THE NARROW ESCAPE OF MR. TUCKETT.
Undoubtedly an admirable rule, if only it could be always carried out. But mistakes, unhappily, may be made even by experts, as witness this story of a thrilling adventure which befell F. F. Tuckett, twenty-two years ago.
The season had been exceptionally cold and wet. Snow lay thickly everywhere, even on the Faulhorn, the Scheinige Platte, and the Wengern Alp. But in the early days of July an improvement began to show itself, and Mr. Tuckett, who for a whole month had been able to make no big expedition, resolved to make an attempt upon the Eiger.
The members of the party were Mr. Tuckett, Mr. Whitwell, J. H. Fox, and the guides, Christian and Ulrich Lauener. They got off between 3 and 4 A.M., and presently started to ascend the Eiger glacier. The surface of it was entirely concealed with snow, but, for some reason, they neglected to put on the rope. High up in front of them were the disordered pillars and buttresses of the ice-fall, and above the ice-fall rested an enormous weight of freshly fallen snow.
Instead of ascending the centre of the glacier, the party, fortunately for themselves, were keeping to the left, towards the rocks of the Rothstock. Of a sudden, a sort of crack was heard high up above their heads, and every eye was turned upon the hanging ice-cliff from which it came. A large mass of “sérac” was seen to break away, mingled with a still larger contingent of snow from the slopes above; and the whole mass slid down like a cataract, filling the “couloir” to its brim, and dashing in clouds of frozen spray over the rocky ridges in its path, towards the travellers.
THE MAUVAIS PAS, MONT BLANC.
For a moment they did not realize that they were in its track. But then 419 the knowledge flashed upon them all, and they shouted to each other, “Run for your lives,” and struggled desperately through the deep, soft snow to reach the rocks of the Rothstock, yet with their faces turned to watch the swift oncoming of the foe.
Let Mr. Tuckett himself describe that thrilling race for life.
“I remember,” he writes, “being struck with the idea that it seemed as though, sure of its prey, it wished to play with us for a while, at one moment letting us imagine that we had gained upon it, and were getting beyond the line of its fire, and the next, with mere wantonness of vindictive power, suddenly rolling out on its right a vast volume of grinding blocks and whirling snow, as though to show that it could outflank us at any moment if it chose.
“Nearer and nearer it came, its front like a mighty wave about to break. Now it has traversed the whole width of the glacier above us, taking a somewhat diagonal direction; and now—run, oh! run, if ever you did, for here it comes straight at us, swift, deadly, and implacable! The next instant we saw no more; a wild confusion of whirling snow and fragments of ice—a frozen cloud—swept over us, entirely concealing us from one another, and still we were untouched—at least I knew that I was—and still we ran. Another half-second and the mist had passed, and there lay the body of the monster, whose head was still careering away at lightning speed far below us, motionless, rigid, and harmless.”
The danger was over, and the party examined the avalanche at their leisure. It had a length of three thousand three hundred feet, an average breadth of a thousand feet, and an average depth of five feet. This is to say, its bulk was six hundred and eleven thousand cubic yards, and its weight, on a moderate computation, about four hundred and fifty thousand tons.
Accidents of this sort, happily, are very rare, and the climber who is carried away by the avalanche has, as a rule, deliberately faced the risk out of bravado, and the desire to go home and boast that he had done hard things. But there is another sort of avalanche which is a much more frequent source of danger. It consists of a stratum of snow loosely adherent to a slope of névé or ice. The snow breaks away under the weight of the party, and carries them down with it, sometimes to a place of safety, sometimes to a crevasse.