A cornice is a mass of snow projecting over the edge of a precipice, and resting upon empty space. Occasionally it will bear the weight of one, or even several, men; but more often it gives way when trodden on, carrying a whole party to destruction. This was the case in the famous accident on the Lyskamm—a mountain where the cornices are particularly treacherous—when Messrs. William Arnold Lewis and Noel H. Paterson, with the guides Niklaus, Johann, and Peter Joseph Knubel, met their deaths in the year 1877. “The cornice,” writes Mr. Hartley, who visited the scene of the accident immediately afterwards, “had broken away in two places, leaving some ten feet in the middle still adhering to the mountain. The length of the parts which broke away was, perhaps, forty feet on each side of the remaining portion. The distance of the fall we estimated at from twelve hundred to fifteen hundred feet. The bodies, from the nature of the injuries they had received, had evidently fallen upon their heads on the rocks, and then, in one great bound, had reached almost the spot where they were found.”
A typical instance of the ice-avalanche accident happened to, and has been recorded by, Mr. Whymper. Accompanied by A. W. Moore and the guides Croz and Almer, he was trying to discover a shorter route than those usually taken between Zinal and Zermatt. After spending the night in a châlet on the Arpitetta Alp, they started, and struck directly up the centre of the Moming glacier. The route proved impracticable, and it became necessary to cut steps across an ice-slope immediately below the great pillars and buttresses of the ice-fall, which were liable to break away and descend upon them at any moment.
“I am not ashamed to confess,” wrote Mr. Moore in his journal, “that during the whole time we were crossing the slope my heart was in my mouth, and I never felt so relieved from such a load of care as when, after, I suppose, a passage of about twenty minutes, we got on to the rocks and were in safety. I have never heard a positive oath come from Almer’s mouth, but the language in which he kept up a running commentary, more to himself than to me, as we went along, was stronger than I should have given him credit for using. His prominent feeling seemed to be one of indignation that we should be in such a position, and self-reproach at being a party to the proceeding; while the emphatic way in which, at intervals, he exclaimed, ‘Quick; be quick,’ sufficiently betokened his alarm.”
And now, let the rest of the story be told in Mr. Whymper’s graphic words. Croz, it should be remembered, was leading, and had advised the perilous route.
“It was not necessary,” Mr. Whymper says, “to admonish Croz to be quick. He was fully as alive to the risk as any of the others. He told me afterwards that the place was not only the most dangerous he had ever crossed, but that no consideration whatever would tempt him to cross it again. Manfully did he exert himself to escape from the impending destruction. His head, bent down to his work, never turned to the right or to the left. One, two, three, went his axe, and then he stepped on to the spot where he had been cutting. How painfully insecure should we have considered those steps at any other time! But now we thought of nothing but the rocks in front, and of the hideous ‘séracs’ lurching over above us, apparently in the very act of falling.”
PASSAGE OF A CREVASSE, MONT BLANC.
At last they reached the rocks in safety, and, says Mr. Whymper, “If they had been doubly as difficult as they were, we should still have been well content. We sat down and refreshed the inner man; keeping our eyes on the towering pinnacles of ice which we had passed, but which now were almost beneath us. Without a preliminary warning sound, one of the largest—as high as the Monument, at London Bridge—fell upon the slope below. The stately mass heeled over as if upon a hinge (holding together until it bent thirty degrees forward), then it crushed out its base, and, rent into a thousand fragments, plunged vertically down upon the slope that we had crossed. Every atom of our track that was in its course was obliterated; all the new snow was swept away, and a broad sheet of smooth, glassy ice showed the resistless force with which it had fallen.”