An Oberland Châlet

by Edith Elmer Wood

I don’t know what thoughts passed through the minds of the others, but mine beat a sort of tattoo in my head like this: “You fool—fool—Fool! You’ve got two little children in Grindelwald and a husband in the Philippines. And you are going to break your neck within the next ten minutes. And you aren’t accomplishing anything under heaven by it. It’s just sheer futile idiocy.”

The numbness of my hands was so great that my control over them was most uncertain. My life and that of my companions depended on the grip I should keep with those cramped, aching fingers, but though I concentrated my will-power on them I felt no certainty that the next minute they would not become rigid and refuse to obey me.

Every once in a while the distance from ledge to ledge would be too great for me to reach, and Biner would lift me by the rope around my waist. During those instants, when I had loosened my own hold of hand and foot and swung clear into space with nothing but an inch of manila hemp and a man’s grip on it between me and a horrible death, I thought of the daily Alpine accidents I had been reading about in the papers, I thought of the frequency with which the rope parts at the critical moment, I thought of my children in Grindelwald—and I called myself names. The faculty to do a very extensive amount of thinking seemed to be concentrated in those instants, the phenomenon probably being akin to that so often chronicled of the last moment of consciousness by those resuscitated from apparent drowning.

I am more particularly relating here my own sensations because I am most familiar with them. Those of the others, with the possible exception of Biner, were undoubtedly equally vivid. Each of us was perfectly conscious that if any one of us slipped, all four would go down. In the nature of things, we had none of us a grip or foothold sufficiently secure to resist a sudden jerk such as would come if one were to fall.

After the first few minutes, I never looked downward. I was not inclined to dizziness, but the drop was too appalling. The others told me afterwards that they also abstained from looking down. We concentrated eyes and thoughts on the few feet of rock immediately around and above us.

Several times on the way up, puffs of biting wind would come down the face of the cliff which it seemed must surely blow us loose. At such moments we stopped climbing and flattened ourselves against the rock, clinging as we loved our lives.

Once we got all four on a little ledge not as wide as the length of our feet, but solid enough to stand on without balancing. We paused there to take breath, and somebody said “Cognac.” Now our experience in the Alpine hut the night before had nearly made teetotalers of us. But at this moment we decided that stimulants might have a legitimate use. Frater produced his silver pocket flask and handed it around. We took a swallow in turn, and it was like liquid life running down our throats. I never experienced anything so magical. (Here I am describing my own sensations again!) I was at the very last point of endurance. I had lost faith in ever reaching the summit of the cliff. I had no more physical force with which to lift my sagging weight upward. I had lost the will-power that lashes on an exhausted body. My numb hands were stiffening. My lungs were choked and laboring. I could neither go on nor go back. Then those two teaspoonfuls, or thereabouts, of fiery cognac that burned down my throat sufficed to give me back my grip on myself, physical and mental. I moved my cramped fingers, and they answered. I took a deep, long breath and felt strengthened. A hope, almost a confidence, crept into my heart, that with God’s help we might reach the top alive.

Then we went on and on and on. The same thing, with our eyes always upward, but not far ahead. At last Biner clambered on to what was evidently a broad ledge, for he knelt on it and, leaning over, gave me his hand to help me up. It was a long reach, and as I got one knee on the ledge and started wearily to lift the rest of my weight, he gave me a pull and push that rolled me lengthwise over the brink, and to my wonderment I found a resting-place for my whole body.

“This is the summit,” said Biner. I had not known we were within five hundred feet of it.