As we descended the Lötschthal to Gampel the air seemed to thicken. The excessive warmth allowed our garments to stretch once again to their wonted girth, and we became less thoughtful. The vignette of the ancient curé dissolved away and was replaced by a view (mental only, unhappily) of our aiguille at Chamouni, black and bare of snow, inviting another [pg 129]attack. Gampel does not tempt the traveller much to seek repose, and we therefore caught the first train that came crawling along the valley and shaped our course for Chamouni in a second-class carriage tenanted by a pension of young ladies out for a holiday apparently, who all chirped and twittered and wrangled for the best places till the going down of the sun, like the Temple sparrows.
CHAPTER V.
AN OLD FRIEND WITH A NEW FACE
Chamouni again—The hotel clientèle—A youthful hero—The inevitable English family—A scientific gentleman—A dream of the future—The hereafter of the Alps and of Alpine literature—A condensed mountain ascent—Wanted, a programme—A double “Brocken”—A hill-side phenomenon and a familiar character—A strong argument—Halting doubts and fears—A digression on mountaineering accidents—“From gay to grave, from lively to severe”—The storm breaks—A battle with the elements—Beating the air—The ridge carried by assault—What next, and next?—A topographical problem and a cool proposal—The descent down the Vallée Blanche—The old Montanvert hotel—The Montanvert path and its frequenters.
It was the summer of 18— and our old quarters at Couttet’s hotel knew us once more. As we drove into the village of Chamouni we turned our heads carelessly around to note the various new hotels that might have arisen since our last visit. Observing that they were four or five in number, we rightly conjectured that we should find all the hotel keepers complaining bitterly of the hard times and the want of custom. Also we wondered in how many ways it was possible to build a house without any particular system of drainage, a deficiency which was at that time becom[pg 131]ing very marked in Chamouni, but has since, I believe, been improved. Yet the place itself had not altered essentially. New buildings of imposing exterior and little else do not materially alter a place that leads a life like that of modern Chamouni. The population, which throughout the summer appears to pass its time in the streets with its hands in its pockets, was still amusing itself in the same way. The tone of the village was just the same as we had always known it, and even M. Couttet himself had not succeeded in imparting any marine flavour by building an odd little lighthouse with an iron flag on the top which the architect had ingeniously represented as streaming permanently in a direction indicating a wind favourable for fine weather. We knew that we should find the same denizens in the hotel; and they were there.
A youthful hero
There was a very young man with a very parti-coloured face from exposure on the glaciers, who had recently completed the thousand-and-first ascent of Mont Blanc and was perpetually posing gracefully against the door-post or in a lattice-work summer-house a few steps from the hotel, gazing towards the mountain and rather eagerly joining in any conversation relating to the perils of the ascent. There were three or four young ladies of various periods of life who gazed at him with admiration and enquired at intervals if he wasn’t very tired; to which the young man replied carelessly that he was not, and inwardly thought [pg 132]that the discomfort of sunburn and the consequent desquamation was on the whole cheaply bought, the while he wished the expedition had not cost so much and that so many others had not thought of making the same ascent. And then there came a lithe, active lady walker who had been up Mont Blanc and a great many other mountains too, and paid no more attention to the guides’ stereotyped compliments than a suspicious dog does to those of a nervous visitor: so the young man’s nose was put out of joint and he would have laughed scornfully at the fickleness of hero worship had not the skin of his face been in danger of cracking, and he wished his shirt collar had not been starched and thumped by the village washerwoman into the form of a circular linen saw.
A scientific gentleman