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I will condense this account, as follows: On the 12th of August, 1861, at the hour of the close of mass, a guide arrived out of breath at the mairie of Chamonix, and bearing on his shoulders a very lugubrious burden. It was a sack filled with human remains which he had gathered from the orifice of a crevice in the Glacier des Bossons.
"Thank you! Will you ask Mr. Driver to come to the telephone"; and with Mr. Driver he talked genially for the space of five minutes. Then, and not till then, with a smile of satisfaction, Mr. Jarvice turned to the unopened letters which had come to him by the morning post. That summer was long remembered in Chamonix.
They carried food and cordials for the refreshment of their predecessors; they took lanterns with them, too; night was coming on, and to make matters worse, a fine, cold rain had begun to fall. At the same hour that these three began their dangerous ascent, the official Guide-in-Chief of the Mont Blanc region undertook the dangerous descent to Chamonix, all alone, to get reinforcements.
There was no signature, but across the table the two men looked at one another, for the writing was the writing of Jasper Cole. Jasper Cole at that moment was trudging through the snow to the little châlet which May Nuttall had taken on the slope of the mountain overlooking Chamonix. The sleigh which had brought him up from the station was at the foot of the rise.
The same evening the diligence landed me in Chamonix. I sent for Couttet. "Mont Blanc in the morning," I said. "Delighted, monsieur; we'll do it this time." "Storm or no storm?" "Yes." It so happened that I was to hear one more story of disaster before getting to the top of Mont Blanc.
At last Chayne came to that very narrative which Sylvia had been reading on her way to Chamonix and there the truth was bluntly told for the first time. Chayne started up in that dim and quiet room, thrilled. He had the proof now, under his finger the indisputable proof. Gabriel Strood suffered from an affection of the muscles in his right thigh, and yet managed to out-distance all his rivals.
We took a walk down street, a block or two, and a place where four streets met and the principal shops were clustered, found the groups of men in the roadway thicker than ever for this was the Exchange of Chamonix. These men were in the costumes of guides and porters, and were there to be hired. The office of that great personage, the Guide-in-Chief of the Chamonix Guild of Guides, was near by.
This mountain, about seven thousand six hundred feet high, is only the prolongation of the chain for the Aiguilles-Rouges, which runs from the south-west to the north-east, parallel with that of Mont Blanc, and forms with it the narrow valley of Chamonix.
Four months before the first remains were found, a Chamonix guide named Balmat a relative of one of the lost men was in London, and one day encountered a hale old gentleman in the British Museum, who said: "I overheard your name. Are you from Chamonix, Monsieur Balmat?" "Yes, sir." "Haven't they found the bodies of my three guides, yet? I am Dr. Hamel." "Alas, no, monsieur."
He urged her, however, to eat, and when she had done they went out together and sat upon the bench, watching in silence the light upon the peaks change from purple to rose, the rocks grow cold, and the blue of the sky deepen as the night came. "You too are making an ascent?" she asked. "No," he answered. "I am crossing a pass into Italy. I am going away from Chamonix altogether."
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