As it turned out, he was right.
From the sea, Aconcagua seems to rise up just behind Valparaiso, a regular and, from that distance, gentle cone. But getting there is half the hell. Its base is tucked in among a tangle of lower mountains, and the team spent a week alternating between the antithetical torments of miasmic jungle and dusty ravines as they followed the old Fitz-Gerald route to the foot.
There is in this world no more demoralizing climb than that vast heap of rotten rock and ice. It destroys men, not with the noble counterstrokes of an Eigerwand or a Nanga Parbat, but by eroding a man's nerve and body until he is a staggering, whimpering maniac. No single stretch of the hill is particularly difficult, or even interesting in the Alpine sense. It is no exaggeration to say that any athletic layman could handle any given thousand feet of it, if properly equipped and conditioned to the thin air. But Aconcagua rises thousands upon thousands of feet, and one climbs hour after hour up through shale and ragged rock, through moraine and crevassed glacier, day upon day, with no sense of accomplishment, with no feeling that the summit is nearing. And time and again, the flash storms that twist around the peaks pin the climbers down for who knows how long. Maybe forever. And still that pile of garbage left from the Creation goes on and upward.
Within three thousand feet of the summit, one of the Germans gave in, demoralized with mountain sickness and the bone-deep cold. "What's the use?" he asked. "It really doesn't matter." They all knew what he meant. So slight is the technical challenge of the Aconcagua that it is less a cachet to a climber's career than an avowal of the latent death wish that drives so many of them up.
But no bitch-kitty of a hill was going to stop Big Ben! And it was unthinkable that Jonathan could let him go it alone. It was decided that the Germans would stay where they were and try to improve the camp to receive the new summit team when they staggered back.
The next fifteen hundred feet cost Ben and Jonathan an entire day, and they lost half of their provisions in a near fall.
The next day they were pinned down by a flash storm. Saint Elmo's fire sparkled from the tips of their ice axes. With wooden fingers they clung to the edges of the strip of canvas that was their only protection from the screaming wind. The fabric bellied and flapped with pistol-shot reports; it twisted and contorted in their numb hands like a maddened wounded thing seeking vengeance.
With the coming of night, the storm passed, and they had to kick the canvas from hands that had lost the power to relax. Jonathan had had it. He told Ben they must go back the next morning.
Ben's teeth were clenched and tears of frustration flowed from the corners of his eyes and froze on the stubble of his beard. "Goddam it!" he sobbed. "Goddam this frigging hill!" Then his temper ruptured and he went after the mountain with his ice axe, beating it and tearing at it until the thin air and fatigue left him panting on the snow. Jonathan pulled him up and helped him back to their scant cover. By full dark they were dug in as comfortably as possible. The wind moaned, but the storm remained lurking in ambuscade, so they were able to get a little rest.
"You know what it is, ol' buddy?" Ben asked in the close dark. He was calm again, but his teeth were chattering with the cold, and that lent a frighteningly unstable sound to his voice. "I'm getting old, Jon. This has got to be my last hill. And goddam my ass if this old bitch is going to bust me. You know what I mean?"
Jonathan reached out in the dark and gripped his hand.
A quarter of an hour later Ben's voice was calm and flat. "We'll try tomorrow, right?"
"All right," Jonathan said. But he did not believe it.
The dawn brought ugly weather with it, and Jonathan surrendered his last feeble hope of making the summit. His concern now was getting down alive.
About noon, the weather healed up and they dug themselves out. Before Jonathan could phrase his reasons for turning back, Ben had started determinedly upward. There was nothing to do but follow.
Six hours later they were on the summit. Jonathan's memory of the last etape is foggy. Step after step, breaking through the wind crust and sinking up to the crotch in the unstable snow, they pressed blindly on, stumbling, slipping, reason reduced to concentration on the task of one more step.
But they were on the summit. They could not see a rope's length out into the swirling spindrift.
"Not even a goddamed view!" Ben complained. Then he fumbled with the drawstring of his plastic outer pants and dropped them away. After a struggle with his wool ski pants, he stood up free and expressed his contempt for the Aconcagua in ancient and eloquent style.
As they plunged and picked their way back down, eager to make time, but fearful of setting off an avalanche, Jonathan noticed that Ben was clumsy and unsteady.
"What's wrong?"
"Ain't got no feet down there, ol' buddy."
"How long since you felt them?"
"Couple of hours, I guess."
Jonathan dug a shallow shelter in the snow and fumbled Ben's boots off. The toes were white and hard as ivory. For a quarter of an hour Jonathan held the frigid feet against his bare chest inside his coat. Ben howled with vituperation as feeling returned to one foot, replacing numbness with surges of pain. But the other foot remained rigid and white, and Jonathan knew there was nothing to be gained by continuing first aid. But there was great danger of a fresh storm catching them in the open. They pushed on.
The Germans were magnificent. When the two came staggering into camp, they took Ben from Jonathan and all but carried him down. It was all Jonathan could do to stumble along behind, broken-winded and half snow-blind.
Ben looked uncomfortable and out of place sitting up against a pile of pillows in the Valparaiso hospital. By way of small talk, Jonathan accused him of malingering there because he was making the nurses every night.
"I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole, ol' buddy. Anyway who would take a man's toes when he ain't looking would take just about anything."
That was the last mention of the amputated toes. They both knew Big Ben would never make a major climb again.
They felt neither elation nor accomplishment as they watched the mountain slip into the sea beyond the stern of their ship. They did not feel proud of having made it, nor did the Germans feel shame for having failed. That is the way it is with that pile of fossilized shit.
Back in the States, Ben set about establishing his little school for climbing in a corner of Arizona where many kinds of natural face problems abound. So few people wanted the kind of advanced training he offered that Jonathan wondered how he kept his head above water. To be sure, he and twenty or so other skilled climbers made it a practice to patronize Ben's school, but that is just what it was—patronizing. The repeated struggles to force Ben to accept payment for lodging and training embarrassed Jonathan, and he stopped coming. Soon after, he stopped climbing altogether as his new home and his collection of paintings absorbed all his interest.
"Yeah," Ben shouted as they landed back in the seat after a bad bump, "I sure paid that old bitch back, didn't I?"
"You ever consider what would have happened if you had gotten local frostbite?"
Ben laughed. "Oh, my! There'd have been wailing and moaning on the reservation, and lots of Indian girls dripping tears, ol' buddy."
They broke over a little rise and started winding down into Ben's valley, leaving a rising trail of dust in their wake. Jonathan was surprised as he looked down on Ben's spread. It certainly had changed. Gone was the modest grouping of cabins around a cookhouse. There was a large swimming pool flashing emerald and surrounded on three sides by the body and wings of a pseudo-Indian lodge, and what appeared to be a patio lounge was dotted with the white blobs of people in swimming suits who looked nothing at all like climbers. There was no comparison between this and the Spartan training school he remembered.