Page 93 - Life of Gertrude Bell

COURAGE AND DETERMINATION 79
our minds/ On the last day of July she and the guides set out to
conquer the Finstcraarhorn by its then unclimbed north-east face.
Gertrude wrote a detailed account of the attempt to her father
in early August. They made good progress early on and by soon
after midday —they had started out at 5 a.m. — were on to the
arete, and after a few more hours of heavy rock and ice work they
were within sight of the summit. Suddenly the weather broke and
heavy snow impeded their progress. Then came thunder and
lightning, their axes attracting the lightning. They could not go
on, in either direction. They bivouacked for the night in a crevice
which protected them from falling stones and avalanches. They
remained roped together. By next day the ridge had grown
narrower with the snowfall and its sides steeper. The summit was
about a thousand feet above them and even in those incredibly
dangerous conditions they decided, more at Gertrude’s instiga­
tion than at the wish of the guides, to go on. A thick mist came
up to add to their difficulties. ‘Once we got to the top we could get
down the other side in any weather,’ said Gertrude. As it was they
could not attempt the journey down the north-east buttress. They
crept along the knife-edge of a col, but it proved too difficult for
even the brilliant Ulrich. The awful alternative of the descent
down the arete was better than trying to go on. They had been
fifty-three hours on the rope and had had little sleep. Gertrude and
one of the guides tumbled down on to a ledge and though they
had a fixed rope to hold on to it was a frightening experience. By
six in the evening they were attempting to climb down a chimney,
the one that had already caused them trouble in the ascent. They
were standing on an upright at the top of a tower when there was
a blue flash. Gertrude’s ice-axe jumped in her hand and she
thought she felt it getting hot through her woollen glove. ‘It’s
not nice to carry a private lightning conductor in your hand in
the thick of a thunderstorm,’ she said. They survived that danger,
but they were forced to stop again because Heinrich had fallen
into soft snow on die mist and rain-swept glacier. She and
Heinrich slept in sacks, Ulrich insisdng that Gertrude should lie
on his while putting her feet into her own. They awoke at 4 a.m.
A few hours later they reached safety.
Gertrude had failed to conquer the Finsteraarhorn, but her
fame among mountaineers was now such that she was offered a
place in the next Himalayan expedition planned by Dr C. F. de
Filippi. Five years after the event, a letter from the guide Ulrich