2023-07-02 02:03:58
The first eight-thousander ascents are full of examples of tenacity and overcoming adversity, but none as epic as the conquest of Nanga Parbat (8,125 meters) by the Austrian Hermann Buhl on July 3, 1953, a lonely challenge and in against the orders of the head of the expedition who buried common sense to cheat death and star in an unprecedented feat. Just a month before, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had trodden the top of Everest – in fact, Buhl heard the news already on the mountain.
It was the third eight thousand, the first without oxygen, in which the human being had set foot on the summit but, above all, the feat of the tiny Tyrolean mountaineer, born in Innsbruck in 1924, was a relief for the Germans: the « murderous mountain” had become an obsession, especially for the Nazi regime, after a succession of catastrophes that had cost almost thirty lives, including that of Willy Merkl, half-brother of the iron doctor Herrligkoffer, in command of this new attempt. from 1953 despite the fact that, as Buhl himself would point out in his autobiography, from the mountaineering point of view it was “a completely blank sheet”.
Impossible not to read the account given by the Austrian mountaineer in “From Tirol to Nanga Parbat” (Unevenness) of those 41 hours in which he waged a titanic fight against logic and not flinch at the accumulation of adversities he had to overcome to reach the summit. major challenge. Because Buhl’s triumph is the triumph of the will, that of a child “so delicate, so weak”, that nothing presaged a great mountaineer. “It seemed absurd that I wanted to be a mountaineer,” he wrote, “that an inextinguishable fire of enthusiasm for the world of the summits burned in me.” And what if he burned, because at Nanga Parbat he would add the first absolute to another eight thousand, the Broad Peak, before in the Chogolisa his footprint was lost forever at the age of 32.
“Everyone down!”
Because Herman Buhl was ordered to turn around. “Everyone down!” they urged from the base camp on the last day of June before the fluctuations of the barometer, which announced an imminent change in weather. But four climbers and as many porters ignore the orders and continue up to Camp IV.
Already in the upper camp, at about 6,900 meters above sea level, Buhl is left alone with one of his companions. They are still separated from the top by 1,200 meters of unevenness and some six kilometers of hard effort, an unprecedented challenge in eight thousand at that time. “We have to try!”.
On the morning of July 3, the Tyrolean climber is already up at one o’clock. After unsuccessfully trying to drag his partner, at half past two in the morning Buhl took the first steps in a feat that would go down in the annals of mountaineering. Above him, nothingness; below, the communication with the base camp cut and the intermediate camps, empty. It is the challenge of a man facing the mountain, the pulse of tenacity in the face of the most dire prediction that any mountaineer has ever faced.
Before reaching 7,800 meters, below the height, he leaves the backpack to lighten the weight, but forgets his thick sweater inside. “I no longer have the energy to go back those steps.” Otto, his partner, who has followed his trail for a few hours, has already given up. Symptoms of exhaustion begin to take their toll on his exhausted body, but he persists in his endeavor because “I have a habit of never giving up on the goal.”
“All I want is to go back”
Overcoming a “monstrous fatigue”, gasping for oxygen, in the last few meters he only carries the ice ax, the summit flags and his camera. “As in a kind of self-hypnosis, I move forward.” She reaches the top almost dusk, at seven in the evening, after 17 hours of solo effort. “Each step was a fight, an indescribable effort of will,” she would admit later.
After half an hour at the summit and a few photos, it’s time to descend. At the top he leaves the ice ax with the Pakistan flag as proof of his ascension. In his pocket he carries a stone for his wife. “All I want is to go back to the valley, to the humans, to life.”
When night falls on him, he is forced to bivouac at eight thousand meters and 20 degrees below zero, without so much as a rope to secure himself. In the early morning light, he continues to descend with only one crampon and frozen toes. His thirst tortures him. He hears voices, he has the feeling that an invisible companion is walking next to him and protecting him. He searches desperately for his backpack and finally finds it. He swallows some glucose tablets.
the oath to the dead
The need to avoid a second night in the open spurs him on. “It’s not me anymore, just a shadow.” He spots the tents of the camp he abandoned nearly two days ago. He can’t anymore. He feels “completely emptied.” He then remembers that he had put in his backpack, “in case of absolute emergency”, some Pervitin pills, an amphetamine stimulant commonly used among German soldiers in World War II (currently prohibited in competitive sports). . He swallows three tablets “as if they were wood shavings.” Barely two hours later, he is finally reunited with his companions, already about to descend to the base camp, giving him up for dead. Buhl, who seems to have aged years, can’t even utter a word. «There are moments in which it is no shame that men cry…».
The welcome at the base camp is cold, except in the case of the Sherpas. After all, he has defied the orders of the fearsome Herrligkoffer. With fingers still frozen, he has to type up his ascension account, which he finds “utterly unreal.”
A great mountain, an eight-thousander, he later wrote, “does not allow itself to be conquered without maximum personal risks.” He did not act like a madman, he defended himself, simply an imperishable flame burned in him, “the oath to the mountain and to the dead: to try as much as our forces could.”
#agony #ecstasy #Nanga #Parbat