“I sat down,” recalled Bertrand, "my legs handing over a precipice, my back leaning on a rock as big as an armchair. I chose that brink because there was no snow, and because I could face better the magnificent panorama of the Alpes Bernoises. I at once remembered that in my pocket there were two cigars, and put one between my teeth.” Bertrand lit the cigar, sat back, and considered himself “the happiest of men.”
Suddenly a kind of paralysis came over him. The match he had lit for his cigar burned down to his fingers, but he was unable to release it. Though his body was immobilized, Bertrand’s thoughts were crystal clear. “If I move,” he reported thinking to himself, “I shall roll down in the abyss; if I do not move, I shall be a dead man in twenty-five or thirty minutes.”
Unable to do anything else, Bertrand studied the sensations he felt as his body temperature slowly dropped. First his hands and feet froze, then “little by little death reached my knees and elbows. The sensation was not painful, and my mind felt quite easy. But when death had been all over my body my head became unbearably cold, and it seemed to me that pincers squeezed my heart. I never felt such an acute pain, but it lasted only a minute, and my life went out.”
“’Well," thought I, "at last I am what they call a dead man, and here I am, a ball of air in the air, a captive balloon still attached to earth by a kind of elastic string, and going up and always up . . ."
Looking down, Bertrand saw his half-frozen carcass sitting on the snowy ledge. “What a horrid thing is that body—deadly pale, with a yellowish-blue color, holding a cigar in its mouth and a match in its two burned fingers. . . . If only I had a hand and scissors to cut the thread which ties me still to it!”
With the feeling of joy and lucid calm that are also so often mentioned in the context of these experiences, Bertrand felt his vision expand, so that he could suddenly see far beyond the mountain his body was on. He saw his wife traveling to the village of Lucerne—though Bertrand recalled that she had told him she was not going there until the following day.
“My own regret was that I could not cut the string. In vain I traveled through such beautiful worlds that earth became insignificant. I had only two wishes: the certitude of not returning to earth, and the discovery of my next glorious body, without which I felt powerless.
Then Bertrand suddenly felt a tug. “Something was pulling the balloon down.”
The guide had discovered Bertrand’s body and was rubbing it with snow to shock
him back into consciousness.
“I felt disdain for the guide who, expecting a good reward, tried to make me understand that he had done wonders. My grief was immeasurable.”
Ptolemy Tompkins, The Modern Book of the Dead (Atria Books, 2012), 197-99.
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