There is a most interesting discussion by Darwin, in his voyage of the Beagle, on muscular action and balance in riding, but of course in the case of the guides’ feet there may be some structural difference, hereditary and acquired, actually permitting more freedom of movement at the ankle joint, which neither muscular action nor power of balance could give to the amateur. These points are separately considered in another chapter on the “Climbing Foot.”
On a memorable morning at the end of August, the morning of Miss Sampson’s fatal accident upon the Triftjoch, while we were packing up to travel over that same pass, my friend had a telegram to report the death of his mother at Chamounix. It was his first great grief, and seemed the one unbearable thing in life. With him I travelled to join his afflicted family. The sorrow of others thus threw a strong shadow over me, and my friend having gone to England, I had now little heart for further climbing.
Nevertheless, taking my guides to Montanvers I traversed the Charmoz, a very fine rock climb, in which five points of varying size are scrambled over. There is a good deal of standing on one another’s shoulders in acrobatic fashion in the ascents, and the use is frequent of a second rope looped over a point of rock in the descents. The highest peak is the last climbed, and its couloir is descended to the base of the rock to join the route below the couloir of the first ascent. The glacier which it is necessary to cross is, this year, in a dangerous state; falls of ice are seriously frequent. When on the highest point of the Charmoz, the most awful avalanche of stones came thundering down from near the top of the adjacent Grépon. The noise was deafening, and a strong sulphurous smell, which lasted some time afterwards, suggested, as Whymper says, that the Devil was at the bottom of the business.
MELCHIOR ANDEREGG, 1895.
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY MR. MYLES MATHEWS.
Wandering into Couttets’ Hotel at Chamounix quite without intention, I witnessed a touching farewell between Mr. M. and Melchior. To see an undemonstrative Englishman kiss his grey-bearded old guide on both cheeks, when these two have climbed together for forty years, gives one suddenly a glimpse of the pathos of life impossible to recall without emotion.
Beautiful for weather, dreadful for disasters, this season will be remembered as the year in which Emile Rey was killed on the Alps, and Mummery lost in the Himalayas. All who knew the strong and genial Benjamin Eyre have felt his loss, and he was a man with many friends. Then alas! there were others to whom we say farewell for ever.
For this season I have said good-bye to my faithful guides, one of whom is a friend of many other climbs, giving them a modest addition to their moderate fees and the old rope, which I leave behind. My folding lantern shall come away with me for future use; it shuts up into a leather case no larger than the little sketch-book in which I write the following somewhat heathenish, but very hopeful hymn: