At least they were moving up; that was something. They climbed one at a time, while the others found what purchase they could to protect the vulnerable climber. Perhaps Karl had found a secure stance up there out of sight, Ben told himself. Perhaps they were safer than they seemed.
There was a sudden tension in the string of colored dots.
They were no longer moving. Ben's experience told him something had happened.
He cursed at not being able to see better. A slight, impatient movement of the telescope, and he lost them. He swore aloud and located them again in the eyepiece. The thread above Anderl was slack. White jacket—Bidet—was hanging upside down. He had fallen. The rope above him was taut and led up to blue jacket—Jonathan, who was stretched out spreadeagle on the rock. That meant he had been pulled off his stance and was holding his own weight and Bidet's with his hands.
"Where the hell's Karl!" Ben shouted. "Goddam his ass!"
Jonathan clenched his teeth and concentrated his whole being on keeping his fingers curled into the crack above him, He was alone in an agony of effort, isolated by the deafening roar of water just to his left. A steady, numbing stream flowed down his sleeves and froze his armpits and chest. He did not waste breath shouting. He knew that Anderl below would do what he could, and he hoped that Karl above and out of sight had found a crack for a piton and was holding them in a strong stance. The dead weight of Jean-Paul on the rope around his waist was squeezing the air out of him, and he did not know how long he could hold on. A quick look over his shoulder revealed that Anderl was already scrambling, open and unprotected, up through the roaring trough toward Bidet, who had not stirred since the rock that had sung past Jonathan's ear had struck him on the shoulder and knocked him out of his stance. Jean-Paul lay head downward in the middle of the torrent, and the thought flashed through Jonathan's mind that it would be ridiculous to die of drowning on a mountain.
His hands no longer ached; there was no feeling at all. He could not tell if he was gripping hard enough to hold so he squeezed until the muscles in his forearms throbbed. If water or rock knocked Anderl off, he would never be able to hold them both. What in hell was Karl up to!
Then the rope slackened around his middle, and a surge of expanding pain replaced the pressure. Anderl had reached Jean-Paul and had jammed his body crosswise in the chute, holding Bidet in his lap to give Jonathan the slack he needed to recover his stance.
Jonathan pulled upward until his arms vibrated with the effort, and after interminable seconds, one boot found a toehold and the weight was off his hands. They were cut, but not too deeply, and the flow of icy water prevented them from throbbing. As quickly as he dared, he uncoiled enough rope to allow him to climb up, and he followed the arcing line of rope up and around a fold of rock where he found Karl.
"Help me!"
"What's the matter?" Karl had found a niche and was braced in it to belay the climbers below. He had been totally unaware of the crisis beneath him.
"Pull!" Jonathan shouted, and by main strength they dragged Bidet up away from Anderl's wedged body. Not a moment too soon. The strong Austrian's legs had begun to quiver with the task of holding Bidet up.
Anderl bypassed Jean-Paul's inert body and climbed up to the stance recently occupied by Jonathan. Bidet was safe now, held from two points of purchase. From their position, neither Jonathan nor Karl could see what was occurring below, but Anderl told them later that Jean-Paul had a comically quizzical expression on his face as he returned to consciousness and found himself dangling in a vertical river. The falling rock had done him no real damage, but he had struck his head hard against the face when he fell. With the automatic responses of the climber prevailing over his dizziness, he began to scramble up. And before long the four of them were crowded into Karl's small, secure niche.
When the last jacket disappeared behind the fold of rock at the top of the chute, Ben stood up from his telescope and drew the first full breath he had taken in ten minutes. He looked around for deep grass, and he vomited.
Two of the young climbers who had been standing by, concerned and helpless, turned away to give Ben privacy. They grinned at each other out of embarrassment.
"Wet and cold, but not much the worse for wear," Karl diagnosed. "And the worst of it is behind us. You really needn't be so glum, Herr Doctor."
"We can't get back through that chute," Jonathan said with finality.
"Fortunately, we shall not have to."
"If it comes to a retreat—"
"You have a Maginot mentality, Herr Doctor. We shall not retreat. We shall simply climb up out of this face."
Jonathan felt a hot resentment at Karl's bravado, but he said nothing more. Instead, he turned to Anderl who shivered on the ledge beside him. "Thank you, Anderl. You were fine."
Anderl nodded, not egotistically, but in genuine appreciation of the sureness and correctness of his actions. He received his own critical approval. Then he looked up at Karl. "You didn't know we were in trouble?"
"No."
"You didn't feel it on the line?"
"No."
"That is not good."
Anderl's simple evaluation stung Karl more than recriminations could have.
Jonathan envied Anderl his composure, sitting there on the lip of rock, looking out over the abyss, musing into space. Jonathan was in no way composed. He shivered, wet through and cold, and he was still nauseated with the sudden spurt of adrenalin.
Bidet, for his part, sat next to Jonathan, gingerly touching the bump on the side of his head. He suddenly laughed aloud. "It's strange, isn't it? I remember nothing after the stone knocked me off my stance. It must have been quite an event. Pity I slept through it."
"That's the spirit!" Karl said, slightly accenting the first word to differentiate between Jean-Paul's attitude and Jonathan's. "Now, we shall rest here for a moment and collect our senses, then up we go! From my study of the route, the next four hundred meters should be child's play."
Every fiber of Ben's body was weary, drained by the sympathetic tensions and physical stresses with which he had tried to help the climbers, conducting their movements, as it were, by kinesthetic telepathy. His eyes burned with strain, and the muscles of his face were set in grooves of concern. He had to give a grudging credit to Karl who, once the torrent of the chute was behind, had led the party up in a clean, rapid ascent of the virgin rock; up past the windows of the Eigerwand Station and through a long gully packed with snow and ice that brought them to a prominent pillar standing out from the rock pitch separating the First and Second Ice Fields. Making that pillar had consumed two hours of desperate climbing. After two unsuccessful attempts, Karl had disemburdened himself of his pack and had attacked it with such acrobatic abandon that he had received an unheard flutter of applause from the hotel terrace when he topped it. Belayed from above, the other climbers had made the pillar with relative ease.
Following its diurnal custom, Eiger's cloudcap descended and concealed the climbers for two hours in the afternoon, during which time Ben relaxed his cramped back and responded to insistent reporters with grunts and monosyllabic profanity. Those Eiger Birds who had been cheated of their turns to ogle and thrill complained bitterly, but the hotel management was adamant in its refusal to refund money, explaining with uncharacteristic humility that it could not control acts of God.