Books: Obsessed by an Ogre

THE CLIMB UP TO HELL (212 pp.)—Jack Olsen—Harper & Row ($4.95).

For two years, tourists poured into the little Swiss Alpine town of Kleine Scheidegg to gawk at a grisly spectacle. Hanging by a rope high up on the north wall of the Eiger (Ogre) was the body of a man, swinging free in summer, frozen to the wall in winter. It was the grim finale to a disastrous assault on the Eiger made by two Germans and two Italians in 1957. The retelling of their ordeal by Jack Olsen, a senior editor of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, is an engrossing study of the dark drives that make men climb.

To Claudio Corti, 29, the Eiger was an obsession. An Italian truck driver who had had many brushes with death on mountains, he was “Ahab-like” in his determination to scale the Eiger’s north wall, a 6,000-ft.-high slab of rock raked by avalanches and lashed by storms. The Eiger can be scaled with only moderate difficulty from the west or south. But mountaineers, with typically contrary bravado, are inevitably lured to its north wall, where more than 100 people have managed to make it to the top and 25 others have been killed in the attempt. Many mountaineers consider it the world’s toughest climb.

A Prayer for a Miracle. A zealot who scorned careful preparation, Corti could find no experienced climber to go with him up the Eiger. He had to settle for a good-natured, 44-year-old factory worker, Stefano Longhi, who had never made a strenuous climb. Without so much as glancing at a map of the route, Corti and Longhi impetuously started climbing. Part way up they met two Germans also making the climb and joined forces. Trouble began. One of the Germans developed stomach cramps, and Longhi ran out of breath.

Below, spectators began gathering, like a Greek chorus, to watch the tragedy unfold. When the four men appeared to be moving too slowly to make the top, rescuers were alerted. Improvising as best they could, the rescuers began an ordeal as harrowing as that of the climbers. They struggled up the slope with heavy equipment. Some of them fell into deep crevasses along the way, seriously injured. By this time both Germans had fallen to their deaths; Corti and Longhi were stranded on different ledges on the wall. Securing a winch to the ice on the razor-thin summit, the rescuers lowered a man on cable down the north wall. After three agonizing hours, he managed to bring back Corti. But storms kept rescuers from reaching Longhi. When the observers below last saw him alive through the clouds, he was “clearly visible in his fire-engine red tricot, his face turned upward to the skies, his arms outstretched as though asking the heavens for a miracle.” In the dark of the night he was swept from his perch and died entangled in his rope against the face of the cliff.

A Dream of Evil. As skillfully as he describes the horrors of the mountain, Olsen conveys the hell within Corti. Alone on his ledge, Corti cursed the planes that buzzed uselessly by. After his rescue, he murmured gratefully, “How beautiful the sun is.” But in the next breath, to his rescuers’ dismay, he boasted exultantly that he had conquered the Eiger. Later, he was pilloried in the press and charged with deserting Longhi to save himself. When he was finally vindicated, he swore that he would attempt the mountain once again. “I dream about it all the time, that evil wall,” he told Olsen, “I dream that I am on the summit and I have climbed the wall, and I am at peace.”