“Such experiences as this leave no very lasting impression, and might just as easily happen were the party accompanied by the best of guides. But I hardly think that any guide would have been crack-brained enough to take part in two expeditions which taught me what it feels like to slip on rock and ice respectively. The first slip took place during the winter. With one companion I was climbing in a long and not very difficult gully on a Welsh mountain. The frost had just broken, and there was more water in the pitches than was quite pleasant. It was very cold water, and my hands, which had been frost-bitten the week before, were still swathed in bandages. Hence progress was very slow, and at last my friend took the lead to spare me. He was climbing over a big overhanging stone jammed between the walls of the gully and forming an excellent spout for the water, which was thus poured conveniently down his neck. I stood on the shelving floor of the gully in perfect safety, and watched the shower-bath, which was gradually exhausting him. He asked for his axe, and I, in a moment of madness, came near and handed it up; his legs, which were all I could then see of him, were kicking in the water about 5 feet above my head. What happened next I do not know, but I shall always maintain that, seeing an eligible blade of grass above him, he plunged the adze in and hauled with both hands. The blade resented such treatment, and came out. Anyhow he fell on my head, and we commenced a mad career down the way we had ascended, rather rolling than falling, striking our heads and backs against the rocks, and apparently destined for the stony valley upon which we had looked down between our legs for hours. People who have escaped drowning say that, in what was their struggle for life, their minds travelled back over their whole history. I know that my brain at this moment suddenly acquired an unusual strength. In a few seconds we were safe, but in those seconds there was time for centuries of regret. There was no fear; that was to come later. But I felt vividly that I was present as a spectator of my own suicide, and thought myself a feeble kind of fool. Had it been on the Dru or the Meije, I thought, it might have been worth it, but, half-drowned, to plunge a poor 40 feet over the next pitch on a hill not 3000 feet high, with a carriage road in sight, and a girl driving in the cows for milking in Nant Francon! We did not roll far, and stuck between the walls of the gully, where they narrowed. Then I arose and shook myself, unhurt. My companion made me light his pipe, which cheered me very much, and we each partook of an enormous mutton sandwich. Help was near, for another party of three was climbing in the next gully, and came to our shouts; one ran down to the farm for a hurdle, the rest began the descent. For hours we seemed to toil, for my companion, though with admirable fortitude he supported the pain of movement, had temporarily no power over his legs and the lower part of his body. I could do little, but the others worked like blacks, and just at dark we reached the farm and the ministrations of a Welsh doctor, who told my friend, quite erroneously, that there was nothing the matter with him, pointed out a swelling on my face as big as a pigeon’s egg, which, he said, would probably lead to erysipelas, and then departed into the darkness.
“A fall on ice has something in it more relentless, though, until the last catastrophe, less violent. We had all been victims to the flesh-pots of the valley, and were, perhaps, hardly fit for a long ice-slope, when we began to cut up the last few feet to gain the arête of our mountain. The incline seemed to me very steep, and, third on the rope, I was watching the leader at his labours, half pitying him for his exertions, half envying him his immunity from the ice fragments which he was sending down to me. Below me the fourth man had barely left the great flat rock on which we had breakfasted; there was no reason to think of danger; when to my horror I saw the leader cut a step, put out his foot slowly, and then very slowly and deliberately sway over and fall forwards and downwards against the ice. We were in a diagonal line, but almost immediately beneath one another, and he swung quietly round like a pendulum, his axe holding him to the slope, until he was immediately beneath the second man. Very slowly, as it seemed, the rope grew taut; the weight began to tug at his waist; and then he, too, slowly and reflectively in the most correct mountaineering attitude, as though he were embarking upon a well-considered journey, began to slide. Now was the time for me to put into practice years of patient training. I dug my toes in and stiffened my back, anchored myself to the ice, and waited for the strain. It was an unconscionable time coming, and, when it came, I still had time to think that I could bear it. Then the weight of 27 stone in a remorseless way quietly pulled me from my standpoint, as though my resistance were an impudence. Still, like the others, I held my axe against the ice and struggled like a cat on a polished floor, always seeing the big flat rock, and thinking of the bump with which we should bound from it, and begin our real career through the air; when suddenly the bump came and we all fell together in a heap on to the rock and the fourth man, who had stepped back upon it, my crampons running into his leg, and my axe, released from the pressure, going off through the air on the very journey which I had anticipated for us all. The others were for a fresh attack on the malicious mountain; but I was of milder mood, and very soon, torn and wiser, we were off on a slower but more convenient path to the valley than had seemed destined for us a few minutes before. But our cup was not yet full. Having no axe with which to check a slip, I was placed at the head of the line, and led slowly down, floundering a good deal for want of my usual support. The great couloir was seamed across with a gigantic crevasse, the angle of the slope being so sharp that the upper half overhung, and we had only crossed in the morning by standing on the lower lip, cutting hand-holes in the upper, and shoving up the leader from the shoulder of the second man: hence, in descending, our position was similar to that of a man on the mantel-shelf who should wish to climb down into the fire itself. We chose the obvious alternative of a jump to the curb, which was, I suppose, about 15 feet below us and made of steep ice with a deep and deceptive covering of snow. I jumped and slid away with this covering, to be arrested in my course by a rude jerk. I turned round indignant; but my companions were beyond my reproaches. One by one, full of snow, eloquent, and bruised, they issued slowly from the crevasse into which I had hurled them, and, heedless of the humour of the situation, gloomily urged me downwards.
“Some hours still passed before we reached our friendly Italian hut, left some days before for a raid into Swiss territory; there on the table were our provisions and shirts as we had left them, and a solemn array of bottles full of milk carried up during our absence by our shepherd friends; and there, on the pile, in stinging comment on our late proceedings, lay a slip of paper, the tribute of some Italian tourist, bearing the inscription ‘Omaggio ai bravi Inglesi ignoti.’ We felt very much ashamed.
“When the soup has been eaten and the pipes are lighted, and you sit down outside your hut for the last talk before bed, you will find your guides’ tongues suddenly acquire a new eloquence, and, if you are a novice at the craft, will be almost overwhelmed by the catalogue of misfortune which they will repeat to you. And so, too, upon us in the winter months comes the temptation to dwell on things done long ago and ill done, and, as we write of the sport for others, we give a false impression of peril and hardihood in things that were little more than matter for a moment’s laughter. I too must plead guilty to a well-meant desire to make your flesh creep.