By-and-by they reached the long sheer snowy slope near the Three Brothers. This slope is liable to slip, and requires careful walking, so the guides began roping them together. ‘The stout monsieur in front, next after me,’ said the chief guide, knotting the rope soundly round Herbert Le Breton: ‘then Kaspar; then you, monsieur,’ to Harry Oswald, ‘and finally Paolo, to bring up the rear. The thin monsieur is nervous, I think; it’s best to place him most in the middle.’
‘If you really ARE nervous, Oswald,’ Herbert said, not unkindly, ‘you’d better stop behind, I think, and let me go on with two of the guides. The really hard work, you know, has scarcely begun yet.’
‘Oh dear, no,’ Harry answered lightly (he didn’t care to confess his timidity before Herbert Le Breton of all men in the world): ‘I do feel just a little groggy about the knees, I admit; but it’s not nervousness, it’s only want of training. I haven’t got accustomed to glacier-work yet, and the best way to overcome it is by constant practice. “Solvitur ambulando,” you know, as Aldrich says about Achilles and the tortoise.’
‘Very good,’ Herbert answered drily; ‘only mind, whatever you do, for Heaven’s sake don’t go and stumble and pull ME down on the top of you. It’s the clear duty of a good citizen to respect the lives of the other men who are roped together with him on the side of a mountain.’
They set to work again, in single file, with cautious steps planted firmly on the treacherous snow, to scale the great white slope that stretched so temptingly before them. Harry felt his knees becoming at every step more and more ungovernable, while Herbert didn’t improve matters by calling out to him from time to time, ‘Now, then, look out for a hard bit here,’ or ‘Mind that loose piece of ice there,’ or ‘Be very careful how you put your foot down by the yielding edge yonder,’ and so forth. At last, they had almost reached the top of the slope, and were just above the bare gulley on the side, when Harry’s insecure footing on a stray scrap of ice gave way suddenly, and he began to slip rapidly down the sheer slope of the mountain. In a second he had knocked against Paolo, and Paolo had begun to slip too, so that both were pulling with all their weight against Kaspar and the others in front. ‘For Heaven’s sake, man,’ Herbert cried hastily, ‘dig your alpenstock deep into the snow.’ At the same instant, the chief guide shouted in Roumansch to the same effect to Kaspar. But even as they spoke, Kaspar, pushing his feet hard against the snow, began to give way too; and the whole party seemed about to slip together down over the sheer rocky precipice of the great gulley on the right. It was a moment of supreme anxiety; but Herbert Le Breton, looking back with blood almost unstirred and calmly observant eye, saw at once the full scope of the threatening danger. ‘There’s only one chance,’ he said to himself quietly. ‘Oswald is lost already! Unless the rope breaks, we are all lost together!’ At that very second, Harry Oswald, throwing his arms up wildly, had reached the edge of the terrible precipice; he went over with a piercing cry into the abyss, with the last guide beside him, and Kaspar following him close in mute terror. Then Herbert Le Breton felt the rope straining, straining, straining, upon the sharp frozen edge of the rock; for an inappreciable point of time it strained and crackled: one loud snap, and it was gone for ever. Herbert and the chief guide, almost upset by the sudden release from the heavy pull that was steadily dragging them over, threw themselves flat on their faces in the drifted snow, and checked their fall by a powerful muscular effort. The rope was broken and their lives were saved, but what had become of the three others?
They crept cautiously on hands and knees to the most practicable spot at the edge of the precipice, and the guide peered over into the great white blank below with eager eyes of horrid premonition. As he did so, he recoiled with awe, and made a rapid gesture with his hands, half prayer, half speechless terror. ‘What do you see?’ asked Herbert, not daring himself to look down upon the blank beneath him, lest he should be tempted to throw himself over in a giddy moment.
‘Jesu, Maria,’ cried the guide, crossing himself instinctively over and over again, ‘they have all fallen to the very foot of the second precipice! They are lying, all three, huddled together on the ledge there just above the great glacier. They are dead, quite dead, dead before they reached the ground even. Great God, it is too terrible!’
Herbert Le Breton looked at the white-faced guide with just the faintest suspicion of a sneering curl upon his handsome features. The excitement of the danger was over now, and he had at once recovered his usual philosophic equanimity. ‘Quite dead,’ he said, in French, ‘quite dead, are they? Then we can’t be of any further use to them. But I suppose we must go down again at once to help recover the dead bodies!’
The guide gazed at him blankly with simple open-mouthed undisguised amazement. ‘Naturally,’ he said, in a very quiet voice of utter disgust and loathing. ‘You wouldn’t leave them lying there alone on the cold snow, would you?’
‘This is really most annoying,’ thought Herbert Le Breton to himself, in his rational philosophic fashion: ‘here we are, almost at the summit, and now we shall have to turn back again from the very threshold of our goal, without having seen the view for which we’ve climbed up, and risked our lives too—all for a purely sentimental reason, because we won’t leave those three dead men alone on the snow for an hour or two longer! it’s a very short climb to the top now, and I could manage it by myself in twenty minutes. If only the chief guide had slid over with the others, I should have gone on alone, and had the view at least for my trouble. I could have pretended the accident happened on the way down again. As it is, I shall have to turn back ingloriously, re infecta. The guide will tell everybody at Pontresina that I went on, in spite of the accident; and then it would get into the English papers, and all the world would say that I was so dreadfully cruel and heartless. People are always so irrational in their ethical judgments. Oswald’s quite dead, that’s certain; nobody could fall over such a precipice as that without being killed a dozen times over before he even reached the bottom. A very painless and easy death too; I couldn’t myself wish for a better one. We can’t do them the slightest good by picking up their lifeless bodies, and yet a foolishly sentimental public opinion positively compels one to do it. Poor Oswald! Upon my soul I’m sorry for him, and for that pretty little sister of his too; but what’s the use of bothering about it? The thing’s done, and nothing that I can do or say will ever make it any better.’