hese
aged men entered and approached the table. Davouassoux, more than eighty
years old, contemplated the mournful remains mutely and with a vacant
eye, for his intelligence and his memory were torpid with age; but
Couttet's faculties were still perfect at seventy-two, and he exhibited
strong emotion. He said:

"Pierre Balmat was fair; he wore a straw hat. This bit of skull, with
the tuft of blond hair, was his; this is his hat. Pierre Carrier was
very dark; this skull was his, and this felt hat. This is Balmat's
hand, I remember it so well!" and the old man bent down and kissed it
reverently, then closed his fingers upon it in an affectionate grasp,
crying out, "I could never have dared to believe that before quitting
this world it would be granted me to press once more the hand of one of
those brave comrades, the hand of my good friend Balmat."

There is something weirdly pathetic about the picture of that
white-haired veteran greeting with his loving handshake this friend
who had been dead forty years. When these hands had met last, they were
alike in the softness and freshness of youth; now, one was brown and
wrinkled and horny with age, while the other was still as young and fair
and blemishless as if those forty years had come and gone in a single
moment, leaving no mark of their passage. Time had gone on, in the one
case; it had stood still in the other. A man who has not seen a friend
for a generation, keeps him in mind always as he saw him last, and is
somehow surprised, and is also shocked, to see the aging change the
years have wrought when he sees him again. Marie Couttet's experience,
in finding his friend's hand unaltered from the image of it which he
had carried in his memory for forty years, is an experience which stands
alone in the history of man, perhaps.

Couttet identified other relics:

"This hat belonged to Auguste Tairraz. He carried the cage of pigeons
which we proposed to set free upon the summit. Here is the wing of one
of those pigeons. And here is the fragment of my broken baton; it was by
grace of that baton that my life was saved. Who could have told me that
I should one day have the satisfaction to look again upon this bit of
wood that supported me above the grave that swallowed up my unfortunate
companions!"

No portions of the body of Tairraz, other than a piece of the skull,
had been found. A diligent search was made, but without result. However,
another search was instituted a