Images and ink (54)

Image: Everest in winter, by courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure.

Ink: The Magic Mountain (1924) by Thomas Mann, translated by H T Lowe-Porter.

One afternoon in February, the gentlemen arranged an excursion to Monstein, some hour and a half from the village by sleigh. … The cold was severe, the mountains misty. The road, a narrow, railingless shelf between mountain wall and abyss, rose steeply into the fir forests. They disentangled themselves from their wraps and climbed out in front of the little Monstein inn, that called itself a Kurhaus, and went on foot a few steps further to get the view south-west toward the Stulsergrat. The gigantic wall, three thousand metres high, was shrouded in vapours. Only one jagged tooth reared itself heavenward out of the mist — superterrestrial, Valhallan, far and faint and awesomely inaccessible. Hans Castorp admired it immensely, and summoned the others to follow suit. It was he who with due respect dubbed it inaccessible — and afforded Settembrini the chance of saying that this particular rock was considerably frequented. And, in general, that there were few spots where man had not set his foot. That was rather tall talk, retorted Naphta; and mentioned Mount Everest, which to date had icily refused to surrender to man’s importunity, and seemed likely to continue to do so. The humanist was put out. They returned to the Kurhaus, before which stood other unharnessed sleighs beside their own.

Victor de Beauclair’s last climb

Book review: Emil Zopfi’s new documentary novel recreates a tragic story from the Belle Époque of climbing and ballooning

But were they really a pair? Visitors who step into Zermatt’s churchyard see them at once – the twin headstones leaning tenderly towards each other, one for Irmgard Schiess (b.1903) and the other for Victor de Beauclair (b. 1874). Both died on 15 August 1929, “am Matterhorn”. Noting the age gap of almost three decades between these ill-fated rope partners, most visitors just sigh, shake their heads and move on – leaving the question unanswered.

The gravestones of Irmgard Schiess and Victor de Beauclair

But not Emil Zopfi, a prominent Swiss writer on mountains and mountaineering. Taking as his challenge the almost complete lack of accessible public information about the couple – just try Googling them – he has recreated their lives and times in a documentary novel, Victors letzte Fahrt (Victor’s last climb). Along the way, he sheds plentiful light on the origins of ski-mountaineering, high-altitude balloon flying, and alpine climbing without guides.

Victor de Beauclair in 1898

Despite the French-sounding surname, Victor de Beauclair was born in Cantagalo, Brazil, where his father, an expatriate German doctor, had a practice. The family returned to Germany in 1878, settling in Freiburg im Breisgau, not far from the Swiss border. Zopfi suggests that this early deracination left de Beauclair somehow adrift – he never gave up his Brazilian passport, never married and never stayed long at any address.

In 1892, de Beauclair started his first year at Zurich University. His medical studies did not prosper, then or later. A glance at his alpinistic record suggests why. By 1896, de Beauclair had started to build up an impressive list of both summer and winter ascents. This was the year when he made the first ever ski ascent of a Swiss three-thousander, the Oberalpstock, with Wilhelm Paulcke, Peter Steinweg and Erwin Baur.

On the Oberalpstock in 1896:
From left to right: de Beauclair, Steinweg, Baur, Paulcke

Another notable first was the first ski traverse of the Bernese Oberland’s central glaciers, undertaken over four days in January 1897 with Paulcke and three more companions. Again, Paulcke was the moving spirit, having pioneered ski-mountaineering in the mountains around Freiburg. The geologist even designed his own improved ski binding for the Oberland tour – one of the book’s revelations is that modern alpine ski-touring was effectively invented in the Black Forest.

The Bernese Oberland traverse team:
From left to right: Paulcke, de Beauclair, Mönnichs, Ehlert, Lohmüller

As a member of this Freiburg-based group, de Beauclair soon became an acknowledged expert and evangelist (“Wanderprediger”) for ski-mountaineering. In 1899, he was elected into the Academic Alpine Club of Zurich, a club set up a few years before specifically for student alpinists who preferred to climb without professional guides. 

Two years later, de Beauclair helped to found the Skiclub Zürichs, serving as its first president – later he co-founded the Schweizer Skiverband, a national federation, too. And in 1902, in a neat twist on the guideless theme, he ran the first ski course for the Bergführer of Zermatt.

Pioneering a new mountain sport came with the inevitable nemesis. In January 1899, during a ski-tour on the Susten Pass, an avalanche overwhelmed Gustav Mönnichs and Reinhold Ehlert, two of de Beauclair’s companions on the Oberland traverse. De Beauclair spent several days that winter searching for them, but the bodies appeared only when the snow melted in June.

Yet it may have been a summer accident that more decisively changed the trajectory of de Beauclair’s career. In 1907, an afternoon storm trapped three prominent AACZ members near the Matterhorn’s summit, one of them dying during the forced overnight bivouac. Zopfi suggests that the accident helped to hasten de Beauclair’s drift away from the club’s orbit. 

In any case, he’d already made his final breach with Zurich University – without qualifying as a doctor – and he’d taken up a new form of high-altitude pioneering. In fact, de Beauclair’s first flight with his new gas-filled balloon “Cognac” had taken place as early as August 1906. A companion on two of these early flights was Heinrich Spoerry, the AACZ member who would perish on the Matterhorn the following summer.

"Cognac" at the "Eigergletscher" station, 1908

In 1908, “Cognac” lifted off from the meadows beside the Eiger rack-railway’s Eigergletscher station and landed the following day at Gignese in Italy. Depending on how one defines the term, this was the first transalpine flight by any kind of aircraft. Alas, the following year, the balloon was lost at sea after another transalpine flight, when de Beauclair had to ditch it in the Gulf of Genoa. This reverse didn’t stop him from co-founding a Zurich-based club that is still flying gas balloons more than a century later.

He kept climbing too. In 1911, he made a first ascent on the west face of the Mönch, one of the Bernese Oberland’s four-thousanders, in the company of the guide Fritz Steuri, who would later win fame with Maki “Yūkō” Aritsune on the Eiger’s Mittellegi Ridge. There was also a professional reason to focus on this region, since he was now working as the secretary of the Jungfraubahn rack-railway company. Then, all too suddenly, the Belle Époque was over.

Since records for the 1914-17 period are thin, it’s hard to say whether Victor de Beauclair had a good war. As a Brazilian national, he was exempt from the fighting. But many of his former climbing companions found themselves in uniform, whether in neutral Switzerland or in the armies of the warring powers. Several failed to return from the conflict, and those who did had experienced things that would forever put a distance between them and their former climbing partner.

When the smoke cleared, the world had changed. Balloons were “cold coffee”; now it was heavier-than-air craft, piloted by younger men, who made the dramatic flights over the Alps. But de Beauclair was still an acknowledged alpinist, and it was as a rope partner and ski tour leader that he got to know Irmgard Schiess and her twin sister, Herta (known to family and friends as Spatzi and Hatzi) together with their father, Erhard, also a keen mountaineer.

And so we come to 15 August 1929, when de Beauclair reached the summit of the Matterhorn with Herta, Irmgard and the guide Andreas Kohler. Descending in two rope pairs, the party was already within sight of safe ground when de Beauclair pulled on a loose rock and fell down the east face with his rope partner, Irmgard. “Once again the Sphinx of Zermatt has demanded her toll …” began the eulogy written by a friend and quoted in full by Zopfi.

It would have been a considerable feat just to ferret out the facts of de Beauclair’s life, of which the above is the barest summary. But Zopfi has done much more – he has fashioned these facts into a convincing narrative arc.

Writing in the dramatic present, and ranging boldly back and forth through time, he assembles a series of tableaux that gradually build up a portrait of the protagonist and other dramatis personae. Everything moves inexorably and logically towards that fatal rendezvous in Zermatt.

As in a well-crafted film, the focus changes constantly. Some scenes are recreated in exquisite detail, elsewhere an entire world war passes by in a couple of pages. In part, this zoom technique reflects the variety and variability of Zopfi’s sources – books, archives, genealogies, and conversations with descendant families – for the source materials are part of his narrative too.

In this, he is ahead of the game. At the very university once attended by Victor de Beauclair, a current professor of modern history calls for “a greater acknowledgement of authorial metadata in the writing of history” – in other words, historians should be more open about how they go about selecting and using their archives.*

This is exactly how Zopfi works. The author is present in his work, starting with an account of his own fateful encounter with the “Sphinx of Zermatt” in the summer of 1964. And so are his sources: take the scenes in the book’s early pages in which he recreates the Whitsun weekend of 1929 when de Beauclair led a ski-touring group that also included the Schiess twins. “And you, my young friend, will write up this trip,” says the fictional de Beauclair, clapping a young writer named Alfred Graber on the shoulder. Of course he will. For it is Graber’s memoir that Zopfi will tap for this scene, almost a century in the future.

Victors letzte Fahrt is the work of a master craftsman. Or Zopfi might perhaps prefer the analogy of a gifted route-finder, given that he spent many years at the extreme end of the Swiss climbing scene. The narrative technique is polished, and the action, as in all the best novels, driven by psychological insight. The book should be read by anybody interested in “how it was” within alpinistic circles during that faraway era.

After all that, may we still ask if Victor de Beauclair and Irmgard Schiess were really a pair? Suffice it to say that Zopfi addresses the question with all the subtlety that the sources demand and allow. And circling back to those twin gravestones in Zermatt, he concludes the book with a thunderclap revelation. As to its nature, your reviewer isn’t saying. You’ll have to read the book for yourself ….

References

Victors letzte Fahrt (Victor’s last climb) is a biographical novel by Emil Zopfi, published in 2023 by AS Verlag, Zurich (269 pages, German language). It includes an appendix with a comprehensive chronology of Victor de Beauclair’s life, lists of persons and families involved, and a comprehensive bibliography.

*See epilogue in Martin Dusinberre, Mooring the Global Archive: A Japanese Ship and its Migrant Histories, Cambridge University Press, 2023.

About Emil Zopfi

Born in 1943 in the canton of Zurich, Switzerland, Emil Zopfi studied electrical engineering and worked as a development engineer and computer specialist at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich and in industry. His first novel was published in 1977. Since then, he has written several more novels, as well as crime stories, mountain monographs, radio plays, children's books, press articles and columns.

His subject matter includes mountains, nature and mountaineering, computers and technology, history, politics and autobiography. “Zopfi's work revolves around the self-awareness of people in extreme situations, including those arising from social and political issues” (Swiss Lexicon).

Together with his wife Christa, he has run creative writing seminars for thirty years and written books on this topic. Zopfi has received a number of awards for his works, including from the City and Canton of Zurich, the Swiss Schiller Foundation, the Swiss Young People's Book Prize, the Swiss Alpine Club, the Canton Glarus Culture Prizes and the King Albert I Mountain Award.

Like Victor de Beauclair, the subject of his recent documentary novel, Zopfi is a member of the Academic Alpine Club of Zurich, founded in 1896, and might be described as the unofficial doyen of its small but active arctic/mountain literature cadre.

A meizanologist's diary (72)

30 March: for some days, on the Sensei’s local hill, we’ve seen strollers anxiously inspecting the buds of some glossy-leaved plants at the roadsides. And today their patience is rewarded: the katakuri or fawn lilies (Erythronium japonicum) are in full bloom. It’s a noble flower, says the Sensei. Don’t you mean ‘gracious’, I ask. No, I mean noble, she replies.

Back home, I look up the katakuri in a book about the flowers that appear in the Man'yōshū. If you accept that katakuri were known as “katako” back in the eighth century, then there they are in a poem by Ōtomo no Yakamochi (Man'yōshū XIX.4143):

もののふの八十娘子らが汲み乱ふ寺井の上の堅香子の花

Which PoetryNet translates more or less as:

A crowd, a host of maidens
Drawing their water
From the temple well;
Like a cluster of fawn lilies.

As I thought, says the Sensei, who is more learned than she lets on, the invocation introduces a noble subject. By the way, where did you find that book? Isn't it the one I remember buying together in Nara, I ask. You mean, she says, the book that I bought you there…

Our memories, evanescent as flowers. And vice versa, of course.

On a whim?

Project HaMo (translation): a very short essay from the Swiss Alps

A glorious late summer day. A hundred thousand peerless peaks rise into the sky: grassy hills, rocky pinnacles, snow peaks, narrow ice ridges, tall and short,  a multitude of old friends and countless strangers.

"As innocent and quiet as only a harmless pinnacle can be..."
Photo by courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure

There they parade themselves, beckoning and inviting, each in its own way: that one offering its green pillows for an easy repose, the dark one hinting at scrambling pleasures, the snow dome with its a morning’s worth of devotions, to say nothing of that promising ice ridge … Look how they beckon!

A young mountaineer sets out cheerfully, as if answering a summons. How could he resist? Which one of the mountain throng was it? Won’t it be hard for him to make his choice? Unerringly, he cleaves to his path, carelessly leaving behind whole chains of mountains, each of which could enchant him, as he weaves through the massifs. On foot, he marches up a long valley surrounded by marquee peaks, further and further, inexorable.

Somewhere in the serried rows of mountains a gap yawns and a valley opens up, one like a thousand others, and beyond it, hardly to be remarked by mere mortals, beckons a little white peak, as innocent and quiet as only a harmless pinnacle can be.

The mountaineer quickens his step as he enters the valley. Suddenly a fever seizes him, and breaking into a run, he finally achieves the summit, overjoyed to be on his little white peak.

As for those hundred thousand other peaks, could it be that they are envious?

References

This is an excerpt from a centennial translation of Ihr Berge (1916), a mountain memoir by Hans "Hamo" Morgenthaler (1890-1928). Translation (c) Project Hyakumeizan.

A medieval mash-up

A tale of past and present hinges on an oddly assorted duo

But should an aspirant meizanologist be reading Japanese folk tales? If they happen to be those selected and translated by Royall Tyler, then the answer has to be yes. To quote the book’s blurb, Japanese Tales is a collection of 220 stories from medieval sources that opens “a window into a long-vanished though perennially fascinating culture”.

For the meizanologist, the window gapes wide at Tale 88. Entitled “The wizard of the mountains”, this tale comes from Konjaku Monogatari (Tales of Past and Present), a collection of about a thousand stories that dates back to around 1100 CE. It sketches the life of En-no-Gyōja, known to all readers of this blog as the founder of Japan’s syncretic tradition of mountain religions.

By this account, En-no-Gyōja was a late starter. At the age of 34, he turned his house into a temple, enshrining there an eight-foot tall image of Miroku that he’d made of clay. Then he went to live in a cave in the Katsuragi Mountains in Yamato Province, wearing clothes made of bark and eating only pine needles.

One day, from Ōmine, he caught sight of Shaka Peak from far off, and was struck by its unusual form. This mountain clearly had power. When he went to inspect it more closely, En-no-Gyōja found, hanging from a tree, a tall skeleton with a bell in its left hand and a single-pronged vajra in its right.

The discovery was explained when Miroku appeared to him in a dream. “For seven of your past lives you were an ascetic on this mountain,” the god explained. “The skeleton you found is your own. If you want the bell and the vajra, chant the Mantra of the Peacock King.”

En-no-Gyōja did as he was told, and soon acquired supernatural powers. The scene now shifts to Golden Peak in the Ōmine range. This sacred mountain was believed to have flown in from India, after breaking off from the mountain where the Buddha preached the Lotus Sutra. In 552, during the reign of Emperor Kimmei, it wafted thousands of leagues on a white cloud and landed in Japan.

Seeing how powerful Golden Peak was, En-no-Gyōja thought it should have a god who could help sentient beings toward salvation. To this end, after a thousand days of prayer, he enshrined Zaō Gongen there. He then coopted another god, Hitokotonushi, to build a stone bridge so that his followers could reach Golden Peak.

Understandably, Hitokotonushi jibbed at this forced labour, and denounced En-no-Gyōja to the authorities. This resulted in En-no-Gyōja’s famous exile to Ōshima in the province of Izu. Here he whiled away the time by flying to the top of Mt Fuji every night. But Hitokotonushi continued to intrigue against him at court, so that eventually En-no-Gyōja tired of living in Japan. So instead, he put his mother in a bowl and flew across to China, where he toured every sacred peak.

Accounts of En-no-Gyōja’s life often leave it at that. But the Konjaku Monogatari version adds a final twist. It seems that Monk Taichō, the pioneer of Hakusan, set out on a pilgrimage to the Katsuragi and Ōmine mountains. And there he found Hitokotonushi imprisoned within a mossy boulder. But when Taichō tried to release the refractory god, En-no-Gyōja suddenly appeared and scared him off. And nobody ever tried to free Hitokotonushi again.

To find En-no-gyōja and Taichō facing off in the same story is a surprise, at least to this blogger. Apart from worshipping different deities and climbing different mountains, they are traditionally assigned to different centuries, En-no-gyōja to the seventh and Taichō to the eighth.

Even more widely separated are the primary sources for their legends – En-no-ozunu, another name for En-no-Gyōja, appears as early as 797 CE in the Shoku Nihongi, an early imperial history. Whereas the best-known record of the Taichō legend dates back only to 1325, about six centuries after the Hakusan pioneer is supposed to have lived.

In terms of Western culture, this is a bit like finding Robin Hood suddenly shouldering his way into the court of King Arthur. For King Arthur is a very ancient legend, Robin Hood a much more recent one. Nevertheless, the mythical king and a thinly disguised Robin Hood did eventually show up in the same narrative. This was in T H White’s The Sword in the Stone, a novel published in the 1930s.

Like T H White, the author of the Konjaku-monogatari tale – or a predecessor – must have had a motive for mashing up two distinct stories. Unlike T H White’s case, though, it remains obscure who first brought Taichō into En-no-Gyōja’s story, or when or why. Was it perhaps because religious sects centred around Ōmine or Mt Fuji feared competition from the Hakusan faith? It would be interesting to find out more …

References

Royall Tyler, Japanese Tales, Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library, 2002

Ohmori Hisao (ed), Hito wa naze yama ni noboru no ka, Heibonsha, Autumn 1998

Mountain heritage

A Swiss exhibition celebrates the creative legacy of an alpinistic family

Centenaries are there to be commemorated. Some century-old stories by the Swiss alpinist and author Charles Gos have recently appeared in translation on this blog. Meanwhile, an exhibition at his home town in Switzerland is now celebrating the artistic oeuvre of the entire Gos dynasty. “Les Gos: une montagne en héritage” opened at the Médiathèque Valais at Martigny in June and runs until 16 January next year.

Pictures at an exhibition

On a rainy August afternoon, we are welcomed into the exhibition by larger-than-life portraits of a talented quartet. These show Albert Gos (1852-1942), the mountain painter and his three sons, François Gos (1880-1975), the eldest and likewise a painter, Charles Gos (1885-1949), the writer, and Emile Gos (1888-1969), the photographer who made the very portraits we are looking at.

The Gos family

All four men loomed large over the alpine culture of their time. As we turn into the exhibition, an expansive panorama by Albert meets our eyes.

Landscape by Albert Gos

He learned his craft between 1870 and 1872 at the Geneva School of Art under Barthélemy Menn (1815-1893), who introduced the principles of plein-air painting into Swiss art.

Albert Gos en plein air

After absorbing that teaching, Albert Gos ran with it. Preferring to paint in the open air, he left the school before graduating. He concentrated on painting mountains, particularly in the Bernese Oberland and the Valais Alps.

Importantly, he could make a decent living with these works. This mattered even more after 1878, when he married Jeanne Monnerat. François, the first of five children, arrived two years later (there were also two daughters). The couple settled first in Geneva before moving to Clarens, a village near Montreux.

The Matterhorm painter

During his most productive decade, the last of the 19th century, Albert was justifiably known as the “Matterhorn artist”. Indeed, one of these paintings features in Charles Gos’s story “Gladys”.

Landscape by Francois Gos

A painting by François Gos hangs close to his father’s work. Modest in scale, its style is a touch more modern than Albert's, as if the artist had imbibed at the same sources as Félix Vallotton (1865-1925). François studied for five years at the Geneva School of Arts and Crafts and at the city’s art academy before, like Vallotton, moving to Paris. Unlike Vallotton, however, Emil had to work in a factory as a decorative artist.

Poster by Francois Gos

On returning to Switzerland, he gave drawing lessons in Clarens. In 1910, he settled in Munich, and later spent three years in Holland before returning to Geneva, making a living with illustration, sculpture and writing, as well as painting. Travel posters were a forte. In 1913, he helped to start up an art school in Lausanne. Like his father, he showed a predilection for the mountain world, both as a climber and a painter.

Charles Gos, alpinist and author

Charles Gos, after studying in Lausanne and Paris, established himself as an author and journalist, focusing on military affairs and alpinism – mostly the latter in his short stories and novels: Pres des névès et des glaciers (1912), La croix du Cervin (1919), Propos d'un alpiniste (1922), Alpinisme anecdotique (1934), and Solitude montagnarde (1943).

In 1918, he married Edmée de Coulon, who died in 1930. In 1934, he took over the management of the mountain books department at the Victor Attinger publishing house in Neuchâtel. He remarried in 1947, and a son was born two years later.

Mountain photography by Emil Gos

The Gos brothers climbed at a high standard, often without guides. Charles Gos knew everybody in the world of alpinism, from the local guides to the prominent climbers who visited the Alps from abroad. He was elected a member of the Alpine Club in 1935, and once secured a half-hour audience with the “climbing pope”, Pius XI. And this without the benefit of a Catholic upbringing - the Gos family came from a sternly Protestant background.

For his part, the youngest son, Emile Gos, completed an apprenticeship as a photographer in Montreux, in the workshop of Rodolphe Schlemmer (1878-1972). He continued his training in German-speaking Switzerland, in Paris, Munich and London before moving back to Clarens and later starting his own studio in Lausanne. In 1939, he married Claire André, who gave him two children.

Making a living with studio portraits and newspaper photography, he left a more durable legacy in landscape and mountain photography – sampled in the exhibition by a compelling slide show of his medium-format images.

In 1922, he filmed his brother Charles’s short story about the Matterhorn cross (“La Croix du Cervin”). This was one of the first films to be shot in the high mountains. Alas, only fragments of the original footage have survived.

Filming La Croix du Cervin

On the way out, we pick up a copy of the well-produced brochure that accompanies the exhibition (CHF 20, including both French and German versions of the text, with photos).

An article by the art historian Maéva Besse points out that, in its day, the Gos family was by no means unique in passing the torch of mountain culture from father to son. On their own doorstep, there were the Töpffers and the van Muydens of Geneva, whose artistic productions spanned two generations. And, over in Chamonix, the Tairraz and Gay-Couttet clans presided for even longer in the world of mountain photography.

Even so, the truly golden age of the mountain artist may have ended with the first world war. From the biographical sketches given in the exhibition brochure, one surmises that François and Emil Gos had to scrabble harder than their father to eke out a living from mountain art.

Writer with a saturnine streak?

As for Charles, his fiction dwells frequently on human fallibility and the dark side of mountaineering, even while recreating the glittering social and alpinistic scenes of the belle époque. And one non-fiction work concerns itself entirely with mountain accidents. This might signify no more than a saturnine streak in the author's personality. Or was he oppressed by a sense that the civilisation he grew up in, and its genial ways of living, were sliding into the abyss, never to be retrieved?

References

Exposition: Les Gos: une montagne en héritage, Médiathèque Valais - Martigny, Av. de la Gare 15, 1920 Martigny, Suisse.

Website of the Gos family: Une famille d'artistes

The case of Séraphin Mochay, alpine guide (4)

Concluded: a tale by Charles Gos from the belle époque of alpinism

"When I came to, slumped against the rock, the sun was tinging the peaks, and my nemesis was still there, lying motionless on the snow. A shiver ran through me and my head throbbed feverishly. "At the twelfth shooting star, you will cut the rope!" The hideous thought flashed back into my mind. Should I die with the dead man, or cut the rope? Die with the dead? The sacrifice would be useless; so cut the rope! But can a guide cut the rope, the bond that ties him to his guest?"

Climbers on a ridge: photo by Marcel Ichac (1906-1994)
Source of photo: John Mitchell Fine Paintings

"Yet that is what I did. With one hand grasping the granite, I opened the largest blade of my military knife with my teeth, and slowly cut into the rope where it was wound tightly around the rock. The strands snapped apart one after the other, and then came a sudden rasping noise as the rope whipped through the air, and Herr Bartmann's body plunged away head-first, his arms splayed out, his legs flailing limply. The rest you know. I spent a second night on the ridge of the Dent Blanche, half-frozen and starving, shattered by that night of horror, and the next evening I arrived in Zermatt, completely speechless, still with the end of the cut rope tied around my waist. Then they took me to court, sentenced me to two years in prison, and stripped me of my guide's diploma, disgraced me. Am I a murderer, a coward, for having cut a rope that tied me to a dead man?"

The smuggler fell silent. Sharing the same fellow-feeling, we stretched out our hands to him. He squeezed them with emotion, but made no other move. He stared at the fire, seeming to see the tragic spectacle dancing in the flames. Two large tears beaded on his eyelashes, trickled down his weatherbeaten cheeks and lost themselves in the hairs of his moustache. After a long time, he seemed to shrug off the visions that were creasing his forehead.

“Now come on, old Séraphin, your conscience is clear, get a grip and stand up. Gentlemen, goodbye. I'm sorry if I've bothered you with my nonsense, but you know how these things get to you, and thank you for your kind hospitality – it was very good of you.” He heaved up his heavy bundle, lit his pipe again, looked up at the lowering sky, and vanished into the gloom.

The sound of his footsteps faded into in the distance. We talked for a while longer, our voices hushed, as if the story we’d heard had stayed with us, casting its shadow of anguish over the company. Then we said good night to each other and huddled into our sleeping-bags.

From time to time, the fire flared up again, rekindled by the wind slipping through the cracks. Or sparks jetted out, lighting up the cave. The embers crackled dryly from time to time. Haunted by the smuggler’s story, I could not sleep, replaying in my mind all the scenes of this eerie drama as it had unfolded, high on the Dent Blanche. The guide clinging to the wall, his eyes stark, his hands bloodied, the rope stiff as a steel cable scouring the snow, and pendant from it, the dead man lolling on his back, the corpse slowly but inexorably dragging the survivor down to his death. The heavens are remarkably calm, a-glitter with stars. The Milky Way is up there, a broad thoroughfare for souls on their way to paradise - and sometimes a shooting star streaks silently by. The guide counts eleven of them, at the twelfth, he will cut the rope - the rope that binds him to a dead man.

At the foot of the smugglers' pass, a solitary figure is laboriously climbing the slope, bent double under his heavy burden. The glows of dawn start to paint the mist-wracked sky and, who knows, the customs officers may be lurking among the rocks on the ridge, their rifles at the ready. Or could it be the avalanche slope that is primed, ready for its plunging ride into the abyss.

As if to drown these reveries, the murmuring of the streams pouring from the Valsorey glacier grew louder in the night.

References

This is an excerpt from Project Hyakumeizan's centennial translation of the third story in La Croix du Cervin (1919), a collection of alpine fiction by Charles Gos (1885-1949). Translation (c) Project Hyakumeizan. This was the story that, in the words of an alpine historian, "greatly agitated the guides of Zermatt".

The case of Séraphin Mochay, alpine guide (3)

Continued: a tale by Charles Gos from the belle époque of alpinism

It happened on the Dent Blanche. I was climbing with a German client, Herr Bartmann, and I assure you I’ve not forgotten his name. We’d already done some tours together and we got along well. This year, the Dent Blanche was in very bad condition: fresh snow powdered the rocks and we had a lot of snow: the ridges were all corniced. The climbing had been difficult and we’d only reached the summit at two o'clock in the afternoon. To tell the truth, I was a bit apprehensive about the descent because of the soft snow, but we were young, we had the bit between our teeth, and we wouldn’t have given up the climb for anything in the world.

The Dent Blanche: detail from a photo by Gabriel Loppe (1825-1913)

After a short rest at the top, we started down. High up, everything went well, but as we descended, the wet snow sloughed away in small avalanches or clogged up the rock. For safety's sake, we moved very slowly. At five o'clock in the evening we turned the Grand-Gendarme. I remember the time, because the accident happened twenty minutes later. Then we doubled up the rope to come down the middle of the slabs where the Lochmatters came to grief in eighty-two, together with their English client. This was now a sheet of snow-covered ice, into which we had to cut steps. It was hard work, but my guest carved them out like a real mountaineer. Spikes of rock poked out through the ice, marking our passage. The pitch wasn’t so difficult, but it was dangerous enough.

My guest was then twenty meters below me, on a good stance. He was waiting for me to join him and watching the ropework. Suddenly, just as I turned towards the cliff to go down, I got a violent jolt on my back, as if I’d been grabbed by a brutal hand that meant to toss me out into space. I fell a few feet, scraping down the wall, terrified – surely I was gone. But my hands instinctively went for a rocky edge, where I was able to stop myself. The rope was still pulling me viciously, stretched like a steel bar, but I couldn’t see anything below.

“Herr Bartmann! Herr Bartmann!” I yelled, “What’s happening? Get a grip and hold on!”

No answer. I yelled down again. Still nothing.

After five minutes in this position, I couldn't take it anymore. My legs were shaking and my torn-up fingers were stiffening, slowly letting go of their hold.

For the second time, I knew I’d buy it if I didn’t do something. This was nightmarish! By some extraordinary effort, I managed to get up on the slab I’d been hanging off, and the first thing I saw, to my horror, was my guest, hanging on the rope like a sack, head lolling back, arms hanging out, face towards the sky. My first thought was that he was dead. Or, if he’s just passed out, I thought, it wouldn’t be long before he came round again.

“Herr Bartmann! Herr Bartmann!” I shouted again. But what had happened? Will we ever find out? Anyway, gentlemen, as I said on the day I was sentenced, nothing had fallen on us, not a stone, not an ice-block. Herr Bartmann must have had some sort of attack and slumped over, without saying a word.

A thought struck me: I swung the rope, but the body just trembled a bit and then was still; I tried again, and it was the same. So you can see how I was placed. It was absolutely impossible for me to do what had to be done to rescue my guest – either haul him up to me, or let myself down to him. Oh, this corpse who was dragging me into the abyss! For a moment, I thought I’d go mad. I screamed, I sobbed, I groaned... An hour passed, the most terrible hour of my life. My strength was fading, and I all but let myself fall rather than draw out the agony. Then I managed to hitch the rope around a rock. I thought I was almost saved. Evening came, then night and its solemn silence amid the peace of these great white glaciers and the serried mountains!

It was a beautiful summer night, crowded with stars. I could see everything very clearly – and how my life would end, as a bundle tied to a rope lying the snow. Well, sirs, one curious detail comes back to me: I counted eleven shooting stars that night, as they arced over me through the dark sky, so bright but so quick to snuff out that they somehow touched me to the heart. And I said to myself that, when I saw a twelfth shooting star, I would cut the rope. But I never did see a twelfth, as I then fainted away.

(To be concluded)

References

This is an excerpt from Project Hyakumeizan's centennial translation of the third story in La Croix du Cervin (1919), a collection of alpine fiction by Charles Gos (1885-1949). Translation (c) Project Hyakumeizan. This was the story that, in the words of an alpine historian, "greatly agitated the guides of Zermatt".

The case of Séraphin Mochay, alpine guide (2)

Continued: a tale by Charles Gos from the belle époque of alpinism

We had been sitting round the fire for barely an hour, smoking our pipes, when all of a sudden we were surprised to hear a strange noise. It sounded as if some animal, attracted by the glow of the bivouac, had paused in its tracks, startled after sniffing a human spoor.

Engraving of the Valsorey environs
Image courtesy of the Cantonal and University Library of Lausanne (Viaticalps)

We sensed an invisible presence. Something was spying on us, watching us – we didn’t know how, but we could feel it. The same sixth sense made us turn towards the opening. We saw nothing but the night and the streaks of snowflakes wavering in the fleeting light of the campfire. A chamois, somebody said.

But no chamois could have been there, so late on a snowy night like this one!

We strained our ears in vain; the noise did not come again. Even so, I couldn’t relax. An indefinable something told me that someone was watching and spying on us, that an alien somebody was out there, disturbing our peace.

Suddenly, the noise came again, footsteps crunched on the pebbles, and a voice rang out, making us jump:

“Evening, all!”

A snow-dusted man appeared, bent down under the archway, threw a huge grey bundle to the ground and walked towards the fire.

Quickly recovering from our surprise, we greeted the stranger politely. We made a space for him; he pulled a bottle out of his pocket and took a nip of brandy.

“I took you for Italian customs officers at first," he said, "and we saw them prowling up to the camp at Roz last week, those carrion-eaters! Also, I didn’t want to be judged by my profession, but when I saw your axes and ropes, I said to myself they’re good people; you can trust them. And so here I am: Séraphin Mochay, formerly a guide.

Tall and well-built, the man was getting on for fifty. A broad kerchief of greying beard framed his honest face. The snow was slowly melting in the folds of his robe and on his shoes. As he spoke, he tamped tobacco into his pipe and lit it up with a twig from the fire.

We quickly warmed to each other’s company. Our new acquaintance, who had been smuggling for years, was about to cross the Valsorey Pass, alone, at dawn, in order to carry 45 kilos of prohibited foodstuffs over to the other side. He was undaunted by the fog and snow. On the contrary. He told his story with a natural bonhomie and a sober simplicity that I had to admire. What a man!

More than once, he said "When I was a guide", as if proudly highlighting this allusion to former times. And then I suddenly remembered: this Séraphin Mochay, smuggler, must be the same Séraphin Mochay who’d been sentenced to gaol and struck off from the roster of guides for having cut the rope during a mountain accident. I had heard this hoary story told a number of time: the agonising moral dilemma it raised seemed to be beyond the power of reason to resolve. Attempting a neutral tone of voice, I ventured to ask when he’d been a guide? But wasn’t that a long time ago? And wasn’t it you who... He interrupted me, his face creased into a frown.

“That's me, yes. They accused me of cutting the rope; and that's true; I did cut the rope; but (here the smuggler took the pipe out of his mouth), but I swear to you, gentlemen, that when I cut it, my client was already dead. But the scoundrels wouldn't believe me, or, if they did, they still wanted to blame me. And the rest of them hounded me out of the valley and banned me from being a guide again!”

His voice trembled; the colour had drained out of his face.

“Oh! if I could give you my side of this case, as I would give it to a tribunal, shout it out to the whole valley, this man would be innocent, do you hear? Innocent!”

I can still see him crouching by that bivouac fire, in the full red light of the flames, as he told his story. And when somebody speaks like that, you have to believe them. There are moments in life that bring home the facts with a force that is more certain than actual experience itself. And there, a stone's throw from the glaciers, amid the snow and the wind, the old guide could not lie. And so, quite straightforwardly, he told us his story.

(To be continued)

References

This is an excerpt from Project Hyakumeizan's centennial translation of the third story in La Croix du Cervin (1919), a collection of alpine fiction by Charles Gos (1885-1949). Translation (c) Project Hyakumeizan. This was the story that, in the words of an alpine historian, "greatly agitated the guides of Zermatt".

The case of Séraphin Mochay, alpine guide (1)

Another tale by Charles Gos from the belle époque of alpinism

For Guido Rey

There was no Valsorey Hut at that time.

This was one of my first alpine tours, with my brother and a friend. We were climbing without a guide. I was a novice, and my two seniors, both excellent mountaineers, were training me up on difficult routes. The season had started badly: June was coming to an end and in two weeks we hadn't seen three fine days. It snowed every night down to the edge of the pastures, and still the heavy grey clouds came piling in from the east, lowering over the valleys and sending down flurries of snow.

Smugglers on the Grand St Bernard Pass (old postcard)
Photo by courtesy of notrehistoire.ch

One evening, with another storm on our heels, we came up into the Valsorey valley. God! What a grim amphitheatre of peaks, and we were going to spend the night there. Shrouding the Velan and the Combin, the fog drifted dolefully on the wind. Snowpatches streaked the monotonous grey of the scree and moraines and, up there under the glacier, yesterday’s snow carpeted the boulder terraces, picking out their contours; some stray rays of sunlight had melted everything underneath. Sodden rakes of grass covered the valley bottom. We would have much preferred to bed down in some chalet, on hay perfumed with fennel and mint, rather than the uninviting bivouac that awaited us. But instead of retreating, we kept on upwards. Some black birds, standing ponderously on a rock, flapped away on silent wings, and suddenly it started to snow. That was all we needed! We quickened our pace towards the dark loom of a rocky shoulder, where surely we would find some niche to bivouac in. And there indeed we found a place, more hospitable than we’d dared hope, dry grass and shingle on the floor, and a solid granite roof three metres thick. We’d fallen on our feet.

Now to make some soup. The wood was wet, the fire wouldn't take, but finally, the flames licked out, crackling and cracking, chasing away the smoke that was making us cry.

On the pallid slopes, a spectral light filtered through a rift in the fog, vaguely illuminating the hollow of the valley, where night was already creeping in. It was no longer snowing. The dripping rocks were dark. From outside, a voice called to me:

"Let’s take a look at the smugglers' pass!”

“The smugglers' pass, where’s that?”

I went out, and my companion motioned for me to follow. We walked for a few minutes, heading for the fantastic landscape created by this unexpected play of light.

“The smugglers' pass: it's that ice-slope over there, in the clear patch. It’s actually the Col de Valsorey, but I’m calling it like it is, because this is the smugglers' favourite way over. And quite a few have snuffed it there. Just a winter ago, six of them fell into those crevasses. They’re rough and ready folk, though good people in their way in spite of what they do. They don’t get much sympathy around here, so they deserve a mention in this bleak patch of earth that’s buried so many of them.”

The snowy cliffs were gradually fading, as the mists pierced by the ray of light thickened again. Here and there, the snow piled up on outcrops of rock. Ridges cut into their arched spines. Little snow-slides had made regular smears down the flanks of the Velan. You could still make out the glaciers by the chaos of their snow-covered pinnacles and sagging crevasses. Then night came on and the darkened mists slithered towards the valley.

We made our way back to the bivouac in a sombre mood. But the red gleam of our fire, relieving the darkness, cheered us up. Under the rock, the flames crackled and the soup smelled appetising. We sat down on our sheepskins, the warm bowls clutched in our hands, and everyone took his share of cheese and his slice of brown bread. While eating, we talked about smugglers. In this vile weather, they had a good game. “Wouldn’t be surprising,” my brother said “if we didn’t get a visit from them tonight!”

Little did he know what he was saying.

(To be continued)

References

This is an excerpt from Project Hyakumeizan's centennial translation of the third story in La Croix du Cervin (1919), a collection of alpine fiction by Charles Gos (1885-1949). Translation (c) Project Hyakumeizan. This was the story that, in the words of an alpine historian, "greatly agitated the guides of Zermatt".

Images and ink (43)

Image: View of the Hörnli Ridge (Photo courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure). 

Ink: From The cross of the Matterhorn, being Project Hyakumeizan's centennial translation of La Croix du Cervin (1919) by Charles Gos.

On the Zermatt side yawns the terrifying abyss, its sheer drop streaked with snowy edges, glazed with patches of shimmering ice, and plated with blackened walls. The cliff falls away, steepens, curves downwards and drops into nothingness. The pallid gleam, far below, is the glacier onto which Whymper’s unfortunate companions tumbled, shattered in every limb. Further off, and to the right, are discerned the tawny chalets of Zmutt and, lower still, the village of Zermatt straddling the Visp, with its smudges of building activity. No other summit in the Alps, perhaps in the world, gives such a chilling sensation of emptiness as does the Matterhorn. In its splendid isolation, the peak simply stands there, seeming to touch the sky, like some great reef engulfed and battered by the void....

Face à Zermatt, dévale le monstrueux abîme: à pic formidable, tacheté de franges neigeuses, poli de plaques glacées miroitantes et barbelé de murs noircis. La pente file, se raidit, arque son échine et s'éclipse, c'est le vide... puis, le glacier d'une blancheur candide, où roulèrent, fracassés, les infortunés compagnons de Whymper. Plus bas, en ligne droite, on distingue les chalets bronzés de Z'mutt, et plus bas encore, Zermatt, à cheval sur la Viège, avec ses pâtés de constructions... Nulle cime dans les Alpes entières — dans le monde peut-être ! — ne donne autant que celle du Cervin la frissonnante sensation du vide. Dans son splendide isolement, la pyramide du mont est là, comme un écueil géant cerné par la mer, cernée, elle, par le vide, battue par le vide béant de tous côtés, et sem- ble toucher le ciel....

"Gladys" (9)

Concluded: a tale by Charles Gos from the belle époque of alpinism

No one replied, but we saw a flake of ice shining in the small of her back, embedded in the flesh, that seemed to rise and fall all but imperceptibly. Gladys was breathing!

The Matterhorn at sunrise, a painting by Albert Gos

Opening her mouth, which was frighteningly slack, we poured brandy down her throat. Her complexion was completely white. Her nostrils didn’t twitch, her eyes stayed closed and her ears frozen white. The expression of sheer terror on her face spoke eloquently of the torments she’d endured. It was the grimace of a corpse. We tried in vain to lift her leaden weight: the ice had welded Gladys to the glacier, as if they were one and the same thing.

This was ghastly. To release her from that monstrous embrace, and to avoid hurting her, we had to patiently dig her icy body out of the snow that gripped it and to cut away her tresses. Then we set her down on a blanket, putting a coil of rope under her head, and started to rub her down with alcohol. The clots of snow on her started to melt, all too slowly.

What grim and dismal work this was. And what a picture we must have made, we three men, silently kneeling on the glacier around this lifeless figure, half unrobed, under the flickering light of the lanterns hanging from our ice axes! The light reflected in glints from her golden tresses, mingling in the snow, amid a patch of darkness, a remnant of beauty abandoned to the glacier.

A hint of dawn started to flow around the horizon, projecting the outline of the ridges more clearly against the sky. And as if climbing back from death to life, in a kind of trance, Gladys opened her eyes under the fading stars.

For ten months after this hazardous rescue, Gladys made a slow recovery from pneumonia with complications, hovering a long while between life and death. She came close to losing her frost-bitten feet and hands, but in the end only the little finger of her right hand had to be amputated. On medical advice, the Earl set out with his wife for the island of Ceylon. Only there could the sun finally triumph over the fatal malady she’d contracted in the icy grip of the Tiefenmatten Glacier.

Towards the middle of the following spring, a letter from Gladys reassured me that she had made a good recovery and gave me a rather remarkable account of that terrible night on the glacier. As it documents her state of mind at that time, it might be worthwhile for me to reproduce the letter here, to accompany the above outline of the story of her first accident:

Kandy (Ceylon), Spring 19...

My dear friend, you will doubtless be surprised to receive this letter instead of the promised impressions of our trip to the Temple of the Moon Festival; but let that be as it may. Oliver says you would be interested, and that I should have written about this a long time ago. He may be right. But, you know, I still feel uneasy about this shred of the past, and I’m somehow reluctant to revisit it. Sometimes, I can’t stop this sense of dread overtaking me, and dark images come back to torment me, before subsiding into the depths of whatever subconscious lurks beneath our souls. And then, leaving the sense of dread aside, there is my right hand, my poor little finger, as a hideous reminder.

Alas! I can’t get used to this mutilation, and I have stopped playing the piano for good and all. Sometimes I used to forget myself, but suddenly one note or other wouldn’t play. Then I remembered, but those were dreadful moments and I burst into tears at the keyboard. Then the doctors said I shouldn’t practise anymore because of my nerves, and I did as I was told. I feel like I’ve reached the summit of my life’s trajectory, and now I’m rapidly slipping down the descending arc. 

But let me return to the accident. How can I talk to you about it when, around me, bamboos and palm fronds rustle in the musky airs of this Hindu land? Isn’t it some nightmare that I am about to summon up? My husband told you about our fall. So you have already heard how an avalanche took us in the Penhall Couloir, carrying us down onto the Tiefenmatten glacier, at the foot of the Z’mutt face.

Lifted by a wave of snow, I slid on my back, arms crossed, while the cataract burst around me. Then nothing. Oblivion. When I came to, I found myself alone in the rubble of the avalanche. Crushed by the silence, battered and half buried, I couldn’t grasp what had happened, so much did the horror of the situation dull my senses and, feeling my whole body float away as if under the sway of an anaesthetic, I fainted again. From then on until I regained consciousness, thanks to you, at the end of that tragic night, my mind was so shattered by the fall, exhaustion and shock that it was taken over by some sort of hallucination.

This is what I saw: I was lying limply in a meadow at the foot of a cherry tree in full bloom. The sky was a pure blue and the sun projected onto the green grass the oval shadow of the tree with its exquisite white blossoms. A silver-glinting stream meandered away between mossy banks. Suddenly, by some sleight that seemed perfectly natural to me, another blossoming tree appeared, and then three, four, five, and five and six more, until the previously empty meadow was full of trees. 

Now it was a shimmering vault of white and pink flowers, all under the tender blue of the sky. A delicious freshness wafted from the snowy branches; the flowers were filled with an enervating sweetness, while their petals, as if freighted with dreams, slowly floated away down the stream. I was bemused by this feast of light, of smells, of flowers and colours. A voluptuous numbness flowed through me. It was enchanting just to be alive.

Yet, I didn’t feel alone. Someone else was lying not far from me, someone who was like a stranger to this landscape that I alone could see. I could sense this presence without being able to define it. But who was with me in this paradise? Who was there? I wanted to know, but I could not. As if half asleep, and in spite of some hidden urge to regain consciousness, I was all but unable to respond, almost drowning in this intoxicating torpor. My willpower was slipping away, my thinking became drowsier and drowsier, washing away any shreds of energy that I could summon to make the mental efforts to find out...

Suddenly, the illusion vanished. I no longer felt this presence weighing on my delirious imagination; that enigmatic somebody was no longer there and I found myself alone in the enchanting meadow. And suddenly the light of the sun reddened. A ruddy glare now lit the white blossoms. The blue sky gave way to a leaden one, streaked with long pale plumes. The air caught fire, choking me. The meadow turned red, withering the blossoms and parching the waters of the stream under the desiccated trees. 

Astonished even more by this unaccustomed heat than by the landscape’s sudden transformation – nothing surprises one in a dream, does it? – I begin to strip off my clothes. A pink flame stretches out towards me, burning. I have to escape, run somewhere, to breathe, to cool myself ... but find myself rooted to the spot, transfixed by this searing pink flame; and to escape it I’m stripping off my clothes to the waist. I throw out my arms to push it back, but expose my whole front to the flame. A sensation of heat sears through me, unbelievably brutal. No more than half-aware in my unconsciousness, I somehow sense that this flame, although no hotter than before, has wrapped itself, coiled itself around me, crushing me...

I want to struggle, I claw, I bite, but my strength gives out at once, paralysing me. I choke as the noose tightens. I want to scream, but no sound comes out of my throat. The noose tightens, tightens, crushing me. Then I have the distinct sensation that, in the midst of my swoon, I am fainting away.

When I opened my eyes again, you were bending over me by the light of lanterns and in the dark of night. I have often tried to explain this nightmare to myself, which is more of a hallucination than a dream. A friend of ours from here, an officer that I’ve talked about it, told me that in the course of a geographical expedition to the mountains of Kashmir, he experienced something quite similar. Exhausted, at the end of his tether, he fell asleep on his feet while staggering through the scree of a moraine. A phantasmagorical landscape appeared in front of him, obliterating the real world so completely that he forgot who his companions were and even his own name. He called this a “paranormal mirage”. In explaining my own “paranormal mirage”, I feel it’s simpler to call it a “landscape of lies”.

The white blossoms can only recall the snow that passed over my retina during the fall. As for the rest of the scenery, that must have been dreamed up by my hallucinating mind. You can imagine what sort of physical and mental state I was in after being avalanched all the way down from the Z’mutt ridge. The presence that I couldn’t recognise, that must have been Oliver lying next to me; and I started to feel alone when he went off by himself. The crimson sun reddening the white blossoms was surely a kind of transformation of the setting sun’s glare on the snowy flanks of the Dent d’Hérens – which I somehow picked up on. Just then, in a fit of madness brought on by the fever, I no doubt started to strip off my clothing. And, immediately, the snow touching my skin brought about the burning sensation corresponding to the pink flame. You can imagine how this terrifying drama should have ended, the struggle of a crazed, half-naked woman, struggling in the grip of the snow at the bottom of a remote glacier, and slowly freezing to death.

And then this postscript, by way of a preface to her impending doom: “We plan to return to England, via Genoa and the Alps next July. (Alas, this time without a climb!) But Courmayeur might tempt us. Could we meet up there?”

Alas, no, my dear and precious friend, never were we able to meet again, except at your little grave nestling in the shadow of the glaciers. Wounded on the Matterhorn and fallen on Mont Blanc. Poor Gladys. My imagination, darkened at first, brightens again as your luminous memory blossoms in me.

And I try to imagine that you died amid the struggle and exaltation of achieving some high peak, just as you liked them, real or allegorical. I remember you, Gladys, on that radiant morning, on the snowy heights of the Teufelsgrat, silent and ecstatic, when those words came to your lips – and now I repeat them on the other side of your tomb: “And you, ye Mountains, why are ye beautiful?”

References

This is an excerpt from Project Hyakumeizan's centennial translation of the second story in La Croix du Cervin (1919), a collection of alpine fiction by Charles Gos (1885-1949). Translation (c) Project Hyakumeizan.

"Gladys" (8)

Continued: a tale by Charles Gos from the belle époque of alpinism

That evening, my brothers and I were the only guests at the small hotel on the Staffel Alp. The season was coming to an end. Although the fine weather had lasted longer than usual, the tourists were thinning out. The high pastures were deserted. Near the hotel, three cows without bells were grazing among the dried-up rhododendrons and the blueberry plants with their reddening leaves. The early twilights smelled of autumn. The evenings were cool and the nights cold. Every morning, frost would whiten the tawny grass. But, during the day, what a rich array of colours there was in that splendid October radiance, where the shadows flow like light itself. Now completely bare of snow, the glaciers sparkled, as if scoured and polished.

The Matterhorn by moonlight: a painting by Albert Gos

For a few days, we had been strolling, aimlessly and listlessly, through the pastures and the terraced moraines below the Matterhorn. Seen from the Staffel Alp, from so close and so low down, the Matterhorn looked twisted, heaving itself laboriously upwards like some colossal ruin. The season’s melancholy only added to its monstrous splendour. But we’d decided to leave, and the next day we would go over the Breuiljoch and down our beloved Valtournanche during the peaceful evening hours.

It might have been ten o'clock that night. We were about to retire to our rooms when a violent hammering on the door of the inn halted us in our tracks. Footsteps creaked along the hallway. Words were exchanged through the bolted door. Perhaps some benighted party arriving from Schönbühl? A key grated in the lock and the door opened. We heard an exclamation of horror. At the same time, we heard another voice, gasping, disjointed, a voice we recognised. We looked at each other in wild surmise:

“Fairness!”

“What?”

“Alone!”

Fearing the worst, we hurled ourselves down the stairs, four at a time. In the dining room, a guttering lamp revealed a maid, wringing her hands, and in front of her, there stood Fairness, without a jacket or waistcoat, his shirt in tatters, hatless, his hair a mess, face pallid and grim, trousers ripped and mud-stained. Pack, ice-axe and rope were nowhere to be seen. A bloody gash lacerated his forehead, dried blood and dirt streaked his hands. This is what death in the mountains looks like. Fearfully, we rattled out our questions:

“Gladys?”

“The Countess?”

“An accident?”

As if dazed and staring blankly, Fairness stammered out:

“We’ve had an accident. No, not dead - Gladys isn’t dead!”

Draining off a cognac in one gulp, he ran his red hand over his red forehead, like an automaton. Then the pain must have jarred him awake: looking up, he only then seemed to see and recognise us, apparently astonished as we were at this extraordinary meeting.

After our traverse of the Täschhorn by the Teufelsgrat, we'd gone our separate ways. The Fairnesses had moved to Cogne, and we had left for the Bernese Oberland. Now, after two months, this unheard-of chance had brought us together again at the foot of the Matterhorn, but this time under such unfortunate circumstances. But this was no time for reminiscences or narratives.

“We were coming down the Z'mutt ridge,” Fairness went on in that matter-of-fact way of his, “Just Gladys and I. From the Italian hut, we’d topped out by Carrel’s route. Conditions were fine on the descent as far as the couloir, but we couldn’t get down further, as there was verglas everywhere, so we kept to the face. Then we were avalanched in the Penhall couloir; it threw us onto the Tiefenmatten glacier. The fall was terrible – I was out for a while. When I came to, Gladys was still unconscious... I wrapped her in my jacket and got here as quickly I could. She's a hundred metres below the rimaye.”

We resolved to leave at once on our rescue mission. After throwing our gear together and lighting our lanterns, we went out into the night, ahead of Fairness and a porter. That unfortunate man, with all his sprains and bruises, followed us at a distance, making a desperate effort to overcome his sufferings. The gnarled limbs of the last pine trees loomed in the darkness. Pebbles grated harshly under our feet on the path. Sheep bleated as we disturbed them; a bell tinkled somewhere. The grass gave way to scree. And before us, like a coastal dune, the black mass of a moraine rose up against the stars. Beyond it lay the icy expanse of the Z'mutt glacier. We wove our way between boulders, stumbling over the ice and the scree, leaping over crevasses, the noise of water rumbling up from their black depths. No breath of wind ruffled the night. The stars twinkled in the still and utterly pure air.

Under the Matterhorn’s dark bulk, we could just about make out the white slash of its glacier, from which sounded the dull murmur of torrents. As we climbed, there were fewer blocks, and the rubble gave way to broader stretches of rough ice. The slope steepened, then eased again. The sky opened up, revealing a new set of constellations. The Tiefenmatten gully loomed in front of us.

We’d come up here in one push, driven by our fears for Gladys, who was dying or perhaps dead. Mountain veterans as we were, inured to fear, we trembled at the thought of having to retrieve a shattered body, pitiful and broken. Exhausted by our efforts, we took a moment's rest on some rocks that had fallen from the Z'mutt ridge. The frigid air cooled our sweating faces and we felt the blood hammering in our veins. A long way below us, we could clearly hear the Count's party moving up and we saw the glow of their lanterns.

Now we uncoiled the ropes and put on crampons. Roped up and widely spaced, we set off again over the hard snows of the Tiefenmatten Glacier. Was she dead or was she alive? The Matterhorn kept its counsel, browbeating us with its dark menace. Quickly arriving on the edge of the first terrace, we struggled to get our bearings. We tried to penetrate the darkness with our lanterns held high, but all we could see was a vague expanse of gray, sloping up into the gloom. Hard by, the Matterhorn loomed majestically into the night, its enormous bulk blotting out the stars in a whole quadrant of the sky. Even so, our eyes were getting used to the pallid light reflected from the snow. Now we could make out the mouth of the couloir and its bounding rimaye, bridged by the avalanche track. It was this below this sinister chasm, stretching from the Dent d'Hérens to the Matterhorn, that we had to make our search for Gladys. No sound of water broke the petrified silence. The darkness hovered thicker there, and the cold bit more deeply into us.

To assuage our fear in the face of this nothingness, I shouted out her name at the top of my voice. We waited, breathing hoarsely and with our hearts pounding. Then, attenuated by the night, the echo reached us - “Gladys” - the syllables of that pleasant name reverberating through space from the rocks lodged among the stars.

Now, more full of fears than ever, we launched ourselves into the darkness, scrambling over crevasses and across snow-bridges, scoring the ice with our sharp crampons. A hundred metres under the rimaye, we reached the avalanche zone, a chaos of snow boulders, pulverised ice, stones and earth. The snow had cascaded out of the couloir, which was now hanging right above us, and, fanning out, had ploughed a sort of giant trench with smooth, hard walls. We clambered up this rim, stopping every five paces to lift our lanterns and search the track of the snowslide. This extraordinary sight brought home to us the avalanche’s destructiveness, and we asked ourselves how Fairness could have escaped alive – and if his companion would too. We would soon find out. We hadn’t been searching for more than an hour, when one of us shouted:

“There!”

In the gleam of the lanterns, at the centre of the patch of light surrounded by darkness, a body lay flat on its stomach, stiff as a corpse, and exposed to the hips. It was Gladys, one leg bent under her, her arms flung out towards the Matterhorn in a gesture of supplication or self-defence. Around her the snow was indented with strange tramplings, as if some violent struggle had taken place. Garments, cloths, a pack, a rope, a hat were strewn about. Footprints and bloodstains showed the way the earl had gone. And there was the woman, leaning on her cheek, her lovely, finely drawn profile, the delicate features, the clenched fingers, her sunburned colour, that beautiful golden hair now disarrayed, muddied and matted with earth, looking as if she’d died in agony. We stood there and felt the pity of it, this tragic martyrdom of a mountaineer. Somebody spoke:

“She’s dead.”

(To be continued)

References

This is an excerpt from Project Hyakumeizan's centennial translation of the second story in La Croix du Cervin (1919), a collection of alpine fiction by Charles Gos (1885-1949). Translation (c) Project Hyakumeizan.