ame time the reality of the danger and the
usefulness in sudden crises of the mountaineer's rope. A tourist
descending from the Grands Mulets was passing, under an impending serac,
around the head of a crevasse, where the only footway was a few inches
of ice hewn with the axe. Being heedless or nervous, his feet shot from
under him, and with a yell he plunged into the pit. Luckily, he was tied
to the rope between two guides, one of whom had passed the dangerous
corner, while the other, behind, had also a safe footing. As he fell the
guides braced themselves, the rope zipped, and the unfortunate
adventurer hung clutching and kicking at the polished blue wall. He had
really descended but a few feet into the crevasse, though to him
doubtless it seemed a hundred, and with a surprising display of
strength, or skill, the guides hauled him out by simply tightening the
rope. One of them pulled back and the other forward, and between them
the sprawling victim rose with the strain to the brink of the chasm,
where a third man dexterously caught and landed him.

[Illustration: REFUGE STATION AT THE GRANDS MULETS, MONT BLANC.]

Madame Marke and Olivier Gay were not so fortunate near this spot in
1870. A bridge of snow spanning a crevasse gave way beneath them, and,
the rope breaking, they disappeared and perished in the abyss.

We reached the Grands Mulets in the middle of the afternoon. Here the
great majority of amateur climbers are content to terminate their ascent
of Mont Blanc. The experience of getting as far as this point and back
again is, as the incidents just related show, anything but
insignificant, and may prove not only exciting but even tragic. Yet, of
course, the real work, the tug of war between human endurance and the
obstacles of untamed nature, is above. The Grands Mulets formed the
stopping place in some of the earliest attempts to climb Mont Blanc,
more than a hundred years ago. Here Jacques Balmat, the hero of the
first ascent, passed an awful night alone, amid the cracking of glaciers
and the shaking of avalanches, before his final victory over the peak in
1786. In the spirit which led the Romans to surname the conqueror of
Hannibal "Scipio Africanus," the exultant Chamonniards called their hero
"Balmat de Mont Blanc." He, too, finally perished by a fall from a
precipice in 1834, and to-day there are those who whisper that his
spirit can be seen flitting over the snowy wastes before every new
catastrophe.