Chapter 9 — Chamonix

After Justine's execution Victor cannot bear the family. He cannot bear Elizabeth's grief; he cannot bear his father's; he cannot bear his own. He sets out alone for the high Alps, hoping the mountains will silence in him what the household cannot. He walks the valleys around Chamonix for weeks. He climbs alone in conditions a normal traveler would have refused. The landscape is sublime — Mary Shelley uses the Romantic vocabulary of the period with care — but the sublimity does not heal him. He grieves; he rages; he plans, in vague ways, to kill himself.

One morning, after a difficult night in a hut on the lower slopes, he sets out at dawn for Montanvert, the great glacier above Chamonix. The climb is dangerous; he goes alone. He reaches the ice in the early afternoon and sits on a rock above it, watching the slow movement of the glacier and the brutal beauty of the mountains. He weeps for William and for Justine. The chapter has been quietly preparing the reader for what is about to happen.

Across the ice, far off, a figure appears — moving toward him at extraordinary speed, "with a velocity almost supernatural." Victor recognizes him. The figure crosses the glacier in a few minutes, climbs the rock face below Victor, and reaches the ledge where Victor sits. He stops a few feet away. He is the Creature. He is, this time, going to be heard. The chapter ends with the two figures facing each other on the ledge above the ice, and a meeting the novel has been arranging since the laboratory.