Thereabout it chanced that a
man came into this community from the outer world. And this is the
story of that man.
He was a mountaineer from the country near Quito, a man who
had been down to the sea and had seen the world, a reader of books
in an original way, an acute and enterprising man, and he was taken
on by a party of Englishmen who had come out to Ecuador to climb
mountains, to replace one of their three Swiss guides who had
fallen ill. He climbed here and he climbed there, and then came
the attempt on Parascotopetl, the Matterhorn of the Andes, in which
he was lost to the outer world. The story of that accident has
been written a dozen times. Pointer's narrative is the best. He
tells how the little party worked their difficult and almost
vertical way up to the very foot of the last and greatest
precipice, and how they built a night shelter amidst the snow upon
a little shelf of rock, and, with a touch of real dramatic power,
how presently they found Nunez had gone from them. They shouted,
and there was no reply; shouted and whistled, and for the rest of
that night they slept no more.
As the morning broke they saw the traces of his fall. It
seems impossible he could have uttered a sound. He had slipped
eastward towards the unknown side of the mountain; far below he had
struck a steep slope of snow, and ploughed his way down it in the
midst of a snow avalanche.
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