"On y Va"

For days the wintry winds had howled about the high peaks of the French Alps, whipping the mountain snows into white fury, keeping skiers and tourists at home. In the valley below, one day last fortnight, the rival guides of fashionable Chamonix and humbler St. Gervais gathered as usual to down their morning grog and gripe about the weather. High over their heads, the pilot of an Air India

Constellation fought his way across the mountaintops toward Geneva with 40 Pakistani seamen bound for England to man the newly launched freighter Queen City. A monk in the lofty monastery of St. Bernard thought he heard a noise. Two days later the Constellation's wreckage was sighted on the 15,781-foot peak of Mont Blanc by a pilot in a sport plane.

A Mountain Law. In the winter thick snows rest on Mont Blanc so lightly that the vibration of a man's voice can bring them cascading down in lethal tons. It was almost certain that nobody in the plane, even had he survived the crash, could have lived for two days on the mountain. In the valleys below Mont Blanc, however, there is an unwritten law that when a man is lost on the mountain, somebody must go after him. In Chamonix, sharp, energetic little Rene Payot, first Alpinist of France and chief instructor at the army's mountaineering school, put on his climbing clothes, greased his face well against the winds to come, rounded up 25 colleagues and announced simply, "On y ua [Let's go]." In St. Gervais, Louis Viallet, farmer and part-time guide, got on the telephone to call five friends. "When do we start?" was all they said.

The Chamonix group was close to a refuge hut at Grands-Mulets, more than halfway up, when Leader Payot untied himself from the main party to move a little ahead. A sudden gust swept him over a crevasse and buried him under 20 feet of snow. Two hours later a walkie-talkie notice of his death filtered down to his wife and two children in the valley. By radio the word came back from the French army ordering all men off the mountain.

A Mountain Mouse. By then the fog had lifted, leaving the air crystal clear. Villagers below could now see tiny lights still moving up and up along the mountain. Lacking radios and fortified with grog, the St. Gervais party was pushing on. They spent the night in a refuge hut. Next morning at 6 they started climbing again. One of the climbers froze his foot and went back under protest. "By noon," said Viallet later, "we had dug through snow up to our chests across the corridor of avalanches . . . We drank grog. That's very important on the mountain in winter. By 4 o'clock we reached another shelter. There was much wind, very much, and very strong, and it was terribly cold [ -- 22DEG F, according to army meteorologists]. Our shoes were frozen solid.

"There was a mouse in that place--what he ate and how he kept alive I don't know. He kept nibbling at our hair. Next morning we greased ourselves again, wrapped wool rags around us and started off again." It was 10 o'clock when they at last reached the wrecked plane.

"First we found some toys for a baby, and that made us upset. Then we found an arm, a foot, a head, but no complete person. The biggest thing we saw was one wheel of the plane." Tied together and using ice axes to hang on in the 100-kilometer wind, the climbers crawled around for ten minutes, picked up three bundles of letters and started down the mountain once again. "We came fast," said Viallet. "The trip back took only five hours."

That night the village of St. Gervais drank champagne instead of grog. Telegrams of praise poured in from all the world. Fresh from a visit to Chamonix where he had told Rene Payot's widow that his government would never permit her or her children to worry about money, Indian Ambassador Sardar Singh Malik started a speech. He burst into tears before he could finish. As for the mountaineers of St. Gervais, not one of them went to bed until the last drop of champagne was gone.

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