Undoubtedly an admirable rule, if only it could be always carried out.
But mistakes, unhappily, may be made even by experts, as witness this
story of a thrilling adventure which befell F. F. Tuckett, twenty-two
years ago.
The season had been exceptionally cold and wet. Snow lay thickly
everywhere, even on the Faulhorn, the Scheinige Platte, and the
Wengern Alp. But in the early days of July an improvement began to
show itself, and Mr. Tuckett, who for a whole month had been able to
make no big expedition, resolved to make an attempt upon the Eiger.
The members of the party were Mr. Tuckett, Mr. Whitwell, J. H. Fox,
and the guides, Christian and Ulrich Lauener. They got off between 3
and 4 A.M., and presently started to ascend the Eiger glacier. The
surface of it was entirely concealed with snow, but, for some reason,
they neglected to put on the rope. High up in front of them were the
disordered pillars and buttresses of the ice-fall, and above the
ice-fall rested an enormous weight of freshly fallen snow.
Instead of ascending the centre of the glacier, the party, fortunately
for themselves, were keeping to the left, towards the rocks of the
Rothstock. Of a sudden, a sort of crack was heard high up above their
heads, and every eye was turned upon the hanging ice-cliff from which
it came. A large mass of "_serac_" was seen to break away, mingled
with a still larger contingent of snow from the slopes above; and the
whole mass slid down like a cataract, filling the "_couloir_" to its
brim, and dashing in clouds of frozen spray over the rocky ridges in
its path, towards the travellers.
[Illustration: THE MAUVAIS PAS, MONT BLANC.]
For a moment they did not realize that they were in its track. But
then the knowledge flashed upon them all, and they shouted to each
other, "Run for your lives," and struggled desperately through the
deep, soft snow to reach the rocks of the Rothstock, yet with their
faces turned to watch the swift oncoming of the foe.
Let Mr. Tuckett himself describe that thrilling race for life.
"I remember," he writes, "being struck with the idea that it seemed as
though, sure of its prey, it wished to play with us for a while, at
one moment letting us imagine that we had gained upon it, and were
getting beyond the line of its fire, and the next, with mere
wantonness of vindictive power, suddenly rolling out on its right a
vast volume of grinding blocks and whirling snow, as though to show
that it could outflank us at any moment if it chose.
"Nearer and nearer it came, its front like a mighty wave about to
break. Now it has traversed the whole width of the glacier above
us, taking a somewhat diagonal direction; and now--run, oh! run,
if ever you did, for here it comes straight at us, swift, deadly,
and implacable! The next instant we saw no more; a wild confusion
of whirling snow and fragments of ice--a frozen cloud--swept over
us, entirely concealing us from one another, and still we were
untouched--at least I knew that I was--and still we ran. Another
half-second and the mist had passed, and there lay the body of
the monster, whose head was still careering away at lightning
speed far below us, motionless, rigid, and harmless."
The danger was over, and the party examined the avalanche at their
leisure. It had a length of three thousand three hundred feet, an
average breadth of a thousand feet, and an average depth of five feet.
This is to say, its bulk was six hundred and eleven thousand cubic
yards, and its weight, on a moderate computation, about four hundred
and fifty thousand tons.
Accidents of this sort, happily, are very rare, and the climber who is
carried away by the avalanche has, as a rule, deliberately faced the
risk out of bravado, and the desire to go home and boast that he had
done hard things. But there is another sort of avalanche which is a
much more frequent source of danger. It consists of a stratum of snow
loosely adherent to a slope of _neve_ or ice. The snow breaks away
under the weight of the party, and carries them down with it,
sometimes to a place of safety, sometimes to a crevasse.