The catastrophe.

On a dark, dark night, moonless, starless, skyless, on the trembling whiteness of a vast ledge of snow, slowly a long rope unrolled itself, to which were attached in file certain timorous and very small shades, preceded, at the distance of a hundred feet, by a lantern casting a red light along the way. Blows of an ice-axe ringing on the hard snow, the roll of the ice blocks thus detached, alone broke the silence of the névé on which the steps of the caravan made no sound. From minute to minute, a cry, a smothered groan, the fall of a body on the ice, and then immediately a strong voice sounding from the end of the rope: “Go gently, Gonzague, and don’t fall.” For poor Bompard had made up his mind to follow his friend Tartarin to the summit of Mont Blanc. Since two in the morning — it was now four by the president’s repeater — the hapless courier had groped along, a galley slave on the chain, dragged, pushed, vacillating, balking, compelled to restrain the varied exclamations extorted from him by his mishaps, for an avalanche was on the watch, and the slightest concussion, a mere vibration of the crystalline air, might send down its masses of snow and ice. To suffer in silence! what torture to a native of Tarascon!

But the caravan halted. Tartarin asked why. A discussion in low voice was heard; animated whisperings: “It is your companion who won’t come on,” said the Swedish student. The order of march was broken; the human chaplet returned upon itself, and they found themselves all at the edge of a vast crevasse, called by the mountaineers a roture. Preceding ones they had crossed by means of a ladder, over which they crawled on their hands and knees; here the crevasse was much wider and the ice-cliff rose on the other side to a height of eighty or a hundred feet. It was necessary to descend to the bottom of the gully, which grew smaller as it went down, by means of steps cut in the ice, and to reascend in the same way on the other side. But Bompard obstinately refused to do so.

Leaning over the abyss, which the shadows represented as bottomless, he watched through the damp vapour the movements of the little lantern by which the guides below were preparing the way. Tartarin, none too easy himself, warmed his own courage by exhorting his friend: “Come now, Gonzague, zou!“ and then in a lower voice coaxed him to honour, invoked the banner, Tarascon, the Club . . .

“Ah! va?, the Club indeed!.. I don’t belong to it,” replied the other, cynically.

Then Tartarin explained to him where to set his feet, and assured him that nothing was easier.

“For you, perhaps, but not for me . . . ” “But you said you had a habit of it . . . ” ”Bé! yes! habit, of course . . . which habit? I have so many . . . habit of smoking, sleeping . . . ” “And lying, especially,” interrupted the president.

“Exaggerating — come now!” said Bompard, not the least in the world annoyed.

However, after much hesitation, the threat of leaving him there all alone decided him to go slowly, deliberately, down that terrible miller’s ladder . . . The going up was more difficult, for the other face was nearly perpendicular, smooth as marble, and higher than King Rene’s tower at Tarascon. From below, the winking light of the guides going up, looked like a glow-worm on the march. He was forced to follow, however, for the snow beneath his feet was not solid, and gurgling sounds of circulating water heard round a fissure told of more than could be seen at the foot of that wall of ice, of depths that were sending upward the chilling breath of subterranean abysses.

“Go gently, Gonzague, for fear of falling . . . ” That phrase, which Tartarin uttered with tender intonations, almost supplicating, borrowed a solemn signification from the respective positions of the ascensionists, clinging with feet and hands one above the other to the wall, bound by the rope and the similarity of their movements, so that the fall or the awkwardness of one put all in danger. And what danger! coquin de sort! It sufficed to hear fragments of the ice-wall bounding and dashing downward with the echo of their fall to imagine the open jaws of the monster watching there below to snap you up at the least false step.

But what is this?.. Lo, the tall Swede, next above Tartarin, has stopped and touches with his iron heels the cap of the P. C. A. In vain the guides called: “Forward!..” And the president: “Go on, young man!..” He did not stir. Stretched at full length, clinging to the ice with careless hand, the Swede leaned down, the glimmering dawn touching his scanty beard and giving light to the singular expression of his dilated eyes, while he made a sign to Tartarin:—

“What a fall, hey? if one let go . . . ”

“Outre! I should say so . . . you would drag us all down . . . Go on!”

The other remained motionless.

“A fine chance to be done with life, to return into chaos through the bowels of the earth, and roll from fissure to fissure like that bit of ice which I kick with my foot . . . ” And he leaned over frightfully to watch the fragment bounding downward and echoing endlessly in the blackness.

“Take care!..” cried Tartarin, livid with terror. Then, desperately clinging to the oozing wall, he resumed, with hot ardour, his argument of the night before in favour of existence. “There’s good in it . . . What the deuce!.. At your age, a fine young fellow like you . . . Don’t you believe in love, qué!“

No, the Swede did not believe in it. Ideal love is a poet’s lie; the other, only a need he had never felt . . .

“Bé! yes! bé! yes!.. It is true poets lie, they always say more than there is; but for all that, she is nice, the femellan— that’s what they call women in our parts. Besides, there’s children, pretty little darlings that look like us.”

“Children! a source of grief. Ever since she had them my mother has done nothing but weep.”

“Listen, Otto, you know me, my good friend . . . ”

And with all the valorous ardour of his soul Tartarin exhausted himself to revive and rub to life at that distance this victim of Schopenhauer and of Hartmann, two rascals he’d like to catch at the corner of a wood, coquin de sort! and make them pay for all the harm they had done to youth . . .

Represent to yourselves during this discussion the high wall of freezing, glaucous, streaming ice touched by a pallid ray of light, and that string of human beings glued to it in echelon, with ill-omened rumblings rising from the yawning depth, together with the curses of the guides and their threats to detach and abandon the travellers. Tartarin, seeing that no argument could convince the madman or clear off his vertigo of death, suggested to him the idea of throwing himself from the highest peak of the Mont Blanc . . . That indeed! that would be worth doing, up there! A fine end among the elements . . . But here, at the bottom of a cave . . . Ah! va?, what a blunder!.. And he put such tone into his words, brusque and yet persuasive, such conviction, that the Swede allowed himself to be conquered, and there they were, at last, one by one, at the top of that terrible roture.

They were now unroped, and a halt was called for a bite and sup. It was daylight; a cold wan light among a circle of peaks and shafts, overtopped by the Mont Blanc, still thousands of feet above them. The guides were apart, gesticulating and consulting, with many shakings of the head. Seated on the white ground, heavy and huddled up, their round backs in their brown jackets, they looked like marmots getting ready to hibernate. Bompard and Tartarin, uneasy, shocked, left the young Swede to eat alone, and came up to the guides just as their leader was saying with a grave air:—

“He is smoking his pipe; there’s no denying it.”

“Who is smoking his pipe?” asked Tartarin.

“Mont Blanc, monsieur; look there . . . ”

And the guide pointed to the extreme top of the highest peak, where, like a plume, a white vapour floated toward Italy.

“Et autremain, my good friend, when the Mont Blanc smokes his pipe, what does that mean?”

“It means, monsieur, that there is a terrible wind on the summit, and a snow-storm which will be down upon us before long. And I tell you, that’s dangerous.”

“Let us go back,” said Bompard, turning green; and Tartarin added:—

“Yes, yes, certainly; no false vanity, of course.”

But here the Swedish student interfered. He had paid his money to be taken to the top of Mont Blanc, and nothing should prevent his getting there. He would go alone, if no one would accompany him. “Cowards! cowards!” he added, turning to the guides; and he uttered the insult in the same ghostly voice with which he had roused himself just before to suicide.

“You shall see if we are cowards . . . Fasten to the rope and forward!” cried the head guide. This time, it was Bompard who protested energetically. He had had enough, and he wanted to be taken back. Tartarin supported him vigorously.

“You see very well that that young man is insane . . . ” he said, pointing to the Swede, who had already started with great strides through the heavy snow-flakes which the wind was beginning to whirl on all sides. But nothing could stop the men who had just been called cowards. The marmots were now wide-awake and heroic. Tartarin could not even obtain a conductor to take him back with Bompard to the Grands-Mulets. Besides, the way was very easy; three hours’ march, counting a detour of twenty minutes to get round that roture, if they were afraid to go through it alone.

“Outre! yes, we are afraid of it . . . ” said Bompard, without the slightest shame; and the two parties separated.

Bompard and the P. C. A. were now alone. They advanced with caution on the snowy desert, fastened to a rope: Tartarin first, feeling his way gravely with his ice-axe; filled with a sense of responsibility and finding relief in it.

“Courage! keep cool!.. We shall get out of it all right,” he called to Bompard repeatedly. It is thus that an officer in battle, seeking to drive away his own fear, brandishes his ............