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 I. “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.