AN ADVENTURE OF PROFESSOR TYNDALL.
Experience, of course, has laid down many rules for determining whether snow of this sort is safe, but the best men—guides as well as amateurs—may sometimes be misled. Professor Tyndall, for instance, was always a cautious as well as a brilliant mountaineer; yet there was a day when the professor’s snow craft failed him, and he came very near to paying for his blunder with his life.
The place was the Piz Morteratsch, in the Engadine, and the time the month of July, 1864. Professor Tyndall’s companions were Mr. Hutchinson and Lee Warner, and the guides Jenni and Walter. Jenni was at that time the dictator of Pontresina, and he seems to have set out with the deliberate intention of showing his Herren how great and brave a man he was.
The ascent was accomplished without any incident of note. On the way down the party reached a broad couloir, or gully, filled with snow, which had been melted and refrozen, so as to expose a steeply sloping wall of ice. The question arose whether it would be better to descend this wall of ice, or to keep to the steep rocks by the side of it. Professor Tyndall preferred the rocks; Jenni inclined towards the slope, and started to lead the way upon it.
THE NEEDLE OF THE GIANTS AND MONT BLANC.
There was a remonstrance from the professor:
“Jenni,” he said, “do you know where you are going? The slope is pure ice.”
“I know it,” the guide replied, “but the ice is quite bare for a few rods only. Across this exposed portion I will cut steps, and then the snow which covers the ice will give us a footing.”
So they started, roped together, Jenni in front, Mr. Tyndall next, followed by Mr. Hutchinson, Mr. Lee Warner, the one inexperienced member of the party, and, last of all, the guide Walter, ready to check on the instant any false step that Mr. Lee Warner might make.
After a few steps Jenni began to see that the slope was less safe than he had supposed. He stopped and turned round to speak a word of warning to the three men above him.
“Keep carefully in the steps, gentlemen,” he said; “a false step here might start an avalanche.”
And, even as he spoke, the false step was made. There was a sound of a fall and a rush, and Professor Tyndall saw his friends and their guide, all apparently entangled, whirled past him. He planted himself to resist the shock, but it was irresistible; he, too, was torn from his foothold, and Jenni followed him, and all five found themselves riding downwards, with uncontrollable speed, on the back of an avalanche, which a single slip had started.
“Turn on your face, and grind the point of your axe or baton through the moving snow into the ice”—that is the golden rule for cases of the kind, the only way in which the faller can do anything to arrest his speed. But it seldom avails much, and in this instance it availed nothing.
“No time,” writes Professor Tyndall, “was allowed for the break’s action; for I had held it firmly thus for a few seconds only, when I came into collision with some obstacle and was rudely tossed through the air, Jenni at the same time being shot down upon me. Both of us here lost our batons. We had been carried over a crevasse, had hit its lower edge, and, instead of dropping into it, were pitched by our great velocity beyond it. I was quite bewildered for a moment, but immediately righted myself, and could see the men 421 in front of me, half-buried in the snow, and jolted from side to side by the ruts among which we were passing.”
Presently a second crevasse was reached. Jenni knew that it was there, and did a brave thing. He deliberately threw himself into the chasm, thinking that the strain thus put upon the rope would stop the motion. But, though he was over a hundred and eighty pounds in weight, he was violently jerked out of the fissure, and almost squeezed to death by the pressure of the rope.
And so they continued to slide on. Below them was a long slope, leading directly downwards to a brow where the glacier fell precipitously; and at the base of the declivity the ice was cut by a series of profound chasms, where they must fall, and where the tail of the avalanche would cover them up forever.
The three foremost men rode upon the forehead of the avalanche, and were at times almost wholly hidden by the snow; but behind, the sliding layer was not so thick, and Jenni strove with desperate energy to arrest his progress.
“Halt! Herr Jesus! halt!” he shouted, as again and again he drove his heels into the firmer surface underneath.
THE MATTERHORN.
And now let Professor Tyndall tell the rest:
“Looking in advance, I noticed that the slope, for a short distance, became less steep, and then fell as before. Now or never we must be brought to rest. The speed visibly slackened, and I thought we were saved. But the momentum had been too great; the avalanche crossed the brow and in part regained its motion. Here Hutchinson threw his arm round his friend, all hope being extinguished, while I grasped my belt and struggled to free myself. Finding this difficult, from the tossing, I sullenly resumed the strain upon the rope. Destiny had so related the downward impetus to Jenni’s pull as to give the latter a slight advantage, and the whole question was whether the opposing force would have sufficient time to act. This was also arranged in our favor, for we came to rest so near the brow that two or three seconds of our average motion of descent must have carried us over. Had this occurred, we should have fallen into the chasms and been covered up by the tail of the avalanche. Hutchinson emerged from the snow with his forehead bleeding, but the wound was superficial; Jenni had a bit of flesh removed from his hand by collision against a stone; the pressure 422 of the rope had left black welts on my arms, and we all experienced a tingling sensation over the hands, like that produced by incipient frost-bite, which continued for several days. This was all. I found a portion of my watch-chain hanging round my neck, another portion in my pocket; the watch was gone.”
Very similar in many respects was the famous accident of the Haut de Cry, in which J. J. Bennen perished in February, 1864. So sure of foot was Bennen that it used to be said of him, as it was said of Johann Lauener, who died upon the Jungfrau, that nothing could bring him to grief but an avalanche. And the hour came when the snowfield which he was crossing with his Herren split suddenly and the ground on which they stood began to move, and Bennen solemnly called out the words, “Wir sind alle verloren,” and never spoke again.
THE DENT BLANCHE.
The avalanche was deeper than the one which swept Professor Tyndall down the glacier of the Piz Morteratsch. “Before long,” writes Mr. Gossett, one of the survivors of the accident, “I was covered up with snow and in utter darkness. I was suffocating, when, with a jerk, I suddenly came to the surface again. To prevent myself sinking again I made use of my arms much in the same way as when swimming in a standing position. At last I noticed that I was moving slower; then I saw the pieces of snow in front of me stop at some yards distance; then the snow straight before me stopped, and I heard on a large scale the same creaking sound that is produced when a heavy cart passes over hard, frozen snow in winter.”
But the snow behind pressed on and buried Mr. Gossett. So intense was the pressure that he could not move, 423 and he began to fear that it would be impossible to extricate himself. Then, while trying vainly to move his arms, he suddenly became aware that his hands, as far as the wrist, had the faculty of motion. The cheering conclusion was that they must be above the snow. So Mr. Gossett struggled on. At last he saw a faint glimmer of light. The crust above his head was getting thinner, and let a little air pass; but he could no longer reach it with his hands. The idea struck him that he might pierce it with his breath. He tried, and after several efforts he succeeded. Then he shouted for help, and one of his guides, who had escaped uninjured, came and extricated him. The snow had to be cut with the axe down to his feet before he could be pulled out. Then he found that his travelling companion, M. Boissonnet, was dead, and that no trace of Bennen could be seen. His body, however, was afterwards recovered. The story is told in a letter from Mr. Gossett to Professor Tyndall.
“Bennen’s body,” he writes, “was found with great difficulty the day after Boissonnet was found. The cord end had been covered up with snow. The Curé d’Ardon informed me that poor Bennen was found eight feet under the snow, in a horizontal position, the head facing the valley of the Luzerne. His watch had been wrenched from the chain, probably when the cord broke; the chain, however, remained attached to his waist-coat. This reminds me of your fall on the Morteratsch glacier.”
It may be said that the principal danger of climbing rock-mountains is the danger of falling off them. For the art consists largely in traversing the faces of precipices by means of narrow and imperfect ledges, which afford more facilities for falling off than will readily be believed by any one who has not tried to stand on them. The climbers, of course, are always securely roped together in such places, and the theory is that two of them shall always be so firmly anchored that they can instantly check any slip that the third may make. But that is not always feasible. It is not feasible, for instance, at the difficult corner on the Dent Blanche, where Mr. Gabbett and the two Lochmatters came to grief.
As all three climbers were killed on that occasion, no details of the accident are known. But the elder Lochmatter was known to be an exceptionally heavy man, and the presumption is that it was he who fell, and dragged the rest of the party after him. How he came to fall may be understood from the following description of the “Mauvais Pas,” given by a traveller who traversed it a little afterwards:
“Here,” he writes, “we must get round past a perpendicular ledge by creeping out on an overhanging rock, and then turning sharp round, with head and arms on one side of the rock, while the legs are still on the other; then we must at once cling to a hardly visible fissure, and draw round the rest of the body, gently, cautiously, little by little, and hang there by the points of our fingers until our toes find their way to a second fissure lower down. I made this passage,” he adds, “like a bale of goods at the end of a rope, without being conscious of the danger, and I really do not know how I escaped in safety.”
The description gives some idea of what stiff rock-climbing is really like; and it should be remembered that in the Dolomites more awkward places even than the Lochmatters’ corner have often to be passed, and that when, as often happens, the rocks are glazed with ice, the danger of climbing them is more than doubled.
It is always assumed that the Dent Blanche is inaccessible in such a case. Yet the story is told of an inexperienced climber who managed to get to the summit in spite of the ice.
He was on his first visit to Switzerland; and as soon as he got to Zermatt he engaged the best available guide.
“What are considered the hardest mountains here?” he asked.
The guide told him: “The Dent Blanche, the Weisshorn, and the Ober Gabelhorn.”
“Very well,” said the novice; “we’ll begin with the Dent Blanche.”
The guide protested. Did not his 424 Herr think it would be better to begin with something easier—with the Rothhorn, for instance, or the Strahlhorn, or the Unter Gabelhorn?
“No,” was the reply; “you’ve got to take me up the Dent Blanche. I’ve climbed in Wales, and I’ll undertake to climb any rock you show me.”
So the guide yielded, and the two started, with a porter, and for a certain distance got on very well. But at last they came to a point where all the hand-holds within reach were frozen up; the nearest practicable hand-hold could only just be found by stretching out the ice-axe. The guide explained the situation, and insisted that they must turn back. But his employer had been roused to such a pitch of excitement that he would not hear of it.
THE RHONE GLACIER.
“Look here,” he said, “you’re a bachelor; I’m a married man with a family. If I can afford to risk my life you can afford to risk yours. You’ve got to go on up this mountain. Otherwise I’ll throw myself over the precipice, and as you’re roped to me you’ll have to come, too.”
The man was absolutely mad. There was no question that, in his excitement, he would do what he threatened if he were not obeyed. So the guide sullenly struck his ice-axe into the fissure, and climbed up it hand over hand, and took his lunatic up and down the Dent Blanche at a time when its ascent ought by all the laws of ice-craft to have been impossible.