My guide was Ambroise Couttet, whose family name is famous in the mountaineering annals of Savoy. An earlier Ambroise Couttet lies in the icy bosom of Mont Blanc, fallen, years ago, down a crevasse so profound that his would-be rescuers were drawn, baffled, awe-struck, and with shaking nerves, from its horrible depths, whose bottom they could not find. Even before that time Pierre Couttet had been whirled to death on the great peak, and his body, embedded and preserved in a glacier, was found nearly half a century afterward at its foot. And two other Couttets of past years escaped, by the merest hair of miraculous fortune, from a catastrophe on the same dreadful slopes in which three of their comrades were swallowed up. Yet the Ambroise Couttet of to-day is never so happy as when he is on the mountain. His eyes sparkle if he hears the thunder of an avalanche, and he smiles as he watches its tossing white crest ploughing swiftly across some snowy incline which he has just traversed. One porter sufficed, for my only traps consisted of a hand camera, a field-glass, and a few extra woollen shirts and stockings. Having had no serious exercise since climbing the Matterhorn a year before, I deemed it prudent to spare my strength for the more important work above by taking a mule to the Pierre Pointue. It was a fine morning, offering a promise of favorable weather after several days of mist and rain. Monsieur Janssen, the French astronomer, who was waiting at Chamonix for his porters to complete their long and wearisome labor of transporting piecemeal his telescope and other instruments of observation to the summit, before making the ascent himself, said, grasping my arm at parting: "I wish you good luck; good weather you are sure of." [Illustration: COL DE BLANC, MONT BLANC. From a photograph loaned by Mr. Frank Hegger, New York.] It was high authority, for Monsieur Janssen has studied the weather all his life, and knows the atmosphere of mountain peaks and of the airy levels where balloons float; yet if he could have foreseen what was to occur on Mont Blanc within twenty hours, he would have wished me the good fortune of being somewhere else.