Read Conquistadors of the Useless for Free Online Page B

high-level skiing, and although these had not given me a refined rock-climbing technique, they had made me very sure-footed on mixed ground, by which I mean easy but loose rocks, and medium-angled snow slopes and glaciers. As I had thus no difficulty in following my companion up the first part of the Moine ridge, we got on very fast. However, when we got to the corner which is the hardest part of the climb, he found it too much for him, partly through lack of training and partly because he had forgotten his gym shoes. He made several courageous attempts, trembling frantically the while; and each time I watched with dilated eyes, expecting to see him fall off. After the third try he was completely out of breath and told me, apologetically, that as he could not get up the pitch we would just have to climb down again. I was most upset at the idea of this premature retreat, and felt a surge of revolt mounting inside me. The day was too fine, and I felt too much life boiling through my muscles, to let myself be beaten quite so easily. With some astonishment I heard myself asking if I might have a try at the pitch.
    The first long stride out over space seemed the more disagreeable for a sharp blade of rock some way below, which seemed to have been put there by nature to punish the foolhardy. Unwilling to be impaled like an oriental criminal, I felt a surge of energy, and in a few quick moves I stood at the top of the pitch. Emboldened by this success, I continued at the front of the party. Higher up I had a bit of trouble with a vertical wall of some fifteen or twenty feet which seemed practically hold-less, but I eventually got up thanks to the adhesive qualities of the clothes covering my chest and stomach! Soon after this, my face shining with joy, I reached the modest summit of the Moine. Not a cloud marked the vivid blue of the sky. It seemed impossible a day so clear could ever deaden into twilight. We rested a long time, gazing at the savage walls, hemmed with lace of snow, that ringed us round from the Dru to the Charmoz in a cirque without rival in the whole of the Alps. At a time when France was just beginning to recover some sort of unstable balance from one of the worst convulsions in her history, we were alone in the mountains. A mineral silence entered into us. In that enormous peace, I felt that somehow, henceforward, nothing would truly count for me beyond this world of grandeur and purity where every corner held a promise of enchanted hours.
    This ascent of the Aiguille du Moine had a decisive influence on the course of my life. Like Guido Lammer, ‘Having been a prey from childhood to every cruel division, conflict and disorder of thought and of modern life, I stretched longing arms towards inner peace and harmony, which I found in the solitudes of the Alps.’
    My easy success on this climb had given me back the confidence in my own will and physical powers which is a
sine qua non
to undertaking the really great climbs, outside of which, in my opinion, mountaineering is only a sporting form of tourism. For ‘Although from my childhood I have found pleasure in the many aspects of nature’s mysteries at high altitudes, and tried with ever-increasing fervour to catch the meaning of her silent language, the bitter-sweetness and the best of mountaineering have always been for me in the rough adventure, the conquest of danger, of the climbing itself … If all one sought were a few moments of rest and peaceful reflection, how absurd it would be to reach the summit at the cost of so much fighting and suffering, amid so many mortal dangers, and by such extraordinary routes, when a cable-car could carry us to the same spot by the shortest possible line. No, from my earliest ascents I have recognised that a passionate involvement in the act of mountaineering, and the constant menace of danger disturbing the very depths of our being, are the source of powerful moral or religious emotions which may be of the