Heinrich Harrer - The White Spider

About 1,000 feet above the Bergschrund, Liebl saw a body lying about 150 feet diagonally below him at the edge of a patch of snow. He attracted the attention of the others.

“That can only be Hinterstoisser,” he said. “Anderl is still missing….”

Liebl had taken part in the previous year’s recovery attempts. He knew that Hinterstoisser and Mehringer had not yet been found. “Still missing.” Tragic words, embodying all the sadness which can be felt for a lost comrade, even when matter-of-factly uttered, without a touch of sentimentality. The weather was fine and would almost certainly remain so for the next few days. But Rebitsch, who always kept a silent tongue when most moved, knew that there would be no attempt on the Face for him and Vörg in the morning. The body of Andreas Hinterstoisser had been lying down there ever since last year….

So they spent that day, the 27th, in carrying up bivouac equipment and provisions to a knob of rock at the top of the so-called “Second Pillar”, and then came down again. On the 28th it was as fine as ever, just as on the day when they brought Gollackner down. Once again the four men spent it in bringing down a body. And once again the brilliance of the sun seemed a ghastly mockery of their tragic work.

No doubt many will say: “What cold, unfeeling young men Rebitsch and Vörg must have been! How could they bring themselves to recover two dead bodies, in the space of a week, on the eve of their own attempt on that dread Face? Couldn’t even that fearful omen shake them? And isn’t it a sign of sheer brutal insensitivity?”

Nobody knows what Rebitsch and his companions thought during those recovery operations. They didn’t advertise their feelings. The fact remains that they put off their supreme effort, which might quite probably have ended in success, because they found Hinterstoisser’s body on the way up. They brought it down in spite of the stones whistling about their ears. They carried out what to them was an essential, final act of piety. In so doing they proved themselves true pupils of the mountain school, in which they had learned to do what was right and necessary. Did that mean that they ought to abandon their plans? They had already made up their minds to attempt the climb. They followed their own law.

They started up the Face again on July 30th. Dawn was a many-coloured splendour—a sure sign of bad weather. They met the first storm at the Bergschrund below the cliffs.

So it was decided only to carry more supplies and equipment up to the top of the Pillar. They reached it at about noon. The weather had moderated by then. Curiosity lured them on; they would reconnoitre a part of the route. The rock became difficult, very difficult indeed. This was no place for nailed boots or crampons. Rope-soled slippers were the thing … but they were down below there. This wasn’t meant to be the start of the attempt on the Face; they were only exploring the way and carrying gear up. So both men took to “Nature’s climbing-boots”—bare feet.

In order to save time and speed things up Rebitsch, that master of rock-climbing, climbed the super-severe “Difficult Crack” without threading a rope through the pitons he found in position there. Vörg followed him equally quickly. And so they reached the vital traverse and, marvelling at the razor-keen solution of the problem how best to reach the First Ice-field, christened it the Hinterstoisser Traverse.

They immediately furnished it with two rope handrails, to ensure a safe retreat in all circumstances. After the traverse, they climbed another difficult crack and there found a small stance, protected from falling stones by an overhang, on which one could even sit in an emergency—in terms of this particular Face, an ideal bivouac. There they dumped everything they could spare and started down again. The second thunderstorm of the day caught them on the far side of the traverse. Dripping wet, and climbing down through vertical waterfalls, they disposed of the 2,700 feet of the lower part of the Face and got back to their tent at Alpiglen before dark.

The rain led to a fresh period of bad weather. Days lengthened into weeks. On August 6th, during a temporary improvement, Vörg and Rebitsch teaming-up with their friends Eidenschink and Möller climbed the North Face of the Great Fiescherhorn. This magnificent wall of snow and ice, first climbed by Willo Welzenbach in 1930, had also been chosen for a final climb, before they turned their backs on the Bernese Oberland for this year, by Fraissl and Brankowsky. Many others too had grown tired of waiting.

Rebitsch and Vörg, however, stayed on. It was now the start of the fourth week since they had withdrawn from the Eiger’s Face. Still they never lost patience, made no careless, irresponsible move. The Press had also quitened down a good deal about the Eiger. There was one article in the Frankfurter Zeitung which caused great amusement in well-informed circles. In it a Mr. M. gave all and sundry what was intended for well-meaning advice. For instance, he suggested that the traversing ropes ought to be fixed at the Hinterstoisser Traverse during a period of Fòhn, that is to say during warm weather, when the ice had melted, the following period of bad weather should be spent waiting in the valley and a fresh start made on the Face as soon as the barometer began to rise again. The Zurich paper Sport expressed its opposition to such “cookery book recipes” in witty, ironical terms.

The traversing ropes were already there. They had been fixed, not during a spell of Föhn, but during a spell of thundery bad weather. But it looked as if they were going to remain unused till the following summer.

On August 9th Berne at last forecast fine weather. On the 10th the hot sun cleared masses of fresh snow from the Face. And early on the 11th Rebitsch and Vörg started out on their second attempt.

It was only 10.30 when they reached their depot on top of the Pillar. They moved on across the roped-traverse to their bivouac-place very heavily laden. They were in such splendid form that they were back at the top of the Pillar by one in the afternoon to fetch up the rest of their gear. And by 5 p.m., everything was safely lodged at the bivouac-place. They had even managed to drag fleece-lined sleeping bags and air mattresses up to it. They improved their sleeping quarters by building a low wall of stones, then they stretched their tent-sack from a projection overhead, to keep the heavier drips off them, and enjoyed a precious night’s sleep in the “Swallow’s Nest” they had built for themselves high up on the precipice.

Next day they climbed on, over ice-covered rock and ice, and achieved the difficult ascent of the overhanging cliff between the First and Second Ice-fields. Then came five hours of upward traversing—twenty rope’s-lengths diagonally upwards—across the Second Ice-field. Then the ice-plastered rocky step leading from the Second to the Third Ice-field. Then the Ice-field itself….

The watchers at the telescopes down in Grindelwald, up at the Kleine Scheidegg, were amazed. They had already seen much wonderful climbing on the Eiger’s Face. All the men who had come and had died on it had climbed wonderfully. But nobody had yet seen anything like the assurance and care of this pair, Rebitsch from the Tirol and Vörg the Munich man. Would these two succeed, at last; or would bad weather come, once again, to rob them?

It wasn’t a question of coming; it was already there. Above the arête of the “Flatiron”, the men were swallowed up by the mists. Up above that, there still loomed more than 2,000 feet of the summit wall, a precipice about which nobody knew anything, for no living being had yet reported on it.

The pair climbed on up the steep ice, penetrated by rock ledges, to where Sedlmayer and Mehringer had spent their last bivouac. There they were half expecting to find Mehringer’s body, which Udet had seen from his plane the previous September, frozen rigid in its steps. They seemed fated always to be meeting dead men.