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 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!”