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That night the party slept again at the Grands Mulets, and next day they reached Chamouni, fagged, no doubt, and bearing marks of mountaineering in the shape of sun-burnt cheeks and peeled noses, but hearty, nevertheless, and not a little elated with their success in having scaled the mighty sides and the hoary summit of Mont Blanc.
«Les chemins sont pavés partout mieux que dans beaucoup de villes; des chevaux et des mulets chargés les fréquentent toute l'année; et dans quels pays ces grands travaux ont-ils été exécutes? Dans un véritable chaos de rochers et montagnes dont partie sont bouleversés, et l'autre paroît prête
The wind howled around them, and the snow circled in mad evolutions, as if the demon of wintry storms dwelt there, and meant to defend his citadel to the "bitter end." There are two rocks near the summit, which crop through the ice like rugged jewels in the monarch's diadem. The lower is named the Petits Mulets, the upper the Derniers Roches.
Gravity was in our favor, but gravity could not entirely spare our wearied limbs, and where we sank in the snow we found our downward progress very trying. I suffered from thirst, but after we had divided the liquefied snow at the Petits Mulets among us we had nothing to drink.
"Did any of the hotel people tell you?" "No. Don't be mysterious before breakfast. It isn't good for the digestion." "Don't joke. I wasn't going to say anything about it till afterwards, in case you hadn't heard; but now I will. The femme de chambre told me. The news has just come that a young guide has died of exhaustion on the mountain, between the Observatory and the Grands Mulets.
It was a lucky piece of sagacity in us that we concluded to stop a man whom we met and get a light for our pipes from him instead of continuing the climb to that lantern to get a light, as had been our purpose. The man said that that lantern was on the Grands Mulets, some sixty-five hundred feet above the valley!
Sometimes, when two were in full career towards one another, each would appear dexterously to get out of the other's way; sometimes a crowd would assemble and jostle one another, with as much semblance of individual effort as a spectator on the Grands Mulets might observe with a telescope among the specks representing men in the valley of Chamounix.
And, afterward, one star came out over it, and a bright light shone from the hut on the Grand Mulets, a rock in the waste of snow, where a Frenchman was passing the night on his way to the summit. Shall I describe the passage of the Tete Noire?
He found Mrs. Prockter slowly and cautiously ascending the stairway. If he was at the summit of Mont Blanc she had already reached Les Grands Mulets. "What is it?" she asked, pausing, and looking up at him with an appealing gesture. "What's what?" "Why have you been so long?" It was as if she implied that these minutes without him were an eternity of ennui. He grew more and more conceited.
I remember on one occasion over-taking a large party in the descent from the Plateau to the Grands Mulets, in a place where the snow was extremely soft, and any moment might land one of us in a crevasse; and I shall never forget the oaths which caught my ear, from a floundering fellow-countryman enveloped from the waist downwards.
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