Free A Woman in Arabia by Gertrude Bell Page A

by Mathon. Both cut their hands, he badly. She took photographs, her numb fingers fumbling with the camera. Bitter winds drove clouds of snow around them at midday, delaying the descent from the peak. On the way down, she twisted her foot painfully.
    For the climbing season of 1900, Gertrude chose the Swiss Alps and met her new guides at Chamonix. Ulrich Fuhrer and his brother Heinrich would take her on all her major climbs thereafter. She had decided to tackle Mont Blanc. At 15,771 feet, it is physically demanding and the highest summit in the Alps. Only a year after her first mountain, she succeeded in climbing Mont Blanc and two other major peaks in the range, the Grepon and the Dru. Her fame as a mountaineer began to spread, and she became overconfident. She was riding for a fall, but she was so natural and agile a climber, combining such strength and courage, that it would be some time before the reckoning.
    In 1901, she met Ulrich and Heinrich again, this time in the Bernese Oberland. Her first ambition was to climb the Schreckhorn, dominated only by the immense razor of the Finsteraarhorn. From her letter home she appears to have found the Schreckhorn easy, including even the two-thousand-foot rock tower at its crest. At the summit she announced to the Fuhrers her latest ambition: to climb the Finsteraarhorn by the unconquered northeast face.
    Ulrich, whatever his private doubts, now put her through an intensive period of difficult climbing in preparation for this daunting challenge. Systematically, she climbed all the perpendicular peaks of the Engelhörner range. During the course of two weeks she climbed seven virgin peaks, one of which was named after her and remains in all the literature to this day asGertrudspitze (Gertrude’s Peak). At her personal best she undertook the most difficult ascent of the year, the unclimbed first-class traverse of the Urbachthaler Engelhorn. In a long letter to her family, she describes the key moments of what proved to be a horrific day’s climbing in bad weather, which involved Ulrich standing on Gertrude’s shoulders and then her upstretched hand in order to reach a small handhold. The ascent could have been fatal for all three and would have deterred almost any other climber, but in 1902 Gertrude returned to hold Ulrich to his promise to take her up the Finsteraarhorn.
    She discovered that she had become famous when the train guard came to ask her if she were the same Miss Bell who had climbed the Engelhorn the previous year. However, she had rivals, and rather comically she ran into one of them, Fräulein Kuntze, in the same inn at Rosenlaui, and again when both were attempting the first ascent of the Lauteraarhorn-Schreckhorn traverse. There was, apparently, an acrimonious exchange between the two ladies, with Gertrude coming off best. Amused and on her mettle, she achieved the first ascent without much trouble, although, according to the
Alpine Journal,
the climb remains technically her most important climb.
    Now she had truly earned her attempt on the Finsteraarhorn, the highest mountain in the Oberland, approaching the summit by the new and difficult route that she and Ulrich had been working up to for a couple of years. Sharp as a blade, this remote and bad-tempered mountain rises perpendicular to a razor ridge at 14,022 feet, its steeple point visible for a hundred miles. It is notorious for bad weather and frequent avalanches, and many an experienced climber had turned away from the challenge that this thirty-five-year-old woman and her guide now set themselves. This was to be Gertrude’s most dangerous mountain exploit, and at her death it would still be regarded as one of the greatest expeditions in the history of Alpine climbing. It is clear from her vivid letter home afterward that she could have lost her life several times in the attempt, as the three climbers gave up the ascent in despair and struggled to descend the precipice at night in a raging