Herr Lorria pays a warm tribute to the kindness of Seiler and his wife, and the skill of Dr de Courten, who saved his limbs when other doctors wished to amputate them. He ends his graphic account as follows: "The lesson to be learnt from our accident is not 'Always take guides,' but rather 'Never try the Penhall route on the Matterhorn, except after a long series of fine, hot days, for otherwise the western wall of the mountain is the most fearful mouse-trap in the Alps.'"
THE ICE AVALANCHE OF THE ALTELS.
Those who climbed in the Alps during the summer of 1895 will recollect how wonderfully dry and warm the weather was, denuding the mountains of snow and causing a number of rock-falls, so that many ascents became very dangerous, and, in my own case, after one or two risky encounters with falling stones, we decided to let the rock peaks alone for the rest of that campaign.
In the centre of the picture may be seen an Avalanche, which a non-climber might mistake for a Waterfall, dropping down the Rocks of the Wetterhorn.
In The Alpine Journal of August 1897, Mr Charles Slater gives an admirable description of a great ice-avalanche which overwhelmed one of the fertile pastures near the well-known Gemmi route. From this account I make some extracts, which will give an idea of the magnitude of the disaster and its unusual character, as the ice from a falling glacier rarely ever approaches cultivated land and dwellings.
The scene of the catastrophe was at Spitalmatten, a pasturage with châlets used in summer by the shepherds, in a basin at the beginning of the valley which extends to the pass. Steep slopes bound it on the east, and above them rises the glacier-capped peak of the Altels. The glacier was well seen from the Gemmi path, and all tourists who passed that way must have noticed and admired it. It is believed that a big crevasse, running right across the glacier, was noticed during the month of August, and the lower part of the glacier seemed to be completely cut off from the upper portion by it.
On the evening of 10th September, the Vice-President of the commune of Leuk (to which commune the Alp belonged) arrived at the châlets to settle the accounts of the past summer. Several of the women had already gone down, taking some of the calves with them, and the rest of the inhabitants of the little settlement were to follow next day. The weather was warm but cloudy, with a strong föhn wind.[2]
On the morning of 11th September, about 5 A.M., the few people who lived at or near the Schwarenbach Inn heard a roar like an earthquake, and felt a violent blast of wind. A servant, rushing out of the inn, saw "what appeared to be a white mist streaming down the Altel's slope. The huge mass of ice forming the lower end of the glacier had broken away, rushed down the mountain side, leapt from the Tateleu plateau into the valley, and, like an immense wave, had swept over the Alp, up the Uschinen Grat, as if up a 1500 sea-wall, and even sent its ice-foam over this into the distant Uschinen Thal."