“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 had come and gone in a single moment, leaving no mark of their passage.  Time had gone on, in the one case; it had stood still in the other.  A man who has not seen a friend for a generation, keeps him in mind always as he saw him last, and is somehow surprised, and is also shocked, to see the aging change the years have wrought when he sees him again.  Marie Couttet’s experience, in finding his friend’s hand unaltered from the image of it which he had carried in his memory for forty years, is an experience which stands alone in the history of man, perhaps.

Couttet identified other relics: 

“This hat belonged to Auguste Tairraz.  He carried the cage of pigeons which we proposed to set free upon the summit.  Here is the wing of one of those pigeons.  And here is the fragment of my broken baton; it was by grace of that baton that my life was saved.  Who could have told me that I should one day have the satisfaction to look again upon this bit of wood that supported me above the grave that swallowed up my unfortunate companions!”

No portions of the body of Tairraz, other than a piece of the skull, had been found.  A diligent search was made, but without result.  However, another search was instituted a year later, and this had better success.  Many fragments of clothing which had belonged to the lost guides were discovered; also, part of a lantern, and a green veil with blood-stains on it.  But the interesting feature was this: 

One of the searchers came suddenly upon a sleeved arm projecting from a crevice in the ice-wall, with the hand outstretched as if offering greeting!  “The nails of this white hand were still rosy, and the pose of the extended fingers seemed to express an eloquent welcome to the long-lost light of day.”

The hand and arm were alone; there was no trunk.  After being removed from the ice the flesh-tints quickly faded out and the rosy nails took on the alabaster hue of death.  This was the third right hand found; therefore, all three of the lost men were accounted for, beyond cavil or question.