Free Conquistadors of the Useless by Geoffrey Sutton Lionel Terray David Roberts Page A

daily-repeated climbs, carried out at a snail’s pace, had become excessively boring. On the contrary, however, I loved every minute of the time, which seemed to go by all too quickly. Doing these easy climbs in such conditions was after all a real adventure. Constant care was necessary, to say nothing of ingenuity. Getting a party safely up them bit by bit called for the concentration of all one’s powers, and gave me the sort of pleasure a child gets from succeeding in a difficult game.
    I suppose we really amounted to nothing more significant than a gang of overgrown children delighting in the conquest of altitude by the force of our own muscles. Yet to see a companion arrive for the first time on a sunlit crest, his eyes full of happiness, seemed in itself an adequate recompense. Tomorrow he might return to the valley and be swallowed up by all the mediocrity of life, but for one day at least he had looked full at the sky.
    It was in helping these uninspired parties of beginners, under the direction of André Tournier, that I began to love the guiding profession, and to understand its peculiar problems. I learned to make the most of the lay of the land, to be ready for emergencies at any moment, to foresee events, to keep the ropes unentangled, and how to make a group of clumsy beginners advance at a relatively respectable pace.
    After these harassing five- or six-day weeks, we had earned a rest by the time Sunday came round. Far from profiting by the opportunity, no sooner had Rébuffat and I returned the last novice to safety on a Saturday evening than we would be off up to some hut thanks to André Tournier, who took all the responsibility with his customary kindness and more than ordinary generosity. The following morning, caring nothing for the fatigue that weighed down our limbs, we would do a big climb as amateurs.
    Despite our brilliant placings on the leaders’ course, although we were good climbers, we were not yet really excellent ones. Both of us had some of the qualities necessary to do the ‘grandes courses’, but in each of us these were to some extent cancelled out by equivalent weaknesses. Gaston was remarkable for his self-confidence: no doubt he thought, like Nietzsche, that ‘nothing succeeds without presumption’. Thanks to this optimism he faced his chosen mountain with extraordinary calmness and cold-bloodedness. Moreover, without being a genius, he was an extremely good rock climber. By contrast, however, he was deficient in some of the qualities which distinguish the mountaineer from the climber, such as a sense of direction and ease of movement on mixed ground and snow and ice. I was completely his opposite. I was rather nervous and lacking in confidence and, apart from occasional flashes, a very mediocre rock climber. But I had an unusual sense of direction and was completely at my ease on all types of high mountain terrain.
    Thus our qualities complemented each other, but for all that we did not make up a really first-class team. The climbs we did together, such as the Mayer-Dibona on the Requin and the Mer de Glace face of the Grépon, were quite good for those days but not really exceptional. The proof of the pudding is that during these climbs all sorts of strange incidents occurred, and even taking into account poor conditions and equipment our times were quite slow. The speed with which a party does a climb is an almost exact gauge of its ability.
    Rébuffat showed the greatest enthusiasm for these Sunday climbs, and seemed to enjoy them, but his ambition made him look on them a bit patronisingly: they were no more than something to be doing while preparing oneself for the really big stuff. For me the mountain world remained wonderful and terrible. Each of our climbs put me into a state of delicious anxiety, every enterprise was an adventure, and my mind was not at peace until the summit was finally under our feet. Our successes made me feel at least as