With a force that was excessive in its intensity, the bitter Alpine wind swept up through the narrow black-ice encrusted gully and pounded into Neil's exposed left side, as he dug his ice-axe into the face and hugged the rock with all his might. A foothold crumbled beneath him and he lost his balance, leaving him hanging with both hands from the axe.
Cursing under his breath, Neil fumbled frantically with his clumsy, cramponed boots to find any kind of lump on the face to rest his weight on and preyed to God that his pick did not break free also. Way, way down beneath his dangling feet, the beautiful Swiss meadows lay incongruously bathed in the mid-afternoon sunshine and Neil thought to himself that he would give anything to be back down there on his hotel's patio, sipping cold German draught and munching vienerschnitzel.
The wind continued its relentless hammering of the face, indiscriminate in its target selection. Slowly and methodically, Neil worked his precarious way up the sheer ice-wall.
As he gripped the rubber-handle of the steel axe with one hand, his forearm muscles ached and twisted with the strain of holding his entire body weight and the first icy beads of sweat broke out on his sunburnt forehead. Even though his hands were encased within two layers of arctic-mitts, his fingers were already beginning to stiffen with the frigid cold.
Realising that he had only one remaining ice-screw, Neil inserted it into the wall a couple of feet above and made himself fast with a couple of nylon-webbing slings secured to his climbing harness. Now, safely anchored to the wall, he could bring up his partner.
One hundred and fifty feet below, his friend and climbing-partner Tony returned Neil's OK sign and cautiously began to ascend the seventy-degree ice slope.
The two men had three days previously begun their assault on this, the notorious north face of the Belzadler, an eleven thousand foot peak in the Austrian Tyrol. Already that summer it had claimed a total of seven lives - six men and a woman, all from Britain and the States. It was common knowledge amongst the world climbing community that the mountaineers on the continent held the infamous north face in such awe and trepidation, that none even considered attempting it: it was regarded 'unclimbable'. It did indeed stand, that although attempted a dozen known times, not one of these had been successful. In every case the mountain had been the victor: it had butchered every single person who had ventured on its cold and unforgiving flanks -every single person...
Although he endeavoured to keep that piece of information far from his mind, Neil could not help but wonder if indeed he and Tony had bitten off far more than they could chew. As if to confirm his dark forebodings, an even more viscous blast of freezing wind hammered the face, whipping of fragments of ice that cut the exposed the flesh of Neil's face and burred his vision. With one gloved hand he wiped the particles from his ski-goggles before they froze and dug his heels even more fiercely into the ice. Very, very cautiously he leaned over to get a clear view of Tony and thanked God that the icy gust had not swept him from his holds. It was over two and a half thousand feet to the bottom of the wall and almost that again still to the summit. From base to peak the wall was notorious for never slanting slighter than sixty five degrees. In all the Alpine guide-books it was annotated with the same two words: Suicide Wall.
Crack. A small rock, about the size of a golf ball, struck Neil's fibreglass helmet and bounced off into the abyss. Several more rocks, slightly larger in size, followed it, but none struck Neil.
Once more Neil leaned over to catch sight of his friend. All he could distinguish was the bright red of his partner's helmet. Tony appeared hunched over, unmoving.
"Tone, are you alright?"
Neil could hear his voice bellow the question. It seemed to be coming from someone else, someone far away.
"Tone!"
Nothing.
"Tone!"
Still nothing.
Neil did not panic. He knew that to do so would spell disaster for both him and his friend. He had been in similar situations before - tight spots, dilemmas. Always the most important thing was to remain calm and lucid - think things through, one thing at a time, one thing at a time...
For perhaps a minute longer, Neil craned his neck and scanned his friend for any sign of movement, however slight. There was none. Tony appeared frozen in space. Then - no...
In what seemed like slow motion, Tony appeared to outstretch both arms as if crucified and toppled backwards into the abyss.
Neil knew what was coming next. Leaning back against the wall, he locked the rope tight against his thigh and braced himself for the weight of his falling friend.
In accordance with the well-known saying: seconds seemed an eternity. Then, with a force that threatened to wrench Neil from his securing, the rope snapped tight across both of his legs, pinning him to the face with quite awesome pressure. The shock had also jerked him off his footholds and he now hung free, suspended solely from the solitary ice-screw. That little screw was now all that separated the two men from almost certain death.
The icy knot in his stomach that was a fresh rush of adrenaline, seemed for a moment to tap some unknown reserve of strength and as the thin nylon rope sliced into his thighs cutting off his circulation, Neil succeeded in locking the free end of the lifeline around the figure-of-eight steel piece at his waist.
For several seconds Neil was unable to do anything except stare, as if transfixed, at the inert form that was his friend Tony. He felt removed from reality, dazed, as if in some dream, or more appropriately -nightmare. An awful wave of dizziness and nausea rushed over him and he gripped the ice-axe handle with both hands, less he topple from his holds.
As far as he could determine in the dim light of the late afternoon sun, Tony was hanging completely upside down, suspended from his heavy climbing-harness. His feet had become entangled in the rope above and were pinned to the face and his bulky rucksack was slung from one shoulder, obscuring his head. In the valley below he could discern the giant shadow of the mountain they were suspended from, swallowing up meadows and forests as the sun sank below the horizon, like some great ogre from a medieval legend. He and his climbing partner were nine and a half thousand feet up an Alpine peak on the most notorious face in Europe - a face that was considered 'unclimbable' and it now looked as though Tony was seriously injured. With night falling, the temperature was guaranteed to drop considerably. This had one advantage: all the loose rubble on the face would be frozen into position. Making a conscience effort to suppress his fear and concentrate on one thing at a time, Neil formed a plan in his mind.
Okay, okay. Gotta secure Tony to the wall, get him under shelter.
He began to retrace his steps, working his way methodically down the seventy degree ice wall to his unconscious friend. It seemed to take an eternity and, when he eventually reached him, the sight that awaited Neil came close to making him reel in shock; Tony's hair was matted with blood, his mouth agog, revealing four ugly gaps where teeth had been and his nose was flattened as if by a giant boxing glove, dried blood caking his upper lip and chin. With considerable effort, Neil succeeded in hoisting the badly injured man into an upright position and made him fast to the wall. The digging of the snowhole almost killed him.
It took Neil four and a half long tortuous hours to burrow out a cave in the ice large enough for Tony and himself to sit inside. Exhausted and totally drained, with night having fallen like the Devil's eiderdown, Neil wrapped his friend up in a down sleeping bag making sure his head was covered with a spare woollen balaclava helmet and attempted to melt down a large chunk of ice for a mug of tea on the little butane gas stove they had brought.
Up above the two men the stars sparkled like diamonds in a black coat, while in the valley below the lights of automobiles and motorcycles could be discerned, darting back and forth in the darkness, their occupants oblivious to the drama taking place high above them on the Belzader's north face. As Neil attempted in vain to revive Tony from his unconscious state, he felt warm tears tumble down his numbed face and he prayed for the life of his friend, and his own...
The night was a long and difficult one. During the course of it, Neil managed to sleep for maybe an hour in total - an hour of peace, of blissful oblivion - but then it was back to reality. Tony had regained consciousness briefly in the middle of the night and had gone into violent convulsions, screaming deranged phrases and unintelligible garbling that frightened Neil, who tried despairingly to calm him. He feared the blow to Tony’s skull had caused possibly irreparable brain damage and he longed for first light, when he could strive to complete their terrifying ascent and hoist his friend to safety.
The dawn was breathtaking in its grandeur.
Like the explosive burst of energy in the creation of a new planet, huge shafts of splintering orange and red split the sky on the horizon, as if sliced by some giant's sabre. An amber glow enveloped the surrounding valleys and as the first rays of sun stroked the tip of the Belzadler, several small rocks zinged past the two men into the void.
Shivering with the shock of the frigid morning air, Neil crawled out of his bivouac bag and set about preparing the equipment for the day's climb. Tony had earlier lapsed into unconsciousness again and now lay cocooned inside his sleeping bag, snoring quietly.
Despite his numb fingers and empty stomach, Neil managed to have everything prepared with in a quarter hour. He positioned Tony at the lip of the snowhole in such a way, that if he were to roll over in his sleep, he would not tumble into space. Then he stepped out onto the sheer black-ice wall.
It was an awful, terrifying climb. Every step, every stab into the ice with his axe, was taken with the knowledge that it could be his last planned action. With some difficulty Neil succeeded in looking always upwards, but the face sloped so steeply that the sight of overhanging outcrops above made him giddy and queasy.
On and on, up and up he went, pausing every one hundred and fifty feet, when the rope connecting him with Tony became taut. Then he was able to anchor himself to the face and be secure and safe for at least the time it took to hoist his friend up in the pulley-system he had rigged.
The sun rose and fell slowly, not once brushing the two men, as the north face of the Belzadler was such that the sun never struck it directly.
By late afternoon, Neil was astounded at the progress he had made. Perhaps the complete concentration on his every move and action had made him oblivious to the amount of ground he was covering, but there now remained but five hundred feet or so to the summit of the formidable peak.
The face began to slope less sharply and Neil was bathed in the first few rays of the sun. Taking a calculated risk, he emptied both their rucksacks of all but the bare essentials for survival. Then he slung one lightened sack across his back and hoisted his friend up over his shoulders.
Then they could climb no more and a bitter southern wind struck the two men head on. Neil lost his balance and tumbled into the snow, falling heavily beneath his friend. Quickly he turned to grab at Tony, but it was a fraction too late and he failed to get a grip on his friend's anorak-hood.
The friction of the big taffeta-covered sleeping bag amounted to nothing on the hard-packed snow and Tony was now sliding down the ice slope, his bright red bug-like shape incongruous against the stark white surroundings. Neil lunged with his axe into the summit snow, but it was too fine and soft for the serrated blade to bite. He new that the momentum of his friend's slide would tear him off the peak and carry them both to their deaths. Staring down in absolute stupefying horror, he watched the red blob that was Tony gather tremendous speed and approach the lip of the precipice that was the Belzadler's north face.
Neil prepared himself for the shock of being ripped from his holds and the inevitable ghastly end that would follow. He waited, eyes clenched tight, hands sunk deep into the snow, in a pathetic attempt to secure himself.
But...nothing. Absolutely nothing.
With stupefying shock and mind-numbing fear - an inkling of the tragedy of the inevitable, Neil slowly turned his head to look down the steep ice-slope for what he knew was there no more.
His friend was gone. No trace of the big sleeping-bag remained. The rope was still attached to Neil's climbing-harness. Foot, by painful heartbreaking foot, Neil reeled it in. At the end was the metal clip that had linked him to his friend. Just the simple, solitary clip - no harness.
Tony must have regained consciousness for those last, few, fleeting, terrible seconds and come to realise that he could die alone, or take his best friend with him. As he skidded ever faster towards the abyss, he had unclipped himself from the rope linking him with Neil.
Neil felt such an overwhelming feeling of the most gut-wrenching pain, sorrow and crushing love for his friend that he collapsed, safe on the summit of the Belzadler.
As he made the conscious effort to rise to his feet and begin the long, lonely journey down the mountain's gentle east-flank, one thought remained lodged in his mind: Suicide Wall was no more. Tony had committed the most unselfish act known to man: he had laid down his life for that of his friend.
Silently he wept.
