A TRAMP ABROAD By Mark Twain

Dr. Forbes, the English geologist, had made frequent visits

to the Mont Blanc region, and had given much attention

to the disputed question of the movement of glaciers.

During one of these visits he completed his estimates

of the rate of movement of the glacier which had swallowed

up the three guides, and uttered the prediction that the

glacier would deliver up its dead at the foot of the

mountain thirty-five years from the time of the accident,

or possibly forty.

A dull, slow journey–a movement imperceptible to any eye–

but it was proceeding, nevertheless, and without cessation.

It was a journey which a rolling stone would make in a

few seconds–the lofty point of departure was visible

from the village below in the valley.

The prediction cut curiously close to the truth;

forty-one years after the catastrophe, the remains

were cast forth at the foot of the glacier.

I find an interesting account of the matter in the

HISTOIRE DU MONT BLANC, by Stephen d’Arve. I will

condense this account, as follows:

On the 12th of August, 1861, at the hour of the close of mass,

a guide arrived out of breath at the mairie of Chamonix,

and bearing on his shoulders a very lugubrious burden.

It was a sack filled with human remains which he had gathered

from the orifice of a crevice in the Glacier des Bossons.

He conjectured that these were remains of the victims

of the catastrophe of 1820, and a minute inquest,

immediately instituted by the local authorities,

soon demonstrated the correctness of his supposition.

The contents of the sack were spread upon a long table,

and officially inventoried, as follows:

Portions of three human skulls. Several tufts of black and

blonde hair. A human jaw, furnished with fine white teeth.

A forearm and hand, all the fingers of the latter intact.

The flesh was white and fresh, and both the arm and hand

preserved a degree of flexibility in the articulations.

The ring-finger had suffered a slight abrasion, and the

stain of the blood was still visible and unchanged after

forty-one years. A left foot, the flesh white and fresh.

Along with these fragments were portions of waistcoats, hats,

hobnailed shoes, and other clothing; a wing of a pigeon,

with black feathers; a fragment of an alpenstock;

a tin lantern; and lastly, a boiled leg of mutton,

the only flesh among all the remains that exhaled an

unpleasant odor. The guide said that the mutton had no

odor when he took it from the glacier; an hour’s exposure

to the sun had already begun the work of decomposition upon it.

Persons were called for, to identify these poor pathetic relics,

and a touching scene ensured. Two men were still living

who had witnessed the grim catastrophe of nearly half

a century before–Marie Couttet (saved by his baton)

and Julien Davouassoux (saved by the barometer). These aged

men entered and approached the table. Davouassoux, more than

eighty years old, contemplated the mournful remains mutely

and with a vacant eye, for his intelligence and his memory

were torpid with age; but Couttet’s faculties were still

perfect at seventy-two, and he exhibited strong emotion. He

said:

“Pierre Balmat was fair; he wore a straw hat. This bit of skull,

with the tuft of blond hair, was his; this is his hat.

Pierre Carrier was very dark; this skull was his, and this

felt hat. This is Balmat’s hand, I remember it so well!”

and the old man bent down and kissed it reverently,

then closed his fingers upon it in an affectionate grasp,

crying out, “I could never have dared to believe that

before quitting this world it would be granted me to

press once more the hand of one of those brave comrades,

the hand of my good friend Balmat.”

There is something weirdly pathetic about the picture

of that white-haired veteran greeting with his loving

handshake this friend who had been dead forty years.

When these hands had met last, they were alike in the

softness and freshness of youth; now, one was brown and

wrinkled and horny with age, while the other was still

as young and fair and blemishless as if those forty years