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 grandfather, 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
step-cutting 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.