Chapter IV

(i)

44TQY George, you chaps!" said Tom Meredith,

-° " but this is hot."

He sat down hastily above the angle of the path and wiped his face hard all over.

It was almost impossible to believe that forty-eight hours.ago, at this very time, they had been struggling in the luggage-room of Victoria Station, between charging porters and half-hysterical women and furious vindictive-looking men in tweeds, all at other times civilised beings, but in the midst of this anxiety once more barbarous individualists. And now the three young men were on their way up from Zermatt to the Riflel. The elders were somewhere behind, on mules.

They had come out with as much speed as these days permitted. All the previous afternoon they had wound through the Rhone valley, passing hot little stations with green-shuttered official residences abutting on to the platform, looking up almost continually from the sweltering valley to the great hmnmocky hills on this side and that — hills that, in their turn, aspired here and there to vast crags of brown and black, and even to spires and towers, beyond which, now and again, looked down the serene snows, dazzling bright against the intense blue. Then, by haste, they had arrived at Zermatt the same evening.

Tom Meredith was the kind of young man with whom boys inevitably make friends almost immediately. In physical build he was impressive; in his short, jerky sentences he was even more impressive, for his speech was full of allusiveness and vivid detail, singularly unlike the periods of Professor Macintosh, who had held forth three days ago on the same subject. In appearance he was a lean, well made young man, hard and strenuous, thin-faced, with projecting cheek-bones, and extremely keen blue eyes beneath rather prominent brows. He was the proper colour, too, for a young man of his age and vocation, browned even with the suns of England; his hands were nervous and sinewy.

His outlook on life too was just now extraordinarily inspiring. Val had learned, by merciless questioning, that he had played football for Rugby for two years before he left and during one year for Oxford. But what impressed him prodigiously was Tom's entire detachment from mere games. Obviously these things were, for Tom, just a recreation for boys; the real thing was climbing, for in climbing you were facing natural facts and not artificial situations. It stood, towards games, in the relation in which fencing stands to fighting.

On climbing, then, Tom was inexhaustible. In periods between conversations in the train he had indeed looked out with unconscious contempt now and again at wayside stations; he had emerged from silence to point out a stationrnaster who was unusually fat; he had said that he believed that Sion had a cathedral; but he had detected the Weisshorn, and indicated it with a lean finger, when there was no more to be seen of it but a flash of white, seen between two hills and gone again. And all the rest of the time, till his mother fell asleep, he had discoursed almost endlessly on technical points. Val had even come into his bedroom late last night to hear some more, and Tom had sat up in bed to gratify him.

Well, even Val was too hot and breathless to ask anything more just now (they had come for fifty minutes without a break), and he too sat down and took out his handkerchief. Austin was already breathing rather emphatically, though even then with a certain reserve of self-respect, in the shade of a rock.

The view at which Val presently began to look is, most certainly, one of the finest in the world. They were just emerging out of the pines on to the first slopes of the vast plateau on the top of which stands the Riffelalp hotel. Beneath them lay the valley from which they had come, sloping abruptly down from the trees over which they looked down to Zermatt itself, a village of toyhouses, far away to the right. Then on the other side rose up the great bastions of rock and pine and scree, stripping themselves as they rose higher, up into the giant fortifications that protect the mountains proper — first the spires and pinnacles of the lower peaks, purple-shadowed here and there, lined with delicate white; and then the enormous solemnities of the eternal snows. Over all lay the sky, brilliantly blue, seeming to scorch the eyes with its intensity; while the grave murmur of the fly-haunted woods beneath, the ponderous far-off roar of the streams, did little else but emphasise to the subconscious attention the huge scale of the silence and the space and the vastness in which all expressed itself.

" By gad! " said Val presently.

Tom waved a hand.

" Ah! but that's the chap! " he said.

Val nodded.

For, hugely greater in its isolation than all else, standing clear out, built as it seemed, as on a foundation, on the high line of which other peaks looked but a continuation, towered, out to the left, against the high sky, that enormous abrupt wedge of rock, so steep that the snow lies on it but in patches and drifts and lines — that wedge of rock known as the Matterhorn — a monster who has, all to himself, a little cemetery outside Zermatt where lie, as if ennobled by their fate, the " victims of Mont Cervin."

" And we're going to do him before we leave? " Tom nodded. " We'll have a try," he said. And Val continued to stare.

Already even this peak bore to his mind a certain air of personality. For first he had read all about it; he had followed, almost breathlessly, Mr. Wrhymper's adventures on it, and had formed an opinion on the famous question as to whether the rope, whose parting had cost four lives, were snapped or deliberately cut; next he had heard Tom discourse upon the peak; and thirdly he now saw for himself what a self-sufficient giant it was, broad-based as if on great claws, with that famous sharp head, tilted ever so little as if to see who were the next adventurers who were going to attack. It was upon the Matterhorn, then, that his heart was chiefly set; it stood for him as a symbol of all he meant to do in life generally.

" They say there are a lot of chains on it now," he suddenly said.

" That's nonsense! " said Tom. " They're fused by lightning within a year or two. Besides, the climbing's just as difficult. Besides, you needn't use them."

" And we start on the Riffelhorn to-morrow? "

" This afternoon, if you're game."

" Tell us about it."

" Well, we must be getting on. I'll tell you as we go.... Look; isn't that them? "

He stood up, pointing down the slopes; and there, tiny as mechanical toys, there moved out of the shadow of the trees, five hundred feet below, the small and solemn procession of mules and porters with which the Meredith parents were ascending. Mr. Meredith had been perfectly explicit this morning. He would walk, he said, where it was absolutely impossible to be conveyed, provided it was reasonably flat going, and not too far. The boys might kill themselves as soon as they liked; but they must not ask him to accompany them.

" Yes; let's get on," said Val, getting to his feet once more.

It appeared that the Riffelhorn had been designed by an indulgent Providence as a kind of gymnasium for rock-climbers. It was a small peak of rock, jutting out from the Corner Grat over the Corner glacier; it possessed precipices quite deep enough to test the head (that on the glacier was a good thousand feet); it was constructed of excellent rock; and, best of all, there were no fewer than six ways to the top, namely, the ordinary way, the " sky-line," the ascent from the glacier, the ascent from the Corner side, with two more on the side facing the Matterhorn — these latter both short, but exceeding-steep. The ascent known as the Matterhorn chimney contained but two footholds in forty feet.

:( Then how do you get up it? " panted Val; for they were swinging on again at a good pace.

" Shoulders and knees," said Tom tersely, " right across the chimney."

" Have you done it? "

" Lord, yes."

"And if you fall?"

" Oh! you'd go on to the glacier, I should think. But of course you have a rope."

(n)

A Riffelalp table d'hote presents as remarkable contrasts as any table d'hote in the world, since it comprises specimens of the most active and the most passive types of the human race. There are large, stately ladies there, suspiciously bright-eyed, in silk petticoats, with their lace- fringed parasols leaning in the corner; and there are lean, sun-dried athletes, who have ascended Monte Rosa yesterday and propose to start for the Weisshorn to-morrow. The complexions of the former are often perfectly preserved, since they have come up here in a litter, and have done no more than stroll for a quarter of a mile along the level path leading towards the Findelen glacier; the complexions of the latter are usually non-existent: at the best they are of a rich dry-leaf tint, at the worst they are olive, with a pink, peeled nose and puckered eyes set in the midst.

It was at the end of one of the two long tables, furnished with guests of these varieties, that the party of five sat down at about a quarter-past twelve. The parents had taken it easily, and appeared now, scarcely flushed — Mrs. Meredith a rather round-faced, happy-looking lady, in a blouse and twill skirt; Mr. Meredith a dry, thin man, looking to be exactly what he was — a lawyer — in a neat grey tailed suit, with a high forehead and humorous, sharp eyes. As a matter of fact, he was a K.C., sitting, so to speak, on the very edge of the bench.

" Now, Tom," he said, " tell us all about them. Who's here? I mean of your sort."

Tom took another careful survey of the faces and began. It was a big room, high-ceilinged and wide-windowed, looking straight out at the end by which the new party sat upon the Matterhorn end of the valley. There sat the monster, guarded by the little, black Hoinbi at his base, as a giant might sit with a small dog between his knees. And the whole view was sublime; it glimmered, from these windows, with the blue of a London riding-school. But it was not with this that Val was interested just now.

It was extraordinarily fascinating to Val, for there were at least two climbers at the table that day of whom he had actually read in printed books; and one of them James Armstrong, Secretary of the Alpine Club. (With infinite envy he saw Tom presently nod at him and receive a nod in return.) There were also, it appeared, staying in the hotel, though not present at this moment, a party of four men whom Tom had met and climbed with last year. They had gone for what was called a " training-walk " up to the top of the Breithorn, and would be back by evening. Tom had learned all those things from the hotel-porter upon his arrival.

" And what are you boys going to do this afternoon? "

" Riffelhorn, father."

His mother glanced at Val.

" You don't look very strong, Mr. Val," she said. " Are you sure "

" Oh! I'm all right, thanks."

He had determined to take a firm line at once. He was not going to be mothered.

" And you'll be back...?"

" For table d'hote, anyhow/' said Tom.

"You three alone?"

" Oh! we'll go up the easy way, of course, unless Armstrong'll come. I'll ask him afterwards. Here he comes, by gad."

It was a very pleasant man, thought Val, and very admirable looking, who came and sat down by them on his way out. But he seemed very unsensational-looking for the Secretary of the Alpine Club, and indeed, with his short whiskers and bald forehead, rather resembled a Low Church clergyman. He was not even in knickerbockers, but in a grey flannel suit, and carried a white canvas hat. He actually had a gentian in his buttonhole. He moved slowly and easily, as if his limbs were loosely attached to his body.

" And what are you going to begin with, Tom? " he asked, when all the proper things had been said. " Monte Rosa between tea and dinner? "

" Riffelhorn," said Tom decisively. " We start in ten minutes from now. I wish you'd come."

The Secretary grinned.

" And you walked up from Zermatt this morning! And your friends? "

" They're coming too."

" Gentlemen," said the other gravely to the two boys, " I solemnly warn you against Mr. Thomas Meredith. I hope you won't stand it for one moment. And wouldn't you much sooner sit quietly in the verandah for the rest of the day? "

Val dissented enthusiastically. (He thoroughly approved of this man. )

" Well, well; and so it's the Riffelhorn. Glacier side?"

Tom explained that his friends had never been in Switzerland before; he had proposed the easy way up, but if Mr. Armstrong would come they could take a rope and do the sky-line.

Mr. Armstrong sniffed.

" You'll be getting into mischief. I see that. Yes, I'll come if you'll give me half an hour for a cigar and won't walk too fast.... Yes, I should think we might manage the sky-line together."

He glanced at the three faces with an approving humour that made Val's heart leap with pleasure.

(m)

A marmot was feeding on the grass not a hundred yards from the foot of the Riffelhorn, and not fifty from the little lake in whose surface the Matterhorn lies reversed.

It was a day of extraordinary peace down here in the hollow. On all sides lay hummocky and broken ground, rocks, grass, wiry plants, rolling up and up towards the path far away that led to the Corner Grat. Overhead lay the sky, an enormous hard-looking dome of intense blue deepening to black. It was an entire cosmos in itself, silent, self-sufficient, complete; for the iron crags of the Riffelhorn, black against the glaring sky, were as remote as the sun from the earth. Here was no sound, for the breeze had dropped, and not a thread of water moved; only the minute crunching and tearing of the marmot's teeth emphasised the stillness. Once he heard the shuffle of feet as his friend over the nearest slope moved to juicier pasture, and then silence fell again.

The isolation was so complete, the spaces so vast, that an interruption would seem to partake of the nature of the miraculous; for the world of consciousness within the marmot's tiny brain was as well rounded and secure as the hollow in which he browsed and the earth on which he lived. An eternity separated him from the warm morning into which he had come to take air and food and water; an eternity from the evening in which he would go back to his safe darkness and his lined nest. Only the sun moved overhead, a blazing pool of fire, like Destiny across the sky. He had his universe to which his instincts responded: there was that within him that had brought him out a few hours ago, that would send him back a few hours hence; there was that within him too that would respond to the unexpected, should it befall him, that would adapt him to his shattered world....

Well, the unexpected happened, as it always does; and a phenomenon came into his life that of course had come before with the advent of every tourist, that, for all that, he continually forgot.

It began with a tremor of the earth, so subtle, and originated at so great a distance, that it did no more than cause him to lift his brown chin from the grass. Presently it died away, and presently began again.

He sat up abruptly. Still all was as it had been. The vast blue vault was unmoved; the Matterhorn remained unruffled in its perfect mirror; the Riffelhorn stood up abrupt and forbidding. No voice or cry or shot broke the intense, hot silence. Yet Destiny approached.

Five minutes later there was a shrill call and the rush of scampering feet. His neighbour had gone to ground. Down by the shore there rippled across the grass yet another brown body, and vanished. The marmots were going to earth.

Yet still he waited, his ears pricked, his nose moving gently. And then, as against the glaring horizon twenty yards away, a white hat rose swinging, he too whistled and went.

The cosmos was broken up. And beneath, in the secure darkness, he began once more to adapt himself to his environment.

It was about two hours and a half after tabled'hote that Val suddenly found himself wishing he had never been born. That moment comes sooner or later to every living being who climbs a mountain. It arises from a multitude of causes, and usually passes away again with as startling a movement as that with which it arrived. Val's moment was a typical case.

They had started in less than half an hour after a rather heavy meal, having preceded that meal with an exceedingly hot walk up from the valley, and the ascent to the base of the RifTelhorn seemed almost endless to a mind accustomed only to English slopes and distances. The sun shone straight down with an astonishing force upon their backs as they ascended, and Val had almost despaired ever of reaching even the plateau of the lower Corner Grat. Then, when that was reached, there was a long walk over tumbled ground, where Val had his first sight of a marmot, and then, at the moment when the first slopes of rock were reached and the Riff el-horn itself, a towering white peak, stood straight overhead — at the moment when Val had expected to be allowed to throw himself flat on the ground to pant and to drink, Tom, with shining eyes, had exclaimed:

" Now we're going to begin."

Val looked desperately at Austin, and was enraged to see his calmness. Certainly that brother of his looked hotter than he had ever seen him before; he was flushed heavily, and his face was one thin sheet of wet that dripped off his chin and nose; but he did not seem at all distressingly exhausted, and made no protest. Very well then; Val would not either.

Then, without another word, Tom had set his hands upon the rock and risen some four feet. Austin came next, then Val, and last Mr. Arm-strong, a little behind, since he had paused to arrange his handkerchief delicately under his hat and over the back of his neck. He was still in grey flannel trousers....

The climbing did not seem impossibly difficult. Certainly it was unlike anything Val had ever done before, and it appeared to him strange that the rope was not put on, since after a quarter of an hour's climbing, there was a slope of rocks on their right that would certainly kill anyone who happened to fall over. But he made a strong act of faith in Tom

Meredith, and went on. On the whole he was pleased with his prowess. He was also pleased that the rope had not been mentioned again.

Then came the moment when he wished himself dead, suddenly and violently — or, rather, that he had never been born, since it seemed to him that death, abrupt and brutal, was his only possible prospect.

They had reached the foot of a little wall of rock about twelve feet in height, up which ran a deep crack, not deep enough to get inside. The wall appeared to Val absolutely insurmountable. Tom turned round.

"Look here/' he said, "I think you'd better watch my feet, if you don't mind. This is absolutely the only bit of climbing on the thing at all. And if you start with the wrong foot, you'll find it hard." "

Val regarded him with horror, but he said nothing.

For it seemed to him that not only had they been climbing, but that the climbing was quite tolerably hard. He looked down the side of rock up which they had scaled their way just now. The view ended abruptly some fifteen feet below him, and the next solid earth to be seen beyond was, perhaps, three hundred feet distant. And now they were to ascend on the top of all this, an apparently perpendicular wall. To fall on it would mean certain death. One would pitch first on the slope, roll three yards, fall again, bounce off, and then land — well — three hundred feet below. All this was entirely clear to him; and he marvelled.... He glanced at Mr. Armstrong.

That gentleman still held between his teeth a stalk of grass he had plucked at the foot of the little peak: he was twiddling it about with his tongue.

1 This is your patent way up, isn't it, Tom? "

" Just a variation: we meet the regular way at the top of this."

" I thought so. Up you go, then."

Val leaned back and watched.

He looked first at Tom, who now resembled an enormous spider going up a wall, attached to it, it appeared, merely by some mysterious power of suction. His body seemed to have dwindled to nothing; there were just four limbs of unsuspected length, writhing their way upwards. Then he looked at Austin: Austin, silent and apparently unmoved, was watching closely where Tom put his hands and feet. Then he stared out desolately at the huge spaces about him, the gulf of air up which they had come; the enormous sky, hard and near-looking, just beyond those ruddy rocks. He considered that he was a fool; for the agony was not upon him yet — a fool, no more at present.

" Come on," said a voice; and there was Tom, grinning like a griffin on a gate-post, peering down from the summit of this wall that seemed now the end of all things. His face seemed sinister and dark against that tremendous blue sky — sinister even in its happy grin of physical delight.

But it was Austin's turn next; and with a kind of fascination, he watched his brother go up, aided by remarks — " Right foot there;... now your left hand here;... yes; let go with your right " — until with a heave, Austin wriggled over the top of the wall and instantly vanished.

And then he knew that he must go forward.

"Which foot first?" he stammered....

The moment came when he was half-way up. Up to that point he had obeyed, simply and blindly, with a sense of fatality more weighty even than his own despair. He had found himself rising... rising, exactly as Tom told him; once even a flush of exultation thrilled through him, as he considered that he was doing very admirably for his first climb.

And immediately after the exultation came the horror. He put out his wrong hand, seeing, as he thought, a corner of rock which simply demanded it; he let go with his left hand, shifted his position, lost control; and for about five seconds hung, he thought, merely by one hand and one foot, and that his foot was slipping. He was entirely unable to speak.... No one spoke....

In those instants came the full horror on him. He saw, as in a vision, the rocks below him, the gulf below the rocks. He was perfectly certain that no power on earth could now save him; and that interior act of which I have spoken, though with a vehemence quite impossible to describe, exploded within him like gunpowder. Why had he ever been born? His cosmos was unexpectedly shattered....

" Go on. I've got you," said a solemn and tranquil voice. " Yes, go on. Do as I tell you. Put your left hand three inches higher."

He felt something firm grip his ankle. He did what he was told. He felt his knees shaking violently; but the rest was easy; and he too wriggled over the top, gripped by the shoulder as he did so, and stood up on a broad platform, beside Austin. Then the grave face of Mr. Armstrong, with the grass-stalk still in his mouth, rose serene and beneficent over the beetling edge.

The exultation that came on him as he swung his way downwards at last, and dropped on to the shingle an hour later, was proportionate to his bad moment on the way up.

It seemed to him he had done extraordinarily well. Certainly he had had a horrible instant; but he had shown no signs of it, and that was exactly what courage meant. He had done, in fact, a good deal better than Austin, since Austin, through hearing what was said and doing it exactly, had had no real difficulty at all. Himself, on the other hand, had got into trouble, and had emerged from it triumphant.

There was a good deal of excuse for this exultation. The superb air in which he had climbed was like wine to his heart; his muscles had been exercised to the full. Besides, he had, actually, at his first attempt, succeeded in what really was rock-climbing, after all. Even Armstrong had implied that it was a good deal to do, after the morning walk from Zermatt.

" I thought you always put on the rope for the sky-line of the Riffelhorn," he said to Tom as they swung homewards.

" Most people do. I've done it without, though."

" I'm glad we didn't."

"Eh?"

" I'm glad we didn't," explained Val.

" That wasn't the sky-line we did."

"But "

" Good Lord, no; that's the ladies' way. All except the bit of wall where you were shoved."

"And that's the easiest way?" said Val, with sinking heart.

"Of course, my dear chap. Armstrong thought we'd better not try the sky-line till you'd seen what you could do."

" Oh! "

" There was a pause. Then Val put the question he had longed to put for the last hour.

"And did I... we... do pretty well?"

" Oh, yes," said Tom indifferently.