It so happened that I was to hear one more story of disaster before getting to the top of Mont Blanc.  While I watched the distant mountain from the Milan cathedral spire the closing scene of a new tragedy was being enacted amid its merciless crevasses.  Dr. Robert Schnurdreher, an advocate of Prague, accompanied by Michael Savoye, guide, and Laurent Brou, porter, ascended Mont Blanc from the Italian side on August 17th, and passed the night in the hut on the Bosses du Dromadaire where, six days before, I had had a stormy experience.  But now the weather was superb, and when, on the morning of the 18th, they started to descend to Chamonix, no thought of impending evil could have oppressed their minds.

They passed the Grand Plateau and the Petit Plateau in safety, and reached the labyrinth of crevasses between the cliffs of the Dome du Gouter and the Grands Mulets.  Just what happened then no one will ever know, but there they disappeared from the world of the living.

[Illustration:  VIEW FROM THE SUMMIT OF MONT BLANC, SHOWING THE MATTERHORN IN THE DISTANCE.]

Eight days went by, and then a telegram was received at Chamonix from the family of the guide Savoye, in Courmayer, Italy, inquiring if he and his party had been seen.  All Chamonix comprehended in an instant the significance of that telegram, and thirty guides started post haste for the mountains.

The fact was now recalled that several days before some of Monsieur Janssen’s porters had noticed an ice axe lying on the snow a little aside from the ordinary route.  They thought nothing of it at the time, supposing that the implement had either been thrown away, or left behind by some one who would return to get it.  This abandoned axe now became the first object of the search.  Having discovered it, the guides knew well where to look for its owner.  The axe lay on a slope of snow almost as hard as ice, and at the foot of the slope was the inevitable crevasse; not one of the largest, being only fifteen feet wide by two hundred long, and one hundred deep, but all too sufficient.  They crept to the edge, and peered into the gloomy depths.  There lay the missing men, still tied together.  Schnurdreher and Savoye had apparently been killed at once; but there was heart-rending evidence that Brou had survived the fall, and made a pitiful effort to scale the perpendicular walls of the ice chasm.  Enclosed in bags of rough sacking, the bodies were dragged with ropes down to the Pierre Pointue, and thence carried to Chamonix.  This is a time-honored procedure in such cases.  Every boy in Chamonix understands how a body should be brought down from Mont Blanc.

On the night of my arrival Savoye and Brou had just been buried at Chamonix, and money was being raised for the relief of their almost destitute families.  But Schnurdreher, in his mountain dress, with his spiked shoes on his feet, still lay at the undertaker’s, awaiting the coming of his relatives.