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Updated: June 7, 2025
Leaving Courmayeur early, Lattery and his guide would have slept the night on the rocks at the foot of the Blaitiere, they would have climbed all the next day and at four o'clock had reached within two hundred feet of the ridge, within two hundred feet of safety. Somewhere within those last two hundred feet the fatal slip had been made; or perhaps a stone had fallen.
The door was locked, and there was no one about the house, nor was there any other house within miles. My guide, however, went on. Lattery and I sat out there in the rain for a couple of hours, and then an old woman with a big umbrella held above her head came down from the upper pastures, driving some cows in front of her. She told us that no one had stayed at her inn for fourteen years.
Having passed the ice-fall, and when within two hours of the Montanvert, Lattery had turned to the left and had made for the great wall of precipitous rock which forms the western side of the valley through which the Glacier du Géant flows down, the wall from which spring the peaks of the Dent du Requin, the Aiguille du Plan, the Aiguille de Blaitière, the Grépon and the Charmoz.
Up to these last four years, on some day in each July his friend and he had been wont to foregather at some village in the Alps, Lattery coming from a Government Office in Whitehall, Chayne now from some garrison town in England, now from Malta or from Alexandria, and sometimes from a still farther dependency.
Michel replied with some embarrassment: "I do not climb with every one, monsieur. I hoped perhaps that one of my old patrons would want me. So I waited." Chayne looked round the platform for his friend. "And Monsieur Lattery?" he asked. The guide's face lit up. "Monsieur Lattery? Is he coming too? It will be the old days once more." "Coming? He is here now.
He felt some shame that his own troubles had so engrossed him. After all, Lattery was not greatly to be pitied. That was true. He himself too was young. There would come other summers, other friends. The real irreparable trouble sat there before him on the other side of the iron table, the trouble of an old age to be lived out in loneliness. "You never married, Michel?" he said. "No.
Chayne began quickly to look through the photographs outspread upon the table. If Kenyon's portrait was amongst Revailloud's small treasures, there might be another which he had no wish for his wife to see, the portrait of the man who climbed with Kenyon, who was Kenyon's "John Lattery."
Michel, however, clung to his opinion. "The worst part of the climb was over," he argued. "The very worst pitch, monsieur, is at the very beginning when you leave the glacier, and then it is very bad again half way up when you descend into a gully; but Monsieur Lattery was very safe on rock, and having got so high, I think he would have climbed the last rocks with his guide."
"I mean that I believe Monsieur Lattery has made the first passage of the Col des Nantillons from the east," he said, with a peculiar solemnity. "I think we must look for them on the western side of the pass, in the crevasses of the Glacier des Nantillons." "Surely not," cried Chayne. True, the Glacier des Nantillons in places was steep.
From these two disbeliefs his hope had sprung. It was possible that either Lattery or his guide lay disabled, but alive and tended, as well as might be, by his companion on some insecure ledge of that rock-cliff. A falling stone, a slip checked by the rope might have left either hurt but still living.
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