That night a gale lashed the face.
There was a half-hearted attempt to organize a rescue team, but more in response to the desire to do something than to any hope of reaching them alive. In manifestation of typical Swiss compassion, the Bernese Oberland guides haggled over wages until it was too late to bother with the rescue. An intrepid German flyer dared the treacherous air currents to fly close to the face and search. He spotted the boys, frozen to death, still hanging from their harnesses.
With this, the Eiger began its nomenclature of human tragedy. To this day that spot on the point of the Flatiron above the Third Ice Field is called Death Bivouac. The game between the Eiger and Man was begun.
Score: Ogre—2; Man—0
Early in 1936 two Germans came to reclaim the bodies of their countrymen from where they had stood frozen against the wall for a year, a target for the prying telescopes on clear days. If possible, they were also going to attempt the summit. They decided to take a training climb first. An avalanche caught one up and broke his neck against a rock. Ogre—3; Man—0
In July of that same year German Youth challenged the Ogre again. This time it was a team of four: Rainer, Angerer, Kurtz, and Hinterstoisser. Again the tourists watched and placed bets. The young men, suffused with the Zeitgeist of Hitler's early days, made such melodramatic statements to the press as: "We must have the Wall, or it must have us!"
It had them.
The most experienced of the party, Hinterstoisser, discovered a tricky traverse across the face that turned out to be the key to subsequent climbs. But so confident were they of victory that they pulled in the rope after the last of the party had crossed. This gesture of cocky confidence killed them.
The party climbed well, although Angerer appeared to be injured, probably by falling rock, and the others had to slow down to help him along. Their first bivouac was just above the Rote Fluh, that red rock crag that is one of the more salient landmarks of the face. In one day they had gone more than halfway up the Eiger!
The next day, with the injured man becoming steadily weaker, they gained the Third Ice Field and tied off to camp just below Death Bivouac. When dawn allowed the rubbernecks at the corn-operated telescopes to enjoy the drama, the party had begun a descent. Obviously the condition of the injured man prevented them from continuing.
Smoothly and with remarkable speed, considering the incapacitated climber, they descended the first two ice fields. But night caught them, and they were forced to make a third bivouac. That night, with Eiger Weather freezing their soaked clothes into clanging armor of ice, must have been brutal. Their reserves of strength were sapped by the cold, and through all of the next day they managed only 1,000 feet.
For a fourth time, and now out of food, they had to bivouac on the inhospitable face.
Some novices at the hotel opined that the team had a good chance. After all, they had only the Hinterstoisser Traverse and the Difficult Crack before them, then the going would be relatively easy.
But the team had overconfidently retrieved their rope from the traverse.
And the next morning it was completely iced over. Again and again, with a growing desperation that never overwhelmed his skill, the gifted Hinterstoisser attempted to make the verglas and slime of the traverse, and each time he was stopped by the hungry Ogre.
The mists descended, and the tourists could hear the roar of avalanches all through the night. Another name was attached to the Eiger: The Hinterstoisser Traverse.
Ogre—7; Man—0
Throughout 1937 team after team attacked the Eiger, only to be driven back. The mountain came close to claiming more victims during the remarkable retreat of Vorg and Rebitsch from Death Bivouac.
But the score remained the same.
In June of 1938 two Italians (there were national movements afoot in Italy too) fell to their deaths near Difficult Crack.
But rope and piton techniques were steadily perfected, while the natural defenses of the mountain remained as they had been since the memory of man, so in July of that year a German team finally removed the north face of the Eiger from the list of "impossibles." Ogre—9; Man—1
Throughout the war years, the Eiger was free from incursions into its privacy. Governments provided young men with other ways to inscribe their names on the roles of glory—ways that converted suicide into murder, and soothed all with the balm of patriotism.
But directly these avenues to danger were sealed off by peace, the vertical snare of the Eiger beckoned again. In recent years, more than thirty men have slogged up the last snow slope, panting and crying and promising never to touch the stone of the Ogre again. But most of the attempts are still driven back by weather and avalanche, and the death toll continues to rise regularly. The critical ice field of the White Spider has played the antagonist role in most of the recent tragedies, like the one in 1957 in which three men died and a fourth was rescued only after hunger and thirst had driven him to splinter his teeth on glacier ice in an attempt to get something into his stomach.
Jonathan stared ahead, his mind unrolling the death record of the Eiger.
"Is there something wrong?" the English girl at the telescope asked.
He had forgotten her.
"Why are you staring at me like that?" She smiled, anticipating the reason.
"I wasn't staring at you, dear. I was staring through you."
"How disappointing. May I join you?" She interpreted his silence as invitation. "You've been looking at that mountain with such concentration that I couldn't help noticing you. I do hope you're not thinking of climbing it."
"Oh, no. Never again."
"You've climbed it before?"
"I've tried."
"Is it awfully fierce?"
"Awfully."
"I have a theory about mountain climbers. By the way, my name's Randie—Randie Nickers."
"Jonathan Hemlock. What's your theory, Randie?"
"Well... may I have some wine? That's all right. I'll just use your glass, if you don't mind. Well, my theory is that men climb mountains out of some kind of frustration. I think it's a kind of sublimation of other desires."
"Sexual, of course."
Randie nodded earnestly as she swallowed a sip of wine. "Yes, probably. This wine's half fizzy, isn't it?"
He put his feet upon an empty chair and leaned back to receive the sun. "It has the giggling sparkle of Swiss maidens, blushed but pleased by the attention of rural swains, but these high spirits do not eclipse the underlying tartness of the petulant Oberland peasant that resides largely in the wine's malolactic fermentation."
Randie was silent for a moment. "I do hope you're teasing."
"Of course I am, Randie. Don't people usually tease you?"
"Not men. They typically try to make love to me."
"How do they do? Typically."
"Well, of late they've been doing very well indeed. I'm in Switzerland for a sort of holiday before I go home and settle down to a most proper married life."
"And you're spreading the blessings of your body around while there's still time."
"Something like that. Not that I don't love Rodney. He's the dearest person, really. But he is Rodney."
"And he's rich."
"Oh, I imagine so." Her brow clouded over for an instant. "I certainly hope he is. Oh, of course he is! What a fright you gave me. But the nicest thing about him is his name."
"Which is?"
"Smith. Rodney Smith."
"And that's the nicest thing about him?"
"It's not that Smith is all that grand of itself. I believe it's actually a fairly common name. But it will mean that I shall finally be rid of my name. It's been a plague to me all my life."