The Ice Soldier Read Online Free PDF

a glacier near Trélatête and almost certainly belonged to the infamous guide Emil Boileau. Although it had never been proven, Boileau was said to have murdered several of the
climbers who had hired him in the early 1800s. He would lead them high into the mountains, to places from which they would never be able to return without his help. Then he would demand money, which, if not paid out immediately, would result in the deaths and disappearance of the climbers. Boileau drank heavily, even when climbing. According to legend, he would throw the bodies of the climbers he had killed down bottomless crevasses and toast them with a tankard full of brandy. His own end came when he found himself unable to kill a particularly beautiful young woman. He became so deranged that he threw himself down the crevasse instead, tankard and all. The tankard, bruised by its journey through the shifting glacier ice, emerged almost a century after Boileau’s death, and was immediately acquired by Carton. How much truth there was in the story of Emil Boileau didn’t matter to Carton. What mattered was the legend.
    Thousands flocked to Carton’s lectures, hoping for a glimpse of Archie, who was sometimes sitting behind Carton on the stage, sometimes appeared after the intermission, and sometimes could be found in the front row of the audience.
    Membership in the Climbers’ Club tripled.
    Archie became, in the words of Carton, “the most popular man in London. And the thinnest.” People posed for pictures beside him. Carton took to swinging his arm around Archie in the middle of the meal, squinting out at the dinner guests and remarking, “Well, Archie, what do you think of the view?”
    The greater Carton’s popularity became, the more he added to his shows. He brought in blond, blue-eyed “Alpine maidens” in traditional costume. The fact that these women never spoke but only smiled led to some speculation as to whether the maidens were actually from the Alps, although no one truly cared. Nor did they care when the Saint Bernard dogs
Carton brought in turned out to be boxers, or even when the stuffed and tattered bird which he claimed was the last of the dreaded baby-snatching lammergeier vultures in the Alps turned out to be of a more common variety.
    It was all about the show, and if the show was sometimes short on fact, Carton made up for it with the energy he put into his presentations. He reenacted not only his own ascent of the Dragon’s Teeth but also many other mountaineering epics, in particular those which involved some loss of life. These included the notorious Hamel expedition to Mont Blanc, which ended in the deaths of three men who were caught in an avalanche. He also gave his own interpretation of Whymper’s 1865 ascent of the Matterhorn and the subsequent deaths of four of its members. He would stand on his toes, grasping at imaginary rock holds, hauling up make-believe companions at the end of invisible ropes, pausing only to wipe genuine sweat from his forehead.
    Carton’s next venture, a plan to lead an expedition back to the Dragon’s Teeth, was cut short by a bout of pneumonia that ruined his already asthma-scarred lungs. After that, he had trouble even climbing the stairs of his club. Although the lecturing continued, his mountaineering days were over. The strain began to show on Carton’s face and in his voice. Carton’s talks were filled with awkward silences as he fought for breath.
    By the time he hired Stanley, the Climbers’ Club had begun its slow decline.
    Nowadays Carton usually invited other mountaineers, like Hell and Paradise, to do the speaking for him.
    Stanley was still going on about her. “She gave me a look, and I looked right back!” He pointed a finger at his eyes, as if the force of her glance had left a gash across his pupils. “And I tell you something happened. Now she is all I can think about.
We’ve been out to