Moving rapidly to conserve what daylight they had, the team climbed up through the mist, ascending the ice couloir that bridges the Second and Third Ice Fields. When the clouds lifted, Ben could see them making what appeared to be a safe, if uncomfortable bivouac a little to the left of the Flatiron and below Death Bivouac. Sure the day's climbing was done, Ben allowed himself to break the invisible thread of observation that had bound him to the climbers. He was satisfied with the day's work. More than half the face was beneath them. Others had climbed higher the first day (indeed, Waschak and Forstenlachner had climbed the face in a single stretch of eighteen hours through ideal weather conditions), but none had done better over an unexplored path. From this point on, they would be following the classic route, and Ben felt more confident of their chances—providing the weather held.
Drained of energy and a little sick with the acid lump in his stomach, Ben folded up the legs of his telescope and walked heavily across the terrace. He had not eaten since breakfast, although he had fortified himself with six bottles of German beer. He paid no attention to the Eiger Birds still clustered around the telescopes. And indeed, the Birds' attention was wandering away from the climbers who, it seemed, would be running no further risks that day and providing no further excitement.
"Isn't that precious!" one of the rigorously made-up older women gushed to her paid companion, who dutifully squeezed her hand and pointed his Italian profile in the required direction. "Those little flecks of cloud!" the woman rhapsodized, "all pink and golden in the last light of day! They're really very, very pretty."
Ben looked up and froze. Ripples of buttermilk cloud were scudding in rapidly from the southeast. A foehn.
Attacking the reluctant Swiss telephone system with desperate tenacity, and crippled by his lack of German, Ben finally contacted the meteorological center. He discovered that the foehn had run into the Bernese Oberland without warning. It would hold through the night, bringing fierce storms to the Eiger face and melting out much of the snow and ice with its eerie press of warm air, but they assured Ben that a strong high descending from the north would drive the foehn out by midday. With the high, however, was expected record cold.
Ben replaced the phone in its cradle and stared sightlessly at the mnemonic graffiti on the wall of the telephone cabine.
A storm and a melt, followed by record cold. The entire face would be glazed with a crust of ice. Ascent would be impossible; retreat would be extremely difficult and, if the Hinterstoisser Traverse were heavily iced over, equally impossible. He wondered if the climbers in their precarious bivouac knew what Eiger Weather had done for them.
The two slight lips of rock they had found were scarcely adequate for bivouac, but they had decided against climbing on through the last half hour of light and running the risk of night finding them with no shelter at all. They had perched in their order on the rope; Karl and Jonathan occupying the higher ledge, Anderl and Jean-Paul taking the lower, slightly wider site. Scooping out snow with their ice axes and driving in a pattern of pitons on which to secure themselves and their gear, they nested as well as the stingy face would allow. By the time bivouac was made, the first bold stars had penetrated the darkening sky. Night descended quickly, and the sky was seeded with bright, cold, indifferent stars. From that north face, they had no hint of the foehn storm closing in on them from the southeast.
A collapsible spirit burner balanced tentatively on the slim ledge between him and Jean-Paul, Anderl brewed cup after cup of tepid tea made from water that boiled before it was really hot. They were close enough to pass the cups around, and they drank with silent relish. Although each man forced himself to swallow a few morsels of solid food, glutinous and tasteless in their desiccated mouths, it was the tea that satisfied their cold and thirst. The brewing went on for an hour, the tea relieved occasionally by a cup of bouillon.
Jonathan struggled into his eider-filled sleeping bag and found that, by forcing himself to relax, he could control the chattering of his teeth. Save when he had actually been climbing, the cold that followed their drenching in the frigid water of the chute had made him shudder convulsively, wasting his energy and eroding his nerves. The ledge was so narrow that he had to sit astride his pack to cling without continuous effort, and even then his position was almost vertical. His rope harness was connected to the pitons behind by two separate ropes, just in case Karl should attempt to cut one while he dozed. Although Jonathan took this sensible precaution, he considered himself to be fairly safe. The men below could not reach him easily, and his position directly above them meant that if Karl knocked or cut him off, his fall would carry the other two with him, and he doubted Karl would care to be on the face alone.
After his own safety, Jonathan was most concerned about Jean-Paul, who had made only the most minimal arrangements for comfort. Now he slumped his weight against the restraining pitons and stared down into the black valley, receiving the proffered cups of tea dumbly. Jonathan knew there was something very wrong.
The rope connecting two men on a mountain is more than nylon protection; it is an organic thing that transmits subtle messages of intent and disposition from man to man; it is an extension of the tactile senses, a psychological bond, a wire along which currents of communication flow. Jonathan had felt the energy and desperate determination of Karl above him, and he had sensed the vague and desultory movements of Jean-Paul below—odd manic pulses of strength alternating with the almost subliminal drag of uncertainty and confusion.
As the fall of night combined with their physical inactivity to give the cold a penetrating edge, Anderl shook Jean-Paul out of his funk and helped him struggle into his sleeping bag. Jonathan recognized from Anderl's solicitude that he, too, had sensed something defocused and queer through the rope that had connected his nervous system to Jean-Paul's.
Jonathan broke the silence by calling down, "How's it going, Jean-Paul?"
Jean-Paul twisted in his harness and looked up with an optimistic grin. Blood was oozing from his nostrils and ears, and the irises of his eyes were contracted. Major concussion.
"I feel wonderful, Jonathan. But 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."
Karl and Jonathan exchanged glances, Karl was going to say something when he was interrupted by Anderl.
"Look! The stars!"
Wisps of cloud were racing between them and the stars, alternately revealing and concealing their twinkle in a strange undulating pattern. Then, suddenly, the stars were gone.
The eeriness of the effect was compounded by the fact that there was no wind on the face. For the first time in Jonathan's memory, the air on Eiger was still. And, more ominous yet, it was warm.
No one spoke to break the hush. The thick plasticity of the night reminded Jonathan of typhoons in the South China Sea.
Then, low at first but increasing in volume, came a hum like the sound of a large dynamo. The drone seemed to come from the depths of the rock itself. There was the bitter-sweet smell of ozone. And Jonathan found himself staring at the head of his ice axe, only two feet from him. It was surrounded by a greenish halo of St. Elmo's fire that flickered and pulsed before it arced with a cracking flash into the rock.
Faithful to the last to his Teutonic penchant for underlining the obvious, Karl's lips formed the word, "foehn!" just as the first rock-shaking explosion of thunder obliterated the sound of the word.