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Dr. Jules Jacot-Guillarmod Diary Entry Friday, 1 September 1905
Up at 8:00. Righi [Alcesti de Righi] and I decide to go up and see the others, that is, Pache [Alexis Pache], Reymond [Charles-Adolphe Reymond] and Crowley. We eat a little and we take with us all men of good will.
We leave at 10:00 for the upper camp. We take men with us without loads for several reasons. It's first and foremost to help us make and score the path, with their bad Tibetan shoes that are not made for snow and glaciers and that it be closed (?), for the following days in case this fresh snow melts and adheres to the underlying ice. Then yesterday these men came back from the upper camp saying that Crowley had beaten them and stung them with his ice axe when they didn't move forward as they pleased. These men refused to walk with him again and prefer not to receive any more treatment and ask to go home even without anything; do they have to be pushed to the limit! There is more to it than that: these men argue that the chosen route is too dangerous and that we could go further to the left with much less risk. Crowley trop fier not only does not want to take into account these observations, which are nevertheless very accurate, but also effects taunting them and persists only so that it is not said that he has only listened to the common opinion of the indigenous people expressed by Nanga's sensible words; finally we hope by bringing them back to Crowley and defending them if necessary against him to keep their support by eliminating Crowley, if necessary.
Besides, until now Crowley has done almost nothing of any use whatsoever, from the point of view of mountaineering and the point of view of the ascent itself. All he managed to do was to move the steps forward thanks to Pache and Righi who worked miracles to bring up to the upper camp the numerous and heteroclite things including Crowley still thinks he needs it. However, he wanted to move much too fast and in the last few days, especially as we moved away from the supply base, we could not make him understand that we had to wait 2, then 3 and then 4 days before we could resume communication with the base.
We leave at 10 a.m. and we climb quite quickly to the bottom of the great slope whose snow has gone down the avalanche where we have to walk every step carefully because of the coolies. Righi is not very useful, but he cannot be blamed for this given his novitiate. At the top of the gde slope it goes a little better and we find 2 loads abandoned by the fugitives the day before yesterday, we do not find the suitcase of Pache which must have rolled or precipitated by its carrier, although it had been seen the previous 2 days.
We reach Camp IV without any problem or 2 or 3 coolies who can't sleep higher have taken up residence. We don't stop for long and half an hour later we're at Camp V where there's only one nanka. We see Crowley lying on a bag with 3 coolies who can't go any higher and who left after Righi and Pache without knowing where they will sleep tonight. Another foolishness of Crowley that the madness of always wanting to advance without tactics pushed to drive out these men without providing them with a shelter. These men have been here since 9:00 in the morning and it's 2:1/2 hours.
The dramatic descent. Crowley when he saw us, abandoned his men and came to us. Righi him takes out all the package he has on his heart, so that Crowley remains flattened; I tell him in turn that I no longer recognize his authority and that I will come down. By shouting a little I can talk with Pache and Reymond and after a while they decide to come down, we decide with Righi to wait for them; I go to meet them twice, once to carry a rope that Crowley claims but that he lets me carry higher then a second to help Pache and Reymond who have a lot of trouble with their coolies that come down and that they assist not without trouble and it is not pride. We're wasting our time waiting for them. I bring the dak (?) and give Pache some letters from home and elsewhere.
At 5 a.m. the last coolies are at good port and the others who had gone up with us have already left, there are about 15 of them.
We quickly get in line and Pache asks to come down with us to be less cold, he is very proud to have gone to 6,500 m and seems to want to be satisfied with this feat; we take briefly Crowley's leave that we leave with Reymond, Salama and 2 or 3 other men. The first steps go very well as men slip into the steps redone partly by those who have come down in front of us, but they are easily retained. a little lower the steps are very fast; I pass them quickly and Righi too, but 2 coolies who come behind slip and cannot hold back and moreover drag Pache and my nanka who carries my bag; Righi and I arque about ons but in vain; all the snow of the slope falls below us and we are thrown down a slope of 45° and more perhaps; more way to hold back; we must undergo his fate; we slide very quickly and quickly I lose sight of our comrades who disappear in the swirls of the snow. Trained by the rope, having lost my ice axe and not being able to catch up with others in passing, I let myself be carried away by simply swimming and staying on the surface; all at the same time I feel myself falling and falling on my kidneys; I feel myself sliding and climbing slightly to stop; I look around me and pull on the rope; I get up as fast as the shortness of breath allows and I see Righi on his back not moving, I go to him as fast as I can and as he is only applied to the snow by the rope I clear him and then we both try to pull on the rope, but it is caught like a chain in a wall and nothing moves; we call for help and Reymond answers immediately while Crowley only says "they fell with a avalanche there is nothing to do! and don't even put your nose in to his tent". Reymond joins us as quickly as he can by following the tracks of the avalanche, where there is no longer any danger. Meanwhile with our bare hands, we try to dig the snow but it is like cement and during this 15 minutes it takes Reymond to join us we can't dig more than 1/2 meter. Reymond finds 3 of our ice axes and joins us. We're starting over again to dig following the rope but no matter how much we stir the snow, it's a Danai des job. The night is here. . . We are exhausted and wonder when and how we will get back to our camp. Our rope mates are dead; you can't stay so long without breathing. We won't risk any more lives. . . We'll come back with tools to take these friends out tomorrow or the days. following. Let's go down again.
We go back up together, around 10 am, on September 1st. The coolies show a great reluctance to follow us, but most of them end up following the steps that we carefully cut for them. We move quickly up to the first big slope where the road of the previous days has been swept by an avalanche. We have to redo all the steps, which takes us a lot of time. Higher up, other sections of the road were also swept away, especially where Pache's [Alexis Pache] bunk had remained. In three hours, we reach the camp VI which was abandoned, and one hour later we arrive at the VII°, deserted at the moment. The first thing that I notice is that Pache did not have his bunk taken and that it must have been carried away by an avalanche; this assumption was soon after confirmed to us.
Through the holes in the fog, we see, a hundred meters above us, a few coolies in the company of Crowley, who had stopped for lack of rope. I soon join him by bringing him one, which had remained in the camp. As the evening is quite advanced and that no place suitable for the establishment of a camp could be discovered, we decide to return to the Camp VII, summarily arranged for two people. The porters come down in their turn, carefully and without a hitch, in spite of their enormous loads; with Pache and Reymond, who had climbed two to three hundred meters higher without finding anything suitable in terms of camp, we help them to make their way back and, at half past four, everyone returned safely.
Pache, who slept three nights on the bottom of the tent, would rather go back down to Camp V than sleep at 6,200 meters; he is very happy to have climbed to 6,500 meters,—1,700 more than Mont Blanc, he said, not without pride—and manifests the intention to limit himself to this feat. So we took him and his servant, leaving Crowley at Camp VII with Reymond [Charles-Adolphe Reymond].
We formed a rope of six, three Europeans with shoes equipped with spikes and three natives, two of whom had poor footwear, and whom, for pity's sake, we roped up. As a precautionary measure, two of the latter were placed in the middle. I walk in front, to redo the steps damaged by the coolies who came down before us; de Righi comes next; he is followed by two natives; Pache is the fifth and my servant, to whom I gave a pair of shoes and crampons, closes the step.
The first steps go quite well; the coolies in the middle sometimes slip, but the rope is always well stretched, so they are easily retained. A little further down, the track that used to go down vertically turns at right angles and becomes horizontal; Righi [Alcesti de Righi] and I pass easily; but the coolie that follows slips and drags the fourth one. Pache does not have the strength to hold these two men on such an inclined slope and loses his footing in turn and the sixth. De Righi and I, with a firm grip, believe we can hold these four men, whose fall speed is increasing rapidly. As the rope tightens, the snow suddenly comes off under our feet, creating an avalanche that quickly takes on huge proportions. The entire slope of the mountain is soon swept over more than fifty meters wide.
With no support for my feet, despite my crampons, and suspended by my hands from my ice axe, I only have the strength to hold on to Righi, who is swept away in the avalanche; but when the whirlwind of our comrades rolling over each other passes by, there is no human strength capable of resisting such a jolt; violently separated from my ice axe, I am dragged to my tour. The whole scene didn't last five seconds. However, I don't lose my head; I try in vain to catch another ice axe; I miss it; all I have to do is try to stay above the snow, swimming with all my strength. My comrades disappear one after the other in the swirling avalanche.—Suddenly I fall on my kidneys, half suffocated; I feel like I'm going back up slightly, then I resume my fall, when I suddenly stop.
For a few seconds, I lie on my back, annihilated, unable to catch my breath. Panting, I manage to get up again and, thanks to the rope, to climb up to the lower lip of the crevasse where I see Righi lying on his back, unable to move and half buried in the snow. I approach him and, after much effort, I succeed in freeing him; he is so devastated that he barely has the strength to stand. Without effective help, I try in vain to pull on the rope that still connects us to our comrades buried under the snow. With our bare hands, we try to follow this rope; it descends vertically into the crevasse, to a depth we do not know. We only manage to dig a funnel without encountering anything but snow.
I call for help and soon Reymond appears at the top of the slope; the air is very calm, so that despite the distance—more than half a kilometer—we manage to make ourselves understood. I shout the accident to him. Without hearing more, he summarily equips himself and starts to descend as quickly as the slope allows. Soon he is towards us and with the ice axes he has picked up along the way, we start digging the snow hard again. For almost an hour, we exhaust ourselves in useless efforts; the rope always descends vertically without the slightest trace of our companions appearing.
Night has come; a starry night like we had not had until now and which had been preceded by a sunset with infinitely soft hues, green, red, blue and yellow, melted harmoniously, as Pache loved and admired them so much. But we had only glimpsed this splendor confusedly. In turn, we take turns to go down to the bottom of the funnel that we try to dig a little deeper: we exhaust ourselves in vain. Our clothes are filled with snow that melts while working and freezes as soon as we stop. I have two frozen toes and my hands are insensitive. Our comrades have been dead for a long time; all our efforts are now useless; all we have left is the sad duty of returning to pick up their corpses with tools other than our ice axes.
We spent nearly two hours at the scene of the accident; there are still as many hours left to return to Camp V and we are exhausted. The temperature drops more and more; one night without shelter on the glacier could still be fatal for one of us. Let's go back down. As of the first steps, of Righi, annihilated, stumbles at every moment, in spite of his crampons; Reymond has to do a lot to hold him on slopes of 45° and 50° where the snow has no resistance and slips away under his feet. At the end of half an hour, we arrive at the big slope which gave us so much trouble this morning, and there again de Righi makes many false steps to which Reymond remedies as well as he can. Half an hour again and our cries end up being heard from the camp. A light is stirring and soon we see who is finally coming to meet us. Cruel irony! It is the son of one of the coolies left in the avalanche who comes to bring us life! After many sorrows and time, the camp is finally reached; we go to bed without eating, but nobody closed the eye of the night.
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