Free The Abominable by Dan Simmons Page B

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