Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - XVII. Doctors
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out of print I must tell it you here to make you
understand what I owe to Professor Tillaux.
The ascent of Mont Blanc, winter and summer,
is comparatively speaking, easy. Nobody but
a fool attempts the ascent in the autumn before
the sun of the day and the frost of the night has
had time to fix the fresh snow to the vast slopes
of the mountain. The king of the Alps relies for
his defence against intruders on his avalanches
of fresh snow just as the Schreckhorn relies on his
projectiles of loose rocks.
It was luncheon time when I lit my pipe on
the top. All the foreigners in the hotels of
Chamonix were looking in turn through their
telescopes at the three flies crawling about on the
white calotte that covered the head of the old
mountain king. While they were having their
luncheon, we were groping our way through the
snow in the couloir under Mont Maudit, soon to
appear again in their telescopes on the Grand
Plateau. Nobody spoke, we all knew that the
very sound of the voice might start an avalanche.
Suddenly Boisson looked back, and pointed with
his ice-axe to a black line drawn as by the hand
of a giant across the white slope.
“Wir sind alle verloren,” he murmured as the
immense snowfield split in two and started the
avalanche with a roar of thunder, hurling us
down the slope with vertiginous speed. I felt
nothing, I knew nothing. Suddenly the same
reflex impulse which in Spallanzani’s famous
experiment made his decapitated frog move its
paw to the spot he was pricking with a pin—this
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