such a manifestation

In spite of their time-saving but exhausting technique the two men could not continue their rapid assault at the pace they had hoped to maintain. Heavy volleys of stones and cascades, pouring furiously down the cliffs, delayed their progress so much that they were compelled to bivouac at roughly the same elevation as had Schlunegger and Krähenbühl.
   It says much for their good sense that they did not hurry on blindly, but waited for a more favourable time of day, preferring to include an unintended bivouac rather than risk annihilation by falling stones. By doing so they acted in the true tradition of good guides.
   Next morning, July 16th, they traversed to the "Spider". I am not sure whether they followed our route exactly or whether they traversed higher up; but they negotiated that very difficult traverse in dazzling style. Just as they reached the "Spider", traditional "Eiger-weather" overtook them; but this time the storm was a particularly severe one. Terray and Lachenal, well acquainted with every kind of bad weather which visits their native Mont Blanc and the savage spires of the Chamonix Aiguilles, reported later that they had never experienced such a manifestation of tension-laden air as on the "Spider" that day. It is of course axiomatic that a climber caught in a thunderstorm should divest himself of all iron equipment -- axes, hammers, hooks, pitons and snap-links, so as not to become a human lightning-conductor. But on the North Face one cannot afford to part with one's "ironmongery"; nor is it possible to follow the rules and sit patiently under an overhang or, better still, in a cave and, safe from the flashes of lightning, wait till the storm has passed. For where on the Eiger's Face is there anywhere to sit, where is the protecting overhang -- to say nothing of a cave?
   Terray and Lachenal had to push on, with all their iron-ware on them, even if St. Elmo's fire was crackling from the points of their pitons, their axes and their hammers, and a halo of light outlined their hair.
   One must have experienced a storm high up in the mountains on an exposed ridge or a steep face to understand what an effort is called for to keep one's nerve and go on climbing, while everything about you is humming like an electricity-works and you are at the centre of the static discharge of a thunder-cloud. Terray and Lachenal had the nerve to do it. They climbed on up the "Spider", on up the exit cracks, though they were part covered in glassy ice, part overrun with cascading water. The amazingly short time in which they climbed the final wall is sufficient evidence how well qualified these two men were to attempt this terrific Face. They reached the summit at 2.15 p.m. But they paid the Face the respect it deserves, refusing to diminish their achievement by shooting a line. They candidly admitted that they never wanted to climb the Face again. Indeed it is an admission made by every party which has succeeded in climbing it -- if they were honest about it. 

(from Heinrich Harrer, The White Spider (1958), English translation by Hugh Merrick (1959). This extract is from the description of the second successful ascent of the Eiger's north face, by the French climbers Lionel Terray and Louis Lachenal, in 1947.)

shoot a line -- describe something in an exaggerated or untruthful way.

*

The White Spider is acknowledged as a classic of mountaineering literature, but nearly every reader has sought to qualify this judgment with some characterization of the book's distinctive prose; a wordy style, heavy humour, pontification; a consciousness of authority that no effort of humility can quite eliminate --  in 1938, Heinrich Harrer had himself been one of the team to make the first ascent -- ; or the lurking confrontation we sense between the book's values and our own, for instance its celebration of specific kinds of male behaviour and manners, its free assignment of spiritual value to lifestyles that might be called self-absorbed. Sometimes we uncomfortably hear echoes of the rhetoric of the Third Reich*, sometimes we hear the rearguard masculinism typical of books from the 1950s. But these ugly yet challenging features seem intrinsic to the book's identity. There's a kind of honesty, too, in its lumbering efforts to find and secure a moral position. It's a book about a mountain with one deadly face, but also about an era in European culture.

*

* [I should perhaps clarify that I am not saying there's anything Nazi about the book or its implications. I should do that because Harrer had been, for a short time, a member of the SS; he was asked to coach them in skiing. But I don't believe he ever embraced Nazism. He wasn't even racist to any exceptional degree for that time; probably less so than the average northern European. What I'm saying is more difficult: that Nazism arose out of, and was quick to leverage, the rather romantic aspirations of many young Germans and Austrians at that time. Perhaps because Harrer had been insulated in Tibet between 1944 and 1951, or because he knew Tibet had fundamentally changed him, or because his own reputation as a national hero hadn't been sullied by subsequent events, he didn't seem to feel the need to distance himself from that tainted cultural legacy in the way that so many of his compatriots did. Consequently, The White Spider conserves some of the thought-forms and highflown language of the 1930s.]