We reached the Grands Mulets in the middle of the afternoon.  Here the great majority of amateur climbers are content to terminate their ascent of Mont Blanc.  The experience of getting as far as this point and back again is, as the incidents just related show, anything but insignificant, and may prove not only exciting but even tragic.  Yet, of course, the real work, the tug of war between human endurance and the obstacles of untamed nature, is above.  The Grands Mulets formed the stopping place in some of the earliest attempts to climb Mont Blanc, more than a hundred years ago.  Here Jacques Balmat, the hero of the first ascent, passed an awful night alone, amid the cracking of glaciers and the shaking of avalanches, before his final victory over the peak in 1786.  In the spirit which led the Romans to surname the conqueror of Hannibal “Scipio Africanus,” the exultant Chamonniards called their hero “Balmat de Mont Blanc.”  He, too, finally perished by a fall from a precipice in 1834, and to-day there are those who whisper that his spirit can be seen flitting over the snowy wastes before every new catastrophe.

The cabin at the Grands Mulets is furnished with rough bunks and cooking apparatus, and during the summer a woman, Adele Balmat, assisted by the guides, acts as hostess for this high-perched “inn,” ten thousand feet above sea level.

It is customary to leave the Grands Mulets for the ascent to the summit soon after midnight, in order to get over the immense snow slopes before the action of the sun has loosened the avalanches and weakened the crevasse bridges.  But we did not start until half-past three in the morning.  The waning moon, hanging over the Dome du Gouter, gave sufficient light to render a lantern unnecessary, and dawn was near at hand.  Threatening bands of clouds attracted anxious glances from Couttet, and it was evident that a change of weather impended.  But we clambered over the rocks to the crevassed slopes below the Gouter, and pushed upward.

We were now approaching the higher and narrower portion of the immense cleft or channel in the mountain that I have described.  On our right towered the Dome du Gouter, and on the left the walls of the Mont Maudit and its outlying pinnacles.  Snowy ridges and peaks shone afar in the moonlight on all sides.  It was a wilderness of white.

[Illustration:  ADELE BALMAT, HOSTESS AT THE GRANDS MULETS STATION.]

At the height of twelve thousand feet we came upon the Petit Plateau, a comparatively horizontal lap of snow which is frequently swept clear across with avalanches of ice descending from the enormous seracs that hang like cornices upon the precipices above.  The frosty splinters of a recent downfall sparkled and crunched under our feet.  It is one of the most dangerous places on the mountain.  “Men have lost their lives here and will again lose them,” is the remark of Mr. Conway, the Himalayan climber, in describing his passage of the place.  “Many times I have crossed it,” said Monsieur Vallot, the mountain meteorologist, last summer, “but never without a sinking of the heart, and the moment we are over the Petit Plateau I always hear my guides, trained and fearless men, mutter, ‘Once more we are out of it.’”