“What on earth are you doing here?” We asked the question simultaneously. It comes as a surprise to find one’s only sibling in a place like Zermatt and apparently staying at the same hotel.
It was a silly question on my part. Zermatt is the Swiss town for which the Matterhorn is named, the base for ascents, and Sue’s husband Rob is a climber. But then again, perhaps it wasn’t so silly. Their finances being tight, Rob has normally travelled alone with Sue staying home to work and hopefully whittle down the bills just a little.
The question that I didn’t ask was where the money was coming from this time. Our maternal great-grandfather founded the Dunedin firm of general merchants that still bears his name and continues as a family concern to this day. The fourth generation numbers eleven so that our individual returns are not massive but handy. Before her marriage and while with Volunteer Service Abroad, Sue had no difficulty in living on this income and even managed to accumulate a nest egg. Then she came home and met Rob the handsome macho hero.
Rob came to public attention when his fellow climbers died after falling into a crevasse in the Southern Alps. Rob was the sole survivor of the party and his accounts of his effort to rescue his companions at the risk of his own life became front-page news. No-one thought to question several obvious anomalies in his account. He is one of those people who secure instant belief. He’s a charmer in the worst sense.
It’s a one-sided marriage. What Rob wants Rob gets and what he wants is to climb. Idiot me gifted my share of the family home to Sue when she married. I wish I’d known then what I know now. The house was remortgaged in nothing flat. Sue’s dream of starting a family is not going to happen. Some mountain, and it has to be a new mountain, will always have a prior claim.
And it’s all happened before. While still back home there, I ran into Janice, Rob’s first wife. We had an interesting talk. She said that if she pointed out that they were already in over their heads, it was proof that ‘she didn’t love him’ , ‘was being selfish’, ’ thought only of herself.’
He’d storm around the house and sulk until he got what he wanted. As she said, ‘his public face and his private face are just so different.’ Somehow she was made to accept a mantle of guilt that still amazes her and although she has since remarried, and happily this time, she still has some need of counselling.
Rob and Sue are into me for ten thousand dollars and that, I suspect, went toward his trip to Nepal. In other words, it’s gone for good. Then three months ago, Sue called me on Skype begging for more but this time I told her, ’no more.’ I wouldn’t mind if it was for her but I’m not going to throw money away just to indulge Rob.
“But this trip means so much to him,” she pleaded.
“Tough bikkies!” I told her. “It’s time that that useless retard learned that he can’t have everything he wants.”
“But he had such a terrible childhood….and…and nobody cares.”
That’s what it always comes back to. The world owes him and Sue must shoulder and expiate the wrongs, real or imagined, inflicted on him by his parents. His parents being dead, the responsibility falls to his current wife as her marriage due. It makes no sense but reason obviously plays no part in emotional blackmail.
I got nowhere trying to make her understand that it was time to stand up to this childish behaviour; that no matter how much anyone gave him it would never be enough. To her though, it was me who didn’t understand and I had ’no right to speak about her husband in that way.’ I have never seen or heard her so angry. She was never going to speak to me again and she hasn’t until now. Being in a strange place apparently makes a difference.
Obviously, the pair have managed to borrow somewhere else and I am not going to ask where. I don’t want another fight. Our little conversation, though, brought out that Rob has already climbed the Eiger, the Monch, and Jungfrau on this trip and now here he was at Mont Blanc. They’ll be in hock forever.
The reason for my own presence in Zermatt is less obvious. Since my move to London, I’ve gained something of a reputation as a history presenter on television. Undeserved I admit. There are any number of people with a more solid academic background but the important thing on television is to speak with the appearance of authority and to look good on screen. Research assistants are two a penny.
Until now, I have been cast as the expert on pre-Christian times , my last series dealing with the Punic Wars and the eclipse of Carthage by the rising Roman power, but my new series looks at more recent history. That is, the interest in mountaineering that sprang up in the mid- eighteen hundreds, the alpine clubs that were set up, the personalities involved, the conquest of individual peaks, and so forth. It wasn’t my choice of subject and it worries me. Will viewers be able to make the mental flip and accept me in this more modern role?
So I’m here with the crew to shoot footage of the conquest of the ‘horn in July 1865. By Englishmen of course. Our vans, unfortunately, are back in Visp. There was no getting around the local ban on the internal-combustion engine. It was rail and steam or stay away. I just hope that we’ve left nothing vital behind.
It has quite a story this mountain. By 1865, every other peak in the Alps had been scaled and the Matterhorn was the final challenge. Three English groups, meeting here by chance, decided to combine their efforts. They were Edward Whymper sent to Switzerland by a London editor, Lord Francis Douglas, and Charles Hudson and his young friend Hadley. There were also two Swiss and one French guide whose names escape me at the moment.
Have you heard of Whymper? He was an interesting man. A skilled artist and wood engraver, a mountain climber, explorer, and writer. He was also the first to scale Chimborazo in Ecuador and explored Greenland and the Great Divide region of Canada. Fortunately for us, among his various books, he wrote and illustrated ‘Scrambles Among the Alps’ our primary source of information on his climb here.
The group started their climb on the 13th , a sunny day, and found the going easy on the lower slopes. They made an early camp at 11,000 feet and idled away what was left of that day apparently enjoying the sunshine.
The next day they found things more difficult with some tricky obstacles. They stopped several times to rest and work out how they should tackle them. The last 230 feet was snowfield and hard going. They reached the summit at 1:45 p.m. And, as they hoped, found no sign of anyone having been there before. They were the first. And just in time as it happened. Three days later an Italian team led by Giovanni Carrel reached the summit from the rather-more-difficult Italian side.
Their descent, though, brought tragedy. They were roped together with the most experienced guide, the Frenchman, leading. But Hadlow, the youngest of them, slipped and fell onto the man below. Whymper and the two Swiss guides who were on the tail end, heard a scream and grabbed onto rocks but the rope broke and the front four fell over a precipice. Three bodies were recovered from the glacier 4000 feet below but Lord Douglas has never been found.
These deaths were the first of around 600 to date and they continue in spite of today’s improved equipment and the ropes permanently fixed across rock walls and clefts on the various routes. Quite a few have died due to falling rock. The mountain is particularly bad for this. The weather is another factor. The day can start out fine and sunny but before one knows it heavy cloud can envelop the mountain. Fierce snowfalls and lightning are common.
I’m not a climber myself. I’ve never felt the need to prove myself. I can admire mountains from a distance preferably from a comfortable armchair in a hotel lounge with a single-malt at my elbow. The Matterhorn is particularly worthy of contemplation from this sort of vantage point. It’s a lot safer too. It appears, though, that I am going to have to do at least the easy part up to 11,000 feet where Whymper and company made their camp.
But that could be some days away the mountain being up to its usual tricks. With the weather closing in yesterday, filming has become impossible and movement up there is dangerous in the extreme. It’s black enough now and it’s going to get a lot worse according to the weather reports.
In this business, delays are the norm. The crew are used to it and, at the moment, are immersed in their long-running poker game. Why should they worry? Their pay continues regardless. Me? I’ve got money in the venture and it’s leaking away by the minute
My one consolation is that Sue’s precious Rob is somewhere up in all that murk. Scared stiff I would think. Hungry! Soaked through! Freezing his butt off! It does me good just to imagine it. Sue, of course, will be worried sick and, in spite of her stupidity, I can’t help feeling sorry for her. She is, after all, my sister. But he’s not worth her worry. She’d be better off without him. The world too if it comes to that. With any luck, he’ll meet one of those falling rocks.
Should I suggest it in my prayers tonight?