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Updated: June 12, 2025
Chayne turned to Michel Revailloud. "You were right, Michel," he said, solemnly. "My friend has made the first passage of the Col des Nantillons from the East." The party moved forward again, watching with redoubled vigilance for some spot in the glacier, some spot above a crevasse, to which ice-steps descended and from which they did not lead down.
"Yes it's from Lattery," he said, as he glanced first at the signature. Then he read the telegram and his face grew very grave. Lattery telegraphed from Courmayeur, the Italian village just across the chain of Mont Blanc: "Starting now by Col du Géant and Col des Nantillons." The Col du Géant is the most frequented pass across the chain, and no doubt the easiest.
The guide we brought down with him from the Glacier des Nantillons a fortnight back all this fortnight I have been envying him yes, yes, even though he kicked the snow with his feet for a little before he died. It is better to do so than to lead mules up to the Montanvert." "I am sorry," said Chayne.
"Don't do that!" cried her mother, irritably. Then she asked suddenly a question which startled her daughter. "Did you meet any one last night on the mountain, at the inn?" Sylvia's face colored, but the moonlight hid the change. "Yes," she said. "A man?" "Yes." "Who was it?" "A Captain Chayne. He was at the hotel all last week. It was his friend who was killed on the Glacier des Nantillons."
Michel spoke with so much certainty that even in the face of his telegram, in the face of the story which Jules had told, hope sprang up within Chayne's heart. "Then he may be still up there on some ledge. He would surely not have slipped on the Glacier des Nantillons." That hope, however, was not shared by Michel Revailloud. "There is very little snow this year," he said.
The following day he set out alone about three in the morning for the Grepon. He took the road up the Nantillons glacier to the Col, and then he must have climbed the Mummery crack by himself. After that he left the ordinary route and tried a new traverse across the Mer de Glace face.
It seemed to him disloyal to believe it. A man should not slip from his steps on the Glacier des Nantillons. He turned toward the door. "Very well," he said. "Send three guides up the Mer de Glace. We will go up to the Glacier des Nantillons." He went up to his room, fetched his ice-ax and a new club-rope with the twist of red in its strands, and came down again.
The damage reported was very slight, and of no military value. The machines made a trip of 300 miles length, in order to carry out this attack, an achievement worthy of special notice. A strong French squadron shelled the stations at Nantillons and Brieulles on April 10 and 11, 1916, doing considerable material damage to buildings.
Here and there the ridge sinks between the peaks, and one such depression between the Aiguille de Blaitière and the Aiguille du Grépon is called the Col des Nantillons. To cross that pass, to descend on the other side of the great rock-wall into that bay of ice facing Chamonix, which is the Glacier des Nantillons, had been Lattery's idea. Chayne turned to the porter. "When did this come?"
Once past its great ice-fall, the glacier leads without difficulty to the Montanvert hotel and Chamonix. But the Col des Nantillons is another affair.
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