The Sunday afternoon climbers, averaging half experts and half dudes, toss on backwoods clothing and 120 feet of coiled rope and ride the subway to Quincy under the disapproving glances of Bostonian eyebrows. The quarry itself is a city of rock cliffs and groundwater lakes, where engineers built America's first cog railway in 1836 and a local murderer dumped a dead salesman in 1948. Old-timers in the Har- vard crowd simply sidle up to a cliff and start, walking up the wall in a manner that is quite disconcerting to observe.
It's like a human-fly act. The mountaineer reaches two feet above his head and pulls himself up by his fingertips; he stands with one foot on an inch-wide ledge looking for another-inch-wide ledge; he jams his fist into a crack for a hold fast. From the top of the cliff another mountaineer, who has gone up the sane way, "belays" the climber with nylon rope in case he should fall. From the bottom of the cliff the rest of the party offers verbal encouragement:
"Put your left foot about three inches above your right shoulder."
"Put your foot in your mouth and spit it up to the next ledge."
"Wait a second--don't fall--you'll crush my egg sandwich Mountaineers have a peculiar sense of humor.
For the novice attempting his first climb, HMC rule-makers have devised a devilish set of directives and frustrations. The experts tell you there's no holds barred, but the man who uses his knee in a climb is roundly booed from below, and the student who grabs the belaying rope for support is hold in disdain for the rest of his days. And you can't walk to a cliff by the back slope, you've got to scale the face. And you can't scale the face the easy way, you've got to climb the barest flattest, most unyielding wall in sight.
There's a reason for it, of course, Rock-climbers are always practicing for the day they'll be climbing alpine peaks, when there won't be any belay from above and there isn't any choice of easy routes. When they reach this stage, they will travel in pairs tied together by a rope. One man will tie himself to the cliff wall by wedging a "piton" or spike into a crack, while the other man climbs. Sometimes mountain-climbers have to drill holes in the rock and screw in expansion bolts to conquer a difficult cliff.
Rock-climbing is one side of mountaineering; the other side is ice-climbing. HMC members wear "crampons" with two-inch spikes when they're ice-climbing, and carry ice axes to chop zig-zag staircases in glaores. "Glissading" is their name for skiing down a slope without any exis; "glassading" is a similar procedure involving another part of the anatomy.
With its rock-climbs at Quincy and its ice-climbs at Mt. Washington, HMC promises to prepare a novice for mountain conditions anywhere in the Alps. Just why a man should want to travel 4000 miles to climb an obscure pinnacle in Liechtenstein, of course, is a question that even a mountaineer couldn't answer.