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.

"Gladys" (7)

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

All of a sudden, a volley of stones came hooting down, melted out by the sun. We looked up. Those ice pillars stood at the end of the snow gable we’d just set foot on. Welded to a wall weeping with moisture, they formed a fragile scaffolding of huge stalactites that resembled a portico supported on columns of crystal. Impressed as we were with this baroque spectacle, we kept quiet and made haste, well aware of our fate should one of those elegant arches collapse.

Cutting steps on the Wetterhorn
(Photo by George D Abraham)

We brushed against the base of the projection and, rounding it to the left, stepped up onto a twist of neve. At its tip, a formidable ice wall stood in our path like a marble slab, hanging over us in the shadow and frost. Its glistening faces shaded from green and blue in the middle to the colour of slate where they lapped against the rocks. Further down, the ice vanished under the snow, to be swallowed up by the void.

There was no way to avoid the obstacle; we had to tackle it or retreat. Fairness, a first-class rock climber, suggested a chimney, but the ice-glazed slabs that we would have to traverse to reach it looked too risky. Should we retreat? This option came to mind, perhaps as a form of chivalry, seeing that we had a young woman with us. We discussed the matter; Gladys was firmly against any idea of retreat and we decided to continue the ascent. So what did it matter if an ice slope stood in our way? It wasn't the first one we’d had to deal with.

Besides, we couldn't wait to escape from this north face with its pale walls of frost and its killing cold. We unroped and tied our two ropes together. I set off, trailing sixty metres of rope, and carrying an extra coil on my shoulder, as well as two iron pitons and a peg hammer in my pockets. It was difficult to judge the height of this face; foreshortened as it was, it didn’t look more than forty metres, fifty at the most. Towards the top, the ice sheet merged into rock-studded snow, and from there to the ridge it was just a steep snow-slope. Our plan was this: I would try to get as far the nearest rocky outcrop, from where I would bring up the others. If that couldn’t be done, I would run out the full sixty metres, drive a piton into the ice, belay the rope around it, bring the others up, and then climb on again.

For two whole hours, I worked my way up that face, clinging to it with my fingers clenched into a ladder of notches, my boots lodged in the steps that I'd just hacked out. The steepness of the ice, as well as its adamantine hardness, made this axe-work both tedious and perilous. I could only sketch out the notches where I had to plant the spikes of my crampons. For two long hours, flattened against the face, I worked my way slowly upwards – there was no turning back now. I felt the bulging slickness of the ice sliding against me; at times, it even at times brushed my face with a gentle but grisly touch. I heard my companions muttering below. Someone was stamping their feet. Someone else whistled a dance tune. Someone shouted up to me, as if from a distance:

"Are you all right?”

“Yes," I replied, through gritted teeth, and without pausing in my work.

And keeping up my series of sketchy little axe-blows, I continued my struggle with the ice wall. Ice splinters went tinkling down with a noise like shards of porcelain. The rope crept upward as I hoisted myself another foot higher with infinite slowness and with but one thought in my mind – to keep my body in balance over two sets of crampon points.

You'd think something compelling might be written about the psychology of a man working his solitary way up an ice slope in the shadow of the abyss, liberating himself move by move from the fatal pull of the void as he climbs towards the light, the sun and the blue sky. Yet, though this picture does have a certain charm, the psychology involved would add up to little more than a few trivial thoughts that owe more to gut feel than reason. As such, this account would be of only modest interest, and hardly worth the effort of setting down.

Suddenly, the slope eased and softer, whitish ice shattered under my ice axe. At last I could stand up and breathe deeply.

“How much more rope?”

“Twenty metres!” was the reply, “Twenty metres!”

“I’m there," I said. “What time is it?”

“Nine.”

Nine o'clock! So it had taken me two hours to do those forty metres. I found that incredible, until I looked back and saw the ladder of my footsteps spilling vertiginously away beneath me. At the bottom of the slope, at the other end of the rope that was starting to get noticeably heavier, I caught a glimpse of my companions, still grey shapes against the rock. They were looking up at me. At that moment, a beneficent warmth flooded over me and the sun glared into my eyes.

"Watch me,” I shouted down, “I'm going up another six metres, to the rock.”

Behind me, the rope rasped over divots in the frozen crust as, hacking away lustily with my ice axe, I made my way up to the ridge. A draught of air from the mountain’s southern face wafted over me, and without a glance at the new set of views, I walked quickly along the snow ridge to an outcrop of rocks where I could sit down. Solidly braced, with my hands firmly grasping the rope, which I’d wrapped around a rock, I shouted down:

“That's it, you can come up now!”

The rope swung, stretched and started to thrum gently. A medley of noises came up. Somebody was climbing. The rope slackened a bit. I hauled it in, inch by inch, keeping it taut and sensing with my tensed muscles the life of the companion who was coming up. Suddenly, over there, where the ice slope suddenly relented, Gladys emerged from the void, glowing in the sunlight, which picked out her lustrous profile against the purple shadows of the valley below.

When she reached the snow, she paused a moment, one hand on the rope one hand and the other resting on her ice axe, her shrunken shadow falling around her feet.

“Hello!" she called out.

She turned around, waved to the others, and set off along the footprints I’d left. From a distance, she’d appeared as an outline, pleasing enough, yet no more than a silhouette, but as she approached the entire person came into view, the woman who’d made that haunting appearance at Sir Evelyn S.'s reception.

In a fleeting vision, I saw the Countess again, as she’d been in the glittering setting of that evening reception, confounding me with her dreamy, lofty, noble thoughts. Yet, serious and impassioned as her words had then been, they’d failed somehow to express the deeper meaning she had wanted to give them. Up here, though, in the pure air of four thousand metres, these words came echoing back, taking on a new life, as if some ardent and mystical spirit had awakened them – the same triumphant spirit that had animated her rendition of Beethoven's adagio and stunned the audience into silence. It had taken months of waiting and then the test of this climb to show me how Gladys communed with the mountains, this still centre of her being.

Right there on the ridgecrest, on snow that twinkled with ice crystals, stood Gladys, between the white dome of the Breithorn and the Matterhorn’s dark fin, the sun limning her in a nimbus of light against the blue sky. Her graceful figure harmonised elegantly with the stupendous backcloth that unfolded behind her. And the declivities beneath, those walls of sheeted granite, those vertiginous chimneys, the crack of falling stones, the iced-up couloirs, the pristine snows, the avalanche-raked rocks, the serrated ridges, their pinnacles as if carved into space, those forbidding ice faces shimmering like glass, those palisades of tottering seracs, the tiered glaciers with their delicate pallor, the murmur of streams hidden in their depths, the silent gulfs – and now it seemed that the very abyss poised beneath her, the plunging valleys, the whole solemn procession of the Alps across the horizon, and this entire chaos of rock and ice was rushing magnificently forwards to bear up this ridge of snow set on the edge of eternity, on which this young woman was walking towards me.

A stone's throw from me she unroped, her face flushed under her sunburn, and turned to view the vast spectacle. Her eyes seemed to light up with a single thought, as refined as the alpine air: “And you, ye Mountains, why are ye beautiful?”

The silence was broken by the clatter of the rope, as I threw it down to the others.

(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.

"Gladys" (6)

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

Rising above us, the ice slope ran up to the ridge at a giddy angle. It was a few hours after dawn. Grazing the crumbling ridge of snow, the sunlight fanned out into diffused beams of light and azure. Far below us, the glacier lurked within a clear-cut shadow zone. Crowded into an angle on the north slope and propped against a wall bristling with frosty encrustations, we had paused for a moment before starting our assault on the icy slope, a formidable obstacle that had suddenly blocked our path.

The Täschhorn, seen from the east
(Photo by courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure)

There were five of us, in two ropes; I led the first, with Gladys and the Earl following; my two brothers were on the second. It was viciously cold. Our ropes and boots were rigid with frost; our skin stuck to the steel of the ice axes. Below us gaped the abyss, frozen in the shadows. The distant murmur of the torrent in the valley rose with the icy air exhaled from the walls and the snow. Above us, scarcely a hundred metres away, rippled that cheerful sheet of golden light.

A ray lit up the blue sheen of a snowface - pretty as a hanging garden - with ripples that shimmered with a pristine subtlety. But this was a light without heat, and the cold kept boring mortally into us. Ah, how beautiful life would be on the rocks of the ridge, in that summer morning’s sunlight! Just a hundred yards away; up here, you have no idea how much that can mean to a man’s life!

The appointment made at Sir Evelyn S.'s house last winter had been kept, and we had met the day before in Zermatt. The Fairnesses arrived from the Dauphiné, just as we were completing a foray into the Cogne massif. Dubious weather kept us in the hotel. We used the time to make the appropriate preparations for our climb, renew our friendship and lounge in front of the fire chatting agreeably. Around us in this salon of the Hotel Monte Rosa, which has lodged so many famous mountaineers and launched so many famous climbs, tourists were chatting and they too were readying themselves for their expeditions. Pervading every corner of the room, the reek of English tobacco from their heavy mountain garb mingled with the scent of tea.

Although I somehow hadn’t looked forward to seeing Gladys again, worrying that a second meeting would break the spell of that unforgettable evening in London, I was overjoyed to find her as I had left her. My imagination had added nothing to my memories of her that could either embellish or idealise. The top-flight alpinist that she proved to be was only one side of her enigmatic personality.

An Alpine Club friend, Major H. C. O., was keen to lend us his guide, Franz Lochmatter, but we turned this kind offer down, although we listened gladly enough to this man’s advice. Franz gave us a useful briefing. Raising his left hand to represent the Täschhorn, he traced out the route with his right index finger: here, the couloir; cross the gendarme there, descend and then get back on the ridge by working across the face; skirt this problematic wall; and then you’re on the summit ridge; in good conditions, we’d be there in eight hours.

So now we were ready, indeed very ready, and confident of success. We all but sighed with relief when, after two days of fog, we saw the twin peaks of the Mischabel, the Dom and the Täschhorn, swept by the north wind in a cloudless sky. Our ridge, the Teufelsgrat, stretched away above us, magnificent and feline, its black serrations set off by delicate white undulations. It made a beautiful spectacle and we were raring to get to grips with it. Fortune favoured us. There was not a speck of fresh snow on the rocks; they were dry as a road in Provence after a mistral. In front of the hotel, Franz was inspecting the mountain through a telescope.

“Good enough,” he said, “but there are those pillars. I would turn them on the left.”

Putting my eye to the instrument, I inspected the pillars: they looked like huge bluish ice-blocks leaning against a wall. That little stretch of ridge encircled by the telescope's field of view sent a chill down my spine. The Earl bent down and took a look:

“Yes, better go left,” he said matter-of-factly.

We took a morning train to Täsch and the same evening rested up in a hayloft on the Täschalp.

We were away long before dawn, climbing the grassy slopes and scree by the light of our lanterns in the early morning hours. A pale gloaming, streaked with long dark plumes, chased away the night and we reached the ridge just as dawn broke over a clear horizon. Then came the burgeoning red glow of the sun, the light growing in the silence, the gold and green-tinged peaks glittering into the sky, the blaze of the glaciers, an expanse of space that reached out to the world’s end, and abysses that plunged away beneath us, all more lifeless than death itself.

Slowly but unremittingly, we climbed the jagged ridge, tackling its obstacles directly. The Fairnesses were going superbly. I’d made my appraisal at the outset and I trusted them implicitly. Although we were mere tourists and in no sense pioneers, the ropes thrummed with that heroic spirit of solidarity that inspires a first ascent, filling us with enthusiasm and enjoyment. If we could stand the pace for a while and if conditions continued to favour us, the summit would be ours by nine o'clock....

(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.

"Gladys" (5)

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

Then, abruptly recovering her poise, she held out her hand to two new guests, who inclined their heads over her ringed fingers.

Moonlight on Lake Geneva, a painting by Albert Gos

I have to confess that I felt myself slightly thrown by this strange confession, from a socialite who had just pronounced anathema on all her caste. And also by the oddly insouciant way she’d invited me to join her on a climb of the Täschhorn via the Teufelsgrat, one of the longest, most arduous ascents anywhere in the Alps. This too took me aback, although I was willing to believe she was serious about her offer. After all, why shouldn’t she be? A woman with a climbing record like hers could not be expected to behave like all the rest. So she must have been in earnest.

The Countess introduced me to her acquaintances. At once, I recognised one of them as the monocle-wearing officer, the Countess’s companion from the previous day’s exhibition at the Alpine Club.

“This is my cousin,” she said, “Captain Hugh McPherson.”

As the Countess struck up a conversation with the other guest, the officer turned to me. “I am quite sure, sir,” he began, "that you were talking about mountains with my fair cousin. I could see that look on her face, sick as a palsied parrot, that she has whenever she gets back from a season in Switzerland, but she’ll get over it by and by. What a strange creature she is; it’s a pity really! You're a mountaineer too, no doubt?”

“Yes, sir, a mountaineer and a passionate devotee of mountain beauty.”

“Well, that goes for my cousin too. I could understand it if she was a man, but she’s a woman! And why her, of all things? She affects to be tired of society balls or theatre-goings, and yet she’s the life and soul of the party wherever she goes. She's one of the prettiest, most elegant young women in society, and (here he leaned towards me) would you believe it, a perfect wife too. No affairs, nothing. But her thing for mountains; it’s too bad, really. Besides, her husband shares her alpine obsession. That's it, really, they love each other. So she’s got no time for admirers! Though this too could be some sort of pose, like any other, even if it gets a special twist from my cousin’s ardent and poetic nature. Women! What funny things they are!”

The conversation rattled on in this light-hearted manner. All the same, I read in Captain McPherson’s remarks another tribute to the Countess's virtues. His revelations strengthened my faith in her, confirmed my admiration.

At this moment, the Earl appeared, accompanied by somebody who looked like a musician. “Madam," said this person obsequiously, "won’t you play for us tonight? A bit of Chopin, perhaps?”

Seeming not to hear, the Countess said, “Oliver, I've invited this man to climb the Teufelsgrat on the Täschhorn with us, in July.”

“Did you, indeed?” the Earl replied in a matter-of-fact way. “I hope you don’t mind? It should be a pleasant tour. We both of us adore your country. Did I not hear that you and your brothers climbed a new route on the Aiguille Verte, but where did it go exactly?”

“Countess,” the artist beseeched her, “the nocturne in F sharp minor, the one that Pugno played at the Queen's Hall.”

“Huh!" exclaimed the officer, adjusting his monocle and looking at his pretty cousin, “I'll wager twenty pounds that after you get up your Devil’s Ridge or whatever, you’ll get a column in the Times, an article in the Alpine Journal and your picture in the Illustrated News. I’ll say it again – it’s just a pose, even if it’s one that not every girl can indulge in. Let’s just say, Gladys, that you have a very individual way of expressing yourself. Well, I take my hat off to you.”

She waved her impertinent cousin away and asked if I liked music. Very much, I replied.

“Would that be Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Debussy?” she enquired. I confessed a distinct inclination towards Bach, that master of the well-tempered harpsichord. She smiled.

“Me too," she said, "but we can’t play him here, you know. Oliver, do you remember, Olivier, that sweet young girl at the Couttet hotel in Chamonix? How she played that eighth andante, and to listen to it the night we got back from eight days in the mountains. How beautiful it was, and how it suited our mood. Now, if you like, I'll play you the Moonlight Sonata.”

At this moment, her expression changed, as if she was already thinking through the piece she was about to interpret. And, suddenly sombre, she walked away on the musician’s arm.

The Countess Gladys played for us in a sort of penumbra. She liked to wrap her music in mystery and, by this simple device, to prolong the entrancement of our rapt souls.

The chandeliers had been put out. Only a few torches flickered here and there, reflected and diffused in the dark depths of the mirrors. A shimmering figure seated at the black bulk of the piano, the Countess played a few chords, silencing the hum of last conversations with her first few arpeggios. She held her audience in thrall, as if hypnotised. A breath of air wafted in through an open window, stirring a spray of white roses against a buttress. One could hear the petals fall, all but imperceptibly.

Then the notes of the immortal adagio rang limpidly through the room’s dusky recesses. Against the crepuscular backing of the chords, the melody stood out in a soft, serene and harmonious clarity, like some ancient bas-relief on a marble frieze. Evanescent, unhurried and unfailingly measured, the notes flowed and rippled away, borne up by the swell and ebb of the bass, which seemed to lend or soften its voice to bring out the composition’s full beauty. Reaching the final allegretto, the last notes died away. The pianist’s outstretched arms fell back inert. The Countess lowered her head, rested her hand on her knees, and slumped as if she was in pain - or in some radiant trance.

Stunned by this extraordinary conclusion, the audience sank into an even deeper state of contemplation, a more gratifying tribute than any sudden burst of applause. No facile compliments were murmured; nobody for an instant thought of clapping. In this timeless moment, we were abashed to silence.

(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.

"Gladys" (4)

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

Conversing about the mountains amid the drawing room chatter seemed to us a strange contradiction. All around us the talk was of trivia, gossip and sports. Women giggled; the blades of the fans softly modulated the dissonant hum of voices; jewels glittered; and chandeliers bathed all the black suits and the glamorous turn-outs in a wash of light. I admit quite frankly, even at the risk of sounding like a fool, that our private and all but flirtatious conversation appealed to me far more than did the surrounding babble.

The Dom and the Taeschhorn, a painting by Albert Gos

The Countess was full of animation. The natural grace of her gestures seemed to come from her innermost thoughts, suggesting to me that she deplored coarseness in all its forms. She spoke a very pure French. The way she rolled her ‘r’s’, her slightly exotic accent added something indefinable to her charm.

I listened to her, delighted, as she shared her thoughts with me, ingenuously, without posturing or artifice and, remarkably, without any emotional twists, something that the women described by Paul Bourget or Marcel Prévost have not accustomed us to. There are certain women, sensitive and passionate, who are transformed by love. The beauty of the feelings they carry in them irradiates, even transfigures them. And such a one was Gladys, infused as she was with her twofold love for her Earl and the mountains, which her soul reflected as if in a crystal lake.

I looked at her. As she sat back slightly in her armchair, her shoulders emerged from an exquisite Chantilly gown, its delicate tracery lapping over her bare arms. No jewellery encumbered her golden hair; two solitary pendants glinted from her ears. Large, violet, dreamy eyes; a short, straight nose, slightly turned up; dazzling teeth in a very small mouth; a delicate chin completed this picture of a society woman, as if as painted by Paul César Helleu. She was twenty-four years old, yet looked scarcely older than twenty.

Captivated by her spirit as much as by her charm and overwhelming attractiveness, I was starting to wonder if all this society stuff wasn't just nonsense, perhaps - when the Countess seemed to read my mind:

“Don’t you think so?” she smiled, “But it really is like that. Ah! How vain and selfish people are! Come on, you men are all the same! Because we're pretty, because we look frivolous, scatterbrained perhaps, because you like to admire us, you think we’re just here to divert you or liven up your life with flirting or an affair when you're bored; or add a bit of grace and poetry to your to your home or heart. Yes, it’s like that.”

She curled her lips scornfully and, without waiting for my reply, went on bitterly, as if speaking to herself:

“I hate “society”... I hate it. Everywhere, women are the target of looks that defile them. And what looks! If men knew how much contempt we have for them, they might even give up desiring us and creep back into their shells, just to preserve their own self-worth. Yes, I hate “society”. The looks on my face burn like my thoughts. I feel defenceless against this secret groping. If only I could – but what can a woman do? I’d rather live in an alpine valley, somewhere I could let my feelings bloom, lead my inner life, safe from the baseness here.”

She paused after her soliloquy, then turning to me:

“Why did I have to tell you this nonsense? Was it amusing? It’s odd, though, you're the first man, after my husband, to whom I’ve dared to say anything like that. Do you know what Oliver calls it? He calls it my romantic childishness..."

I wanted to say something, to break the awkward silence to which her words had reduced me, but she didn't give me time, and looking me straight in the eyes, somewhat like a supplicant, she asked:

“You do take me seriously, don’t you?

And then she suddenly came out with:

“Have you done the Täschhorn by the Teufelsgrat?

“No, indeed.”

“Well, neither have I; let’s make a date for next July.”

(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.