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- Herausgeber: Vertebrate Publishing
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
In Mountaineering in Scotland, climber and mountaineer W.H. Murray vividly describes some of the most sought-after and classic British climbs on rock and ice, including the Cuillin Ridge on Skye and Ben Nevis. The book – written in secret on toilet paper in whilst Murray was a prisoner of war – is infused with the sense of freedom and joy the author found in the mountains. He details the hardship and pleasure wrung from high camping in winter, climbs Clachaig Gully and makes the second winter ascent of Observatory Ridge. Murray recounts his adventures in Glencoe and the mountains beyond – including a terrifying near-death experience at the falls of Falloch. Murray's first book, Mountaineering in Scotland is widely acknowledged as a classic of mountaineering literature. It inspirational prose – as fresh now as when first published – is bound to make a reader reach for their tent and head for the hills of Scotland. He asserts, 'Seeming danger ensures that on mountains, more than elsewhere, life may be lived at the full.' This is classic mountain climbing literature at its best.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Mountaineering in Scotland
W.H. Murray
www.v-publishing.co.uk
– CONTENTS –
There is a region of heart’s desire
free for the hand that wills;
land of the shadow and haunted spire,
land of the silvery glacier fire,
land of the cloud and the starry choir,
magical land of hills;
loud with the crying of winds and streams,
thronged with the fancies and fears of dreams.
There are perils of knightly zest
fit for the warrior’s craft;
pitiless giants with rock-bound crest,
mystical wells for the midnight rest,
ice-crowned castles and halls, to test
steel with the ashen shaft;
realms to be won by the well-swung blow,
rest to be earned from the yielding foe.
Frosted cities of timeless sleep
wait for the errant knight;
kingly forest and frowning steep,
spirits of mist and of fathomless deep,
snow-winged dragons of fear that keep
watch o’er each virgin height;
treasure of dawn and a crown of stars
his who can shatter the frozen bars.
All that the wanderer’s heart can crave,
life lived thrice for its lending,
hermit’s vigil in dreamlit cave,
gleams of the vision that Merlin gave,
comrades till death, and a wind-swept grave,
joy of the journey’s ending: –
Ye who have climbed to the great white veil,
heard ye the chant? Saw ye the Grail?
From the Collected Poems of Geoffrey Winthrop Young.
– CHAPTER 1 –
Twenty-four Hours on the Cuillin
It was ten o’clock at night, in Glen Brittle. The June sun had left our little cluster of tents, which nestled behind a screen of golden broom between the Atlantic and the Cuillin. Eastward, the peaks were written along the sky in a high, stiff hand. High above us, the brown precipice of Sron na Ciche, which reacts, chameleon-like, to every subtle change of atmosphere, was dyed a bright blood-red in the setting sun.
I watched the lights fade from the rocks and white evening mist begin to creep round the hills, then I thought of having supper and retiring with a pipe to my sleeping-bag. But in this hope I had reckoned without my friend, B.H. Humble; his head, adorned by a dilapidated panama, emerged of a sudden from the door of a nearby tent. The lighted eye, the mouth upturned at the corners, the warm colour – they all bore witness to a recent brain-storm. Humble had given birth to an idea. I regarded him with profound suspicion.
‘It would be a fine night for a climb,’ said Humble, tentatively.
‘Well,’ I hastily replied, ‘there’s going to be no moon, no stars – it will be dark, cold, cloudy, and every cliff in mist. Granted that, it’s heresy to deny that all weather’s climbing weather.’
But Humble was paying no attention to me.
‘We’d start right now,’ said he; ‘go up Coire Banachdich, rest on the main ridge, then north along the tops.’
‘And what then?’
‘Leave it to me … ’ And he looked away very mysteriously.
‘On this very spot,’ I protested, ‘is to be had a hot meal, a quiet pipe, and an eiderdown sleeping-bag.’ But I was merely according the flesh its privilege of free speech. The spirit was already aloft, I was pulling on my boots …
I had faith in Humble. He is one of those men who brim with an incalculable alliance of ingenuity and energy. A rock-climb in his company has all the fascination of a mystery tour; one is likely to end, not on some nearby peak, but miles from anywhere in a rarely visited mountain stronghold. And if port be not made until all hours of the day or night, at least one returns buoyed by novelties and ballasted by exhaustion. Of one thing I felt certain: there was more in his taciturnity than met the eye. I knew him. What that ‘more’ might be I should have to wait for time to disclose. I packed a rucksack, picked up a rope, and we bade farewell to Maitland and Higgins, the two remaining members of our party.
A June gloaming in Skye is so long-drawn-out that one may usually climb on moderate rocks until eleven o’clock. But the mist had been brewing for an hour in the corries and now overflowed round every peak, complicating the problem of route-selection through the wilderness of screes and boulders that carpet Coire Banachdich. Up the wall that backs the corrie a winding route gives easy access to the main ridge. To find that route in mist at late twilight was another matter. Indeed it proved to be impossible.
We climbed the face by guess and by God a considerable height toward the crest, until an unavoidable traverse brought us to a square rock platform, like a balcony. The situation had a dramatic aspect that appealed to us. Below, the rocks plunged into blackness; above, they rose sheer into the mysteries of the mist. We resolved to bivouac until there was sufficient light for safe climbing.
There was just enough room on the ledge to accommodate us in comfort. Like difficulty, comfort on mountains is a term relative to the individual climber. We could stretch out at full length, heads pillowed on rope or rucksack. The hard rock made an indifferent mattress and night cloud a somewhat chill blanket, but luckily I have the capacity to sleep at will, any time and anywhere, and
Weariness
Can snore upon the flint, when resty sloth
Finds the down pillow hard.
Humble wakened me at 2 a.m. The darkness was appreciably less but mist still enveloped us. We could now see to move, and in ten minutes arrived on the rim of the main ridge, at about three thousand feet. We turned northward and scrambled over the three tops of Sgurr na Banachdich. Immediately beyond Banachdich the ridge takes a big swing north-east, the first curve of the horse-shoe that encloses Coruisk. The route at this juncture was by no means easy to find; four ridges branch downward-bound, and it is only too easy to follow the wrong line. The compass, moreover, is untrustworthy, for magnetic rocks on Banachdich attract the needle.
After reconnaissance we saw close by the spike of Sgurr Thormaid, projecting like a dragon’s fang through streamers of twisting cloud. We swarmed up one side and down the other, secure in the knowledge that our route was now correct. A traverse of the Cuillin Ridge in mist is a stirring experience. The jagged edge, picturesque enough when clear, then astounds the eye with a succession of distorted towers. They impend suddenly through the clouds, grim, as wild in outline as any creation of nightmare.
At 3 a.m. we reached Sgurr a’ Ghreadaidh. The dawn was well under way and sunrise might shortly be expected. Nothing was visible save mist, so we halted to cheer ourselves with a bite of food. I confess that I again fell asleep, curled up on a slab that gently tilted over the southern cliff. In a short while Humble roused me. He was justifiably in a state of high excitement. On every hand the mist was sinking, and slowly, one by one, each peak of the Cuillin reared a black tip through snow-white vapour.
Never again in summer have I seen a sight so magnificent. The clouds had now fallen to a uniform level at two thousand five hundred feet; just sufficient to hide the linking ridges and to isolate each pinnacle of the six-mile horseshoe. From the mainland to far beyond the Outer Hebrides this cloud-mass formed an unbroken sea. Immediately beneath our feet the surface surged and spun as though impelled by inner vortices, rising and falling like the rollers of a mid-Atlantic swell. Over the submerged cols between each mountain the ocean poured and seethed in a never-ending flow.
The grey sky was steadily changing to cornflower blue and black rock to ashen. To obtain a still finer vantage point we moved east to Sgurr a’ Mhadaidh. No sooner did we reach the top than the sun rose. Down in the basin of Coruisk, the cloud-surface at once flashed into flame, as though a stupendous crucible were filled with burning silver. The twenty turrets of the Cuillin, like islands lapped by fire-foam, flushed faintly pink. The shade crimsoned. Within a space of minutes, the rocks had run the gamut of autumn leafage, ‘yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red.’
Beyond such bare words one may say little. The mind fails one how miserably and painfully before great beauty. It cannot understand. Yet it would contain more. Mercifully, it is by this very process of not understanding that one is allowed to understand much: for each one has within him ‘the divine reason that sits at the helm of the soul,’ of which the head knows nothing. Find beauty; be still; and that faculty grows more surely than grain sown in season. However, I must be content to observe that here, for the first time, broke upon me the unmistakable intimation of a last reality underlying mountain beauty; and here, for the first time, it awakened within me a faculty of comprehension that had never before been exercised.
Humble indeed had not failed me. He had hoped for a noble panorama. But in the bleak hours around midnight not even he had dreamed that we should be led by cloud and fire to the land of promise. Since then I have always believed and repeatedly proved that the mountains reserve their fairest prize for the man who turns aside from common-sense routine. One might say that hills repay trust with generosity. In Glen Brittle, our companions when they awoke saw nothing but a steel-grey layer of low clouds, and not imagining that the peaks were in sunlight, commiserated us on such an unprofitable end to our waywardness.
Several of the best hours of our otherwise misspent lives thus passed away on Sgurr a’ Mhadaidh. Towards nine o’clock the cloud-bank broke up and gradually dissolved. We scrambled down to the high col under Bidein Druim nan Ramh, and thence turned downward toward Coruisk by the Corrie of Solitude. Overhead, hardly a wisp of cloud remained; below, Loch Coruisk was a royal blue rippled with silver.
After winning clear of the screes in the corrie we walked the best part of two miles south, to the junction of the main burn and the loch. And here I add my voice to Humble’s in exploding the myth of ‘gloomy Coruisk.’ The face of Scotland has so often been falsified by writers in search of melodrama that there is now difficulty in convincing people of the evidence of their own eyes. Far from being shadowed and overhung by beetling crags, Loch Coruisk has a fairly open situation, inasmuch as the Cuillin main ridge lies a couple of miles back. In spring and summer it is flooded by sunlight for the best part of the day. I have heard it further alleged that here grows no tuft of vegetation; yet when I stood beside the loch with Humble the very banks were alive with wild flowers, their hues offset by cool green shrubs and long grasses. We might have imagined ourselves transported to the land of Xanadu, where
… twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round,
And there were gardens, bright with sinuous rills.
A few of these flowers were rare, and Humble, who is an accomplished botanist, was highly gratified by some carnivorous specimens.
As I am ill content to rejoice in mountains yet not climb them, so I am compelled not only to admire lochs and rivers but to plunge in and swim. In either act knowledge of their charm is extended. Every condition for the ideal swim had here been satisfied, for the sun had more than warmed us on the four-mile tramp. There was no need to propose a bathe – of one accord we stripped and plunged. I have never known anything like it. The swim was unique in my own experience because all five senses were feasted to the full.
The sharp sting of that first dive cleared at one stroke the fogs of lethargy from the mind – at one stroke the world stood vivid. The corrie was full of sun and the song of the burn, gay with the flash of many colours and the dance of light on the loch, fresh with the scents of blossom and an aromatic tang of plants in morning air. I drank from the burn and the taste was sweet and lively to the palate. And these good reports, being gathered together in the mind, suddenly fused in image of the beauty we had seen during the supreme hour on Sgurr a’ Mhadaidh: so that I knew, what until then I had not known, that the one Beauty pervades all things according to their nature, they having beauty by virtue of participation in it; and that in the degree of realizing its presence within us, so is life lived in fullness. The ecstasy of that morning is bright after eight years.
When at last we emerged dripping from the water we let our bodies dry in the hot sun while we ate our too little food. Our departure from camp had been just a thought casual. There is no appetite on earth to surpass a Skye appetite; one is permanently hungry. But now we were ravenous. However, shortage of food for a day is of no consequence; much more serious was Humble’s plight. I was almost sorry for him. He is an ardent and expert photographer and he had brought a camera but no spools.
Our intention was to go down to the sea – one might almost say up to the sea, for parts of Coruisk are said to be below sea-level – and then go north up the far side of the loch to Sgurr Dubh, by the ascent of which we should return to the Glen Brittle side of the main ridge. Reviewing this project in my mind while we walked along the east bank of the loch, I began to regard the absence of spools as an unmixed blessing. On a fine day in the Cuillin there is no more insatiable devourer of the fleeting hours than a camera with Humble behind it. As it was, the surprising variety of plant life all along the two-mile bank of the loch caused many a halt and much botanical dawdling. I think we spent two hours over these two miles, for it was after noon when we arrived at Loch Scavaig.
All this while I had been promising myself another bathe. As befits a small sea-loch, Scavaig is green, deep and clear – a perfect swimming-pool in one of the most lonely and remote corners of Britain. What was our astonishment, then, when we arrived on the brink, to see a MacBrayne Line steamer sweep into the loch and drop anchor! Within fifteen minutes several boatloads of tourists landed. They had arrived from Oban to see that world-famous view: Coruisk and the Black Cuillin.
At another time Humble and I might have selfishly resented this landing as a rude shattering of our solitude. Instead, we looked at each other with gleaming eyes. The same thought had simultaneously occurred to us both – food!
We negotiated swiftly with the officer in charge. In a few minutes we had been taken out to the ship in a motor-boat and were climbing on board. The first man I met on deck knew me, and to put the finishing touch to our luck he was officially in charge of the cruise. We explained our urgent need of a good meal. He introduced us to the captain and we found ourselves conducted as honoured guests to the first-class dining saloon. I must explain that my beard was a fortnight strong, that I was in shirt-sleeves and braces, bore a large coil of rope round my shoulders, and that my breeches were in tatters. Humble, I am glad to report, looked distinctly less disreputable, but any good effect was destroyed by his antique and sorely battered hat.
Having run the gauntlet of clean, cool, spruce, and inquisitive tourists on deck, we were mightily relieved to find the dining saloon empty. The stewards had never before entertained two starving climbers. They watched round-eyed while we polished off two helpings of every course throughout a lengthy menu. Then followed a quart of cool beer. Ever since that day I have harboured tender feelings for the English tourist, and I raise my hat to the name of MacBrayne.
At three o’clock we went ashore and were introduced to a number of young ladies, who suspected that Humble and I were local colour engaged by Messrs. MacBrayne for their entertainment. The consensus of opinion regarding the view spread before us was this: that to set foot on the Cuillin either in mist or clear weather was certain death; and that Loch Coruisk was the deepest lake in Europe – otherwise, why had they been brought to see it?
The ladies were charming, and after a prolonged bout of photography we parted from them with regret. The time was now five o’clock and we should be hard pressed to reach Glen Brittle before dark. Our proposed route of ascent, by the east ridge of Sgurr Dubh, was over three thousand feet high, and one of the two longest rock-climbs in Britain. I would recommend that ridge as a paradise for a rock-climbing beginner. Apart from the initial trouble in climbing on to the ridge, one may thereafter proceed unroped up broad acres of boiler-plate slabs, whose rock is the roughest gabbro in all the Cuillin. In other words, it is so rough and reliable that only the grossest negligence could bring a man to harm. Here, too, one may learn balance and rhythm – the secrets of successful rock-work.
Humble and I kept our pace as slow as we could, consistent with continuous upward movement. The steamer slowly shrank to the size of a skiff and human figures became too small to be distinguished. White gulls wheeled and flashed across the green sparkle of Loch Scavaig. Meanwhile we sweltered under a grilling sun and were roasted by waves of heat reflected upward from the brown rock. The temperature must have been at least ninety degrees, and a raging thirst possessed our desiccated bodies. Beyond the summit, we threaded an involved descending route amongst huge crags, where we were obliged to rope down an overhang of twenty feet – our first use of a rope all day. At nine o’clock we stood on the rim of Coire a’ Ghrunnda.
We were anxious to reach camp as soon as possible; our friends knew us too well to bother about a twenty-four hours’ absence, but might feel less at ease thereafter. We decided, therefore, not to traverse sgurr Alasdair and instead went straight down to Coire a’ Ghrunnda. Here, if you like, lies a genuinely gloomy loch – a black and glassy sheet of water framed by a chaos of screes as desolate as one may find in all Scotland. In the stream that flows from it we at last quenched our agonizing thirst. Then we set off downhill, skirting those terrific slabs in the corrie-bed, convex slabs that pour seaward, scored and burnished by ancient glaciers.
At 10.30 p.m. we strolled into camp, exactly twenty-four hours after departure. Maitland and Higgins had proved friends indeed and a hot meal was waiting for us. This time, no earthly power, not even another Humble mystery tour, could have wooed me from supper, a quiet pipe, and that eiderdown sleeping-bag.
– CHAPTER 2 –
The Cioch and Crack of Doom
Prolonged drought and blazing sun have almost invariably blessed my climbing days in Skye. I go in June. But in June 1937, when camping with J.K.W. Dunn in Glen Brittle, my luck suffered the inevitable relapse. We were halfway up the South-West Buttress of Sgurr na h-Uamha when a full gale sprang from the south and spread-eagled us on the central slabs. It was the last big unclimbed buttress in the Cuillin. Therefore we battled our way to the top, fled before the wind to Sligachan, and not an hour too soon retired west to Glen Brittle. Heralded by the gale, rain stormed over the mountains and found us much inclined to rest on our laurels and keep dry. There was at first an indisputable pleasure to be wrung from lying warm and dry in one’s sleeping-bag, listening to the vain beat of rain upon the tent-canvas, and thinking ‘God help the sailors on a night like this!’ After several hours the sound became monotonous; after three days we realized that there were worse things than a wet skin.
I amused myself by reminding Dunn of the less creditable episodes of his climbing career. He is one of the most hopelessly casual and yet friendly of men. To cite but one incident, typical of his way of life, he once sent me a telegram from the wilds of Kintyre, commanding me to climb with him on Nevis next day – but omitting to state time or place of meeting. I set off by car from Glasgow, staking all upon a chance encounter somewhere in Lochaber. Halfway there I happened to stop at Inverarnan Hotel in Glen Falloch – to find Dunn, large and fair-haired, sprawling before the fire and wolfing hot scones and tea. I advanced to unleash my thunder, when ‘Good man!’ cried Dunn, ‘I knew it was two to one you’d stop at Inverarnan.’ You cannot damn and blast a man whose eye is sparkling with delight at meeting you. I tried; but it was no use.
Thus it was in our storm-bound tent that wrath at his carefree habit kept me lively and was yet stayed by his infectious smile and naive geniality. Against these I have no defence. My own more irritating behaviour he regarded with the phlegmatic calm of a noble but lazy mastiff. Despite such accord in idleness, three days of stored-up energy brewed a restlessness that drove us to action. We resolved that regardless of weather we should go on the fourth day to the best rock-climb in the Cuillin. To my own mind this was the Cioch direct and the Crack of Doom, which lie one above the other to form a thousand-foot route up the precipice of Sron na Ciche. To climb the first half by the Cioch pinnacle was practicable; but whether in rain we could cope with the Crack of Doom – by repute the hardest climb in Skye – was a question that I was unqualified to decide. We had not been there before.
The following day dawned with a rain-squall. We wakened, listened – and hastily shut our eyes again. But after a midday breakfast our resolution triumphed. As we made our preparations the weather relented. The rain went off and we set out in weak sunshine for Coire na Ciche, where the wet flanks of the circling sgurrs gleamed as though sheathed in tinfoil.
We spent an hour climbing up Coire Lagain and following a stony track under the mile-long cliffs of Sron na Ciche. Rooted four hundred feet above our heads, in the centre of the cliff, the pinnacle projected squat and gigantic, yet hardly distinguishable from below against the background of the main face. Its very presence there went long unsuspected until Professor Norman Collie, observing its shadow cast upon the cliff behind, deduced the existence of what has become one of the most famous rock-spires in Scotland. We proposed to climb by the direct route made in 1907 by Harland and Abraham.
After a few minutes’ rest we roped up on a hundred feet of line. The rocks were still very wet, but the weather was fast turning to the lively breeze and sun that housewives call ‘a good drying day.’ Moreover, the cliff was gabbro, the roughest of mountain rock, to which wetness spells added difficulty only where the rock is water-worn or interlarded with basalt, or by chilling the fingers. The latter has caused several accidents hereabouts, but is not a trouble to which I am readily susceptible.
I started up a slab at the base of a long shallow chimney. There was more water in this natural drain-pipe than I liked, so at the earliest opportunity I climbed over the left wall on to the open face of the cliff, perhaps fifty feet above the screes. I found myself in a splendidly free situation, with the gabbro unrolling before me like a red ceremonial carpet. Dunn joined me and for a hundred feet we continued parallel to the chimney until the slabs converged on a little corner beneath a vertical nose. To the right and left, bulging rocks prevented an avoiding traverse.
I had been previously counselled that combined tactics – a ‘shoulder’ from the second man – had best be employed to vanquish this severe pitch. But the holds are definite, if small, and for a tall man like myself no aid is required. The high angle threw me out of balance, so that determined arm-pulling and quick climbing to avoid numbed fingers were the key to success. There followed a hard corner and rib; we zigzagged from one to the other and slowly advanced up to a bulwark of overbending crags.
The immense bastion of the rock above was unscalable, and to turn it we had to ford a river of slabs that fairly poured from the bulge on our left, two hundred feet down to the corrie. I launched out on a horizontal line of stepping-stones close beneath the overhang, and halfway across happened to look straight down to the screes, where I saw a large cairn that marked the landing-place of an unfortunate climber who had once fallen from my present position. The abominable practice of erecting cairns at such spots can hardly be condemned in strong enough terms. At the same instant there came a loud rushing sound like the noise of a high approaching wind. For one hopeless second I believed that a line-squall was coming at me. I clung to the rock like a limpet, and breathed a thankful prayer that Dunn weighed fourteen stone and myself but ten, that the rope was new and Dunn one of the best second men in Scotland.
The rush of wind changed to a long-drawn-out roar, lasting a full minute, and punctuated by terrific crashes from close below me. I then had good reason to recognize that alarming noise. A week before, when traversing the main ridge with J. Banford, I had left Sgurr Dearg in dense mist. After descending steep rock, we had embarked on a hand-traverse on the upper ledge of an overhang, at which the mist cleared, revealing not the main ridge a few feet below, but a chasm eight hundred feet deep. Aided by the sketchiest foothold, we were gaily swinging by our hands over the north-eastern precipice. We hastily retired and were no sooner clear of the ledge than the overhang, ledge and all, silently heeled over into the void in blocks like cottages, then dropped with that rushing noise that I heard now; with just that same roar when thousands of tons of rock crashed on the corrie.
I stood fascinated on the slabs until the avalanche ended, waiting until the last hoarse rattle of the small shot had fallen still. A breathless hush pervaded the mountain. Then I called to Dunn to let out the rope and continued the traverse with exaggerated caution, finding problems in foot-placing where five minutes ago I should have romped freely. This delicacy of nerve was promptly restored to more robust condition by the sudden uprise of the crux.
The traverse ended at a wet and slabby wall of twenty feet lying at right angles to the bastion. The middle of the wall was worn smooth and white, both by water and my predecessors’ boot-nails. There was no place here for sensitivity to noise or memorial stones; such rock had to be dealt with in a mood of business-like determination. Dunn, unfortunately, was still on the far side of the traverse and I had already run out seventy feet of rope, the weight of which was growing noticeable, and would by now have been a serious drag but for his skill in keeping it dry. However, his stance was good, those close at hand bad, so I left with him orders to be ready for an instant move should my rope give out, and then turned to the wall.
The principal difficulty was the glossiness of the rock, which after the coarse gabbro below lent a feeling of insecurity to each movement, not only of the feet but also of the hands, which, chilled by running water, found the tiny holes inadequate. Upon reaching the white patch halfway up I was therefore delighted to find two vertical cracks, wide enough to admit my fingertips. With these for assistance, the doubtful downscrape of boots on the polished stone was much less dreadful than it had looked from below. This vital move accomplished, I clambered to the top. Before my rope quite ran out I reached a good ledge, from which I brought up Dunn.
Thus far the climbing had been of the most physically satisfying kind, making big demands on muscle and energy. The golden rule of rock-work – use the feet as much as possible, the arms as little as possible – must on the Cioch be often honoured in the breach. One must fight out one’s way. For an untrained man I can think of no route more heart-breaking; and for a fit man, none more exhilarating.
We had now outflanked the girdle of the overhang and climbed a further long stretch of slabs, on which we were soon able to move together and which led us to the terrace under the Cioch pinnacle. The terrace sloped unevenly from the eastern gully on our left to the base of the pinnacle on our right. Directly in front arched that hugest sweep of gabbro known throughout the climbing world as ‘The Cioch Slab,’ from whose western edge sprang the Cioch, leaning towards us like the head of a lizard.
The day was growing ever more sunny as blue rents in the cloud-woof grew more frequent. After that most glorious of Cuillin climbs this unanticipated sun came like a liqueur at the close of a banquet, a final touch that raised our spirits to unprecedented heights. The ordinary route up the Cioch by the Slab and nape seemed too tame a conclusion, so we traversed westward to the direct finish on the nose. After scrambling up broken rocks to the right of the overhang, we climbed the left wall of a corner, wriggled up a steep, rough slab with few holds, and cautiously eased ourselves on to an awkward mantelshelf. Immediately above, on the very tip of the nose, were a series of three knife-edges. Looked down upon from the top, these short blades, set one below the other like the teeth of a saw, wear a spectacular aspect; their situation is an airy one. But in the climbing of them resides no difficulty. Indeed, we found ourselves deliberately lingering over them – and savouring to the full that joyous sense of freedom they yield, that feel of hovering over space as though the climber were a bird on spread wings.
We pulled ourselves on to the broad roof and relaxed. Dunn lit up his pipe,
A trophy which survived a hundred fights,
A beacon which has cheered ten thousand nights,
and lay on his back, happily gazing into vacuity, while I rolled over on my stomach, head over the edge, and surveyed the cliffs below. Throughout the precipice of Sron na Ciche, in particular the area around the Cioch, there is a peculiar atmosphere, clean and spacious, which I have never observed so markedly on any other mountain. It arises perhaps from the free lift of the pale brown slabs and the unique bareness of them; for no vestige of vegetation is nourished in their crystalline rock. One’s heart goes out to them, for the cliff has the same virginal purity as snow-peaks in a burst of sun, or green seas breaking white on a skerry.
Half an hour passed in delicious ease. And here indeed is the fine art of idling anywhere: there should be a mountain of work accomplished in the near past or instantly impending in the future. Where these twin conditions are both satisfied, as now, one may experience a double dose of bliss. At the close of our half-hour I proposed that we try the Crack of Doom. Dunn was enthusiastic, for I had kept this part of the programme to myself until I knew our day’s form. We could then contain ourselves no longer and climbed down the nape of the pinnacle to the cliff.
A sharp descent and right-hand traverse along a shattered ledge brought us to the start of our route. It began as a deep groove, gradually growing shallow as it curved for a hundred and fifty feet up rough and tumbled slabs. On this first section, advancing by easy stages and husbanding energy for whatever might lie ahead, we encountered no difficulty. On the last thirty feet the groove became harder; then the cliff shot abruptly up, the groove swung hard to the left, and came to a sudden end at a right-angled corner. We stood on a sloping slab, on either side of which the corner walls rose sheer for fifty feet. The right-hand wall was split from top to bottom by a hanging chimney, set slightly at a tilt from right to left. We had arrived at the Crack of Doom.
While Dunn secured himself in the corner I scrutinized the crack to discover the worst. The tilt was clearly awkward, but twenty feet up a jammed stone augured a brief resting-place. Below that stone the crack was wide enough to admit one’s right leg and arm. Above the stone I could see no holds at all and the crack narrowed. Although the outside walls were dry, trickling water filmed the interior.
Whenever Dunn declared himself ready I set to work. Facing sideways toward the corner I wedged my right arm in the crack as a balance-preserver and climbed by foothold only to the chock-stone. Those twenty feet were hard but not severe. Nevertheless, I had no doubts of what must follow, and there being no need to hurry, I stopped on the chock-stone for some two minutes until I felt completely rested. On the slab below me Dunn looked up with that smile of unbounded optimism that has cheered me up many an ice-clad pitch in winter. No matter how grim the prospect or precarious his own situation, he has the remarkable capacity of appearing unshakably safe and solid. Indeed, he inspires a leader with the sense of mutual confidence, which means much to the success of a climbing team.
I began to climb again. With every foot now gained the crack narrowed and the difficulties increased. At intervals on the outside edge were microscopic in-cut holds, too wide apart to provide continuous footing. In between these havens I retained position and mounted higher by slipping a foot inside the crack and turning the ankle to jam the boot. I had also to fight against the tilt of the crack, which tended to thrust my body outward; and since an arm might no longer be wedged, I was obliged to force a hand into the crack and make pressure-holds by clenching the fist. I imagine that a shorter man might find less trouble with the tilt than myself. With jammed foot and fist I thus pulled up my body from one sparse hold to another.
Unfortunately I had done almost sixty thousand feet of climbing on the Cuillin in sixteen days and my boot-nails were in a sad state of decrepitude, being not only worn to shreds but loose into the bargain. There was one edge-nail, on the inner side of my left boot, which tinkled as merrily as a dinner bell whenever my foot was shaken. This nail had repeatedly to be used on the miniature holds on the outside of the crack. One placed it carefully and applied the strain gently, in constant preparedness for its breaking off. Like a true friend it did not fail me in emergency.
Meanwhile I had progressed to the top of the crack, where a tongue of stone jutted overhead as though to mock my weariness. I again jammed myself, and for a few seconds halted to gather in strength for the final tussle. I put out my hand and grasped the top of the stone. With a last strenuous heave I pulled myself out of the crack, dangled for a second, then swarmed up, drawing myself into a flat-bottomed corner.
I frankly confess that although by no means exhausted, I was muscularly very tired indeed. In comparison with this crack, the Cioch direct, everywhere recognized as a standard ‘severe,’ seemed child’s play. Yet the crack is eminently practicable; it calls for no feat of esoteric gymnastic.
While my breath was returning I looked over the edge to give Dunn a signal of success. My eye flashed a thousand feet past his head, down a cascade of slabs to the corrie. So absorbing had been the climb that till now I had felt little or no sense of height. My eye wandered further, down to the green fields of Glen Brittle, where black cloud-shadows were driven in herds by following sun-shafts. Beyond was the Atlantic, its wrinkled expanse scored by a dozen golden furrows, as though the outer islands, like low Viking ships, had ploughed those gleaming wakes when they stood out to the west.
Intense power was given to this simple vista by the frame of crags to my left, and once again I was struck by the truth of those words of Mummery, when he declared that the best route up a mountain is a difficult one. Only there, rather than upon the screes of an easy route, may one find a foreground of bold rock whose noble outline does no less than justice to the distant view; and only there, rather than upon the plod up a uniform slope, which dulls the mind, is one’s whole being glowingly alive and keyed to full receptiveness. After one is up, there can be no doubt that ridge-walking is the finest occupation.
Being fully recovered, I gave Dunn a shout to come on. Like me, he went well to the chock-stone. Thenceforward, and despite his exceptional strength, his much greater weight placed him at a disadvantage; for my own body, being relatively light, has a high power-to-weight ratio. But Dunn was too skilful a mountaineer to climb anyhow but gracefully, and the only signs of difficulty were some hard breathing, and when he glanced up, his fair hair tumbled over his eyes, an expression of acute anguish that almost choked me with laughter. His expression immediately changed to a broad grin, his more explosive mirth being held, perforce, behind glistening eyes – a triumph of mind over matter which those who know the Crack of Doom will appreciate. He came on slowly but surely, and in due course was prostrated by my side.
We sat together for a while, coiling up the rope and congratulating each other on the best climb we had had in Skye. Then we went up to a glacis or broad slabby ledge, which ran leftward like a corridor on to the crest of Sron na Ciche. Where we emerged on the glacis a short final crag rose above us. I understand that this gives a very hard finish to the climb; to me it looked more suitable to rubbers on dry rock than to loose boot-nails on wet rock. We therefore turned to the corridor and walked on to the top of the mountain. We made there the brief halt that proper respect for such a hill demands, then pursued our way along the ridge to Sgurr Alasdair, descending thence to Coire Lagain, a thousand feet in five minutes by the rapids of the Stone Shoot – the longest scree-run in Scotland. On passing below the cliff of Sron na Ciche we threaded our way through hundreds of tons of new avalanche debris, and saw a fresh scar on the face a few hundred feet above the track. Gabbro holds may be the most reliable in the world, but in the mass, I fear, even gabbro is little more immune from decay than other rocks.
We returned to Glen Brittle, and that night I examined my boots. To an attentive ear the note they sounded had become unmistakably one of warning. Until I was new-shod there must be no more rock-climbing. Moreover, the very skin of my finger-tips was worn to a fragile tenuity. Next day we struck camp and departed for Glasgow.
– CHAPTER 3 –
Slav Route – Ben Nevis
Flanked by a cheerful fire, Dunn, W.M. Mackenzie A.M. MacAlpine, and I sat round the breakfast table in the Scottish Mountaineering Club’s hut on Ben Nevis. It was mid October 1937. I was entertaining myself with the hut’s climbing register and speculating what was the full tale behind some of these cryptic entries: ‘Observatory Buttress – three hours rain and sleet,’ or ‘South Trident Direct – half-gale.’ They were succinct enough in all conscience, but too tantalizing. They stimulated yet did not satisfy imagination. What tense moments, high on the mountain-wall, were hidden there? How many hard fights by a leader, silently witnessed by only a couple of friends on windswept ledges – and never again mentioned? I closed the book with a bang. ‘What are we going to climb?’ I asked.
‘When the weather is foul,’ said Mackenzie – and here he paused so that his audience could hear the wind soughing round the corners of the hut – ‘and the rain is coming down in sheets’ – at which he looked pointedly out of the small window – ‘there is only one thing to do.’
‘Get back to bed,’ I murmured.
Mackenzie’s blue eyes flashed with indignation and the nostrils of his hawk-nose distended. He looked a perfect specimen of the intolerant man of action. ‘The only thing to do,’ he sternly continued, ‘is to climb the hardest route on the mountain.’
‘Why?’ asked MacAlpine briskly.
‘Why!’ exploded Mackenzie. ‘In rain you get miserable on an easy climb. But go to a hard climb and you forget the weather – all your interest goes to the rock.’
We could not deny there was an element of truth there. A mild route would be dreary in the thick mist that choked this upper corrie of the Allt a’ Mhuilinn: not a glimpse of the Spean valley two thousand feet below or of the cliffs rising two thousand feet above was vouchsafed us. We were housed like unwilling gods among the clouds. But there were limits to Mackenzie’s theory; we were not like gods, immune from destruction.
‘The hardest climb is Rubicon Wall,’ I remarked, ‘and that won’t go in rain. You must have something else in mind.’
‘Slav route,’ said Mackenzie, sitting up very straight. But with these two words he had won me over. Like a magic charm they broke the spell of lethargy, for Slav route was then reputed to be the finest summer route on the mountain. The name Slav derives from two Czechoslovakian mountaineers with whom E.A.M. Wedderburn made the first ascent in 1934. So far as I knew, however, all ascents to date had been made either in rubbers or rope-soled shoes. And rubbers cannot be used on wet slabs.
‘We’ll try it in boots,’ concluded Mackenzie. ‘It’s a full sixteen hundred feet – takes about four hours.’ Then, brusquely, ‘Nothing to it! Can’t be more than very severe!’ And his whole face lit up with infectious enthusiasm.
MacAlpine and I burst out laughing. Mackenzie is that happy companion, an unconscious humorist. There is a Confucian dictum that love of daring without understanding casts the shadow named rashness. If Mackenzie loved daring more than most virtues his understanding was commensurate, so that boldness of planning was balanced by prudence in execution, which in combine made him a first-class mountaineer. A party of four, however, was too large for so long a climb in wild weather. Dunn and MacAlpine therefore decided to go to Observatory Ridge.
