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facing fearful odds, and yet escaping to freedom, under the very eyes of their
captors.
Recently an almost incredible narrow escape was effected by a company of
tourists, in the upper French Alps.
Truth, it is said, is stranger than fiction, and so is this actual escape from
threatening death more gripping to the reader’s mind than any imaginary
predicament successfully overcome.
At the end of August, a party of tourists, numbering about 100, set out
from the small town of Chamonix in eastern France, to view some of the
magestic sights of the French Alps.
They travelled high up the awe-inspiring Mont Blanc, by aerial cable car.
As it had hitherto been regarded as impossible for the traction cable of these
aerial cable cars to be broken, doubtless the passengers were quite at ease,
and filled with wonder and excitement at making this unusual sightseeing tour.
Their horror and astonishment at the damage done to the cables, by a low-flying
French aircraft which caused the disaster, cannot be imagined.
After the breaking of the cable, two cars conveying six people, crashed into
the valley below, killing the occupants. The other cabins, left with no power
connection, hung over the valley, 1,500 feet below. Miraculously, after 19
hours ordeal, the suspended cars were winched slowly back to safety, and the
trapped tourists once more set down on safe ground.
We read of no panic among the survivors, they appear to have all remained
calm, and there is even an account of parlour games being played through the
long, dark, freezing night of suspense. One Alpine Guide, conspicuous for his
bravery in securing his cabin to the unbroken portion of the cable, and then
securing two neighbouring cabins in similar fashion, earned for himself the
title of the “Spiderman”, due to his spiderlike descent of 450 feet of cable to the
glacier beneath.
What horror those people must have suffered, we can not imagine, but what
a miraculous escape for the survivors.
— Marguerite Elliott, IIA

“Singing Masons building roofs of gold” — Henry V.
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