Part 2

I continued among the rocks, though with less and less confidence in the wisdom of my choice. My knapsack annoyed me excessively; the straps frayed my shoulders, and tied up my muscles. Once or twice I had to get round a protruding face of rock, and then found my bonds very grievous. At length I came to a peculiar piece of cliff, near the base of which was a sharp ridge of snow, and at a height of about five feet above it the rock bulged out, so that a stone dropped from its protuberance would fall beyond the ridge. I had to work along the snow cautiously, squatting down so as to prevent the rock from pushing me too far out. Had I a fair ledge underneath I should have felt perfectly at ease, but on the stability of the snow-wedge I dared not calculate. To retreat was dangerous, to advance useless; for right in front of me was a sheer smooth precipice, which completely extinguished the thought of further rock-work. I examined the place below me, and saw that a slip would be attended with the very worst consequences. To loose myself from the crag and attach myself to the snow was so perilous an operation that I did not attempt it; and at length I ignobly called to Lauener to lend me a hand. A gleam of satisfaction crossed his features as he eyed me on my perch. He manifestly enjoyed being called to the rescue, and exhorted me to keep quite still. He worked up towards me, and in less than half an hour had hold of one of my legs. ‘The place is not so bad after all,’ he remarked, evidently glad to take me down, in more senses than one. I descended in his steps, and rejoined Hawkins upon the snow. From that moment Lauener was a regenerate man; the despair of his visage vanished, and I firmly believe that the triumph he enjoyed, by augmenting his self-respect, was the proximate cause of our subsequent success.

The couloir was a most singular one; it was excessively steep, and along it were two great scars, resembling the deep-cut channels of a mountain stream. They were, indeed, channels cut by the snow-torrents from the heights. We scanned those heights. The view was bounded by a massive cornice, from which the avalanches are periodically let loose.[1] The cornice seemed firm; still we cast about for some piece of rock which might shelter us from the destroyer should he leap from his lair. Apart from the labour of the ascent, which is great, the frequency of avalanches will always render this pass a dangerous one. At 2 P.M. the air became intensely cold. My companion had wisely pocketed a pair of socks, which he drew over his gloves, and found very comforting. My leather gloves, being saturated with wet, were very much the reverse.

[1] Hence the name ‘Lauwinen-Thor,’ which, with the consent of Mr. Hawkins, if not at his suggestion, I have given to the pass. [The name has since been adopted in all the maps. March 1871.]

The wind was high, and as it passed the crest of the Breithorn its moisture was precipitated and afterwards carried away. The clouds thus generated shone for a time with the lustre of pearls; but as they approached the sun they became suddenly flooded with the most splendid iridescences.[2] At our right now was a vertical wall of brown rock, along the base of which we advanced. At times we were sheltered by it, but not always; for the wind was as fitful as a maniac, and eddying round the corners sometimes shook us forcibly, chilled us to the marrow, and spit frozen dust in our faces. The snow, moreover, adjacent to the rock had been melted and refrozen to a steep slope of compact ice. The men were very weary, the hewing of the steps exhausting, and the footing, particularly on some glazed rocks over which we had to pass, exceedingly insecure. Once on trying to fix my alpenstock I found that it was coated with an enamel of ice, and slipped through my wet gloves. This startled me, for the staff is my sole trust under such circumstances. The crossing of those rocks was a most awkward piece of work; a slip was imminent, and the effects of the consequent glissade not to be calculated. We cleared them, however, and now observed the grey haze creeping down from the peak of the Breithorn to the point at which we were aiming. This, however, was visibly nearer; and, for the first time since we began to climb, Lauener declared that he had good hopes--‘Jetzt habe ich gute Hoffnung.’ Another hour brought us to a place where the gradient slackened suddenly. The real work was done, and ten minutes further wading through the deep snow placed us fairly on the summit of the col.

[2] See ‘Note on Clouds,’ p. 82.

Looked at from the top the pass will seem very formidable to the best of climbers; to an ordinary eye it would appear simply terrific. We reached the base of the barrier at nine A.M.; we had surmounted it at four; seven hours consequently had been spent upon that tremendous wall. Our view was limited above; clouds were on all the mountains, and the Great Aletsch glacier was hidden by dense fog. With long swinging strides we went down the slope. Several times during our descent the snow coating was perforated, and hidden crevasses revealed. At length we reached the glacier, and plodded along it through the dreary fog. We cleared the ice just at nightfall, passed the Märjelin See, and soon found ourselves in utter darkness on the spurs of the Æggischhorn. We lost the track and wandered for a time bewildered. We sat down to rest, and then learned that Lauener was extremely ill. To quell the pangs of toothache he had chewed a cigar, which after his day’s exertion was too much for him. He soon recovered, however, and we endeavoured to regain the track. In vain. The guides shouted, and after many repetitions we heard a shout in reply. A herdsman approached, and conducted us to some neighbouring chalets, whence he undertook the office of guide. After a time he also found himself in difficulty. We saw distant lights, and Lauener once more pierced the air with his tremendous whoop. We were heard. Lights were sent towards us, and an additional half-hour placed us under the roof of Herr Wellig, the active and intelligent proprietor of the Jungfrau hotel.

After this day’s journey, which was a very hard one, the tide of health set steadily in. I have no remembrance of any further exhibition of the symptoms which had driven me to Switzerland. Each day’s subsequent exercise made both brain and muscles firmer. We remained at the Æggischhorn for several days, occupying ourselves principally with observations and measurements on the Aletsch glacier, and joining together afterwards in that day’s excursion--unparalleled in my experience--which has found in my companion a narrator worthy of its glories. And as we stood upon the savage ledges of the Matterhorn, with the utmost penalty which the laws of falling bodies could inflict at hand, I felt that there were perils at home for intellectual men greater even than those which then surrounded us--foes, moreover, which inspire no manhood by their attacks, but shatter alike the architect and his house by the same slow process of disintegration.[3] After the discipline of the Matterhorn, the fatal slope of the Col du Géant, which I visited a few days afterwards, looked less formidable than it otherwise might have done. From Courmayeur I worked round to Chamouni by Chapieu and the Col de Bonhomme. I attempted to get up Mont Blanc to visit the thermometers which I had planted on the summit a year previously; and succeeded during a brief interval of fair weather in reaching the Grands Mulets. But the gleam which tempted me thus far proved but a temporary truce to the war of elements, and, after remaining twenty hours at the Mulets, I was obliged to beat an inglorious retreat.--_Vacation Tourists, 1860._

[3] This, I believe, was in allusion to the death of Sir Charles Barry.--J. T., 1871.

II.

_DISASTER ON THE COL DU GÉANT._

On the 18th of August, while Mr. Hawkins and I were staying at Breuil, rumours reached us of a grievous disaster which had occurred on the Col du Géant. At first, however, the accounts were so contradictory as to inspire the hope that they might be grossly exaggerated or altogether false. But more definite intelligence soon arrived, and before we quitted Breuil it had been placed beyond a doubt that three Englishmen, with a guide named Tairraz, had perished on the col. On the 21st I saw the brother of Tairraz at Aosta, and learned from the saddened man all that he knew. What I then heard only strengthened my desire to visit the scene of the catastrophe, and obtain by actual contact with the facts truer information than could possibly be conveyed to me by description. On the afternoon of the 22nd I accordingly reached Courmayeur, and being informed that M. Curie, the resident French pastor, had visited the place and made an accurate sketch of it, I immediately called upon him. With the most obliging promptness he placed his sketches in my hands, gave me a written account of the occurrence, and volunteered to accompany me. I gladly accepted this offer, and early on the morning of Thursday the 21st of August we walked up to the pavilion which it had been the aim of the travellers to reach on the day of their death. Wishing to make myself acquainted with the entire line of the fatal glissade, I walked directly from the pavilion to the base of the rocky couloir along which the travellers had been precipitated, and which had been described to me as so dangerous that a chamois-hunter had declined ascending it some days before. At Courmayeur, however, I secured the services of a most intrepid man, who had once made the ascent, and who now expressed his willingness to be my guide. We began our climb at the very bottom of the couloir, while M. Curie, after making a circuit, joined us on the spot where the body of the guide Tairraz had been arrested, and where we found sad evidences of his fate. From this point onward M. Curie shared the dangers of the ascent, until we reached the place where the rocks ended and the fatal snow-slope began. Among the rocks we had frequent and melancholy occasion to assure ourselves that we were on the exact track. We found there a penknife, a small magnetic compass, and many other remnants of the fall.

At the bottom of the snow-slope M. Curie quitted me, urging me not to enter upon the slope, but to take to a stony ridge on the right. No mere inspection, however, could have given me the desired information. I asked my guide whether he feared the snow, and, his reply being negative, we entered upon it together, and ascended it along the furrow which still marked the line of fall. Under the snow, at some distance up the slope, we found a fine new ice-axe, the property of one of the guides. We held on to the track up to the very summit of the col, and as I stood there and scanned the line of my ascent a feeling of augmented sadness took possession of me. There seemed no sufficient reason for this terrible catastrophe. With ordinary care the slip might in the first instance have been avoided, and with a moderate amount of skill and vigour the motion, I am persuaded, might have been arrested soon after it had begun.

Bounding the snow-slope to the left was the ridge along which travellers to Courmayeur usually descend. It is rough, but absolutely without danger. The party were, however, tired when they reached this place, and to avoid the roughness of the ridge they took to the snow. The inclination of the slope above was moderate; it steepened considerably lower down, but its steepest portion did not much exceed forty-five degrees of inclination. At all events, a skilful mountaineer might throw himself prostrate on the slope with perfect reliance on his power to arrest his downward motion.

It is alleged that when the party entered the summit of the col on the Chamouni side the guides proposed to return, but the Englishmen persisted in going forward. One thing alone could justify the proposition thus ascribed to the guides by their friends--a fog so thick as to prevent them from striking the summit of the col at the proper point, and to compel them to pursue their own traces backwards. The only part of the col hitherto regarded as dangerous had been passed, and, unless for the reason assumed, it would have been simply absurd to recross this portion instead of proceeding to Courmayeur. It is alleged that a fog existed; but the summit had been reached, and the weather cleared afterwards. Whether, therefore, the Englishmen refused to return or not on the Montanvert side, it ought in no way to influence our judgment of what occurred on the Courmayeur side, where the weather which prompted the proposal to go back ceased to be blameable.

A statement is also current to the effect that the travellers were carried down by an avalanche. In connection with this point M. Curie writes to me thus: ‘Il paraît qu’à Chamounix on répand le bruit que c’est une _avalanche_ qui a fait périr les voyageurs. C’est là une fausseté que le premier vous saurez démentir sur les lieux.’ I subscribe without hesitation to this opinion of M. Curie. That a considerable quantity of snow was brought down by the rush was probable, but an avalanche properly so called there was not, and it simply leads to misconception to introduce the term at all.

We are now prepared to discuss the accident. The travellers, it is alleged, reached the summit of the col in a state of great exhaustion, and it is certain that such a state would deprive them of the caution and firmness of tread necessary in perilous places. But a knowledge of this ought to have prevented the guides from entering upon the snow-slope at all. We are, moreover, informed that even on the gentler portion of the slope one of the travellers slipped repeatedly. On being thus warned of danger, why did not the guides quit the snow and resort to the ridge? They must have had full confidence in their power to stop the glissade which seemed so imminent, or else they were reckless of the lives they had in charge. At length the fatal slip occurred, where the fallen man, before he could be arrested, gathered sufficient momentum to jerk the man behind him off his feet, the other men were carried away in succession, and in a moment the whole of them were rushing downwards. What efforts were made to check this fearful rush, at what point of the descent the two guides relinquished the rope, which of them gave way first, the public do not know, though this ought to be known. All that is known to the public is that the two men who led and followed the party let go the rope and escaped, while the three Englishmen and Tairraz went to destruction. Tairraz screamed, but, like Englishmen, the others met their doom without a word of exclamation.

At the bottom of the slope a rocky ridge, forming the summit of a precipice, rose slightly above the level of the snow, and over it they were tilted. I do not think a single second’s suffering could have been endured. During the wild rush downwards the bewilderment was too great to permit even of fear, and at the base of the precipice life and feeling ended suddenly together. A steep slope of rocks connected the base of this precipice with the brow of a second one, at the bottom of which the first body was found. Another slope ran from this point to the summit of another ledge, where the second body was arrested, while attached to it by a rope, and quite overhanging the ledge, was the body of the third traveller. The body of the guide Tairraz was precipitated much further, and was much more broken.

The question has been raised whether it was right under the circumstances to tie the men together. I believe it was perfectly right, if only properly done. But the actual arrangement was this: The three Englishmen were connected by a rope tied firmly round the waist of each of them; one end of the rope was held in the hand of the guide who led the party; the other end was similarly held by the hindmost guide, while Tairraz grasped the rope near its middle. Against this mode of attachment I would enter an emphatic protest. It, in all probability, caused the destruction of the unfortunate Russian traveller on the Findelen Glacier last year, and to it I believe is to be ascribed the disastrous issue of the slip on the Col du Géant. Let me show cause for this protest. At a little depth below the surface the snow upon the fatal slope was firm and consolidated, but upon it rested a superficial layer, about ten inches or a foot in depth, partly fresh, and partly disintegrated by the weather. By the proper action of the feet upon such loose snow, its granules are made to unite so as to afford a secure footing; but when a man’s body, presenting a large surface, is thrown prostrate upon a slope covered with such snow, the granules act like friction wheels, offering hardly any resistance to the downward motion.

A homely illustration will render intelligible the course of action necessary under such conditions. Suppose a boy placed upon an oilcloth which covers a polished table, and the table tilted to an angle of forty-five degrees. The oilcloth would evidently slide down, carrying the boy along with it, as the loose snow slid over the firm snow on the Col du Géant. But suppose the boy provided with a stick spiked with iron, what ought he to do to check his motion? Evidently drive his spike through the oilcloth and anchor it firmly in the wood underneath. A precisely similar action ought to have been resorted to on the Col du Géant. Each man as he fell ought to have turned promptly on his face, pierced with his armed staff the superficial layer of soft snow, and pressed with both hands the spike into the consolidated mass underneath. He would thus have applied a break, sufficient not only to bring himself to rest, but, if well done, sufficient, I believe, to stop a second person. I do not lightly express this opinion: it is founded on varied experience upon slopes at least as steep as that under consideration.

Consider now the bearing of the mode of attachment above described upon the question of rescue. When the rope is fastened round the guide’s waist, both his arms are free, to drive, in case of necessity, his spiked staff into the snow. But in the case before us, one arm of each guide was virtually powerless; on it was thrown the strain of the falling man in advance, by which it was effectually fettered. But this was not all. When the attached arm receives the jerk, the guide instinctively grasps the rope with the other hand; in doing so, he relinquishes his staff, and thus loses the sheet-anchor of salvation. Such was the case with the two guides who escaped on the day now in question. The one lost his bâton, the other his axe, and they probably had to make an expert use of their legs to save even themselves from destruction. Tairraz was in the midst of the party. Whether it was in his power to rescue himself or not, whether he was caught in the coil of the rope or laid hold of by one of his companions, we can never know. Let us believe that he clung to them loyally, and went with them to death sooner than desert the post of duty.

III.

THE MATTERHORN--FIRST ASSAULT.

BY F. VAUGHAN HAWKINS, M.A.[4]

[4] Instead of attempting to write one myself, I requested the permission of my friend Mr. Hawkins to republish his admirable account of our first assault upon the Matterhorn. I have to thank both him and Mr. Macmillan for the obliging promptness with which my request was granted.

The summer and autumn of 1860 will long be remembered in Switzerland as the most ungenial and disastrous season, perhaps, on record; certainly without a parallel since 1834. The local papers were filled with lamentations over ‘der ewige Südwind,’ which overspread the skies with perpetual cloud, and from time to time brought up tremendous storms, the fiercest of which, in the three first days of September, carried away or blocked up for a time, I believe, every pass into Italy except the Bernina. At Andermatt, on the St. Gothard, we were cut off for two days from all communications whatever by water on every side. The whole of the lower Rhone valley was under water. A few weeks later, I found the Splügen, in the gorge above Chiavenna, altogether gone, remains of the old road being just visible here and there, but no more. In the Valteline, I found the Stelvio road in most imminent danger, gangs of men being posted in the courses of the torrents to divert the boulders, which every moment threatened to overwhelm the bridges on the route. A more unlucky year for glacier expeditions, therefore, could hardly be experienced; and the following pages present in consequence only the narrative of an unfinished campaign, which it is the hope of Tyndall and myself to be able to prosecute to a successful conclusion early next August.

I had fallen in with Professor Tyndall on the Basle Railway, and a joint plan of operations had been partly sketched out between us, to combine to some extent the more especial objects of each--scientific observations on his part; on mine, the exploration of new passes and mountain topography; but the weather sadly interfered with these designs. After some glacier measurements had been accomplished at Grindelwald, a short spell of fair weather enabled us to effect a passage I had long desired to try, from Lauterbrunnen direct to the Æggischhorn by the Roththal, a small and unknown but most striking glacier valley, known to Swiss mythology as the supposed resort of condemned spirits. We scaled, by a seven hours’ perpendicular climb, the vast amphitheatre of rock which bounds the Aletsch basin on this side, and had the satisfaction of falsifying the predictions of Ulrich Lauener, who bade us farewell at Grindelwald with the discouraging assertion that he should see us back again, as it was quite impossible to get over where we were going. As we descended the long reaches of the Aletsch glacier, rain and mist again gathered over us, giving to the scene the appearance of a vast Polar sea, over the surface of which we were travelling, with no horizon visible anywhere except the distant line of level ice. Arrived at the Æggischhorn, the weather became worse than ever; a week elapsed before the measurement of the Aletsch glacier could be completed; and we reluctantly determined to dismiss Bennen, who was in waiting, considering the season too bad for high ascents, and to push on with Christian Lauener to the glaciers about Zinal. Bennen was in great distress. He and I had the previous summer reconnoitred the Matterhorn from various quarters, and he had arrived at the conclusion that we could in all probability (‘ich beinahe behaupte’) reach the top. That year, being only just convalescent from a fever, I had been unable to make the attempt, and thus an opportunity had been lost which may not speedily recur, for the mountain was then (September 1859) almost free from snow. Bennen had set his heart on our making the attempt in 1860, and great was his disappointment at our proposed departure for Zinal. At the last moment, however, a change of plans occurred. Lauener was unwilling to proceed with us to Zinal: we resolved to give Bennen his chance: the theodolite was packed up and despatched to Geneva, and we set off for Breuil, to try the Matterhorn.