It was a bright sunny morning, hot and dusty. For a good part of the way from Arolla to Haudères I chatted to Jones. We did not go very fast on account of the damaged member of our party, about whom Jones was very solicitous. He himself seemed very fit, and was full of life and enthusiasm for his favourite passion. He chatted freely of all his climbs, of our first meeting nine years before, of all that had happened since, of frostbite on the Dom, and the remedy--sticking his fingers into boiling glue--worse than the disease. His traverse of the ice arête between the two peaks of the Lyskamm and his Easter ascent of the Dent Blanche seemed to me to have made the deepest impression on him of all his achievements in the mountains. He was rather inclined to underrate his wonderful rock-work in North Wales and in the Lake District, a department in which, in my opinion, he was really greatest, though his feats of endurance in the Alps were something off the common. He told me that his ambitions inclined towards a tour in the Himalayas, if circumstances allowed of his realising that dream.
At Haudères we parted company. Hill and Jones, with their guides, who met them at Haudères, turned up to Ferpècle; we went on to Evolena. If my friend’s health permitted, I had arranged to see Jones in Zermatt on Tuesday afternoon. Difficult as was the expedition he was undertaking, the awful reality of the morrow never crossed my mind even as a possibility. A stronger or more well-equipped party I had never seen start on an expedition. It was about 12-30 when we all said good-bye.
At Evolena the doctor ordered our invalid a day or two of complete rest. So on Monday morning the third member of our party, with his guide, started for the Col de la Meina to return to his wife, whom he had left in the Val des Bagnes, from which we had come. For the sake of the walk I accompanied them to the top of the Col. About 9-15, just before we lost sight of the west arête of the Dent Blanche, I searched the arête with my field glasses to see if any trace of Jones and Hill’s party could be detected. None of us could see anything, so we concluded, as the mountain was in very good condition, that they had probably already got to the top, and were then descending by the south arête. But they were still on the arête, though we failed to see them on the dark rocks. Had it been three-quarters of an hour later we might actually have been witnesses of the accident.