First on the Rope

The classic of French literature

Roger Frison-Roche

• Publisher: Vertebrate Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781911342441

First on the Rope – the acclaimed English translation of the French fiction classic Premier de Cordée by Roger Frison-Roche – is a tale about the harsh lives of mountain guides and their families in the French Alps in the 1920s and 1930s.

An ascent of Mont Blanc as porter with his uncle leaves young Pierre further convinced he wants to be a mountaineer, breathing the crisp, pure air and soaking up the splendour of the wild landscape. But his family have other ideas. Chamonix is becoming ever more popular with tourists wanting their thrills on the slopes, and they all need somewhere to stay. Running a hotel, however, is not Pierre's idea of fulfilment.

Among the glittering peaks and desolate passes, wonderful sunsets and wild winds, tragedy strikes across the Vallée Blanche on the Dru: a brutal storm leaves sadness and destruction in its wake. Can the onset of spring and the hope it brings rebuild Pierre's passion for climbing?

First on the Rope epitomises the rhythm of mountain life, the clanking cowbells and the gurgling streams set against the formidable grandeur of the ice and rock. Equip yourself for an immersive and emotive experience in the high Alps.

– PART 1 –

The Birth of a Vocation

– CHAPTER I –

The two men had left Courmayeur that morning at the hour when the dew rises in blue wisps from the stone-tiled roofs. They walked quickly up the road to Entrèves and passed the little mountain village still asleep in its green hollow. The track to the Col du Géant goes up from there, tacking up the hillside between low stone walls, its erratic course dictated by the layout of the fields.

At this early hour, the cattle were coming out of the barns, horns up, muzzles steaming, and all their bells a-tinkle. A few peasants were already at work in the tiny fields that dot the stony slopes: they paused for a moment as the two strangers passed, glanced up and, doubled over their tools, took a good look at the travellers who greeted them with a civil ‘Good morning.’ ‘Morning,’ answered the peasants. Soon the checkerboard of tiled fields gave way to larches. The valley looked wider now, and the murmur of the Dora down below could be heard more clearly. At the first zigzag, where the path begins to attack the slope in earnest, the two climbers halted. The younger was first to stop – a strapping young fellow who up till then had walked jauntily enough, jumping up on the stone walls, mowing down the nettles in his path with a sweep of his ice-axe, stopping suddenly to look back at the village perched in the angle of the two mountain walls, the peaceful valley, and the distant landscape shimmering blue under a sapphire sky. A few yards behind came the older man, who had walked up at a slow rhythmical pace, bending his knee slightly at each step as if trying to feel the earth under his thick nailed soles.

‘That’s enough larking, Pierre, my boy,’ he grunted as he joined the other. ‘Let’s put our sacks down and have a breather.’

They slipped their huge guides’ rucksacks off their shoulders: they were made of solid Valais leather, marked by sun and air, scratched and worn by the rub of rock. Then, sitting on the bank by the side of the path, legs apart and elbows on knees, they rested for a moment and got back their breath. The silence was broken by the young man:

‘How long from here to the Col, Uncle?’

‘Six hours. Two from here to the Mont Fréty inn,’ the old man counted them off on his fingers, ‘from Mont Fréty to the foot of the rocks, an hour and a half; from there to the hut on the Col, you have to reckon three hours, with heavy sacks – and it’s going to be hot, so I’d best go in front and set the pace. You’d walk your legs off at the rate you’re going – and I’m sixty years old. Mercy on us, sixty years old, and they want to make me retire! As if my strength didn’t count for something! Look at these hands, young fella-me-lad: do you think they can’t get a proper grip? Mark me, these hands of Red Joseph’s have never let go, never, I tell you, not even on the Pic Sans Nom that day when half a ton of rock came down and I took the whole weight of the rope in my fists.’

‘There aren’t any hands to touch yours in all the valley, Uncle; with them, you’re as firm as a rock – I’ve seen that very well for myself these last few days. But what can you do about it, these are the regulations and we’ve got to put up with them. Anyway, you won’t need to leave the mountains, the president of the Club Alpine Français offered to make you warden of the Couvercle hut.’

‘Don’t say another word about it, my boy. It’s a dreary way of ending my days, waking people up in the small hours and getting tea ready for parties setting off on a climb.’

‘Sorry, Uncle, I hadn’t meant to hurt you.’

‘Take your pack, and get a move on.’

Joseph Ravanat, generally known as Red Joseph, was one of the heroes of the French Alps; he had been called the guide of kings and the king of guides. This was the end of his last big expedition. According to the rules of the Chamonix Corps of Guides he had to go on the retired list at sixty, and take no further engagements. Even though he could still keep the title of guide, he had no longer the right to keep his name on the books of the Guides’ Office and take his turn on the roster. This is the inexorable law of the mountains, which demand for their service men in the prime of life and health. And Ravanat, still at the top of his form, cursed and grumbled, as cross as any old salt forcibly barred from the sea, and wished that the end of his climbing career had come in hot blood with a fall, on one of those many first ascents that starred his record.

The two men started up again in silence. Ravanat walked in front, back bowed, leaning on his ice-axe, his left hand hitched into the strap of his rucksack to take some of the weight off his shoulders. Pierre Servettaz followed, adapting his stride to the older man’s, in the knowledge that at this rate they would reach the hut without undue effort and before nightfall. A newcomer to the Alps noticing the general deliberateness of their progress would have been surprised at the lightness with which the two mountaineers put their feet down on the loose stones of the path. Not a pebble moved, and their bootnails bit evenly into the ground.

The old man climbed without a word, his eyes fixed on the path ahead, careful not to break the rhythm of his stride. His face – burned by the sun, battered by storms and worn by years of hardy and strenuous life – was wrinkled and dried up: years ago he had stopped having anything to sweat off. He was an odd sight, this old guide with his brick-red complexion and twinkling lively eyes, deep-set under bushy red eyebrows that were always twitching, as if they’d been stuck on; and the wonderful pirate’s moustache that he was always absentmindedly stroking, did nothing to lessen his general air of Saracen ancestry. His long, bony frame was rough-hewn, his hands were like flails, knotty, freckled and covered with hair – red-brown like the rest – and the fingertips were all worn and cracked by the rocks. Hands, as he liked to point out, that never let go their grip.

– CHAPTER II –

So this was the end of Ravanat’s last expedition. During the last few days he had traversed Mont Blanc, from Chamonix to the Italian side, as guide to two young women from whom he had parted at Courmayeur. His nephew, Pierre Servettaz, a strong young man of twenty-two, had at his own request accompanied them as porter.

Pierre, who was learning the hotel business, had a passion for the mountains; whenever he could, he was off to climb in the Mont Blanc massif with his friends. Well set up, climbing with the confidence that comes from belonging to a family of hereditary mountaineers, he was always a welcome member on a rope. His father, Jean Servettaz, a man of forty-five, was considered the outstanding guide of the present generation; but – though he would on occasion deny it – he had up till then spared no pains to educate his son for another life.

‘It’s enough to risk one member of the family,’ he often pointed out. ‘Pierre will run a hotel – it’s a job that brings in more cash with less danger.’

In anticipation of that day he had already, during the leisure hours of the off-season, added a storey to the 200-year-old chalet that he owned at Moussoux, just above Chamonix, hard by the woods of Prin and just out of the way of the avalanches of the Roumna Blanche.

Pierre had followed the line indicated by his father. In order to know his trade inside out, he had been in turn accountant in Paris, cashier in Lugano, assistant chef in London, hall porter in Berlin and receptionist in Innsbruck, going from one course of instruction to another, conscientiously taking it all in, and already fluent in three foreign languages. His trip across Europe had matured him early and had also increased his nostalgia for his own countryside. He was an obedient son – in Savoy paternal authority is no laughing matter – and was successfully equipping himself to run the small hotel that it would be his business to enlarge and make prosper. He was always having old Payette’s experience held up to him – a guide like his father who had made his two sons the most considerable hotelkeepers in Chamonix. But in his own heart, he looked forward to his future life with no enthusiasm whatever; he envied the local lads, who from one year’s end to the other led the free and hazardous life of guides. He had a vague feeling that here was a calling with something noble about it, something indefinable, that even the mountain folk themselves could not rightly understand, but that made different men of them, initiates of a mysterious world whose secrets no outsider could share.

For the time being, his love of the mountains was mainly physical: it satisfied a craving for action and recreation. He was drawn to the peaks by ties of blood and birth; his father was a guide; his grandfather and his great-grandfather had guided many generations of travellers; and the archives of the Priory of Chamonix, from the earliest times, bore witness to Servettaz after Servettaz who had walked on the mountaintops, been smugglers, chamois hunters, crystal gatherers. He alone, the first of his line, was going – admittedly against the grain – to break away from the path destined for his breed. Hitherto, Pierre had not tried to analyse the source of the happiness that he felt when he passed beyond the grassy alps to the solitude of the high peaks. Was it because he found in his struggle with the mountains the perfect antidote to those long monotonous spells in city hotels? Was it the pleasure of coming back once a year to his own friends, the good simple folk of his own countryside, of sharing meals with them on great slabs of granite heated by the sun? Was it the unutterable happiness that comes on a mountaintop when, mind and body still at full stretch, the climber tastes the full joy of hard-earned victory?

He would not have known what to answer and he felt he could not analyse his own feelings. ‘I couldn’t live in the plains,’ he would say. ‘I’ve got to be among the hills – but I don’t exactly know why.’ Nothing short of a catastrophe could have revealed the full depth of his inclinations and shown him what his future life ought to be. This catastrophe, which threatened to destroy all the plans that a prudent father had made for Pierre, had happened the day before.

– CHAPTER III –

Two days earlier, starting from the hut on the Aiguille du Goûter an hour before daylight, Joseph Ravanat and his party had reached the top of Mont Blanc without any difficulty. It was 1 September 1925, a remarkably fine year in the Mont Blanc region. But a storm had suddenly burst over their heads as they were coming down the Italian side by the long and difficult route of the Rochers de Mont Blanc – a storm of the utmost violence, though it lasted barely an hour. Several times lightning struck the rocks near the perch where they were sheltering after having left their ice-axes at a respectful distance so as not to attract the discharge. Snow and hail had alternated with never a moment’s respite, covering the mountains with a new coat of white; then in a few moments a wind from the north had partly blown away the mist and once more revealed the sun and large patches of blue sky.

Ravanat – quite unmoved, for he had seen many a storm as bad as this – had given the word to resume the descent. As porter, Servettaz went first, followed by the girls, and the old guide came down last, safeguarding the whole party, rope taut, and himself ready to check the least slip.

This was certainly no place for slipping; the party had started down a couloir of ice overlaid with new snow that plunged at an angle of sixty degrees towards the Miage glacier some 2,000 metres below. Danger sharpened Pierre’s faculties; deliberately, he cut steps for the girls with great blows of pick and blade. Ravanat, standing erect in his steps, watched him without a word and his face showed his satisfaction. If his brother-in-law had so wished it, Pierre Servettaz could have been a first-class climber. ‘A pity,’ said the old man to himself, ‘a pity to make a plainsman of him.’ The improvement in the weather did not last long. A curtain of mist from the Dôme du Goûter crept down the south face of Mont Blanc; it swallowed up the party with its icy and impenetrable breath, and a fine snow-like rime began to fall. In the mist Ravanat could barely distinguish the outline of Servettaz who, forty-five metres lower down, showed himself more and more hesitant over the line to follow. Soon the guide realised that he would have to go down first, as he was the only one who could find the way among these little rocky outcrops that appeared here and there on the ice slope, cut off by deep channels down which hissed runnels of snow.

‘Wait a minute, Pierre,’ he said, ‘you’re bearing too far over to the left, let me go first, all these hummocks look the same.’ Servettaz obeyed, but not without some misgiving; going down last was as good as taking on the position and responsibility of the guide. As long as he was going down first, well held by the rope that linked him, through the two clients, to the solid pillar that was Ravanat, he felt himself absolutely secure. Several times the girls, who were exhausted and numb with cold, had stumbled in their steps; each time, with a masterful pull on the rope, Ravanat had checked a slip and re-established their balance.

‘Stand up, ladies,’ he commanded. ‘Stand up straight in your steps.’

The fate of the party now depended on the hands – strong enough, but inexperienced – of the porter. Deliberately, he drove his ice-axe up to the head in the snow and belayed the rope round the shaft while Ravanat, who had overtaken the party and checked up on the general line of advance, was already cutting steps with one hand, three strokes of the axe to each step, to the full length of the rope. With all his faculties heightened by this struggle with the elements, Servettaz kept his eye on the two clients. He did not worry about his uncle, for he had never put a foot wrong on snow, but every instant he had to brace himself against a possible slip by the girls, whose tiredness had slowed down their reactions. And he could not help wondering if an unexpected pull might not drag him from the steps where he stood in precarious balance – heels dug in, nails biting into the ice – and send him hurtling down towards the old man, who was hacking away without a pause. If that happened it would all be over; and Servettaz pictured the fourfold tumble, and the bodies hurtling from one side of the couloir to the other.

For the first time in his life Servettaz held in his hands the lives of human beings for whom he was responsible. Bit by bit the anxiety in his heart gave way to a new feeling of strength, self-confidence and pride. His pulses no longer throbbed so quickly, and when his turn came to climb down last, a critic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Translator’s introduction
• Contents
• Part 1: The Birth of a Vocation
• Part 2: The Making of a Guide
• About the author