Free The Abominable by Dan Simmons Page A

fingerholds, and footholds are tiny and hard to find, the projecting boulders and flat areas where a man can brace himself for a belay are all but nonexistent.
    So while the seven climbers, especially the amateurs, felt much more confident now that Whymper and the two Taugwalder guides were tied to their rope—by a totally inadequate rope connecting Old Peter and Lord Francis Douglas, it was discovered later—the new arrangement really didn’t offer much, if any, additional safety.
    And then it all happened at once. Despite a legal inquest in Zermatt which questioned all the principals just days after the event, despite later articles and newspaper stories and books by Whymper and all the other survivors, and despite a thousand newspaper stories about the event, no one is completely sure what happened and in which sequence.
    It seems most probable that the rankest amateur, the 19-year-old Douglas Hadow, missed his step—even with Croz’s guiding hands—and fell, hitting Croz hard and pulling the guide off his own perch. The combined weight of the suddenly plummeting Croz and Hadow must have plucked the more experienced Reverend Charles Hudson and the amazed Lord Francis Douglas off their tiny footholds in less than a second. In almost an instant, four of the seven roped men were bouncing and sliding toward their deaths.
    The remaining three on the rope—“Old Peter” Taugwalder, still connected to Lord Francis Douglas and the other falling men by a cheap piece of rope, then “Young Peter,” then Edward Whymper himself—acted immediately out of instinct and years of experience.
    Old Peter was the only one who had any real chance of stopping the fall by a strong belay. He had a good, comparatively broad foothold. More than that, he was standing below one of the very few rock outcroppings on this entire “treacherous bit” of descent, and he’d looped the climbing rope around it without even thinking about it. Above him, Young Peter and Whymper grabbed what rock they could with one hand and braced themselves for a desperate belay with their other hands on the rope.
    The rope went as taut as an arrow in flight. The physical shock of impact from four falling and constantly 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