accelerating human bodies on the three braced men—especially on Old Peter—was terrible. The rope whipped through Old Peter’s hands, leaving a terrible sear that remained for many weeks. (In his guilt and dismay, Old Peter would show anyone who would look his scarred hand.)
But despite the loop around the small outcropping above Old Peter—or perhaps because of it—the rope snapped in midair. Much later, Edward Whymper told a reporter that he had perfectly remembered the terrible sound of that snapping for twenty-five years and would until the moment of his own death.
In his book Whymper wrote:
For a few seconds, we saw our unfortunate companions sliding downwards on their backs, and spreading out their hands, endeavouring to save themselves. They passed from our sight uninjured, disappeared one by one, and fell from precipice to precipice on the Matterhorn-gletscher below, a distance of nearly 4,000 feet in height.
It takes a while for men to fall almost a mile. Luckily—if that’s the word—they are almost always dead and largely dismembered long before they reach the bottom. Many was the time that I’d heard climbers—both in the States and in Europe—describe the horrors of slowly descending for hours after a comrade or comrades had fallen. It was not pristine. Each described following intermittent trails, on rock and snow and ice, of blood—so very much blood—and shattered ice axes and shredded, bloody clothing and boots, and, always, fragments of rended body parts.
Whymper and the Taugwalders’ route—when they finally worked up the nerve to begin moving again, which was up to half an hour after their friends’ fall, according to Whymper (who blamed the blubbering, terrified Taugwalders for the delay)—was on the slab-stepped ridge itself. From that angle they had a clear view of the bloody path of their friends’ violent descent—bodies bouncing from boulder to boulder, ricocheting from precipice to precipice—down the sheer north face of the Matterhorn onto the unyielding ice of the Matterhorn Glacier.
In the end, it took Whymper more than two days to urge, cajole, threaten, bribe, and shame the Zermatt guides to climb back up to that glacier to “retrieve the bodies.” The local guides—members all of a strong guides’ trade union—obviously knew better than the gifted amateur British climber what “bodies” would consist of after such a fall. The guides also had a much better appreciation of what Whymper was calling “a simple climb to the base of the mountain.” The climb to the glacier at the base of the north face of the Matterhorn was a dangerous proposition—in some ways as dangerous as climbing the mountain—with hidden crevasses, seracs that could collapse at any time, unstable pinnacles and leaning towers of old ice, and a maze of ice boulders in which men could, and usually did, get lost for hours or days.
But eventually Whymper got his volunteers—paid “volunteers” in the case of most of the guides who grudgingly agreed to go on Monday (on Sunday they all had to stay in Zermatt for Mass)—and eventually they found the bodies.
Whymper later admitted that he’d fully hoped, through some miracle of soft snow and lucky sliding for almost a vertical mile, that he would find one or more of his climbing partners alive.
Not even close.
What was left of the three corpses was scattered on the ice and rock at the base of the north face. Rocks were falling all around the “rescuers” almost the entire time they were there, but when the guides fled for cover, Whymper and other Englishmen who’d joined him held their ground. Or, to be specific, the Brits stupidly and stubbornly held their spot on the glacier, with rocks and boulders slamming down all around like cold meteors.
At first no one, not even Whymper, could distinguish the bits of one corpse from another. But then the Englishman was able to identify his guide and friend Michel Croz by a bit of his beard. Croz’s arms and legs had been torn off, as well as most of his skull, but a fragment of his lower jaw remained, and the beard there was the color of Croz’s beard. One of the guides who returned when the rockfall let up, an old friend of Michel Croz’s, identified scars on a shattered forearm lying many yards away and a hand atop an ice boulder with more scars that Croz’s friend well remembered.
Oddly enough, there were slight tatters of trousers left around Croz’s dismembered trunk, and six gold coins had stayed in the pocket during his entire descent.
Someone noticed that Croz’s crucifix—without which he never climbed—had dug itself deep into the surviving fragment of the guide’s lower jaw, embedding itself as deep and solidly as a cross-shaped bullet. One of the men, Robertson, clicked open his penknife and dug it out, thinking that Croz’s family might want it.
Hudson’s remains were identified only by his wallet, and by a letter from his wife that had completed the descent with him when his arms, legs, and head had not. Whymper found one of Hudson’s gloves and, wandering wider on the bloodied glacier, picked up a broad-brimmed English sunhat that he, Whymper, had only recently given Croz.
The majority of Hadow’s remains were scattered between those of Croz and Hudson.
As the guides ran for shelter during another rock avalanche, Whymper stood by the bodies and noticed for the first time that the rope was still attached between what was left of the torsos of Croz and Hadow, and also between Hadow and Hudson.
There was no body of Lord Francis Douglas. Some records say that the men that day found one of Douglas’s boots—no human foot inside—while others say that it was a belt that Whymper had noticed Douglas wearing during the ascent. Another story says that it was a single glove.
Whymper’s realization at that moment was that the first three men had been secured by one of the thicker, more solid ropes, while Old Peter Taugwalder had tied Douglas to himself by a much thinner, lighter rope, not often used for roping the actual climbers. There was no doubt in Whymper’s mind at that moment that Old Peter had deliberately used a less secure rope in case the first four men should fall. In later years, the famous British climber came close to accusing the old guide of this in plain words and print.
In truth, though,
No one ever did find the remains of 18-year-old Francis Douglas, and this fact gave rise to an odd little footnote to the tragedy.
Lord Francis Douglas’s somewhat elderly mother, Lady Queensberry, as Whymper wrote, “suffered much from the idea of her son not having been found.”
In truth, it was worse than that. Lady Queensberry soon became obsessed with the morbid conviction that her young son was still alive somewhere on the Matterhorn—trapped high in an ice cave, perhaps, while surviving by eating lichens and bits of mountain goats, drinking the water that tumbled over his prison from the snows above. Perhaps—most probably Lady Queensberry thought—her beloved son Francis was injured, unable to descend on his own and even unable to find a way to signal to those so far below. Or perhaps, she told one old friend during a visit, Francis had survived the fall to the glacier—after all, he wasn’t attached by rope to those who had died so horribly—and was even now eking out a cold survival in a crevasse somewhere.
Men of honor such as Professor John Tyndall—who had almost joined Whymper on the famous first ascent—then returned to the Matterhorn to carry out systematic searches for Douglas’s remains. He wrote to Lady Queensberry and promised “to exert to the full extent of my abilities in the difficult and dangerous—but necessary for your piece of mind—task of finding and returning your brave son’s body to his native land and ancestral home.”
But Douglas’s mother wasn’t interested in someone returning her darling son Francis’s body. She knew he was alive and she wanted him found.
She went to her grave believing that Lord Francis Douglas still lived, stranded high on the north face of the Matterhorn or wandering the cold blue caverns beneath the glacier at the mountain’s foot.
So the Deacon calls a halt to our descent through the “treacherous bit,” and Jean-Claude and I stand there a few meters lower than him, both of us getting colder by the minute (the north face is in full shadow now and the wind has grown colder as it increases its howling), and—at least on my part—wondering what the hell old Richard Davis Deacon is up to. Perhaps, I think, he’s getting senile. After all, the Deacon, although physically more fit than I am at 22, is entering his dotage at age 37 (the precise age of George Mallory when he disappeared on Everest this
