Three Days on a Rope

As mountains go, Switzerland's 14,701 -ft. Matterhorn is not much of a challenge any more. Robert McNamara climbed it, after all, and it is the sort of hill that Stewart Udall would probably try to run up. So many people (1,000 a year) have made the trip since Britain's Edward Whymper first succeeded in 1865 that the popular climbing routes are covered with pitons and footholds as easy to negotiate as a flight of steps. So easy, in fact, that a whimsical Englishman once won a bet that he could reach the summit without ever touching the mountain: he simply hired four guides and had them carry him to the top.

Imagine the surprise, then, of villagers in the base town of Zermatt when none other than Italy's Walter Bonatti turned up last week to try a Matterhorn ascent. Bonatti, 34, is one of the best-known mountain climbers in the world --the handsome, brooding hero of a dramatic rescue on France's Mont Blanc, the youngest member of the triumphant Himalayan expedition up K2 in 1954, the fellow who in 1955 spent six days and five nights alone clawing his way up sheer rock and ice to become the only man ever to conquer Mont Blanc's Aiguille du Dru singlehanded.

A Drop of Water. For Bonatti, the trick now is to find new ways to climb the familiar old hills. And he had a really novel idea for the Matterhorn: a "direttissima" assault, straight up the mountain's ice-coated, practically vertical north wall, a climb that had been tried (without success) only once before--in the summer. It was, shuddered a Swiss guide, "the route that a drop of water would follow."

With two friends, Gigi Panel, 50, and Alberto Tassotti, 47, Bonatti took two days to reach the shelter at Hornli Ridge, 10,500 ft. up, paused briefly to rest, and began to attack the 3,550-ft. cliff of the north wall. Going up hand over hand on nylon ropes, they climbed only 420 ft. on the first day. The next day was almost as tough: 550 ft. Both nights they slept suspended in midair on ropes anchored to pitons, with sleeping bags pulled up to their shoulders and nylon tents over their heads to protect them from the bitter wind.

Cocoons on the Cliff. On the third day, the pilot of a search plane circled over their heads but failed to spot them --three tiny human spiders, inching their way up the mountain. As soon as the plane banked away, clouds swept in. At 3 a.m. it began snowing, and 60-m.p.h. gusts lashed at the climbers, clinging like cocoons to the cliff in their sleeping bags. One gust ripped the tent off Bonatti's head, and tiny slivers of ice, sharp as thumbtacks, dug at his eyes. "I found myself at 13,000 feet in a terrible position," Bonatti said later. His face was rimmed with ice, and he was in excruciating pain. "But we all three had to remain absolutely immobile, because the slightest movement could have been fatal."

Bonatti decided to abandon the ascent. At 10:30 a.m., the three men started down--their task made all the trickier because the surface of the rock was covered with fresh ice. Finally, at 6 p.m. they reached the base of the vertical wall and collapsed, exhausted, on a narrow ledge--the first horizontal surface they had seen in five days. They had not eaten or drunk in 72 hours, and when they staggered back into Zermatt after seven days on the Matterhorn, they discovered that newspapers had already given them up for dead. Dead? Next day Bonatti went skiing for exercise, and two days later he was back on the mountain, attacking the north wall again--this time by himself. Said Bonatti: "I'm on a war footing now."

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