them should be struck by lightning and fall out of the crack. They could shift their position by only an inch or two, and discomfort soon became agony. “The golden rule is to take no brandy because you feel the reaction more after. I knew this and insisted on it.” She fell asleep “quite often,” to be woken by thunderclaps and flashes, impressed in spite of everything by the power of the storm and the way the lightning made the rocks crackle and fizz like damp wood igniting. “As there was no further precaution possible I enjoyed the extraordinary magnificence of the storm with a free mind . . . and all the wonderful and terrible things that happen in high places . . . Gradually the night cleared and became beautifully starry. Between 2 and 3 the moon rose, a tiny crescent.”

They longed for the warmth of the sun, but the dawn brought a blinding mist and a cutting, snow-laden wind. They emerged from their crack crippled with cold. Gertrude ate five ginger biscuits, two sticks of chocolate, a slice of bread, and a scrap of cheese with a handful of raisins; she now drank her tablespoon of brandy. For the next four hours the three figures inched their way down blindly, their ropes stiff and slippery with ice, in a gale-force wind that whirled around them in spirals of snow. The couloirs were now waterfalls. As soon as she cut a step in the ice, it filled with water. Always, in situations of extreme danger, Gertrude could somehow detach herself from her suffering and drive on. This extraordinary ability now allowed her to exercise the utmost courage. “When things are as bad as ever they can be you cease to mind them much. You set your teeth and battle with the fates . . . I know I never thought of the danger except once and then quite calmly.”

That moment came later, after each one of the three had fallen at the same place, one after the other, spinning into the abyss and then brought up with a rib-cracking jerk as the rope held. They thought the worst was over, but they were wrong. Their nemesis came in a short slope of icy rock skirting the base of a tower. This had been difficult enough to climb when, aeons ago yet only yesterday, they had crawled their way up. Now it was covered with four inches of snow that hid every hold and crack. Beside it raced a cataract of watery snow. Both men—Ulrich beside her, Heinrich below—were too insecure to hold her, and the reaches of the next ten feet were too far apart. “We managed badly . . . I had to refix the
extra rope on a rock a little below me so that it was practically no good to me. But it was the only possible plan. The rock was too difficult for me. I handed my axe down to Heinrich and told him I could do nothing but fall.”

In this state of extreme tension, she acted precipitately. Heinrich did not have time to secure himself before she jumped. They both fell, tied together, head over heels down the ice corridor. But Ulrich, on hearing her say she was going to fall, had stuck his axe into a crack, hung on to it with one hand, and held the two of them with the other. Afterwards, he could hardly believe he had done it. Gertrude wrote, “It was a near thing and I felt rather ashamed of my part in it. This was the time when I thought it on the cards we should not get down alive.”

She felt excruciating pain in her shoulders and back, probably caused by a torn muscle. The three of them were shaking with the wet and cold. The day ground on. At 8 p.m. they still had to cross several crevasses and get down the serac before they reached safety. A serac, a barrier of ice at the lower edge of a glacier, is very dangerous to negotiate because of the constant shifting and breaking under the pressure being exerted on it. It should never be crossed at night. But they were desperate. For half an hour they tried to light their lantern with wet matches under the shelter of Gertrude's dripping skirt. Giving up on that, they began to grope forward in what was now pitch-black night, but straight away Heinrich fell into eight feet of soft snow. “That was the only moment of despair,” she recalled.

Ahead of them was another night in the open on the glacier, in driving sleet. The men each carried a sack as a mattress of last resort, and Heinrich, gallantly and unusually, gave up his to Gertrude; while Ulrich put her feet, with his own, into the second sack. She passed the hours thinking of Maurice when he was fighting the Boers, commanding the Volunteer Service Company, Yorkshire Regiment. He had written of night after night spent sleeping out in the pouring rain, and assured her that he had been none the worse for it.

In the grey light of the second dawn, crippled from exposure, they could hardly walk. They staggered on and at last, barely comprehending that they had reached safety, came to the end of their ordeal. Arriving back in the village of Meiringen after fifty-seven hours on the mountain, they found her hotel buzzing with anxiety about their fate. After a
hot bath and supper in bed, Gertrude slept for twenty-four hours. Her hands and feet were frostbitten—her toes were so swollen and stiff that she had to delay her return to London for days until she could put on her shoes again. Her fingers recovered quickly enough for her to write the longest letter to her father ever, acknowledging that Domnul's prognostications on the likelihood of her demise in the Alps had almost come true.

From the glacier to the summit of the Finsteraarhorn is three thousand feet. It was only the final few hundred that had cheated them of glory. Their fifty-three hours on the rope had nearly all been endured in the worst possible weather, with winds that could have blown them off the mountain, in cold so intense that the snow froze on them and on the ropes as it fell; and, at times, in a mist that prevented them from seeing where their next step might take them. While her traverse of the Lauteraarhorn–Schreckhorn was her most important ascent, she will always be remembered for the expedition on the Finsteraarhorn. The attempt had been a failure, but a glorious one. Their safe retreat under such conditions was a tremendous performance. “There can be in the whole Alps few places so steep and so high. The climb has only been done three times, including your daughter's attempt, and is still considered one of the greatest expeditions in the whole Alps,” Ulrich Führer wrote to Hugh. “The honour belongs to Miss Bell. Had she not been full of courage and determination, we must have perished.”

A year later, Gertrude took a couple of days out of a world tour to climb in the Rockies near Lake Louise. There, to her delight, she ran into three Swiss guides from the Oberland who teased her mercilessly, asking, “How did the gracious Fräulein enjoy the Finsteraarhorn?”

Her last climb of note was the Matterhorn, in August 1904, from the Italian side and once more with Ulrich and Heinrich. Until she had notched up this last giant, she felt, she had unfinished business in the Alps. More than any other mountain in Switzerland, it is full of history. More fatal accidents have occurred on the Matterhorn than on any other Alpine peak. Gertrude had read and reread the account by Edward Whymper, the British climber who thirty-nine years previously had made the first ascent of the Matterhorn, of the appalling descent on which four members of the party slipped and fell, only the breaking of the rope saving Whymper and the two remaining guides from the same
fate. The deaths of his companions undoubtedly ruined his life: “Every night, do you understand, I see my comrades of the Matterhorn slipping on their backs, their arms outstretched, one after the other, in perfect order at equal distances . . . Yes, I shall always see them.”

Gertrude knew the mountain so well by hearsay that every step was familiar. After an unpromising dawn, the weather cleared and they made the whole climb in comfort. Near the summit, they encountered the famously difficult Tyndall Grat overhang. A rope ladder was usually to be found at this point, but it had broken and been partially replaced by a fixed rope. They took two hours to climb twenty feet. “I look back to it with great respect. At the overhanging bit you had to throw yourself out on the rope and so hanging catch with your right knee a shelving scrap of rock from which you can just reach the top rung which is all that is left of the rope ladder. That is how it is done . . . and I also remember wondering how it was possible to do it.”

Poor Heinrich found it “uncommonly difficult.” They reached the summit at 10 a.m. and came down the Swiss side, Whymper's original route, which was now hung with the ropes of recent climbers. Gertrude described the descent as “. . . more like sliding down the bannisters than climbing.”

The most recognizable of all mountain profiles, it is the Matterhorn that is portrayed in the memorial window to Gertrude in East Rounton church. At the top of the window, the mountain is pictured opposite a vignette of her on camelback, with palm trees behind. These two parts of her life were, indeed, in opposition, and her interests were now to focus on archaeology and the desert. The Matterhorn was her last great mountain. In 1926 Colonel E. L. Strutt, then editor of the
Alpine Journal
, wrote that in 1901–2 there had been no more prominent female mountaineer than Gertrude Bell: