“Bennen’s body,” he writes, “was found with great difficulty the day after Boissonnet was found. The cord end had been covered up with snow. The Curé d’Ardon informed me that poor Bennen was found eight feet under the snow, in a horizontal position, the head facing the valley of the Luzerne. His watch had been wrenched from the chain, probably when the cord broke; the chain, however, remained attached to his waist-coat. This reminds me of your fall on the Morteratsch glacier.”
It may be said that the principal danger of climbing rock-mountains is the danger of falling off them. For the art consists largely in traversing the faces of precipices by means of narrow and imperfect ledges, which afford more facilities for falling off than will readily be believed by any one who has not tried to stand on them. The climbers, of course, are always securely roped together in such places, and the theory is that two of them shall always be so firmly anchored that they can instantly check any slip that the third may make. But that is not always feasible. It is not feasible, for instance, at the difficult corner on the Dent Blanche, where Mr. Gabbett and the two Lochmatters came to grief.
As all three climbers were killed on that occasion, no details of the accident are known. But the elder Lochmatter was known to be an exceptionally heavy man, and the presumption is that it was he who fell, and dragged the rest of the party after him. How he came to fall may be understood from the following description of the “Mauvais Pas,” given by a traveller who traversed it a little afterwards:
“Here,” he writes, “we must get round past a perpendicular ledge by creeping out on an overhanging rock, and then turning sharp round, with head and arms on one side of the rock, while the legs are still on the other; then we must at once cling to a hardly visible fissure, and draw round the rest of the body, gently, cautiously, little by little, and hang there by the points of our fingers until our toes find their way to a second fissure lower down. I made this passage,” he adds, “like a bale of goods at the end of a rope, without being conscious of the danger, and I really do not know how I escaped in safety.”
The description gives some idea of what stiff rock-climbing is really like; and it should be remembered that in the Dolomites more awkward places even than the Lochmatters’ corner have often to be passed, and that when, as often happens, the rocks are glazed with ice, the danger of climbing them is more than doubled.
It is always assumed that the Dent Blanche is inaccessible in such a case. Yet the story is told of an inexperienced climber who managed to get to the summit in spite of the ice.
He was on his first visit to Switzerland; and as soon as he got to Zermatt he engaged the best available guide.
“What are considered the hardest mountains here?” he asked.
The guide told him: “The Dent Blanche, the Weisshorn, and the Ober Gabelhorn.”
“Very well,” said the novice; “we’ll begin with the Dent Blanche.”