Conquistadors of the Useless by Geoffrey Sutton Lionel Terray David Roberts Read Free Book Online

greatest spirituality’ – thus Guido Lammer.
    That summer I did a lot of climbing, mostly with my companion of the Moine. I gave myself up to a life of adventure and action for its own sake and found in it perfect happiness, for, to quote Lammer once more, ‘on summits haunted by the unfettered elements, you may take long draughts of the foaming cup in the headiness of action which admits no obstacles’.
    But to be truthful, though I read Lammer between climbs, finding in his romantic style a clear expression of what I also felt in my confused way, there was nothing of the intellectual climber about me. I was rather an ardent young animal, bounding from summit to summit like a kid among the rocks. I had no thought of reputation, and the simplest climbs made me crazy with joy. The mountains were a sort of magic kingdom where by some spell I felt happiest.
    By virtue of all this experience I began to make progress in technique, going through alternate stages of the most promising ease and the most paralysing fear. On the north ridge of the Chardonnet, for example, we found the final slopes consisted of bare ice. My companion cut very small steps which were also inconveniently outward-sloping. Taking these to be quite normal, I walked up them without any bother on the front two spikes of my crampons. I would certainly have continued on to the summit in the same blissful state if I had not, at that moment, noticed a party of famous climbers behind us hacking away furiously to triple the area of our steps. A certain doubt found its way into my soul, which turned to worry. Suddenly I realised the full peril of our position on these tiny steps, up which we were gaily walking without any precautionary measures. It only needed one false move on the part of either of us, or one of the steps to give way, and we should be sliding inexorably towards the abyss which yawned beneath our heels … in a moment I was paralysed with giddiness, and refused to move hand or foot in such unsafe circumstances. My companion had to cut real ‘buckets’ to give me sufficient confidence to finish the climb.
    At that time the outlook of the majority of French climbers was very different from what it is today. The traverse of the Grépon was still considered a serious matter, calling for considerable natural aptitude and some years of experience. No one would then have dared to try this ascent without leading up to it carefully, a thing which is quite common today. The Mer de Glace face of the Grépon, the Mayer-Dibona ridge of the Dent du Requin, the Ryan-Lochmatter route on the Aiguille du Plan, the traverse of the Aiguilles du Diable, were all considered to be ‘grandes courses’, [3] and the ambition to do them one day began to stir in the bottom of my mind. The north face of the Grandes Jorasses and even that of the Dru were generally considered to be quite out of the question for a normal human being. It was reckoned that to attack a face of this sort you either had to be a fanatical lunatic (a quality attributed in particular to the great German and Italian climbers) or one of those phenomenal supermen who turn up in every sport perhaps once or twice in ten years.
    Feeling in no way fanatical and not taking myself to be in any way exceptional, the idea of trying such climbs never crossed my mind for a moment, and I used to think of the rare individuals who went in for this sort of thing with just the same kind of admiring pity that I sometimes see today on the faces of my own interlocutors.
    By the end of the summer of 1940 I had done a respectable number of classic routes. If I had not been so impressed with the aura of legend which at that time surrounded the least little climb and the least little climber, I could already have been doing much harder and bigger things. I had amassed a fair amount of experience and possessed an excellent sense of direction. I was also very quick over mixed ground, but my rock