It was exactly eight o'clock on Sunday morning when Alfred Hellepart began moving down the mountain into aloneness. As he walked slowly backward on the fifty-degree angle of the summit ice field, watching his friends operate the winch above him, he set about preparing himself psychologically. From long experience, he knew that one had to purge one's mind of all outside thoughts; the entire concentration had to be on the job at hand, and on the men to be rescued. One could not think at all of oneself; the slightest glimmer of fear could be deadly. Nor could he allow his thoughts to drift back to Munich, to his wife and his eleven-year-old son. From this minute on, they must be forgotten, until he had succeeded or failed in his rescue mission.
Certainly, there was no need to worry about the cable. The experienced Gramminger was up at the anchorage, protecting him as he had so many times before. The men of the Mountain Guard had an almost childlike faith in their leader; they acted on his orders without question or hesitation. In practice exercises, Hellepart had carried two men on his back up the side of a mountain, and the cable had held. He would press a button in his mind and give the matter no further thought.
Now he was halfway down the summit ice field, and he tested the portable radio. The contact was excellent; he could hear Friedli loud and clear, and Friedli could hear him. When he had gone 250 feet, almost to the end of the field, he heard Friedli telling him to make himself secure on his crampons; the cable had to be disconnected from the winch and joined to the next three- hundred-foot length by a frog coupling.
Hellepart waited until the go-ahead came from the top, backed over the last few feet of the snow field, and found himself looking down the vast sweep of the north wall. For a moment, despite all his psychological preparations, he felt wild panic. An indescribable feeling of aban donment came over him; he could no longer see the men on the top, and instinctively he looked up at the quarter-inch cable spinning up into the mists, like a thin strand of cotton thread. Below him the north wall fell endlessly away, down and down and down, black and menacing, broken only by a few insignificant snow ledges.
Dangling from the cable, he gulped for air, and almost forgot what he had come for. Just then the voice of Gramminger broke in on the radio. "You are doing fine, Alfred," the calm voice said. "Everything is secure for you. Keep control of yourself, and remember that there are men on the wall depending on you for their lives."
The soothing words brought composure back to Hellepart; he was no longer alone; he felt the strong ties to the men above, all their concentration fixed on him and his task, and he gave the order to continue letting the cable down. Off to his right, he could see a black rift coming up, one of the gaping exit cracks leading to the White Spider. He made a short traverse to the crack, and began wriggling his way obliquely downward. He did not know if this was the right route, but at the moment it was the only one. Two thousand feet below him, he could see the morning mists walking up the wall. For brief seconds, he glimpsed the village of Alpiglen, but then the mists closed together again and blanketed the valley. All around him the wind probed the holes and cracks on the mountain, and the low, hollow "whoo" gave him an uncomfortable feeling.
Now he had to find a secure stance again, to hold himself against the wall while another three-hundred-foot roll of cable was attached above. Friedli's voice crackled down to him from above: "All is well. You will be on your way in a few minutes." The signal came, and he continued his descent.
After a hundred more feet, he went on the air to tell Friedli that he was coming in sight of the Spider. Against the low howl of the wind, he talked to the summit, and during that brief conversation he heard another human voice, barely audible at first, then growing louder and coming from the east. He traversed toward the voice and came to a shattered pillar bulging out across the face. He stepped onto the pillar and sent rocks and rabble clattering down the face with his crampons. Still he went on, only partially supported by the cable which now had assumed a sort of J-shape as it followed him on the level course across the pillar.
About sixty feet away, he spotted a man in a half-sitting, half-lying position on a narrow ledge pitched with a small red tent. Nervously, he pushed the transmitting button and signaled the summit: "I have found a man."
Across the litter-covered pillar, Hellepart shouted: "Who are you? Are you Mayer, or Nothdurft?" The voice came back: "Italiano."
Slowly, still sending tons of rubble down the mountain, Hellepart continued the difficult traverse. Now he was within six or seven feet of the Italian, and he could hear the man calling, "Mangiare! Something to eat!" Hellepart fumbled in his pocket, found a frozen half-bar of black, hard Cailler chocolate, and tossed it across the edge to the hungry man.
The Italian did not even pause to remove the wrapper. He rammed the chocolate into his mouth and began to chew. His mouth full of paper and chocolate, the man called to Hellepart: "Sigaretta?" But Hellepart had none.
He paused for a moment and considered the situation. He could traverse the remaining few feet of the pillar, but only at increasing risk to himself, since he no longer dangled straight down from the cable. And if he reached the Italian in this manner, he would be unable to make the rescue. The two men, no matter what their condition, could not have effected the traverse back across the rubble without undue danger.
Hellepart decided to retreat to the exit crack and ask the summit to pull him up to another position. From there he would try to make a straight perpendicular descent to the Italian.
"Take me up," Hellepart called to the summit. "I am going to look for another route."
A hard jerk on the cable yanked him off the pillar and out into space. Spinning in mid- air, he fought to turn himself toward the wall so that he could take up the shock of the return impact with his legs. He had barely succeeded in twisting around when he crashed into the wall feet first. "All right," said Hellepart to the summit, "haul me straight up. I will tell you when to stop."
Up he went, inches at a time, for 150 feet, and then set himself into a slow swing until he was able to grab a jutting rock straight above the Italian. "Now let me down," he instructed.
As he descended a sheer gully, stones began to shake loose again, and he shouted to the Italian to take cover. Finally he dropped the last few feet and onto the ledge.
While the marooned man mumbled "Grazie! Grazie!" and put his arms around Hellepart, the German called triumphantly to the summit: "I am with the Italian!" It was nine-fifteen, and he had been on the wall for more than an hour.
The Italian gave his name, and Hellepart reported it to the summit. Friedli asked where the others were. Hellepart said to Corti: "Where is Longhi? Where is Mayer? Where is Nothdurft?"
Corti pointed down the mountain. The two men leaned over the edge and called, but there was no response. Hellepart asked Corti in German, "Your condition?" Corti understood -- the phrase is similar in both languages - and answered, "Buona." But Hellepart, seeing that the man's knees were trembling, ordered him to sit down, and gave him coffee from a thermos which had been provided by the Poles.
Corti was talking in Italian, and Hellepart got the impression from the torrent of words in the peculiar dialect that Nothdurft and Mayer had tried to force through to the top and that Corti had not seen them for several days. He looked at Corti's scarred hand and his bloodied head and decided that the Italian's condition was too poor to permit him to attempt a climb up to the top on a separate cable. Hellepart would have to make the carry on his back.
He radioed to the summit for an Italian-speaking man to take the radio and explain the situation to Corti. Cassin's voice came on, and Hellepart handed the speaking mechanism to Corti, who seemed befuddled by it and nervously pushed the wrong buttons. Finally the contact was established, and Cassin could talk to his friend from the Ragni.
"Rispondi, Claudio," Cassin's voice said. "This is Cassin. Now listen to me: you have not the strength to go up by yourself. Watch how he shows you how to get up on his shoulders! Try everything to make it easy for your rescuer! Drink something when he gives you to drink. Remember, you are safe. Do not lose your spirit!"
Hellepart took back the radio as the last words of Cassin crackled through the earphones: "Coraggio, Claudio, coraggio!"
Hellepart took a final look at Corti's tiny resting place. It was totally cleared of ice and snow, gobbled up by Corti in his terrible hunger and thirst. Some of his teeth were broken and splintered, shattered against the hard, cold ice for a last few useless "meals."
Hellepart packed the rucksack, strapped it on the sitting Corti's back, and began lacing him into the webbing of a Gramminger-Sitz. He sat down with his back to Corti's front and pulled the harnesses of the human back-pack around his own chest and up over his shoulders. This left no place for the radio; using snap links to lengthen the girth, he fixed the apparatus so that it dangled across his chest. Bearing the uncomfortable weight, he struggled to his feet and snapped the cable in place. All these preparations had taken nearly an hour.
"We are ready," he said to the summit. It was ten o'clock.
Back came Friedi's voice: "We have been rearranging the equipment. It will take us a few minutes more."
Hellepart sat down with his heavy load and waited for the signal. Finally it came. "We bring you up now," Friedli called. "Prepare yourself!"
Hellepart wrenched himself into a standing position, but still the cable hung slack above him. "What is the matter?" he called to the summit.
"We are having a little trouble," Friedli answered.
Long minutes went by, and then the cable began to tense. Hellepart pressed his feet against the wall and pushed outward with all his strength so that he would keep the cable from rubbing against the wall and prevent it from fouling.
Now the wind began to hum across the tightening thread of steel. It sounded to Hellepart like a giant violin string, starting on a low note and gradually whining higher as it tensed, until it had reached a screaming, piercing pitch. And still they did not move up from the ledge. He looked above him at the delicate strand and wondered, for the first time, if it would hold.
Copyright Jack Olsen, all rights reserved.