For the past ten days
Alhubel had basked in the radiant midwinter weather proper to its
eminence of over 6,000 feet. From rising to setting the sun (so
surprising to those who have hitherto associated it with a pale, tepid
plate indistinctly shining through the murky air of England) had blazed
its way across the sparkling blue, and every night the serene and
windless frost had made the stars sparkle like illuminated diamond dust.
Sufficient snow had fallen before Christmas to content the skiers, and
the big rink, sprinkled every evening, had given the skaters each
morning a fresh surface on which to perform their slippery antics.
Bridge and dancing served to while away the greater part of the night,
and to me, now for the first time tasting the joys of a winter in the
Engadine, it seemed that a new heaven and a new earth had been lighted,
warmed, and refrigerated for the special benefit of those who like
myself had been wise enough to save up their days of holiday for the
winter.
But a break came in these ideal
conditions: one afternoon the sun grew vapour-veiled and up the valley
from the north-west a wind frozen with miles of travel over ice-bound
hill-sides began scouting through the calm halls of the heavens. Soon it
grew dusted with snow, first in small flakes driven almost horizontally
before its congealing breath and then in larger tufts as of swansdown.
And though all day for a fortnight before the fate of nations and life
and death had seemed to me of far less importance than to get certain
tracings of the skate-blades on the ice of proper shape and size, it now
seemed that the one paramount consideration was to hurry back to the
hotel for shelter: it was wiser to leave rocking-turns alone than to be
frozen in their quest.
I had come out here with my cousin,
Professor Ingram, the celebrated physiologist and Alpine climber. During
the serenity of the last fortnight he had made a couple of notable
winter ascents, but this morning his weather-wisdom had mistrusted the
signs of the heavens, and instead of attempting the ascent of the Piz
Passug he had waited to see whether his misgivings justified themselves.
So there he sat now in the hall of the admirable hotel with his feet on
the hot-water pipes and the latest delivery of the English post in his
hands. This contained a pamphlet concerning the result of the Mount
Everest expedition, of which he had just finished the perusal when I
entered.
“A very interesting report,” he
said, passing it to me, “and they certainly deserve to succeed next
year. But who can tell, what that final six thousand feet may entail?
Six thousand feet more when you have already accomplished twenty-three
thousand does not seem much, but at present no one knows whether the
human frame can stand exertion at such a height. It may affect not the
lungs and heart only, but possibly the brain. Delirious hallucinations
may occur. In fact, if I did not know better, I should have said that
one such hallucination had occurred to the climbers already.”
“And what was that?” I asked.
“You will find that they thought they
came across the tracks of some naked human foot at a great altitude.
That looks at first sight like an hallucination. What more natural than
that a brain excited and exhilarated by the extreme height should have
interpreted certain marks in the snow as the footprints of a human
being? Every bodily organ at these altitudes is exerting itself to the
utmost to do its work, and the brain seizes on those marks in the snow
and says ‘Yes, I’m all right, I’m doing my job, and I perceive
marks in the snow which I affirm are human footprints.’ You know, even
at this altitude, how restless and eager the brain is, how vividly, as
you told me, you dream at night. Multiply that stimulus and that
consequent eagerness and restlessness by three, and how natural that the
brain should harbour illusions! What after all is the delirium which
often accompanies high fever but the effort of the brain to do its work
under the pressure of feverish conditions? It is so eager to continue
perceiving that it perceives things which have no existence!”
“And yet you don’t think that these
naked human footprints were illusions,” said 1. “You told me you
would have thought so, if you had not known better.”
He shifted in his chair and looked out
of the window a moment. The air was thick now with the density of the
big snow-flakes that were driven along by the squealing north-west gale.
“Quite so,” he said. “In all
probability the human footprints were real human footprints. I expect
that they were the footprints, anyhow, of a being more nearly a man than
anything else. My reason for saying so is that I know such beings exist.
I have even seen quite near at hand — and I assure you I did not wish
to be nearer in spite of my intense curiosity — the creature, shall we
say, which would make such footprints. And if the snow was not so dense,
I could show you the place where I saw him.”
He pointed straight out of the window,
where across the valley lies the huge tower of the Ungeheuerhorn with
the carved pinnacle of rock at the top like some gigantic
rhinoceros-horn. On one side only, as I knew, was the mountain
practicable, and that for none but the finest climbers; on the other
three a succession of ledges and precipices rendered it unscalable. Two
thousand feet of sheer rock form the tower; below are five hundred feet
of fallen boulders, up to the edge of which grow dense woods of larch
and pine.
“Upon the Ungeheuerhorn?” I asked.
“Yes. Up till twenty years ago it had
never been ascended, and I, like several others, spent a lot of time in
trying to find a route up it. My guide and I sometimes spent three
nights together at the hut beside the Blumen glacier, prowling round it,
and it was by luck really that we found the route, for the mountain
looks even more impracticable from the far side than it does from this.
But one day we found a long, transverse fissure in the side which led to
a negotiable ledge; then there came a slanting ice couloir which you
could not see till you got to the foot of it. However, I need not go
into that.”
The big room where we sat was filling
up with cheerful groups driven indoors by this sudden gale and snowfall,
and the cackle of merry tongues grew loud. The band, too, that
invariable appanage of tea-time at Swiss resorts, had begun to tune up
for the usual potpourri from the works of Puccini. Next moment the
sugary, sentimental melodies began.
“Strange contrast!” said Ingram.
“Here are we sitting warm and cosy, our ears pleasantly tickled with
these little baby tunes and outside is the great storm growing more
violent every moment, and swirling round the austere cliffs of the
Ungeheuerhorn: the Horror-Horn, as indeed it was to me.”
“I want to hear all about it,” I
said. “Every detail: make a short story long, if it’s short. I want
to know why it’s your Horror-Horn?”
“Well, Chanton and I (he was my
guide) used to spend days prowling about the cliffs, making a little
progress on one side and then being stopped, and gaining perhaps five
hundred feet on another side and then being confronted by some
insuperable obstacle, till the day when by luck we found the route.
Chanton never liked the job, for some reason that I could not fathom. It
was not because of the difficulty or danger of the climbing, for he was
the most fearless man I have ever met when dealing with rocks and ice,
but he was always insistent that we should get off the mountain and back
to the Blumen hut before sunset. He was scarcely easy even when we had
got back to shelter and locked and barred the door, and I well remember
one night when, as we ate our supper, we heard some animal, a wolf
probably, howling somewhere out in the night. A positive panic seized
him, and I don’t think he closed his eyes till morning. It struck me
then that there might be some grisly legend about the mountain,
connected possibly with its name, and next day I asked him why the peak
was called the Horror Horn. He put the question off at first, and said
that, like the Schreckhorn, its name was due to its precipices and
falling stones; but when I pressed him further he acknowledged that
there was a legend about it, which his father had told him. There were
creatures, so it was supposed, that lived in its caves, things human in
shape, and covered, except for the face and hands, with long black hair.
They were dwarfs in size, four feet high or thereabouts, but of
prodigious strength and agility, remnants of some wild primeval race. It
seemed that they were still in an upward stage of evolution, or so I
guessed, for the story ran that sometimes girls had been carried off by
them, not as prey, and not for any such fate as for those captured by
cannibals, but to be bred from. Young men also had been raped by them,
to be mated with the females of their tribe. All this looked as if the
creatures, as I said, were tending towards humanity. But naturally I did
not believe a word of it, as applied to the conditions of the present
day. Centuries ago, conceivably, there may have been such beings, and,
with the extraordinary tenacity of tradition, the news of this had been
handed down and was still current round the hearths of the peasants. As
for their numbers, Chanton told me that three had been once seen
together by a man who owing to his swiftness on skis had escaped to tell
the tale. This man, he averred, was no other than his grand-father, who
had been benighted one winter evening as he passed through the dense
woods below the Ungeheuerhorn, and Chanton supposed that they had been
driven down to these lower altitudes in search of food during severe
winter weather, for otherwise the recorded sights of them had always
taken place among the rocks of the peak itself. They had pursued his
grandfather, then a young man, at an extraordinarily swift canter,
running sometimes upright as men run, sometimes on all-fours in the
manner of beasts, and their howls were just such as that we had heard
that night in the Blumen hut. Such at any rate was the story Chanton
told me, and, like you, I regarded it as the very moonshine of
superstition. But the very next day I had reason to reconsider my
judgment about it.
“It was on that day that after a week
of exploration we hit on the only route at present known to the top of
our peak. We started as soon as there was light enough to climb by, for,
as you may guess, on very difficult rocks it is impossible to climb by
lantern or moonlight. We hit on the long fissure I have spoken of, we
explored the ledge which from below seemed to end in nothingness, and
with an hour’s stepcutting ascended the couloir which led upwards from
it. From there onwards it was a rock-climb, certainly of considerable
difficulty, but with no heart-breaking discoveries ahead, and it was
about nine in the morning that we stood on the top. We did not wait
there long, for that side of the mountain is raked by falling stones
loosened, when the sun grows hot, from the ice that holds them, and we
made haste to pass the ledge where the falls are most frequent. After
that there was the long fissure to descend, a matter of no great
difficulty, and we were at the end of our work by midday, both of us, as
you may imagine, in the state of the highest elation.
“A long and tiresome scramble among
the huge boulders at the foot of the cliff then lay before us. Here the
hill-side is very porous and great caves extend far into the mountain.
We had unroped at the base of the fissure, and were picking our way as
seemed good to either of us among these fallen rocks, many of them
bigger than an ordinary house, when, on coming round the corner of one
of these, I saw that which made it clear that the stories Chanton had
told me were no figment of traditional superstition.
“Not twenty yards in front of me lay
one of the beings of which he had spoken. There it sprawled naked and
basking on its back with face turned up to the sun, which its narrow
eyes regarded unwinking. In form it was completely human, but the growth
of hair that covered limbs and trunk alike almost completely hid the
sun-tanned skin beneath. But its face, save for the down on its cheeks
and chin, was hairless, and I looked on a countenance the sensual and
malevolent bestiality of which froze me with horror. Had the creature
been an animal, one would have felt scarcely a shudder at the gross
animalism of it; the horror lay in the fact that it was a man. There lay
by it a couple of gnawed bones, and, its meal finished, it was lazily
licking its protuberant lips, from which came a purring murmur of
content. With one hand it scratched the thick hair on its belly, in the
other it held one of these bones, which presently split in half beneath
the pressure of its finger and thumb. But my horror was not based on the
information of what happened to those men whom these creatures caught,
it was due only to my proximity to a thing so human and so infernal. The
peak, of which the ascent had a moment ago filled us with such elated
satisfaction, became to me an Ungeheuerhorn indeed, for it was the home
of beings more awful than the delirium of nightmare could ever have
conceived.
“Chanton was a dozen paces behind me,
and with a backward wave of my hand I caused him to halt. Then
withdrawing myself with infinite precaution, so as not to attract the
gaze of that basking creature, I slipped back round the rock, whispered
to him what I had seen, and with blanched faces we made a long detour,
peering round every corner, and crouching low, not knowing that at any
step we might not come upon another of these beings, or that from the
mouth of one of these caves in the mountain-side there might not appear
another of those hairless and dreadful faces, with perhaps this time the
breasts and insignia of womanhood. That would have been the worst of
all.
“Luck favoured us, for we made our
way among the boulders and shifting stones, the rattle of which might at
any moment have betrayed us, without a repetition of my experience, and
once among the trees we ran as if the Furies themselves were in pursuit.
Well now did I understand, though I dare say I cannot convey, the qualms
of Chanton’s mind when he spoke to me of these creatures. Their very
humanity was what made them so terrible, the fact that they were of the
same race as ourselves, but of a type so abysmally degraded that the
most brutal and inhuman of men would have seemed angelic in
comparison.”
The music of the small band was over
before he had finished the narrative, and the chattering groups round
the tea-table had dispersed. He paused a moment.
“There was a horror of the spirit,”
he said, “which I experienced then, from which, I verily believe, I
have never entirely recovered. I saw then how terrible a living thing
could be, and how terrible, in consequence, was life itself. In us all I
suppose lurks some inherited germ of that ineffable bestiality, and who
knows whether, sterile as it has apparently become in the course of
centuries, it might not fructify again. When I saw that creature sun
itself, I looked into the abyss out of which we have crawled. And these
creatures are trying to crawl out of it now, if they exist any longer.
Certainly for the last twenty years there has been no record of their
being seen, until we come to this story of the footprint seen by the
climbers on Everest. If that is authentic, if the party did not mistake
the footprint of some bear, or what not, for a human tread, it seems as
if still this bestranded remnant of mankind is in existence.”
Now, Ingram, had told his story well;
but sitting in this warm and civilised room, the horror which he had
clearly felt had not communicated itself to me in any very vivid manner.
Intellectually, I agreed, I could appreciate his horror, but certainly
my spirit felt no shudder of interior comprehension.
“But it is odd,” I said, “that
your keen interest in physiology did not disperse your qualms. You were
looking, so I take it, at some form of man more remote probably than the
earliest human remains. Did not something inside you say ‘This is of
absorbing significance’?”
He shook his head.
“No: I only wanted to get away,”
said he. “It was not, as I have told you, the terror of what according to
Chanton’s story, might —await us if we were captured; it was sheer
horror at the creature itself. I quaked at it.”
The snowstorm and the
gale increased in violence that night, and I slept uneasily, plucked
again and again from slumber by the fierce battling of the wind that
shook my windows as if with an imperious demand for admittance. It came
in billowy gusts, with strange noises intermingled with it as for a
moment it abated, with flutings and moanings that rose to shrieks as the
fury of it returned. These noises, no doubt, mingled themselves with my
drowsed and sleepy consciousness, and once I tore myself out of
nightmare, imagining that the creatures of the Horror-horn had gained
footing on my balcony and were rattling at the window-bolts. But before
morning the gale had died away, and I awoke to see the snow falling
dense and fast in a windless air. For three days it continued, without
intermission, and with its cessation there came a frost such as I have
never felt before. Fifty degrees were registered one night, and more the
next, and what the cold must have been on the cliffs of the
Ungeheuerborn I cannot imagine. Sufficient, so I thought, to have made
an end altogether of its secret inhabitants: my cousin, on that day
twenty years ago, had missed an opportunity for study which would
probably never fall again either to him or another.
I received one morning a letter from a
friend saying that he had arrived at the neighbouring winter resort of
St. Luigi, and proposing that I should come over for a morning’s
skating and lunch afterwards. The place was not more than a couple of
miles off, if one took the path over the low, pine-clad foot-hills above
which lay the steep woods below the first rocky slopes of the
Ungeheuerhorn; and accordingly, with a knapsack containing skates on my
back, I went on skis over the wooded slopes and down by an easy descent
again on to St. Luigi. The day was overcast, clouds entirely obscured
the higher peaks though the sun was visible, pale and unluminous,
through the mists. But as the morning went on, it gained the upper hand,
and I slid down into St. Luigi beneath a sparkling firmament. We skated
and lunched, and then, since it looked as if thick weather was coming up
again, I set out early about three o’clock for my return journey.
Hardly had I got into the woods when
the clouds gathered thick above, and streamers and skeins of them began
to descend among the pines through which my path threaded its way. In
ten minutes more their opacity had so increased that I could hardly see
a couple of yards in front of me. Very soon I became aware that I must
have got off the path, for snow-cowled shrubs lay directly in my way,
and, casting back to find it again, I got altogether confused as to
direction. But, though progress was difficult, I knew I had only to keep
on the ascent, and presently I should come to the brow of these low
foot-hills, and descend into the open valley where Alhubel stood. So on
I went, stumbling and sliding over obstacles, and unable, owing to the
thickness of the snow, to take off my skis, for I should have sunk over
the knees at each step. Still the ascent continued, and looking at my
watch I saw that I had already been near an hour on my way from St.
Luigi, a period more than sufficient to complete my whole journey. But
still I stuck to my idea that though I had certainly strayed far from my
proper route a few minutes more must surely see me over the top of the
upward way, and I should find the ground declining into the next valley.
About now, too, I noticed that the mists were growing suffused with
rose-colour, and, though the inference was that it must be close on
sunset, there was consolation in the fact that they were there and might
lift at any moment and disclose to me my whereabouts. But the fact that
night would soon be on me made it needful to bar my mind against that
despair of loneliness which so eats out the heart of a man who is lost
in woods or on mountain-side, that, though still there is plenty of
vigour in his limbs, his nervous force is sapped, and he can do no more
than lie down and abandon himself to whatever fate may await him... And
then I heard that which made the thought of loneliness seem bliss
indeed, for there was a worse fate than loneliness. What I heard
resembled the howl of a wolf, and it came from not far in front of me
where the ridge — was it a ridge? — still rose higher in vestment of
pines.
From behind me came a sudden puff of
wind, which shook the frozen snow from the drooping pine-branches, and
swept away the mists as a broom sweeps the dust from the floor. Radiant
above me were the unclouded skies, already charged with the red of the
sunset, and in front I saw that I had come to the very edge of the wood
through which I had wandered so long. But it was no valley into which I
had penetrated, for there right ahead of me rose the steep slope of
boulders and rocks soaring upwards to the foot of the Ungeheuerhorn.
What, then, was that cry of a wolf which had made my heart stand still?
I saw.
Not twenty yards from me was a fallen
tree, and leaning against the trunk of it was one of the denizens of the
Horror-Horn, and it was a woman. She was enveloped in a thick growth of
hair grey and tufted, and from her head it streamed down over her
shoulders and her bosom, from which hung withered and pendulous breasts.
And looking on her face I comprehended not with my mind alone, but with
a shudder of my spirit, what Ingram had felt. Never had nightmare
fashioned so terrible a countenance; the beauty of sun and stars and of
the beasts of the field and the kindly race of men could not atone for
so hellish an incarnation of the spirit of life. A fathomless bestiality
modelled the slavering mouth and the narrow eyes; I looked into the
abyss itself and knew that out of that abyss on the edge of which I
leaned the generations of men had climbed. What if that ledge crumbled
in front of me and pitched me headlong into its nethermost depths? ...
In one hand she held by the horns a
chamois that kicked and struggled. A blow from its hindleg caught her
withered thigh, and with a grunt of anger she seized the leg in her
other hand, and, as a man may pull from its sheath a stem of
meadow-grass, she plucked it off the body, leaving the torn skin hanging
round the gaping wound. Then putting the red, bleeding member to her
mouth she sucked at it as a child sucks a stick of sweetmeat. Through
flesh and gristle her short, brown teeth penetrated, and she licked her
lips with a sound of purring. Then dropping the leg by her side, she
looked again at the body of the prey now quivering in its
death-convulsion, and with finger and thumb gouged out one of its eyes.
She snapped her teeth on it, and it cracked like a soft-shelled nut.
It must have been but a few seconds
that I stood watching her, in some indescribable catalepsy of terror,
while through my brain there pealed the panic-command of my mind to my
stricken limbs “Begone, begone, while there is time.” Then,
recovering the power of my joints and muscles, I tried to slip behind a
tree and hide myself from this apparition. But the woman — shall I
say? — must have caught my stir of movement, for she raised her eyes
from her living feast and saw me. She craned forward her neck, she
dropped her prey, and half rising began to move towards me. As she did
this, she opened her mouth, and gave forth a howl such as I had heard a
moment before. It was answered by another, but faintly and distantly.
Sliding and slipping, with the toes of
my skis tripping in the obstacles below the snow, I plunged forward down
the hill between the pine-trunks. The low sun already sinking behind
some rampart of mountain in the west reddened the snow and the pines
with its ultimate rays. My knapsack with the skates in it swung to and
fro on my back, one ski-stick had already been twitched out of my hand
by a fallen branch of pine, but not a second’s pause could I allow
myself to recover it. I gave no glance behind, and I knew not at what
pace my pursuer was on my track, or indeed whether any pursued at all,
for my whole mind and energy, now working at full power again under the
stress of my panic, was devoted to getting away down the hill and out of
the wood as swiftly as my limbs could bear me. For a little while I
heard nothing but the hissing snow of my headlong passage, and the
rustle of the covered undergrowth beneath my feet, and then, from close
at hand behind me, once more the wolf-howl sounded and I heard the
plunging of footsteps other than my own.
The strap of my knapsack had shifted,
and as my skates swung to and fro on my back it chafed and pressed on my
throat, hindering free passage of air, of which, God knew, my labouring
lungs were in dire need, and without pausing I slipped it free from my
neck, and held it in the hand from which my ski-stick had been jerked. I
seemed to go a little more easily for this adjustment, and now, not so
far distant, I could see below me the path from which I had strayed. If
only I could reach that, the smoother going would surely enable me to
outdistance my pursuer, who even on the rougher ground was but slowly
overhauling me, and at the sight of that riband stretching unimpeded
downhill, a ray of hope pierced the black panic of my soul. With that
came the desire, keen and insistent, to see who or what it was that was
on my tracks, and I spared a backward glance. It was she, the hag whom I
had seen at her gruesome meal; her long grey hair flew out behind her,
her mouth chattered and gibbered, her fingers made grabbing movements,
as if already they closed on me.
But the path was now at hand, and the
nearness of it I suppose made me incautious. A hump of snow-covered bush
lay in my path, and, thinking I could jump over it, I tripped and fell,
smothering myself in snow. I heard a maniac noise, half scream, half
laugh, from close behind, and before I could recover myself the grabbing
fingers were at my neck, as if a steel vice had closed there. But my
right hand in which I held my knapsack of skates was free, and with a
blind back-handed movement I whirled it behind me at the full length of
its strap, and knew that my desperate blow had found its billet
somewhere. Even before I could look round I felt the grip on my neck
relax, and something subsided into the very bush which had entangled me.
I recovered my feet and turned.
There she lay, twitching and quivering.
The heel of one of my skates piercing the thin alpaca of the knapsack
had hit her full on the temple, from which the blood was pouring, but a
hundred yards away I could see another such figure coming downwards on
my tracks, leaping and bounding. At that panic rose again within me, and
I sped off down the white smooth path that led to the lights of the
village already beckoning. Never once did I pause in my headlong going:
there was no safety until I was back among the haunts of men. I flung
myself against the door of the hotel, and screamed for admittance,
though I had but to turn the handle and enter; and once more as when
Ingram had told his tale, there was the sound of the band, and the
chatter of voices, and there, too, was he himself, who looked up and
then rose swiftly to his feet as I made my clattering entrance.
“I have seen them too,” I cried.
“Look at my knapsack. Is there not blood on it? It is the blood of one
of them, a woman, a hag, who tore off the leg of a chamois as I looked,
and pursued me through the accursed wood. I—”
Whether it was I who spun round, or the
room which seemed to spin round me, I knew not, but I heard myself
falling, collapsed on the floor, and the next time that I was conscious
at all I was in bed. There was Ingram there, who told me that I was
quite safe, and another man, a stranger, who pricked my arm with the
nozzle of a syringe, and reassured me ...
A day or two later I gave a coherent
account of my adventure, and three or four men, armed with guns, went
over my traces. They found the bush in which I had stumbled, with a pool
of blood which had soaked into the snow, and, still following my
ski-tracks, they came on the body of a chamois, from which had been torn
one of its hindlegs and one eye-socket was empty. That is all the
corroboration of my story that I can give the reader, and for myself I
imagine that the creature which pursued me was either not killed by my
blow or that her fellows removed her body ... Anyhow, it is open to the
incredulous to prowl about the caves of the Ungeheuerhorn, and see if
anything occurs that may convince them.
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From Your Dark Side
