32823	----	NARRATIVE OF A JOURNEY TO THE SUMMIT OF MONT BLANC. [Illustration: _Passing a crevice in the_ Glacier _of_ Boissons] NARRATIVE OF A JOURNEY TO THE Summit of Mont Blanc, MADE IN JULY, 1819. _BY WM. HOWARD, M. D._ "Mont Blanc is the monarch of mountains, They crown'd him long ago, On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds, With a diadem of snow." BALTIMORE: PUBLISHED BY FIELDING LUCAS, JR. J. Robinson, printer. 1821. The account of the following journey was written a few days after its execution, while the author was confined to his chamber by the inconveniences he had suffered, and it was then penned for the gratification of his immediate friends, and without any view to publication. The partiality of friends, however, having permitted it, during his absence, to appear in the Analectic Magazine, for May 1820, it excited more attention than he could have anticipated, which has induced the author to correct the errors arising from haste and other sources, and to republish it in the present form. _Baltimore, April, 1821._ NARRATIVE OF A JOURNEY TO THE SUMMIT OF MONT BLANC. ----------------- "Above me are the Alps The palaces of Nature, whose vast walls Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps, And thron'd Eternity in icy halls Of cold sublimity, where forms and falls The avalanche--the thunderbolt of snow, All that expands the spirit, yet appals, Gather around these summits, as to show How earth may pierce to Heaven, yet leave vain man below." BYRON. NARRATIVE OF A JOURNEY, &c. Geneva, July, 1819. You, my dear friend, who are well acquainted from my infancy with my clambering disposition, which, within these few months, has carried me to the top of both Vesuvius and Ætna, will not be much surprised to learn, that I have attempted, with success, to mount to the summit of Mont Blanc; an aerial journey which the sight of this mountain has inspired many persons with a wish to accomplish; but in which few have engaged, and still fewer have succeeded. I am somewhat afraid that you will condemn the expedition as a wild one, and will justly consider the gratification of our curiosity, which was, unfortunately, the only object we attained, as an inadequate recompense for our toil and danger; but you have no cause to fear my embarking in similar adventures in future. Having reached a spot, undoubtedly the highest in Europe, and, with the exception of the Himalaya mountains in India, the highest in the Old World, my curiosity is completely gratified, and there is scarcely any possibility of my meeting with an enterprise of this nature, of sufficient magnitude to renew its excitement: since five of the loftiest of the Alleghanies piled on each other, would scarcely reach to the height I have attained. To give you a correct idea of the nature of our undertaking, I will begin with a concise account of this king of the Alps, and of the various attempts that have been made to reach its summit. Mont Blanc is situated amidst some of the highest mountains of Savoy, forming a part of the great chain of the Alps, above which, however, it raises far its snowy head, as with a dignified air of conscious triumph. It is this white head, which its elevation renders doubly bright, that gives its name. On the north side of the mountain, and immediately at its foot, is the valley of Chamouny, which is sixteen leagues south from Geneva, and is much frequented in the summer season by the inhabitants of that city, and strangers, who throng to this enchanted vale, to enjoy the coolness of the air, and to view its stupendous glaciers, several of which are formed by the snow and ice gliding down from Mont Blanc itself. On the south-east side is the valley of Entrèves, which separates Mont Blanc both from the great and the little St. Bernard, and through which runs a small river, whose waters join the Po, below Turin, while the Arva, which flows through Chamouny, joins the Rhone, near Geneva. These rivers finally discharge themselves into the sea, at the distance of several hundred miles from each other; the one into the Mediterranean, near Marseilles, and the other into the Adriatic, near Venice. The chain of Alps, of which Mont Blanc forms a part, runs from N. E. to S. W. and is partly surmounted in its neighbourhood, by sharp pointed rocks, whose sides are too steep for the snow to rest upon, and of which seven, rising abruptly to a great height, have the appropriate name of the "Needles of Chamouny." The height of Mont Blanc, according to the observations of Saussure, is 14,790 French feet above the level of the sea,[A] which is only 5800 less than that of Chimborazo, the summit of which has been never reached: on the other hand, its relative height above the surrounding country is greater; for Mont Blanc is 11,500 above the valley of Chamouny, while Chimborazo, according to Humboldt, is only 11,200 above the plain of Tapia, at its foot. It is calculated that, from this height, the eye could reach sixty-eight leagues, or about 170 of our miles, without being intercepted by the convexity of the earth. Mont Blanc is seen from Lyons in all its magnificence; from the mountains of Burgundy, from Dijon, and even from Langrès, sixty-five leagues distant in a straight line: M. Saussure thought he recognised the mountain of Cavme, near Toulon. [A] About 15,500 English feet, or something less than three miles. In 1760 and 61, Saussure, the celebrated philosopher of Geneva, then engaged in examining the natural history of the Alps, promised a considerable reward to any person who should succeed in finding a practicable path to the summit, offering even to pay for the lost time of those who made ineffectual efforts. The first who undertook this, was Pierre Simon, a hunter of Chamouny, in 1762: but he was unsuccessful. In 1775, four men of the same village endeavoured for the same object, and with as ill success, to follow the ridge of the Montagne de la Côte, which runs parallel to the Glacier of Boissons. In 1783, three others followed the same track, but were attacked by an increasing disposition to sleep, from which they could only relieve themselves by returning. M. Bouritt, of Geneva, made two ineffectual attempts the same year, and the following year another, accompanied by Saussure, his own son, and fifteen guides. In June 1786, six men of the valley of Chamouny, renewed the effort to reach the summit, but fatigue and cold forced them to renounce it; one of them, however, Jacques Balmat, separating from his companions to search for crystals, and having lost himself, was prevented by a storm from rejoining them, and compelled to pass the night on the snow, unprovided and alone; youth, however, and the vigour of his constitution, saved his life. In the morning he perceived the top at no great distance, and having the whole day before him to provide for his descent, he examined leisurely the approaches to it, and observed one, that appeared more accessible than any he had hitherto seen. At his return to Chamouny, he was taken ill, in consequence of his great exposure, and was attended by Dr. Paccard, the physician of the village, to whom he communicated his discovery, and offered, in gratitude for his care, to guide him to the summit of Mont Blanc. In consequence of this, Jacques Balmat and Dr. Paccard, set out from Chamouny the 7th of August, the same year, and slept on the top of the Montagne de la Côte. The next day they experienced great difficulties and excessive fatigue, and were long doubtful of the ultimate event of their enterprise; but finally, at half past 6, P. M. they reached the pinnacle of the mountain, in sight of many visitors, who were at Chamouny, watching their progress with telescopes. The cold was so intense, that provision was frozen in their pockets, the ink congealed in their ink horns, and the mercury in Farenheit's thermometer, sunk to eighteen and a half degrees. They remained about half an hour on the top, regained at midnight the Montagne de la Côte, and after two hours repose, set out for Chamouny, where they arrived at eight in the morning, with their lips swollen, their faces excoriated, and their eyes much inflamed; and it was some time before they recovered from these disagreeable effects. As soon as the intelligence of this success reached Saussure at Geneva, he determined on making a similar attempt: which he in fact did the same year, but was compelled by unfavourable weather to return. He was, however, not discouraged, but as the season was now far advanced, he postponed his operations until the ensuing summer. Accordingly, on the 1st of August, 1787, he again set out from Chamouny, accompanied by his servant, and eighteen guides, carrying a tent, a bed, ladders, cords, provisions, and philosophical instruments. The party arrived early the same day at the Montagne de la Côte, where they passed the night. The next day, notwithstanding an increase of dangers and difficulties, they passed under the Dome de Gouté, and reached a platform, or small plain, at the height of 11,790 feet above the sea, where they pitched their tent in the snow, and passed the night. The following morning, (August 3d) the snow was so hard, and the ascent so steep, that they were compelled to cut their footsteps with a hatchet, and it was only by proceeding with the greatest caution, that they were enabled to pass this dangerous acclivity with safety. They, however, persevered, and reached the summit about an hour before noon, in view of many persons who were observing them from Chamouny. M. Saussure turned his eyes to the house where his mother and sisters were watching his progress with a telescope, and had the satisfaction of seeing the waving of a flag, which was the signal they had agreed to make, as soon as they should be assured of his safety. The latter part of his ascent was the slowest and most fatiguing, owing to the difficulty of breathing, occasioned by the rarity of the air: the stoutest of his guides could not take more than thirty steps, without stopping to take breath. No one had the least appetite, but all were much tormented by thirst. The guides pitched the tent, in which M. Saussure remained four hours, making a number of observations. At half after three, the party began to descend, and slept lower 1100 feet than the preceding night. The next day they arrived, without any accident, at Chamouny. This successful expedition of Saussure, and the interesting account he published of it, inspired many persons with a wish of accomplishing the same task; but they were generally soon deterred by an examination into the difficulties attending its execution, and returned satisfied with a view from the vallies below, of the terrific glaciers, and everlasting snows, which defend the approaches to the summit. The following are the principal attempts that have since been made, and it will be perceived that of these few, only a part have succeeded. On the 8th of August, 1787, five days after M. Saussure's return, Col. Beaufoy, an Englishman, set out from Chamouny for Mont Blanc, accompanied by ten guides. He reached the top the following day, and returned the third day to the village, with his face and eyes so inflamed, that he nearly lost his sight in consequence. As he was not properly provided with instruments, he was unable to add much to the observations which had been made by Saussure. He, however, determined the latitude of the summit to be 45°, 49´, 59´´. The year following these two journeys, (1788,) Mr. Bouritt, of Geneva, in company with his son, two other gentleman, and a number of guides, attempted the ascent of Mont Blanc. The party was dispersed by a storm, and only Mr. Bouritt, his son, and three guides, succeeded in reaching the top, where the violence of the cold compelled them to abridge their stay to a few minutes. While there, Mr. Bouritt thought he perceived the sea in the direction of Genoa; but the immense distance rendered the objects at the horizon, too indistinct to be certain of it. The whole party returned to Chamouny in a terrible condition. One of Mr. Bouritt's companions, who had lost himself, suffered dreadfully, as well as the guides who were with him, and returned with his feet and hands frozen, while some of the company, who were more fortunate, had only their fingers and ears in the same condition. Mr. Bouritt was obliged to wash for thirteen days in ice water, to restore the use of his limbs, which had suffered from the extreme cold. In 1792, four Englishmen undertook the same journey, but were prevented, by an accident, from proceeding farther than the Montagne de la Côte, where, unfortunately, one of the guides had his leg broken, and another his skull driven in: they themselves were all more or less wounded. A false step of one of the foremost of the party upon a loose rock, which brought it and a number of others down upon his companions, was the cause of this accident. M. Forneret, of Lausanne, and M. d'Ortern set out on the 10th of August, 1802, with seven guides, for Mont Blanc, and notwithstanding a storm, reached the summit the following day. They remained there only twenty minutes, and returned on the 12th to Chamouny, protesting that nothing in the world could tempt them to undertake again the same expedition. In August, 1808, Jacques Balmat, surnamed Mont Blanc, from his having been the first to discover the way to the summit, safely conducted thither fifteen of the inhabitants of Chamouny, one of whom was a _woman_. About this time also he returned with two of his companions, and placed on the top an obelisk of wood, twelve feet in height, (which they had brought up in pieces) to serve in the trigonometrical survey, that was then making of the country. In 1812, M. Rodasse, a banker of Hamburgh, undertook and accomplished the same journey, without any accident. The 16th of September, 1816, the Comte de Lucy, a Frenchman, succeeded, notwithstanding the severity of the cold he experienced, in attaining a rock only 600 feet lower than the summit of Mont Blanc. He was there, however, so entirely overcome with cold and fatigue, that he was unable to proceed this short distance, and compelled, with much reluctance, to return. On reaching the valley he was unable to walk, but was carried by his guides to the inn, where his feet proved to be so much frozen, that on drawing his boot, the skin peeled off and remained in it. Two of his guides were also severely frozen. Count Malzeski, a Pole, left Chamouny the 5th of August, 1818, for Mont Blanc, accompanied by eleven guides, reached the summit the following day, and returned, in safety, the third, without suffering much more inconvenience than having his nose frozen. During our visit to Chamouny, in the beginning of this month, my friend Dr. Van Rensselaer and myself, in our various excursions to the glaciers, and other scenes of the valley, had frequently opportunities of conversing with the guides, who had participated in these journeys, and among them with old Balmat, the Columbus of Mont Blanc. The result was, that our curiosity was strongly excited, and being induced by their representations of the almost certainty of succeeding in the present favourable weather, we finally determined, after much deliberation, to make the attempt. We therefore engaged _Marie Coutet_, an experienced guide, who had been three times on the summit, as leader, and eight other guides to accompany us. They refused to undertake the journey with a smaller party, on account of the number of articles which it was necessary to take with us, as a ladder, cords, provisions, charcoal to melt the snow for drinking, and a number of other things, which were indispensable, and which formed a sufficient quantity to load each of the nine with a considerable burthen. One day was occupied in making preparations, on which our comfort and our ultimate success depended. These were passed in review in the evening, and having found that nothing material was omitted, an early hour the next day was appointed for our departure. Accordingly, on Sunday the 11th of July, we left the village of Chamouny, at five o'clock, full of anxiety ourselves, and accompanied by the good wishes of the honest inhabitants for our success. The necessity of taking advantage of the fine weather, opposed our delaying another day. Our guides, who in common with all the inhabitants of the mountainous parts of Savoy, are very attentive to the duties of their religion, were unwilling to set out on a church day, without having previously attended service. They had, therefore, induced the Curé to celebrate mass at three o'clock, and, notwithstanding the fatigue they expected during the day, the early hour had not prevented them from attending it. We descended the valley by the side of the Arva, about a league, till we approached the glacier of Boissons, and then turning suddenly to the left into the woods, we began immediately a very steep ascent, parallel to, and about a half mile from the edge of the glacier. After about three hours toilsome mounting, we came to the last house on our road. It was the highest dwelling in the neighbourhood, and was one of those cottages called "Chalets," which are inhabited only during three of the summer months, when the peasants drive their cattle from the plains below, to the then richer verdure of the mountains. We found there the old man and his two daughters; his wife, as is the custom, was left behind to take care of the house in the valley. After refreshing ourselves with a delicious draught of fresh milk, and receiving the wishes of these good people, for a 'bon voyage,' we bade adieu to all traces of man, and continued to mount. Another hour's toil brought us above the region of wood, after which the few stinted vegetables we met with, gradually diminished in size, and when we arrived, at 10 o'clock, at the upper edge of the glacier of Boissons, only a few mosses, and the most hardy alpine plants were to be found. We had been compelled a little before, by the precipices of the Aiguille du Midi, which presented themselves like a wall before us, to change our direction, and instead of proceeding parallel to the glacier, to strike off suddenly towards it. We had now a close view of some of the obstacles which bar the approach to Mont Blanc; the glacier of Boissons, on which we were about to enter, seemed to me absolutely impassable. The only relief to the white snow and ice before us, was an occasional rock, thrusting its sharp point above their surface, and too steep to permit the snow to lodge on it. One of these rocks, or rather a chain of them, called the 'Grand Mulet,' which we had destined for our resting place for the night, was before us, but far above our heads at the distance of four or five miles; the glacier, however, still intervened, and appeared to defy all attempts to approach it. The glacier of Boissons, like all the glaciers of the Alps, is an immense mass of ice filling a valley which stretches down the mountain side, and is formed by the accumulated snow and ice, which are constantly in the summer months, falling from above. While the glaciers are thus continually increasing on the surface, the internal heat of the earth is slowly melting them below. Hence, when they are large, there generally proceeds from under them a considerable stream: such are the sources of the Rhine and of the Rhone. Their surface, often resembles that of a violent agitated sea, suddenly congealed. They are frequently of several leagues in breadth, and from 100 to 600 feet in depth. The snow which falls on them, to the depth of several feet every winter, is softened by the sun's rays in summer--and freezing again at the return of cold weather, but in a more solid state, forms a successive layer every year. This stratum may be easily measured, (as each of them is distinctly separated from its neighbour by a dark line,) at the section made by those cracks, which traverse every glacier in all directions. These cracks or crevices, are generally thought to be caused by the irregular sinking of part of the mass, whose support below has been gradually melted away. They are formed suddenly, and frequently with a noise that may be heard at the distance of several miles, and with a shock that makes the neighbouring country tremble: this effect takes place principally in summer. These rents are from a few inches to 20, 30, or even 50 or 60 feet in breadth, and generally of immense depth: probably extending to the bottom of the glacier. They present the greatest danger and difficulty to the passenger. They are often concealed by a layer of snow, which gives no indication on its surface, of its want of solidity; and it often happens that the chamois hunter, notwithstanding all his caution, suddenly sinks through this treacherous veil into the chasm beneath. We remained a couple of hours at our resting place, to take some refreshment, and to regain strength for our next difficult task. Jacques Balmat accompanied us this far, to point out the best means of attaining that spot on which he was the first to set foot; but the infirmities of age prevented him from accompanying us farther. Our feet seemed to linger, and to leave with reluctance the last ground they were to touch until the period of our return. We however entered on the glacier with confidence in the skill and prudence of our guides; several of whom being hunters, and accustomed to chase the chamois over such places, were acquainted with all the precautions, that it was necessary to take for our safety. To avoid the danger of falling into the crevices, especially those masked by the snow, we connected ourselves, three persons together, at the distance of 10 or 12 feet apart, by a cord round the body: so that in case of one of the three falling into a chasm, the other two could at least support him, until assistance could be procured from the rest of the party. Each person was provided with a pole, 6 feet long, and pointed at the bottom with iron, which we found to be a necessary article. Where the crevices were not more than two or three feet broad, we leaped over them with the assistance of our staff; others we passed on natural bridges of snow, that threatened every moment to sink with us into the abyss, and over others, we made a bridge of the ladder, which was extremely slight, as otherwise it would have been impossible for a man to carry it up the steeps we had ascended. Without its assistance, we could not have passed the glacier. Over this slender support we crawled with caution, suspended over a chasm, into which we could see to an immense depth; but of which in no instance could we see the bottom. We were sometimes forced to pass on a narrow ridge of treacherous ice, not more than a foot in breadth, with one of these terrific chasms on either side. The firm step, with which we saw our guides pass these difficulties, inspired us with confidence: but I cannot even now think of some of the situations we were placed in, without a feeling of dread; and especially when in bed, and in the silence of the night, they present themselves to my imagination, I involuntarily shrink with horror at the idea, and am astonished in recollecting what little sensation I felt at the moment. We threw down into some of the narrow cracks, pieces of ice and fragments of rock, and heard for a considerable time, the more and more distant sound, as they bounded from side to side. In no instance could we perceive the stone strike the bottom; but the sound, instead of ceasing suddenly, as would then have been the case, grew fainter and fainter, until it was too feeble to be heard. What then must be the immense depth of these openings, when in these silent regions, the noise of a large stone striking the bottom is too distant to be heard at the orifice! The number of openings we met with, which were broader than the length of our ladder, and which, of course, we had no means of crossing, rendered our path extremely circuitous. We were often enabled, by the ladder's assistance, to scale high and perpendicular banks of snow. It sometimes proved too short to reach to the top; but where the steep was not absolutely perpendicular, we contrived in several instances to remedy this inconvenience. One of the guides, standing on the top of the ladder, enabled the rest, who clambered up by his assistance, and over his shoulders, to reach the summit; when there, we easily drew up him and the ladder with cords. We were occasionally compelled to retrace our steps, and we were frequently so involved in the intricacies of the glacier, that we had to remain without proceeding, a considerable time, until the guides, who were dispersed in every direction on the discovery, could find a practical path to extricate us. In addition to these difficulties, I had not been long on the glacier, before I perceived that my faithless boot had given way; which, as every thing depended upon the state of our feet, was a serious misfortune. Necessity, however, is the mother of invention, and I contrived to bind it with cords in such a manner, that it served me tolerably well the rest of the journey. In consequence of all these obstacles, we only arrived at 5 o'clock at the "Grand Mulet," not more than four or five miles distant, in a straight line from the point where we entered on the glacier; but, from the circuitous route we had taken, we could not have walked less, in this distance, than 14 or 15 miles. We were now 11,000 feet above the level of the sea, and 8,000 feet above the village of Chamouny. A niche on the steep side, and near the top of the rock, about a hundred and fifty feet from its base, and to which we had much difficulty in climbing, was selected for our lodging place; indeed it was the only part of the rock, that afforded any thing like a level place. We were fortunate in finding the day had been so warm, that there was water in some of the crevices of the ice, which circumstance enabled us to economize our charcoal. The sun shone very bright on our side of the rock; but as soon as it sunk below the horizon, the eternal frost around us regained its influence, and the air became very cold. We had, however, time to dry our boots and pantaloons, and I found a pair of large woolen stockings, that I had with me, an invaluable article. Our guides stretched the ladder from one point of the rock to another, and, throwing over it a couple of sheets they had brought for the purpose, formed a kind of tent, just large enough for Dr. Van Rensselaer and myself to creep in: a single blanket upon the rock was our bed. The guides were so loaded with indispensable articles, that we had not been able to bring a blanket, or even an extra coat to cover us. After a cold and uncomfortable supper, we crept into our den, soon after the genial sun had left us, and endeavoured, by every means our ingenuity could suggest, but ineffectually, to keep ourselves warm. We suffered much from the cold, but principally towards morning, as the thermometer was several degrees below freezing. The night seemed to last at least twenty hours; at one time I thought the day must certainly be not distant, and was surprised, at looking at my watch by the light of the moon, to find it only 11 o'clock. Tired of inaction, and shivering with the cold, I crawled out about midnight to endeavour to warm myself, by the exercise of clambering on the rock. The view around was sublime, and rendered me for a time insensible to all feelings of personal suffering. The sky was very clear, but perfectly black; the moon and stars, whose rays were not obscured by passing through the lower dense region of the atmosphere, as when seen from the surface of the earth, shone with a brilliancy, tenfold of what I had ever observed from below; and the comet, with its bright tail, formed in the north-west, a beautiful object. Nothing was to be seen around the rock on which we were placed, but white snow and some heavy clouds, that, floating below us, shut out the valley from our view. The guides appeared to be all asleep, and the only interruption to the silence of death, was the occasional avalanche, rolling with the sound of distant thunder from the highest part of the surrounding glaciers, and heightening the feelings of awful sublimity, which our situation was so calculated to inspire. As our lodging was extremely uncomfortable in every respect, we were under no temptation of lying till a late hour in the morning. On the contrary, we hailed with joy the first appearance of the dawn, which enabled us to substitute the warmth of marching, for the cold inactivity from which we had suffered all night. We set out at three o'clock, leaving most of our provisions and other articles on the rock. Four hours of laborious, but not dangerous walking, brought us to a large plain, called the 'Grand Plateau,' which is nearly surrounded, (on the one hand) by a spur of Mont Blanc, and the Aiguille du Midi; on the other, by the Montagne de la Côte, while Mont Blanc presents itself directly in front. These mountains form a steep amphitheatre around this plain. Here we stopped an hour to breakfast, and to recruit strength for the last and most difficult part of the ascent. We were now more than 12,000 feet above the level of the sea, and only 3,000 feet lower than the summit, which was in full view before us. But I looked around, in vain, for any part of its steep sides that seemed to offer a possibility of being scaled, and when the guides pointed out the route we were to take, among and over precipices, and huge broken masses of snow, and up almost perpendicular steeps, I involuntarily shrunk at the prospect, and could not forbear casting my eye wistfully at our road back. But it would not have done to be deterred at this time by a few difficulties; and a moment's reflection, on the skill and experience of our guides, renewed our confidence, and we began cheerfully to mount the first steep before us. We here began to feel more seriously an effect, that is always experienced at considerable heights, and which had not much incommoded us before. It was impossible for the strongest of us, to take more than twenty or thirty steps, without stopping to take breath, and this effect gradually increased as we continued to ascend; insomuch, that when near the summit, even the stoutest of our guides, who could run for leagues over the lower mountains without panting, could not take more than twelve, or at most fifteen steps, without being ready to sink for want of breath. If we attempted to exceed this number by even three or four steps, a horrible oppression, as of approaching death, seized us; our limbs became excessively painful, and threatened to sink under us. It is very possible, that Walter Scot's hero, Up Ben Lomond's side could press, And not a sob his toil confess; but I am very certain he could not perform the same feat on Mont Blanc. It is remarkable, that a few seconds rest was sufficient to restore both our strength and breath. One of our guides, a robust man, who had been once on the summit, was so much incommoded, that we were compelled to leave him behind to await our return. I experienced some inconvenience from a slight degree of nausea and head-ache, of which most of those, who have made this journey have complained. When ascending Ætna, two months before, I had been seriously affected both by a difficulty of breathing, and by a violent thumping of the heart and arteries, which was loud enough to be easily heard by my companions, and which the slightest exertion was sufficient to excite. In the present instance I dreaded these effects, and had already begun to feel them in an uncomfortable degree; but was almost entirely relieved by drinking plentifully of vinegar and water, with which our guides, to whom experience had taught its utility, had taken care to be well provided. This drink was extremely agreeable to us; wine on the contrary, disgusted us. All the water we had, we had brought from the rock at which we slept, where we had carefully collected it from the cracks of the ice: for we were now in the region of eternal ice, where rain never falls, and where the utmost power of the midsummer sun can only soften, in a slight degree, the surface of the snow. The acclivity we were now ascending, was steeper than any we had before encountered, so much so that we could only accomplish it by a zigzag path, advancing not more than a few feet every 20 or 30 yards we walked. To have an idea of our situation, you must imagine us marching in single file on the steep mountain side, placing with the greatest care our feet in the steps, which the hardness of the snow rendered it necessary for our leader to cut with an axe, supporting ourselves with our poles against the upper side of the slope, and having on the other side, the same rapid slope terminating below in a precipice several hundred feet in height, over which we saw rapidly hurried all the small pieces of ice, that we loosened with our feet. Our situation was similar to that of a person scaling the steep and iced roof of a lofty house, and constantly liable, by an incautious step, to be suddenly precipitated over the eaves. After we had been proceeding in this manner for some time, I looked down on the Plateau beneath, for the guide we had left, and when at last I discerned him, like a speck on the snow, my head began to grow dizzy at the idea of the distance below me, and I was forced to keep my head averted from this side, to recover from this disagreeable feeling. Our guides had attached themselves and us with cords, each three persons together, as when passing the glacier. They were provided with large iron cramps fastened to their feet, which prevented them from slipping. Doctor Van Ranselaer and myself had found this contrivance impede too much our walking, and after a short trial had given it up, so that we had to rely on the firmness of foot of those guides to whom we were tied, to preserve us in case of our falling. I am not entirely convinced, that if one of us had had the misfortune to fall, and were slipping down the declivity, he would not have drawn his two companions, in spite of these precautions, over the precipice. To add to our difficulties, the sun was excessively bright, and almost blinded us, notwithstanding the gauze veils with which we were all provided. Fortunately, we met with but few crevices; however, on passing one of these that was hid by the snow, I suddenly sunk, but my body being thrown forward by this motion, my breast opposed a larger surface to the snow which thus supported me, and I was easily extricated by a guide. On looking back through the hole I had broken, I could perceive the black cavity beneath. At one period, our path necessarily led us close under a wall of snow, more than 150 feet high, from the top of which projected several large masses of snow, that appeared to require only a touch to bring them down on our heads. Our captain pointed out our danger, and enjoined us to pass as quickly as possible, and to observe the strictest silence. When we looked up at these -------- Toppling crags of ice, The avalanches, whom a breath draws down In mountainous o'erwhelming, we felt no disposition to disobey his directions, but passed on with hurried step, and in the stillness of death. The inhabitants of those parts of the Alps, exposed to these avalanches, assert that the concussion of the air, produced by the voice, is often sufficient to loosen, and bring down their immense masses. Hence the muleteer is often seen to take the bells from his animals, when he passes through a valley subject to this danger. A few years since some young men, relying on the solidity of the ice, and wishing to try the echo, were so imprudent as to discharge a pistol in a large cave which is at the lower edge of the glacier des Bois, near Chamouny. The shock brought down the roof, which crushed them on the spot. At 11 o'clock we had passed most of the difficulties, and all the dangers of our ascent, and reached a granite rock, which appears or nipple, which forms the summit of Mont Blanc. This rock is only 1000 feet lower than the summit. Here we enjoyed a full view of the valley and village of Chamouny, which had hitherto been masked by the 'Aiguille du Midi;' and when we recollected the promises of our friends there, to watch our progress with their glasses, and were convinced that they were at that moment observing us, we felt relieved from the sensation which we had previously experienced, of being shut out from the world. In fact, we learned afterwards, that they had seen us distinctly, counted our number, and observed that one of the party was missing: this was the guide we had left at the 'plateau.' Our final object was now close at hand. We turned, with renewed ardor, to accomplish it; continuing our zigzag path, till, after much suffering from fatigue, cold, and shortness of breath, we stood, at half an hour after noon, on the highest point of Europe! Our first impulse, on arriving, was to enjoy the pleasure of throwing our eyes around, without encountering any obstacle. The world was at our feet. The sensations I felt were rather those of awe, than of sublimity. It seemed that I no longer trod on this globe, but that I was removed to some higher planet, from which I could look down on a scene which I had lately inhabited, and where I had left behind me the passions, the sufferings, and the vices of men. The houses of Chamouny, appeared like dwellings of ants, and the river which flows through the valley, seemed not sufficient to drown one of these pigmy animals. These emotions made me for some time insensible to the cold, but the piercing wind, which here had free scope, soon put an end to my waking dream, and bringing me back to the reality of life, enabled me to fix my attention on the objects around. Notwithstanding the pleasure inspired by the view, it was certainly more terrific than beautiful. The distant objects appeared as if covered by a veil. To the north-west was the chain of Jura, with a mist hanging on its whole extent, which prevented the eye from penetrating into France, in that direction. On the north was the lake of Geneva; of a black colour, and surrounded by mountains, which we had thought high, while we were on its banks, but which now appeared insignificant, and the lake itself seemed scarcely capacious enough to bathe in. To the east were the only mountains that appeared of a considerable size; among which, the most conspicuous were the Jungfrau and Schreckhorn in Grindelwalden, and Monte Rosa, on the borders of Piedmont, which raises its hoary and magnificent head to within a few hundred feet of the level of Mont Blanc. The grand St. Bernard was at our feet, to the south east, scarcely appearing to rise to more than a mole hill's height above the adjoining vallies. The obstacles which Bonaparte had to encounter in leading his army over this mountain, even in winter, appeared so diminished in our eyes, that this vaunted undertaking lost, at the moment, in our estimation, much of its heroism and grandeur. The view below and immediately around, presented a shapeless collection of craggy points, among which the 'Needles' were easily distinguished. We could hardly trust our senses, when we saw, beneath our feet, those rocks which, from below, appear higher than Mont Blanc itself, and which seem to penetrate into the region of the stars, and to threaten to 'disturb the moon in passing by.' Our view may be compared with that from the top of an elevated steeple over an extensive city, of which, except in the immediate neighbourhood, the roof only of the various buildings which compose it, are to be seen. The only green that we could perceive, was the narrow valley of Chamouny, and the two vallies by the side of St. Bernard. The portion of the earth that was not covered with snow, appeared of a gloomy and dark grey colour. The world presented an image of chaos, and offered but little to tempt our return to it. The top of Mont Blanc is a ridge of perhaps 150 feet in length, and six or eight in breadth. It is entirely composed of snow, which is probably of immense depth, and is constantly accumulating. We could see no traces of the obelisk, 12 feet in height, which had been set up about ten years before. One of our guides was of the number of those who placed it, and designated to us its position. The highest rock which appears above the snow, is a small one of granite, 600 feet below the summit. We remained but a few minutes immediately on the top, as the wind blew hard and piercingly cold. Descending a few feet on the south side, we were partially sheltered from the wind, and here the sun shone with an excessive brightness, heating every part of the body exposed to his rays; but the least breath of wind, which reached us at intervals, was sufficient to make us shiver with cold. Farenheit's thermometer in the sun, was two degrees below freezing, and five and a half in the shade. It must be considered, however, that we suffered a much greater degree of cold than the thermometer indicated, from the rapid evaporation from the surface of our bodies, of the insensible transpiration occasioned by the dryness and great rarity of the surrounding air. This cause, familiar to physiologists, affected our sensations, and could not influence the thermometer. Most of our guides stretched themselves on the snow in the sun, and yielded to the strong inclination to sleep, which we all felt. Only one or two of them ate: the others, on the contrary, evinced an aversion to all kinds of food. We did not suffer the great thirst which Saussure and his party experienced; This we prevented by drinking vinegar and water, which was very grateful to us, instead of pure water. Our pulses were increased in frequency and fulness, and we had all the symptoms of fever. I occupied myself, notwithstanding the indisposition to action which I felt, in making a few observations, and in stopping and sealing very carefully a bottle which I had filled with the air of the summit, intended for examination on my return. The colour of the sky had gradually assumed a deeper tint of blue as we ascended: its present colour was dark indigo, approaching nearly to black. There was something awful in this appearance, so different from any we had ever witnessed. There was nothing to which we could compare it, except to the sun shining at midnight. During some of the first attempts that were made to ascend Mont Blanc, this appearance produced so strong an effect on the minds of the guides, who imagined that Heaven was frowning on their undertaking, that they refused to proceed. The portion of atmosphere above us was entirely free from the vapours which the lower strata always contain, and was truly the 'pure empyreal,' seldom seen by mortal eyes. We had all our life beheld the sun through a mist, but we now saw him, face to face, in all his splendour. The guides asserted that the stars can be seen, in full day, by a person placed in the shade. It being near noon, and the sun almost over our heads, we could not find shadow to enable us to make the experiment. The air on the top of Mont Blanc is of but little more than half the density of that at the surface of the ocean. According to the observations of Saussure, the height of the barometer on the summit, was sixteen and a half inches, while that of a corresponding one at Geneva, was twenty-eight inches. In consequence of this rarity of the air, a pistol, heavily charged, which we fired several times, made scarcely more noise than the crack of a postillion's whip. We remained an hour and a quarter on the summit, part of which time was spent in useless regrets at not having waited to provide ourselves with instruments, as we were now so admirably situated to make with them a series of interesting experiments. Those which had suggested themselves, were principally concerning the absorption and radiation of caloric, and on the degree of cold produced by the evaporation of æther and other liquids. We found the descent more easy and much less fatiguing, though perhaps more dangerous than the ascent, on account of the greater risk of slipping. We passed under the place where the avalanche threatened us, with even more caution and more rapidity than before, as we found that a small piece had actually fallen, and covered our path since we had passed by. We arrived in about an hour at the 'Grand Plateau,' where we stopped to refresh ourselves, and gratify our returning appetites. We found the guide whom we had left, quite relieved. Here the sun, reflected from the walls of snow which surrounded us on three sides, poured down upon us with the most burning heat that I ever experienced from its rays, while our feet, cold from being immersed in the snow, prevented perspiration, and thus increased its power. Wherever its rays could penetrate, as between the cap and neckcloth, or even to the hands, it resembled the application of a heated iron. We were compelled, in addition to the assistance of our veils, to keep our eyes half closed, and even then the light was too powerful for them. We however continued with ease and cheerfulness our descent, until an unexpected difficulty occurred. Where in the morning we had cut our footsteps with an axe, we now found the snow so much softened by the sun, that we sunk in it every third or fourth step, to the middle of the body. My friend and myself were more subject to this inconvenience than the guides, on account of the soles of our boots presenting a less surface to the snow, than those of their large shoes. After plunging on in this manner for some time, I began to despair of reaching our rock, which was yet four or five miles distant: but there was no alternative but to proceed. We therefore kept on, though with excessive fatigue. We frequently fell forward, and one limb being tightly engaged in the snow, was violently twisted, and constantly liable to be sprained; which in our situation would have been a serious misfortune. The crevices too were, from their edges having become softened, more dangerous than before. Perseverance and caution, however, triumphed over all these difficulties, and we reached the 'Grand Mulet,' half an hour after five, our boots, stockings, and pantaloons completely soaked. These were immediately stretched on the rock to dry, which the heat of the sun soon effected. I had the disappointment to find, on examining my pockets, that the bottle which I had so carefully filled with the air of the summit, had been broken in one of my frequent falls, and of course my hopes of making with it some interesting experiments, were now destroyed. The thermometer was also broken. Notwithstanding the Herculean labour of the day, and the fatigue we experienced at the time, we had not been long on our rock before we felt strong and invigorated, as if just risen from a comfortable night's repose. This effect of the mountain air has often been remarked. We had even sufficient strength, and ample time to enable us to continue our descent with ease to Chamouny; but in the present softened state of the snow it would have been madness to attempt to cross the glacier, which we had found difficult and dangerous the preceding day, even before the sun's rays had affected it. In fact, while two of the guides were looking down on our path over the glacier, they saw a bridge of snow which we all crossed the day before, suddenly sink into the chasm beneath. Imprisoned thus by the glacier, which was now all that intervened betwixt us and terra firma, we quietly resolved to remain where we were, and made the same arrangements for passing the night, as we had done the evening before. We were, however, at present better off: I mentioned that we had been so fortunate as to find a sufficient supply of water in the neighbourhood of our rock, in consequence of which most of the charcoal, we had brought to melt the snow, remained. With this we made a small fire at our feet, and by blowing almost constantly, kept it up during the night. It has been often observed, that as we ascend in the atmosphere, the difficulty of maintaining combustion, is proportionably increased. The cold was notwithstanding our fire, so great, that whenever I fell asleep, I was awakened in a few minutes to shiver and chatter my teeth. Our guides slept in the open air, huddled as close together as possible. July 13th.--The dawning of the day was truly welcome, as it promised a near termination to our toils and suffering, while the gratification of having accomplished a difficult and interesting object remained as a recompense. We left our hard bed without reluctance, and were impatient at the slowness with which the guides made their preparations in packing up their numerous articles. We began to descend as the sun illumined the white top of Mont Blanc, but long before his beams penetrated below. Above our heads the sky was perfectly clear, while the vallies beneath, and all except a few of the highest surrounding mountains, were concealed by a sea of clouds. The appearance of the clouds when seen from above is singular; they resemble immense floating masses of light carded cotton. We retraced our path of the first day, and took the same precaution as then of tying ourselves together. When the sun's rays began to shine on the snow around us, I found that my eyes were so much inflamed, I could scarcely bear them sufficiently open to see the path; notwithstanding the gauze veil I had constantly used, my face was in a terrible condition: the outer skin had fallen, rendering my chin and lips one continued sore. Doctor Van Rensselaer's eyes were in a worse condition than mine, and his face nearly as bad. At one part of the glacier where the snow had been so hard at our passing, that our feet left no impression, we lost our path, which was a misfortune, as we had chosen a much better path in ascending, than we could have done in descending. We however fell in with the track of two chamois, which our guides followed with confidence, relying on the instinct, which they attribute to these animals, of finding a practicable path over the most difficult glaciers. When we had at last past the glacier, our feet seemed to rejoice at once more touching firm ground; and we felt as if returning to the world from a distant voyage. The rest of our task offered no difficulty, being a constant descent down the rocky mountain side, except what was occasioned by our almost total blindness, and the pain we suffered in our eyes. It was however very fatiguing, as the descent from a mountain is generally more so than the ascent to it. We stopped at the same Chalet, where two days before we had bid adieu to the world; and were regaled by the old man and his daughters with another delicious draught of milk and cream. We reached the village soon after ten o'clock in the morning, having been absent fifty-three hours, during forty-five of which we were on the ice. We were received with many congratulations by the honest villagers, who had taken considerable interest in our success. As soon as my companion and myself reached our inn, we buried ourselves in our chamber, to enjoy the luxury of a bed, and of darkness, which was necessary for our eyes. It was not until the sun had set, and the twilight was not too strong for them, that we ventured out to regale ourselves with a comfortable meal. Two English visitors, who had watched with a glass our progress on the top of Mont Blanc, had expressed a determination to follow our example; but our account of the difficulties we met with, and still more the view of the condition we were in, soon induced them to abandon the design. We walked out at the approach of night under the "Needles," and as we saw these rocks, on whose sides -------- the clouds Pause to repose themselves in passing by, and on whose tops the stars seemed to rest, we could scarcely realize the idea that they were the same we had seen only thirty hours before, far below our feet. The next day after our return to Chamouny, our eyes had become so much stronger, that we were enabled, without much inconvenience, to proceed to Geneva, where we have since remained to recover from our sufferings. Though now more than a week has elapsed, my face is yet much inflamed; but my eyes have regained their usual strength. Dr. Van Rensselaer has suffered in the same manner, but on the whole rather less than myself. Wherever the sun's rays could penetrate, even behind the ears to the level of the neckcloth, the skin has fallen off, and I have exchanged the tawny hue of an Italian and Sicilian sun, for the fair complexion of a German or Englishman. We have purchased perhaps too dearly the indulgence of our curiosity; but at present, when the difficulties are passed, and the gratification remains, I cannot regret our hardships, especially if I succeed in making you partake of the one, without suffering from the other. THE END. TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES 1. Passages in italics are surrounded by _underscores_. 2. The following misprints have been corrected: "Bourrit" corrected to "Bouritt" (page 12) "representa-ons" corrected to "representations" (page 15) "breath" corrected to "breadth" (page 20) "visiters" corrected to "visitors" (page 47) 3. Other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies in spelling and punctuation usage have been retained. 
49826	----	The Light on Precipice Peak By STEPHEN TALL Illustrated by NEWMAN [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] _How warm should a handshake be? The answer may be more vital than you could guess!_ The three young men sat quietly and watched the faint eerie glow. It was ruddy and small, a spot of dull red color. For perhaps five or six minutes it showed, moving slowly along what seemed to be the lip of Bighorn Glacier, six miles away and seven thousand feet up in the thin cold air. Then it vanished. John Drinkard lowered his binoculars. "Well, that's that. You can see it, but still you can't. The glasses don't help a bit." "Spooks!" said Chuck Evers. He wriggled his muscular shoulders, slipped down onto the small of his back in the chair, and propped long legs on the porch railing. "Spooks?" Carl Royston's brow wrinkled puzzledly. Drinkard and Evers both watched with suppressed amusement as his face suddenly cleared and he almost smiled. "Ah, yes, apparitions." "Haunts," Chuck said. "Hobgoblins. Ghosts. Banshees." "Banshees wail," said Drinkard. Royston's pale eyes glowed with interest. "This you can say for the lights of Precipice Peak--they are quiet." "Are you sure?" John Drinkard asked. "How do you know that every coyote you hear is a coyote?" "At any rate," said Royston, "if they make sounds, they are the sounds of the country." He shivered slightly. "A miserable country," he added. John Drinkard was thick and blocky, with big hands and a square chin. Chuck Evers was long and sinewy. Beside them, Royston seemed a pale, slight figure, his thin face sallow, his shoulders ever hunched against the crisp western air. "You are speaking of the land I love," said Chuck Evers. "If you don't like it, why stay around?" * * * * * Royston shrugged. "It is supposed to make me a man of vigor, with red corpuscles and a need for cold shower baths. Actually, there is nothing wrong with me. I was simply born to sit and watch while great louts like you run and wrestle and climb and sweat." He shifted his gaze to the peak, now a dark silhouette against the ice-clear stars. "There, the light shows again." Slowly the red glow progressed along a cliff face, much higher than it had before. For minutes it moved along steadily, then faded. "That thing," said Evers suddenly, "was goin' along Fifth Avenue. Spooks don't need a route of ascent, even up Precipice. All of a sudden, the lights of Precipice Peak are gettin' solid. I got a feelin' they'll leave sign." "Sign?" Royston's voice went up in the darkness. There was the familiar pause, then Royston's satisfied tone: "Ah, yes, traces." "Right--traces, tracks, spoor. Only mystery about those lights is, we don't know who makes them. But they're gettin' to be a tourist attraction. Maybe that's a lead." "How many trips have there been up Precipice this season?" Royston queried softly. "Fifteen or so," John Drinkard said, "and the boy has something. Any sign on Fifth Avenue or across Bighorn would have been seen by now. There've been some good mountain men on the Peak this summer. Some of 'em don't miss much." Royston hugged his narrow shoulders and made himself small in his chair, shivering again as the chill mountain breeze blew across the porch of the Lodge. "Over the swamps of my native Louisiana, where I wish I now was, I have seen balls of fire go drifting. It is swamp gas, methane, slowly oxidizing and glowing. Could this on the mountain be something like?" "It's almost impossible," said Evers. "And anyhow," he added stubbornly, "balls of gases wouldn't follow a trail. Those blasted lights do." John Drinkard rose easily, stretched his thick arms wide. "Tomorrow, Chuck, tomorrow!" he reminded. "Take it easy, boy. Tomorrow you can look for yourself, remember? At day-break, we go up to solve the mystery of the lights." "Ghastly," said Royston. "To go out at dawn is as bad as eating raw flesh. But tap on my cabin door when you go by. I will wave to you from the window." * * * * * John Drinkard swung his nailed short boots along the trail with a steady, satisfying rhythm. Ahead of him, Chuck Evers set the pace, an easy, loose-jointed shamble that ate up the mountain miles. They were a good team. They felt the trail alike. Drinkard swelled his big chest, then exhaled gustily, as though to expel the last of the tainted air of the settlements below. He warmed slowly to a climb approach and he would have liked a breather. Ahead, the trail switched back sharply. At the switchback, Evers broke his stride, swung the pack-sack from his shoulders and leaned his long frame against a boulder. "Break," he said. "I heard you heave like a foundered mule." John Drinkard grinned. He shrugged off his own pack. "It'll be good to enjoy the view and not have to look at your silly hat." Chuck tilted the Swiss mountaineer's hat, complete with eagle feather. "These are the Alps of America," he observed, "so my hat is fitting." "It doesn't even fit _you_," said Drinkard. Forests of lodgepole pine and spruce lay below them. Already the resort town seemed a toy settlement at the edge of the valley, and the sagebrush world stretched away east to the horizon. To the north, the big peaks of the range tumbled in a massive, orderly row, with lakes flashing along their bases and a vast and timbered plateau rearing up beyond. It was West, good American West, twentieth century and solid, with clean cold mountain air, yellow sunlight on the cliffs and snowfields above. As if by signal, both men turned their gazes upward. The cutback was a vantage point from which could be seen the jumble of ridges and crags surmounted by the glistening white expanse of Bighorn Glacier and, higher still, the seamed front of the eastern face of the mountain, tapering upward to the pinnacle of the peak. The men swung up their pack-sacks and shook hands. "Good luck, friend," said John Drinkard. "Let's go and see if our names are still on the register up there." "Good luck," said Evers. "To-night we'll be up where the lights are. Punch me if you see one first." "Lights, nuts," John Drinkard said. "There'll be none while we're on the peak. Five bucks says so." Evers raised his eyebrows. "I'm not a rich man, but I love a sporting chance. Here's my five. Where'll we put 'em?" Drinkard fumbled in his jacket pocket, brought out a tobacco tin. He poured the remaining tobacco into a pouch and held out the tin. "Stick it in there," he said. "Here's mine." A few paces off the trail, John Drinkard pried up a stone, slipped the tin underneath. "Lights, yours; no lights, mine. Right?" "Right," said Evers, and he grinned at the little added spice for the two days ahead. * * * * * Their steady plodding passage up the ever-dimming trail was an appreciative one. Going into the world above the trees was one of the good things of a peak climb. Hoary marmots whistled from their rocks, conies scurried, brown- and gray-barred ptarmigan crouched almost invisibly among the gaudy alpine fields of avens and mountain sun-flowers and tiny forget-me-nots. At near dusk, they laid out their bedrolls on a level bit of tundra in the lee of a massive outcrop near Bighorn Glacier. A small fire of dead branches of firs and pines that literally crawled on their bellies at this altitude cooked a kettle of stew and heated the water for tea. The men went through the simple chores of an evening camp with the ease that comes when things have been done many times. And when Chuck Evers walked a few paces from the fire, stepped on a small stone that rolled with his weight, he felt with a sort of irritated surprise the little thread of pain that ran through his ankle. Tentatively he tested the foot, then hobbled back to the fire. He knew that he wouldn't climb the peak in the morning. He said nothing to big John until he had stripped off the boot and heavy sock. Then, as Drinkard came back to the fire with more wood, he held out the ballooning ankle. "How are you at taping, friend?" he asked casually. Drinkard looked at the foot, already purpling as it swelled. He reached for his first-aid kit. "Well, anyway," he said resignedly, "you got close enough to watch for lights." Evers set his teeth as Drinkard's big fingers probed the sprain. "We'll pack ice on it," Drinkard decided, "then tape it in an hour. Maybe it's a simple twist." "You know it isn't." "Sure," admitted Drinkard. "I thought you wanted to be cheerful, that's all. It's like when I broke three ribs climbing to look into a bird's nest the day before we were tackling the East Face of Long's. Then _you_ were chin-up." "That was different," said Evers. "I wasn't hurting." When the stars were out and the quarter moon rose from the plains, John Drinkard got up from his bedroll seat by the fire. The two men had sat talking quietly for an hour. Evers' ankle was taped and he was easing it before him as best he could. "I'm going to have a look before I turn in," said Drinkard. "My five still says there won't be lights, but the technical crew may be monkeying around somewhere." "Take it easy," Chuck Evers said. "I'll just skirt along the edge of the glacier. Back in half an hour. _You_ take it easy!" * * * * * Drinkard knew Bighorn Glacier. Its crevasses were so consistent that they were shown on maps. He carried his ice axe, but had no mind to use it. Only after he had worked his way for a number of minutes along the edge of the moonlit ice sheet did the whim to cross it seize him. The glacier had a good snow covering. The going was easy and the view was something few men see. Drinkard automatically avoided the big ice cracks, then slipped through a snow roof into a shallow, temporary one. He wasn't hurt. The moonlight from the crack above showed his ice axe beside him. It was a lucky fall, except for the fact that he couldn't get out again. Time after time, he tried to dig hand- and foot-holes into the splintery icewall. But he was freezing his fingers and making no headway. He was stoutly but not heavily clothed. The cold began to bite into him. He settled himself on his heels quietly and tried to decide what to do. After an hour, Chuck Evers began to call. John Drinkard knew that if he answered, Chuck would probably attempt the ice himself. Evers' voice came now in measured, regular yips. And, while John wavered, from the crags above the glacier he was answered. It was a strange voice, yet oddly not unfamiliar. To John Drinkard it was muffled, but it had a reassuring sound. Drinkard waited in silence. Not many minutes later, a dark silhouette showed in the narrow crack of sky above. From the voice's first call, Drinkard had realized that they had been watched, probably all day. "Are you injured?" asked the man's odd voice. "I'm okay," Drinkard said. "Just drop me a rope and I can walk up the wall. Mind the snow ledge. I didn't--and look at me." The man chuckled. "A joke," he said, almost tentatively. "Here is the rope." John Drinkard caught the loop lowered to him. Its texture was strange to his mountaineer's hands. It was down-soft, warm to the touch, and he felt its strength instinctively. He climbed it easily, hand over hand. The stranger stood three strides back from the crevasse lip, negligently holding the rope with one heavy-gauntleted hand--yet he was slender, slight of build, and when Drinkard rose to his feet, he towered over his rescuer. Big John thrust out his hand. "Well, thanks. Lucky for me _somebody_ has sense enough to walk around ice cracks." The man seemed to hesitate, then extended his own gloved hand. "You must not mind the glove," he said. "It is for your protection. The hand has not yet cooled." * * * * * John Drinkard was glad of the dimness of the moonlight, for his jaw dropped. But the man turned promptly away. "Come," he said, "I have made an easy way. The one with the swollen foot is concerned for you." John Drinkard, who had climbed scores of peaks up and down the Rockies, followed and felt like a tenderfoot. The man's odd voice and stilted phrases tantalized him, yet he knew they were not entirely strange. And the matter of the hot hand.... Drinkard dropped back a couple of paces. The man was setting his booted feet into a line of holes that had not been on the glacier earlier; Drinkard would have sworn to that. They made the traverse of the ice field a simple matter. As they approached the glacier's edge, Drinkard realized that he could see his companion with an amazing clarity. He seemed limned with a dim red glow, which grew brighter with each step. In a few moments, he became as a man outlined in flame, and Drinkard could feel a warmth radiating from him. Yet the snow did not melt under his tread. "It is the boots," said his guide, just as though Drinkard had spoken his thoughts aloud. "They insulate." John Drinkard held onto his poise with something of an effort. "Thank you," he managed drily. "Not only do you light up, but you pick brains. They're both good tricks." The man ahead chuckled tentatively. "A joke," he said, but it was almost a question. "He really doesn't know," thought John Drinkard in astonishment. "That is true," admitted his guide. "Everything else I understand with ease. Even the many kinds of speech are not difficult. But only on Earth are there jokes. We can never be sure about them." "We, huh? I thought a gag like this would take cooperation. How many of you boys are in on it?" They had left the ice and were threading along the little ledge that gave onto the boulder field. "We are four," said the man. He seemed to sense no sarcasm in the question. Drinkard noted, almost without surprise, that the ruddy glow had faded completely and that the man was simply a dark silhouette ahead. * * * * * They reached the tundra and Chuck Evers' voice hailed them from close by. He sat near the tiny fire, the taped foot and ankle eased on a pack-sack before him. "Well," said Evers, "you took your time." "I fell in a crevasse," John Drinkard said, "and I owe you five bucks." "You should put the more important statement first, but we can take that up later. I see we have company." "I'm sorry." His rescue from the crevasse and the little trek back across the glacier had been like something from a dream to John Drinkard. But now, with the familiar figure of Chuck across the fire, things suddenly assumed their proper proportions again. He faced his guide, who stood silently by. "This is Chuck Evers. I'm afraid I didn't catch your name." The man's thin face showed palely from the peaked hood that covered his head and disappeared into the bulky collar of his stout, steel-smooth jacket. "I am called Dzell," he said quietly. The two men stared at him, and he returned their looks with composure. "It's different, anyway," said Chuck finally. "Yes," agreed the man. "That is because I am different." "He can read your head like a crystal ball and light up like a neon sign," John Drinkard heard himself babbling. Evers, though he sensed the strangeness of the situation, turned to Drinkard with concern. "Easy, boy," he said soothingly. "You've slipped on the ice before. Sit down and let's quit being funny." The stranger smiled, but his curving lips seemed more a studied imitation than any indication of mirth. "Let us all sit and I will tell you why I am Dzell. I will do it because I know, when you repeat my words, that you will not be believed." Evers started to speak, thought better of it, and closed his mouth with an exaggerated snap of teeth. John Drinkard sat wearily on the soft tundra vegetation. "You came up to climb the peak," said the man Dzell, "but also you came to see what caused the lights. If you had not had misfortune, you would have climbed the peak, but there would have been no lights." * * * * * He glanced away, up and across the rocky ride and to the upper reaches of the glacier. A dull red glow moved down the route he and John Drinkard had recently taken. Keen eyes could readily see that it had the shape of a man. "That is Dzorr," said Dzell. "We grew in the same membrane. He is erasing our trail across the ice, John Drinkard." Drinkard watched the glow until it slowly faded. "Very smart. We can tell tales, but there won't be any proof, eh?" "That is correct," said the strange man. He turned to Chuck Evers. "You wonder about the statement that we grew in the same membrane. I should have said that we are twins." Evers caught his breath. "Telepathy," he breathed. "John wasn't out of his head." The chill night wind rippled across the alpine field. The little fire flickered and glowed. Overhead, the stars were blue and red and yellow ice. "The truth is simple," said the man called Dzell. "We have told it before, but no one believed, and it has not seemed wise to support our facts. We, Dzorr and I, with our companions Dzinn and Dzett, are explorers." John Drinkard slapped his hand against the boulder beside him and seemed reassured by its solidity. He shook his head to clear it. "I don't get it," he objected. "Chuck and I could call ourselves explorers, too, if rambling around the mountains every chance we get falls under that heading." "We do not explore the mountains," said Dzell. "Here we rest and allow ourselves to behave normally. We explore in the towns and in the cities, where people gather. It is strenuous," he added, with a sound almost like a sigh. "We cannot tolerate it for long. Then we must go into seclusion and renew ourselves." Keen interest was replacing puzzlement in both Evers and Drinkard. They smiled now and Chuck said: "I know what you mean. Ten days in Denver--a fine town, mind you--and I feel like I'd been staked with a short rope." "You do not exactly know what I mean," said Dzell. "Your problems are simply matters of preference. Ours are physiological. We cannot long maintain metabolic balance in the company of people. Thus, Dzinn and Dzett are now in the world you inhabit. When they must rest, then our turn comes." * * * * * Dzell had gathered a pile of small flat stones and he sat sorting them with his gauntleted fingers. They were simply flakes of weathering gneiss, fire- and pressure-derived from some granite as ancient as the range. Neither man noticed the idle movements until Dzell raised a piece to his mouth and bit into it with a grinding sound, like a man cracking nuts. His teeth were large and square, and they had a metallic gleam. They made short work of the gneiss. Dzell flexed his fingers, selected another piece of the rock. "Among people," he observed, "this would be conspicuous. You are not adapted to get oxygen from quartz. We are." "You make Houdini look like a piker," big John told him admiringly. "I admit that's tougher cereal than I'd want to try. But the point of the gag still escapes me." "I am aware of that," said the strange man. "You cannot comprehend because your mind is shackled. Yet it must be evident that we are not too much alike." He rose to his feet. "There is the matter of the body glow. I can control my body temperature, raising and lowering it as I choose. The greatest difficulty when I am among people is to keep it down to human body heat. Normally it is very much higher than yours. And when, due to exercise and metabolic speed-up, excess energy is accumulated, it is satisfying to us to radiate it. You get the same release by deep sighs, by long breaths, by stretching your limbs. Unfortunately, when we radiate rapidly in air, we glow. It has made us conspicuous." "We all have our hobbies," said Evers, shifting his swollen ankle and wincing. "Did you ever hear of the Liars' Club? If you like to hold office, you could be President." Dzell did not appear offended. "I said you would not believe. When it is again my turn to explore, I will search for your Liars' Club. I can see from your thoughts that it is concerned with jokes. And this is the one thing about you that we have not mastered. Other explorers have also felt baffled. The function of odd misstatement escapes us." "'Other explorers'?" Evers' voice lost its note of ridicule, and Drinkard leaned forward with new interest. "You mean there are a lot of incandescent guys like you prowling about?" Dzell shrugged. "All are not from my environment. Many are so unlike you that they cannot mingle and so must observe from hiding. Others cannot exist in your atmosphere without artificial help. We contact them constantly. Your unawareness is a marvel to us all. For creatures so well supplied with adaptations for sensation, you are indeed blind." * * * * * Chuck Evers drew a long breath. "If I could radiate, I'd be lit up like a theater marquee. You sound like an old professor I had once. I didn't understand him, either." Had Dzell comprehended humor, he would have smiled. But he simply turned away with finality. "Dzorr is waiting by the glacier," he said. "We have plans for this time. When you return to the settlements below, it would perhaps be wisest not to attempt to explain the lights." The next instant, he was gone without a sound. The two young men sat silently by the dying fire. A few minutes later, both looked up, as though by signal, toward the upper reaches of the glacier. Two glowing spots, dull cherry red, moved steadily across the ice. They were visible for brief minutes, then slowly faded. Chuck Evers shifted restlessly. He shook his head as though a bee were buzzing inside it. "Did you hear something?" he asked. "Not with my ears," said Drinkard. "But as plain as a voice, Dzell just said to my brain 'Good luck, boys!' in good American." "Now I know I'm nuts," grunted Chuck Evers. "That's what he said to me." To descend Precipice Peak, even if only from Bighorn Glacier, is no fit task for a cripple. Still, Evers and Drinkard knew it had to be done, so, in the early morning, they set about it without haste and without complaint. Where the going allowed it, big John simply back-packed Evers. They made use of every ledge, for Chuck could rappel himself down spots he could not climb or be carried. Both were mountain men and tough, but by mid-afternoon they knew they had had enough. So nothing had ever looked better than the cheerful figure of Heine Kolb, slouched in the saddle of his dainty-footed pinto mare, and leading two pack horses loaded with fish panniers. The ranger was headed down. "The complete Samaritan, that's me," said Heine. "I haul fish up and Poor Fish down. Two loads for the price of one." "We will accept your insults along with the ride," Chuck Evers said wearily. "I never knew what a pretty thing a horse could be!" Heine dropped his fish cans, helped to hoist Evers onto one of the pack horses. Drinkard climbed aboard the other. "What happened?" asked the ranger. "I saw by the headquarters record that you were going up." Evers shrugged and John Drinkard said, "The boy here was playing rockchuck on the stretch below the glacier and one rolled with him." Evers grinned wryly, and John added, "It could happen to anybody, but it's the kind of thing that's partial to tender-feet." "Next time," said Evers humbly, "just leave me up there. I ain't worth saving." They stopped only once. At the big switchback, John Drinkard swung from his horse, pried up a stone, tossed the tobacco can to Evers without a word. The ranger only raised his eyebrows. * * * * * Back at their tent camp on the lake shore, Evers and Drinkard were not disturbed by questions. When men fail on the peaks, they tell their own stories in their own time. Chuck's ankle showed quick improvement and in a couple of days he was hobbling about. Only young Royston came to visit. "You have not been back to the Lodge," he said. "Perhaps you are afraid to show your faces?" "People talk your arm off up there," said Drinkard. He grinned at the pale young man. "Not many of 'em have the gall to come snooping down here!" Royston sat composedly on a boulder. "You cannot offend me. I was concerned for you, I was interested, so I came. Did you see the lights?" "Nary a light," said Chuck cheerfully. He sat in a canvas chair with his foot propped up. "I told you they wouldn't show when anybody was up there." Drinkard turned on him. "You collected five bucks from me by being on the other side of the fence. You were the man who was sure there would be some sign." Royston looked at them with pale eyes. "You are both muddling the waters. And you are both lying. There were lights on the peak when you were there and I have a feeling you saw them. They were quite a show from here." "Then this is the place to see them from," said Chuck. "Closer up, you lose perspective." Royston rose from his seat on the rock. "Friendship means nothing to you, so I will take my small hike back to the Lodge again. Actually, I came to say that tomorrow I leave this miserable place and go home. I have endured all the health I can stand." "Now that," said Chuck, "is a different story. We're sorry to see you go, fella." "Our regards to the swamps," John Drinkard put in. "Ten to one, when you get there, you'll wish you were back." Carl Royston showed his big teeth in a mirthless smile. "This," he said, "I very much doubt." They watched him go around the turn in the trail. Then Drinkard took two strides to the rock where Royston had sat. He touched a finger tentatively to the stone and snatched it away. "I thought so," he said. "He really liked us, but this time he was careful not to shake hands. In spite of himself, he has reached his limit of control. His temperature is going up." Evers looked on with puzzled eyes. "He never could see a joke and he'd wait to pick our brains for a new word," Drinkard pointed out. "Royston--" "--is a name out of a hat," said John Drinkard. "When that lad really goes home, he'll go with his buddies up there on the peak. I wonder which he is--Dzinn or Dzett." 
33122	----	generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) [Illustration: VILLAGE OF CHAMONIX. 1 Summit of Mont Blanc. 2 Bosses du Dromadaire. 3 Dôme du Goûté. 4 Aiguille du Goûté. 5 Grands Mulets. 6 Glacier des Bossons. 7 Montagne de la Côte. 8 Glacier de Taconnaz.] AN IMPROMPTU ASCENT OF MONT BLANC: BY _W. H. LE MESURIER._ LONDON: ELLIOT STOCK, PUBLISHER, 62 PATERNOSTER ROW. BIRKENHEAD: E. GRIFFITH & SON, HAMILTON STREET. 1882. BIRKENHEAD: E. Griffith & Son, Printers, "Caxton" Works, Hamilton Street [Illustration] PREFACE The interest which still follows individual ascents of Mont Blanc, notwithstanding the attraction of other mountain peaks, must be my apology for once again repeating an oft-told tale; but with this endeavour, to make the narrative a true and unvarnished account of what we did and how we did it, and to present the accompanying illustrations (which, for the most part, are taken from photographs) free from exaggeration. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. Evening at Chamonix--Excursion to the Brévent--View of the Mont Blanc chain. CHAPTER II. Commencement of the ascent--Pierre Pointue--Crossing the Glacier des Bossons--An awkward bit--"Cabane" on the Grands Mulets. CHAPTER III. View from the Grands Mulets--A foreign invasion--Trying to sleep--Preparation for a night march. CHAPTER IV. The start at midnight--Ascending the Montées--Arrival at the Petit Plateau--An attempt at breakfast on the Grand Plateau--The expedition jeopardised through mountain sickness--Churlish "foreigners"--The ascent resumed--Repose on the Rochers des Bosses--Climbing the Mauvaise Arête--The final assault--The goal reached. CHAPTER V. Descending the "back bone"--Approach of clouds--An unfortunate slip--Floundering in the snow--In danger--An awkward descent--In and out of the snow--The "Cabane" at last--Delicious repose--The journey resumed--Re-crossing the Glacier--A thunderstorm in the Forest des Pélerins--Welcome back. CHAPTER VI. A few words on our complexions--Certificates procured--Ladies' preparation for an attempt--Nipped in the bud--Concluding remarks. APPENDIX. A brief account of some of the most noted ascents--Routes to Chamonix from the Lake of Geneva. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE THE VALLEY OF CHAMONIX _Frontispiece._ MONT BLANC FROM THE BRÉVENT, SHEWING THE ROUTE 13 THE GLACIER DES BOSSONS 18 THE "CABANE" ON THE GRANDS MULETS 26 MONT BLANC FROM THE COL DE BALME 42 COMING DOWN THE GLACIER DES BOSSONS 50 DIAGRAM SHEWING THE RELATIVE HEIGHTS OF MONT BLANC AND SNOWDON 56 MAP OF ROUTES TO CHAMONIX 72 _CHAPTER I._ "And thou, fresh breaking Day, and you, ye Mountains, Why are ye beautiful?" On a delightful evening in the month of July, 1881, table d'hôte being over, my friend S---- and myself were seated under the verandah of the hotel d'Angleterre at Chamonix; there were many others besides ourselves, chiefly English and Americans, grouped in parties, some taking their coffee, others smoking, and all devoting their attention to the summit of Mont Blanc whose diadem of snow was being warmed in colour if not in reality by the last rays of the setting sun. Though seven miles off as the crow flies it seemed much nearer, and it was hard to realize that some twelve or fourteen hours of incessant toil must be undergone before the foot could be planted on that rounded crest of eternal snow, that guide and porter must be employed, and that ropes and ice-axes must be brought into requisition before those apparently gently-sloping hills of pure white down could be traversed. They looked so smooth, so inviting, and so incapable of doing any one harm. The summit changed from gold to grey, the dome and Aiguille du Goûté faded from view, the Grands Mulets were no longer to be seen, and the form of the Glacier des Bossons could scarcely be distinguished from the Montagne de la Côte. Gradually and imperceptibly they vanished into night, the stars came out, the guests retired, and following their example I climbed up to my room on the sixth floor. We had left Martigny at four in the morning, and had walked most of the way to Forclaz, and the whole of it from thence over the Col de Balme, so I was not sorry to get to bed. Not having the remotest intention of making the ascent my slumbers were undisturbed by the excitement which they say invariably precedes the undertaking, from which even professionals are said not to be exempt. On getting up next morning I was very agreeably surprised to find that the sun was shining brightly on the summit which was entirely free from clouds--a somewhat unusual circumstance, as lofty mountain peaks more often than otherwise are enveloped in them, especially in the morning. Feeling lazy and somewhat stiff after our long walk of the previous day, we loitered about till nearly twelve o'clock, and then decided upon taking advantage of the splendid weather by making an excursion to the Brévent, a mountain on the north side of the valley, from which the view of the Mont Blanc chain is one of the finest in the neighbourhood. A mule was hired with a boy to attend it, and a stout muscular young guide named François Ravanel was employed--not that there was any need of his good services, but the rules and regulations of the "Bureau des Guides" must be complied with, and one of these stipulates that a guide must in all cases accompany a mule. After crawling upwards for a couple of hours, we arrived at a newly erected hut, where refreshment was provided, and here the remainder of the afternoon was devoted to the inspection of the magnificent scenery which surrounded us on every side. The Valley of Chamonix lies nearly east and west, and is so narrow that it might almost be termed a ravine. It is rather more than ten miles long and less than half a mile in width. The mountains of the Mont Blanc range on the south, and those of the Brévent, on the north, rise abruptly on either side, their bases being covered with thick forests of pine for some two thousand feet above the valley. On the south side countless "aiguilles" pierce the sky, from le Tour on the east to the Aiguille du Goûté on the west. These graceful spires are of warm tinted rock, and here and there streaks of snow are to be seen in the crevices and gullies which are shaded from the sun. Several large glaciers descend from the northern slopes of the Mont Blanc chain, the first at the east or upper end being the Glacier du Tour; the next is the Glacier d'Argentière, which is the largest of them all, being no less than seven miles long between its upper and lower extremities and about a mile wide for two-thirds of its length, at which point it tapers off--as all glaciers do on approaching the valley. Three miles further to the west is the Glacier des Bois, the termination of the famous Mer de Glace. Between it and the village of Chamonix there are two or three unimportant glaciers which do not quite reach the forest. The Glaciers des Bossons and Taconnaz complete the list, the latter being ten miles from the Glacier du Tour. These gigantic streams of ice, hundreds of feet thick, are formed in the upper regions of the mountains, and slowly and with irresistible force slide down towards the valley, moving at a rate which varies according to the season and other circumstances, but which seldom exceeds three feet per day. They do not, however, quite reach the foot of the mountain, for, as the temperature is excessively hot during the summer months, the ice thaws rapidly, and the water thus formed rushes out in a roaring torrent through a tunnel-like hole at the extremity or "Snout." [Illustration: VIEW OF MONT BLANC FROM THE BRÉVENT. 1 Forest des Pélerins. 2 Pierre Pontue. 3 Glacier des Bossons. 4 Grands Mulets. 5 Petit Plateau. 6 Grand Plateau. 7 Bosses du Dromadaire. 8 Summit of Mont Blanc. A Aiguille du Midi. B Mont Blanc du Tacul. C Mont Maudit. D Dôme du Goûté. E Aiguille du Goûté. F Montagne de la Côte. G Glacier de Taconnaz. H Montagne de la Côte. NOTE.--_The route to the Summit is indicated by the dotted line._] These torrents flow into the Arve, which in summer time roars along the valley, leaping wildly over a bed of rocks and boulders in its headlong course to mingle with the waters of the Rhone at Geneva. The view of Mont Blanc from this spot was magnificent. His snow-capped head, glistening against a cloudless sky, formed the centre of the picture. Slightly on his left, and a little lower, was the Mont Maudit, separated by a thin line from the Mont Blanc du Tacul, and below the rocky base of the former several dark-looking pointed specks could be seen on the snow, the lower being the Grands-Mulets rocks, the upper the Aiguilles à Pichner. Lower yet are the Glaciers des Bossons and Taconnaz, on either side of the Montagne de la Côte, their delicately green tinted surfaces becoming more rugged and sparkling as they neared the valley. Apparently within rifle range the Aiguille du Midi raised its mitred summit 12,600 feet above the sea, the precipitous naked rock contrasting with the snow which here and there found lodgment, or lay in detached fields some 5,000 feet above the valley. On the right of the "Monarch of the Mountains" the Dôme and Aiguille du Goûté with their silver robes completed the scene. On our way down the following arrangements were made for the next day's excursion:--We were to visit the Grands Mulets, and in order to be back for dinner were to start at six in the morning. A porter was to be engaged, not to carry us or our belongings, but to act as the rear-guard when the rope was used in dangerous places, and François undertook to find a suitable man for that purpose. A mule was to be hired, François remarking "you shall have the same mule and the same boy you had to-day; you know them both." _CHAPTER II._ "Around his waist are forests braced, The Avalanche in his hand." "Friend! have a care, Your next step may be fatal!--for the love Of Him who made you, stand not on that brink!" The day broke bright and clear, and at six we were introduced by François to his friend, Jules Tairraz, who looked very business-like with a knapsack on his back and carrying an ice-axe and a coil of rope. The mule having overslept himself, we went on without him, and awaited his arrival under the trees at the foot of the mountain. At last the lazy brute hove in sight, walking in his usual style; then our coats, the knapsack, rope, etc., were strapped on, and by way of adding to his comfort I got into the saddle, and thus the ascent was begun. The route lay through the forest des Pélerins, and for some distance ran parallel with the Arve, crossing the torrents which flow into that river, over picturesque wooden bridges. Then, on approaching the lower extremity of the Glacier des Bossons, it wound to the left and zig-zagged up the base of the mountain. As we ascended the steep and narrow track an occasional gap in the trees afforded a sight of the glacier and enabled us to perceive that substantial progress was being made. The first stage of mountain climbing in these parts is decidedly tiresome; the forest is so thick one can see little else besides, and there is a monotony in the operation that would be unendurable were it not for the end in view. The trees at length became more scarce and stunted, and after two hours of this unexciting work they disappeared altogether; Pierre Pointue was reached, and the first stage of our journey was thus accomplished. Here we breakfasted. I spent some time in sketching this spot with its unassuming little buildings, and the Aiguille du Goûté in the back ground. We then moved on without the mule and boy, and worked our way round the face of the mountain, the rock being perpendicular to the left, and on our right a precipice, but the track was sufficiently wide to enable us to walk in comfort and without experiencing any of those feelings of nervousness which Albert Smith felt when passing over the same ground thirty years ago. Three quarters of an hour after leaving Pierre Pointue, we reached Pierre à l'Echelle, against whose side was reared a strong ladder which is kept for use when the crevasses are too wide to be crossed without its assistance. Its services were not, however, required on this occasion. Before introducing my readers to the Glacier des Bossons, which we were about to traverse, I may remark that opinions differ widely as to the difficulties and dangers of the undertaking. Some make very light of them, while others lead one to suppose that nothing short of cat-like agility, combined with heroic courage, could surmount the obstacles. The fact is, that leaving out of consideration experience, nerve, and surefootedness, the crossing of the Glacier may be comparatively easy one day, and beset with dangers another, the difficulties varying with the state of the ice, which is constantly changing. New crevasses are being formed, and those already in existence alter from day to day, so that great skill is required on the part of the guides to select a feasible route. Then, again, a snow bridge, consisting of a mere lump of snow jammed into the upper part of a wide crevasse, may bear one's weight or not according to a variety of circumstances, so after making due allowance for the disparagement of difficulties on the one hand, and the exaggeration of them on the other, it may fairly be said that walking over the Bossons is not exactly child's play. At about eleven o'clock we stepped on the ice and were agreeably surprised to find that there was no tendency to slip, our boots having been well studded with nails before starting, and as yet the points had not become rounded through wear. For the first half hour walking was fairly easy, the surface, though irregular, being in no way difficult. After this we reached a queer-looking place, where the ice was split up with yawning crevasses whose edges twisted and turned in the most extraordinary way. Here there was a bit of climbing in which both hands and feet had to take their part. François helped S----, Jules helped me, and we each helped the other until all were safely across; and then turning to look at the gulf we had just passed we noticed that the _face_ of the ice (not the surface) was exquisitely tinted with the most delicate green and blue, deepening into azure until it was lost in the abyss. Between this spot and the junction of the Glaciers des Bossons and Taconnaz, the ice was tolerably regular, and being free from snow there were no unseen crevasses to be guarded against; until we reached the "junction," where these mighty Glaciers part company. They seem to part in anger, for here the ice is in a frightful state of confusion, with the "seracs" (ice-bergs) heaped about in all directions, and with fathomless crevasses on every side. [Illustration: GLACIER DES BOSSONS.] A halt was called, and François uncoiled the rope which he measured out, forming a loop at every twelve feet or thereabouts; we were tied round the chest, and having been cautioned to keep our distances, and on no account to let the cord be slack, we proceeded on our way very slowly, and with the greatest care. This was by far the most trying part of the Glacier, and just before quitting this chaos our nerves were put to a severe test, for the only method of advance was over a ridge of ice about a foot wide, twisting about, and having a very irregular surface. François went first and cut some rude steps with his ice-axe, then we walked after him at a snail's pace, at one moment seeking for a good foot-hold, and the next looking into the crevasses on either side, the azure blue of which was more beautiful than ever. We crossed without a slip, and François remarked, "the most difficult part of the ascent to the summit has now been accomplished." This observation, however, was not borne out by the facts which shall be narrated in due course; but small blame to him, poor fellow! He was a young guide, having only just passed his examination and obtained his certificate, consequently he was naturally anxious to lead a party to the top; besides this there was another motive, his fee would be increased five-fold, twenty francs being the regulation charge to the Grands Mulets, a hundred to the summit. For the next half hour or so numerous crevasses barred the way; when they did not exceed four feet or a little more we jumped across, and although we soon became accustomed to the work it was not always an easy operation, for putting aside the ugly look of the chasm, the foot-hold not being secure, it was a somewhat difficult matter to spring from the slippery brink of ice on which we stood. Sometimes we crossed over a snow-bridge but a few feet wide, François first prodding it with the handle of his axe; then, being satisfied that it would bear, he stepped forward, while we stood on the alert to save him from an untimely death should the snow give way. The difficulties lessened as we advanced, and, our attention not being constantly directed to our footsteps, we were enabled to look about us a little more. The dark-coloured Grands Mulets, no longer insignificant but rising some hundreds of feet above the snow, their wedge-like forms leaning well forward, seemed to defy the mighty downward pressure of avalanche and ice. The colour of the sky was of the deepest blue, almost indigo, the intensity of which far exceeded anything we had ever seen, or could have imagined possible, and it was not until we had been in the "Cabane" on the Grands Mulets for some time that we discovered that the sky is the same here as in any ordinary atmosphere at a lower level. The cause of the deception is easily explained; our eyes had been rivetted on ice and shining snow for several hours, consequently the colour appeared deeper by contrast. At length we quitted the Glacier, and the remainder of the journey was on slopes of snow. In some respects it was pleasanter than before; there was a nice soft feeling about it, there was no fear of slipping, and no particular care had to be exercised. On the other hand the work was more fatiguing, and worst of all our boots were getting wet through. The base of the Grands Mulets was nearly reached when our arrival was announced by Jules, who gave a genuine Alpine shout which was answered from the "Cabane," and, having clambered up the rocks, at 1.30 we entered the little hut. Prior to Albert Smith's ascent there was no refuge of any kind in this wild and exposed situation. But as the number of excursionists spending a night on the rocks to see the glories of sunset and sunrise was on the increase, a rude hut fourteen feet long by seven wide was erected by the guides in 1854. The walls were formed of flat blocks and splinters of the rock, and the roof was of boards. The existing "Cabane" is somewhat larger. It is divided into three compartments, two of which are furnished with a couple of beds covered with coarse rugs, a deal table and two stools. The other room is fitted with a small cooking-stove, and is used by the man and woman in charge, and by passing guides and porters. On the north side there is a narrow walk about a yard in width protected by a hand-rail, and on the west a short sloping path leading to the snow. Hence it is plain that the life of those who dwell on this barren rock during the season is not unlike that of lighthouse keepers. True it is that they may stretch their legs on the snow, but the only out of door exercise they can take in comfort is the narrow walk, some forty or fifty feet in length, referred to. Supplies are as a matter of course brought to this isolated place with difficulty and at considerable expense, consequently the prices charged, though high, are not exorbitant, more especially as the proprietor pays a large sum to the Commune for his license. Luncheon was just over when a foreigner, accompanied by two guides and a porter, joined us in the hut. He was on his way back to Chamonix, having successfully made the ascent. There was an air of joy in his countenance, and satisfaction in his every movement, and we fondly hoped to be in the same happy frame of mind at the expiration of twenty-four hours or so. Having rested for a while, he with his party quitted the "Cabane," and, roped together, crept down the rocks. Just as they reached the snow I shouted to the guide, "Will you have the kindness to tell them at the hotel d'Angleterre that we mean to go to the top?" "Very well, sir, I shall not forget." Then leaning over the post and rail-fence, we watched them going down the slopes till they disappeared from view among the "seracs." _CHAPTER III._ "The world is all before me; I but ask Of Nature that with which she will comply-- It is but with her summer's sun to bask, To mingle in the quiet of her sky, To see her gentle face without a mask, And never gaze on it with apathy." Then we were left alone. "All heaven and earth are still, though not in sleep." The sun shone brightly on the pure white snow by which we were surrounded; the air was motionless, and not a sound disturbed the stillness of that memorable afternoon. At our feet lay the Glacier des Bossons. "Heaven-descended in its origin, it yet takes its mould and conformation from the hidden womb of the mountain which brought it forth. At first soft and ductile, it acquires a character and firmness of its own, as an inevitable destiny urges it on its onward career. Jostled and constrained by the crosses and irregularities of its prescribed path, hedged in by impassable barriers which fix limits to its movements, it yields groaning to its fate, and still travels forward seamed with the scars of many a conflict of opposing obstacles. All this while, though wasting, it is renewed by an unseen power,--it evaporates, but is not consumed. "On its surface it bears the spoils which, during the progress of its existence, it has made its own; often weighty burdens devoid of beauty or value, at times precious masses, sparkling with gems or ore. Having at length attained its greatest width and extension, commanding admiration by its beauty and power, waste predominates over supply, the vital springs begin to fail; it stoops into an attitude of decrepitude--it drops the burdens one by one it had borne so proudly aloft--its dissolution is inevitable. But as it is resolved into its elements, it takes all at once a new, and livelier, and disembarrassed form; from the wreck of its members it arises 'another, yet the same'--a noble, full-bodied, arrowy stream, which leaps rejoicing over the obstacles which had stayed its progress, and hastens through fertile valleys towards a freer existence, and a final union in the ocean with the boundless and the infinite." Northward on the opposite side of the valley rose the Brévent. The buttress up which we had ridden the day before seemed quite vertical and inaccessible from this point of view. The pine forest clothing its base resembled turf, while the zig-zag paths above appeared as fine yellow threads. Turning towards the west, vast fields of sloping snow formed the foreground, and towering above them rose the imposing Dôme du Goûté, relieved here and there by dark-coloured patches of rock; further to the left the base of the Aiguille à Pichner, the upper of the two little specks we had noticed at Chamonix and from the Brévent. Time passed rapidly; what with sketching, discussing the prospects of a successful ascent (concerning which our fellows had not the slightest misgiving, although we had two guides less than the regulation number), perusing the traveller's book, looking at the scenery, and basking in the sun, we had a most delightful time of it. At five we sat down to a plain dinner, although it consisted of several courses; and having indulged in our usual smoke, we lay down to rest during the few hours which remained before our re-commencing the ascent. Although it was rather early for sleep we might have done something in that direction had not our attempts been rudely interfered with. When we lay down all was still as death, and remained so for a time; then there was a terrific noise of stones rattling against the wooden walls of the hut. The cause of all this was that an addition to the building is about to be made, and the levelling of the rock for its reception is done by the men who bring up the materials from Pierre Pointue, and the only time they give to it is before retiring at night. What muscles these fellows must have! They had crossed the Glacier _twice_ that day with heavy loads of wood on their backs, and not contented they must needs set to work at sunset to the discomfort of those who, like good children, had gone to bed at an early hour. At length this diabolical noise ceased, and we again courted sleep, and were on the verge of attaining it when voices were heard outside followed by a thundering kick at the door, which was opened by the inconsiderate fellow who had bestowed it, and who, on perceiving that the beds were occupied, uttered a "Pardon, Messieurs," and slamming it disappeared. But this was not the last of him and his friend, who, occupying the next room to ours, made as much noise as if they were doing it by contract. The partition being thin I heard nearly every word they said, and was somewhat amused and very disgusted at the following dialogue which was carried on in French between one of the tourists and a guide. [Illustration: Aiguille à Pichner. Dôme du Goûté. "CABANE" ON THE GRANDS MULETS.] "What are the regulations as to the payment of your expenses here?" "There are no regulations, sir; you are not obliged to pay for us; but as a fact we have never paid; our employers have invariably done so." "Oh, very well, we don't object, only we think that if you let it be understood that you would have to pay, they would probably charge somewhat less!" Exit guide. To this interesting conversation succeeded the clattering of knives and forks; later on subdued talking, which ended finally in regular and prolonged snores. These interruptions effectually drove sleep away, coax it as we would. With closed eyes and in a half dreamy state I saw the "seracs" and crevasses, and passed over the ground we had traversed in the morning. Then regaining the full possession of my faculties, I asked myself if I was not bent on taking part in an idiotic action by starting in the middle of the night to clamber up some thousands of feet of snow and ice. Should I be repaid for the trouble and discomfort? Most likely there would be clouds or mist to hide the scenery, and even if there were not, would the game be worth the candle? Would not my friends say, "Very wrong, and very foolish, too; you ought to have known better?" Inclination tried hard to make me change my resolve, but was beaten in the attempt; and I am glad of it, for I was repaid, and amply, too. Later on, in the perfect stillness of that calm night, I heard a loud rattling report caused by the falling of a mighty avalanche. It was now ten o'clock; rolling restlessly about, I waited for the knock which was to summon us at a quarter to twelve. At last it came; a shuffling of feet was heard which approached nearer and nearer, then the signal was given, and in a few minutes we were ready for François to put on our half dried and dreadfully stiff boots (despite the grease) and to tie on the gaiters. I ate some bread and cheese, and drank a glass of water, but S---- took nothing. My flask was filled with brandy; some provisions, two bottles of Bordeaux, and one of Champagne, were stowed away in Jules' knapsack, and we each took a packet of raisins, prunes, and chocolate, which we were assured would be very acceptable later on. As to our clothing, S---- had on an alpaca coat and knickerbockers, whilst I wore an ordinary light summer suit. We were unprovided with top coats, wrappers, and had _no_ gloves. S---- had bought a pair of coloured spectacles some day previously, but, having nothing of the kind, I was fortunate in being able to procure a pair of goggles at the Grands Mulets, without which I could not have made the ascent, as the glare of the snow would in all probability have produced snow blindness. We were now at an elevation of 10,000 feet, the goal we hoped to reach at six or seven in the morning was 15,780 feet above the sea, consequently the portion _yet_ to be ascended was no less than 5,780 feet, or nearly twice the height of Snowdon. Midway between the Grands Mulets and the summit is the Grand Plateau, and to reach it three gigantic snow-slopes or steps, each some 900 feet high, have to be surmounted, then the remaining portion of the journey is over the Bosses du Dromadaire, the Mauvaise Arête, and the final slope. _CHAPTER IV._ "The stars are forth, the moon above the tops Of the snow-shining mountains.--Beautiful!" Our modest preparations being now completed, the rope was stretched along the narrow path, loops were made, and we were tied in the following order--François, S----, myself, then Jules. All being ready, François moved forward with a lantern, and in a couple of minutes we were fairly on the snow. All thoughts of difficulties, dangers, and what our friends would say, were left in the "Cabane," and our sole attention was devoted to the breasting of the gigantic slopes which are called Les Montées. The night was fine but dark, the moon not having risen yet. Onwards and upwards we went in silence, and with slow and measured tread, keeping at distances of about twelve feet apart. We had not proceeded very far before we came to a dead stop, and on enquiring of S---- what it meant, he replied that François' nose was bleeding. This is one of the many inconveniences to which one is liable at these altitudes. On looking back we saw a light advancing, and as it came nearer and nearer we made out the figures of a party of six men crawling slowly in our direction. They were the noisy foreigners who had not added to our comfort in the "Cabane." On drawing near a great deal of talk went on between their guides and ours in patois. Then they went ahead, and, François having recovered, we followed them closely, as soon as the route--concerning which there appeared to be some doubt--had been agreed upon. The work was tiresome, with nothing to look at besides the snow under our feet, and no excitement of any description, not even the jumping of a crevasse. To add to the monotony, talking was prohibited, for, having made some remarks to Jules as we went along, I was advised by him not to speak; and no doubt he was right, as a certain amount of exertion was necessary to carry on a conversation, separated as we were by an interval of several yards. This portion of the journey was decidedly uphill work, figuratively as well as literally. At about two o'clock the moon appeared above the tops of the mountains, and although it had just entered the last quarter, it afforded sufficient light to enable François to dispense with the lantern, which he left on the snow; on several occasions we stopped a considerable time while mounting the steep slopes, without any apparent reason. At last, becoming quite impatient, I asked S---- to pass the word to François to get ahead of the "foreigners." He preferred, however, to follow in their path, thinking that the track must be rather more easy by being beaten down. Although so thinly clad I did not suffer in the least from cold, except in my feet, which was not to be wondered at, considering that my socks were cotton, and that my boots, damp at starting, were now wet through. On nearing the Petit Plateau we went up a slope which was nearly perpendicular. It was not snow, for that substance could not have stood at so steep an angle; and it was not hard ice, but névé--its consistence was much the same as that of an ice pudding; by giving a smart kick the foot entered sufficiently to afford a good hold. It was really very steep, and at the same time a particularly easy bit of climbing; but, had we been photographed, the uninitiated would have marvelled at our daring. After this we walked on the level for a short distance, and arrived in full sight of the Petit Plateau before reaching which we we went along some very narrow ridges of ice with deep crevasses on either side, then up some snow slopes, at the top of which we stood on the Plateau. This we crossed at as rapid a pace as circumstances permitted on account of the danger of falling avalanches that beset this spot. The guides will have it that the slightest disturbance of the atmosphere, such as can be created by the human voice, is sufficient to cause a disaster; and as it is always as well to practice obedience, we proceeded on our way without uttering a word. So far I had not experienced any difficulty of breathing, nor had I suffered from thirst; but soon after quitting the Grands Mulets I felt a dryness in the mouth and throat, and then I tried the effects of a raisin; but not being satisfied with the result, took a prune, and, discarding the fruit, rolled the stone in my mouth, from which process I derived great benefit. Plodding steadily upwards, we asked from time to time whether we were not yet half way? "No, sir; not till we arrive at the Grand Plateau, and it is some distance off yet." How we longed for day-light, that the monotony of this night excursion might be broken by the sight of the grand scenery which, though surrounding, was almost invisible to us! Before the Grand Plateau was reached we stopped for refreshment. We had been tramping for nearly four hours, and it was needed. The knapsack was opened, and a bottle of wine produced, but what about the corkscrew? Left behind of course! So François volunteered to operate with his ice-axe, but as he was far less expert in decapitating a bottle than in hewing steps, a considerable portion of the contents was lost. It was not long before we resumed our march, and having nearly traversed the Grand Plateau another halt was made, and this time we meant to eat as well as drink. Not feeling hungry I was told by our fellows that no one had much appetite up here. Then the remaining bottle of claret was uncorked with care, and after we had partaken of its contents sparingly, it was deposited in the snow for our return. Much as we should have liked to sit down and rest we could not do so, for reposing on a bed of snow was not to be thought of. Resuming our journey we soon came up with and passed the other party who were grouped together apparently engaged in our late occupation. Dawn now began to break, and stopping for a few minutes at the foot of a long and regular incline I said to S---- "Well, have have you had enough of it?" To my inexpressible surprise, he answered "Yes, I feel so ill that I do not think I shall be able to go on, and the summit seems as far off as ever." It was now broad day-light, and we were little more than half-way. "Oh! come on, women have done it, and why should not we?" "I am ill, and your talking in that way only makes me worse." Then I called François, who made light of it, remarking that feelings of sickness are often experienced in this locality; the flask was produced, and we took a little nip all round, and went on. After going a short distance, S---- said, "I feel dreadfully ill, I never felt so bad in my life, it is impossible for me to go on. I could not reach the Plateau for £10,000. Go on, and I will find my way back to the Grands Mulets, somehow." "That's out of the question; you can't get there alone, and as there is no help for it, we must all go back." Then I told François, and the poor fellow's countenance at once fell below zero. This was his first ascent as guide, although he had accompanied other parties as porter on eleven previous occasions. Matters certainly looked gloomy at this moment. S---- not only appeared the picture of misery, but was undoubtedly very ill--suffering, in fact, from mountain sickness; he complained of internal cold and shivered all over, besides experiencing other sensations which are best described in his own words,--"It seemed as though all power had departed from my limbs, my eyes were dim and incapable of vision, and I more than once put my hand to them and my ears and mouth to make sure that blood was not spurting forth." Feeling averse to beat a hasty retreat after all the toil that had been undergone, and when the end was so comparatively near, and hoping against hope that S---- might yet be able to reach the summit, we tried to make him as comfortable as possible. A seat was made on the snow with alpenstocks and ice-axe handles, and Jules goodnaturedly took off his jacket, in which he wrapped the invalid. It was near this very spot that Sir Thomas Talfourd's expedition was forced to return through the same cause in 1843. At this time the other party came in sight, crawling slowly up the slope of snow, walking in single file, and roped together. On moving past us and noticing that there was something amiss, one of the guides observed to me: "You are all right, or you would not be able to smoke." They then discovered that we were going back, and the same fellow who had just spoken to me said, "Do you wish to make the ascent, sir?" "Of course I do; that is why I am here." "Then untie yourself and fasten on to our line, and come on." "Yes, with pleasure, if your employers are willing." Whispering was carried on, and, after some conversation in patois, François announced that they were _not_ willing. Then S---- rose up, quietly remarking: "We had better get on." "You can't do it, man; you are far too ill." "I will, if I die for it!" Without further talk we made a fresh start up this interminable slope. The indignation S---- felt at the churlish behaviour of the "foreigners" completely restored him, the effect produced being the same as intense excitement on those who are suffering from _mal-de-mer_. I pictured to myself the fun we should have on our way back, and the railway speed with which we should come down, but I quite left out of the calculation what the condition of the snow might be a few hours hence. It was broad day-light when we reached the top of the incline, and the sun's welcome rays were beginning to brighten up the aiguilles and peaks on our left. Looking back the spectacle was not only grand and beautiful but weird-like, and the perfect stillness that reigned made it all the more impressive. The valley of Chamonix was filled with clouds, not mere fog or mist, but real clouds rolling beneath us, and slowly rising up the mountains whose rugged peaks and sharp-pointed aiguilles reared their graceful heads against a back ground of unclouded sky. The scene was one to be remembered, and we felt that we were beginning to reap the fruits of our five hours toil. Travelling was fairly easy, the snow being in splendid condition, and as there was no danger to be guarded against we were able to devote the whole of our attention to the scenery. The summit shining white certainly appeared nearer than it did from the Hotel d'Angleterre, but not so close as we should have expected after the hours we had spent in journeying towards it. Arriving at the Rochers des Bosses, some low, flat rocks, scarcely rising above the surrounding snow, their surfaces rent by the severity of the climate into thousands of sharp jagged pieces of stone, we sat down to rest for the first time since quitting the Grands Mulets. Lying down on this hard but welcome couch, and warmed by the sun now shining brightly upon us, we surveyed the remaining portion of the task before us--the 1,500 feet and more--yet to be mounted, immense fields of snow to be traversed, les Bosses du Dromadaire to be climbed--and then the final slope. Having "lighted up" I felt in a very contented mood, then an involuntary nod reminded me that we had not slept since the night before last,--puff--nod--puff--then a longer doze. "François, I should like to have a snooze." "You must not, sir!" "It can't do any harm." "You must not!" "Then the sooner we are off the better, for there is a lot of work to be done yet." Getting up lazily, we buckled to once more, and surmounting first the Grande and then the Petite Bosse, we approached a pure white ridge, sharp as a knife, and apparently vertical. Wondering how François would steer, whether to the right or left, so as to scale one of the sides, I was surprised to see him direct his steps to the centre. "Surely he does not intend to go up that frightful ridge! He does, though!" and on reaching it he informed us that it was the Mauvaise Arête; and a more wicked _back-bone_ could scarcely be conceived. This was the spot which was visited by Pierre Balmat, Marie Couttet, François Paccard, and several others, when exploring the mountain on the 8th of June, 1786. They described it as a "huge ridge which connected the top of Mont Blanc with the Dôme du Goûté, but it was so steep and narrow that its passage was impossible;" and having concluded that the summit was inaccessible by this route, they returned to Chamonix. The Corridor and Mur de la Côte is the route generally followed, but this one is somewhat shorter and less fatiguing, though more difficult. It cannot, however, be made use of unless the weather is calm. Speaking for myself, I did not relish the prospect of climbing that knife edge, which was frightfully steep, scarcely a foot in width, apparently several hundred feet high, and its sides not very far removed from the perpendicular. Acting on the principle that when a disagreeable thing has to be done the sooner the better, we did not linger at the base, but went straight at it, slowly and with the greatest care, for we were now on ice. Before taking a step our alpenstocks were firmly driven in, which was a most laborious operation, although the surface was sufficiently soft to enable us to do so by stabbing it several times on each occasion. François had by far the heaviest task to perform, for he had constantly to use his axe in cutting steps. How long this went on I am unable to say, perhaps half an hour, most likely more; all I know is that ultimately we found ourselves standing in a happy frame of mind on the snow, which was almost level, and here we rested, panting, after our exertions, and then walking forward almost on a level the foot of the last slope was soon reached, and now the final assault was begun. The work was very stiff, though by no means difficult or dangerous, and we stopped more than once. Feeling very tired I remarked to François: "Well, I confess that I am fatigued." "And so are we, sir," was his laconic reply. During the whole of the ascent I had not experienced so much difficulty in walking as now. I felt as though I had a greater weight to support, and compare the work to carrying a heavy load up a long flight of stairs. And this was not to be wondered at, considering that the density of the air at this elevation is as nearly as possible half that at the level of the sea. Going up the Arête the pause between each step, whilst the alpenstock was being driven in, was sufficiently long to afford a rest. Then again, the mind was so occupied that fatigue, though doubtless present, passed unnoticed. But neither at this nor at any other time did I experience any difficulty of breathing or feelings of suffocation. At last the goal was reached!--we stood on the summit of Mont Blanc! The customary salute of three guns was fired from Chamonix; the bottle of champagne was drunk with the usual toasts; and, having shaken hands all round, we turned our attention to the world below--on which we did not seem to stand, but rather on some huge white cloud. Above the sky was a clear, unbroken atmosphere of blue; far beneath the spot on which we stood detached fields of clouds covered the landscape, and, uniting with the horizon, had the appearance of a vast sea; some of them, rising above the rest, resembled island rocks, while others towered up like gigantic cliffs. Monte Rosa, the rival of Mont Blanc, though rearing its proud head far above the ocean of clouds, seemed but a mere rock. The Jura was scarcely visible; the Brévent was indistinct; the Mont Maudit, Tacul, and the other peaks of the Mont Blanc range, though near and unclouded, were dwarfed into insignificance as we looked down upon them. There was no inclination to identify mountain, lake, or city, but rather to gaze in silence on that vast and weird-like scene. [Illustration: MONT BLANC FROM THE COL DE BALME.] "There is a calm upon me-- Inexplicable stillness! which till now Did not belong to what I knew of life. ... It will not last, But it is as well to have known it, though but once; It hath enlarged my thoughts with a new sense, And I within my tablets would note down ... That there is such a feeling." _CHAPTER V._ "The mists boil up around the glaciers; clouds Rise curling fast beneath me, white and sulphury." Would that our stay could have been prolonged! but frail human nature cannot perform impossibilities. We had been on foot nine hours, and had a long day's work before us; furthermore we were thinly clad, and were exposed to a chilly breeze, from which no shelter could be found; so, casting a look on this indescribable scene, and with feelings of grim satisfaction that its awful stillness would never be profaned by crowds of noisy tourists and vendors of cheap articles, we commenced to retrace our steps. The Mauvaise Arête, bad as we had found it going up, was infinitely worse coming down; the ridge seemed narrower, and the slopes on either side much steeper. Several times our fellows called out "you must not look down, gentlemen;" but fortunately neither S---- nor myself were troubled with nervousness, and we did look down the steep inclines, whose end to all appearance was eternity. Slowly and cautiously the descent was made, each one minding his neighbour as well as himself, and taking special care that the rope should not be slack. We did not walk in step like soldiers on the march, but advanced in a succession of jerks as it were. François having made a step, stood still; S---- having followed his example, I did the same, and when Jules had completed his part of the performance, the opera was repeated. Some idea of the steepness of the ridge may be formed, when I say that at one exceptionally steep place I leaned back, and rested my shoulders against it. Jules at once called out, "Don't do that, sir, you are more likely to slip; trust to your heels." So following his advice I dug them well in and by dint of care the foot was safely reached, and we all looked forward to an easy and enjoyable return. But the end had not come yet! At the Rochers des Bosses we felt very much inclined to lie down, and to take it easy, but François urged us on, not liking the appearance of a cloud which was drifting in our direction. Clouds are one of the sources of danger on the mountain, through which cause eleven lives were lost a few years since. The poor fellows being unable to find their way perished of cold and exposure. We were marching down the rocks in a leisurely manner, and I, forgetful that we were roped, was paying no attention whatever to those who preceded me, the foot-hold being secure, when suddenly I felt a terrific jerk, and before there was time to plant myself firmly on my feet I had lost my balance, and was on the point of falling headlong, when to my great satisfaction a violent backward pull arrested a very ugly fall, which would probably have resulted in a broken limb if not something worse. The cause of this was an unseen piece of ice upon which S---- had placed his foot--slipped--and, falling suddenly, had communicated his misfortune to me through the agency of the rope. The alpenstock was jerked violently out of his hand, and went glissading down the snow for a distance of a hundred yards at least. It stopped, however, in a place that fortunately was accessible. The snow was now no longer in the same condition as in the early morning, the heat, though temperate, being sufficient to soften the crust, and render walking very laborious; and as we reached the top of the incline, where the expedition nearly came to an abrupt termination, and down which we had expected to glissade, we found the snow so soft that we sank in it to the knee and occasionally to the waist. Floundering along, and with an occasional grumble at a style of work for which we had not bargained, we slowly and gradually descended this unlucky slope, till its foot was reached. Parched and weary we went on, keeping a sharp look out for the wine we had left in the snow. "There it is!" "No! that belongs to the foreigners." "Then ours can't be far off;" and sure enough it was found in the same place where we had left it. Our stock of drinkables was now exhausted. Nearing the Petit Plateau we were enabled to examine the much-feared avalanches, which were almost invisible during the ascent. In appearance they were not unlike chalk cliffs, cracked here and there as though the foundation had yielded. On the whole, these huge blocks looked safe enough, with the exception of one some thirty feet in height which was hanging over, ripe for a fall at any moment. Under the very shadow of this threatening mass of consolidated snow we were bound to pass, and, eyeing it with suspicion, we increased our pace to the utmost possible speed, when, as luck would have it, S---- sank into a mixture of ice and snow just as we were immediately underneath. François turned back, and tugged away; Jules went forward to assist, but their united efforts proving of no avail they resorted to their ice-axes, and finally succeeded in quarrying out the imprisoned limb. This was probably the most hair-breadth escape during the whole expedition. With feelings of relief we walked on in silence, and crossed the same uninviting ridges, high walls of ice, with crevasses on the right hand and on the left; as it was softer than on our way up, there was a feeling of suspicion that the material might give way at any moment. However, it held good, and once again we exclaimed, "All right." Moving cautiously along, we reached the brink of the nearly vertical slope referred to in the ascent, and now that it was visible we wondered how we had climbed it. Looking down it appeared quite perpendicular, and its condition was so changed by the influence of the sun that going down in the same free and easy way that we had climbed up was quite out of the question. "François, cannot we get round that way?" "It is impossible, sir." "Well, what is to be done?" "Oh! we shall manage very well!" We were now untied, then each one in turn was fastened round the chest with an end of the rope, the other being held by those above. S---- went first and disappeared over the brink; my turn came next, and holding the rope firmly, and kicking my feet into the soft névé, I joined him below; then François followed, and lastly Jules, and a very trying time it must have been for him, for he was obliged to descend by his own unaided exertions. The rope being fastened round his waist, we held the other end, carefully taking in the slack as he came down, so that in the event of a fall we might prevent him from slipping into eternity down the slope on which we stood. As he worked his way down by kicking his feet into the partially-melted névé, and retaining his vertical position by means of the ice-axe, he seemed like a fly on a wall, and was more to be admired than envied; but to his credit he descended the forty-five feet without a slip. Pausing for a few minutes, we commenced the descent of les Montées in a very matter-of-fact way, glissading being quite out of the question on account of the soft condition of the snow, for the weather was now excessively hot. Although we were going downhill, the work was trying enough, and to make matters worse the flask was empty! However, the Grands Mulets were in sight, and the thought of the "Cabane," and the refreshment contained therein, encouraged us as we alternately buried and extricated our legs in and out of the yielding snow. The much-desired haven seemed so very near, that I remarked in a diffident way, "Another quarter of an hour, Jules?" "Three quarters, sir." Deceived again! How provokingly distinct it appeared through the pure atmosphere, unpolluted with smoke, gas, and the many other impurities to which we are subject in England. The remaining thousand feet or thereabouts having been descended without any incident worth recording, we entered the "Cabane" at two o'clock, tired, parched, and our lower extremities wet through. S---- forthwith threw himself on a bed, and was sound asleep in a moment. Our trusty fellows disappeared, and having taken off my boots I had some luncheon, with a bottle of beer, which was perfect nectar. I lay down on one of the beds, and smoked the pipe of peace. We had allowed ourselves a rest of an hour and a half; at 3-30 p.m., time being up, we once more and for the last time got into harness, and ten minutes afterwards quitted the "Cabane." We worked our way down the rugged rocks at a quick pace, for the weather had changed and a thunderstorm was rapidly approaching. Heavy clouds were rolling up the valley, and ever and anon a clap of thunder pealed forth, reverberating amongst the mountains. "I am very anxious to cross the glacier before the rain comes down." "Very well, François, go ahead as fast as you like, and we won't stop you." So down the slopes of snow we went at a rapid pace, soon arriving on the ice. Our route was not the same as on going up, in consequence of a change in the crevasses; they are always changing, for the glacier, as I have before explained, never remains still, moving forward at the rate of some three feet or even more per day. [Illustration: COMING DOWN THE GLACIER DES BOSSONS.] On the whole we found the work less trying than on the previous day. Whether it was really so, or only by comparison, I cannot tell; however, there were one or two awkward bits to dispose of, one, especially, which was a perpendicular face of ice forming the side of a deep crevasse, along which we worked our way by stepping into holes cut into it at every two or three feet, and by gripping the ice in notches which were hewn out for this purpose. Then the ropes were untied, and we felt like colts unloosed. The remaining portion of the glacier was speedily crossed; the rocky base of the Aiguille du Midi was traversed at a run; the little torrents were bounded over; the rude zig-zag paths, covered with rolling stones, were scampered down, and Pierre Pointue was safely reached. Here we paid our bill for board and lodging at the Grands Mulets, and whilst refreshing ourselves, we were rather amused at hearing an altercation between the "foreigners"--who, by the way, had made the ascent--and the landlord respecting the price of a bottle of wine! This was the last we saw of them. We now commenced the final stages of our journey, and a wet one it proved, for the storm was overhead, the lightning flashed, and the rain began to fall; and by the time we entered the Forest des Pélerins, it came down in torrents. Being without top-coats or umbrellas, it was not long in penetrating our thin clothing. But what did it signify? The journey was nearly over, and the thought that our impromptu expedition had been so successful cheered us as we strode down the zig-zags, which seemed never ending. The bottom, however, was reached at last, and, gaining the level, we soon found ourselves on the outskirts of the village. The populace did not turn out, neither did we attempt to form a procession, _à la_ Albert Smith, but quietly, and in the same unostentatious manner that we had left on the previous day, we directed our way to the Hotel; on approaching which we were rather astonished at being again saluted by cannon, and much more so at finding the entrance hall of the Hotel filled with guests, who had hurriedly left the table d'hôte to welcome our safe arrival. It was very good of them to give, and very pleasant for us to receive, their kind and unexpected congratulations. Our wet clothes having been changed, we spent a pleasant evening sitting under the verandah, and talking over our adventures. _CHAPTER VI._ "Here are the Alpine landscapes which create A fund for contemplation; to admire Is a brief feeling of a trivial date; But something worthier do such scenes inspire." On getting up next morning I felt rather stiff, and there was a burning sensation all over my face and ears, as though they had undergone a mild scorching. The effect of the sun's rays and radiation from the snow is very remarkable, and in a few hours the complexion is dyed the colour of mahogany. Much to our surprise, François and Jules, weather-beaten and sun-burnt as they were before going up, were several shades darker on their return. As for S---- his condition was simply deplorable, and he suffered great inconvenience for more than a week afterwards. For several days he presented an indescribably unwholesome appearance, and it was not until the whole of his skin had fallen off--which it did piecemeal and in huge flakes--that his good looks were restored. After breakfast our trusty fellows were paid for their services, François receiving one hundred and Jules fifty francs, which with one hundred and fifty-two francs for board and lodging at the Grands Mulets, brought up our expenses to three hundred and two francs, or about £6 each, exclusive of a few extras that are not worth noting; I may say, however, that the ascent is rarely made for so moderate a sum. The regulation number of guides is as follows, viz., two guides and one porter for a traveller, and one extra guide for each additional person, by which we ought to have had three guides and one porter, but not having intended to go further than the Grands Mulets we went with half the usual number, and although we were perfect novices at the work, we got on admirably, and do not quite see what advantage would have been gained by having a larger number of attendants. The next thing to be done was to pay a visit to the guides' office, and on our way there François said, "Sir, will you explain to the chief that when we started we had not intended going further than the Grands Mulets, otherwise we shall be fined, because we were not on turn for the ascent?" The chief listened attentively to my explanation, and then remarked, "In that case they shall not be punished." We then signed our names in the record book, and afterwards obtained certificates surmounted by comical-looking sketches, supposed to represent the summit with a party of tourists and guides in a variety of absurd attitudes. These documents were numbered 768, which means that this was the seven hundred and sixty-eighth ascent from Chamonix since Balmat successfully reached the top on the 8th August, 1786. They were dated 20th July, 1881, and were signed by François, Jules, and Frederic Payot, the chief guide. Whilst lolling about during the remainder of the day, we were "interviewed" pretty frequently, and the interest taken in our adventures appeared to be as deep as though the ascent was a matter of very rare occurrence. The first question invariably asked was, "Did you suffer from the rarified air?" The answer to which was, "Not at all as regards breathing, but we none of us had any appetite at a higher elevation than the Grands Mulets." They did not, however, put the second question, which one is always asked in England, "Did it repay you?" How many are there, of the thousands who visit Chamonix every year, who would not go to the top of Mont Blanc if the journey could be as easily performed as on the Rigi? But risk to life and limb, mountain sickness, wet feet, and rather more walking than they have a fancy for, keeps them in the lower regions, from which they content themselves with viewing the mountain. Amongst those who took a special interest in our late achievement were two ladies, who, accompanied by a gentleman, were to make an attempt the following morning. The route had been carefully studied, experienced guides and porters had been engaged, wrappers, veils, and better fare than can be procured at the Grands Mulets, had been provided. The weather, too, was magnificent, the thunderstorm having completely passed away at sunset, so as far as one could foresee they were likely to be favoured by the weather, which is half the battle. At six next morning, having hurried down to wish them success, I found the party all ready for a start. Two mules, which had been hired to carry their fair burdens to Pierre Pointue, were flapping their long ears and looking as if they thought getting up early a horrid bore. The guides and porters were fully equipped, and amongst other things they were provided with coils of brand new rope, which was indicative of precaution. On coming up to them, one of the ladies, with something very like tears in her eyes, said, "Couttet won't go; the weather has changed; there are clouds on the mountain; so our excursion must be put off." Turning to the guide who was responsible for this decision, he remarked in a most disconsolate tone, "Ah, monsieur, c'est impossible;" and no doubt he was right, for the summit down to the Glacier des Bossons was completely obscured; and what made it all the more vexatious was that in other respects the weather was everything that could be desired. Having expressed my warmest sympathy, I hastened to my room to prepare for our departure by the diligence, which was to leave at seven o'clock. [Illustration: DIAGRAM SHEWING THE RELATIVE HEIGHTS OF MONT BLANC AND SNOWDON] In bringing my narrative to a conclusion, I may say that although the ascent of Mont Blanc is no longer considered difficult or dangerous, I submit that in all probability the route is practically the same as when Balmat made the first ascent. The zig-zags to Pierre Pointue may have been slightly improved, and possibly the path which Albert Smith describes as so trying to the nerves on the way to Pierre à l'Echelle may be a few inches wider, but I doubt whether the Glacier des Bossons, the Montées, the Plateaux, and the Bosses du Dromadaire, have undergone any appreciable change; and I would point out that, although nearly eight hundred ascents have been made in a hundred years, the failures are not recorded. These, I am informed, far exceed the successes; therefore let those whose ambition it is to stand upon the highest point in Europe be prepared to meet with disappointments; for not only may they be unequal to the physical exertion that is necessary, but their expedition may be brought to an untimely end by various causes, and above all by the weather; but, on the other hand, should they be favoured as we were, and succeed in reaching the "diadem of snow," I promise them ample repayment. The fatigue undergone, the discomforts endured, and the dangers encountered, will soon be forgotten. But the deep impressions made when viewing the sublimest works of nature from those regions of eternal snow will last as long as life. APPENDIX. In 1760, De Saussure paid his first visit to Chamonix, and, feeling convinced that the summit was accessible, he promised a handsome reward to anyone who discovered a practicable route, and even offered to pay the wages of all those who attempted the ascent. His guide, Pierre Simon, tried twice--once by the Tacul and once by the Bossons--but returned without success. 1775.--Four peasants managed to reach a valley of snow which appeared to lead directly to the summit, but they suffered so acutely from the rarified air that they were compelled to return. 1783.--Three guides, Jean Marie Couttet, Lambard Meunier, and Joseph Carrier, attained a great elevation, when one of the party was seized with drowsiness and could proceed no further, so the attempt was abandoned. Having returned to Chamonix, Lambard Meunier stated "that the sun almost scorched him; that they had no appetite to eat even a crumb; and that if he tried the excursion again, he should only take with him a parasol and a bottle of scent!" During the same season, M. Bourrit, of Geneva, accompanied by two chamois hunters, reached the foot of a steep rock--probably the Aiguille du Bionassay--but being exhausted he could go no further. One of the guides remained with him, whilst the other went on until he reached the foot of the dome of Mont Blanc, from which he was only separated by a ridge of ice, and he was of opinion that had he only had time and some assistance he could have gained the summit. 1785.--De Saussure, accompanied by M. Bourrit and his son, started from the village of Bionassay on the 13th of September, and having climbed to the foot of the Aiguille du Goûté, they passed the night in a rude hut, eight feet by seven, which had been specially prepared for them. M. Bourrit, as well as his son, was afflicted by the rarified air and could not eat anything. At six next morning they started again. The route was dangerous, being over some snow drifts and blocks of ice. After five hours one of the guides, Pierre Balmat, proposed a halt, whilst he went on to reconnoitre the condition of the snow. In an hour he returned, and said that it was in such a treacherous state it would not be advisable to proceed. So the attempt was abandoned. They regained their cabin in safety, De Saussure remaining there another night to make scientific observations, but M. Bourrit, with his son, started off for Bionassay, not having a fancy for another night at this elevation. 1786.--Pierre Balmat, Marie Couttet, and another guide reached the top of the Dôme du Goûté, by the Aiguille of the same name, on the 8th June, suffering acutely from the rarifaction of the air. Here they fell in with François Paccard and three other guides, who had ascended by La Côte. Uniting their forces they went onwards and upwards, until they were brought to a stand by a ridge of ice--the Mauvaise Arête--which they considered to be inaccessible, and on their return they were nearly lost in a fearful storm of snow and hail. "It so happened that one of Paccard's party, named Jacques Balmat, who appears just at this time not to have been very popular in the valley, had presented himself without invitation, and followed them against their will. When they turned to descend, they did not tell this poor man of their intention. Being on unfriendly terms with them, he had kept aloof; and whilst stopping to look for some crystals he lost sight of them, just as the snow began to fall, which rapidly obliterated their traces. The storm increasing, he resolved to spend the night alone in the centre of this desert of ice, and at an elevation of 14,000 feet above the level of the sea! He had no food; he got under the lee of a rock and formed a kind of niche in the snow; and there, half dead from cold he passed the long hours of that terrible night. At last morning broke--the storm had cleared away; and as Balmat endeavoured to move his limbs he found that his feet had lost all sensation--they were frost-bitten! Keeping up his courage he spent the day in surveying the mountain, and he was rewarded: he found that if the crevasses that border the Grand Plateau were once crossed, the path to the top of Mont Blanc was clear, and he then traced out the route which has, with little variation, been followed ever since. Balmat returned that evening to Chamonix. He took to his bed, and did not leave it for weeks. He kept his secret close, until moved with gratitude to Dr. Paccard, the village physician, the line of road was hinted at, and an attempt agreed upon as soon as Balmat recovered." On the 7th of August these two started alone. They ascended La Côte, and slept there. Before daybreak next morning they were on their march again. At three o'clock in the afternoon they were still uncertain as to the results of the enterprise. At last they arrived at the Summit, at sunset. Here they waited half an hour, and then returning got back to their night bivouac, where they again slept, by midnight. On the following morning they reached Chamonix by eight o'clock. Their faces were swollen and excoriated--their eyes nearly closed; and for the next week Balmat was scarcely recognisable. 1787.--De Saussure, accompanied by eighteen guides, started from Chamonix on the 1st August. The summit of the Montagne de la Côte was reached in about six hours, and then the party encamped for the night. At four o'clock in the afternoon of the following day they prepared to pass the night on the snow, at an elevation of 12,300 feet above the level of the sea. De Saussure suffered considerably, and a raging thirst added to his discomfort. Next morning they crossed the Grand Plateau, and, after suffering much discomfort, succeeded in reaching the Summit; there they remained several hours, and then commenced to retrace their steps at half-past three in the afternoon. Towards evening they arrived at the Grands Mulets, where they bivouaced for the night. At six the next morning--that of the fourth day of the journey--they left the rocks, crossed the Glacier de Taconnaz, descended the Montagne de la Côte, and finally reached Chamonix in safety. 1788.--The indefatigable M. Bourrit made his fifth--unsuccessful--and last attempt in the autumn of this year. Regardless of expense, he engaged seventeen guides, and took provisions enough to last six days. Just before starting he was joined by Mr. Woodley, an Englishman, and Mr. Camper, a Dutchman, who were attended by five guides. This large party passed the first night on the Côte, and attempted to reach the Summit the next day. Mr. Woodley, with four guides, distanced the others, some of whom gave in on the Grand Plateau and returned to the Grands Mulets. MM. Bourrit and Camper commenced to beat a retreat after having nearly reached the foot of the last slope; then a mist came on, which added to their difficulties, but they managed to find their way to the tent, where, towards night, they were rejoined by Mr. Woodley and his guides, the former with his feet frost-bitten. The following morning they returned to Chamonix. Mr. Woodley was obliged to keep his feet in snow and salt for a fortnight; one of the Balmats was blind for three weeks; Cachat had his hands frozen, and poor M. Bourrit made up his mind never to try it again! 1791.--Two of the guides accompanying four Englishmen were seriously injured by a fall of rocks on La Côte--one of them sustaining a broken leg, the other a fractured skull. 1802.--On the 10th of August, M. Forneret and Baron Doorthensen reached the Summit after suffering acutely from the rarified air. M. Forneret compared the agony he endured to that of a man whose lungs were being violently torn from his chest! 1820.--The first recorded fatal accident occurred in this year. Dr. Hamel, accompanied by M. Selligue and two Oxford men--Messrs. Durnford and Henderson--and twelve guides, reached the Grands Mulets the first day. Here they were detained all the next by bad weather. At two the following morning the storm passed off, and day broke most beautifully. All were anxious to proceed, with the exception of M. Selligue, who considered that a married man had no right to risk his life in such a perilous adventure. Remonstrances proving of no avail, he was left behind with two guides, who were much disgusted with the arrangement. At twenty minutes past eight in the morning the party reached the Grand Plateau, where they made an attempt at breakfast, but there was no great appetite amongst them. At half-past ten they had arrived nearly below the Rochers Rouges, and shortly afterwards a frightful disaster happened, which is thus described by Mr. Durnford:-- "I was obliged to stop half a minute to arrange my veil; and the sun being at that moment concealed behind a cloud, I tucked it up under the large straw hat which I wore. In the interval, my companion, H----, and three of the guides, passed me, so that I was now the sixth on the line, and, of course, the centre man. H---- was next before me; and as it was the first time we had been so circumstanced during the whole morning, he remarked it, and said we ought to have one guide at least between us in case of accident. This I over-ruled by referring him to the absence of all appearance of danger at that part of our march; to which he assented. I did not then attempt to recover my place in front--though the wish more than once crossed my mind--finding, perhaps, that my present one was much less laborious. To this apparently trivial circumstance I was indebted for my life. A few minutes after the above conversation, my veil being still up, and my eyes turned at intervals towards the summit of the mountain--which was on the right, as we were crossing obliquely the long slope above described, which was to conduct us to Mont Maudit--the snow suddenly gave way beneath our feet, beginning at the head of the line, and carried us all down the slope on our left. I was thrown instantly off my feet, but was still on my knees and endeavouring to regain my footing, when, in a few seconds, the snow on our right--which, of course, was above us--rushed into the gap thus suddenly made, and completed the catastrophe by burying us all at once in its mass, and hurrying us downwards towards two crevasses about a furlong below us and nearly parallel to the line of our march. The accumulation of snow instantly threw me backwards, and I was carried down, in spite of all my struggles. In less than a minute I emerged, partly from my own exertions and partly because the velocity of the falling mass had subsided. I was obliged to resign my pole in the struggle, feeling it forced out of my hand. A short time afterwards I found it on the very brink of the crevass. This had hitherto escaped our notice from its being so far below us, and it was not until some time after the snow had settled that I perceived it. At the moment of my emerging I was so far from being alive to the danger of our situation, that, on seeing my two companions at some distance below, up to the arms in snow and sitting motionless and silent, a jest was rising to my lips, till a second glance shewed me that, with the exception of Mathieu Balmat, they were the only remnants of the party visible. Two more, however, being those in the interval between myself and the rear of the party, having quickly re-appeared, I was still inclined to treat the affair as a perplexing though ludicrous delay, in having sent us down so many hundred feet lower, than in the light of a serious accident, when Mathieu Balmat cried out that some of the party were lost, and pointed to the crevass, which had hitherto escaped our notice, into which he said they had fallen. A nearer view convinced us of the sad truth. The three front guides, Pierre Carrier, Pierre Balmat, and Auguste Tairraz, being where the slope was somewhat steeper, had been carried down with greater rapidity, and to a greater distance, and had thus been hurried into the crevass, with an immense mass of snow upon them, which rose nearly to the brink. Mathieu Balmat, who was fourth in the line, being a man of great muscular strength, as well as presence of mind, had suddenly thrust his pole in the firm snow beneath, when he felt himself going, which certainly checked, in some measure, the force of his fall. Our two hindermost guides were also missing, but we were soon gladdened by seeing them make their appearance, and cheered them with loud and repeated hurrahs. One of these, Julien Devoussaud, had been carried into the crevass where it was very narrow, and had been thrown with some violence against the opposite brink. He contrived to scramble out without assistance. The other, Joseph Marie Couttet, had been dragged out by his companions quite senseless, and nearly black from the weight of snow which had been upon him. It was a long time before we could convince ourselves that the others were past hope, and we exhausted ourselves fruitlessly for some time in fathoming the snow with our poles." After relating how every effort had been made to recover the poor fellows, the abandonment of the ascent, and the melancholy return to Chamonix, he goes on to explain the cause of the accident. "During two or three days a pretty strong southerly wind had prevailed, which, drifting gradually a mass of snow from the summit, had caused it to form a sort of wreath on the northerly side, where the angle of its inclination to the horizon was small enough to allow it to settle. In the course of the preceding night that had been frozen, but not so hard as to bear our weight. Accordingly, in crossing the slope obliquely, as above described, with the summit on our right, we broke through the outer crust and sank in nearly up to the knees. At the moment of the accident a crack had been formed quite across the wreath; this caused the lower part to slide down under our weight on the smooth slope of snow beneath it, and the upper part of the wreath, thus bereft of its support, followed it in a few seconds and was the grand contributor to the calamity." The route (l'Ancien Passage) followed on this occasion is no longer used--indeed, the guides are forbidden to go that way. On the 12th August, 1861, or thirty-nine years later, the remains of the three unfortunate men who had lost their lives in this ill-fated expedition were discovered at the orifice or "Snout" of the Glacier des Bossons. Besides the fragments of human bodies were found portions of clothing, boots, a lantern, and a boiled leg of mutton. These relics were identified by Couttet, who had formed one of the party when the accident occurred. 1843.--In the early part of September Sir Thomas Talfourd, with his son Francis, and Messrs. Bosworth and Cross, formed a party, and, attended by guides and porters, reached the Grands Mulets rocks, where they rested for some hours before starting for the summit. Sir Thomas, however, was compelled to return after having reached the spot where S---- was taken ill (_vide_ page 35). The start at midnight, and the cause of his return, is thus described by his own pen: "I slept till the guides roused me at ten minutes before twelve from deep and sweet slumber. There was no moonlight--the only elemental felicity wanting to our enterprise--but the stars and snow relieved the darkness, which was also broken by numerous lanterns, which were already lighted, and shone among the bristling cornices of the rock below me like huge dull glow-worms. After the first sensation of cold and stiffness had subsided, and the mistiness that hangs over the perception of a suddenly-awakened sleeper in a strange place had dispersed, I took my pole, and picked my way down the rock, my steps being lighted by Julien's lantern, and soon found myself in the midst of the long procession of travellers and guides, slowly pacing the plain of snow which lies between the rock and the first upward slope. When we began to ascend, the snow was found so hard and so steep, that we were obliged to pause every ten paces, while the guides with hatchets cut steps. Every one, I believe, performs some part well; at least, few are without grace or power, which they are found to possess in a peculiar degree, if the proper occasion occurs to rouse it into action; and I performed the stopping part admirably. While we stood still I felt as if able to go on; and it is possible that if the progress had always been as difficult, and consequently as slow and as replete with stoppages, I might eventually have reached the summit--unless first frozen. But unluckily for me, these occasions of halting soon ceased; for the snow became so loose, as to present no obstacle excepting the necessity of sinking to the knees at every step. The line of march lay up long slopes of snow; nothing could ever be discovered but a waste of snow ascending in a steep inclination before us; no crevice gave us pause; there was nothing to vary the toil or the pain except that as fatigue crept on, and nature began to discriminate between the stronger and the weaker, our line was no longer continuous, but broken into parties, which, of course, rendered the position of the hindermost more dispiriting. The rarity of the atmosphere now began to affect us; and as the disorder resulting from this cause was more impartial than the distribution of muscular activity, our condition was, for a short time, almost equalized; even Mr. Bosworth felt violent nausea and headache; while I only felt, in addition to the distress of increasing weakness, the taste or scent of blood in the mouth, as if it were about to burst from the nostrils. We thus reached the Grand Plateau--a long field of snow in the bosom of the highest pinnacles of the mountain--which, being nearly level, was much less distressing to traverse than the previous slopes; but just before the commencement of the next ascent, which rose in a vast dim curve, the immediate occasion of my failure occurred. Mr. Bosworth, who was in advance, turned back to inform me that my son was so much affected by the elevation, that his guides thought it necessary that he should return. We halted till we were joined by him and his guides, on two of whom he was leaning, and who explained that he was sick and faint, and wished to lie down for a few minutes, to which they would not consent, as, if he should fall asleep on the snow, he might never awake. The youth himself was anxious to proceed--quite satisfied, if he might only rest for a very little time, he could go on--but they shook their heads; and as their interests and wishes were strongly engaged for our success, I felt it was impossible to trifle with such a decision. I could not allow him to return without me; and therefore determined at once to abandon the further prosecution of the adventure; a determination which I should not else have formed _at that moment_, but which I believe I must have adopted soon from mere prostration of strength; and which, therefore, I do not lay in the least to the charge of his indisposition. He was still light of limb, and courageous in heart; only afflicted by the treachery of the stomach, and dizziness produced by the rarity of the air; whereas, if I had been supported and dragged (as perhaps I might have been) to the foot of the steep La Côte, which is the last difficulty of the ascent, I do not believe I should have had muscular pliancy left to raise a foot up a step of the long staircase, which the guides are obliged to cut in the frozen snow. While the guides were re-arranging matters for the descent, I took one longing, lingering glance at the upward scenery, and perceived sublime indications of those heights I was never to climb." 1851.--In the month of August, Albert Smith made an ascent, which was rendered famous by the graphic account he gave of his adventures, during a period of several years, at the Egyptian Hall, in London. He was accompanied by three English gentlemen, and attended by no less than fifteen guides, as well as a small army of porters, who were employed to carry the provisions, wrappers, rugs, &c., as far as the Glacier des Bossons. The party started from Chamonix at half-past seven in the morning, and reached the Grands Mulets at four in the afternoon. Shortly after midnight they resumed their journey, and having traversed the Grand Plateau they took the Corridor route, and arrived at their destination at nine in the morning. During the latter part of the ascent, Albert Smith seems to have been in a state bordering on delirium: "With the perfect knowledge of where I was, and what I was about--even with such caution as was required to place my feet on particular places in the snow--I conjured up such a set of absurd and improbable phantoms about me, that the most spirit-ridden intruder upon a Mayday festival on the Hartz Mountains was never more beleaguered. I am not sufficiently versed in the finer theories of the psychology of sleep, to know if such a state might be; but I believe for the greater part of this bewildering period I was fast asleep with my eyes open, and through them the wandering brain received external impressions; in the same manner, as upon awaking, the phantasms of our dreams are sometimes carried on, and connected with objects about the chamber. It is very difficult to explain the odd state in which I was, so to speak, entangled. A great many people I knew in London were accompanying me, and calling after me, as the stones did after Prince Pervis, in the Arabian Nights. Then there was some terribly elaborate affair that I could not settle, about two bedsteads, the whole blame of which transaction, whatever it was, lay on my shoulders; and then a literary friend came up, and told me he was sorry we could not pass over his ground on our way to the summit, but that the King of Prussia had forbidden it. Everything was as foolish and unconnected as this, but it worried me painfully; and my senses were under such little control, and I reeled and staggered about so, that when we had crossed the snow prairie, and arrived at the foot of an almost perpendicular wall of ice, four or five hundred feet high--the terrible Mur de la Côte--up which we had to climb, I sat down again on the snow, and told Tairraz that I would not go any further, but they might leave me there if they pleased." Having stayed on the summit for half an hour, they retraced their steps, reaching the Grands Mulets at one o'clock, and Chamonix in the evening. One of the most remarkable things in connection with this memorable ascent was the vast quantity of liquids and solids consumed, viz:-- 93 Bottles of wine, 3 Cognac, 7 Lemonade and syrup, 20 Loaves, 10 Cheeses, 8 Joints of mutton, 6 " veal, 46 Fowls; besides packages of raisins, prunes, sugar, salt, and wax candles! The cost of this amounted to 456 francs, which, added to 1881 francs for the guides' fees, &c., brought up the sum total to 2337 francs, or £93 10s., which sum, divided by four--the number of tourists--gives £23. 7s. 6d. each. Thanks to the enterprising individual who manages the "Cabanes" at Pierre Pointue and the Grands Mulets, it is no longer necessary to take provisions; therefore, reader, should you ever visit those stations, do not grumble at the bill, but remember Albert Smith![A] [Footnote A: This and the foregoing ascents are condensed from Albert Smith's "Mont Blanc."] 1866.--Sir George Young, with his brothers James and Albert, succeeded in reaching the Summit without guides or porters. Shortly after commencing the descent one of the brothers fell a depth of twenty feet and broke his neck. The survivors managed to reach the Grands Mulets at two in the morning. An hour later six guides arrived from Chamonix, and although Sir George had been on foot twenty-four hours he placed himself at the head of these men to recover his brother's body. In the meanwhile another party had come up, but they did not proceed further than the Grands Mulets. Early in the afternoon six of these guides went forward to render what assistance they could; and at five three more followed, carrying refreshments with them. At half-past seven the whole party returned, bringing the corpse with them. Sir George at once went down to Chamonix, which he reached about three in the morning, having been on foot for two days and two nights! 1870.--One of the most disastrous events, and which resulted in the loss of no less than eleven lives, occurred during this year. On the 5th September, Messrs. Randall, Bean, and Corkindale, accompanied by three guides and five porters, spent the night in the "Cabane" on the Grands Mulets, and next morning resumed their journey. All seems to have gone on well till they began to descend from the Summit, which they had reached at half-past two in the afternoon. About that time a cloud enveloped the highest parts of the mountain and obscured their movements. At ten o'clock the man in charge of the "Cabane," feeling uneasy at their not having arrived, sent to Chamonix for assistance. In the meanwhile a violent storm had set in, and it was with the greatest difficulty that the relief party managed to get to the Grands Mulets; and there they were forced to remain a whole week, during which time the storm raged with unabated fury. At last the weather cleared, and they went forward. On nearing the Summit they came upon five bodies, and a little further on upon five more; the eleventh could not be discovered. The poor fellows, being unable to find their way, had died of starvation and exposure. This, I believe, is the last fatal accident that has taken place on Mont Blanc. Although the misfortunes related in the foregoing are somewhat numerous, they are not large when compared with the number of individuals who have successfully gained the Summit, and which must have amounted to about 8,000; and do not, probably, exceed the proportion of sporting accidents, if all those who have visited the Grands Mulets, and even higher elevations, are taken into consideration. ROUTES TO CHAMONIX. The valley, as before stated, lies in an easterly and westerly direction; and as there are no cross country roads, it follows that there are only two ways of reaching it. ROUTE A. From Lausanne you may take the train direct to Martigny; or go by steamer from Ouchy to Villeneuve, then by rail to Martigny, and thence by private conveyance viâ Forclaz and the Tête Noire. At Forclaz you may proceed on foot and walk over the Col de Balme, giving directions to your driver to meet you at Le Tour on the other side. We started from Ouchy--a small village near Lausanne--at mid-day, and steamed along the northern shore of the lake, touching at several stations, and passing close to the celebrated Castle of Chillon. At half-past one we landed at Villeneuve, where we had to wait for about an hour for the train, and then proceeded on our journey up the Valley of the Rhone. The scenery is very fine, gigantic mountains rising up on either side, so close and so lofty that their summits can only be seen under difficulties from the railway carriage. There are waterfalls in abundance, and the grey-coloured Rhone roars and bounds along the line of railway on its course to the Lake of Geneva. We arrived at Martigny at half-past four, and ordered a carriage from the hotel (Clerc) for the following morning. This we were obliged to do, as there are no diligences or public conveyances of any description to Chamonix. Having decided upon walking over the Col de Balme, we made arrangements to leave at four in the morning. The weather being excessively hot, we deemed it advisable to start at this early hour in order to reach Forclaz before the great mid-day heat. This arrangement, however, did not meet with the approval of the hotel authorities, who did their best to persuade us to delay our departure till six or seven o'clock, so that breakfast might be included in the bill! This little secret was let out by our driver on the way, and he wound up by saying, "I received a good blowing up for not having got you to do as they wished!" Punctually at four we were all ready for a start; and the luggage having been secured at the back of a liliputian carriage, drawn by a pair of horses, we set off. After clearing the village the gradient becomes very steep, and there is no proper road for a considerable portion of the way, but simply a track which winds up the pass, amongst walnut and other trees, the fragrance from which, at that early hour of the day, was very agreeable. We made comparatively little use of the conveyance, but preferred to take short cuts; and, whilst waiting for it to come up, to sketch or merely admire the view as the fancy took us. At half-past eight we reached the little wayside inn on the Col de Forclaz (5,000 feet above the sea). Here we breakfasted, and exchanged our carriage for one that had just conveyed a party from Chamonix. This is an arrangement that is commonly made for the convenience of the coachmen. At about half-past nine we set off on foot for the Col de Balme, having first given directions to our new man to meet us at Le Tour at two o'clock. Having descended the western slope of the hill, we reached a valley and crossed the torrent issuing from the extremity of the Glacier du Trient, and immediately began to ascend the eastern side of the mountain. The zig-zag paths were well shaded by pine trees for a considerable distance, but in spite of this we found it very hot work. The fact is we were utterly ignorant of the first principles of mountain climbing, and walked too quickly. The consequence was that we were fagged at the expiration of the second hour. There is no greater mistake than to move rapidly on such expeditions, for by so doing one's heart, lungs, and muscles, are unduly taxed, and when lofty ascents are being made, such action would be fatal to the undertaking; for, _if once the legs fail_--as a guide remarked to me when conversing with him on the subject--it is useless attempting to go on. You may rest for a while, and feel recruited, but the effect will not last, and a few minutes after resuming the journey a painful sensation will be experienced in the muscles of the legs, which will necessitate another and perhaps a longer halt; and finally you will have to give in, and return home. Fortunately for us, there were only a few hundreds of feet to be mounted when the pace began to tell, or we might have been put to serious inconvenience. [Illustration] At about eleven o'clock we had left the last tree behind, and continuing our upward journey, the only vegetation to be seen consisted of small plants--the pretty Alpine rose, a species of rhododendron, and turf. Further on we came to large patches of snow, on reaching which there was a marked diminution in the temperature, although the sun was shining brightly and the air was calm. Nearing the summit, we passed a rude hut, inhabited by two or three men, whose occupation is to look after a herd of cows, the tinkling of whose bells was the only sound to be heard in that wild place. As the snow gradually disappears from the mountain side, the cows are driven higher and higher, until the last available blade of grass has been reached; and the milk, which could not be otherwise used, by reason of the distance from the towns and villages, is converted into cheese. Having interchanged a few words with the occupiers of this lonely, though beautifully-situated dwelling, we passed on. Threading our way between patches of snow, we reached the summit of the Col (7,212 feet) at noon. The sight which now presented itself was inexpressibly grand, and no adequate idea of it can be conveyed by pen or pencil. Mont Blanc, the "Monarch of Mountains," with his girdle of ice and his diadem of snow, rising thousands of feet above the valley of Chamonix, was _the_ feature of the scene, and he looked every inch a king, surrounded by his subjects, in the form of graceful aiguilles and lofty peaks! Before quitting this spot (where, by the way, we were able to procure luncheon), I may remark that Mont Blanc, to be appreciated, must be seen from this or some equally advantageous point of view--if such there be--at a high elevation. The descent on the west side was easy, and was soon accomplished. We found the carriage waiting for us at Le Tour, and at four o'clock were set down at the Hotel d'Angleterre. ROUTE B. From Geneva viâ Bonneville, Cluses, and Sallenches. There is no necessity for hiring a private carriage, as there is a regular service of diligences the whole way. If possible, secure a top front seat, and if that cannot be done, take the conductor's place; he will readily give it up for a few francs. You must, however, be prepared to work the brake going down hill. Between Geneva and Bonneville the immediate scenery is not very interesting, and in dry weather this portion of the road is exceptionally dusty. Hence, to Chamonix, the mountains grow in size, and tremendous precipices of perpendicular rock, with cascades pouring down, are to be seen within a short distance of the road. The view of Mont Blanc from Sallenches is said to be very fine, but unfortunately the upper portion of the mountain was enveloped in clouds when we were there, so I cannot speak from experience. The time occupied in performing the whole journey of forty-nine miles is about nine hours. 
37502	----	CLIMBING IN THE BRITISH ISLES _WALES AND IRELAND_ CLIMBING IN THE BRITISH ISLES _3 vols. 16mo. Sold separately._ I.--ENGLAND. By W. P. HASKETT SMITH, M.A., Member of the Alpine Club. With 23 Illustrations by Ellis Carr, Member of the Alpine Club, and 5 Plans. 3_s._ 6_d._ II.--WALES AND IRELAND. By W. P. HASKETT SMITH, M.A., and H. C. HART, Members of the Alpine Club. With 31 Illustrations by ELLIS CARR and others, and 9 Plans. 3_s._ 6_d._ III.--SCOTLAND. [_In preparation._] London and New York: LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO. CLIMBING IN THE BRITISH ISLES _II--WALES AND IRELAND_ =WALES= BY W. P. HASKETT SMITH, M.A. Member of the Alpine Club =IRELAND= BY H. C. HART Member of the Alpine Club; Fellow of the Linnean Society Member of the Royal Irish Academy, etc. WITH THIRTY-ONE ILLUSTRATIONS BY ELLIS CARR Member of the Alpine Club _and others_ AND NINE PLANS LONDON LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1895 _All rights reserved_ PREFACE The present volume is intended to deal with all parts of the British Isles except England, which was the subject of Vol. I., and Scotland, to which Vol. III. will be devoted. Nothing is here said about the _Isle of Man_ or the Channel Islands, because it would, no doubt, be considered absurd to advise anyone to visit those islands whose main object was the acquisition of mountaineering skill. Pretty as the former island is, its hills are nothing more than hills, except where they are also railways or tea gardens; and even on its cliffs, which are especially fine at the southern end, comparatively little climbing will be found. In the _Channel Islands_, on the other hand, the granite cliffs, though very low, being usually only 100-200 ft. high, abound in instructive scrambles. Many such will be found in Guernsey, Jersey, and especially in Sark, but the granite is not everywhere of equally good quality. The _Scilly Isles_, again, are by no means to be despised by climbers, especially by such of them as can enjoy knocking about in a small boat, which is almost the only means of getting from climb to climb. The granite forms are somewhat wilder and more fantastic than those in the Channel Islands. Peninnis Head is only one of many capital scrambling grounds. An article by Dr. Treves[1] gives a very good idea of the kind of thing which may be expected. If anyone should think of proceeding, under the guidance of this volume, to regions with which he is so far unacquainted, he will naturally ask how the climbing here described compares with the climbing in other parts of Britain or of Europe. How does Wales, for instance, stand with regard to Cumberland or the Alps? On this point some good remarks will be found in the _Penny Magazine_, vii., p. 161 (1838), where the writer assigns to the more northern hills a slight superiority over Wales. An impression prevails among those who know both that the weather of N. Wales is, if possible, more changeable than that of the Lakes. Climbers will notice this chiefly in winter, when the snow on the Welsh mountains less frequently settles into sound condition. Perhaps sudden changes of temperature are partly to blame for the greater frequency in Wales of deaths from exposure. Winter climbing is very enjoyable, but proper precautions must be taken against the cold. A writer on Wales some 300 years ago observes that 'the cold Aire of these Mountainous Regions by an Antiperistasis keeps in and strengthens the internall heat;' but a good woollen sweater, a warm cap to turn down over the ears and neck, and three pairs of gloves, two pairs on and one pair dry in the pocket, will be found quite as effectual. Dangers, however, cease not with the setting sun, and many who have defied frost-bite during the day fall an easy prey to rheumatism in bed at night. A groundless terror of the Welsh language keeps many away from Wales. The names are certainly of formidable appearance, and Barham's lines are hardly an exaggeration. [1] _Boy's Own Paper_, May 5, 1894. For the vowels made use of in Welsh are so few That the A and the E and the I, O, and U Have really but little or nothing to do. And the duty, of course, falls the heavier by far On the L and the H, and the N and the R. The first syllable PEN is pronounceable; then Come two LL and two HH, two FF, and an N. But appalling words like 'Slwch Twmp' or 'Cwmtrwsgl' lose half their venom when it is explained that W is only a way of writing OO. In spite of its apparent complication the language is so simple and systematic that anyone can learn enough in a quarter of an hour to enable him to pronounce with ease and moderate accuracy any place-name with which he is likely to meet. Irish is less regular, but wonderfully rich in expressions for slightly varying physical features, while the Manx names are more interesting than the hills by which they are borne. In comparison with the Alps what was said in Vol. I. of Cumberland applies equally well to Wales, and nearly as well to Kerry or Donegal. The most striking peculiarity of Irish mountains is, next to the size of the bogs, the large amount of car-driving which has to be done before and after the day's work. But this is an intrusion on the province of another. Old Thomas Fuller, on sitting down to write a detailed account of Wales, which he had never seen, genially remarked that 'it matters not how meanly skilled a writer is so long as he hath knowing and communicative friends.' That precisely describes the Editor's position, especially with regard to Ireland, to the treatment of which no other man could have brought knowledge at once so wide and so accurate as Mr. Hart. Unfortunately he, like his own 'carrabuncle,' was somewhat elusive. After months of mysterious silence he would glide into sight, great with solid mountaineering matter, gleaming with pearls of botany and gems of geologic lore; but, alas! in another moment the waters of bronchitis, or influenza, or inertia would close over the mysterious monster's back, and he would glide away into unknown depths where the harpoon of the penny post was harmless and telegrams tickled him in vain. Now the carrabuncle is caught at last, and readers will be well repaid for a few months' delay. They will be astonished that one pair of eyes could take in so much, and that one pair of legs could cover so much ground. Among many other 'knowing and communicative friends' the Editor would especially dwell on his indebtedness to Mr. F. H. Bowring and to Mr. O. G. Jones. The latter has contributed the whole of the section dealing with the Arans and Cader Idris, and his minute knowledge of that region will be evident from the fact that the quantity which our space has allowed us to print represents less than half of the matter originally supplied by him. For most of the sketches we are again indebted to Mr. Ellis Carr, for a striking view of Tryfaen to Mr. Colin Phillips, and for the remainder (taken under most cruel conditions of weather) to Mr. Harold Hughes of Bangor. W. P. H. S. _August 1895._ CLIMBING IN THE BRITISH ISLES WALES WHERE TO STAY =Aber.=--This station on the Chester and Holyhead Railway is in no sense a centre for mountaineers, though a good deal of work _may_ be done from it. We ourselves 'in our hot youth, when George the Third was King,' and a dozen miles extra tramping at the end of a day was a mere trifle, managed to do many of the mountains of North Wales from it. Its only attraction is a pretty valley, at the head of which are some not very striking waterfalls. The surrounding rocks have, however, been the scene of a surprising number of accidents. Most of these have been caused by slipping on the path which crosses the steep slope of the eastern bank and leads to the head of the main fall. Such was the fatal accident on April 13, 1873, to Mr. F. T. Payne, a barrister. His sight was very defective, and this fact goes far towards accounting for the accident.[2] [2] The _Times_, April 16, 1873, p. 6. In 1876 a very similar case occurred. A young man called Empson, who was staying at Llanfairfechan, was killed in descending, apparently at the very same spot.[3] [3] The _Times_, September 9, 1876, p. 8. In April 1885 Mr. Maitland Wills, described as an expert mountaineer, while walking with two friends from Capel Curig to Aber, fell near the same spot, and was instantly killed.[4] [4] _Ibid._ April 7, 1885, p. 7. In August of the same year Mr. Paget, the Hammersmith Police Magistrate, fell and was severely hurt.[5] And these by no means exhaust the list of casualties, which is, perhaps, only second in length to that of Snowdon itself. It may be mentioned that there is a climb or two on the west and steeper side of the falls. [5] _Ibid._ August 3, 1885, p. 10. * * * * * =Bala=, reached from London in about 7 hours by the Great Western line, is a very pleasant place to stop at on entering Wales, being situated at the foot of the finest natural sheet of water in the Principality, and having railway facilities in three directions. By the aid of the rail Cader Idris, the Arans, and the Rhinogs can be easily got at. For the first mountains Dolgelly, for the second Drwsynant and Llanuwchllyn, for the third Maentwrog would be the best stations. This is also the best place for Arenig Fawr, which can be done on foot all the way, or better by taking the train to Arenig station and returning by rail from Llanuwchllyn after crossing the hill. Lord Lyttelton made Bala famous last century. What he said of it will sufficiently appear from some lines (long since erased by the indignant ladies of Bala) which were once to be seen in a visitors' book here:-- Lord Lyttelton of old gave out To all the world that Bala trout Have all the sweetness that pervades The laughing lips of Bala's maids. Which did his Lordship mean to flout? For fact it is that Bala trout (Ask any fisherman you meet) Are bad to catch, but worse to eat. O Maid of Bala, ere we part, 'Tis mine to bind thy wounded heart; And in thy favour testify-- Though seldom sweet, thou'rt never shy! There is, however, one objection to this epigram, for the poet talks of trout and the peer of Gwyniad; let us, therefore, hope that in regard to the fair as well as the fish the poet's harsh judgment was equally unsound. * * * * * =Barmouth=, a capital place from which to visit the Rhinog range and Cader Idris; and the Cambrian Railway extends the range of operations in three directions, so that even Snowdon is within the possibilities of a single day's excursion. There is excellent climbing practice to be had, not only just outside the town, but actually within it. * * * * * =Beddgelert= (i.e. 'Gelert's Grave') is one of the gates of Snowdonia, and it is the gate by which the judicious will enter. It is, moreover, perhaps the prettiest mountain resort in Wales. Penygwrhyd is more central for climbers pure--and simple--but has no pretensions to beauty of situation; Llanberis has its railway facilities, its quarries, and its trippers; Bettws y Coed is delicious, but it is right away from the mountains. For combination of the beauties of mountain, water, and wooded plain Dolgelly is the only rival of Beddgelert. Snowdon on the north, Moel Hebog on the west, and Cynicht and Moelwyn on the east are enough to make the fortune of any place as a mountaineer's abode, even if there were no Pass of Aberglaslyn close by. The nearest station is Rhyd-ddu, on the Snowdon Ranger line, nearly 4 miles off, and it is uphill nearly all the way. To Portmadoc, on the other hand, the distance is greater, 6 or 7 miles, but the road is fairly level, and nearly every step of it is beautiful, both in winter and in summer. Indeed, there was a time when winter in this romantic village was more enjoyable than summer, for in warm weather the eye was much obstructed by the hand which held the nose; but that was many years ago. The ascent of Snowdon from this side used to be the most frequented, but in the race for popularity it has long been distanced by Llanberis. It is a good path, and easily found. The start is made along the Carnarvon road for some three miles to the Pitt's Head; then up the hill to the right to Llechog, and across the once dreaded Bwlch y Maen. A more direct and very fine route leads straight up and over the ridge of Yr Aran, joining the regular path just short of Bwlch-y-Maen. By going up the Capel Curig some 3½ miles, and taking the turn to the left more than half a mile beyond Llyn y Ddinas, Sir Edward Watkin's path up Cwmyllan may be utilised; but at the cost of 3½ miles' extra walking along the same road the far finer ascent by Cwm Dyli may be made. This is the same as that from Penygwrhyd, but with the advantage of including the lowest portion and waterfalls of Cwm Dyli, which are extremely fine. The classical climbs of Snowdonia are within reach for good walkers, but others will find abundance of opportunities for practice within a mile or two, and for the Garnedd Goch range (which has in it some choice bits) there is no better base. The road to Portmadoc on the south and to Penygwrhyd on the north are not only among the most beautiful in the kingdom, but present the most alluring of problems to the rock climber within a stone's throw. There is a corner of the road about 6 miles from Beddgelert where Crib Goch shows over a foot-hill of Lliwedd, and a rocky ridge runs down from the east almost on to the road. This ridge, though broken, bears some very choice bits, including a certain wide, short chimney facing south. A separate guide-book to this place (by J. H. Bransby) appeared in 1840, and there have been several since, among the best being one published at the modest price of one penny by Abel Heywood. The place plays a great part in Charles Kingsley's _Two Years Ago_, and it was at the 'Goat' Inn here that George Borrow was so furious at the want of deference with which his utterances were received by the company. * * * * * =Benglog=, at the foot of Llyn Ogwen and the head of Nant Ffrancon, is only second to Penygwrhyd as a climbing centre, but, unfortunately, the accommodation is so very scanty--Ogwen Cottage, the only house, having no more than two bedrooms--that the place is little used. For Tryfaen, the Glyders, the Carnedds, Twll Du, and the Elider range it is preferable to any other place, and beautiful problems are to be found by the climber literally within a stone's throw of the door. It is about 5 miles from Bethesda station on the north and the same distance from Capel Curig on the east, all three places being on the great Holyhead Road. Penygwrhyd is 2 hours away, whether by road (9 miles) or over the hill. In the latter case the shortest route is by the col which separates Tryfaen and Glyder Fach, and then over the shoulder east of the latter mountain. To Llanberis the way lies by Twll Du and Cwm Patric, and though much longer than the last could probably be done in nearly as short a time. * * * * * =Bethesda= is 5 miles from Benglog, and that much further from all the best climbing. See, however, p. 18. * * * * * =Capel Curig= (600 ft. above sea level) is 5½ miles from Bettws y Coed railway station, 4 miles from Penygwrhyd, and 5 from Benglog, is a very good centre for strong walkers. Most of the best climbs are within reach, but none very near. For Snowdon Penygwrhyd is much nearer; Benglog is better for the Glyders and the Carnedds; so that, while being pretty good for nearly all, Capel Curig is not the best starting-place for any. It has no exclusive rights, except over Moel Siabod on the south and the wild unfrequented district in the opposite direction, which lies at the back of Carnedd Llewelyn. Hutton, who visited it at the beginning of the century, calls it 'an excellent inn in a desert.' The Alpine Club had a meeting here in 1879. * * * * * =Dinas Mawddwy=, reached by rail from Machynlleth, is a pleasant, secluded spot amid mountainous surroundings, but not conveniently situated for climbing anything but Aran Mawddwy. All the advantages of the place may be equally well enjoyed from Machynlleth. Old Pennant records how in his rash youth he used to toboggan down the peat paths of Craig y Dinas, 'which,' says he, 'I now survey with horror.' A Welsh bard, whose poems must have been neglected in the place, declares that it was notable for three things--blue earth, constant rain, and hateful people. * * * * * =Dolgelly=, which ends in _-eu_ in many old books, in _-ey_ on the one side and in _-y_ on the other of the modern railway station, and is commonly pronounced by the residents as if it ended in _-a_, is said to mean 'hazel dale,' a name which the place can hardly be said to live up to. There is, however, no doubt that it is one of the prettiest places in Wales and one of the pleasantest to stop at. In the first place the communications are very good, for by the Great Western Railway there is a capital service to Shrewsbury and London, while on the seaward side the Cambrian Railway puts Barmouth and Portmadoc on the one side, and Machynlleth and Aberystwith on the other, within easy reach. There is good scenery on all sides of it, while for Cader Idris, the Aran Mountains, and the Rhinog range there is no better centre. Many people have an objection to going up and down a mountain by the same route, and have an equal horror of the long grind round the foot of it, which is the result of going down a different side of the mountain if you want to return to your starting-point. At Dolgelly you enjoy the advantage of being able to take a train to the far side of your mountain, so as to come back over the top and straight on down to your sleeping-place. For instance, a very fine way of doing Aran Benllyn and Aran Mawddwy is to go by the Great Western to Llanuwchllyn and then come back along the ridge of both mountains. In the same way one can begin a day on the Rhinogs by rail, walking from Llanbedr or Harlech to Cwm Bychan, and so over the Rhinogs and Llethr, and down to Dolgelly again. Even Cader Idris is rendered more enjoyable if the train be taken to Towyn and Abergynolwyn, whence the walk by Talyllyn and up to the summit by way of Llyn y Cae is in turn pretty and impressive. As a rule it is far better to go out by train and come back on foot than to reverse the process, and for two reasons--first, by taking the train at once you make sure of your ride, and have the remainder of the day freed from anxiety and the fear of just missing the last train a dozen miles from home, with less than an hour of daylight remaining; secondly, if you don't miss the train it is because you have come along at racing pace. You are in consequence very hot, and have to stand about in a draughty station till the train (which is twenty minutes late) arrives and then follows half an hour's journey with wet feet, for wet feet and walking on Welsh hills are very close friends indeed. There used to be a saying about Dolgelly that the town walls there are six miles high. Of course this refers mainly to the long mural precipice which forms the north point of Cader Idris. Abundant climbing is to be found on this 'wall,' which, with a small part of Aran Mawddwy and a few short, steep bits along the course of the river Mawddach, constitutes the best rock-work in the immediate vicinity of Dolgelly. * * * * * =Ffestiniog=, a very pleasant place to stay at, with good communications by rail with Bala, Bettws y Coed, and Portmadoc. There are climbs near--e.g. on the Manods and on Moelwyn--but on a small scale, the good ones being mostly destroyed by the colossal slate quarries. _Blaenau Ffestiniog_ is the more central and less beautiful; the old village (3 miles away) is far pleasanter. The Cynfael Falls, about a mile off, include the well-known 'Hugh Lloyd's Pulpit,' and are very pretty, but have been almost as fatal as those at Aber. Readers will probably remember the death of Miss Marzials at this spot.[6] [6] The _Times_, August 25, 1885, p. 6, and August 27, p. 8. See also the _Times_, October 2, 1837, p. 3. * * * * * =Llanberis= (i.e. 'Church of Peris'), being a station on a railway which has a good service from England, is the most accessible of all the mountain resorts in Wales. As a consequence of these facilities the place is often intolerably overrun, especially during the late summer and autumn. The true lover of the mountains flees the spot, for the day-tripper is a burden and desire fails. Whether the railway will have the power to make things worse in this respect we cannot yet decide, but it seems unlikely. It is only of late years that Llanberis has possessed the most popular road up Snowdon. The opening of the road over the pass in 1818 did a great deal, and the visit of H.M. the Queen in 1832 did still more to make the place popular, and the pony path up Snowdon and the railway settled the matter. The other mountains which may readily be ascended from here are those in the Elider and Glyder ranges, while climbing is nearly confined to the rocks on both sides of the pass, which includes some work of great excellence. As early as 1845 a separate guide-book for this place was published by J. H. Bransby. Now there are several. * * * * * =Machynlleth= (pronounced roughly like 'Mahuntly,' and by the rustics very like 'Monkley') lies midway between Plynlimon and Cader Idris, and within reach of both, yet can hardly claim to be a centre for mountaineers. Of submontane walks and scenery it commands a surprising variety, having railway facilities in half a dozen directions. This makes it a capital place for a long stay, varied by an occasional night or two at places like Rhayader, Dolgelly, Barmouth, or Beddgelert. The best way of doing Aran Mawddwy is by way of Dinas Mawddwy, and the ascent of Cader Idris from Corris railway station, returning by way of Abergynolwyn, makes a most enjoyable day. * * * * * =Nantlle=, once a very pretty place, is now little more than an intricate system of slate quarries. A low pass (Drws y Coed) separates it from Snowdon, of which Wilson took a celebrated picture from this side. There are some nice little climbs on both sides of the pass and on Garnedd Goch, which runs away to the southward of it. Nantlle has a station, but Penygroes, the junction, is so near as to make it a more convenient stopping-place. Anyone staying at Criccieth can make a good day by taking the train to Nantlle, and returning along Garnedd Goch or over Moel Hebog. Snowdon too is within easy reach. * * * * * =Penygwrhyd.=--In Beddgelert Church is a monument 'to the memory of Harry Owen, for forty-four years landlord of the inn at Penygwrhyd and guide to Snowdon: born April 2, 1822; died May 5, 1891.' Harry Owen it was who did for Penygwrhyd what Will Ritson did for Wastdale Head and Seiler for Zermatt. Intellectually, perhaps, he was not the equal of either of the other two, but there was a straightforward cordiality about him which made all lovers of the mountains feel at once that in his house they had a home to which they could return again and again with ever renewed pleasure. The house stands at the foot of the east side of the Llanberis Pass, at the junction of the roads from Capel Curig (4 miles), Beddgelert (8 miles), and Llanberis (6 miles), and at the central point of three mountain groups--Snowdon (the finest and boldest side), the Glyders, and Moel Siabod. The last is of small account, but the other two groups contain some--one may almost say most--of the best climbing and finest scenery in Wales. Most people come to the inn by way of Bettws y Coed and many from Llanberis; but by far the finest approach is that from Beddgelert, and by this way the first approach at any rate ought always to be made. Ascents and climbs innumerable may be made from here, and many valuable notes on climbs may be found here in a certain volume secured from the profane mob by lock and key. In the same volume also several sets of verses occur much above the ordinary tourist level, among them being a very smart study of the climbing class in the style of Walt Whitman, and a few telling alphabetic distichs of which _habitués_ will recognise the force. K--for the Kitchen, where garments are dried; L--for the Language we use when they're fried; O--for the Owens, whom long may we see; P--for the Pudding we call P.Y.G. S is for Snowdon, that's seen from afar; T--for the Tarts on the shelf in the bar. The visitors' book proper also contains entries of some interest, including some lines (given at length in the _Gossiping Guide_) written by Charles Kingsley, Tom Taylor, and Tom Hughes, chiefly remarkable for their breezy good temper. The lines are printed, together with a mass of very poor stuff taken from the same source, in a little book called _Offerings at the Foot of Snowdon_.[7] The inn and the Owens play an important part in Kingsley's novel _Two Years Ago_. Forty or fifty years ago there was a constant visitor at this inn who might have claimed the invention of the place as a climbing centre. He corresponded in profession, and also in age, to the Rev. James Jackson, the Cumbrian 'Patriarch.' He had a mania for ridge-walking, or, as he termed it, 'following the sky line.' His name I could never learn. [7] Tremadoc, 1875. * * * * * =Rhayader= (_The Waterfall_, i.e. of the river Wye, pronounced here 'Rhay-' and not 'Rhy-,' as in North Wales) is a very convenient centre for much scenery which is of great interest to the geologically-minded mountaineer, though the hills are of no great height. The Cambrian Railway has a station here, and makes an expedition to the Brecon Beacons or to the very interesting Black Mountains a very simple matter, while on the way a good deal may be seen of two of the most beautiful rivers in Britain, the Wye and the Usk. Aberedw Rocks and Cwm Elan are quite near, and so is Nant Guillt, with its memories of Shelley, beloved of all who love the mountains, though perhaps few would have cared to be on the same rope with that somewhat erratic genius. Where the Wye enters the Vale of Rhayader there are some remarkably fine rocks (chiefly in the 'Lower Llandovery' formation). Mackintosh calls it 'a deep basin surrounded by very precipitous slopes, which on the side most distant from the river channel present one of the finest and loftiest rocky cliffs in the principality.' The Birmingham Water Works have influenced the town for good in one respect only: they have introduced a barber, who at the end of each week mows navvies' cheeks by the acre. * * * * * =Snowdon Ranger=, a small inn on the west side of Snowdon, readily reached by rail from Carnarvon or coach from Beddgelert, or again by an easy and interesting walk over the low pass of Drws y Coed from Penygroes station. It commands one of the simplest ascents of Snowdon, but by no means the most interesting. Good climbing may be found near it on Clogwyndurarddu, on Mynydd Mawr, on both sides of Drws y Coed, and on the Garnedd Goch range, but none are on a very large scale. In the history of Welsh mountaineering it holds a place, having long been the most usual starting-point for the ascent of Snowdon, and all the early travellers came here. Cradock (1770) calls it 'a small thatched hut at the foot of the mountain (Snowdon), near a lake which they call Llyn Cychwhechlyn (i.e. Quellyn), which I leave you to pronounce as well as you are able. We procured a number of blooming country girls to divert us with their music and dancing.' Even these delights, however, could not keep travellers from drifting away towards Beddgelert--a change which, as readers of _Wild Wales_ will remember, had already become marked when Borrow had his interview with the Snowdon guide forty years ago. The early accounts often speak of this place as Bronyfedw (a name which still survives), and for many years there used to be a kind of 'personally conducted' (Hamer's) ascent of Snowdon from Carnarvon once a week by this route. * * * * * =Tanybwlch.=--Wyndham, Pennant, and, indeed, nearly all the early explorers of Wales stayed at this very pleasant place. At that time the highroad from Dolgelly to Beddgelert and Carnarvon passed the door; but the railway having now superseded the post chaise has left the place somewhat out in the cold. It has, however, some assistance from the 'toy' line to Ffestiniog, and is a pretty little place, though Moelwyn, Cynicht, Moel Siabod, and the Rhinogs are all the mountains which it can command. For those coming from England the best station is Maentwrog Road, on the G.W.R. line from Bala. WHERE TO CLIMB =Anglesey.=--The extreme flatness of the island perhaps gives an increased effect to its fine rock scenery about the Stacks, which will be respected by climbers as perhaps the earliest school of their art in Wales. An old description of the egg-takers here contains some interesting sentences which are not wholly devoid of point even for climbers of the present day. 'The gains bear no tolerable proportion to the danger incurred. The adventurers, having furnished themselves with every necessary implement, enter on the terrific undertaking. Two--for this is a trade in which co-partnership is absolutely necessary--take a station. He whose superior agility renders it eligible prepares for the rupestrian expedition. Dangerous employ! a slip of the foot or the hand would in an instant be fatal to both. To a stranger this occupation appears more dangerous than it really is. In persons habituated to bodily difficulty the nervous system becomes gradually braced, and the solids attain that state of rigidity which banishes irritability, while the mind, accustomed to danger, loses that timidity which frequently leads to the dreaded disaster. Fact demonstrates to what an extent difficulty and danger may be made subordinate to art and perseverance.' This is the voice of truth, but the solids nowadays (owing possibly to the fluids or to the want of them) do not banish their irritability completely. * * * * * =Carnarvonshire.=--Both in the quality and the quantity of its climbs this county leaves the rest of Wales far behind. Its superiority is even more marked than that of Cumberland over the rest of England. Snowdon, the Glyders, and the Carnedds would alone be sufficient to establish this; but there are numbers of less important elevations which would have a great reputation in almost any other county. The chief mountain centres are Penygwrhyd, Beddgelert, Llanberis, and Snowdon Ranger, all four lying at the foot of Snowdon, Benglog (Ogwen Cottage), Capel Curig, and Ffestiniog. The appearance of the county must be greatly changed since Leland's time. He tells us that 'the best wood of Caernarvonshire is by Glinne Kledder and by Glin Llughy and by Capel Kiryk and at Llanperis. More upwarde be Eryri Hilles, and in them ys very little corne. If there were the Deere would destroy it.' The destruction of this wood has greatly injured the beauty of the valleys round Snowdon, Nant Gwynant being the only one where it remains in any quantity. * * * * * =Penmaenmawr= (1,553 ft.) is far from being a difficult mountain. The ancient Britons had a fort on the top of it, and it was ascended 'by a person of quality in the reign of Charles II.,' but it is scarcely a paradox to say that it was the greatest obstacle to knowledge of Welsh mountains during last century. The highroad from Chester crossed it, and our ancestors used to go rolling off it down into the sea, and did not like it. Therefore a journey to Wales was a great and a rare feat. All the early travellers dilate upon its terrors. In 1795 Mr. T. Hucks, B.A., gives a ludicrous account of his ascent, which was actually made without a guide. 'We rashly took the resolution to venture up this stupendous mountain without a guide, and therefore unknowingly fixed upon the most difficult part to ascend, and consequently were continually impeded by a vast number of unexpected obstructions. At length we surmounted every danger and difficulty, and safely arrived at the top.... In the midst of my melancholy cogitations I fully expected that the genius of the mountain would have appeared to me in some formidable shape and have reproached me with rashly presuming to disturb the sacred silence of his solitary reign.' Penmaenmawr was not a frequented tourist resort in those days. The genius would not expect much sacred silence now. The writer knows of no continuous climb on the mountain, though he has often had a scramble on it. * * * * * =The Carnedd Group.=--=Carnedd Dafydd= (3,426 ft.), said to have been named after David the brother of Prince Llewelyn, rises on the north of Llyn Ogwen and on the west of the river which flows from it. The view, looking southward across Llyn Ogwen at the bold northern front of the Glyder group, is one of the grandest in Wales. That to the north-west is to a great extent cut off by Carnedd Llewelyn. The usual starting-points are Bethesda, Ogwen Cottage, and Capel Curig, though strong walkers occasionally attack the mountain from the Conway valley on the west and from Aber on the sea coast. From Bethesda the most direct way to the summit is to steer south-east and straight at the mountain, which is full in view. The distance is 3½ miles, and an active traveller, if by any accident he extricates himself speedily from Bethesda, may reach the summit in two hours. On the other hand he is quite as likely to find himself, at the end of the two hours, still wandering sadly up and down the by-lanes of that maze-like village. The natives are polite, and would willingly give any information; but they cannot speak English, and they do not possess the information. There is only one street which leads anywhere in particular, only one which can be known at sight and followed fearlessly when known. It is the Holyhead road, and to get from one house in Bethesda to another it is said that even the inhabitants find it safest to make for the Holyhead road at once, and thus secure an intelligible base of operations. The route up Carnedd Dafydd by way of Penyroleuwen begins with over two miles of this road, and is, consequently, a very sound opening. It is only necessary to turn off at Tynymaes, on the left hand, and strike up the hill and along the ridge to Braichddu, overlooking the tarn of Ffynnon y Lloer. A sharp turn is now made to the left along the shoulder, and the great cairn which marks the summit is soon reached. The route from Capel Curig is very easily found. Three and a half miles along the Bangor road, after crossing the river Llugwy, and just before a chapel, a path strikes off on the right-hand side towards a farmhouse. Half a mile along this path strike up the hill to the left, travelling at first about north by compass, and afterwards, as the hill is mounted, inclining more to the west. A less popular route, but perhaps shorter and more easily found in mist, and certainly more effective in point of scenery, leaves the highroad about a furlong short of Ogwen Lake. Pass a farm and follow a stream for a mile up to Ffynnon Lloer; from the head of the pool pick your way through some rough ground to the left hand up on to Braichddu, when the view of the Glyders bursts upon you suddenly with great effect, and, on turning to the right to make the final mount to the Carnedd, some good peeps may be had down the confused rocks of Craig yr Ysfa. From Ogwen Cottage the last route is often the best, especially when the party contains some weak members, as the direct line from the foot of the lake is exceedingly steep. The climbs on this mountain are practically limited to Cefnysgolion Duon on the north and Craig yr Ysfa on the west, overlooking Nantffrancon. _Cefnysgolion Duon_--i.e. 'The Black Ladders,' by which name it is commonly known--might be forced into meaning 'The Black Schools,' and this sense greatly bewildered a learned native, who observes, 'It is impossible to imagine a spot less suited to the operations of the school-master.' But we can assure him that as a school for climbers it leaves little to be desired. Perhaps 'Black Pinnacles' would be a better rendering, 'ysgol' being often used in that sense, the comparison referring to a step-ladder, seen sideways, so as to present the shape of an isosceles triangle. The crags are on the south side of Cwm Llafar, the great hollow between the two Carnedds, and there is nothing to do but to follow up from Bethesda the stream which flows down it. In other words, the true line is almost parallel to and about half a mile north of the most direct route to the top of Carnedd Dafydd. As advance is made the slope between the two routes becomes more and more rocky, and when the Ladders themselves come fairly in view the scene is a very grand one. There are two conspicuous gullies, divided by a stretch of rock which looks almost unclimbable. The right-hand or western gully is very steep, and having often quite a stream in it, is then decidedly hard, and requires considerable care in winter. The other gully slopes away sharply to the left, behind a slight projection, and has only one pitch in it, but that is really good. Two ways here present themselves of climbing along the left-hand wall at two different levels, neither of them too easy, or else the gully may be deserted altogether, as the left bank forms a ridge which offers easy but delightful climbing all over it, the hold suddenly becoming magnificent. East of this ridge the hold is still good, but the rocks dwindle in size, until, in the centre of the col between the Carnedds, they wholly disappear. This noble crag has never been much frequented by climbers, though in 1879 about a dozen members of the Alpine Club took it on their way from Bangor to Capel Curig.[8] [8] _Alpine Journal_, vol. ix. p. 384. Some years before 1869[9] a Birmingham Scripture Reader fell over it, and was, of course, killed. [9] Mackintosh, p. 809. _Craig yr Ysfa._--These rugged and in parts highly romantic rocks have attracted but few climbers. A hardworking group of Bangor enthusiasts have done about all the work that has been done here. In November 1894 J. M. A. T., H. H., H. E., and J. S., quitting the road just beyond the eighth milestone from Bangor, reached, in twenty minutes, the mouth of a gully, broad except where it narrows into a gorge, about half-way up. The climbing on the left of the stream is quite easy, on its right less so; but in either case the stream has to be abandoned at the first waterfall, which is quite impracticable when there is any quantity of water falling. One may climb out to the right by a small tributary gully, or up the buttress of rock to the right, and thus turn the lower fall as well as the upper fall, which is a small edition of the Devil's Kitchen. Near the edge of the cliff, on the left of the gorge, is a large tabular rock, which forms the postern to a narrow passage back into the gully, which soon broadens out and leaves a choice of routes; the left-hand branch should be taken by preference, as it contains a rather difficult pitch, above which the ascent to the top of the ridge is simple. [Illustration: A GULLY ON CRAIG YR YSFA] A second gully lies a few hundred yards nearer Ogwen Lake, and contains, besides cascades, two distinct waterfalls, of which the first may be surmounted by a small but not easy chimney close to it on the left, which is also the side for attacking the second difficulty. Here a necessary grass ledge above the level of the top of the fall was loosened by heavy rain, and stopped the progress of the above party, who completed the ascent by climbing out to the left. The craggy portion is just over one mile long. Towards the head of Nant Ffrancon the rocks come lower, and are more fantastic, affording a great variety of fine problems, though few continuous climbs. * * * * * =Carnedd Llewelyn= (3,484 ft.) is the second highest of the Welsh mountains. The last Government Survey gave it a slight lift, and at the same time slightly reduced Snowdon, causing a rumour to go abroad, alarming to conservative minds, that the latter had forfeited its pride of place. This would have been a real misfortune, as the old-established favourite is beyond all question the finest mountain of the two. Only imagine the feelings of a poor peak abandoned in its old age, without cheap trippers, without huts, without a railway, without Sir Edward Watkin. The blow would have been too cruel! The near views from Carnedd Llewelyn are not remarkable. They consist mainly of the crags of Yr Elen and those of the grand north face of Carnedd Dafydd, which, however, practically conceal the Glyders, and these again cut off most of Snowdon. But the seaward view is very fine, and with regard to the very distant places, such as the Cumberland Fells, this mountain has a great advantage over Snowdon both 'to see and to be seen.' Perhaps the extra 7½ miles make the difference, but it is a fact that for once that Snowdon is to be made out from Scafell or Great Gable, Carnedd Llewelyn can be seen half a dozen times. For the ascent Bethesda is the nearest. Several ways present themselves, and whichever the traveller takes he will think that he has taken the boggiest. One way is straight up Cwm Llafar to the ridge (Bwlchcyfrwydrum) between the two Carnedds, or inclining left one mile short of this ridge one soon reaches the ridge connecting our mountain with Yr Elen, on the other side of which are some fine crags. The ascent by way of Cwm Caseg, the next valley to the north, is equally simple and affords a good view of these crags from below. In thick weather the long lonely walk from Aber is an education in itself to the mountain rambler, while from Talycafn station, on the north-west, a good road comes to within a mile and a half E.S.E. of the summit. The Capel Curig ascent is perhaps the least interesting of all; by it the two Carnedds are usually combined. Either the ascent or the return should be made along the Pen Helig ridge, with regard to the terrors of which the guide-books have used language as exaggerated as the descriptions of Striding Edge on Helvellyn. In winter, however, there is sometimes pretty work here. _Climbs._--A few rocks will be found round the remarkable tarns of Llyndulyn and Melynllyn, on the north-east side of the mountain, and on the west side of Llyn Eigiau. Better still are the rocks near where the Talycafn road ends by a slate quarry in the rocks of Elicydu (apparently marked as Pen Helig by the Ordnance Surveyors); but best of all is the north-east side of Yr Elen, where there is a sort of small edition of the Black Ladders, with the same sunless aspect, so that it often keeps its snow in the same way till quite late in the year. In winter, however, the grand cwm which lies due east of the Carnedd offers splendid snow scenes and snow work. Some years ago a quarryman was lost in the snow, and an upright stone on the north ridge of the mountain marks the spot. One of the earliest ascents of the mountain was that made in 1630 by Johnson, who evidently had the spirit of the mountaineer in him, for he pressed his guide to take him to the more precipitous places, alleging the love of rare plants. That worthy, however, declined to go, alleging the fear of eagles. Mackintosh too had a difficulty here with his guide during a winter's day excursion. But his fears seem to have been entirely without reasonable cause, and he was not so near to being robbed or murdered as he at one time fancied. Mr. Paterson's charming book _Below the Snow Line_ describes the route from Llanfairfechan in wild weather. In the _Philosophical Transactions_ for 1771 will be found noted an ascent which satisfied the climber and his water-level that the summit was higher than that of Snowdon. Pennant too made the ascent, but came to an opposite conclusion on this point. * * * * * =Elider Group.=--=Carnedd y Filiast= (i.e. 'Cairn of the Female Greyhound') is a feature on the west side of Nant Ffrancon, on account of the very remarkable slabs which it exhibits on that side. A hundred and twenty-five years ago Pennant was told here that 'if the fox in extreme danger takes over them in wet weather he falls down and perishes.' Certainly they are dangerous enough to a less sure-footed animal--man--and are best left alone, especially when there is any ice about. The nearest place from which to start is Bethesda. Another hill of the same name lies to the north of Bala. * * * * * =Foelgoch.=--A spur running north-west from Glyder Fawr forms the western bank of Nant Ffrancon, and nearly three miles along this ridge is Foelgoch (i.e. 'Red Hill'). It has a steep western side towards the head of Cwm Dudodyn, and on the other side a very steep rocky recess facing Llyn Idwal. Llanberis and Bethesda stations are about equally distant. From the former place it is seldom visited, except before or after the ascent of Elidyr Fawr. On August 6, 1886, E. K. writes, 'There is excellent scrambling to be had about this mountain, and some really difficult work.' On September 29, 1894, a party of three climbed from Nant Ffrancon. The break in the ridge may be reached either by following the ridge itself or from the cwms on either side of it. The ascent thence to the summit offers easy but steep climbing if the crest of the ridge be scrupulously adhered to. Passing over the summit of Y Garn the descent was made down the southern ridge of Cwm Clyd, which gives a good scramble along its barren arête. [Illustration: TWLL DU (looking down through it to Llyn Idwal and Llyn Ogwen)] * * * * * =Y Garn= (3,104 ft.), near the head of Nant Ffrancon, on the west side, is little visited, but has some very good rock on it. Benglog is much the nearest place. The well-known Twll Du may almost be said to be on it, and is practically the division between it and Glyder Fawr. * * * * * =Twll Du= (i.e. 'Black Pit'), commonly called the 'Devil's Kitchen,' is a remarkable chasm in the line of cliff which faces the head of Llyn Idwal on the south-west, being a northerly continuation of Glyder Fawr. From Benglog, which is much the nearest place, there is little choice of route; either side of Llyn Idwal will do, but the west side is rather less boggy. Keeping well up you pass the head of Idwal until you bring it on with the head of Llyn Ogwen, and then about 500 ft. above the former you find yourself at the foot of this grand fissure. In dry weather all but the highest patch can be easily ascended; after rain it is sometimes difficult to enter the place at all. In the summer of 1893, which was extraordinarily dry, a young fellow claimed to have done it single-handed, but it was supposed by some that he had mistaken the place. During the intense cold of March 1895 an extraordinary _tour de force_ was accomplished here by J. M. A. T. and H. H., who cut their way up the frozen waterfall, and thus accomplished what was probably the first ascent of this formidable chasm. The height of the final pitch in its normal condition is about 53 ft., measured from the top of the block down to the surface of the pool below. When the climb above described was made, no doubt much of this height was filled up by snow and ice, yet the remainder was not surmounted in less than 7 hours, so that the average rate of progress must have been about 5 ft. per hour. The total time from Benglog to the top of the Kitchen was 8½ hours. The party descended in the dark to Llanberis in 3 hours more, having left Ogwen in the morning at 10 o'clock. Those who approach from Upper Llanberis by way of Cwm Patric or from Penygwrhyd over the shoulder west of Glyder Fawr, and, in fact, all who do not come by way of Benglog, have to descend the high cliff out of which the Kitchen is cut. The only convenient passage starts about a furlong to the south of the Kitchen, and is very awkward at night or in mist. It begins as a wide, straight trough (the largest and most regular of two or three), which slopes gently downwards and towards Benglog. Presently it takes a more northerly direction and becomes a steep, wide slope of scree following the line of cliff to the great blocks of fallen stones which mark the mouth of the chasm. An active man can return from the lower to the upper exit of the chimney in ten minutes, and the descent could, of course, be done in even less time. In dry weather there is but one slight difficulty before reaching the grand crux at the head. It can be climbed by passing into a cavern and up to the left, but the easier, and after heavy rain the only practicable, way is up the side-wall just to the left of the choke-stone on to a broad ledge. A little way above this a huge slab, fallen from above, is seen leaning against the wall on the right. The passage to the right of it can always be made, however strong the stream on the left hand may be. The climb to the top of this slab is very neat, and, besides affording a capital view of the situation, is about all the consolation left for the ardent explorer, who will seldom succeed in penetrating any further. There are, however, two possible lines of advance, both on the left-hand wall, one well in under the colossal cap-stone, which hangs 50 ft. overhead, and the other outside, nearly opposite the great slab. By the latter route 20 ft. or 30 ft. can be climbed with some little difficulty, but the traverse to the right would no doubt prove a very ticklish operation. Cliffe, in June 1843, penetrated to the foot of the final obstacle, and gives a very good description of it. [Illustration: TWLL DU (looking up from within)] * * * * * =Glyder Group.=--=Glyder Fach= (3,262 ft.), though called 'the lesser,' is far finer than its brother peak, so much so that many have found great difficulty in believing that the Ordnance Surveyors were right in ascribing 17 ft. of superiority to the more lumpy western summit. One might be tempted to build a 20-ft. cairn but for the fear of spoiling the great glory of Glyder Fach, the chaos of rocks on its summit. The present cairn was not in existence ten years ago, and must have been built about 1887. [Illustration: SKETCH MAP OF THE GLYDERS AND TRYFAEN] _Ascents._--From Benglog the most interesting ascent is by the Gribin ridge, between Idwal and Bochllwyd. It involves a slight descent (about 150 ft.) after reaching the ridge, but it is less fatiguing than that by Bwlch Tryfaen and the steep rough screes on the right hand beyond it. From Penygwrhyd you mount behind the inn, crossing the bog as you best can towards a wall which goes straight up the hill. When the direction of the wall changes you make a compromise midway between the old and the new, and very soon come on to a line of cairns which continues right on to the boggy tableland above. Tryfaen top now appears over the hill, and as soon as it is fairly lifted you bear to the left and up a stony slope to the cairn. From Capel Curig it is a simple matter to follow the ridge of Cefn y Capel, but quicker to keep along the highroad past the Llynian Mymbyr, and then strike up a grass slope to the right. As often as not both Glyders are ascended in one expedition; the dip between the two is only 300 ft., the distance is under a mile, and stones are the only obstacles. [Illustration: SUMMIT OF GLYDER FACH] _Climbs._--The north face of this mountain is remarkably fine and contains all the climbing there is. At the east end is the bristly ridge leading down to Bwlch Tryfaen. This is stimulating, but not difficult. In the centre of the face there is a large gully, ascended in November 1894 by J. M. A. T., H. H., and H. E. They did not find it necessary to use the rope. The lofty pitch at the foot of the eastern gully is decidedly hard. (J. M. A. T.) In May 1888 W. E. C., A. E., E. B., and E. K. found and ascended a gully close under the west side of Castell Gwynt, and add that they reached Penygwrhyd by way of Cwm Graianog. The last statement is very mysterious. About the Castell itself (the rugged pile of rocks between the two Glyders, marked by its slender outstanding 'sentinel'), and about the summit of the Fach, there are some good scrambles on a small scale. [Illustration: CASTELL GWYNT AND GLYDER FAWR] Directly under the top stone is the minimum thermometer, which has been kept there for some years.[10] The most interesting thing on the whole mountain is undoubtedly the pile of stones on the top. According to the bard Taliesin it is the burial-place of a mighty warrior, one Ebediw. If a kind of Stonehenge was erected there to his memory and afterwards got upset by an earthquake it might account for present appearances. Edward Lhwyd, the great antiquary, was particularly struck by them 200 years ago, and his description and remarks are equally applicable to-day. [10] See the _Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society_ for April 1893, xix. No. 86, for a summary of the temperatures thus recorded. [Illustration: ROCKS ON GLYDER FACH] 'On the utmost top of the Glyder,' he says, 'I observed prodigious heaps of stones, many of them of the largeness of those of Stonehenge, but of all the irregular shapes imaginable, and all lying in such confusion as the ruins of any building can be supposed to do.... Had they been in a valley I had concluded they had fallen from the neighbouring rocks ... but, being on the highest part of the hill, they seemed to me much more remarkable.' He goes on to remark upon a precipice which has not been identified (see _Esgair Felen_). 'On the west side of the same hill there is, amongst many others, one naked precipice (near or one of the Trigfylchau, but distinguished by no particular name), as steep as any I have seen, but so adorned with numerous equidistant pillars, and these again slightly crossed at certain joints. 'Twas evident that the gullies or interstices were occasioned by a continued dropping of water down this cliff.' Trigfylchau, by the way (i.e. 'Twisting Gaps'), is a name which does not seem to be known at the present day. Lhwyd's description fired the curiosity of the travellers who explored Wales nearly a century later, and the amusing part of it is that they could not find this wonderful mountain, or even hear of it from the intelligent natives. Cradock (1770) found an aged man, who told him that the mountain was 'now called the Wythwar (Wyddfa),' which stands 'a few miles south of the parish of Clynog;' and H. P. Wyndham went further by identifying it with 'the mountain called Ryvil in Speed's map' (i.e. Yr Eifl). It shows how little the natives knew about their mountains until the travellers came and taught them. Pennant made the ascent, and gives a picture of the summit. Bingley also went up, and gives a good description. Kingsley's fine description, in _Two Years Ago_, of Elsley's ascent really applies mainly to Glyder Fach, though he only mentions the Fawr. Elsley's descent, by the way, was apparently into Bochllwyd by way of Castell Gwynt. * * * * * [Illustration: GLYDER FAWR, NORTH FACE] =Glyder Fawr= (3,279 ft.).--The meaning of the name is a mystery. One Welsh scholar gravely tells us that the real name is Clydar, which at once yields the obviously suitable meaning of a 'well-shaded ploughed ground.' Either of these epithets would be quite as appropriate to the Sahara itself, for the two Glyders are among the barest and rockiest mountains in all Wales. The two roads which lead from Capel Curig, one over the Pass of Llanberis and the other through Nant Ffrancon to Bangor, enclose between them the whole of the Glyder group, forming a singular figure, which recalls Menenius Agrippa's description of the Second Citizen as 'the great toe of this assembly.' The toe is slightly bent; Penygwrhyd is the knuckle, Capel Curig the tip of the nail, and Benglog (the head of Nant Ffrancon) is just in the inside bend. The highest point of the group lies practically in a straight line with Snowdon and Carnedd Llewelyn, and, roughly speaking, midway between them. Of Snowdon it commands a profoundly impressive view, and is in turn itself best seen from the Carnedds. Both Glyders are very frequently ascended from Penygwrhyd, Llanberis, Capel Curig, and Ogwen. The simplest way up is from the top of the Llanberis Pass, from which a ridge leads to the summit. This is, perhaps, the best way if the start be made from any place not on the north side, though from Penygwrhyd the route may be boggily abbreviated by making up the little valley to the north-west. From Ogwen the usual ascent passes near Twll Du, though the ridge separating the Idwal and Bochllwyd lakelets is sometimes chosen, and certainly affords a greater variety of fine views. Climbing on this mountain is practically confined to its northern face, and even there very little has been done. There are also a few rocks on the west side. The climbing-book at Penygwrhyd contains very few references to it. At Easter in 1884 H. and C. S. mention that they enjoyed fine glissades down the snow slopes on the north-west side to Llyn y Cwn, but the first real climb recorded therein is that of the big gully in the north face, made on November 25, 1894, by J. M. A. T., H. H., and H. E. From the far end of Llyn Idwal a long scree leads up to the mouth of the gully, which may be identified from a distance by the pitch which blocks it about half-way up and a broad strip of grass outside it on the west. The point to make for is the head of a wall which runs up from the extreme south end of the llyn to the corner of a huge mass of bare smooth rock. If the traveller reaches this point without being engulfed in the boggy ground which fringes the llyn he will now continue in the same general direction as the wall, and soon sees the gully just before him. A kind of trough, probably produced by weathering of the rock, is now seen on the left, and this, as it appeared more interesting than the steep grass of the central part of the gully, was followed at first by the above-mentioned party. The trough is very easy at the foot, and has good holds, which higher up incline outwards, and become less and less prominent until at last progress becomes a question of delicacy and circumspection. Before the trough came entirely to an end the party traversed into the gully, but even there found the ascent to the pitch far from easy. Utilising the full length of their 80-ft. rope, and moving only one at a time, they reached the cave under the big pitch. Here it appeared hopeless to climb out on either side, and recourse had to be taken to engineering of the same kind which was successfully put in practice some years ago on Dow Crags, in Lancashire, by a very scientific band of brothers. Similar success crowned the efforts of this party, and brilliant gymnastics on the part of the leader landed them safely at the top of this difficulty. From this point the remainder of the climb has a deceptively easy appearance. Some 80 ft. higher up the difficulties begin again, and continue up to a small pitch just below the top. On one stretch it was found necessary to adopt a compromise between the wisdom of the serpent and the aimlessness of the crab, advancing by lateral jerks in a semi-recumbent attitude. Possibly these extreme measures would not have been necessary but for the fact that on this occasion the conclusion of a spell of three weeks of incessant rain was chosen as a suitable opportunity for attacking this face of the Glyder. It was the opinion of the party that the climb--at any rate in its then condition--is incontestably more difficult than that of the western buttress of Lliwedd. The time taken was 4 hours, including a short halt for luncheon. [Illustration: WESTERN GULLY IN NORTH FACE OF GLYDER FAWR] This gully is the more westerly of two. The other one was climbed in May 1895 by J. M. A. T., H. H., and W. E. One of the party says of it, 'We soon came to some rather difficult rocks; we climbed them close under the right-hand wall--a really stiff little bit. The gully here is still quite broad, and on the left side of it we saw another way, which looked much easier. We found no special difficulty in the jammed stone which looks from below such a formidable obstacle. Two of us climbed it on the right; the third man circumvented it on the left. From this point to the summit is excellent throughout, the rocks being steep, the holds strong, well defined, and most conveniently distributed. In my opinion it is the best thing on the Glyders, and it can be done by a single man.' Still further east a narrow crack gives a very steep but easy rock staircase, while west of the gully first described is another with two pitches, of which the lower is harder and the upper easier than they look. The 60 ft. just above the latter are climbed by means of slight rugosities in the left-hand wall. It is somewhat curious that when, in February 1873, Glyder Fawr was crossed from Ogwen by way of Twll Du, with John Roberts as guide, it was recorded in the _Alpine Journal_[11] as something of a feat and something of an eccentricity. Twenty years have made a great change, and now, about Christmas or Easter, the snow on these hills is marked by tracks in many directions. [11] Vol. vi. p. 195. * * * * * [Illustration: LLYN IDWAL _a_, The gullies of Glyder Fawr. _b_, Descent to the foot of Twll Du. _c_, Twll Du.] =Esgair Felen= (i.e. 'The Yellow Shank').--In August 1893 G. W. de T. found very good rocks and gullies on this shoulder of Glyder Fawr. Ascending from just above the cromlech stone in Llanberis Pass, the buttress immediately above can be climbed on the right or south-west side. The upper half may be climbed by a narrow gully, too narrow at first to enter, and giving little hold for hands or feet, and that little not sound. Apparently the leader climbed up a little way, and then the rest of the party climbed up the leader. They found good climbing without special difficulty among the rocks on the top of the great gully in the centre. It is somewhere in this neighbourhood that we must look for the mysterious precipice of which Edward Lhwyd wrote two hundred years ago as being strikingly columnar in structure, and possibly identical with 'one of the Tregvylchau or Treiglvylcheu.' He says it is part of the Glyder, and faces west. Perhaps it is about the east side of Cwm Patric. As seen from well down the Llanberis Pass these rocks have a very striking appearance. The term 'esgair' is very commonly applied to long straight projections from higher mountains. Instances of its use are E. Weddar, E. Yn-Eira, E. Geiliog, E. Hir, and E. Galed. * * * * * [Illustration: TRYFAEN FROM THE EAST (Sketched by Colin B. Phillip)] =Tryfaen= (3,010 ft.), not to be confounded with the hill of the same name on the Llanberis side of Snowdon, or the other near Bettws Garmon, is the most remarkable rock mountain in Wales; it has two pillar stones on its summit, from which it is often said that the name (= 'three rocks') is derived. In answer to this it is enough to point out that the assumed third stone is not there, and could not have disappeared without a trace, while the name would equally well mean 'three peaks,' which the mountain certainly has when viewed from either east or west. The Welsh dictionaries give a word 'tryfan' with the sense of 'anything spotted through,' and, whether or not this has anything to do with the origin of the name, the component rocks certainly are quartz-speckled in a most extraordinary manner. The mountain is practically a ridge of rock running in a southerly direction from the head of Llyn Ogwen towards Glyder Fach, from which it is separated by a sharp dip, Bwlch Tryfaen. This dip, which may be reached either from Cwm Bochllwyd on the west or from Cwm Tryfaen on the east, offers by far the easiest ascent of the mountain. The best starting-point for Tryfaen is Ogwen Cottage, at Benglog, from which Llynbochllwyd is reached in 25 and the said dip in 45 minutes; so that, if need were, the whole height (2,000 ft.) and distance (1½ mile) to the summit could be attained within the hour. From Capel Curig, on the other hand, there is a good hour's walking before the highroad is left, beyond Gallt y Gogof, which Borrow calls Allt y Gôg (Cuckoo Cliff), and even then the traveller has about as far to go as if he were starting from Benglog. Most of the Tryfaen climbs being on the east side they can be reached from Capel Curig with much less exertion than from Penygwrhyd, the route from which involves a long, rugged ascent, hot after the sun has risen and ankle-breaking after it has set. _Climbs._--These are extraordinarily abundant, and the hold is nearly everywhere gritty and good. The most popular climbs are: 1. The east side, including especially the two gullies on either side of the summit known as the North and South Gullies. 2. The north ridge up from the head of Llyn Ogwen. 3. The west side. _The South Gully_, climbed by R. W. (1887). The first ascent noticed in the _Book of Penygwrhyd_ being that of H. G. G. and W. in 1890. On September 5, 1891, H. G. G. and E. B. T. offered some clear notes on the subject, to the following effect: The first difficulty consists of three or four jammed stones, each slightly overhanging the one beneath, with a total height of about 10 ft. It can be passed by keeping to the right close to the obstacle, but would not be easy in wet weather for any climber single-handed. At the place where the gully divides the left-hand or nearer division is not difficult. The broad division was found impracticable by a party of four on September 4, 1891, the large smooth rocks at the top being very wet. This place was climbed in 1890 by Messrs. G. and W. by keeping to the extreme right close to the wall of the gully, and then returning along a narrow ledge. It was an awkward place. There is nothing above where the two gullies unite that offers any real difficulty. The North Gully is the more difficult of the two if the immediate centre is to be followed; but it is always practicable to break out on the face to the right. The difficulties of the South Gully are not so severe, but such as they are they must be climbed, as there is no lateral escape. Under date of June 9, 1894, a very clear account is given by J. M. A. T., J. R. S., and H. E. At the first obstacle the first man climbed up into the hole formed by the projection of the topmost rock, but, as the next beneath slopes outwards and downwards, found it impossible to relinquish a crouching posture. The pitch was abandoned. The right-hand rocks close by were taken, and the gully rejoined without difficulty. At the fork the northern branch was chosen. It can scarcely be called a gully; the water trickles down over the crags in several places, but there is no main or well-defined channel. A pinnacle is soon seen on the right, and here the climbing becomes difficult; the footholds are far apart, and the small tufts of grass, which were then wet and slippery, cannot be trusted. The course taken was to the extreme left, and as far as possible from the pinnacle, and in this respect it differs from that taken by Messrs. H. G. G. and W. in 1890. A firm, flat grass-covered shelf, at least a yard square, is seen in a straight line up above, and as soon as the first man has reached this a rope can be used to advantage. A steep rock some 12 ft. in height and of ordinary difficulty remains, and the climb thence to the summit is quite simple. By keeping to the left a cavern is reached, the further end of which opens like a trap door upon the summit; this interesting method of concluding the ascent should not be missed. On August 25, 1892, G. B. B. with Mr. and Mrs. T. R. climbed the five pitches of the South Gully, _a_, _b_, _c_, _d_, _e_; _a_ by the right-hand wall, _b_ in the centre, _c_ by divergence to the right-hand branch and return to the left over a narrow ledge, _d_ and _e_ in the centre or slightly on one side of the face. The gully was never left. Time, about 90 minutes. _North Gully._--This appears to have been climbed in 1888 by R. W. and T. W. Writing on September 5, 1891, H. G. G. and E. B. T. gave the following hints:-- The first difficulty is at the bottom, below the level of any part of the South Gully, and might easily be missed if the horizontal track be followed. On August 30, 1891, these gentlemen found the middle of this (after very wet weather) quite impracticable, and the smooth rock on the right hand, lying at a very high angle, was also wet and very difficult. Either might possibly be passed in a dry season, the rock almost certainly. The next point of note is a very large lodged stone. Going under this they passed through the hole above, one climbing on the other's shoulder and afterwards giving him help from above. The passage was not easy. The next difficulty is made up of two lodged stones about 10 ft. apart. The first might be passed in dry weather. A tempting ledge to the left was climbed without result; ultimately they rounded the obstacle by keeping to the right. On September 19 W. E. C., H. R. B., and M. K. S. ascended the North Gully. They describe it as containing seven pitches, two of which are caverns. They believed that this gully had only once been climbed clean before--namely, in the autumn of 1888, by Messrs. R. W. and T. W. On April 1, 1892, H. B. D., F. W. G., and A. M. M., with Mrs. D. and Mrs. C., ascended the North Gully in 2 hours 10 minutes. The last pitch gave some trouble. In August 1892 W. H. P. and G. B. B. climbed all the pitches of the North Gully clean, taking the sixth from the bottom by the right side and the rocks straight to the summit stones, from where the gully divides. Time, 91 minutes. There is a singular difference of opinion among climbers as to the relative difficulty of these two climbs. Varying conditions of rocks and climbers may partly account for this. Without pretending to decide the matter either way the writer would give it as his experience that unusual conditions more readily affect the southern for evil and the northern for good. For instance, wet or ice makes the former very nasty without altering the latter to the same extent, while really deep and good snow moderately improves the former but converts the latter into a delusion and a mockery, for it ceases altogether to be a climb at all, and becomes a mere snow walk. Even then it is worth doing if it were only to see the wonderful convoluted strata, in the case of more than one great block imitating the rings in the trunk of a tree. _Nor'-Nor' Gully._--On September 18, 1891, Messrs. W. E. C., G. S., and M. K. S. ascended a gully leading on to the north ridge of Tryfaen just to the north of the most northerly of the three peaks. The gully contains three pretty pitches, all of which were climbed, but two of them can be turned. There is yet a fourth gully, still further north, but it has only one obstacle in it, and more scree than anyone can possibly want. So much attention has been devoted to these gullies during the last few years that the ridges which separate them have been unduly neglected. To the writer at least they have always seemed to offer better climbing than any of the gullies, and that of a kind which is very much less common. The ridges on either side of the North Gully are especially fine, and would satisfy the most exacting but for one thing, and that is that the hold is almost too good. _The North Ridge_, from the head of Llyn Ogwen, is of very imposing appearance, and was long spoken of with bated breath. In reality it is a fine but very simple and safe approach to the summit. The gluttonous climbers of the present day will probably complain that it is not a climb at all, but, though the difficulties, such as they are, can all be turned, the more enterprising members of a party can always find abundant outlets for their energies in numerous wayside problems. Some of the rocks are very fantastic in shape; one projecting horizontally bears a resemblance to a crocodile and can be easily recognised from the east. Highly crystalline quartz veins render the rock surfaces even rougher than they would otherwise be, and in a few places the face of the rock is covered with egg-like projections, each containing a core of quartz. At a little distance they look like huge barnacles; their real nature may be left to the geologists. On reaching the heads of the principal gullies the climber will fall in with some capital rocks on or beside his path along the ridge. At the very top he cannot fail even in mist to recognise the two upright rectangular stones, which are so conspicuous from afar. The feat of jumping from one to the other, by the performance of which Mr. Bingley's friend made that eminent traveller's 'blood chill with horror' nearly a hundred years ago, is not as difficult as it has been represented to be, and the danger of falling over the precipice in case of failure is purely imaginary. The unskilful leaper would merely fall on to the rough stones at the base of the pillars. Of the two jumps, that from north to south is the easier. Bingley's guide, perhaps anxious to cap the Saxon's feat, told him that 'a female of an adjoining parish was celebrated for having often performed this daring leap.' Large as the pillars are it is difficult to believe that they were placed in the position they occupy by unassisted nature; they seem too upright, too well squared, and too level-topped; with a cross-piece on the top they would form a nobly-placed 'trilithon,' of which any 'dolmen-builder' might be proud. _The West Side._--A great part of this is occupied by a series of huge slabs, which have been compared by F. H. B. to Flat Crags on Bow Fell. In places luxuriant heather artfully conceals sudden drops and rolling stones on account of which several tempting descents on this side will prove annoying. The only important gully is well seen from Benglog. To reach it strike south-east by the highroad at a point about half a mile east of Benglog. About half-way up the gully trends away to the left, and comes out at a deep notch in the summit ridge. Excellent scrambling again may be found by climbing up eastward from the shore of Bochllwyd. * * * * * [Illustration: TRYFAEN FROM THE NORTH-WEST.] =Moel Siabod= (2,860 ft.) is ascended most easily from Capel Curig, but Dolwyddelan and Penygwrhyd are only slightly more distant, though considerably more boggy. The ascent is worth making, for the sake of the excellent view of Snowdon. The east side is by far the most abrupt, and here a few good crags are found. From this side also the mountain looks its best, but even seen from the west, the tamer side, it is, especially when snow-clad and lit by the setting sun, a remarkably effective feature in the landscape. Readers of 'Madoc,' if such indeed there be, may remember that Southey was benighted on the hills around Dolwyddelan. In that episode Moel Siabod may well have played a part. About the year 1830 Mr. Philip Homer was benighted on it, and died of exhaustion. Mention of this accident is made both by Roscoe (1836) and by Cliffe, who says he heard many details from an eye-witness. The body was taken to Capel Curig and buried there. * * * * * =Snowdon= (3,560 ft.) is the loftiest peak in this island south of Scotland, and one of the most beautiful that is to be seen anywhere. The name seems to have originally described a whole district which the Welsh called Craig Eryri (variously rendered 'rock of eagles' and 'rock of snow'). The peak itself is called Y Wyddfa (pronounced 'E Withva'), which is usually translated 'place of presence' or 'of recognition;' but the splendid suppleness of the Welsh language admits of rival renderings, such as 'place of shrubs or trees,' with which may be compared the name Gwyddallt--i.e. 'woody cliff;' and even, as a non-climber once observed, on seeing a panting form appear at the top of a gully on Clogwyn Garnedd, 'place for a goose.' Leland speaks of 'the greate Withaw hille,' and says 'all Cregeryri is Forest,' and, in another place, 'horrible with the sight of bare stones as Cregeryri be.' [Illustration] Snowdon may be climbed from many points. The nearest inns are Penygwrhyd, Beddgelert, Snowdon Ranger, and Llanberis. The peculiarity of Snowdon consists in the huge cwms which radiate from its summit, and these will be found described in their order, following the course of the sun, and the climbs to be found in each will be indicated. Books on Snowdon are simply countless, and the same remark applies to the pictures which have been taken of it and the panoramas which have been drawn from it. Unfortunately a very large number of fatal accidents have taken place on this mountain, and an interesting but somewhat incomplete article on this subject will be found in _Chambers's Journal_ for May 1887. The Mr. Livesey there mentioned as having been killed by lightning seems to have been really named Livesley, and was of Ashton, in Mackerfield, Lancashire. This occurred on Sunday, September 21, 1884 (the _Times_, September 23). * * * * * [Illustration: CWM GLAS AND THE PARSON'S NOSE, FROM THE WEST] =Cwm Glas.=--As there are three or four tarns on Snowdon called Llyn Glas, so the name of Cwm Glas appears to have been confusingly popular. Cwm Glas proper lies immediately under Crib y Ddysgl, and Crib Goch on the north side; but, to say nothing of the next hollow to the west, which is called Cwm Glas Bach (i.e. little), a recess lying just north of both is called by the same name, and it would appear, from some of the early topographers, that they understood the term to comprehend the whole valley which forms the west approach to the Llanberis Pass. The proper cwm can only be reached from Llanberis or from Penygwrhyd. From the latter (the usual starting-point) the simplest, though not the shortest, way is to go over the pass and down to Pontygromlech, and there, instead of crossing by the bridge, bear away to the left, and up into the cwm. Experts can save something by striking off much earlier near the top of the pass. Those who come from Llanberis will leave the highroad at a point 3½ miles from the station and about half a mile short of the cromlech. Before the two pools come into sight several short but striking pieces of rock are met with, and, indeed, the rock scenery on all sides is extremely fine. Many people come here for that reason alone, and are content to see the rocks without climbing them. For them there is an easy way up to join the Llanberis path by way of the grassy slope west of the Parson's Nose, of which more anon. Between the two a second ridge is seen, smaller than the Nose, and roughly parallel to it, leading out on to Ddysgl, much further up. Not far from this Mr. F. R. Wilton died in 1874 (see _Crib y Ddysgl_) and Mr. Dismore was killed in 1882. * * * * * =Parson's Nose.=--The best known climb in Cwm Glas is on the rock called Clogwyn y Person (i.e. 'Parson's Cliff'), alias the =Parson's Nose=. It is a spur of Crib y Ddysgl, and is easily identified by its projecting in a northerly direction between the two little pools in Cwm Glas. No one seems to know the origin of the name; possibly it may have been scaled by the famous climbing cleric who haunted Snowdonia half a century ago. The most striking feature of this fine arête is the wonderful excellence of the hold. Faces crossed by precarious-looking ledges are found on a closer inspection to have behind those ledges deep, narrow, vertical rifts, affording the perfection of hand-hold, while the rock surface itself is so prickly and tenacious that boot-nails grip splendidly, and the only difficulty for the fingers is that some of them are apt to get left behind on the rocks. It may be climbed direct up the face, either from the very foot or from a point more to the right and some 30 ft. higher up. The height of the initial climb is something like 100 ft. Again, there is a gully on each side of the actual Nose, and it is usually climbed by one or other of these. The western gully is blocked above by an overhanging rock, over or under which it is necessary to climb or crawl. The gully on the opposite or east side is longer, and generally much wetter, and is on that account considered more difficult either to go up or to come down. The three ascents unite close to the cairn. Above the cairn the ridge continues, broken by only two respectable pitches, and leads on to the great tower on Crib y Ddysgl, some 1,200 ft. above the beginning of the climb. It is not, however, necessary, in order to get up out of Cwm Glas on to the main ridge, to climb the Nose at all; by proceeding west and over some white quartz slabs, close under the ridge, and then turning left, one can get out easily a few feet from the top of the Nose, or nearly the same point may be reached from the east side, only it will be after a less interesting and generally somewhat wetter ascent. If a climb is desired when the gullies are in a dangerous condition, there is a place further to the right than the right-hand or west gully where a very steep but safe scramble among big blocks leads up on to the bridge of the Nose. The following ascents are noted in the book at Penygwrhyd, that by T. W. and R. W. being probably the first:-- _1887, September 18._--W. E. C. and A. E. _1890, June 21._--W. P. and G. B. B. tried the Parson's Nose, and, climbing the cleft from the south side, crawled between the rocks which block its upper part, then up the crags to the right for a short distance. _1892, April 2._--A party which had ascended the north gully of Tryfaen the day before ascended the Parson's Nose up the ridge, starting from the cleft. About 50 ft. above it a wall of rock is met which must be climbed either round a corner on the right hand or up a steep chimney on the left. The latter route was chosen, but a large stone (the middle one of three on the left side of the chimney) slipped, and remained in a dangerous position. _1892, August._--W. H. P. and G. B. B. climbed the 'wall of rock' straight up, which they thought easier than the chimney to the left or the green gully to the right. _September 23._--Mrs. H., Miss B., and a large party of gentlemen climbed the Parson's Nose by the gully on the Llanberis side and the jammed stone. Bingley visited this cwm at the close of last century, and gives a good description of it. He was much impressed by Caddy of Cwm Glas, the strong woman. Her real name, by the way, was Catherine Thomas. Cwm Glas Bach also has some fine rocks, and from the head of it up to Cyrn Las a good climb may be had. * * * * * =Crib Goch= ('The Red Ridge') stretches down westward from Crib y Ddysgl to about opposite the summit of the Pass of Llanberis. The name is sometimes used for the whole length of both cribs. This is admitted on all hands to be inaccurate, if convenient, but there is some difference of opinion as to where the line of demarcation should be drawn. Some say at Bwlch Goch (2,816 ft.), while others put it a quarter of a mile or more further west. About 500 yards east of the Bwlch, at almost the highest point (3,023 ft.) of the ridge, a side-ridge strikes away to the north, while the main line continues eastward. The well-known pinnacles (including the 'Crazy' one) are close to Bwlch Goch, and on the north side of the ridge overlooking Cwm Glas. The southern side, sloping into Cwm Dyli, though very steep, is much less precipitous and rocky than the other. [Illustration: CRIB GOCH (Snowdon beyond)] _Starting Points._--Penygwrhyd and Gorphwysfa have almost a monopoly of Crib Goch, because for all other places--such as Llanberis, Beddgelert, Capel Curig, or Bettws y Coed--the distance from Gorphwysfa has simply to be added as so many extra miles along a highroad. In the case of Capel Curig this makes very little difference, seeing that Penygwrhyd lies on the direct route for any ascent of Snowdon, and to the latter there is no nobler approach than that along this ridge. Some have thought it sensational, and many have described its terrors in very sensational language; in fact, it takes the place which among the English lakes is filled by the far less striking Striding Edge on Helvellyn; but in truth, though it is the sort of place where ice, mist, and high wind may encroach to some extent on the margin of safety, to a steady head and foot there is no danger whatever. As for the hands, they are hardly required at all, though for those who like it plenty of real climbing can be had on the way. [Illustration: PINNACLES OF CRIB GOCH] Any mountaineer worthy of the name will admit that the ridge walk up Snowdon by Lliwedd and down by Crib Goch is for its length one of the finest in Europe. The mere gymnast also finds here plenty of enjoyment and almost infinite variety. He may mount by the east ridge or by the north ridge, or in the corner between the two. Again, the north ridge may be reached by either of two gullies in its eastern flank. Of these two gullies the more southerly is the steepest and longest, and may be recognised at some distance by a peculiar split or gap, while the other and more northerly, formed in rock of most cutting quality, offers a convenient passage to the foot of the steep part of the north ridge, from which point there is, if required, an easy descent into Cwm Glas. The north ridge gives a short, pleasant scramble, and is somewhat sheltered from southerly winds, which are sometimes an annoyance on the east ridge. Further west there are several good gullies on the Cwm Glas side, especially round about the pinnacles. The Crazy Pinnacle may be ascended either on the north-east or on the south-west side. The former is now more favoured since the fall of a certain large stone on the latter, which gave a useful hold in former days. Thirty years ago this ridge was almost unknown. A writer of 1833 seems to imply that it had been ascended by saying that 'the passage of it is hazardous, from the shortness and slippery quality of the grass at those seasons of the year when the mountain may be approached;' but this is evidently a mere misapplication of what others had said about Clawdd Goch (Bwlch y Maen), on the other side of the mountain, and we do not hear of anyone climbing here before C. A. O. B. (1847) and F. H. B. a few years later. Between 1865 and 1875 it became better known, and in the books at Penygwrhyd we find it recorded that in April 1884 H. and C. S. climbed from Cwm Dyli, thence along the ridge by Crib y Ddysgl to the summit of Y Wyddfa. In 1887, on June 30, E. K. climbed Crib Goch from Cwm Glas by the gully to the left of the outstanding or Crazy Pinnacle. Near the top two big stones are jammed in, and this compelled him to leave the gully; but on June 29, 1890, G. S. S. found these stones climbable by the aid of a crack in the rocks on the left hand. From this point the ridge can be reached by taking to the rocks on the right. They are sound, which is more than can be said for those on the left of the gully a little farther down. [Illustration: PART OF CRIB GOCH] On July 31 and August 2 E. K. scrambled up the other gullies nearer Bwlch Goch, and found them easier than the first, which is the main one seen from Cwm Glas. He pronounced these climbs well worth trying, but not fit for beginners. On June 17, 1890, W. P. and G. B. B. ascended to Bwlch Goch, and bearing round the foot of the first pinnacle, climbed the gully between the first and the second. They found the holding good, but the rocks by which the gully is blocked somewhat difficult to pass. In 1894, on September 14, W. E. C., S., and B. climbed Crib Goch to the central cairn from Cwm Glas. On December 9, 1894, J. M. A. T., H. H., and H. E. climbed the face from Cwm Glas beside an insignificant watercourse, reaching the ridge at the ruined cairn, then, passing along to the Crazy Pinnacle, scrambled down the gully on the Llanberis Pass side of it. The latter climb they describe as short but excellent, and the former as also good. No more climbs here are described in the _Book of Penygwrhyd_, but many others have been made. The truth is that for the last quarter of a century hardly a climber has visited Wales without making Crib Goch a primary object, and consequently there is not a climb on it whereof men say 'See, this is new.' * * * * * =Crib y Ddysgl.=--The name is pronounced practically 'Cribbythiskle,' and sometimes written 'Distyl,' a spelling probably due to a desire to support the common derivation of the name from 'destillare' i.e. 'dripping ridge.' The climate of Wales, however, is not such as to make any ridge remarkable merely because it drips, and moreover the derivation will not account for the other instances of the word. For instance, two or three miles west of the Pitt's Head we have Trum y Ddysgyl, and the proximity to it of Cwmtrwsgyl suggests that some distinction is expressed by the penultimate syllables. Attempts to derive the name from 'disgl' (= 'dish') seem equally futile. Possibly the explanation may be found in the word 'dysgwyl' ('watch,' 'expect') (compare Disgwylfa, in Cardiganshire), which would make it parallel to names like Lookingstead, &c. The highest point of Crib y Ddysgl is called Carnedd Ugain, and is a worthy rival of Y Wyddfa itself, being, according to the Ordnance surveyors, only 69 ft. lower--viz. 3,491 ft.--and from some points of view a really beautiful peak. From the highest point a narrow crest runs due east, reaching in about a quarter of a mile the huge buttress called Clogwyn y Person, which comes up out of Cwm Glas and has been described with it. This part is sometimes spoken of as the Gribin, a name which the large Ordnance map does not give, and I know of no other authority for it, though it is quite a likely place to bear the name. The main ridge continues east until it joins Crib Goch. The ridge, though sharp, is not a likely place for an accident to a climber, and, indeed, no accident seems to have occurred actually on the ridge, but more than one death has taken place close by. On August 10, 1874, a young man of great promise, Mr. Frederick Roberts Wilton, son of Mr. Robert Wilton, of Doncaster,[12] and a master in the City of London School, ascended Snowdon from Llanberis, and seems to have asked his way to Capel Curig, and to have been informed (not quite accurately) that he must turn to the right 'near the spring,' which is a good bit beyond the proper point of divergence from the Llanberis path. His body was ultimately found a fortnight later 'in the slippery course of a small mountain stream which descends sharply from the most southerly branch of the miners' path immediately below Crib y Ddysgl into the basin known as Cwm Glas. Evidently he had gone down a steep shingly slope with a wall of rock on his right hand over the entrance of a rocky watercourse.' These details are taken from a letter of his colleague, Mr. W. G. Rushbrooke. As the body was found in a posture of repose, and there was no sign of any injury sufficient to cause death, there is some reason to fear that this unfortunate gentleman died of exposure. For further details see the _Times_ for August 22, 24, 26, and 28, 1874. [12] See the _Doncaster Chronicle_. Another death from exposure took place here in the following year--namely, that of Mr. Edward Grindley Kendall, of Crosby, near Leicester, of whom something will be said under the head of _Cwm Dyli_. * * * * * =Cwm Dyli= (pronounced 'Dully') is the great eastern recess of Snowdon, and universally admitted to be the finest thing of the kind in Wales. The long sharp ridge of Crib Goch and Crib y Ddysgl bounds it on the north, while the almost equally fine, though less regular, ridge and majestic crags of Lliwedd shut it in on the south. It contains Llyn Llydaw (Hluddow), the largest lake, and Glaslyn, the finest tarn on the whole mountain, and is one reason why the ascent of Snowdon from Capel Curig is the finest of all. The stream forms some fine cascades (800 ft. above sea level) in its descent to the Vale of Gwynant. Half a mile above these cascades Clogwyn Aderyn, on the north bank of the stream, and Clogwyn Penllechen, between it and Llyn Teyrn (1,238 ft.), have a climb or two on them. At this llyn the path from Gorphwysfa comes in, and along it the great majority of people enter the cwm. The next landmark as we ascend is Llyn Llydaw (1,416 ft.), nearly a mile long, the elevation of which so close an observer as Cliffe over-estimated by more than 1,000 ft. Climbers bound for Lliwedd leave the lake entirely on the right, and find a foot-bridge close to the exit of the stream from it. The path to Snowdon crosses the lake by a stone causeway, which is rarely submerged by floods. From the head of Llyn Llydaw there is a steep rise--555 ft. in a quarter of a mile--to the tarn called Glaslyn (1,971 ft.) Between this and the sky line at the head of the cwm, 1,290 ft. higher, only one more hollow remains, called Pantylluchfa, and here the crags of Clogwyn y Garnedd show up magnificently. It may be mentioned that many people get hopelessly confused in reading or giving descriptions of Snowdon, because they fail to distinguish Glaslyn, here, from Llyn Glas, half a mile to the north of it, in Cwm Glas, and another Llyn Glas less than a mile due west in Cwm Clogwyn. If they know Glaslyn they naturally assume that it must be in Cwm Glas, and if they know Cwm Glas they place Glaslyn in it. Some of the confusion would be avoided if the latter were called by what would seem to be its older and true name--Llynffynnonglas. [Illustration: SNOWDON FROM GLASLYN _a_, Bwlch y Snethan. _b_, Summit, with Clogwyn y Garnedd below. _c_, Junction of paths from Penygwrhyd and Llanberis.] Cwm Dyli was the scene in 1875 of one of the strangest of all the disasters which have happened on the mountain. The victim was Mr. Edward Grindley Kendal, of Crosby, near Leicester, who on June 11 left Gwynant Valley in order to ascend Snowdon. Nothing more was heard of him or his till the end of that month, when a Mr. and Mrs. David Moseley, descending with a guide, found on the edge of Llyn Llydaw a wet and mouldy pair of boots, each containing a stocking marked 'Kendal' and a garter. It was at once surmised that the missing man had been wading and become engulfed in quicksands, which were stated to be numerous. His friends went so far as to employ a professional diver to explore the bottom of the lake, though it would seem that if the body was in the water simpler means would have answered the purpose, and if it was below the water the diver could neither find it nor follow it. At any rate he did not find it, because it was not there. It was found about ten days later on Crib y Ddysgl uninjured--it was identified by Mr. Ison, brother-in-law of the deceased and the jury at Llanberis found a verdict of 'death from exposure.' It was not precisely stated on what part of Crib y Ddysgl the body was found, and nothing transpired as to the condition of the feet; but it is simply amazing to anyone familiar with the character of the ground that a bare-footed man should ever have got so far. Why he did it and how he did it will always remain among the mysteries of Snowdon.[13] Other deaths have taken place in this cwm, for which see under _Lliwedd_ and _Clogwyn y Garnedd_. [13] The _Times_, July 2, 6, 8, and 15, 1875. It is curious that two of the lakes in this valley are among those mentioned 200 years ago by the learned Edward Lhwyd as 'distinguished by names scarce intelligible to the best Criticks in the British.' * * * * * =Clogwyn y Garnedd y Wyddfa=--i.e. 'the Precipice under the Cairn of Snowdon'--has been commonly known by the first three words only for at least 200 years. It is one of the grandest cliffs on Snowdon, and gives very fine climbing. For more than two centuries this precipice has been famous as a refuge for rare ferns and plants. The guide William Williams, well known as a botanist, lost his life here while in search of the Woodsia; so at least says Mr. T. G. Bonney, though he is far from accurate in the date of the accident, which, writing in 1874, he describes as having taken place 'some twenty years ago.' The actual date was June 19, 1861.[14] The old guide had taken up a lady and gentleman from Llanberis, and went from the top alone to gather ferns. The fall was 'down a declivity of three hundred yards.' The body was found at the foot of the precipice, after 'scouts' had been sent out. He had fallen from the point where the slope suddenly changes from about 45° to, perhaps, 75° or 80°. The spot where he slipped was for many years, and perhaps still is, marked by a white stone. [14] See the _Times_, June 25, 1861. On the shore of Glaslyn, at the south-west corner, there is a small cross of wood marking the spot where the body of Mr. Maxwell Haseler was found. He was making for Snowdon by the Lliwedd ridge, and fell from a short distance above Bwlch y Saethau. The party seem to have been well equipped, and contained members of experience, who were not without ropes and axes. They started on January 26, 1879, for Snowdon by Lliwedd, and, after lunching about 1 P.M. on Bwlch y Saethau, proceeded in the direction of Snowdon. Mr. Haseler took a separate course, more to the right hand, and almost immediately seems to have slipped and fallen. His body was found next morning by the shore of Glaslyn, and it was reckoned that he had fallen some 600 or 700 ft. The inquest was held at Penygwrhyd. The victim of this accident was only twenty-three years old.[15] [15] The _Times_, January 29 and February 7, 1879; _Chambers's Journal_, May 7, 1887. The following notes are among the records of Penygwrhyd:-- On September 23, 1887, W. E. C. and A. E. ascended Snowdon from Glaslyn by the first gully on Clogwyn y Garnedd. In 1890, on June 20, W. P. and G. B. B. descended from Snowdon to Haseler's Cross by the gully immediately above it in Clogwyn y Garnedd. In 1890, on September 27, F. W. J. found an excellent gully climb, possibly that referred to in the note of September 23, 1887. He started from Glaslyn, keeping to the right edge of the lake, and, facing towards Bwlch y Saethau, saw a gully choked by jammed stones (five in number), beginning almost from the foot. It has often been climbed. The most interesting and difficult piece is where a large stone roofs a cavern some 15 ft. high. In it there is a kind of skylight, through which the climber must go by an indescribable twist of the body. From the bottom of the gully to the huts where the climb ends is 900 ft., all except a portion of the upper end being narrow gully, and the rest a scramble over rocks. On December 13, 1891, Mrs. H. ascended the big Clogwyn y Garnedd gully direct to the summit of Snowdon. On September 24, 1892, Miss B. and a large party of gentlemen climbed (second lady's ascent) the Clogwyn y Garnedd gully through the cavern. In May 1893 a party climbed up by this and down by the next gully, on the north, which has its head just below the huts. In September 1893 the two Misses T. descended the great gully in 1 hour 25 minutes. In 1894, on September 14, Messrs. W. E. C., S., and B. descended the face of Clogwyn y Garnedd to the left of the big gully. * * * * * [Illustration: SNOWDON FROM THE NORTH, WITH LLIWEDD ON THE LEFT] =Lliwedd= (2,947 ft.) stretches away eastward from the summit of Snowdon, dividing Cwm Dyli on the north from Cwm y Llan on the south. Strictly speaking, perhaps the name only applies to the central portion, where its magnificent northern crags overlook the head of Llyn Llydaw, but, as in the case of Crib Goch, the significance of the name has been enlarged, and it is frequently used to denote the whole length of the ridge. At the Nant Gwynant end a transverse ridge, called Gallt y Wenallt, bears near its base some remarkably fine rocks, on which there is very good climbing. West of the Gallt a side valley, called Cwm Merch, runs nearly due south, and beyond this Cwm Lliwedd proper begins. The southern slope of it is steep, but that to the north is imposingly precipitous. It is, in fact, unsurpassed in Wales. Advancing in the direction of Snowdon, the cliffs become less sheer and the crest less broken, and as soon as the highest point of Crib Goch is 'on with' the head of Llydaw Bwlch Ciliau offers a rough descent into Cwm Dyli. Next on the west comes the Criman, corresponding geographically to Clogwyn y Person on Ddysgl, but more broken; beyond them Bwlch y Saethau (i.e. _Arrows Gap_), leading down to the head of Glaslyn. The last quarter of a mile up to the top of Snowdon is very steep, rising nearly 1,000 ft. in that distance. It was here that Mr. Maxwell Haseler, in 1879, lost his life by keeping too much to the right. [Illustration: LLIWEDD FROM THE NORTH-WEST.] In August 1872 Mr. T. H. Murray Browne and Mr. W. R. Browne, the discoverers of the Scafell Pinnacle, saw the merits of this climb, and attacked it without success. Public attention was first drawn to Lliwedd as a climbing-ground by the ascent made in 1883 by Messrs. T. W. Wall and A. H. Stocker, and thus described by the former in the _Alpine Journal_:[16]-- [16] Vol. xi. p. 239. 'This northern face consists of four buttresses, with three fairly well-defined couloirs between them. The summit ridge has two peaks, of which the western, nearer Snowdon, is the higher by a few feet. In January 1882 from the summit of Crib Goch Mr. A. H. Stocker and myself were struck by the grand appearance of the Lliwedd cliffs, and hearing from Owen, the landlord of the Penygwrhyd Hotel, that the northern face had never been climbed, the desire to make the first ascent naturally came upon us. On the 10th we made our first attempt by the central couloir, which leads up to the depression between the two summits. As it was raining the whole day the rocks were in an abominable state, and it was with the greatest difficulty that we managed to get up about 150 ft.' On January 3, 1883, they tried again. 'On January 4, after carefully observing the rocks of the buttress to the west of the central couloir, we came to the conclusion that it might be possible to cross the face in an upward direction from east to west, and then strike straight up. At 11.15 A.M. we got on the rocks, beginning from the lower of two dark green patches seen from below. From this a ledge runs up to the right, and if it had only been continuous Lliwedd would present no very great difficulties. Unfortunately this was not the case; there were most formidable-looking gaps in it, and the ledges above and below were tacked on to it by smooth and almost perpendicular gullies. Three bits in particular may be mentioned as far the hardest, although they are more or less typical of these crags, which nowhere offer 20 consecutive yards of easy rock-work. The first difficulty which presented itself was where the ledge was broken by a bold face of rock. One of us was pushed to the top of the smooth part, and finding that he could not descend to the ledge on the other side, he ascended a little higher, anchored himself firmly to the rocks, assisted his companion up, and let him down to the required ledge; then, throwing the rope over a pinnacle, he gave both ends to his companion to hold tight, and slid down the 40 ft. of rope to join him. After a few yards of easier work we came to a ledge about 6 inches wide and 4 yards long; the rock above was nearly perpendicular, with no hand-hold, and there was nothing below. It was the only way; we could not turn it, and somehow we got over, but neither of us wishes to be there again. From that ever-to-be-remembered ledge the climbing was grand work up to the point where we had to turn from a westerly direction to go straight up the face. Here there was one nasty corner. A narrow ledge about 2 inches wide had below it a sloping face of rock with three minute cracks in it. One of us had crossed this in safety, and so assumed a position in which the rope would have been of very little use. He was then opposed by a steep bit, topped by 4 ft. of perpendicular rock, with a very steep slope of heather above. At the moment that his last foot left the highest peg of rock his other knee slipped, and the heather, grass, and earth began to give way in his left hand. It was an awkward moment, for the other man was not well situated for supporting a jerk at the end of 30 ft. of rope, which would mean a fall of about 50 ft. Happily the other knee got on the heather and the axe held firm in the earth. Our difficulties were then over. The rocks grew less and less difficult as we ascended, and after 4½ hours of incessant work up 850 ft. of rocks we found ourselves on the summit ridge, exactly 13 yards from the cairn. [Illustration: LLIWEDD FROM LLYN LLYDAW _a_, East buttress. _b_, Central gully. _c_, West buttress. _d_, Slanting gully.] 'It may be mentioned that the only real difficulties lie in the first 200 ft.; above that point the mountain presents rock-work of a very high order, but nothing stupendously difficult, the rock being very firm. 'Future climbers will probably find that of the three couloirs the western is comparatively easy; the central may perhaps be ascended by climbing the lower rocks on the right, and the eastern by a long détour to the left. The buttress to the left of the central couloir looks as difficult as rocks possibly can look. But there is a chance that a careful search among the rocks to the left of the central couloir might reward a rock-climber with an exciting and successful scramble. In any case the whole northern face is distinctly difficult.' Under the date of April 12, 1884, we find recorded by H. S. and C. S. an ascent of Lliwedd by the ridge from Llyn Llydaw, which is apparently nothing more than the ordinary walk, but in 1887, early in April, is an important note in the hand of Mr. Stocker. '_Hints for the Ascent of Lliwedd by the North Face._ (N.B. Lliwedd consists of two peaks--the eastern and western buttress--with a well-defined gully running up between them.) '1. _Ascent of Western Buttress to the Right of Central Gully._--Make for the lower of two green patches easily seen from below just to the right of the foot of the central gully. From it work upwards to the right to the second green patch; then again upwards, still to the right, to a very small, steep green slope. From this the climb is almost straight up, inclining a little to the left at first. This will land the climber a few yards to the west of the cairn. '2. _Ascent by Central Gully and Western Buttress._--Go up the gully till the foot of the steep bit is reached; then climb out of the gully by ledges on the right on to the western buttress. As soon as possible make straight up the face, keeping the gully a little to the left. This will land the climber at the cairn. 'No. 2 is an easier climb than No. 1. All through the hand and foot hold is very good. The chief difficulties lie in the first 200 ft. after leaving the gully. The upper part is fairly easy. The whole climb is about 850 ft.' In 1887, April 11, O. E. and T. V. S. ascended Lliwedd by the central gully at first and afterwards in a line rather left of the summit. Time, under 3½ hours. In September 1887 W. E. C. and A. E. climbed Lliwedd by Mr. Stocker's second route in 1 hour 23 minutes from base to cairn, and subjoined a list of previous ascents, viz.-- First attempt. T. H. M. B. and W. R. B., August 1872 (Vis. Bk.) January 7, 1883, Messrs. Stocker and Wall, by route 1. April 24, 1884, Messrs. A. H. S. and P., by route 2. April 11, 1887, Messrs. O. E. and T. V. S., by route 2. September 10, 1887, Mr. R. W., by route 1. September 20, 1887, Messrs. W. E. C. and A. E., by route 2. On May 20, 1888, Mr. Alfred Evans and two friends, W. E. C. and -- K., left Penygwrhyd at 10 A.M., crossed the northern arête of Crib Goch and Cwm Glas, and climbed Clogwyn Person and by Crib y Ddysgl to the top of Snowdon. Evans and K. then descended by the second or third gully from Bwlch Glas on Clogwyn y Garnedd to the head of Llyn Llydaw. C., E., and K. started up the central gully of Lliwedd at 5.5 P.M. At the bottom, and for some distance up, the rocks are water-worn and but little broken up, and the water flowing down rendered this part difficult. At the moment when C. was about 300 ft. above the scree Evans was about 80 ft. below him, and could not advance. C., therefore, went down 3 or 4 ft. and rested. Evans then tried to get out of the gully by the ledge mentioned in Mr. Stocker's account. This ledge is divided in two parts by a huge outstanding buttress with very scanty footing. Both men passed this; then Evans lowered himself by K.'s ankle on to a rocky foothold and tried to work to the right, but after doing 5 or 6 ft.--half the requisite distance--his feet slipped, his arms were unable to support him, and he fell on his feet about 5 yards on to the edge of a steeply sloping grass ledge running up to this part of the cliff. From this point in four or five terrible leaps he fell over and over, a total distance of 200 ft., to the screes below. The accident happened at 6.55 P.M., and K. is stated to have descended to the body, a distance of 200 ft. of the most awkward climbing in the whole gully, in the space of 5 minutes. This is hardly credible, but under such circumstances people do not judge time accurately. This accident need never have happened. If ever a party courted disaster it was done on this occasion. A cross was erected by friends of Mr. Evans on the spot where his body was found, but being much damaged by stones it had to be removed in 1892 to a rocky knoll not far off, where its position is more secure. It records the age of Mr. Evans as 24. On June 10, 1889, M., A. L. M., and B. climbed the north face of Lliwedd by the rocks of the western buttress, keeping close to the central gully almost the whole of the way. On January 1, 1893, F. P., F. W. O., and H. J. R. ascended the north face of Lliwedd by the western buttress, starting just to the right of the central gully, and coming up at the cairn. Time, 3 hours. At Easter 1893 H. G. G. and -- W. climbed by the central gully and the western buttress, coming out at the cairn, in 3 hours 5 minutes, all the rocks being dry. On April 7, 1893, T. H. M. climbed the north-west face alone in 2½ hours: he found two difficult spots near where Messrs. G. and W. scratched their initials on the rocks. Everything was dry. On September 14, 1894, W. E. C. and M. K. S. ascended the central gully for about 200 ft., then went up the western buttress, and crossed the gully again to the eastern buttress, about 300 ft. below the top, reaching the summit in 2 hours and 20 minutes. On October 14, 1894, J. M. A. T., H. H., and H. E. ascended the central gully to a point apparently beyond that where others have broken out upon the face, and continued up a steep stretch of rock by taking a narrow gutter between the centre and right wall, the upper part being found difficult. A broad ledge brought them to a similar reach, where the outward slope of the holds became more and more pronounced. Finding the rocks above quite impassable, the party descended by means of an iron claw, which had to be left, and then by a ledge in the right wall and an awkward corner got out on the face of the west buttress. Here they found the ledges narrow and the crags extremely steep, but working upwards and tending to the right they crossed an incipient gully by an awkward stride, and thereafter met with only ordinary difficulties, but on passing a cleft which opens into the gully enjoyed a magnificent view of the latter, and struck the summit at the cairn. They pronounced the climb to be quite impossible for one man. _The Slanting Gully._--This gully, on the west side of the western buttress, is easily identified, being the next one to the west of the great central gully and a striking feature of the north face of Lliwedd. It is clearly marked all the way up, and is most readily approached by crossing diagonally up the screes below the great gully and then skirting the base of the rocks of the western buttress. This gully was attacked on January 9, 1894, by Messrs. F. O. W., C. W. N., E. H. K., and H. K. It was then frozen up and covered with snow to a depth varying from a few inches to 3 ft. In 4 hours an estimated height of 350 or 400 ft. above the starting-point was attained, the whole of this distance, with the exception of a few steps in deep snow, having to be climbed. The party kept in the gully the whole way, usually close against the rocks on the western side. Progress was finally arrested at a point where the gully becomes, for some distance, a mere crack, formed by the western rocks overhanging an almost smooth slab, where hold for hand or foot seems almost entirely wanting. With longer time at disposal it seemed possible that this difficulty might have been surmounted by wriggling up inside the crack, or by a dangerous scramble on the face of the slab. Two members of the party were provided with crampons, and derived great steadiness and safety from their use. The uniformly steep angle at which this gully lies may be gathered from the fact that a rücksack dropped from the highest point was picked up at the starting-point on the return. It was the opinion of most of the party that the condition of the snow and rocks was, on the whole, favourable for climbing, as the ice and snow gave some assistance in places which without them might have been still more difficult. The next attempt is valuable, as notes were taken on the heights of some of the obstacles. On March 26, 1894, the gully was attacked by J. C. M., O. M., and W. P. from the screes (2,300 ft.) at 1.55 P.M. They arrived in the cave (2,690 ft.) at 5 P.M. They considered the conditions favourable, except that the snow was melting, but found the climbing difficult all the way. At about 2,500 ft. a chimney 70 ft. high had to be squirmed up. They were of opinion that the gully could not be climbed direct, and all their efforts to break out on either side were frustrated. The climbing does not, as in the central gully, become more easy as progress is made; on the contrary, the difficulties increase. The party carried two ropes, one of 50 ft. and one of 80 ft., and at one place had to use the full length of both together. The descent took 2 hours. On Thursday, August 30, 1894, this gully cost a valuable life. Mr. J. Mitchell, of Oxford, an assistant editor of the _New Historical English Dictionary_, started from the foot at about 2 P.M. The first pitch was quickly ascended, and he then proceeded, apparently without difficulty, to the foot of the long chimney, which he passed by means of the face. On reaching the top he waved his handkerchief, and, being asked what it was like, replied that it was very stiff. Not long after he was seen in a cave, which the lookers-on (probably in error) identified with the highest point reached by previous climbers. From this he climbed with great difficulty to the top, as it appeared from below, of a long chasm, with his head just below an overhanging rock, upwards of 150 ft. above the cave, and after more than half an hour of fruitless endeavour to make further progress he fell at 4.30 P.M., and was killed on the spot. The body was found at the above-mentioned cave, and was brought down by four quarrymen at great personal risk. The lesson which should be drawn from this is, that if a man will insist on climbing alone he should not choose for his attack climbs which parties of greater skill and experience than his own have found to be beyond their powers. * * * * * =Cwm y Llan.=--This large cwm stretches away from Snowdon top to the south-east between Yr Aran and Lliwedd. The scenery consists mainly of the South Snowdon Slate Works, which occupy the centre of the valley, at a height of about 1,100 ft., and of Sir Edward Watkin's road up Snowdon. There is very little climbing, though some parts of Geuallt and Aran are very steep. On the Lliwedd side there is a good rock (Craig Ddu), not far from the slate works, and others rather smaller near the exit of the valley, while at the head, near Bwlch y Maen, almost under Snowdon and near Bwlch y Saethau, some difficult passages occur. The slate quarry here must not be confused with 'Cwm y Llan slate quarry,' which is not in this valley at all, but on the western slope of Aran, about a third of a mile beyond Bwlch Cwm y Llan. This little pass (about 1,700 ft.) is very useful to anyone who, after a climb on Lliwedd, wishes to reach the nearest railway station, for Pont Rhyd-ddu is very much nearer than Llanberis and can be reached without climbing over Snowdon summit. From the top of Lliwedd the pass is in full view, and a stone wall is seen stretching half-way from it towards two little reservoirs which are some 600 yards higher up the valley than the slate works. It is a mile and a half from Lliwedd by way of these reservoirs to the top of the bwlch, which will hardly be reached within half an hour. From the bwlch a fair path on the right bank of the stream leads towards Llynygader, and soon crosses the path from Snowdon to Beddgelert. By keeping round the hill to the right the Carnarvon highroad (which is easily seen from above) is gradually neared. The distance from the bwlch direct to the station may be covered in three-quarters of an hour, making in all 1¼ hour from Lliwedd, as compared with at least 2½ hours which would be required to reach Llanberis from the same point. * * * * * =Cwm Creigiog= is a shallow and unimportant hollow on the south-west side of Snowdon, lying between Aran and the ordinary Beddgelert path to the summit. The cwm has no attractions for a climber, yet at least one life has been lost in it. This was in the winter of 1859, when a Mr. Cox is said to have ascended Snowdon from Llanberis, and to have become exhausted on the way down to Beddgelert, between Llechog and the farm called Fridduchaf. His foolish guide left him alone and went in search of food, with the result, which in such cases usually follows, of finding his unfortunate employer dead on his return. The spot is marked by a heap of stones. Mr. Baddeley says it 'marks the spot where a tourist lost his life from exhaustion in 1874'--perhaps a mistake arising out of a death of the same kind in that year on quite another part of the mountain. * * * * * =Clogwyndur Arddu= ('Black Precipice') is the magnificent ridge which divides Cwm Clogwyn on the south from Cwm Brwynog on the north, being the western buttress of Y Wyddfa, or more strictly of Carnedd Ugain. The ascent from the Snowdon Ranger traverses nearly the whole length of the ridge, which broadens out at its western end into Moel y Cynghorion, beyond which again is the low pass of Bwlch Maes y Cwm (1,100 ft.), giving an easy passage from Llanberis to Snowdon Ranger and Beddgelert. The cliffs on the north side of the ridge are grand, and have been concerned in more than one fatal accident. In 1846 the Rev. Henry Wellington Starr, B.A., of Magdalen Hall, Oxford, eldest son of Mr. George Starr, of Hilperton, Wiltshire, and then a curate in Northampton, left Dolbadarn Inn on September 6 to ascend Snowdon. He failed to return, and on inquiry being made by his friends people came forward with evidence which seemed to show that he had reached the top of Snowdon, then descended to Gorphwysfa, crossed the head of Llanberis Pass, and ascended Glyder Fawr. At that point a guide professed to have met him, and brought him about half-way down, particularly noting that he wore a single glove, corresponding exactly to another which he had left with his luggage at the hotel. Search was made in every direction, but it was not till the beginning of June in the following year that any light was thrown on the mystery. On that day some of the clothes were found accidentally by William Hughes, a huntsman, who was exercising his dogs, apparently on Moel Cynghorion, and next day, on further search being made, the skeleton was discovered buried under gravel. His purse and chain were found, but his watch and ring were gone. It appears from the evidence of Griffith Ellis, of Llanberis, who found part of the remains, that the deceased had fallen over the cliff of Clogwyn Coch, on Moel Cynghorion, while ascending from Llyn Cwellyn--that is, by the 'Snowdon Ranger' route.[17] [17] The _Times_, 1846, October 14, October 24, October 30, November 3, and 1847, June 5; the _Globe_, October 1846; _Chambers's Journal_, May 1887. In 1859 a fatal accident took place near the eastern end of the ridge. The victim, George Henry Frodsham, a clerk in Liverpool, described as a young man of very fine physique, arrived at Llanberis on Saturday, August 13, accompanied by his cousin, F. A. Nicholson, and four friends, T. Clayhills, J. Snape, J. Goodiear, and A. Gardner. It was midnight, but they started off at once for Snowdon. They got as far as the 'half-way house,' where the proper path turns left, and up towards Cyrn Las; they, however, took the right-hand fork, which leads to the old copper level above Llyn du'r Arddu. Struggling up the rocks from the mine, Frodsham, encumbered by an umbrella and a bag, and being, moreover, in the dark, slipped and fell, unknown to his friends, who returned to the proper path and gained the summit. His cousin is said to have searched for him continuously from 4 A.M. on Sunday to 9 P.M. on Monday. At 6 A.M. on Tuesday the body was found by W. Owen; the skull was fractured both at the top and at the back, and the bag and umbrella were found 200 yards higher up, indicating that distance as the extent of his fall. A sapient jury drew from this sad event the moral that a guide should be employed as a safeguard against sudden mists; but few men need fear mists less than those who choose to climb when it is pitch dark. It may be said that this party neglected no precaution which is likely to ensure a fatal accident--inexperience, fatigue, darkness, difficult rocks, the burden of bags and umbrellas. * * * * * =Llechog= (i.e. 'Flat, Slabby Place').--There are two ridges of this name on Snowdon; one is traversed by the ordinary route from Beddgelert and that from Rhyd-ddu, and is precipitous on its curving north front; the other forms the western wall of Cwm Glas Bach, and is traversed for some distance by the pony path from Llanberis. Towards the Llanberis Pass road it presents a fine rocky ridge, very steep and lofty, on which good climbing may here and there be found. * * * * * =Moel Eilio= (2,382 ft.), less than three miles south-west of Llanberis station, has a namesake on the west side of the river Conway, not far from Llanrwst. The name is sometimes spelt Aeliau. The view from the top is extremely fine; the ascent is easy, and, as there is a railway on each side of it, access to the foot of it is very simple. The rockiest side is towards the east. Early in the century a poor little fellow named Closs, while trying to follow his mother from Bettws Garmon to Llanberis, was lost on this mountain. The story is told by H. L. Jones (1829) in his finely illustrated book, and by Wright (1833) and Bennett (1838). The last-named gives his epitaph. * * * * * =Garnedd Goch Range.=--=Garnedd Goch= (2,315 ft.) (i.e. 'The Red Cairns') is a very rugged and unfrequented range of hills lying to the west of Beddgelert. The huge Nantlle slate quarries on the north side of it have spoilt some very pretty scenery and some very pretty climbs. Beddgelert and Snowdon Ranger are good starting-points, and better still is Penygroes station, on the line from Portmadoc to Carnarvon. * * * * * =Moel Hebog= ('Hawk Hill,' 2,578 ft.) seems to have been ascended last century by Lord Lyttelton, by the Ordnance surveyors, and in August 1857 by Mr. J. H. Cliffe, who in his book (published 1860) gives a clear description of his ascent. In his opinion one of the cairns on the summit was then 'very ancient.' It is essentially a Beddgelert mountain, but can be conveniently taken from many other places at the cost of more time, as, for instance, from Snowdon Ranger on the north, Tremadoc and Criccieth on the south, and Brynkir station on the west. A man in the pink of condition who knows the way well can get to the top from Beddgelert in about three-quarters of an hour, but most people take 1½ or 2 hours. The horizontal distance is under 2 miles, nearly the same as that from Wastdale Head to Scafell Pike; but the vertical height is less by one-quarter. The proper route is very simple. A shoulder runs down north-west on to the Carnarvon road, and the ridge of it, after being reached by proceeding due west from Beddgelert, is followed straight to the top. This shoulder may, of course, be used by those who approach from the Snowdon Ranger, but for them a better plan is to take, about ¼ mile after passing the Pitt's Head, a road which continues on the right bank of the stream to Glan y Gors, a few yards beyond which a turning on the right leads across a side stream and past the farm of Hafod Ryffydd to the foot of Cwm Meillionen, and, by following either the cwm or the ridge on the left hand, the top of Moel Hebog is easily reached. The routes from Tremadoc, Criccieth, and Brynkir all take the dull side of the mountain; but this disadvantage is counterbalanced by the increased effect which this gives to the view of Snowdon on reaching the top, and to the peep down into the valley of Beddgelert, below. The most difficult way to hit off is that from Nantlle, but in point of rock scenery it is the finest of all, and was chosen by the Alpine Club for their excursion when they met here in 1883. * * * * * =Mynydd Mawr= (i.e. 'Great Mountain') rises just opposite to and west of the Snowdon Ranger Inn. The noble crag Castell Cidwm (i.e. castle of the wolf or robber) runs steeply down to Llyn Cwellyn, and well deserves a visit. Borrow, on seeing it from the south, was reminded of Gibraltar. Craig y Bera also, which overhangs Drws y Coed, is part of this mountain, and has some very striking rock scenery. Denbigh. This county has little climbing. A few rocks near Bettws y Coed offer short climbs, which are more satisfactory than the limestone rocks of Orme's Head, near Llandudno, or of the Eglwyseg cliffs, near Llangollen; but we find in =Dinas Bran=, close by, an extremely steep, castle-crowned hill, and much favoured by picnickers. It seems, however, to have been the scene of some early climbing, made too, quite properly, with the rope. Leland says, 'Ther bredith in the Rok Side that the Castelle stondith on every yere an Egle. And the Egle doth sorely assaut hym that distroith the Nest goyng down in one Basket and having a nother over his Hedde to defend the sore Stripe of the Egle.' Under such circumstances a climber ought to find St. Paul a better patron saint than St. Martin. Montgomeryshire. =Berwyn Mountains.=--The name is said to signify 'White Tops' (Bera-gwen). The range runs parallel to the river Dee, forming its south bank for many miles. It is not lofty, Moel Sych (2,716 ft.) and Cader Fronwen (2,573 ft.) being the highest points. The individual hills are not of striking form, and are really little more than high heathery moors, on which large numbers of grouse breed, but there are many points on the south-east side where small but striking rocks are found, chiefly about the heads of cwms hollowed out of the 'Llandeilo' and 'Bala' strata. These cwms are occasionally visited for the sake of the waterfalls, two or three of which are exceedingly fine. The rocks at Llangynog would be remarkably good if they had not fallen a prey to the spoilers in the form of quarrymen. Merionethshire. Merioneth mountains and shire Cardigan To travel over will tire horse and man, says Taylor, the Water Poet, and, indeed, as a climbing county it is only second to Carnarvon, and contains such fine mountains as Cader Idris, the Arans, and the Rhinogs. The climbing capital is Dolgelly, though the excellent service of the Cambrian Railway makes it easy to scale almost any mountain from almost any place in the county. The reason of this is that all the places of resort are near the coast, and the mountains are not far inland, so that the railway following the coast puts them all in communication with each other, and it is almost equally convenient to stay at Barmouth, Harlech, Towyn, Aberdovey, or Machynlleth. Indeed, this is almost the only county where railways are cheerfully accepted by the mountaineer as friends and not as enemies. He does not love them at Bettws y Coed, he loathes them at Llanberis, but here they are unobtrusive and at the same time supremely useful. * * * * * =Aberglaslyn.=--Through this beautiful defile lies the only correct approach to Snowdon. It is a true mountain scene, somehow suggesting Scotland rather than Wales, and of such beauty that, according to the story, three Cambridge dons, who went round Wales criticising nature and deducting marks for every defect, unanimously awarded full marks to this. There is fairly good practice climbing on both sides of it, but not very steep, in spite of the fears of some of the early travellers, who (like Hutton in 1803) thought the sides would close before they got through, and reached Beddgelert with a sense of relief. It was one of the earliest scenes in Wales which the taste of last century admitted to be picturesque. Sandby's view was taken about 120 years ago. * * * * * =Cnicht= or =Cynicht= (2,265 ft.), =Moel Wyn= (2,529 ft.)--Mr. J. H. Cliffe ascended the former on September 4, 1857, and declared that he could only hear of one man who had preceded him (the climbing clergyman). Under certain aspects and conditions it is one of the most striking mountains in Wales, owing to its sharp, conical form, but it bears very little really good rock. Beddgelert is the best place from which to ascend, and if the old and higher road to Maentwrog be taken to ¼ mile short of the tramway in Cwm Croesor, a ridge on the left hand can be followed right up to the peak without fear of mistake. If the ascent of Moel Wyn be included it adds less than an hour to the time taken by the last expedition. On the other hand, if Moel Wyn is ascended from Tanygrisiau, on the Ffestiniog line, it is equally easy to take in Cynicht. * * * * * =Rhinog Fawr= (2,362 ft.--just north of Rhinog Fach) is one of the most striking of the rocky hills which rise behind Harlech. It is more visited than would otherwise be the case because the pretty lake of Cwm Bychan and the famous pass of Bwlch Drws Ardudwy, both places of considerable resort, lie at its feet, one on either side. It is one of the barest and most rocky mountains in all Wales, and yet it has hardly anywhere on it a crag of respectable height. Little nameless problems, however, abound, and men who are content to enjoy a day's promiscuous scrambling, without accomplishing any notorious climb about which they will afterwards be able to boast, may be recommended to ramble over Rhinog Fawr. _Easy Ascents._--Several stations on the Cambrian line are convenient for the start, especially Harlech and Llanbedr. Vehicles can be got in summer to take visitors to near Cwm Bychan (about 5 miles), from the east end of which to reach the top of the mountain requires a long hour, by way of the lakelet of Gloywlyn and up the western slope of the mountain. From Dolgelly the way is not so easy to find. Bwlch Drws Ardudwy, the pass between the two Rhinogs, is the first place to make for, and for this the best plan is to go by the Precipice Walk or by the Trawsfynydd highroad to the Camlan stream, which comes in on the left half a mile or more beyond Tynygroes Inn. A path follows the stream for nearly 3 miles to a slate quarry, which can also be reached rather more quickly by crossing the bridge at Penmaenpool, especially if the train be used as far as that station. Half a mile up the stream beyond the quarry the course leaves the brook and strikes away north-north-west round Rhinog Fach, rising as little as may be, so as to join the track up Bwlch Drws Ardudwy. From the head of the pass, rugged as it looks, a way may be picked northward to the east slope of the summit, but many people prefer to descend to the west a long way, so as to strike the easier south-western shoulder. A yet simpler route than the last, but, as involving 3 miles more of the hateful Trawsfynydd road, intolerable unless a carriage be taken, turns out of the route to the left half a mile beyond the ninth milestone, and makes for the north side of Rhinog Fawr. The path for nearly 3 miles is that which leads to Bwlch Drws Ardudwy, and is quitted just after passing through a wall. The stream on the right hand is now followed up to the pool at its head, until a turn to the left and south brings the pedestrian up on to the summit. This route may also be used from Trawsfynydd (where the Great Western have a station very useful for Ffestiniog on one side and Bala on the other), and there is no better place to start from if climbing is wanted, for of that there is plenty to be found in Craig Ddrwg, the ridge which stretches away to the north. In winter this range is very fine, but as stern and desolate as it is possible to imagine anything. The writer has reason to remember that here, in January 1895, he experienced the most intense cold that he has met with in Great Britain. * * * * * =Arenig Fawr= (2,800 ft.) is called 'Rennig' by Daines Barrington, who, writing in 1771, adds that it 'is commonly considered as the fifth mountain of North Wales in point of height.' The ascent from Arenig station, on the Great Western Railway, between Bala and Ffestiniog, is very easy, as the rise is only 1,700 ft., and the distance about 1¾ mile. The usual and most expeditious way of making the ascent is by proceeding westward from the station for ¼ mile to the farm of Milltergerrig, but for scenery and for climbing an opposite direction should be taken for nearly a mile, till the stream is struck which issues from Llyn Arenig, really a very fine tarn and backed by most respectable cliffs. Further south than the tarn again good rocks will be found. The usual, and indeed the proper, way of dealing with this mountain is to traverse it from north to south, ending up at Llanuwchllyn station, on the Great Western line from Bala to Dolgelly. The eastward view is extremely fine, and superior by far to that from many of the highest points in Wales. This was one of our earliest mountain meteorological stations, as it was here that the Hon. Daines Barrington conducted his experiments on rainfall in 1771.[18] [18] See the _Philosophical Transactions_, p. 294, of that year. Its height, too, was measured, as Pennant (1781) tells us, by Mr. Meredith Hughes, a surveyor of Bala. One of the ancient Welsh writers mentions this mountain in a most contemptuous manner. Borrow alludes to this, and remarks that upon him, on the contrary, none of all the hills which he saw in Wales made a greater impression. * * * * * =The Arans.=--This mountain is the highest in Merionethshire, and by many wrongly considered the second highest in Wales. It lies between the Berwyns and Cader Idris. Like the latter, it is of volcanic trap rock, heavily speckled in parts with quartz, and exposed on the east side, where it has been subjected to much weathering. There is a good deal of old _débris_ from the face, that is now grass-covered. [Illustration] The road between the Aran and the outlying hills of the Berwyn is over 1,900 ft. high; we have, however, to descend to 860 ft. in passing from the Aran to Cader Idris. The main ridge runs almost exactly north and south for 6 miles, its west side--a large tract of marshy moorland--sloping down gently to the vales of Dyfrdwy (= the goddess's water; sometimes called the Little Dee) and Wnion, and its east side, irregularly escarped, falling for the most part very rapidly for the first thousand feet. Its ridge culminates in two peaks 1½ mile apart, Aran Benllyn (2,902 ft.) and Aran Fawddwy (2,970 ft.) The word _Aran_ means an 'alp,' or a 'high place;' _Mawdd_ is said to mean 'spreading,' and the terminations _ach_ or _wy_ mean 'water.' _Aran Benllyn_ was one of several of which the height was measured in Pennant's time by 'the ingenious Mr. Meredith Hughes, of Bala,' who made it out to be 30 yards less than Cader Idris. In April 1881 the Alpine Club had one of their informal meetings at Bala, and chose the east front of the Aran as their route from there to Dolgelly. The ordinary ascents of the Aran are effected from Llanuwchllyn in 2 hours, from Drws y Nant in 1¼ hour, and from Dinas Mawddwy in about 3 hours. _Rock Climbs._--These are never extensive, though there are many little pieces that require much ingenuity to surmount. Excepting for a few boulder climbs on the ridge itself the crag work is confined to the east face of the mountains, the side overlooking Lliwbran and Craiglyn Dyfi. Climbers are often asked, where can a man start practising rock work? The Arans are first-rate for this. Whatever the difficulty on the mountain a few minutes' traversing will generally take one out of it, if direct ascent or descent be considered undesirable. The mountain face is so broken up that we have no gullies or arêtes separated by impossible walls of rock from the easy parts of the mountain. In short, from the enthusiastic shin-scraper's point of view the architecture of the Aran face is defective. (_a_) _From Lliwbran._--The rocks rising from Lliwbran are columnar in structure, and by the time a generation of climbers have torn away the grass from the holds they will show up plenty of neat little problems from 50 to 100 ft. high. Looking up from the lake the crag, which is a high dependence of Aran Benllyn, shows on the right an almost unrelieved slabbiness at an easy angle, which gives good practice in small footholds. Up to the centre of the crag is a steep grass gully, in a line with a large boulder down near the lake, with an overhanging wall that blocks the direct ascent of the gully, and with a fine clean-cut buttress on the left. We may creep up the corner of the wall on the left, or circumvent it by traversing round to the right. The route to the ridge from the big boulder is easiest up an oblique gully just invisible from it. Between our crag and the summit of the Benllyn is an easy walk due east down to the green shoulder south of Lliwbran, that takes us quickly by Nant y Barcud and Cwm Croes to the Twrch valley and the main road. This descent to Llannwchllyn, though not direct, recommends itself in wet or misty weather, and is in any case worth taking as a variant. Aran Benllyn itself offers nothing on its broken escarpments; though the face shows up rather well in profile from a distance, the climber need scarcely use his hands in zigzagging up the face to the cairn. The view from the summit justifies our traversing the peak on the way to Aran Fawddwy. It includes the length of Bala lake and a goodly extent of Llyn Fyrnwy, and the outline of Aran Fawddwy shows up magnificently. Passing along the ridge to the south of Benllyn we keep up at a high level for the whole distance of 1½ mile to Aran Fawddwy, the greatest depression being less than 250 ft. below Benllyn. If we bear to the left, just dipping below the ridge, we pass along the foot of an overhanging mass of rock of considerable length that is undercut in a remarkable fashion. There are many places along it where one may shelter comfortably in bad weather. It is difficult to climb up the rock direct, but towards its south extremity we may work up into a small cave and climb out by the left on to the ridge again. Five minutes then bring us to a fine cairn that marks an easy descent to Craiglyn Dyfi, the source of the Dyfi river, with a good view of the best rocks on Aran Fawddwy. The final ascent of this peak begins after a few feet of descent to a wall that crosses the ridge at its lowest. (_b_) _On Craiglyn Dyfi._--A small terrace at about the level of the wall just referred to leads round the rocks to the left into a large scree gully, which offers good sport in snowy weather. Half-way along this terrace is a 'problem' of unusual severity--a narrow crack in an overhanging face, with very scanty hand-holds where the crack closes, some 20 ft. up the face. The pleasantest bit of scrambling is on to the summit of Aran Fawddwy from the lake, by the arête that is seen in outline from the large cairn on the ridge, from which point the two vertical portions of the arête are well marked. It can be reached easily from the lake, or we may descend from the cairn for some 600 ft., and then traverse across to the south till a small gully is passed that shows a cave pitch at its lower extremity. The rock arête forms the south side of this gully and runs up for 400 ft. It reminds us of the easy climb up Tryfaen from the Glyder side, though in one or two places we have difficulties here, whereas there are none on the Tryfaen scramble. It begins below the level of the cave, and after passing over rough rocks at an easy angle we come to a fine wall with a wide crack up it on the left. A huge splintered block is fixed in the lower part of the crack, and we may surmount the block and just squeeze in, passing out on to the roof. There are one or two variations possible here. In fact, instead of starting on the arête we might pass up the gully to the cave. It has mossy walls and a dripping interior. It is marked by a small pile of stones on the right and a well-bleached sheep's skeleton in the gully just above. The pitch may be taken on the left by steep wet grass, which is unpleasant, or we can attack it direct. We go well inside, and with back to the right we find good holds on the left, thus working up until the roof itself offers hold for both hands. From here it is best to pass on to the arête a few feet below the crack above described. The way is then easy, but interesting, and leads to a straight-up crack in a wall in front of us that has to be negotiated. It looks severe, but the surface of the rock is so rough that no real trouble is experienced with it. The crack is much more formidable to descend. Shortly after this we find ourselves out on the open face again, the gully on the left having disappeared, and only a few crags above us marking the summit of the mountain. Striking directly upwards we reach the top in a quarter of an hour, the last 25 ft. being, if we choose, by way of a chimney, that begins with some difficulty and lands us just to the left of the large cairn that marks the highest point. (_c_) _By Llaithnant._--Passing due south of the Aran Fawddwy cairn, along the route to Dinas, we see a fine rock in front between us and the near end of the Dyrysgol ridge, forming the head of Llaithnant. It is marked by an overhanging rock half-way down the left-hand ridge. A steep and wet scree gully leads down to the valley, and we may go part of the way down until we are about 100 ft. below the overhanging block. Here we can strike across to the arête, and keeping close to the gully on our right have 250 ft. of fairly good scrambling. We skirt close under the big boulder, and passing to the right of it (a traverse can also be managed on the left, lower down) clamber over rather loose rock to the grass terrace above the pitch. Then good rock follows, and bearing towards the right we come in sight of a square-walled chimney overlooking the main gully, marked by small cairns at top and bottom. Its holds are all on the left, so we back up on the right and find ourselves close to the main ridge again. Another chimney still further to the right might be taken, but it is always very wet; the two pitches in it are both very small, and it is only interesting when ice is about. A grass gully separates our arête from a few rocks nearer Dyrysgol, which are of basaltic character and rather interesting to descend. * * * * * =Cader Idris.=--The name ('Chair of Idris') includes the whole mountain range, some 7 miles long, that separates the Mawddach from the Dysynni. It is a continuation of the outcrop of volcanic trap rock that stretches from the Arans down to Cardigan Bay, and, as usual with such mountains, its volcanic origin has had much to do with its grand scenery. The range runs in an E.N.E. direction from the sea south of Barmouth, and reaches its greatest elevation at Pen y Gader (2,929 ft.) It forms two other noteworthy peaks on the chain, Tyrran Mawr (2,600 ft.), 2 miles to the south-west, and Mynydd Moel (2,800 ft.), 1½ mile to the north-east. The north side presents a fairly even front of precipitous rock for 3½ miles. Near the highest point, however, a huge amphitheatre of rock, a thousand feet in height, suggesting a volcanic crater half fallen away, breaks the continuity of the ridge, and contributes the finest bit of mountain scenery that this side of Cader can offer. Probably this hollow suggested first the name of 'Cader,' though there is a recess on the summit ridge that is usually taken to be the seat in question. But the mountain can show something even better on the south side. Its high dependency Mynydd Pencoed joins the main ridge almost at the summit of Pen y Gader, and its extremity Craig y Cae forms with Cader itself another crater-like hollow, which, with Llyn y Cae lying at the foot of the crags, is even wilder and more magnificent than the one on the north side. Excepting the crags in this cwm the south side of Cader consists of steep grass slopes, and the general aspect of the mountain is uninteresting. An account is published in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ (vol. xxxviii. p. 147) of an ascent of the mountain in 1767 by L. N. Cader Idris was also climbed in 1863 by Prince Arthur. Several members of the Alpine Club worked their way up the direct route from Llyn y Gader in 1881, and there is some mention in the _Alpine Journal_ (vol. xii.) of a few ascents by Mr. H. Willink. The gullies along the north face of the mountain were explored for many years by F. H. B. The wandering Borrow wordily describes a night adventure on Cader Idris. A pleasantly-written chapter on it may be found in Paterson's _Mountaineering Below the Snow Line_, and just recently an article has appeared on the same subject in the _Scottish Mountaineering Journal_. This latter article has a good general view of the whole length of the north face. On the north face, between Pen y Gader and Cyfrwy, a tailor named Smith, of Newport, met his death by a fall from the crags in 1864. His body was not found until the following spring. There is another Pen y Gader in South Wales, the highest point in the Black Forest of Carmarthen (2,630 ft.); also between Y Foel Fras and the Conway River a hill goes by the same name. The ordinary excursions up the mountain are made from Dolgelly, by the Foxes' Path, in 2¼ hours; by the Bridle Path, in 2¾ hours, or by Mynydd Moel in 3 hours; from Arthog, easily reached by train from Barmouth, in 3 hours; from Tal y Llyn in 2 hours; and from Towyn in 4 hours. The walk up from Towyn is by the Dysynni valley and the _Bird Rock_. This has a very bold and steep front, broken up by narrow ledges. It can be ascended with different degrees of ease, and is worth climbing for the view. The rock is named from its usual frequenters, the kite, hawk, and cormorant showing up in large numbers on the face. _Rock Climbs._--(_a_) _On Mynydd Moel._--These are all fairly easy in dry weather, and are worth exploring on a slack day. Standing at the eastern corner of the little square Llyn Aran, we notice the highest point of Mynydd Moel to the west. A fine-looking arête leads up to it from the north, with a well-marked pinnacle apparently half-way up the climb. This we shall call the north ridge. A prominent pillar of unusual steepness is seen to our left, reaching to the height of the Ceu Graig ridge. Its eastern side is cut into by a narrow gully that seems from below to pass behind the pillar. To the right of the Ceu Graig pillar is seen another gully, looking steep but grassy; it is found to offer a pleasant route on to the ridge. Above the upper screes at the foot of the higher crags several ascents may be planned from below. The best is marked by two oblique chimneys that start upwards to the left. Between this and the north ridge a large scree gully leads up to the highest part of the mountain, and from it on the right several short scrambles on good slabby rocks are obtainable. [Illustration: CRAIG ADERYN (BIRD ROCK)] The first of the Ceu Graig gullies, counting from left to right, is to the left of the pillar, and takes three-quarters of an hour to ascend from the lake. It starts with a water slide that we take on the right, and we pass back into the gully immediately afterwards. Then the ascent of an easy chimney makes us a little wet if the weather has been rainy, and a pitch appears just above. This can be taken on the right or left. The right-hand route gives us wet rocks; the left leads up a side chimney, and back into the gully by an awkward grass traverse. After this the gully divides, and leads us to the neck that joins on to the pillar on our right. The steep outside face of the pillar can be ascended, but is rather dangerous. It is a sample of mantelpiece climbing, but the holds are mostly of grass and heather, and some of the steps are long. The next gully, a short distance to the right of the pillar, is more open than the first, and is less steep. Some water is generally coming down. The first obstacle is a wide cavern, that can be mounted immediately to the left or avoided by passing up the easy open chimney on that side of the gully. The second is a waterfall, and that also is by preference passed on the left; the difficulty finishes with a short corkscrew chimney. From this we emerge on to the open face of the mountain, and a few feet of good rock bring us to the main ridge. We are now at about the level of the upper limit of scree on the Mynydd Moel face, and a traverse can be effected round to the oblique chimney already referred to. In doing so we pass first a scree gully and then an inviting cleft up to the left, but this is found to lose its interest after the first 20 ft. The oblique chimneys can be recommended for beginners, as the climbing is only about 250 ft.; the rocks are very good, and the angle about 45°. Water comes down the gully, but does not offer any trouble, except, perhaps, at the first obstacle. If this is taken direct we climb up the right wall, which overhangs, and cling sufficiently close to permit the water to pass behind us. The second pitch is taken on the right, the rock being so much undercut that we can pass behind the water. After this a little more scrambling leads to a scree and an easy finish. [Illustration: SKETCH MAP OF CADER IDRIS] The north ridge is somewhat disappointing. It works well up to the pinnacle, which may also be approached by a dilapidated chimney on the left. But just above this, where another ridge joins from the north-west, it becomes a mere walk along the edge of a cliff. Perhaps the neatest way of descending this cliff is by a very narrow vertical chimney, marked at top and bottom by small piles of stones, a little to the north of the big scree gully, and close to the highest point of Mynydd Moel. (_b_) _West of Mynydd Moel._--Here the north cliff is very much broken. There are innumerable scree gullies up the face, but the rock ridges in between them have no good features. There are one or two pinnacles just below the ridge, easy to reach from above, but difficult from below. One especially is worth a scramble, about 5 minutes' walk from Mynydd Moel; a thin and uncommonly difficult chimney leads up its outside face. (_c_) _On Pen y Gader._--The central gully up Pen y Gader is a prominent feature of this face of the mountain. It was climbed many years ago, but no definite account of its early history has been obtained. It is in three obvious portions, as indicated in the illustration, and is generally wet. The two shelves that divide the climb stretch obliquely upwards to the right across the whole face, and may be reached in a great variety of ways. Nevertheless the only good climbing is in the two lower portions of the main gully. The first piece takes us on to the shelf with about 70 ft. of climbing. The gully narrows considerably, and we are forced on to the right-hand side and up a steep and smooth slope of water-worn rock. Then we cross over the water to the left, and effect an easy exit on to the ledge. We next scramble over some irregular blocks and into a narrow recess at the foot of the second pitch. This is a narrow chimney, very pleasant in dry weather, landing us in 50 ft. on to the second ledge. From here the ground is more open, and the climbing is of a slight character to the summit, except in winter, when the whole gully is apt to be heavily glazed. Under such circumstances the lowest pitch is almost dangerous. The first pitch may be varied by striking up from the screes a few yards to the left of the main gully, by the cleft shown in the illustration. The second can be quitted altogether, and the columnar rocks to the west taken in a variety of ways; and all along the upper corridor will be found short pitches leading to the summit ridge. (_d_) _On Cyfrwy._--There are two well-defined arêtes leading up close to the summit of Cyfrwy. The first _a a_ is in an easterly direction, and may be seen in profile from the direction of Pen y Gader. This is easily recognisable by the curious truncated pinnacle or tower some way up. The second bears up from the north, and also shows a pinnacle, but of smaller dimensions. Beyond the two arêtes the climbing on Cyfrwy is inferior, but between them there are a few interesting routes up the crags. [Illustration: CADER IDRIS (seen across Llyn y Gader)] The terrace _e e_ is easily reached from the screes. From it there are two definite climbs, one _b b_ up a gully to the left, that leads out on to the east arête, the other _c c_ up a more open gully that passes to the summit ridge. It is possible that the notch between the great tower and the east arête can be reached from this side, but the upper part looks difficult. The east arête was climbed in about 1888 by the writer. The first recorded ascent was in January 1891 (H. K., W. E. S., and O. G. J.), and the first ascent by a lady in August 1891 (Miss L. G., K. W. D., and O. G. J.) [Illustration: THE CYFRWY CLIMBS, FROM THE NORTH.] It can be followed all the way up. The tower is best turned on the right, and the vertical wall of 40 ft. that immediately follows is climbed direct from the little gap, with just a slight divergence to the left. The only serious difficulty on the arête is a wall of rock 100 ft. higher up. It can be surmounted by a thin cleft, the jammed stones in which are unsafe; or by working up the face a little to the left. The situation is very exposed. This, and any other bad bits, can generally be avoided by climbing down to the scree gully on our left. Near the top of the arête we pass the exit of the chimney _b b_, which descends steeply to the right. [Illustration: CYFRWY ARÊTES (The northern is seen in profile, the eastern is much foreshortened)] The north arête has probably not been climbed, but the gullies on each side have been taken. They call for no special comment. The one to the right is worth ascending for the view of the fine rocks on this face. It is mostly scree with a small pitch near the top, and was once marked above by a little cairn. It is admirable when hard snow is about. The gully _c c_ to the left is very open and risky, consisting of a series of shelves formed by the falling away of the porphyritic pillars that characterise the face. The climb _b b_ is rather better. The scrambling from the terrace is easy but steep, until a large overhanging boulder entirely blocks the way. We then climb up the vertical wall on the left and traverse back to the gully. It finishes very abruptly on the narrow upper ridge of the east arête, and in a most unexpected way we find ourselves looking down to Llyn y Gader with the face of Pen y Gader directly opposite. There are a few short climbs on the face of Tyrrau Mawr, but nothing very definite can be picked out. (_e_) _On Craig y Cae._--The great gully of Mynydd Pencoed was climbed for the first time on May 18, 1895 (W. P. H. S., E. L. W. H. S., and O. G. J.) It is by far the finest climb in the Cader district; the work in it is as varied as in any of the more familiar gullies in the neighbourhood of Snowdon, and the rock scenery in its upper portion can scarcely be surpassed on British soil. The upper part of the gully attracted the attention of the writer in 1890, but it was not until April 1895 that he made any attempt to enter the gully at its lower extremity. Then he succeeded in forcing his way over the first pitch, but the great rush of water coming down the gully made the second pitch impossible, and the untimely fracture of an ice axe prompted a temporary withdrawal. On the day when the successful attempt was made the rocks were unusually dry. In wet weather the difficulties of the climb are likely to be very much increased, more especially in the narrower pitches, where the route chosen by the climber is identical in position with that chosen by the water, though opposite in direction so long as valour needs diluting down to discretion. It seems probable that grass traverses may be found to circumvent the lower pitches. The first and second, for example, may be avoided by traversing into the gully from the left, over the grassy buttress that supports the Pencoed Pillar. The third pitch may be passed immediately on the left, if one treats the loose soil with due consideration. The fourth and fifth seem from above to permit an alternative route up to the right, over steep grass and back to the gully by a treacherous-looking upward traverse to the left. From here the three remaining pitches directly up the gully offer the simplest solution to the rest of the problem; variations to the left and right have been freely suggested, but are still untested. [Illustration: LLYN Y CAE (OR CAU) AND CRAIG Y CAE (FROM CADER IDRIS)] The climbing starts within 200 ft. of the level of Llyn y Cae, with a short pitch some 12 ft. high, marked above by a cairn of stones. The second pitch begins almost immediately, and must be taken direct, the roof of the cave in its upper portion to be approached by a serpentine squirm of the body after the cave is entered, up the thin crack on the right. The third pitch is ferocious in aspect, but uncertain in action, on account of the poor quality of its material. It consists of a large cavern with a pendulous mass of brittle rock hanging down from the roof somewhat to the left. The cavern is penetrated as far as possible on this side, and then, with back to the hanging rock and feet on a hold invisible from below, a passage may be effected outwards to the firm hand-holds in the open. A jammed stone with débris attached, in the most handy situation at the corner of the exit, is best left alone. Soon after this we approach a long narrow chimney close to the left wall of the gully. It is about 35 ft. in length, and the upper part gives trouble. But a very fine foothold some 12 ft. up gives breathing space for the final portion. Then the interest ceases for a while, as we mount some 130 ft. of scree and smooth rocky slabs at an easy angle. This is an excellent arrangement, for the fifth pitch, that now comes on, is likely to demand all our powers of admiration for a while. It consists of a cavern divided by two steep buttresses into three parts, side by side, the middle one being most open to inspection but most difficult to approach directly. Immediately above the left-hand portion a vertical chimney rises some 40 ft., its lower end projecting well over the cave and manifesting no direct route of approach from below. To get to the foot of this chimney is the chief difficulty. The method adopted was rather intricate, and probably permitted much improvement. It has, however, the advantage that the leader need not climb straight away the full 80 or 90 ft. without a halt. He first penetrates as far as possible into the cave on the left, until the roof bars further progress. Then he traverses over a dangerously smooth and wet slab, with no perceptible foothold, to the middle portion of the cavern. From here he works upwards and outwards until with a long stride he steps out on to a little ledge on the right wall of the gully. Here a hole through a large block enables him to manipulate the rope with safety, and the second man can join him. The second may reach the terrace more directly, if the rope is available, by working directly up the middle of the gully till the level of the ledge is reached; but the climbing is very uncertain, on account of the treacherous footholds. From the ledge the leader passes back across the centre and over a notched curtain of rock into the upper chimney. Here there is no doubt as to the route; a resting-place is afforded for a moment by a little cave, through the roof of which only the thinnest can hope to wriggle. The edge of this roof is mounted on the right, and a few feet higher a jammed block that dominates the pitch is turned on the right, up some rather treacherous grass that needs very careful treatment. The writer would like to add a word of advice to this already lengthy description of the pitch. Don't attempt to qualify for the through route of the little cave by slipping downwards and jamming in the chimney. The three remaining pitches are short and near together, the last one finishing a few feet below the summit of the ridge, some 850 ft. above the lake. _East Gully._--The gully immediately to the east of the Pencoed Pillar was first climbed on May 19, 1895 (W. P. H. S., W. E. S., and O. G. J.) As seen from the opposite shores of the lake it presents a striking appearance, the middle part looking very difficult. It starts higher up the face than the western climb (about 440 ft. above the lake), and finishes on the ridge at a somewhat lower level than the top of the latter (870 ft. above lake). Thus the climbing is much reduced, and the whole ascent can be accomplished in an hour by a party of three. The scrambling in it is almost continuous, and towards the middle, where the rock walls close in the gully, the route is very steep, though none of the pitches are severe. We begin with oblique slabs of rock rather inclined to be wet. Then the direct route lies over a block of rock with uncertain holds, but a cleft to the left promises much better, and a traverse at the top leads back easily to the gully again. The scrambling is very pleasant where the right wall begins to overhang, and remains interesting till the gully divides. From here screes lead up each part to the crest of the ridge, but a small rock arête separating the two branches give us climbing all the way. Still more to the east is a shorter gully, composed for the most part of scree, that can be taken in 20 minutes. It has two pitches, the upper one requiring a rope. The first is taken up on either side, and is only about 12 ft. high. The second is a cave pitch with a very fine interior. The ascent is effected by backing up the rather loose walls of the cave, and then bearing out to the left and over the obstacle. From here to the summit is nothing but scree. The gully is afflicted with the near neighbourhood of badly weathered rocks, and shows signs of having been quite recently bombarded from the crags on the left. These three gullies on Mynydd Pencoed represent all the climbing that has as yet been attempted on the south side of Cader. It is much to be hoped that a few interesting routes will yet be found between the pillar and the small col that represents the lowest portion of Craig y Cau, and the account of what has been done may induce others to visit this unfrequented region. To the same end it might be advisable to throw out the remark that the Pencoed Pillar, some 700 ft. high, looks quite inaccessible from the grassy buttress at its foot. South Wales. It is scarcely worth while to enumerate the southern counties, as all alike are destitute of climbs, except upon the sea cliffs. Some of these are remarkably bold and picturesque, especially about Lydstep (Tenby) and St. David's Head; but they cannot compare in any way with those of Ireland, and least of all for climbing purposes, being mainly of limestone. Just north of Aberystwith are some highly curious rocks, giving a climb or two. Some twenty years ago a schoolboy was killed by falling from them. Of the inland rocks it will be sufficient to mention a few. * * * * * [Illustration: CLIFFS NEAR LYDSTEP (TENBY)] =The Brecon Beacons= (2,910 ft.), in Brecknockshire (which name the travellers of old, with some justice, modified to 'Breakneckshire'), are sandstone peaks of very striking outline. Indeed, Mackintosh (who saw them from the east) says, 'I was more impressed than I have been with any mountain in Wales. Their outline excited a very unusual idea of sublimity.' Brecon is the best starting-point, and it is a good plan, though by no means necessary, to drive to the Storey Arms inn (1,400 ft.), eight miles towards Merthyr, or to go by train to Torpantau, and thus avoid walking over any part of the way twice. [Illustration: CLIFFS NORTH OF ABERYSTWITH] The way is easy, and easily found; but a wary eye should be kept upon the streams, which in this part of Wales are surprisingly rapid and copious. A curious notion once prevailed that nothing would fall from the top of this hill. Many years ago an unfortunate picnicker disproved this. See the _Times Index_, but the statement there made that he fell 12,000 ft. is somewhat startling. * * * * * =The Black Mountains=, a wide stretch of charming hill-walking, have little to attract the mere climber, nor will he find much on such hills as the bastion-like =Blorenge= (1,720 ft.), in spite of their possessing caps of 'mill-stone grit.' * * * * * =Plynlimon= (2,469 ft.) is seldom mentioned except with derision. _The Beauties of Wales_ (1818) does indeed speak of 'the towering summit which bears the name of Plinlimmon,' and quotes the equally appropriate description given by Philips-- That cloud-piercing hill Plinlimmon from afar the traveller kens, Astonished how the goats their shrubby browse Gnaw pendent. But, in truth, the great difficulty which travellers have, whether far or near, is to ken it at all; and many of them have vented their disappointment in words of bitter scorn. Pennant (1770) candidly admits that he never saw it, which is easily understood, for the mountain is neither easy to see nor worth looking at when seen. The ascent is a protracted bog-walk. It was made in 1767[19] by L. N., but Taylor, the Water Poet (1652), sensibly calls it Tall Plinillimon, Which I no stomach had to tread upon. [19] _Gentleman's Magazine_, 1768. An amusing notice used to be seen at Steddfa Gurig (then an inn), 2½ miles south of the summit, and 13¼ miles by road from Llanidloes: 'The notorious hill Plinlimon is on the premises.' This place, being 1,358 ft. above the sea, is the best starting-point for the ascent of the mountain, and coaches run past it from Llanidloes. * * * * * =Aberedw Rocks= are fairly typical of the kind of climbing which is to be found in South Wales. The rocks being quite close to the station of that name on the Cambrian Railway, are brought within easy reach of Rhayader and Builth Wells on the north and of Brecon on the south. Three or four rock terraces, 15 to 20 ft. high, break the slope of the hill beside the railway, and a sort of rocky cove penetrates it as well. Bits here and there are not unlike the 'chimneys' on Slieve League, but the material is more friable, resembling loose walls of very inferior slaty fragments. A few harder masses stand out picturesquely as small pinnacles, especially in the cove, near the head of which a lofty bulging piece of rock has a vertical rift in it, which for a few feet offers quite a difficult climb. The river =Edw= (close by) has extremely steep, cliff-like banks, and these are a common feature in other tributaries of the Wye. The =Bachwy=, for instance, has a gorge which, seen as the writer has seen it during a winter flood, is profoundly impressive. Malkin's description (1804) should not be missed. He found 'rudely-shaped eccentricities of nature, with all the mysterious gloom of vulgar and traditional ascription,' 'dwarfishly fructified rock,' 'features all of a revolting cast,' and 'a prospect rude and unchastised.' The =Irvon=, again, has sides so rocky as to be chosen by the falcon for nesting. * * * * * =Cwm Elan=, 5 or 6 miles from Rhyader, is a very pretty spot, and the gorge of Cefn Coch is exceedingly striking. Mackintosh says that the height is not less than 800 ft., and the cliffs are in many parts mural and quite perpendicular. He declared that, while the cliffs on the left-hand side of the river are very fine, he had seen nothing to surpass those on the right. This from a hill traveller of his experience is remarkably high praise. The writer has only visited these rocks once, and has never attempted to climb there, nor, indeed, has he ever heard of anyone else doing so. The Birmingham reservoir is to submerge several miles of this cwm and the two houses in which Shelley stayed. * * * * * =Stanner Rocks= are quite near the station of the same name on the branch of the Great Western from Leominster to New Radnor, and on the north side of the railway. The material of which they are composed is superior for climbing purposes to the soft shaly stuff so common in South Wales, being the same eruptive trap rock which forms the hills of Hunter, Worsel, and Old Radnor, and has metamorphosed the surrounding limestone. These rocks narrowly miss being a good climb. The train from Leominster takes about 50 minutes. Near New Radnor is a precipice down which Cliffe (1854) mentions that a gentleman rode, and he also records that another climbed the fall called _Waterbreakitsneck_. IRELAND =Introduction.=--Climbing in Ireland, in the sense in which it is understood in Switzerland, is, of course, unknown, although during a winter of happily rare occurrence, such as that of 1894-5, abundant snow and ice-slope work is no doubt obtainable. It would be accompanied, however, by extreme cold and days of too short a duration for work. Nor can Ireland boast of such arenas for cliff-climbing as the Lake District, or the Cuchullins in Skye. There is no Pillar Rock, no Old Man of Dearg. But there are ample opportunities for acquiring the art of mountain craft, the instinct which enables the pedestrian to guide himself alone from crest to crest, from ridge to ridge, with the least labour. He will learn how to plan out his course from the base of cliff or gully, marking each foot and hand grip with calm attention; and, knowing when to cease to attempt impossibilities, he will learn to trust in himself and acquire that most necessary of all climbers' acquirements a philosophic, contemplative calm in the presence of danger or difficult dilemmas. If the beginner is desirous of rock practice, or the practised hand requires to test his condition, or improve his form, there is many a rocky coast where the muscles and nerves and stamina can be trained to perfection. Kerry and Donegal are competent to form a skilled mountaineer out of any capable aspirant. Ice and snow craft is an accomplishment which must of course be acquired elsewhere. Much of the best scenery in Ireland is available only to the mountaineer. Macgillicuddy's Reeks can hardly be appreciated in less than a week's exploration. Even after three weeks spent amongst them we have wished for more. Donegal alone requires lengthened attention, and there a much longer period will be profitably spent. The climbing described in the following pages was chiefly undertaken with the object, or excuse, of botanical discovery. All the mountain experiences, except where the contrary is stated, represent the personal--usually the solitary--experiences of the writer. Of roped climbing the author has had no experience outside the Alps. Being tied up in a package and lowered from a cliff to a bird's nest, though not climbing, is, no doubt, a feat requiring nerve and dexterity; but when the nest of the raven, peregrine, or chough is in view, and ropes and companions are 'out of all ho,' and it appears improbable such a chance will come again, the eager naturalist will indeed rejoice that his nerve and dexterity are not wholly dependent on the comfortable security of a friendly cable round his waist. To the botanist such accomplishments are even more essential. A knowledge of rocks--what to trust, what to mistrust, what to attack vertically (such as granite and quartzose usually), what to deal with by their ledges (such as limestone often and sandstone still oftener), what to avoid altogether (such as trap, chalk, and decomposing basalt), a knowledge of the elementary principles of guidance under varying conditions of weather--can be gleaned from the mountain and sea coast cliffs in Ireland, not, perhaps, to such an extent as to produce an expert, but quite enough to lay the requisite groundwork of one. Form and condition, nerve and activity, will develop in company, and with them the love for the art will grow, and nothing beyond a little local education will be wanting to enable him to follow upon their arduous undertakings real proficients in mountain craft. Any words that can induce the skilled mountaineers of England and Scotland to test the merits of an Irish welcome, of Irish scenery, and of the bracing combination of Atlantic and mountain air in the western counties will have been written to good purpose. * * * * * =Antrim.=--The highest hills are Trostan (1,810 ft.) and Slieveanea (1,782 ft.) The formation is almost entirely trap or basalt, and there is no cliff-climbing, the rock being crumbly and unsafe. Around the coast there is a belt of cretaceous rocks, forming in some places, as at the Giant's Causeway (White Rocks) and at Fair Head, bold cliffs of chalk or rotten trap. On Fair Head, 640 ft. high, there is a magnificent view. Cyclopean columns of greenstone crown a talus always heavy on the Antrim cliffs, owing to their friable nature. There is a fissure known as the Grey Man's Path on the west side of this Head, in the face of the cliff, by which it is possible to descend and inspect the foot of the columnar prisms. [Illustration: THE TARTAR ROCK (on Fair Head)] The Antrim glens and the Antrim coast road are deservedly famous for their lovely scenery, and excellent accommodation is everywhere obtainable. Of the glens _Glenariff_ is, perhaps, the gem. It is hemmed in by cliffs 1,000 ft. high, with mural summits. Glenarm is equally beautiful, though in a more tranquil and gentle way. On the north and south sides of the Bay there are considerable precipices. From Fair Head the prospect is singularly fine. The Head is columnar basalt. Fair Head is approached from Ballycastle on the west. West of Ballycastle again, about the same distance, is the well-known rocky islet of Carrig-a-Rede, which is severed from the mainland by a chasm nearly a hundred feet deep, spanned by a very slight swinging or flying bridge, which in a storm is not inviting. On this basaltic islet an interesting climb round the cliffs may be had, and the rock is secure enough on the west and north sides. From Ballintoy, which is close to Carrig-a-Rede, it is a magnificent cliff walk to the Causeway; and from the Causeway to Portrush the rocky coast scenery is full of interest. Many places will invite a scramble. Below the road, which is adorned with an electric railway, numerous difficult places occur, and several little valleys permit a descent to the sea and a swim. A few miles west of the Causeway the coast becomes low to Portrush, the golfing centre, with its excellent hotel. At Portrush, or near it, at White Park Bay, the white cretaceous rocks are capped by frowning basalt, and the contrast of colours is most striking. It is not necessary to describe the well-known _Giant's Causeway_. _Pleaskin Head_ is the finest feature in its cliff scenery, but unfit for climbing, owing to the crumbling, weathering nature of its beds of lava and iron ore. More fine sea cliffs are found in the Gobbins, on Island Magee. Antrim, with all its lovely cliff and glen scenery, and all its good hotels, is not a mountaineer's county, like Kerry, Donegal, or Wicklow. It is more highly cultivated and more civilised than a climber with a proper sense of his calling could possibly approve of. It suggests driving, bicycling, picnics, good dinners, and evening dress more than knickers and hard work. We will turn our attention, therefore, to _the_ mountain county of Ireland. * * * * * =Donegal= has some of the highest and finest mountains in Ireland, and the extent of mountainous country is larger than in any other part of Ireland. No maritime mountain and cliff combined can approach Slieve League, in Donegal, and if the coast cliffs of Mayo have a continuous grandeur that excels any similar stretch in Donegal, there are many higher and finer cliffs on the Donegal coast, in endless succession and variety from Inishowen Head, on Lough Swilly, to the south-west coast. The Donegal mountains form four groups--(1) _Inishowen Mountains_; (2) _Donegal Highlands_; (3) _South-West Donegal_; (4) _South Donegal_. _Inishowen Group._--_Slieve Snacht_, the highest point, has no interest, except its view, and the same remark applies to _Rachtin More_, the next highest. Both are composed of barren quartzite. _Bulbin_ has a schistose escarpment looking north-west, of some 300 ft., reaching almost to the summit, and terminating in a short talus and a heather-clad slope. It is a very picturesque little mountain, and possesses some interesting plants. Inishowen is deficient in accommodation. North of Buncrana there are but one or two inns that will tempt a visitor to return. Accommodation can be obtained at Carndonagh and Culdaff, and at Malin Head there is a house that receives visitors by arrangement. Malin Head is the proper place from whence to explore the cliffs of Inishowen, and Glennagiveny, under Inishowen Head, to its north, contains lodging-houses also. The coast line of Inishowen is in many parts wild and magnificent. Inishowen Head affords excellent climbing. The cliffs are from 300 to 400 ft. in height, and various traverses, ascents, and descents can be made between Stroove and Glennagiveny. The Head is in reach of Moville, where there is a good inn. Further to the north-west the cliffs increase in height. From Glengad Head, a little north-west of Culdaff, to Stookaruddan a series of precipitous headlands (500 to 800 ft.) faces the ocean, looking a little east of north. The walk along this coast from Culdaff to Malin Head, although laborious, on account of the steep-sided inlets, is well worth the trouble. The rugged boldness of Malin Head is most fascinating, and in a storm it is superbly grand. At this point the cliffs have fallen to a low elevation. The finest bit is at a place about half-way between Glengad and Stookaruddan. Having put up for the night at Malin Head, if possible, if not at Malin or Carndonagh (the latter for choice), Dunaff Head, guarding the eastern entrance to Lough Swilly, should be visited. Lough Swilly is the finest oceanic inlet round the whole coast of Ireland. The eastern cape, about 700 ft. high, terminates in a range of bold precipices over 600 ft. high for some distance. It is a most enchanting bit of sea cliff. In variety of shape, sheerness of descent, and picturesque grouping and surroundings it is hard to match. The cliffs can be descended at the nose of Dunaff to an outer rocky continuation, provided there is no storm. In stormy weather this rock, of perhaps a hundred feet, is completely swept by surf. There is a steep gully in another place on the south side, which admits of a descent to the water's edge. For most of their length, however, these cliffs are quite impracticable. For some distance downwards all seems to go well, but the pelting of detritus from above and Atlantic surf from below render the lower parts as smooth as marble and straight as a wall into the water. Here and there the inner bluffs are more practicable, and from a boat, in very calm weather, a study of the cliffs would probably reveal more than the scrutiny from above, which is usually alone possible. South of Dunaff Head, up Lough Swilly, the precipitous coast of the Erris Mountains gives a most enjoyable stretch of rough work. It is often possible to descend to the sea, and having done so a difficult climb is often preferable to a tiresome ascent to the headland surmounting one of the numerous creeks. Across the Lough we find ourselves in the lovely peninsula of Fanet, the coast of which is admirably adapted for rock practice. The highest sea cliff is the Bin, a conspicuous headland 350 ft. high and very precipitous. It can, however, be scaled without much difficulty in one place, a few feet from the summit towards the south. Other parts of it appear practicable, and at low tide the base can be completely compassed--a wild bit of work if there is a sea on. There is an admirable hotel at Portsalon, with a famous golf links, about half-way between this cliff and Knockalla Mountains. The whole coast from Portsalon to the Bin is studded with cliffs, caves, and remarkably beautiful natural arches. The rock of Fanet is almost entirely quartzite, a metamorphosed sandstone, often pure and glittering quartz. It is firm and safe, but the absence of stratification renders it difficult to negotiate. This barren rock (it disintegrates to silex) is very common in Donegal, and is identical with that of the Twelve Benns, in Connemara. Before leaving Lough Swilly the remarkable view from Dunaff Head should be referred to. On a clear day the Paps of Jura, the Mull of Cantire, and even the Isles of Arran and Islay, can be seen in Scotland over the low Malin Head. Westwards, in a noble succession, lies the grand series of the outer Donegal capes. Fanet Head, Melmore Head, Breaghy Head, Horn Head, Tory Island, and the Bloody Foreland are all in view, and south-westwards the 'Donegal Highlands' look so imposing that an immediate expedition to them will probably be decided upon. Across the peninsula which lies between Mulroy Water and Lough Swilly there is a most comfortable inn at the Rosapenna Golf Links. It is an extremely pretty wooden structure, brought by the philanthropic Lord Leitrim, whose loss the district will never cease to deplore, from Norway, and the complete success of it makes one wonder that this sort of structure is not more often adopted. From Rosapenna expeditions can be made to cliffs and coast in all directions. _Horn Head_ is a grand range of sea cliffs, ten or twelve miles in extent, which are the largest breeding-place in Ireland for sea fowl. There are a few places where a descent is possible, and a careful exploration (with the proprietor's permission) will be certain to yield excellent climbing. The rock is as firm as iron in most places. Most of the climbing the writer has done on these cliffs has been from a boat upwards in search of sea fowls' eggs. One especially remembered one, after green cormorants' nests, at the entrance to that most noble cave the Gap of Doonmore, was of great difficulty. The absolutely reliable rock had very slight 1-1½-in. ledges, and the latter part of the climb was slightly overhanging. The nests were reached, however. All round this Head excellent rock-climbing, coupled with magnificent scenery, is available. At the base of the cliffs, not far from the proprietor's dwelling-place, there is a little bay with a cave above the reach of the tide. Here a man once saved his life by climbing. My friend, Mr. Charles Stewart, the proprietor of the Horn Head estates, writes:-- 'I think it was the year 1876 that my man John Stewart was over three weeks in the cave watching my salmon, without the boat being able to go to him. The cliffs above were 600 ft. high. He could easily climb up about 100 ft., most of it cliff-climbing with a little grass. After that there is a very difficult piece of cliff, almost perpendicular, of about 40 ft. It is easy enough to get down to this point from the top. A man went down and lowered a rope to him, but he could not come up straight, as the cliff overhung too much. He tied the rope round him and climbed up in a zigzag way. He was half an hour climbing this short piece, and was very exhausted, with his hands badly cut and bleeding. He had with him his son, a boy of about twelve years old. He had rope about 10 ft. long from his waist to the boy, who slipped twice on the way up, each time very nearly taking his father with him. About five years afterwards the boy was looking for eggs in the cliffs, and fell about 500 ft. to a shingly beach, rolling the first part of the way down a steep grassy bank for about 100 ft., and then a sheer drop of 150 ft. to another grassy bank where a small holly bush grows. When picked up (of course quite dead) he had a holly branch in his hand.' There is a comfortable hotel at Dunfanaghy, immediately inland of Horn Head. From Dunfanaghy Tory Island can be visited in calm weather--an interesting boating trip. It is fifteen or twenty miles to the north of west, and Horn Head has to be passed on the way, giving an opportunity of surveying its cliffs. There is a cliff or buttress (called, I believe, Tormore) which the islanders point out, that is somewhat difficult to climb upon. Once on the summit the successful cragsman can have any wish he may pine for. The highest point of the island is under 300 ft. The inhabitants disregard the payment of all rents, taxes, &c. The turreted and bold contour of Tory renders it a great embellishment to the north-west coast. It is visible from all elevations for a considerable distance. Seen in a sunset its richly reddish-coloured granites light up with a warm and lovely glow. It formerly possessed monastic or other religious institutions, and several ruins of small churches or oratories are still visible. It abounds with legends--a home of superstition and folk-lore. From the neighbourhood of Dunfanaghy the most attractive objects upon the horizon are the mountains of the Donegal Highlands, _Muckish_ and _Errigal_ being especially conspicuous. _Muckish_ ('Pig's Back,' 2,200 ft.) is about 7 miles from Dunfanaghy. It is flat-topped, with short rotten cliffs on the north and west sides. _Errigal_ (an oratory or small church) is more interesting. The summit is pointed, bifid, and hardly large enough for more than two persons. It is composed chiefly of disintegrating quartzite, flanked on the west by igneous rocks. Between Errigal and Muckish (about 6 miles) lie the pointed summits of _Aghla Beg_ (1,860 ft.) and _Aghla More_ (1,916 ft.) The largest of many lakes is Alton Lough, where the writer was once solemnly cautioned against swimming, on account of the 'Phouea,' which lived there and used to mingle with the cattle as a cow and lure one down into the depths. So would he do with mankind. Numerous swims in that lake have weakened this prognostication. Above Alton Lough, on its south-west side, are the cliffs of _Beaghy_ (1,200 ft.), which afford a nice bit of climbing. All these hills can be gone over in a day, though some (especially Errigal) will ask a second visit. About 4 miles from the base of Errigal is the excellent fishing inn at Gweedore. From Dunfanaghy over the summit of Muckish, Aghla, Beaghy, and Errigal down to Gweedore is a bit of mountaineering which can be most thoroughly recommended. Gweedore should be made a head-quarters for a few days; and the comfort obtained at the close of the day will be well earned and appreciated. The Poisoned Glen, six miles from Gweedore, is a stern and barren scene of almost sheer, polished granite cliffs, nearly 1,000 feet above the base of the glen. The south-west corner of the glen is the most precipitous. Several deep, black, narrow gorges cut deeply into the granite. Some, particularly one at the corner of a commanding buttress on the south side, about half-way up the glen, are of considerable difficulty. Wedged boulders occur frequently. The worst bit is the final struggle to the crest of the ridge, which slopes south-westward to the summit of Slieve Snacht. It will be found necessary in one place to break out of this gully on to the face, and it should only be attempted in dry weather. A full day may be spent going up one gully and down another on the south-west side of the glen. Often the descent is far easier, a jump of 12 or 15 ft. down to the shingly soft bed of the gully clearing an obstacle difficult to breast upwards. The most glaciated spots in Donegal are this glen and _Slieve Snacht_, a rounded hump of granite. By proceeding to the head of the Poisoned Glen, past the Gweedore Lakes, and past the prettily wooded Dunlewy Lake which lies abreast of the Glen, up the winding stream in its base, and taking the ravine in its apex, we reach a pass known as Ballaghgeeha Gap ('Windy Pass'). From this point it is a short walk across a valley to a road, visible from the pass, which follows the Gweebarra valley south-west down to Doochary. Taking it in the opposite direction, it leads into Glenbeagh, a gorge about eight miles long, with a lake enclosed by steep cliffs on its west shore. On its right a beautifully wooded mountain slope contains the seat of the proprietor, Glenbeagh Castle. This valley is crossed at its mouth by the main road to Gweedore, some 10 miles away, and the circuit described is one of the most beautiful mountain walks imaginable. In order to vary this, and save the road work home, a scramble along the west shore of the lake may be effected to the granite cliffs opposite Glenbeagh Castle, known as Keamnacally. In several places an ascent can be effected of about 1,000 ft. The crest of the cliff leads up by a gradual slope to the summit of Dooish, 2,147 ft. This point is in a straight line for Gweedore from Glenbeagh, and if the mountaineer wants more work the summit of Errigal lies in the same bee-line. _Lough Salt_ (1,546 ft.), a conspicuous hill, was ascended and described by Otway about seventy years ago, in the language of that period (_Scenes and Sketches in Ireland_). He adds some quaint legends about two of the lakes. Into one of these St. Patrick banished the last Irish snake, a rebellious animal that gave him much anxiety. _Gweedore to Carrick._--The pedestrian had better omit the north coast, and proceed westwards round the coast to _Dungloe_. Aranmore Island, with its handsome red granites, shows some fine cliffs, especially those at its north-west end, between Torneady and the lighthouse. In the bay formed by these cliffs a grand tooth or monolith stands isolated and vertical, about 100 ft. in height. The cliffs are from 400 to nearly 600 ft., and some rise perpendicularly from the water. The best point to visit Aran from is Burton Port, about 3 miles off. Skilled boatmen are required, as the passage is winding, amongst islets, rocks, rapid tide currents, and shallows. Aranmore, like many other Atlantic islands, slopes inland or eastward, and faces the Atlantic with a wall of cliffs. The coast north of it is wild and beautiful, with interesting physical features. Across Umfin Island runs a gruesome cleft, through which a heavy sea tears its way in fury, meeting the sea from the other end in frantic commotion. Further east, on Horn Head, is the famous MacSwyne's Gun, for many years a signal to the whole county that a furious sea was raging at the Horn. It is a 'puffing hole' on a large scale, but the little rift, ever widening, has slowly silenced all, or nearly so. On this Head also is the famous _Marble Arch_, Tempul Breagha, jutting out into the sea. At Dungloe good quarters and excellent fishing, as usual, are obtainable. From Dungloe the road lies through Doochary, Glenties, and Ardara to Carrick. Each of these last villages has a good inn. The best plan is to break the journey at Ardara, and take the magnificent coast walk or climb into Carrick, a good day's work. As far as Maghera the way is plain along a low sandy coast. West of this lies Maum Glen, whose cliffs are precipitous enough, and if the glen be crossed a mile inland it is a steep descent and ascent, though devoid of difficulty. Following the coast, there is a track near the water's margin for some distance. Soon the precipices forming the north face of Slieve-a-Tooey are reached. If the tide is low the base can be followed a long way with one or two ugly corners. The cliffs are up to 1,000 ft. (Slieve-a-Tooey 1,692), but can be ascended in various places, and the land lowers again at Port. All along the scenery is of the most impressive character. Outside Port lies Tormore Island, one of a group of boulders, a rock which, though hardly half a mile round its base, is a tremendous sea fowl breeding-place, second only to Horn Head. At low water Tormore can be reached from the shore, and it is scaled in many places by lads in search of eggs. One native was on the Great Tor when a storm arose, and cut him off from the shore and from all help. After a week he died of starvation and exposure. It is, perhaps, about 500 to 600 ft. high. Pursuing our way along the ever-varying cliffs, most interesting in a storm, the curious promontory called Sturrell is reached in about 4 miles. The knife-edged saddle is very rotten, but leads to a firm block of rock nearly 1,000 ft. above the sea. So defiant is the challenge of this rock that no cragsman can pass it by. The passage is not pleasant, yet even on a second visit the writer was powerless to resist temptation. The tottering wall of rotten rock gives the impression that the whole connection may slither down. Considering what desperate Atlantic storms this crumbling cliff withstands annually, such fears must be exaggerated. Nevertheless it would be improper to recommend this climb. It is dangerous as well as difficult, very exciting, and exceedingly delightful--after it is over. The rock along this northern side of the mountainous promontory of Banagh is chiefly quartzite, but in some places, as Sturrell, a rotten schist. About a mile south of Sturrell another and a grander headland is reached, that of Glen Head. It is 600 ft. of cliff, and deservedly famous. It is easily visited from Carrick Hotel, about 7 miles off. On much of the southern side a descent is practicable. From Glen Head to the road to Carrick is a short walk. At this hotel we are at the inland base of a renowned sea precipice. _Slieve League_ (1,972 ft.), whose southern face descends from the summit almost precipitously to the Atlantic, is perhaps the finest ocean cliff in Europe. The ascent from the hotel, almost at sea level, is easy. It is best to drive down to Teelin Bay, and strike up the mountain westwards along the coast. Carrigan Head is soon reached, and from a point north of it, on the south side of Bunglass, the finest view of Slieve League is obtained. This gradual ascent to about 1,000 ft. is a glorious experience. [Illustration: GLEN HEAD] From the southern Bunglass cliffs the view of the richly-coloured precipices opposite is superb. This colouring is a remarkable feature. The cliff is well-nigh sheer for 1,000 ft., descending straight from a heathery brink. With the exception of the wonderful cliff seen in Yellowstone Park from 'Inspiration Point,' the writer could name no rock-face with such an assemblage of hues. Dolerites, diorites, quartzites, schists, and conglomerates all help to form this remarkable mountain. Below the Atlantic lights up and enhances the whole scene. Though usually breaking into heavy surge it is sometimes as smooth as glass, and then the visitor should secure a boat at Teelin (or Towney Bay), and row beneath, viewing the caves. One of these, with a small entrance and a vast interior, gives forth appalling reverberating echoes to a horn or a gun. At Bunglass there is a track leading down to the sea, and a swim rewards the descent. Crossing the heavy-shingled foreshore to the base of the opposite cliffs, there is a gully which appears practicable from below, and leads to the very crest of the cliffs. The violence of storms and the pitiless pelting of surf below and dislodged fragments from above have cemented the steep floor of this slit into an uncompromising hardness. The writer tried it, passed one or two bad places, and was rejoiced beyond measure to reach the bottom with unbroken bones. From the summit of Bunglass cliffs, at a point a little north of the Eagle's Nest, at an altitude of 1,000 ft., it is practicable to traverse the whole face of Slieve, at about the middle height, 700 to 1,000 ft. above sea level, from end to end, to the bluffs of Leahan. In two or three places the ocean edge can be reached, besides the point already mentioned. In search of botanical specimens we have climbed them in all directions. There is a track (of a sort) to the sea at one place between the Eagle's Nest and the One Man's Pass. While scrambling along the sea face this track was discovered amongst steep heather, bracken, and bear-berry, and a footprint showed it to be a human resort. Finally an old man and a little boy emerged from the ocean brink, loaded with samphire, both inside and outside, and eating it as they rested on their climb. Vastly surprised at the appearance of the only stranger they had ever seen there, they eagerly besought him to remove his boots--a suggestion declined with thanks. Samphire boiled with milk is a cure for a cough, but it was a novelty to see it eaten raw. This track is called Thone-na-culliagh ('Back of the Grouse'). It took the writer three summer days to complete this traverse from end to end of the median height of Slieve League. Several nasty ravines, iron-floored and steep-edged, had to be crossed. At the close of each day an ascent had to be discovered--an anxious undertaking, as the return invariably seemed too dreadful to contemplate. The point relinquished at the close of each day was religiously repaired to on the following. Excessively steep slopes of cemented gravel, grass, or crumbling rock, half held together by heather, are the usual difficulties. But in four or five places odd right-angled walls of horizontal, loosely-balanced blocks of slaty schist jut out right across the face of the cliff, the legs of the angle being sheer to the sea and horizontal above. The blocks lie loose upon each other, and are not always large enough to give one a sense of anything except the rickets. Usually it was possible to climb beside these buttresses, and, balancing by them, get over in gingerly fashion. But one--the largest--had to be climbed on equilibristic principles. Sheep tracks follow the face of the cliff in some places. Where a sheep can go a man can go, though he may not like jumps from bad footing to worse landing, where even sheep occasionally come to grief. Accordingly a track going horizontally here looked encouraging to the writer, till a flock of wild goats, signally scared, put his confidence to flight, for a wild goat will lead a man where he may find it necessary to make a prolonged halt. However the goat track vanished upward, and the seven-mile traverse was successfully completed to the Eagle's Nest. From the summit of Slieve League there is a fine oceanic view of island, headland, bay, and cliff. South-east of the summit, at a slightly lower altitude, is the _One Man's Pass_, about the terrors of which a great deal of rubbish has been written. It is a steep, narrow, short ridge of firm rock, which any mountaineer would walk up or down with his hands in his pockets. In a storm he would, however, adopt a worm-like attitude. The sides are very steep, but practicable both seaward and inland. It commands a superb view. Among the legends connected with Slieve League one about a Spaniard, a priest, and a pony is the most captivating (see _The Donegal Highlands_). [Illustration: ONE MAN'S PASS] Slieve League is capped by the remnants of outlying beds of lower carboniferous age, conglomerates, with fossil plant remains. Botanically also this mountain is most interesting, rivalling Ben Bulben for first place as a habitat for mountain plants in Ireland. There is an interesting feature visible from the summit--a group of spire-like pinnacles, close below the crest of the ridge. These are known as the 'chimneys,' and form an attractive assemblage. They are of the same nature as the flying buttresses already spoken of. [Illustration: THE CHIMNEYS (SLIEVE LEAGUE)] Slieve League takes its name from 'liag' (flag). There is a flag formation near the summit. Bunglass is 'Green River Mouth,' but a modern guide-book translates Bunglass 'Beautiful View,' a ludicrous error explained by the fact that the point which gives so noble a prospect of Bunglass is known as Awark More ('Great View'). _Croagh Gorm_ and _Blue Stack Mountains_ lie north and west of Barnesmore Gap and above Lough Eske, reaching nearly to Glenties, Lough Eske being about 30 miles east of Slieve League. The coast eastwards from Slieve League becomes suddenly low, and the formation changes to carboniferous limestone, which occupies a broad belt round Donegal Bay. The Blue Stack group is about 7 miles across. _Blue Stack_ (2,219 ft.) lies above Lough Eske and is granite, although the Lough itself lies in the limestone. About Lough Belshade, which lies north of Lough Eske, about half-way up the east side of Blue Stack, the granite is precipitous, and one bold bluff west of this lake (Belshade), with a sort of little cave in its face, may be taken in the ascent of the mountain. Most of the granite portions of the range are rounded, flowing, gently contoured, barren slopes of bare rock, sometimes at low elevations becoming steep and difficult. The ascent of Blue Stack from Lough Eske should on no account be missed. The lake is about 10 miles round, and most beautifully situated at the southern base of a bold mass of rugged, desolate granitic bosses and cliffs, cleft by a few fairly steep ravines. In direct contrast to this sombre scene is the west shore of the lake, which is girt with timber, chiefly natural. Ardnamona is the nearest portion of this sylvan scene to the mountain base, and the whole basin is admirably sheltered by the surrounding mountains from the violent storms which of late years have been more destructive than ever. From the road above Ardnamona, looking down over it upon Lough Eske and its solemn background, the view is perfect. It is a sort of compact Killarney, which the eye and mind will long feast upon. North-west of Blue Stack, a couple of miles from it, lies _Lavagh More_ (2,211 ft.), a fine upstanding lump of turf-covered schists. Schists and sandstones constitute the greater part of these hills. From Lavagh More, descending southwards, by a series of lakes, the head of the Shrule River is reached, in a valley with a precipitous northern side, which gives difficult bits of crag work. In this valley at the northern end lies a waterfall known as the Grey Mare's Tail. The Blue Stack Mountains are best explored from Donegal on the south or Glenties on the west, in both of which places there are comfortable inns. It is best to drive to the head of Lough Eske, and it is a fine walk from that, including most of the tops, down to Martin's Bridge, 3 miles from Glenties, over Blue Stack, Lavagh More, and Silver Hill. In the mountainous district around Glenties other excursions are available. A walk to be recommended is from Barnesmore Gap (drive of 7 miles from Donegal) across the Croagh Gorm and Blue Stack summits to Glenties. Barnesmore Gap should by all means be visited. The mountains on either side rise 1,500 to 1,700 ft., not quite precipitously, but with bluffs, heavy boulders, and steep rocky faces. Cæsar Otway gives a highly-coloured description of this impressive scene. Another way to explore the group is to follow up the course of the Reelan water through a peculiarly secluded and remote valley. From Glenties to Ardara is about 4 miles, and the latter village is a capital halting place. Fishing and fowling can be had. The road from Ardara to Carrick, about 10 miles, passes up the wild, grand gorge of Glen Gesh by a zigzag road, reminding one of some of the Swiss ascents. For the sake of the varied scenery obtained by these doublings it is almost preferable to stick to the road till near the summit. On the south side of this glen it is bounded by a range known as _Altnadewon_ or _Croaghnagcaragh_ (_Reek_, 'hill of the thicket'). A steep rock face extends from the main road at the 'nock of the Ballagh,' or Pass, which forms a wide amphitheatre on the north face of the highest point of this range (1,652 ft.) For some distance it is by no means easy to scale this declivity. Towards the southern verge of the county the coast is low and flat, but the bold precipitous face of Ben Bulben looks highly attractive. Before leaving Donegal it will be well to mention one useful hint. The Ordnance maps of this county show 100-ft. contours, which are of the utmost advantage upon any excursion, as the height of any point attained by the pedestrian may be fixed within a hundred feet. Very few other parts of Ireland are thus favoured. * * * * * =The Ben Bulben Range= lies in the northern part of Sligo and Leitrim; a most conspicuous object in the landscape viewed from Slieve League across Donegal Bay. The shapely escarpment of the nearest point looks, indeed, as if it belonged to Donegal, which is 7 miles away. This portion consists of _Cloughcorragh_ (2,007 ft.) and _Ben Whiskin_ (1,666 ft.) These mountains are almost entirely carboniferous limestone. Much of the group is an elevated plateau, girt round on all sides, or nearly so, by limestone precipices, usually some hundreds of feet high, rising from a long steep slope of débris. The height of the cliff edges is about 1,600 ft., of which the talus occupies about two-thirds. The cliffs are fine, but consist largely of insecure blocks. Occasionally a fissure occurs, permitting ascent or descent, and some very steep ones are used on the south side of the range by turf-cutters. In consequence of this formation the pedestrian may find himself following a long series of cliff edges, without being able to discover a way of descent. To examine the cliffs the proper course is to follow the sheep walk, which usually occurs at the base of the precipices above the talus. The walk across the range, from Bundoran to Sligo, is full of interest to a mountaineer, and the descent into the valley north of Sligo from _King's Mountain_ is one that will never be effaced from his memory. It is not easy to find the passages leading down. The valley is a vast amphitheatre almost enclosed by cliffs, sheer and, including talus, about 1,000 ft. high. It is always a pleasant experience to follow the crest of a line of limestone cliffs. Similar cliffs on a smaller scale are those of Moher and Aran, in the county Clare. It is probably owing to the fissures and laminations of the limestone, which afford a perfect system of internal drainage, that such cliffs are not only dry and clean, but also free from the gullies and valleys which, causing frequent ups and downs, sometimes render cliff walks extremely fatiguing--near Waterford, for example. Again, limestone grows no heather and forms little peat, so that the usual footing is clean grass sod--very pleasant after hummocky tussocks--and yielding 'quaas.' For these mountains Kinlough is perhaps the most convenient centre. Manor Hamilton and Dromahaire may also be utilised, but Bundoran and Sligo, though the latter commands the beautiful Lough Gill, are too distant from the hills. It may be mentioned here that there are various attractions in Northern Ireland outside the scope of this work. Fishing is always in reach, and of late years golf has thriven apace. No finer links exist than those of Portsalon, Rosapenna, Portrush, and Newcastle, and there are many others of growing excellence. Ben Bulben is famous for its mountain flora, a valuable report on which, by Messrs. Barrington and Cowell, has been published by the Royal Irish Academy. * * * * * =Mayo.= Here are the highest mountains in the west of Ireland, Mweelrea (2,688 ft.) and Nephin (2,646 ft.) [Illustration: MAYO AND CONNEMARA] _Nephin_ is a round, isolated lump of quartzite, becoming schistose, rapidly disintegrating on a northern spur, where the only declivities occur. For the mountaineer it is both distant and unattractive, but on clear days--which are rare--there is an extensive view. About 10 miles west of Nephin the axis of the Corslieve range is struck near the middle of its almost north and south direction. This chain of hills includes Laghdantybaun (2,369 ft.), at the northern end, Corslieve (1,785 ft.), Nephinbeg (2,065 ft.), and several others over 2,000 ft. The chain is about 15 miles in length, terminating near Newport, where fairly comfortable accommodation can be had. The northern hills are slate or sandstone, the southern quartzite. It is an interesting range, and the scenery is wild and rugged, but there is little true climbing. The best way to approach them is to drive from Leenane Inn to the Deel River, due north, and then strike west over a wet bog, full of dunlins, plover, and curlew. _Achill Island_ is about 15 miles west of Newport. The mountainous peninsula of Curraun Achill intervenes, and is about 7 miles across, rising to a tableland of 1,300 to 1,500 ft. in height, composed chiefly of horizontally-stratified sandstones and conglomerates, not very safe, but pleasant enough to follow along by the terraces on its north-eastern edge. Juniper is remarkably abundant here, and, at lower levels, Mediterranean heath. On Achill Island there is a comfortable hotel at the 'missionary settlement,' which is about 10 miles from the ferry. The settlement is at the base of Slieve More (2,204 ft.), the highest point of Achill. This mountain is well worthy of a visit, but far finer are the noble cliffs at Croghaun, about 5 miles west of Slieve More and 2,192 ft. above sea level. [Illustration: ACHILL HEAD] Achill is mainly quartzite, which rock invariably looks and is barren and forbidding. There are several points along these cliffs where a descent to the sea is practicable, and plenty of climbing is obtainable along the face of Croghaun, which may be traversed in all directions, the cliffs having the appearance and repute of being more inaccessible than they really are. The rock (quartzite) is broken into screes and heavy shingle in many places. _Croaghpatrick_ (2,510 ft.), famous for its unrivalled view, and formerly called 'The Reek,' has a northern face of precipitous declivities where the quartzite formation (as on Nephin) gives place to schists and shales. The view to the north of Clew Bay, with its hundreds of islets and Achill beyond, is unsurpassably lovely. The climbing is more of a 'slither' amongst rotten footing or shingle on the northern side. The summit is crowned with numerous cairns, being a famous 'pattern.' The beautiful St. Dabeoc's or Connemara heath abounds. Westport, at its foot, has an excellent hotel, and it is better to return here from Achill, or vice versa. _Mweelrea._--Unlike the quartzite mountains, which are usually conical or dome-shaped, Mweelrea is of a totally different structure. Composed of Silurian slates chiefly, it forms an extensive tableland at the north of Killary Fiord, in the south-west corner of Mayo. It is intersected by three principal valleys, radiating at about equal angles from Doo Lough. One--that of Delphi and Bundorragha--runs southward to the Killary. Another--that of the Glenummera river and Owenduff river--has an easterly trend to the Eriff. The third valley is that of Doo Lough, Lough Cullin, and Lough Connel, which runs north-west to the sea. The names of many of these points, such as Delphi Mountain, the highest above Doo Lough, and Loughty Mountain, its elevated eastern spur, ending in Glen Laur--are not given on the Ordnance map, and were obtained from the natives. Error easily arises in nomenclature. A hill or ridge may have a name known to a few, or belonging to one slope, or to a people living on one side. Again, it may lie along the boundary of two town lands, and each may give its name to one side of it. Moreover the pronunciation is a study in itself. Near Newport there is a district called on the map Burrishoole, and a bay named Bellacragher. These are pronounced 'Brizzool' and 'Ballycroy.' The Mweelrea group consists of a series of plateaux, bounded by long ranges of precipices, ridges, and gullies, often ending in sheer ravines. Mweelrea itself fronts the mouth of Killary Fiord, curving in a grand tabular ridge, 2,600 ft. high, above two small lakes at 1,200 ft. The pass of Delphi and Doo Lough are the most imposing scenes in the west of Ireland for wildness and sombre grandeur. The climbing is of varying difficulty. Between their bases and the screes below tempting ledges wind upwards, but here the strata are almost vertical, rendering them extremely treacherous. A nasty fall impressed this peculiarity on the writer's memory. In other places the rock is sandstone, mixed with decomposing conglomerates--a formation worse to scale than any except the miocene trap rocks of the Antrim coast. There is one interesting and difficult climb. A lake--Glencullin ('Glen of Hollies') Lake--lies immediately north of Doo Lough. A stream runs into the south-west corner of this lake out of Glencullin, starting from a series of black, sunless precipices, seamed with gorges and well-nigh 2,000 ft. high. These can be climbed by two gorges at least from base to summit. The name of these cliffs is Asko Keeran ('Ridge of Mountain Ash'), and when the crest is gained a fine walk is the reward, over Ben Bury (2,610 ft.) to the highest point, Mweelrea (2,688 ft.), along a curved ridge one to two miles long. One portion of the Mweelrea system--that which lies immediately east of Fin Lough or Delphi--is known as Ben Gorm, or Kead-na-binnian. The cliffs upon this mountain are formed chiefly of gneiss, which breaks up into blocks, owing to numerous transverse fissures across the lamination. These blocks lie on one another, often on a steep slope, owing to the roughness of their surfaces, which prevents their sliding. They are then more dangerous even than slaty rocks, since this very roughness beguiles a climber into feeling that the footing is safe at a steeper angle than on the smoother surfaces, while the rocks are merely in unstable equilibrium. Maamtrasna, Slieve Partry, the Formnamore Mountains, or Letterbrickaun ('Wet Hill of Badgers'), abut upon the head of Killary Fiord. The highest points, or rather flats, are Devils Mother (2,131 ft.), Maamtrasna (Formnamore) (2,239 and 2,209 ft.) They are chiefly composed of sandstone and sandstone conglomerate, and form a series of high barren tablelands, dotted with pools, and of no interest whatever. The above group, as well as Mweelrea, is within easy reach of the excellent Leenane Inn at Killary. _Cliffs._--Of the numerous magnificent cliffs on the western seaboard of Ireland none, in the writer's opinion, excel those of North Mayo. Certain aspects of Slieve League are grander, the cliffs of Moher are more splendidly symmetrical, Horn Head, Dunaff Head, Achill, all have their glories, but the Mayo cliffs are unmatched for extent and variety. From Ballina by Ballycastle to Belmullet, round the coast, is the finest sea-cliff walk the writer has ever experienced. For three days there was no cessation of variety in shape, in sculpture, in colouring of the precipices, always lofty and always plunging into a surf-like snow beneath, fringing the blue ocean outside. Occasionally, but rarely, ravines occur, leading to some tiny rock-bound bay. The coast here for many miles is higher than the land inside, and the streams flow away from the sea to the south, and then west to the Atlantic. Perhaps the most hopeless area of undrainable bog in Ireland lies in Western and North-Western Mayo. Although it was impossible to omit mention of these cliffs, they are not for the climber. They are too sheer, and, what is worse, there is no accommodation. From Ballycastle west to Belderg is within reach. But it is west of Belderg that the cliffs are grandest, as at Glinsk, Doonmara, and Benwee Head. Without the happy fortune which enabled the writer to use a shooting lodge, located west of Belderg, the distances would have been impossible without camping out. From Belderg to Belmullet the rock is chiefly a hard and reliable quartzite, often seamed with dykes of basalt. Numerous needle-shaped islets, stacks, and stookawns occur. The whole coast abounds with sea fowl, and is singularly free from human influence, since the absence of bays, strands, or harbours renders long stretches of it uninhabitable even for fishermen. Otway's _Sketches in Erris and Tyrawley_ (1841) should be read. * * * * * =Galway Mountains.=--The Galway Mountains, besides the Maamtrasna range, spoken of above, are _Maamturk range_, _Benchoona_, _Bennabeola_ or _Twelve Bens_ (or 'Pins'). _Maamturk range_, including the hills which form such a conspicuous feature in Joyce's Country, extend, roughly speaking, from the Killary Hotel south-east to Lough Shindilia, at the Half-way House on the coach road from Clifden to Galway. It forms a zigzag series of beehive-shaped domes, connected by ridges, which are frequently 500 ft. to 1,000 ft. below the neighbouring summits. Usually these connecting ridges are set at angles with the tops quite at variance with the main axis of the chain, and are invisible from the summits, so that compass bearings are most misleading. These truncated mounds are composed mainly of gneiss, sometimes of quartzite, and in the northern portion the chain becomes more fertile and of a clayey, schistose nature. They are very similar to the Twelve Bens, save that the latter have their conical tops still adhering, apparently showing that this elongated line was more vulnerable than the self-protecting 'Pins' cluster. This chain is singularly barren, but so bold and conspicuous a feature in the landscape claims exploration. The writer once traversed the whole length of summits from the Half-way House to Leenane in a walk, or climb, for about 14 hours. The going is often excessively rugged and wearisome, owing to the loose detritus of heavy, angular quartzose blocks. An occasional oasis, as at Maumeen, charms the eye with its verdure and some botanical treasures. Near this an hotel once existed, but at present there is nothing nearer than Glendalough or Leenane, at the extreme ends of the range. Many a stiff bit of climbing, short and sharp, was met with on this most severe day's work, in making growingly reckless short cuts from summit to summit. From Leckavrea to the Killary there are about fifteen distinct summits, averaging 2,000 ft. in height. _Benchoona_ (1,975 ft.), a northern outlier of the Twelve Bens, lies at the mouth of the Killary, opposite Mweelrea. Killary Harbour or Fiord runs inland eastwards for some 15 miles. Benchoona is gneissose, with two summits, close on 2,000 ft., and a lake lies between them. Several Alpine plants occur among the north-east cliffs. The rock here is uncommonly dangerous to climb, being loosely constructed and apt to disintegrate in unexpectedly massive segments. On such an occasion, although against the dogma of climbing, a swift and sudden jump or spring is sometimes the only escape. The block--perhaps a ton or two in weight--which is quietly sliding, or more probably overturning, with its captive, yields momentum enough for a final kick to clear out altogether to any preferable station. These rocks are unfit to climb, and will only be meddled with for some special purpose. _Twelve Bens_ (2,391 ft.), within easy access of first-class hotels in Connemara, are huddled together in beautiful confusion, and offer problems of special interest in their puzzling geography and watershed system. Bennabeola is entered by no roads of any great penetration, but there are several valleys forming arteries with its very heart. Of these Glen Inagh from the east, Glen Coaghan from the south, and Owenglin from the west are the most important. The best method is to select a glen--Glen Coaghan for choice--and work to its head. Two or three summits will then probably lie equidistant. Most of these summits are of quartzite, with short heavy screes, white and extremely barren. The most interesting climb is upon the north of Muckanaght (2,150 ft.), which is connected with Benfree by a ridge at about 1,000 ft. The cliffs lie about 1,300 to 1,800 ft., and from near their upper edge to the summit (2,150 ft.) is a steep and perilous grassy slope. Muckanaght is about 2½ miles from the lovely Kylemore Lake. Two 'Pins,' Benbaunbeg and Benfree, intervene. The peak itself is connected by ridges with Bencullagh and Benbaun South. From Muckanaght the heart of Bennabeola is laid bare, and, given a clear day, no better point of vantage could be desired. The Twelve Bens are in the heart of some of the loveliest scenery in the world, full of varied and interesting scrambles, and botanically they are pre-eminently the richest in mountain plants in Connaught, Croaghpatrick coming next. * * * * * =Clare.=--_The Cliffs of Moher_ may be visited from excellent quarters at Lisdoonvarna (the 'Fort in the Gap'), in the north-west of Clare, a district known as the Burren. This district is formed of the carboniferous limestone which occupies most of Central Ireland. This formation, replete with carboniferous fossils, is remarkably monotonous and symmetrical. When it occurs in a cliff formation, as at Moher, or the south-western sides of the Aran Islands, it forms a sheer wall, absolutely vertical, to the sea, or else it is arranged in a series of terraces, like gigantic steps. Very rarely a chasm occurs, connecting two terraces. More often it is possible, by means of slight protruding ledges, to ascend an almost vertical face, since the rock is invariably either absolutely safe or easy to test. Sometimes, as at the southern end of the Moher cliffs, isolated pillars of rock occur, which are most pleasing to climb and pleasant to remain perched upon when climbed. These rocky surfaces of Aran and Burren are very tiresome and difficult to traverse, as the fissures (2-12 in. in width) between the blocks are often adjacent. The rock is usually cut into slabs, generally rectangular in shape. The loose blocks are piled by the inhabitants into tottering walls, which are difficult either to cross or upset with safety. The easiest way is to ascend gently and then jump with a kick behind. On Aran especially the going is most laborious. [Illustration: CLIFFS OF MOHER] As an instance of the sheerness of these cliffs on Aran boys may be seen fishing with a rodless line from their edge, 200 ft. above the water. Inland these cliffs run gradually in a series of irregular declivities, a gently sloping flagged platform to low levels. Much is done here by the natives in the way of egg-collecting, with the assistance of ropes, the eggs being chiefly those of guillemots, gulls, and razor-bills, and required for food. The cliff scenery of Moher is superb and unequalled. It has not the variety of stack, needle, ravine, that other formations have, but its very regularity is most harmoniously imposing. On the other hand, the brilliant and varying colouring of North Mayo or Slieve League, in Donegal, is entirely absent. The Aran Islands are visited from Galway by steamer. There is an hotel on the north island. They are full of ethnological and archæological interest. * * * * * =Co. Down.= _Mourne Mountains._--This chain of granite hills covers an elliptic space of about 15 miles by 6, the longer axis stretching from Newcastle to Rosstrevor, where there are excellent hotels. From either point to the other is a day's walk that will well repay the labour, and can be made to include all the principal summits. The descent to Newcastle, through Donard Lodge woods, by the waterfall, is very pretty, and by varying the night's accommodation a still more beautiful route lies through Tollymore Park to Bryansford, where good quarters are obtainable. [Illustration: MOURNE MOUNTAINS] The highest points lie at the Newcastle or north-east extremity of the group. The southern portions are less interesting, and the western flanks are very dreary. These hills, being of granite, have few precipices, many rounded summits, sloping sides, and heavy screes, of the usual uncomfortable angular nature. The 'Eagle's Cliff,' a mile to the north of Slieve Donard, affords some climbing, and a little rock exercise can be had at 'the Castles,' lying on a spur of Slieve Commedagh, to the west of Slieve Donard, below it and half a mile away. Slieve Bingian, in the south-east of the range, has a little easy climbing. There is also a considerable cliff on a shoulder north-west of Slieve Meel-more. It is known as Spellick, and is easily visited from Bryansford. It is worth examination, but the writer has not climbed it. The view from Slieve Donard is, of course, famous. The ascent from Bryansford, through Tullymore Park, taking Slieve Commedagh and the Castles _en route_, is perhaps the finest walk, so far as scenery is concerned, to be had in this picturesque cluster of mountains. * * * * * =Co. Dublin.=--_Lambay_ is an island abounding in sea fowl and wild flowers, about 2½ miles from the nearest point of land, and about 10 miles north-east of Dublin. It is best approached by boat from Donabate, or less conveniently from Howth, Malahide, Rush, or Skerries. The cliffs reach about 250 ft., and are practically sheer in many places, as on the north-east side at Freshwater Bay, or a little west of it, and on the south-east cliffs below Raven's Well. Several most interesting climbs are to be obtained on it. The best are on those cliffs west of Freshwater Bay. About 30 ft. above the water's edge at high-water mark there is a narrow and deep horizontal fissure, which in May is packed with breeding sea fowl. The ornithological visitor will at once feel it his duty to reach that fissure. The writer's first visit to Lambay was made in the company of one Dykes, known to be the best clifter on Howth. He pronounced this fissure inaccessible. There is a bend in the cliffs leading to the right-hand extremity of the fissure. Here lay the only chance, and the first two grips out of the boat are easy enough, raising one 6 or 8 ft. (or perhaps 15 if the tide is out) above the water. After that there are two enormous stretches, with practically no foothold. If these two points are passed, the fissure is in reach, and an ugly wriggle will land the unwelcome intruder on his anterior surface upon the narrow ledge forming its base. Dykes meantime was highly encouraging, calling out, 'Madness,' 'Break your neck,' 'You can never get down.' The climber had, however, an original plan of descent, and having, with considerable difficulty, divested himself of his garments, he dropped them first into the boat and then himself into the water. On revisiting these cliffs ten years later, and pointing out this climb to a very good rock-man, he failed to see how the climb was done, and so it had to be done again. This time, however, the tide was out, and on stripping to take the plunge it became at once apparent that a rock exactly in the line of descent was too near the surface. To climb down had always appeared dangerous, on account of the lack of foothold and the very awkward nature of the backward movement out of the fissure. So an attempt was made on the wall above. It is marvellous how a naked man can adhere to a cliff. For a full hour an unhappy preadamite man writhed and glued himself against the face of that cliff, descending and reascending by new lines, but always checked by a straight wall about 150 ft. up. Anything appeared better than that hateful descent. Some friends ran to a coastguard station a mile or more away for a rope. However before they reappeared the descent was faced and safely accomplished. This sketch will serve to show that high mountains are by no means necessary for the practice of rock-climbing, the very best of which is constantly attainable along the coast. Owing to the working of the ocean waves unsafe pieces are almost certainly removed, and the cliff, at its lower parts at any rate, is invariably firm and safe. It is fine sport to choose a steep rocky coast at, say, half-tide in spring, and travel between high and low water marks as far as may be during the six hours. It should be a point of honour not to ascend, but if forced to take to the water excellent practice and much amusement is obtainable in this way, and the slippery nature of the rock teaches sureness of foot. Nailed boots are, of course, indispensable. The geological formation of Lambay is principally felstone porphyry. Some stratified Silurian shales and limestone occur, and there is a small sheet of old red sandstone, with conglomerates. The rock is in general hard and reliable. _Howth_ is a promontory with a village about 9 miles from Dublin, for the people of which it is a favourite resort. From Balscaddan Bay, on the north, to an almost opposite point, Drumleck Point, on the south, the east coast is composed of cliffs (200-300 ft.), sometimes abrupt, sometimes ending above in grass slopes, very slippery in hot weather, which have caused many accidents. A very interesting scramble, with many nasty traverses over these steep grass slopes, may be had round Howth Head. Keeping to the upper edge of the rocks, it is necessary to ascend once at Kilrock, but after that the whole headland may be climbed at about the medium height of the cliffs. On the way a 'needle' or 'stack' will here and there attract attention, and perhaps seem worth assaulting. About Piper's Gut a small gully is difficult to pass. North of that a saddle rock leads to a pinnacle, but it is of rotten rock. The cliffs of this part of Howth are exceedingly picturesque, but in some places they are extremely unsafe. From Howth, on a very clear day, the Welsh hills, apparently those about Penmaenmawr, are visible. _Ireland's Eye._ A small rocky island, 340 ft. high, about a mile north of Howth. At its north-east corner there is a bold columnar rock with a tabular summit, partly severed from the island. On its outer face it is very sheer, and to gain the summit is a very short but interesting and somewhat difficult climb. The return is not so bad, as a sidelong spring saves a portion of the worst bit. * * * * * =Wicklow.=--Wicklow forms the third county in Ireland in which the mountains rise to a height of over 3,000 ft., Kerry and Tipperary being the other two. The higher mountains lie in the broad band of granite formation which extends in a nearly southerly direction from near Dublin through Wicklow and Carlow counties. Being granite they are as a rule round masses of wide extent, often covered with peat bogs; so that although Wicklow contains the most continuous extent of elevated (over 1,000 ft.) moorland in Ireland, there are few cliffs of any consequence, and no peaks or summits presenting upon any side material of interest to the rock-climber. Nevertheless there are fine stretches of mountain, affording excellent training ground. What cliffs there are occupy the most lovely scenery in one of the loveliest Irish counties. _Powerscourt Waterfall._--The rocks to the left of the fall, which is kindly left open to the public by Lord Powerscourt, the popular landlord, are nasty, especially in wet or frosty weather. Although not much over 250 feet in height several lives have been lost in this ascent, chiefly, no doubt, owing to the inexperience of the unfortunate visitors. This dangerous though tempting portion has been for several years railed off, and is not supposed to be trespassed upon. During the severe winter of the present year (February 1895) the waterfall presented an Arctic appearance. An interesting account of an ascent of it, or rather of the above-mentioned rocks, was sent to an Irish paper in that month. The climb was effected by a friend of the writer's (a member of the Alpine Club) and another, with ropes and ice axes. The cliff was covered with ice and snow. The same party ascended Djonce (2,384 ft.), which lies above the waterfall, during a blizzard at a temperature of 18°, upon the same day. Unhappily a very few days afterwards a promising young life was lost upon these very rocks. The falls are visited by very large numbers of holiday-makers. The rocks of Powerscourt, which lie against the Wicklow granites, are composed of metamorphic beds of gneiss and schists. Powerscourt is about 7 miles from Bray. _Tonelagee Mountain_ ('Back to the Wind' Mountain) (2,694 ft.), a round mass of moorland, has on the northern shoulder a crater-like valley, containing a tarn, Lough Ouler, and cliffs of schistose, some 400 to 500 ft. high, descending from near the summit to the margin of the lake. An interesting scramble may be made from the Military Road, about a mile above Glenmacanass Waterfall, which lies some 6 miles from Glendalough Hotel; but a short cut to Lough Ouler is easily found by going up the Glendasan valley 3 miles towards Wicklow Gap, and then striking up northwards over the shoulder of Tonelagee. Wicklow county is very poor in highland plants, and these cliffs alone possess species of any interest. Other cliffs in county Wicklow are those of Luggielaw ('Hollow of the Hill'), above Lough Tay; the Eagle's Nest, above Lower Lough Bray; a small series of bluffs above Lough Nahanagan, and the Prisons of Lugnaquilia. In winter the latter, lying high (2,700 to 3,039 ft.), afford excellent glissading and cornice work. But, unless the season is severe there is too much heavy trudging to be done. All the above precipices lie in most attractive scenery, nor must the famous cliff above Glendalough, containing St. Kevin's Bed, be omitted. But none of them affords desirable scope for climbing practice. The granite 'Prisons' of Lugnaquilia are attractive in appearance, but all the cliff faces are ready to drop to pieces. Mullaghclevaun ('Summit with the Cradle' or 'Creel'), 2,783 ft., contains no climbing. Since Wicklow affords the nearest opportunities to Dublin mountaineers, we may mention a few one-day walks from that city which have been accomplished by the writer. Practically the only artery through these mountains is the _Military Road_, constructed after the rebellion of 1798 to connect a series of now disused barracks. This road, from 'Billy's Bridge' at Upper Rathfarnham, about 5 miles from Dublin, is over 35 miles to Aughavanagh. It passes through an almost uninhabited country, and much of it lies from 1,000 to 1,500 feet above sea level, and it is the pedestrian's main anxiety to regain the comparative security of the Military Road before night sets in on the wide stretches of tussocky moorland. To clear the suburbs it is well to take the tram to Terenure (3 miles). Terenure; Ballinascorney Gap; Coronation Plantation (3 to 3¼ hours); Sally Gap; Military Road; Lough Bray (5 hours); back to Terenure (7½ hours: 34 miles). Terenure; Lough Ouler; Tonelagee summit (6 hours); Mullaghclevaun summit (7½ hours); Ballysmutton (9½ hours); home by Ballinascorney Gap (13½ hours: 48 miles). From Bray this walk is about 5 miles shorter. Bray, over Bray Head, Little Sugarloaf, Big Sugarloaf (1,680 ft.), Djonce Mountain (2,384 ft.), and Kippure (2,473 ft.); Lough Bray, by Military Road, to Terenure: about 11 hours. Terenure; Ballinascorney Gap; Seacaun; Kippure; Lough Bray; Terenure (about 8 hours). Terenure; Lough Bray; Kippure (2½ hours); Gravale (2,352 ft.); Duff Hill (2,364 ft.--very heavy going); Mullaghclevaun summit (6 hours); Tonelagee summit (7½ hours); Lough Ouler; Military Road; Terenure (14 hours; about 50 miles). Glendalough; Dublin (7¾ hours); Glendasan; Wicklow Gap; summit of Tonelagee (11 hours); summit of Mullaghclevaun; Clevaun Lake; Ballymullagh old road; across Liffey at Ballysmutton bridge; Ballinascorney Gap; Terenure (20 hours, including rests and delays by bog; 62 miles). Terenure; Lough Bray (3 hours); Laragh (7½ hours); Glenmalure; Drumgoff Hotel (9 hours 5 minutes--1½ hour's rest); Lugnaquilia (3,039 ft., 12¾ hours); Tonelagee summit (16¼ hours); Mullaghclevaun summit (17 hours 40 minutes); Ballysmutton farm (19 hours 40 minutes--35 min. rest); Ballinascorney Gap; Terenure (23 hours 50 minutes; 75 miles). The ascent of Lugnaquilia direct from Glendalough, over Lugduff, round the head of Glenmalure, and up by Kelly's Lough is perhaps the finest walk in Wicklow. It is a fine day's walk along the coast from Bray to Arklow, or Bray to New Rath Bridge, and thence by the Devil's Glen to Glendalough. In a wild, uncultivated county, like Wicklow, experience in the use of map and compass may be gained by setting a course from Woodenbridge to Glendalough, about 12 miles, or from Glendalough to the Scalp or Sugarloaf, on the way to Dublin, some 40 miles. * * * * * =Kerry.=--_Brandon_ (3,127 ft.) is of the same formation as that of the Reeks, i.e. the lower old red sandstone. The Brandon rocks are, in general, hard grits, firm and good to climb. The accommodation on this promontory of Corkaguiny is no doubt improved since the construction of Mr. Balfour's light railway from Tralee to Dingle; but Dingle lies 8 miles to the south of Brandon. I obtained very inferior accommodation at Cloghane, on an inlet at the eastern base of the mountain; and cleaner and better, but not so convenient, from a coastguard at Ballydavid, to the west of Brandon. For the other mountains on the promontory, Castle Gregory is centrally situated, but in all these cases (except Dingle) it is highly advisable to make previous arrangements and supplement the native fare with a hamper. The coast of the Brandon promontory (which was traversed throughout) is often highly precipitous; indeed, from Cloghane on the north to Anniscaul on the south the western extremity is almost entirely so, and many stiff bits of climbing were accomplished, whether in pursuit of scenery, of a direct course, of objects of natural history, or, perhaps, more frequently out of what an Irishman would call 'natural divilment.' A few years ago no language would have sufficed in abuse of the accommodation at Anniscaul, but, as it is now a railway station, no doubt this is all changed. [Illustration: KERRY] _Brandon Peak and Brandon Summit._--The most enjoyable way to make the first acquaintance with these mountains is to ascend Connor Hill, to the north-west of Dingle, and follow the ridge by Beenduff, Ballysitteragh, Geashane, and Brandon Peak to the summit. The peak is about 400 ft. lower than and a little south of Brandon proper. Along this ridge, looking north and north-west, there is a fine rocky face before reaching the peak. After that point a range of cliffs, several hundred feet in altitude, meets the loftier cliffs above Lake Nalacken, looking east. At the head of the Feany valley, under Brandon, these cliffs afford an interesting descent. The range gives plenty of practice in rock work. Alpine plants occur mainly on the north and north-east cliffs, and are more numerous than on the loftier Reeks. _Brandon from Cloghane._--From Cloghane the ascent may be made amongst fine cliffs and rock-climbing, by making south-east for Lough Cruttia, the largest lake under Brandon to its east. It is better to follow the road southwards a mile or two, to save uninteresting moorland. From this lake it is a short distance to the north-west of Lough Nalacken, and by striking in east at once to the cliffs a good climb is obtainable. Lough Cruttia is about 700 ft. above sea level. Between the upper lough and the cliffs the surface is a desolate extent of polished naked grits, strewn with boulders. Crossing this a somewhat dangerous gully leads up to the cliffs at about 1,650 ft. The ascent of this is about 300 ft., and a stiff climb and afterwards some 400 ft. of cliffs may be tackled in various ways. There are numerous ledges, and it is the best botanical ground in the mountains. The cliffs 'go' splendidly. In a lake south of the two mentioned above, locally named Lough Bawn, or the 'White Lake,' lives the enormous 'carrabuncle.' It appears fitfully at night, glittering like silver in the water with gold and silver and precious stones hanging to it galore. It is partly covered with shells, which are lined with gold. Upon one occasion several men went to the lake at night and dived in oilskins to catch this valuable monster. They did not catch him; but pearl mussels, no doubt shed from the carrabuncle, are found in the lake. _Brandon Point and Brandon Head._--From Cloghane it is a fine hard walk right round Brandon Point and Brandon Head. At the cliffs of Slieveglass (1,050 ft.) a bay of extreme grandeur is opened, bound on three sides by lofty precipices and with a depth and sea frontage of about half a mile. There is a shepherd's settlement, Arraghglin, on the coast, which has to be closely approached. A more bleak habitation can hardly be conceived; neither road nor even track leads to it. It is now several hours' work to round the sea face of Brandon Head, at altitudes varying from 500 to 1,200 ft., to Ballydavid. If accommodation has not been arranged for here the walk to Dingle will be found most wearisome, and at all trouble a car should be provided. _Macgillicuddy's Reeks_ contain the highest summits in Ireland. They extend from the Gap of Dunloe, the eastern extremity, to the Beenbane spur near Glencar, about 10 miles west from the Gap. The scenery is magnificent. From Lake Auger, in the Gap, the climber ascends at once by a series of precipitous bluffs to an elevation of about 2,000 ft. Still ascending along a serrated ridge, an elevation of about 3,000 ft. is reached above Lough Cummeenapeasta, about 2½ miles west of the Gap of Dunloe. For several miles this ridge can be traversed at about the above altitude. The ridge frequently becomes a mere knife-edge, and in several places descends abruptly and precipitously to some of the numerous tarns and cooms nestling 1,000 to 1,500 ft. below. A more perfect mountain excursion can hardly be conceived. The ridge carries us to the shoulder of Carran Tuohill, and from its summit a northern branch extends to Beenkeragh (3,314 ft.) and to Skregmore (2,790 ft.) The axis proper continues to Caher (3,200 ft.) and Curraghmore (2,680 ft.) Here we reach a gap connecting Cummeenacappul (Horse's Valley) with the Valleys of Caragh and Cummeenduff, or the Black Valley. West of it is the Beenbane spur, a lower elevation of no interest. The Reeks are chiefly composed of hard green and purple grits, and sandstone of old red sandstone age. The rocks are generally firm and safe to climb amongst. There is a comfortable angler's hotel at Glencar, at the western end of the Reeks. This is the best adapted for the immediate neighbourhood of the higher points, but to reach some of the most interesting climbing it is better to distribute one's attentions equally between Killarney and Glencar. From Killarney (Railway Hotel) two methods are available--one by car to the Gap of Dunloe, or further to the Hag's Glen, up a steep mountain road, and from either of these as starting-point some excellent rock work is available. From the Gap as starting-point a long day can be spent, descending at night to Glencar Hotel. The other method is to boat from Killarney (enjoying exquisite scenery) to Lord Brandon's cottage at the western extremity of the upper lake. Here begins a long, dull ascent, rewarded by the splendid view from the ridge into the heart of the Reeks. Or these routes can be reversed. [Illustration: SKETCH MAP OF KILLARNEY] Guides swarm here. None of these have the slightest knowledge of climbing, and should one be engaged the first deviation from the easiest ascent, or departure into gully or ravine, will put a conclusion to his services. A wiry, bragging, long-legged shepherd undertook to accompany the writer by any ascent he selected from the Hag's Glen to Carran Tuohill, to be paid five shillings at the summit. At the foot of the first gully, with many heart-felt remonstrances and gesticulations, he disappeared, not even thinking it worth while to make an easier ascent. On this account it is all the more necessary to be unfailingly provided with the Ordnance map and a thoroughly good compass. An aneroid barometer is also of great assistance, especially in mist, for a knowledge of the altitude often enables a lake or a peak to be identified. _Cumloughra_ (3,100 ft.)--Starting from Glencar Hotel, a few tedious miles bring us across a country road to Lake Acoose (507 ft.) Passing round the south edge of the lake, a ridge (about 900 ft.) is crossed, and ere long Lake Eighter, at the entrance to Cumloughra (1,500 ft.), is reached. If we pass along the shores of the lake to the south-western edge, a few hundred feet up an open gully brings us to a series of cliffs south-west from Cumloughra lake. The rock is sound, and a fine, almost vertical ascent of 1,000 ft. may be made, striking the ridge of Caher (3,000 ft.) 200 ft. below the summit. It is a severe climb and very long, entailing many zigzags. There is no main gully to adhere to, and the cliffs are less impracticable than they look. Along the west side of the two lakes the cliffs are easier. _Carran Tuohill_ (3,414 ft.)--Cars from Killarney stop at the Geddagh River. Cross it, sweep to the right and back, and then follow the valley by a fair path between two lakes to the Devil's Ladder and up it to the _col_. The summit is then on the right hand. The writer was once fortunate enough to ascend this summit through a cloud layer of about 1,500 ft. thick, which ceased a short distance below the summit. Above was a clear blue sky, and peering out of the dense white, snowlike bed of mist Caher and Brandon (the latter 30 miles to the north-west, the former not a mile away) alone were visible--a never to be forgotten sight, which seemed shut out entirely from earthly considerations. Descending _into_ the clouds, the ridge leading southwards towards Cummeenoughter, or Devil's Looking Glass (Upper Coom), was taken by mistake, and an exceedingly nasty traverse across huge, dangerously sloping slabs was necessary in order to regain Carran Tuohill and find the Caher ridge. _Beenkeragh_ (3,100 ft.)--Between Beenkeragh and Skregmore (2,600 ft.) there lies an inviting glen, sunk in black precipices. These cliffs are to be avoided. At several points an attempt was made to scale them, but the rock is most rotten. Near Beenkeragh is a ridge running a little west of north for half a mile, and bounding the Devil's Looking Glass and the Hag's Glen on their west. This ridge is reached by an easy gully known as the _Devil's Ladder_, about 300 ft. below Beenkeragh. _Devil's Looking Glass_ (Cummeenoughter). This tarn lies at the head of the Hag's Glen, at an elevation of 2,500 ft. It is three-parts encircled by a fine series of cliffs. At the western corner of this bold girth of precipices the finest view in the Reeks may be obtained, looking over the Looking Glass, and the lakes below in the Hag's Glen, across heights and peaks and valleys to Cummeenapeasta. Excellent climbing is to be had here. The rock is a purple sandstone, and one shoulder of an inaccessible appearance can be climbed throughout, owing to the firmness of grip and the recurrence of suggestive little footholds. _Lake Auger_ (Gap of Dunloe).--These cliffs terminate upwards in the Bull's Mountain at about 1,500 ft. The lake is about 350 ft. above sea level. Almost immediately after leaving the lake we come upon a series of bluffs and terraces occasionally communicating with one another, but more often uniting to form smooth-faced walls. Great care and discrimination have to be exercised in selecting ledges that do not terminate upon such faces, as there is little hand grip, and turning to retrace one's steps is most unpleasantly difficult and dangerous. The climbing here is most excellent and exciting, but the writer often felt sorely in need of a companion and a rope. It is in such places as these, inaccessible to sheep and goats, that hawkweeds occur, and in search of these, places were reached which rendered the summit of Bull's Mountain (when gained) extremely welcome. _The Hag's Glen._--Making the ascent from here to the westward, we reach another valley between Hag's Glen and Old Finglas River. At about 1,800 ft. a very black gully leads up to the main ridge from its northern side. It is occasionally blocked with huge masses of rock, which render détours along the boundary walls necessary, and, as is often the case, it becomes very difficult afterwards to regain the gully. This gully is a very tough climb. The Hag's teeth (there are two) are conical knobs of no difficulty, along a ridge running into the glen. _Lake Googh_ (1,600 ft.)--This lake lies on the south side of the main axis of the Reeks. Above it rises to the northwards a series of coombs, or high-lying valleys, which can be traversed by separate and often interesting scrambles till the main ridge is reached. This is a very interesting ascent. It is often rather a matter of chance whether the gully selected will be available to its end for the next coomb level, and a retracement of steps will frequently have to be effected. Nothing is less pleasing than to have to go back down a gully which it was a small triumph to have ascended in safety. This valley is singularly dark, damp, and grand; and it is more rich in ferns than any other portion of the Reeks. _Cloon Lake and Lough Reagh._--Although these cliffs are not a portion of the Reeks, they are mentioned here as being easily reached from Glencar Hotel. They lie south of Lough Reagh, which is separated only by a marsh from Lough Cloon, and are a most superbly rugged cluster of sugar-loaf peaks huddled together and often separated by sheer precipices and inaccessible ravines. Unfortunately they are of easy access from the southern or Sneem side. Many gullies of sound rock occur. Bad weather on two different visits rendered climbing here an unpleasant experience, but enough was seen to enable the writer to pronounce the district well worthy of a visit. _Mount Aitchin_ (Whin Mount) is the chief summit. Golden eagles bred recently amongst these cliffs. Coming down once from these mountains towards Lough Reagh, facing northwards, in a blinding mist, an uncommon sort of descent was obtained. Not knowing the nature of the ground, or indeed our whereabouts, we struck blindly over a declivity, turning at length to a sheer cliff whose termination was invisible. This cliff or series of cliffs is broken into ledges, all coated with a long growth of woodrush. Glissading and holding on brought us in unexpected safety to the valley below. Return would have been impossible by the way of our descent. Other mountains in the neighbourhood of Killarney are _Mangerton_ (2,756 ft.); _Toomies_ (2,415 ft.); _Purple Mountain_ (2,739 ft.); _Turc Mountain_ (1,764 ft.), and the _Paps_ (2,268 ft.) Of these none afford any real climbing. On Mangerton, however, the Horse's Glen is surrounded by rocky declivities, and the Devil's Punch Bowl has a slight cliff above it. From Killarney by rail to Headfort, and then back over the Paps and Mangerton, and through the Horse's Glen, is a fine walk. Another fine walk is from the lake, whither one proceeds from Killarney by boat, up Toomies Mountain, over Purple Mountain, and Turc Mountain, and Mangerton can be included on the way back. The Eagle's Cliff, above the lake, looks climbable and is reported to have been done. The writer, hurrying to the Reeks, always grudged time for the attempt. _Blasquets Islands_ lie off the extreme west of Kerry. They consist generally of grits and slates. Mr. Barrington (_Report on the Flora, &c._) describes the Great Blasquet as a ridge about 700 ft. high for most of its length, but for about a mile it exceeds 900 ft. The ridge is almost perpendicular in many places. 'The cliffs and precipices are very grand, notably the north-western face of the Great Blasquet and the north-eastern portion of Inishnabro, which latter resembles, when viewed from the sea, a cathedral 500 ft. high, the towers, spires, and even doors and windows being represented. Inishtooskert has an isolated pinnacle of rock, with a great chasm in the cliff near it, scarcely less striking. The Tearaght is like a black tooth projecting from the ocean, its sides being rocky, desolate, and very barren.' The present writer was prevented from reaching these islands by stormy weather. * * * * * =Co. Cork.=--_Sugarloaf Mountain_ (2,440 ft.)--An isolated, bare, conical peak, at the head of the Black Valley (Cummeenduff), the southern boundary of the Reeks. Sunshine after rain makes it glitter like a snowy peak. The rock is steep and glaciated. On the steepest face an interesting ascent may be made--easy, but requiring extreme care. South of the Kenmare River the hills are of less interest, though the beautiful Glengariff lies amongst them. _Hungry Hill_ (2,251 ft.) presents one precipitous face to the west, where a piece of interesting gully work occurs. The writer has reason to remember it, owing to the imprisonment of a bull-terrier, the property of a companion, in the middle of the climb. After completing the ascent the deafening howls of the prisoner made it necessary to work round to the base of the gully and help the beloved creature down. An almost identical incident occurred in a worse situation in the Poisoned Glen of Donegal. A bit of rope should be attached to the neck of any dog that follows a rock-climber. _Gougaun Barra_ ('St. Fin Bar's Rock-Cleft') is a gorge on the road west from Macroom to Bantry. The cliffs around rise from a desolate valley to meet the slopes of the mountains, 1,700-1,800 ft. high. On the road Keimaneigh ('the Pass of the Deer') is traversed, a gorge through the Sheha hills some 2 miles in length. It is a scene of wild beauty, and was the head-quarters of the band under 'Captain' Rock. This defile can be visited from Inchigeelagh, a few miles eastwards, where there is good fishing and accommodation. On Gougaun Barra, Otway (_Scenes and Sketches in Ireland_) and Smith (_History of Cork)_ have a good deal to say. * * * * * =Tipperary.=--_The Galtee Mountains_ extend about 15 miles from Caher at the eastern to Massy Lodge at the western extremity. The ridge slopes gently to the south, but abruptly to the vale of Aherlow on the north. The formation is Silurian, with overlying beds of old red sandstone conglomerate forming the summit of Galtymore (3,018 ft.) The Silurian beds form considerable precipices upon the north, almost enclosing numerous tarns, from which interesting ascents may be made. The best head-quarters for the mountains is Tipperary, about 6 miles north of the base of the range below its highest point. No doubt, however, accommodation could be arranged for at some of the farmhouses in the vale of Aherlow. The entire range from Caher to Mitchelstown forms a splendid walk. Lough Curra and Lough Muskry are the most interesting points to make for, and lie amongst the finest cliffs. Lough Diheen is the most remote and barren. At Lough Curra the cliffs descend 1,000 ft. sheer into the water. These cliffs afford attractive but dangerous climbing. They reach to within a couple of hundred feet of the highest point, known as Dawson's Table, or Galtymore. Still grander, however, are the cliffs above Lough Muskry. These tower to a height of about 1,200 ft. in great terraces and vegetated walls above the north and north-east ends of the lake. Numerous clefts, ravines, and ledges exist. Should the climber get pounded here (as not seldom happens) let him beware of undue haste. A mouthful of food has a wonderful effect in steadying the nerves. The holds here are often sods of dubious security, and the Muskry precipices, though they _can_ be traversed in all directions, are the severest amongst the Galtees. * * * * * =Co. Waterford.= _Commeragh Mountains._--The Commeragh Mountains may be explored from Kilmacthomas on the south, Clonmell on the west, or Caher on the north. They form an elevated plateau, bounded on all sides by steep and frequently inaccessible precipices, which enclose cooms and tarns. The highest point is 2,597 ft., and the rock is for the most part sandstone or conglomerate of the old red sandstone period. Slates and shales occur on the northern side. The cliffs can be climbed in many places. As on the Galtees, a few miles west, dense masses of a species of woodrush often render the holding treacherous. Smith (_History of Waterford_, 1774) says, 'On the sides of this chain there are many horrid precipices, and steep declivities, with large naked rocks. In the valleys considerable chips, or parings, lie in prodigious heaps.' The most imposing precipices are those enclosing in a magnificent sweep the Stilloge Lakes, on the south side of the group; and those above Coonshingaun Lough and Crotty's Lough at the eastern end. This east lake takes its name from one Crotty, an outlaw, who made his home in a cave here during the last century. Legends of this worthy abound in the district. The cliffs are often wholly inaccessible without a rope, but a great deal of excellent climbing can be effected with no artificial aids. In search of rare plants the writer has made several distinct ascents above the Stilloges, and also at Coonshingaun, quite apart from the easier gully tracks, by which the ordinary visitor gains the top. The mountains are singularly picturesque. The verdure-clad cliffs, overhanging the deep, rock-bound, lonely tarns, have an effect that is at once rare and beautiful. INDEX Aber, 1 Aberglaslyn, 95 Abergynolwyn, 10 Accidents, 1, 2, 9, 21, 25, 54, 56, 58, 67, 70, 72, 73, 82, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 108, 126, 139, 176 Achill, 158 Anglesey, 15 Antrim, 131 Aranmore Island, 143 Arans (The), 99 Arenig Fawr, 98 Asko Keeran, 162 Bala, 2 Barmouth, 3 Barnesmore Gap, 153 Beddgelert, 3 Beddgelert (Snowdon from), 4 Beenkeragh, 186 Ben Bulben, 155 Benchoona, 165 Benglog, 5 Berwyn Mountains, 94 Bethesda, 6 Bird Rock, 108 Black Ladders, 19 Black Mountains, 13, 126 Blaenau Ffestiniog, 9 Blasquets, 189 Blue Stack, 152 Braichddu, 18, 19 Brandon, 179 Brecon Beacons, 13 Bronyfedw, 14 Bryansford, 169 Bull's Mountain, 187 Bunglas, 145 Burton Port, 143 Bwlch Cwm y Llan, 87 Bwlch Goch, 61 Bwlch y Saethau, 76 Caddy of Cwm Glas, 60 Cader Fronwen, 94 Cader Idris, 106 Cambrian Railway, 7, 95 Capel Curig, 6 Carnarvonshire, 16 Carndonagh, 135 Carnedd Dafydd, 17 Carnedd Llewelyn, 23 Carnedd Ugain, 67 Carnedd y Filiast, 25 'Carrabuncle' (The), 181 Carran Tuohill, 185 Carrick Hotel, 145 Carrig-a-Rede, 133 Castell Cidwm, 93 Castell Gwynt, 34 Castles (The), 171 Cefnysgolion Duon, 19 Clare Co., 167 Clew Bay, 160 Cloghane, 179 Clogwyn Aderyn, 69 Clogwyn Penllechen, 69 Clogwyn y Garnedd, 72 Clogwyn y Person, 58 Clogwyndur Arddu, 89 Closs (Death of), 91 Cnicht, 96 Commeragh Mountains, 192 Cork Co., 190 Corris, 10 Cox (Mr.), 88 Craig Ddrwg, 98 Craig Eryri, 54 Craig y Bera, 94 Craig yr Ysfa, 21 Craiglyn Dyfi, 103 Crazy Pinnacle, 64 Crib Goch, 60 Crib y Ddysgl, 66 Croagh Patrick, 160 Croghaun, 158 Cumloughra, 185 Cwm Creigiog, 88 Cwm Dyli, 68 Cwm Glas, 56 Cwm y Llan, 87 Cyfrwy, 113 Cynfael Falls, 9 Cynicht, 96 Dawson's Table, 192 Denbighshire, 94 Devil's Kitchen, 28 Devil's Looking Glass, 186 Devil's Punch Bowl, 189 Dinas Bran, 94 Dinas Mawddwy, 7 Dingle, 179 Dismore (Mr.), 58 Dolgelly, 7 Donegal, 134 Down Co., 169 Dublin Co., 171 Dunaff Head, 136 Dunfanaghy, 139 Dungloe, 144 Dunloe (Gap of), 182 Eagle's Cliff, 189 Eagle's Nest, 147 Eglwyseg, 94 Elicydu, 25 Elider, 25 Empson (Mr.), 2 Errigal, 140 Esgair Felen, 42 Evans (Mr. Alf.), 82 Fair Head, 131 Fanet, 137 Ffestiniog, 9 Foelgoch, 26 Frodsham (Mr. G. H.), 90 Gallt y Wenallt, 76 Galtee Mountains, 191 Galway, 164 Gap of Doonmore, 138 Gap of Dunloe, 182 Garnedd Goch, 92 Giant's Causeway, 134 Glaslyn, 69 Glen Car, 183 Glen Gesh, 154 Glen Head, 145 Glenariff, 133 Glenbeagh, 142 Glengad Head, 135 Glengariff, 190 Glyder Fach, 31 Glyder Fawr, 36 Golf, 156 Gougaun Barra, 191 Grey Man's Path, 131 Guides, 183 Gweedore, 141 Hag's Glen, 183, 187 Haseler (Mr. Maxwell), 73 Hill names, 161 Homer (Mr. Philip), 54 Horn Head, 138 Howth, 174 Hugh Lloyd's Pulpit, 9 Hungry Hill, 190 Inishowen, 135 Ireland's Eye, 174 Jackson (Rev. James), 12 Keimaneigh, 191 Kendal (Mr. E. G.), 70 Kerry Co., 179 Killarney, 183 Killary, 165 Kingsley (Charles), 12 King's Mountain, 155 Kinlough, 156 Lambay, 171 Leenane Inn, 158, 163 Lisdoonvarna, 167 Livesley (Mr.), 56 Llaithnant, 105 Llanberis, 9 Llangynog, 95 Llechog, 91 Lliwedd, 74 Llyndulyn, 24 Lough Eske, 152 Lough Muskry, 192 Lough Salt, 142 Lough Swilly, 186 Lugnaquilia, 176 Maamtrasna, 162 Maamturk, 164 Macgillicuddy's Reeks, 182 Machynlleth, 10 MacSwyne's Gun, 143 Maentwrog Road, 15 Malin Head, 135 Mangerton, 189 Marble Arch, 143 Marzials (Miss), 9 Maum Glen, 144 Mayo Co., 156 Melynllyn, 24 Merionethshire, 95 Mitchell (Mr. J.), 86 Moel Eilio, 91 Moel Hebog, 92 Moel Siabod, 52 Moel Sych, 94 Moel Wyn, 96 Moher Cliffs, 167 Montgomeryshire, 94 Mount Aitchin, 188 Mourne Mountains, 169 Muckanaght, 166 Muckish, 140 Mweelrea, 160 Mynydd Mawr, 93 Nantlle, 10 Nephin, 156 Newcastle, 169 Ogwen Cottage, 5 One Man's Pass, 149 Orme's Head, 94 Owen (Harry), 11 Paget (Mr.), 2 Pantylluchfa, 69 Parson's Nose, 58 Payne (Mr.), 1 Pen Helig, 25 Penmaenmawr, 16 Penygroes, 11 Penygwrhyd, 11 Penyroleuwen, 18 'Phouca' (The), 140 Pleaskin Head, 134 Poisoned Glen, 141 Portsalon, 137 Powerscourt, 175 Prisons of Lugnaquilia, 176 Purple Mountain, 189 Rhayader, 13 Rhinog Fawr, 97 Rosapenna, 138 Rostrevor, 169 St. Kevin's Bed, 177 Slanting Gully, 85 Slieve Donard, 171 Slieve Glas, 182 Slieve League, 145 Smith (Death of), 108 Snowdon, 54 Snowdon Ranger, 13 Southey benighted, 54 Spellick, 171 Stacks, 15 Starr (Rev. H. W.), 89 Stilloge Lakes, 193 Sturrell, 144 Tanybwlch, 14 Tonelagee, 176 Tormore, 139, 144 Tory Island, 139 Trigfylchau, 36, 44 Tryfaen, 44 Twelve Bens or Pins, 166 Twll Du, 28 Waterford Co., 192 Wicklow Co., 175 Williams (W.), 72 Wills (Mr.), 2 Wilton (Mr. F. R.), 67 Y Garn, 28 Y Wyddfa, 54 Yr Elen, 25 PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE LONDON Transcriber's note: _Underscores_ have been used to indicate _italic_ fonts. =Equals signs= have been used to indicate =bold= fonts. The alternate spellings Carnarvonshire and Caernarvonshire both appear in the original. I have left them as written (both are accepted spellings). Inconsistent hyphenation and dashes (e.g. number-ft vs. number ft) are left as written. 
26059	----	THE ASCENT OF DENALI (MOUNT McKINLEY) A NARRATIVE OF THE FIRST COMPLETE ASCENT OF THE HIGHEST PEAK IN NORTH AMERICA BY HUDSON STUCK, D.D. ARCHDEACON OF THE YUKON ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1918 [Illustration: Ice Fall of nearly four thousand feet, by which the upper or Harper Glacier discharges into the lower or Muldrow Glacier (page 39)] COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Published February, 1914 BOOKS BY HUDSON STUCK, D.D., F.R.G.S. PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS VOYAGES ON THE YUKON AND ITS TRIBUTARIES A Narrative of Summer Travel in the Interior of Alaska Illustrated. 8vo _Net_ $4.50 "His book is a worthy contribution in a fascinating field of natural and geographical science as well as an entertaining record of highly expert and continually risky exploration." --_Phila. North American._ THE ASCENT OF DENALI (MT. MCKINLEY) Illustrated. 8vo _Net_ $1.75 "A wonderful record of indomitable pluck and endurance." --_Bulletin of the American Geographical Society._ "Its pages make one wish that all mountain climbers might be archdeacons if their accounts might thus gain, in the interest of happenings by the way, emotional vision and intellectual outlook." --_New York Times._ TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH A DOG SLED A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska Illustrated. 8vo _Net_ $1.75 "One of the most fascinating and altogether satisfactory books of travel which we have seen this year, or, indeed, any year." --_New York Tribune._ "This startlingly brilliant book."--_Literary Digest._ TO SIR MARTIN CONWAY ONE OF THE WORLD'S GREATEST TRAVELLERS AND CLIMBERS WHOSE FASCINATING NARRATIVES HAVE KINDLED IN MANY BREASTS A LOVE OF THE GREAT HEIGHTS AND A DESIRE TO ATTAIN UNTO THEM THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED WITH RESPECT AND ADMIRATION PREFACE Forefront in this book, because forefront in the author's heart and desire, must stand a plea for the restoration to the greatest mountain in North America of its immemorial native name. If there be any prestige or authority in such matter from the accomplishment of a first complete ascent, "if there be any virtue, if there be any praise," the author values it chiefly as it may give weight to this plea. It is now little more than seventeen years ago that a prospector penetrated from the south into the neighborhood of this mountain, guessed its height with remarkable accuracy at twenty thousand feet, and, ignorant of any name that it already bore, placed upon it the name of the Republican candidate for President of the United States at the approaching election--William McKinley. No voice was raised in protest, for the Alaskan Indian is inarticulate and such white men as knew the old name were absorbed in the search for gold. Some years later an officer of the United States army, upon a reconnoissance survey into the land, passed around the companion peak, and, alike ignorant or careless of any native name, put upon it the name of an Ohio politician, at that time prominent in the councils of the nation, Joseph Foraker. So there they stand upon the maps, side by side, the two greatest peaks of the Alaskan range, "Mount McKinley" and "Mount Foraker." And there they should stand no longer, since, if there be right and reason in these matters, they should not have been placed there at all. To the relatively large Indian population of those wide regions of the interior of Alaska from which the mountains are visible they have always borne Indian names. The natives of the middle Yukon, of the lower three hundred miles of the Tanana and its tributaries, of the upper Kuskokwim have always called these mountains "Denali" (Den-ah'li) and "Denali's Wife"--either precisely as here written, or with a dialectical difference in pronunciation so slight as to be negligible. It is true that the little handful of natives on the Sushitna River, who never approach nearer than a hundred miles to the mountain, have another name for it. They call it _Traléika_, which, in their wholly different language, has the same signification. It is probably true of every great mountain that it bears diverse native names as one tribe or another, on this side or on that of its mighty bulk, speaks of it. But the area in which, and the people by whom, this mountain is known as Denali, preponderate so greatly as to leave no question which native name it should bear. The bold front of the mountain is so placed on the returning curve of the Alaskan range that from the interior its snows are visible far and wide, over many thousands of square miles; and the Indians of the Tanana and of the Yukon, as well as of the Kuskokwim, hunt the caribou well up on its foot-hills. Its southern slopes are stern and forbidding through depth of snow and violence of glacial stream, and are devoid of game; its slopes toward the interior of the country are mild and amene, with light snowfall and game in abundance. Should the reader ever be privileged, as the author was a few years ago, to stand on the frozen surface of Lake Minchúmina and see these mountains revealed as the clouds of a passing snow-storm swept away, he would be overwhelmed by the majesty of the scene and at the same time deeply moved with the appropriateness of the simple native names; for simplicity is always a quality of true majesty. Perhaps nowhere else in the world is so abrupt and great an uplift from so low a base. The marshes and forests of the upper Kuskokwim, from which these mountains rise, cannot be more than one thousand five hundred feet above the sea. The rough approximation by the author's aneroid in the journey from the Tanana to the Kuskokwim would indicate a still lower level--would make this wide plain little more than one thousand feet high. And they rise sheer, the tremendous cliffs of them apparently unbroken, soaring superbly to more than twenty thousand and seventeen thousand feet respectively: Denali, "the great one," and Denali's Wife. And the little peaks in between the natives call the "children." It was on that occasion, standing spellbound at the sublimity of the scene, that the author resolved that if it were in his power he would restore these ancient mountains to the ancient people among whom they rear their heads. Savages they are, if the reader please, since "savage" means simply a forest dweller, and the author is glad himself to be a savage a great part of every year, but yet, as savages, entitled to name their own rivers, their own lakes, their own mountains. After all, these terms--"savage," "heathen," "pagan"--mean, alike, simply "country people," and point to some old-time superciliousness of the city-bred, now confined, one hopes, to such localities as Whitechapel and the Bowery. There is, to the author's mind, a certain ruthless arrogance that grows more offensive to him as the years pass by, in the temper that comes to a "new" land and contemptuously ignores the native names of conspicuous natural objects, almost always appropriate and significant, and overlays them with names that are, commonly, neither the one nor the other. The learned societies of the world, the geographical societies, the ethnological societies, have set their faces against this practice these many years past, and to them the writer confidently appeals. * * * * * This preface must bear a grateful acknowledgment to the most distinguished of Alaskans--the man who knows more of Alaska than any other human being--Peter Trimble Rowe, seventeen years bishop of that immense territory, for the "cordial assent" which he gave to the proposed expedition and the leave of absence which rendered it possible--one more in a long list of kindnesses which have rendered happy an association of nearly ten years. Nor can better place be found for a tribute of gratitude to those who were of the little party: to Mr. Harry P. Karstens, strong, competent, and resourceful, the real leader of the expedition in the face of difficulty and danger; to Mr. Robert G. Tatum, who took his share, and more than his share, of all toil and hardship and was a most valuable colleague; to Walter Harper, Indian-bred until his sixteenth year, and up to that time trained in not much else than Henry of Navarre's training, "to shoot straight, to speak the truth; to do with little food and less sleep" (though equal to an abundance of both on occasion), who joyed in the heights as a mountain-sheep or a chamois, and whose sturdy limbs and broad shoulders were never weary or unwilling--to all of these there is heartfelt affection and deep obligation. Nor must Johnny be forgotten, the Indian boy who faithfully kept the base camp during a long vigil, and killed game to feed the dogs, and denied himself, unasked, that others might have pleasure, as the story will tell. And the name of Esaias, the Indian boy who accompanied us to the base camp, and then returned with the superfluous dogs, must be mentioned, with commendation for fidelity and thanks for service. Acknowledgment is also made to many friends and colleagues at the mission stations in the interior, who knew of the purpose and furthered it greatly and held their tongues so that no premature screaming bruit of it got into the Alaskan newspapers: to the Rev. C. E. Betticher, Jr., particularly and most warmly. The author would add, perhaps quite unnecessarily, yet lest any should mistake, a final personal note. He is no professed explorer or climber or "scientist," but a missionary, and of these matters an amateur only. The vivid recollection of a back bent down with burdens and lungs at the limit of their function makes him hesitate to describe this enterprise as recreation. It was the most laborious undertaking with which he was ever connected; yet it was done for the pleasure of doing it, and the pleasure far outweighed the pain. But he is concerned much more with men than mountains, and would say, since "out of the fullness of the heart the mouth speaketh," that his especial and growing concern, these ten years past, is with the native people of Alaska, a gentle and kindly race, now threatened with a wanton and senseless extermination, and sadly in need of generous champions if that threat is to be averted. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. PREPARATION AND APPROACH 3 II. THE MULDROW GLACIER 25 III. THE NORTHEAST RIDGE 53 IV. THE GRAND BASIN 80 V. THE ULTIMATE HEIGHT 92 VI. THE RETURN 117 VII. THE HEIGHT OF DENALI, WITH A DISCUSSION OF THE READINGS ON THE SUMMIT AND DURING THE ASCENT 141 VIII. EXPLORATIONS OF THE DENALI REGION AND PREVIOUS ATTEMPTS AT ITS ASCENT 157 IX. THE NAMES PLACED UPON THE MOUNTAIN BY THE AUTHOR 180 ILLUSTRATIONS Ice fall of nearly four thousand feet by which the upper or Harper Glacier discharges into the lower or Muldrow Glacier (photogravure) _Frontispiece_ FACING PAGE The author and Mr. H. P. Karstens 4 Tatum, Esaias, Karstens, Johnny, and Walter, at the Clearwater Camp 8 Striking across from the Tanana to the Kantishna 12 One of the abandoned mining towns in the Kantishna 14 Denali from the McKinley fork of the Kantishna River 16 Entering the range by Cache Creek 18 The base camp at about 4,000 feet on Cache Creek 20 Some heads of game killed at the base camp 22 The Muldrow Glacier. Karstens in the foreground 26 Ascension Day, 1913 30 Bridging a crevasse on the Muldrow Glacier 32 Hard work for dogs as well as men on the Muldrow Glacier 34 The Northeast Ridge shattered by the earthquake in July, 1912 48 Cutting a staircase three miles long in the ice of the shattered ridge 52 The shattered Northeast Ridge 56 Camp at 13,000 feet on Northeast Ridge 60 A dangerous passage 64 The Upper Basin reached at last. Our camp at the Parker Pass at 15,000 feet 72 Above all the range except Denali and Denali's Wife 76 Traverse under the cliffs of the Northeast Ridge to enter the Grand Basin 82 First camp in the Grand Basin--16,000 feet, looking up 84 Second camp in the Grand Basin--looking down, 16,500 feet 86 Third camp in the Grand Basin--17,000 feet, showing the shattering of the glacier walls by the earthquake 88 The North Peak, 20,000 feet high 90 The South Peak from about 18,000 feet 94 The climbing-irons 98 Denali's Wife from the summit of Denali (photogravure) 102 Robert Tatum raising the Stars and Stripes on the highest point in North America 104 The saying of the Te Deum 106 Beginning the descent of the ridge; looking down 4,000 feet upon the Muldrow Glacier 122 Johnny Fred, who kept the base camp and fed the dogs and would not touch the sugar 128 "Muk," the author's pet malamute 136 Approaching the range 164 Map showing route of the Stuck-Karstens expedition to the summit of Mt. Denali (Mt. McKinley) _End of volume_ THE ASCENT OF DENALI CHAPTER I PREPARATION AND APPROACH The enterprise which this volume describes was a cherished purpose through a number of years. In the exercise of his duties as Archdeacon of the Yukon, the author has travelled throughout the interior of Alaska, both winter and summer, almost continuously since 1904. Again and again, now from one distant elevation and now from another, the splendid vision of the greatest mountain in North America has spread before his eyes, and left him each time with a keener longing to enter its mysterious fastnesses and scale its lofty peaks. Seven years ago, writing in _The Spirit of Missions_ of a view of the mountain from the Pedro Dome, in the neighborhood of Fairbanks, he said: "I would rather climb that mountain than discover the richest gold-mine in Alaska." Indeed, when first he went to Alaska it was part of the attraction which the country held for him that it contained an unclimbed mountain of the first class. Scawfell and Skiddaw and Helvellyn had given him his first boyish interest in climbing; the Colorado and Canadian Rockies had claimed one holiday after another of maturer years, but the summit of Rainier had been the greatest height he had ever reached. When he went to Alaska he carried with him all the hypsometrical instruments that were used in the ascent as well as his personal climbing equipment. There was no definite likelihood that the opportunity would come to him of attempting the ascent, but he wished to be prepared with instruments of adequate scale in case the opportunity should come; and Hicks, of London, made them nine years ago. [Illustration: The author and Mr. H. P. Karstens.] [Sidenote: Members of the Party] Long ago, also, he had picked out Mr. Harry P. Karstens, of Fairbanks, as the one colleague with whom he would be willing to make the attempt. Mr. Karstens had gone to the Klondike in his seventeenth year, during the wild stampede to those diggings, paying the expenses of the trip by packing over the Chilkoot Pass, and had been engaged in pioneering and in travel of an arduous and adventurous kind ever since. He had mined in the Klondike and in the Seventy-Mile (hence his sobriquet of "The Seventy-Mile Kid"). It was he and his partner, McGonogill, who broke the first trail from Fairbanks to Valdez and for two years of difficulty and danger--dogs and men alike starving sometimes--brought the mail regularly through. When the stampede to the Kantishna took place, and the government was dilatory about instituting a mail service for the three thousand men in the camp, Karstens and his partner organized and maintained a private mail service of their own. He had freighted with dogs from the Yukon to the Iditarod, had run motor-boats on the Yukon and the Tanana. For more than a year he had been guide to Mr. Charles Sheldon, the well-known naturalist and hunter, in the region around the foot-hills of Denali. With the full vigor of maturity, with all this accumulated experience and the resourcefulness and self-reliance which such experience brings, he had yet an almost juvenile keenness for further adventure which made him admirably suited to this undertaking. Mr. Robert G. Tatum of Tennessee, just twenty-one years old, a postulant for holy orders, stationed at the mission at Nenana, had been employed all the winter in a determined attempt to get supplies freighted over the ice, by natives and their dog teams, to two women missionaries, a nurse and a teacher, at the Tanana Crossing. The steamboat had cached the supplies at a point about one hundred miles below the mission the previous summer, unable to proceed any farther. The upper Tanana is a dangerous and difficult river alike for navigation and for ice travel, and Tatum's efforts were made desperate by the knowledge that the women were reduced to a diet of straight rabbits without even salt. The famine relieved, he had returned to Nenana. The summer before he had worked on a survey party and had thus some knowledge of the use of instruments. By undertaking the entire cooking for the expedition he was most useful and helpful, and his consistent courtesy and considerateness made him a very pleasant comrade. Of the half-breed boy, Walter Harper, the author's attendant and interpreter, dog driver in the winter and boat engineer in the summer for three years previous, no more need be said than that he ran Karstens close in strength, pluck, and endurance. Of the best that the mixed blood can produce, twenty-one years old and six feet tall, he took gleefully to high mountaineering, while his kindliness and invincible amiability endeared him to every member of the party. The men were thus all volunteers, experienced in snow and ice, though not in high-mountain work. But the nature of snow and ice is not radically changed by lifting them ten or fifteen or even twenty thousand feet up in the air. A volunteer expedition was the only one within the resources of the writer, and even that strained them. The cost of the food supplies, the equipment, and the incidental expenses was not far short of a thousand dollars--a mere fraction of the cost of previous expeditions, it is true, but a matter of long scraping together for a missionary. Yet if there had been unlimited funds at his disposal--and the financial aspect of the affair is alluded to only that this may be said--it would have been impossible to assemble a more desirable party. Mention of two Indian boys of fourteen or fifteen, who were of great help to us, must not be omitted. They were picked out from the elder boys of the school at Nenana, all of whom were most eager to go, and were good specimens of mission-bred native youths. "Johnny" was with the expedition from start to finish, keeping the base camp while the rest of the party was above; Esaias was with us as far as the base camp and then went back to Nenana with one of the dog teams. [Sidenote: Methods of Approach] The resolution to attempt the ascent of Denali was reached a year and a half before it was put into execution: so much time was necessary for preparation. Almost any Alaskan enterprise that calls for supplies or equipment from the outside must be entered upon at least a year in advance. The plan followed had been adopted long before as the only wise one: that the supplies to be used upon the ascent be carried by water as near to the base of the mountain as could be reached and cached there in the summer, and that the climbing party go in with the dog teams as near the 1st March as practicable. Strangely enough, of all the expeditions that have essayed this ascent, the first, that of Judge Wickersham in 1903, and the last, ten years later, are the only ones that have approached their task in this natural and easy way. The others have all burdened themselves with the great and unnecessary difficulties of the southern slopes of the range. [Illustration: Tatum, Esaias, Karstens, Johnny and Walter, at the Clearwater Camp.] It was proposed to use the mission launch _Pelican_, which has travelled close to twenty thousand miles on the Yukon and its tributaries in the six seasons she has been in commission, to transport the supplies up the Kantishna and Bearpaw Rivers to the head of navigation of the latter, when her cruise of 1912 was complete. But a serious mishap to the launch, which it was impossible to repair in Alaska, brought her activities for that season to a sudden end. So Mr. Karstens came down from Fairbanks with his launch, and a poling boat loaded with food staples, and, pushing the poling boat ahead, successfully ascended the rivers and carefully cached the stuff some fifty miles from the base of the mountain. It was done in a week or less. [Sidenote: Equipment] Unfortunately, the equipment and supplies ordered from the outside did not arrive in time to go in with the bulk of the stuff. Although ordered in February, they arrived at Tanana only late in September, just in time to catch the last boat up to Nenana. And only half that had been ordered came at all--one of the two cases has not been traced to this day. Moreover, it was not until late the next February, when actually about to proceed on the expedition, that the writer was able to learn what items had come and what had not. Such are the difficulties of any undertaking in Alaska, despite all the precautions that foresight may dictate. The silk tents, which had not come, had to be made in Fairbanks; the ice-axes sent were ridiculous gold-painted toys with detachable heads and broomstick handles--more like dwarf halberds than ice-axes; and at least two workmanlike axes were indispensable. So the head of an axe was sawn to the pattern of the writer's out of a piece of tool steel and a substantial hickory handle and an iron shank fitted to it at the machine-shop in Fairbanks. It served excellently well, while the points of the fancy axes from New York splintered the first time they were used. "Climbing-irons," or "crampons," were also to make, no New York dealer being able to supply them. One great difficulty was the matter of footwear. Heavy regulation-nailed alpine boots were sent--all too small to be worn with even a couple of pairs of socks, and therefore quite useless. Indeed, at that time there was no house in New York, or, so far as the writer knows, in the United States, where the standard alpine equipment could be procured. As a result of the dissatisfaction of this expedition with the material sent, one house in New York now carries in stock a good assortment of such things of standard pattern and quality. Fairbanks was ransacked for boots of any kind in which three or four pairs of socks could be worn. Alaska is a country of big men accustomed to the natural spread of the foot which a moccasin permits, but we could not find boots to our need save rubber snow-packs, and we bought half a dozen pairs of them (No. 12) and had leather soles fastened under them and nailed. Four pairs of alpine boots at eleven dollars a pair equals forty-four dollars. Six pairs of snow-packs at five dollars equals thirty dollars. Leather soles for them at three dollars equals eighteen dollars; which totalled ninety-two dollars--entirely wasted. We found that moccasins were the only practicable foot-gear; and we had to put _five_ pairs of socks within them before we were done. But we did not know that at the time and had no means of discovering it. All these matters were put in hand under Karstens's direction, while the writer, only just arrived in Fairbanks from Fort Yukon and Tanana, made a flying trip to the new mission at the Tanana Crossing, two hundred and fifty miles above Fairbanks, with Walter and the dog team; and most of them were finished by the time we returned. A multitude of small details kept us several days more in Fairbanks, so that nearly the middle of March had arrived before we were ready to make our start to the mountain, two weeks later than we had planned. [Sidenote: Supplies] Karstens having joined us, we went down to the mission at Nenana (seventy-five miles) in a couple of days, and there two more days were spent overhauling and repacking the stuff that had come from the outside. In the way of food, we had imported only erbswurst, seventy-two four-ounce packages; milk chocolate, twenty pounds; compressed China tea in tablets (a most excellent tea with a very low percentage of tannin), five pounds; a specially selected grade of Smyrna figs, ten pounds; and sugared almonds, ten pounds--about seventy pounds' weight, all scrupulously reserved for the high-mountain work. For trail equipment we had one eight-by-ten "silk" tent, used for two previous winters; three small circular tents of the same material, made in Fairbanks, for the high work; a Yukon stove and the usual complement of pots and pans and dishes, including two admirable large aluminum pots for melting snow, used a number of years with great satisfaction. A "primus" stove, borrowed from the _Pelican's_ galley, was taken along for the high work. The bedding was mainly of down quilts, which are superseding fur robes and blankets for winter use because of their lightness and warmth and the small compass into which they may be compressed. Two pairs of camel's-hair blankets and one sleeping-bag lined with down and camel's-hair cloth were taken, and Karstens brought a great wolf-robe, weighing twenty-five pounds, of which we were glad enough later on. [Illustration: Striking across from the Tanana to the Kantishna.] [Sidenote: Start] Another team was obtained at the mission, and Mr. R. G. Tatum and the two boys, Johnny and Esaias, joined the company, which, thus increased to six persons, two sleds, and fourteen dogs, set out from Nenana across country to the Kantishna on St. Patrick's day. Travelling was over the beaten trail to the Kantishna gold camp, one of the smallest of Alaskan camps, supporting about thirty men. In 1906 there was a wild stampede to this region, and two or three thousand people went in, chiefly from the Fairbanks district. Town after town was built--Diamond City, Glacier City, Bearpaw City, Roosevelt, McKinley City--all with elaborate saloons and gambling-places, one, at least, equipped with electric lights. But next summer the boom burst and all the thousands streamed out. Gold there was and is yet, but in small quantities only. The "cities" are mere collections of tumble-down huts amongst which the moose roam at will. Interior Alaska has many such abandoned "cities." The few men now in the district have placer claims that yield a "grub-stake" as a sure thing every summer, and spend their winters chiefly in prospecting for quartz. At Diamond City, on the Bearpaw, lay our cache of grub, and that place, some ninety miles from Nenana and fifty miles from the base of Denali, was our present objective point. It was bright, clear weather and the trail was good. For thirty miles our way lay across the wide flats of the Tanana Valley, and this stage brought us to the banks of the Nenana River. Another day of twenty-five miles of flats brought us to Knight's comfortable road-house and ranch on the Toklat, a tributary of the Kantishna, the only road-house this trail can now support. Several times during these two days we had clear glimpses of the great mountain we were approaching, and as we came out of the flat country, the "Sheephills," a foot-hill range of Denali, much broken and deeply sculptured, rose picturesquely before us. Our travel was now almost altogether on "overflow" ice, upon the surface of swift streams that freeze solidly over their riffles and shallows and thus deny passage under the ice to the water of fountains and springs that never ceases flowing. So it bursts forth and flows _over_ the ice with a continually renewing surface of the smoothest texture. Carrying a mercurial barometer that one dare not intrust to a sled on one's back over such footing is a somewhat precarious proceeding, but there was no alternative, and many miles were thus passed. Up the Toklat, then up its Clearwater Fork, then up its tributary, Myrtle Creek, to its head, and so over a little divide and down Willow Creek, we went, and from that divide and the upper reaches of the last-named creek had fine, clear views not only of Denali but of Denali's Wife as well, now come much nearer and looming much larger. [Illustration: One of the abandoned mining towns in the Kantishna.] [Sidenote: The Faces of the Mountain] But here it may be stated once for all that the view which this face of the mountains presents is never a satisfying one. The same is true in even greater degree of the southern face, all photographs agreeing with all travellers as to its tameness. There is only one face of the Denali group that is completely satisfying, that is adequate to the full picturesque potentiality of a twenty-thousand-foot elevation. The writer has seen no other view, no other aspect of it, comparable to that of the northwest face from Lake Minchúmina. There the two mountains rise side by side, sheer, precipitous, pointed rocks, utterly inaccessible, savage, and superb. The rounded shoulders, the receding slopes and ridges of the other faces detract from the uplift and from the dignity, but the northwestern face is stark. One more run, of much the same character as the previous day, and we were at Eureka, in the heart of the Kantishna country, on Friday, 21st March, being Good Friday. We arrived there at noon and "called it a day," and spent the rest of it in the devotions of that august anniversary. Easter eve took us to Glacier City, and we lay there over the feast, gathering three or four men who were operating a prospecting-drill in that neighborhood for the first public worship ever conducted in the Kantishna camp. Ten miles more brought us to Diamond City, on the Bearpaw, where we found our cache of food in good condition save that the field-mice, despite all precautions, had made access to the cereals and had eaten all the rolled oats. Amongst the Kantishna miners, who were most kindly and generous in their assistance, we were able to pick up enough large-sized moccasins to serve the members of the party, and we wore nothing else at all on the mountain. [Illustration: Denali from the McKinley fork of the Kantishna River. Showing the two peaks of the mountain, the one in the rear and to the left (the South Peak) is the higher.] [Sidenote: Timber-Line] Our immediate task now lay before us. A ton and a half of supplies had to be hauled some fifty miles across country to the base of the mountain. Here the relaying began, stuff being taken ahead and cached at some midway point, then another load taken right through a day's march, and then a return made to bring up the cache. In this way we moved steadily though slowly across rolling country and upon the surface of a large lake to the McKinley Fork of the Kantishna, which drains the Muldrow Glacier, down that stream to its junction with the Clearwater Fork of the same, and up that fork, through its canyon, to the last spruce timber on its banks, and there we made a camp in an exceedingly pretty spot. The creek ran open through a break in the ice in front of our tent; the water-ousels darted in and out under the ice, singing most sweetly; the willows, all in bud, perfumed the air; and Denali soared clear and brilliant, far above the range, right in front of us. Here at the timber-line, at an elevation of about two thousand feet, was the pleasantest camp of the whole excursion. During the five days' stay here the stuff was brought up and carried forward, and a quantity of dry wood was cut and advanced to a cache at the mouth of the creek by which we should reach the Muldrow Glacier. It should be said that the short and easy route by which that glacier is reached was discovered after much scouting and climbing by McGonogill and Taylor in 1910, upon the occasion of the "pioneer" attempt upon the mountain, of which more will be said by and by. The men in the Kantishna camp who took part in that attempt gave us all the information they possessed, as they had done to the party that attempted the mountain last summer. There has been no need to make reconnoissance for routes since these pioneers blazed the way: there is no other practicable route than the one they discovered. The two subsequent climbing parties have followed precisely in their footsteps up as far as the Grand Basin at sixteen thousand feet, and it is the merest justice that such acknowledgment be made. At our camp the Clearwater ran parallel with the range, which rose like a great wall before us. Our approach was not directly toward Denali but toward an opening in the range six or eight miles to the east of the great mountain. This opening is known as Cache Creek. Passing the willow patch at its mouth, where previous camps had been made, we pushed up the creek some three miles more to its forks, and there established our base camp, on 10th April, at about four thousand feet elevation. A few scrubby willows struggled to grow in the creek bed, but the hills that rose from one thousand five hundred to two thousand feet around us were bare of any vegetation save moss and were yet in the main covered with snow. Caribou signs were plentiful everywhere, and we were no more than settled in camp when a herd appeared in sight. [Illustration: Entering the range by Cache Creek. The Muldrow Glacier flows between the peak in the background (Mt. Brooks) and the ridge just below it.] [Sidenote: Game and Its Preparation] Our prime concern at this camp was the gathering and preserving of a sufficient meat supply for our subsistence on the mountain. It was an easy task. First Karstens killed a caribou and then Walter a mountain-sheep. Then Esaias happened into the midst of a herd of caribou as he climbed over a ridge, and killed three. That was all we needed. Then we went to work preparing the meat. Why should any one haul canned pemmican hundreds of miles into the greatest game country in the world? We made our own pemmican of the choice parts of this tender, juicy meat and we never lost appetite for it or failed to enjoy and assimilate it. A fifty-pound lard-can, three parts filled with water, was set on the stove and kept supplied with joints of meat. As a batch was cooked we took it out and put more into the same water, removed the flesh from the bones, and minced it. Then we melted a can of butter, added pepper and salt to it, and rolled a handful of the minced meat in the butter and moulded it with the hands into a ball about as large as a baseball. We made a couple of hundred of such balls and froze them, and they kept perfectly. When all the boiling was done we put in the hocks of the animals and boiled down the liquor into five pounds of the thickest, richest meat-extract jelly, adding the marrow from the bones. With this pemmican and this extract of caribou, a package of erbswurst and a cupful of rice, we concocted every night the stew which was our main food in the higher regions. [Illustration: Some heads of game killed at the base camp.] [Sidenote: The Instruments] Here the instruments were overhauled. The mercurial barometer reading by verniers to three places of decimals was set up and read, and the two aneroids were adjusted to read with it. These two aneroids perhaps deserve a word. Aneroid A was a three-inch, three-circle instrument, the invention of Colonel Watkins, of the British army, of range-finder fame. It seems strange that the advantage of the three-circle aneroid is so little known in this country, for its three concentric circles give such an open scale that, although this particular instrument reads to twenty-five thousand feet, it is easy to read as small a difference as twenty feet on it. It had been carried in the hind sack of the writer's sled for the past eight winters and constantly and satisfactorily used to determine the height of summits and passes upon the trails of the interior. Aneroid B was a six-inch patent mountain aneroid, another invention of the same military genius, prompted by Mr. Whymper's experiments with the aneroid barometer after his return from his classic climbs to the summits of the Bolivian Andes. Colonel Watkins devised an instrument in which by a threaded post and a thumb-screw the spring may be relaxed or brought into play at will, and the instrument is never in commission save when a reading is taken. Then a few turns of the thumb-screw bring the spring to bear upon the box, its walls expand until the pressure of the spring equals the pressure of the atmosphere, the reading is taken, and the instrument thrown out of operation again--a most ingenious arrangement by which it was hoped to overcome some of the persistent faults of elastic-chamber barometers. The writer had owned this instrument for the past ten years, but had never opportunity to test its usefulness until now. So, although it read no lower than about fifteen inches, he took it with him to observe its operation. Lastly, completing the hypsometrical equipment, was a boiling-point thermometer, with its own lamp and case, reading to 165° by tenths of a degree. Then there were the ice-creepers or crampons to adjust to the moccasins--terribly heavy, clumsy rat-trap affairs they looked, but they served us well on the higher reaches of the mountain and are, if not indispensable, at least most valuable where hard snow or ice is to be climbed. The snow-shoes, also, had to be rough-locked by lashing a wedge-shaped bar of hardwood underneath, just above the tread, and screwing calks along the sides. Thus armed, they gave us sure footing on soft snow slopes, and were particularly useful in ascending the glacier. While thus occupied at the base camp, came an Indian, his wife and child, all the way from Lake Minchúmina, perhaps one hundred miles' journey, to have the child baptized. It was generally known amongst all the natives of the region that the enterprise was on foot, and "Minchúmina John," hoping to meet us in the Kantishna, and missing us, had followed our trail thus far. It was interesting to speculate how much further he would have penetrated: Walter thought as far as the glacier, but I think he would have followed as far as the dogs could go or until food was quite exhausted. [Illustration: The base camp at about 4,000 feet on Cache Creek. The Muldrow Glacier flows between the ridge in the background and the peak just beyond it.] Meanwhile, the relaying of the supplies and the wood to the base camp had gone on, and the advancing of it to a cache at the pass by which we should gain the Muldrow Glacier. On 15th April Esaias and one of the teams were sent back to Nenana. Almost all the stuff we should move was already at this cache, and the need for the two dog teams was over. Moreover, the trails were rapidly breaking up, and it was necessary for the boy to travel by night instead of by day on his return trip. Johnny and the other dog team we kept, because we designed to use the dogs up to the head of the glacier, and the boy to keep the base camp and tend the dogs, when this was done, until our return. So we said good-by to Esaias, and he took out the last word that was received from us in more than two months. [Sidenote: McPhee Pass] The photograph of the base camp shows a mountainous ridge stretching across much of the background. That ridge belongs to the outer wall of the Muldrow Glacier and indicates its general direction. Just beyond the picture, to the right, the ridge breaks down, and the little valley in the middle distance sweeps around, becomes a steep, narrow gulch, and ends at the breach in the glacier wall. This breach, thus reached, is the pass which the Kantishna miners of the "pioneer" expedition discovered and named "McPhee Pass," after a Fairbanks saloon-keeper. The name should stand. There is no other pass by which the glacier can be reached; certainly none at all above, and probably no convenient one below. Unless this pass were used, it would be necessary to make the long and difficult journey to the snout of the glacier, some twenty miles farther to the east, cross its rough terminal moraine, and traverse all its lower stretch. On the 11th April Karstens and I wound our way up the narrow, steep defile for about three miles from the base camp and came to our first sight of the Muldrow Glacier, some two thousand five hundred feet above camp and six thousand, three hundred feet above the sea. That day stands out in recollection as one of the notable days of the whole ascent. There the glacier stretched away, broad and level--the road to the heart of the mountain, and as our eyes traced its course our spirits leaped up that at last we were entered upon our real task. One of us, at least, knew something of the dangers and difficulties its apparently smooth surface concealed, yet to both of us it had an infinite attractiveness, for it was the highway of desire. CHAPTER II THE MULDROW GLACIER Right opposite McPhee Pass, across the glacier, perhaps at this point half a mile wide, rises a bold pyramidal peak, twelve thousand or thirteen thousand feet high, which we would like to name Mount Farthing, in honor of the memory of a very noble gentlewoman who died at the mission at Nenana three years ago, unless, unknown to us, it already bear some other name.[1] Walter and our two Indian boys had been under her instruction. At the base of this peak two branches of the glacier unite, coming down in the same general direction and together draining the snows of the whole eastern face of the mountain. The dividing wall between them, almost up to their head and termination, is one stupendous, well-nigh vertical escarpment of ice-covered rock towering six thousand or seven thousand feet above the glacier floor, the first of the very impressive features of the mountain. The other wall of the glacier, through a breach in which we reached its surface--the right-hand wall as we journeyed up it--consists of a series of inaccessible cliffs deeply seamed with snow gullies and crusted here and there with hanging glaciers, the rock formation changing several times as one proceeds but maintaining an unbroken rampart. Now, it is important to remember that these two ridges which make the walls of the Muldrow Glacier rise ultimately to the two summits of the mountain, the right-hand wall culminating in the North Peak and the left-hand wall in the South Peak. And the glacier lies between the walls all the way up and separates the summits, with this qualification--that midway in its course it is interrupted by a perpendicular ice-fall of about four thousand feet by which its upper portion discharges into its lower. It will help the reader to a comprehension of the ascent if this rough sketch be borne in mind. [Illustration: The Muldrow Glacier. Karstens in the foreground.] The course of the glacier at the point at which we reached it is nearly northeast and southwest (magnetic); its surface is almost level and it is free of crevasses save at its sides. For three or four miles above the pass it pursues its course without change of direction or much increase in grade; then it takes a broad sweep toward the south and grows steep and much crevassed. Three miles farther up it takes another and more decided southerly bend, receiving two steep but short tributaries from the northwest at an elevation of about ten thousand feet, and finishing its lower course in another mile and a half, at an elevation of about eleven thousand five hundred feet, with an almost due north and south direction (magnetic). A week after our first sight of the glacier, or on the 18th April, we were camped at about the farthest point we had been able to see on that occasion--just round the first bend. Our stuff had been freighted to the pass and cached there; then, in the usual method of our advance, the camp had been moved forward beyond the cache on to the glacier, a full day's march. Then the team worked backward, bringing up the stuff to the new camp. Thus three could go ahead, prospecting and staking out a trail for further advance, while two worked with the dog team at the freighting. [Sidenote: Crevasses] For the glacier difficulties now confronted us in the fullest degree. Immediately above our tent the ice rose steeply a couple of hundred feet, and at that level began to be most intricately crevassed. It took several days to unravel the tangle of fissures and discover and prepare a trail that the dogs could haul the sleds along. Sometimes a bridge would be found over against one wall of the glacier, and for the next we might have to go clear across to the other wall. Sometimes a block of ice jammed in the jaws of a crevasse would make a perfectly safe bridge; sometimes we had nothing upon which to cross save hardened snow. Some of the gaps were narrow and some wide, yawning chasms. Some of them were mere surface cracks and some gave hundreds of feet of deep blue ice with no bottom visible at all. Sometimes there was no natural bridge over a crevasse, and then, choosing the narrowest and shallowest place in it, we made a bridge, excavating blocks of hard snow with the shovels and building them up from a ledge below, or projecting them on the cantilever principle, one beyond the other from both sides. Many of these crevasses could be jumped across by an unencumbered man on his snow-shoes that could not have been jumped with a pack and that the dogs could not cross at all. As each section of trail was determined it was staked out with willow shoots, hundreds of which had been brought up from below. And in all of this pioneering work, and, indeed, thenceforward invariably, the rope was conscientiously used. Every step of the way up the glacier was sounded by a long pole, the man in the lead thrusting it deep into the snow while the two behind kept the rope always taut. More than one pole slipped into a hidden crevasse and was lost when vigor of thrust was not matched by tenacity of grip; more than once a man was jerked back just as the snow gave way beneath his feet. The open crevasses were not the dangerous ones; the whole glacier was crisscrossed by crevasses completely covered with snow. In bright weather it was often possible to detect them by a slight depression in the surface or by a faint, shadowy difference in tint, but in the half-light of cloudy and misty weather these signs failed, and there was no safety but in the ceaseless prodding of the pole. The ice-axe will not serve--one cannot reach far enough forward with it for safety, and the incessant stooping is an unnecessary added fatigue. [Sidenote: Heavy Hauling] For the transportation of our wood and supplies beyond the first glacier camp, the team of six dogs was cut into two teams of three, each drawing a little Yukon sled procured in the Kantishna, the large basket sled having been abandoned. And in the movement forward, when the trail to a convenient cache had been established, two men, roped together, accompanied each sled, one ahead of the dogs, the other just behind the dogs at the gee-pole. This latter had also a hauling-line looped about his breast, so that men and dogs and sled made a unit. It took the combined traction power of men and dogs to take the loads up the steep glacial ascents, and it was very hard work. Once, "Snowball," the faithful team leader of four years past, who has helped to haul my sled nearly ten thousand miles, broke through a snow bridge and, the belly-band parting, slipped out of his collar and fell some twenty feet below to a ledge in a crevasse. Walter was let down and rescued the poor brute, trembling but uninjured. Without the dogs we should have been much delayed and could hardly, one judges, have moved the wood forward at all. The work on the glacier was the beginning of the ceaseless grind which the ascent of Denali demands. [Illustration: Ascension Day, 1913.] How intolerably hot it was, on some of these days, relaying the stuff up the glacier! I shall never forget Ascension Day, which occurred this year on the 1st May. Double feast as it was--for SS. Philip and James falls on that day--it was a day of toil and penance. With the mercurial barometer and a heavy pack of instruments and cameras and films on my back and the rope over my shoulder, bent double hauling at the sled, I trudged along all day, panting and sweating, through four or five inches of new-fallen snow, while the glare of the sun was terrific. It seemed impossible that, surrounded entirely by ice and snow, with millions of tons of ice underfoot, it _could_ be so hot. But we took the loads right through to the head of the glacier that day, rising some four thousand feet in the course of five miles, and cached them there. On other days a smother of mist lay all over the glacier surface, with never a breath of wind, and the air seemed warm and humid as in an Atlantic coast city in July. Yet again, starting early in the morning, sometimes a zero temperature nipped toes and fingers and a keen wind cut like a knife. Sometimes it was bitterly cold in the mornings, insufferably hot at noon, and again bitterly cold toward night. It was a pity we had no black-bulb, sun-maximum thermometer amongst our instruments, for one is sure its readings would have been of great interest. It was a pity, also, that we had no means of making an attempt at measuring the rate of movement of this glacier--a subject we often discussed. The carriage of poles enough to set out rows of them across the glacier would have greatly increased our loads and the time required to transport them. But it is certain that its rate of movement is very slow in general, though faster at certain spots than at others, and a reason for this judgment will be given later. [Illustration: Bridging a crevasse on the Muldrow Glacier.] [Sidenote: The Fire on the Glacier] The midway cache between our first and last glacier camps was itself the scene of a camp we had not designed, for on the day we were moving finally forward we were too fatigued to press on to the spot that had been selected at the head of the glacier, and by common consent made a halt at the cache and set up the tent there. This is mentioned because it had consequences. If we had gone through that day and had established ourselves at the selected spot, a disaster that befell us would, in all probability, not have happened; for the next day, instead of moving our camp forward, we relayed some stuff and cached it where the camp would be made, covering the cache with the three small silk tents. Then we sat around awhile and ate our luncheon, and presently went down for another load. Imagine our surprise, upon returning some hours later, to see a column of smoke rising from our cache. All sorts of wild speculations flew through the writer's mind as, in the lead that day, he first crested the sérac that gave view of the cache. Had some mysterious climber come over from the other side of the mountain and built a fire on the glacier? Had he discovered our wood and our grub and, perhaps starving, kindled a fire of the one to cook the other? Was there really, then, some access to this face of the mountain from the south? For it is fixed in the mind of the traveller in the north beyond eradication that _smoke_ must mean _man_. But ere we had gone much farther the truth dawned upon us that our cache was on fire, and we left the dogs and the sleds and hurried to the spot. Something we were able to save, but not much, though we were in time to prevent the fire from spreading to our far-hauled wood. And the explanation was not far to seek. After luncheon Karstens and the writer had smoked their pipes, and one or the other had thrown a careless match away that had fallen unextinguished upon the silk tents that covered the cache. Presently a little wind had fanned the smouldering fabric into flame, which had eaten down into the pile of stuff below, mostly in wooden cases. All our sugar was gone, all our powdered milk, all our baking-powder, our prunes, raisins, and dried apples, most of our tobacco, a case of pilot bread, a sack full of woollen socks and gloves, another sack full of photographic films--all were burned. Most fortunately, the food provided especially for the high-mountain work had not yet been taken to the cache, and our pemmican, erbswurst, chocolate, compressed tea, and figs were safe. But it was a great blow to us and involved considerable delay at a very unfortunate time. We felt mortification at our carelessness as keenly as we felt regret at our loss. The last thing a newcomer would dream of would be danger from fire on a glacier, but we were not newcomers, and we all knew how ever-present that danger is, more imminent in Alaska in winter than in summer. Our carelessness had brought us nigh to the ruining of the whole expedition. The loss of the films was especially unfortunate, for we were thus reduced to Walter's small camera with a common lens and the six or eight spools of film he had for it. [Illustration: Hard work for dogs as well as men on the Muldrow Glacier.] [Sidenote: Camping Comfort] The next day the final move of the main camp was made, and we established ourselves in the cirque at the head of the Muldrow Glacier, at an elevation of about eleven thousand five hundred feet, more than half-way up the mountain. After digging a level place in the glacier and setting up the tent, a wall of snow blocks was built all round it, and a little house of snow blocks, a regular Eskimo igloo, was built near by to serve as a cache. Some details of our camping may be of interest. The damp from the glacier ice had incommoded us at previous camps, coming up through skins and bedding when the tent grew warm. So at this camp we took further precaution. The boxes in which our grub had been hauled were broken up and laid over the whole portion of the floor of the tent where our bed was; over this wooden floor a canvas cover was laid, and upon this the sun-dried hides of the caribou and mountain-sheep we had killed were placed. There was thus a dry bottom for our bedding, and we were not much troubled thenceforward by the rising moisture, although a camp upon the ice is naturally always a more or less sloppy place. The hides were invaluable; heavy as they were, we carried them all the way up. So soon as we were thus securely lodged, elated when we thought of our advance, but downcast when we recalled our losses, we set ourselves to repair the damage of the fire so far as it was reparable. Walter and Johnny must go all the way down to the base camp and bring up sled-covers out of which to construct tents, must hunt the baggage through for old socks and mitts, and must draw upon what grub had been left for the return journey to the extreme limit it was safe to do so. Karstens, accustomed to be clean-shaven, had been troubled since our first glacier camp with an affection of the face which he attributed to "ingrowing whiskers," but when many hairs had been plucked out with the tweezers and he was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse and the inflammation spread to neck and temple, it was more correctly attributed to an eczema, or tetter, caused by the glare of the sun. So he was not loath to seclude himself for a few days in the tent while we set about the making of socks and mitts from the camel's-hair lining of the sleeping-bag. Walter's face was also very sore from the sun, his lips in particular being swollen and blistered. So painful did they become that I had to cut lip covers of surgeon's plaster to protect them. Then the boys returned with the sorry gleanings of the base camp, and the business of making two tents from the soiled and torn sled-covers and darning worn-out socks and mittens, was put in hand. Our camp looked like a sweat-shop those days, with its cross-legged tailormen and its litter of snippets. In addition to the six-by-seven tent, three feet six inches high, in which we were to live when we left the glacier, we made a small, conical tent in which to read the instruments on the summit. And all those days the sun shone in a clear sky! [Sidenote: Amber Glasses] Here, since reference has just been made to the effect of the sun's glare on the face of one member of the party, it may be in place to speak of the perfect eye protection which the amber snow-glasses afforded us. Long experience with blue and smoke-colored glasses upon the trail in spring had led us to expect much irritation of the eyes despite the use of snow-glasses, and we had plentifully provided ourselves with boracic acid and zinc sulphate for eye-washes. But the amber glasses, with their yellow celluloid side-pieces, were not a mere palliative, as all other glasses had been in our experience, but a complete preventive of snow-blindness. No one of us had the slightest trouble with the eyes, and the eye-washes were never used. It is hard for any save men compelled every spring to travel over the dazzling snows to realize what a great boon this newly discovered amber glass is. There is no reason anywhere for any more snow-blindness, and there is no use anywhere for any more blue or smoked glasses. The invention of the amber snow-glass is an even greater blessing to the traveller in the north than the invention of the thermos bottle. No test could be more severe than that which we put these glasses to. We were now at the farthest point at which it was possible to use the dogs, at our actual climbing base, and the time had come for Johnny and the dogs to go down to the base camp for good. We should have liked to keep the boy, so good-natured and amiable he was and so keen for further climbing; but the dogs must be tended, and the main food for them was yet to seek on the foot-hills with the rifle. So on 9th May down they went, Tatum and the writer escorting them with the rope past the crevasses as far as the first glacier camp, and then toiling slowly up the glacier again, thankful that it was for the last time. That was one of the sultriest and most sweltering days either of us ever remembered, a moist heat of sun beating down through vapor, with never a breath of breeze--a stifling, stewing day that, with the steep climb added, completely exhausted and prostrated us. [Sidenote: The Great Ice-Fall] It is important that the reader should be able to see, in his mind's eye, the situation of our camp at the head of the glacier, because to do so is to grasp the simple orography of this face of the mountain, and to understand the route of its ascent, probably the only route by which it can be ascended. Standing beside the tent, facing in the direction we have journeyed, the great highway of the glacier comes to an abrupt end, a cul-de-sac. On the right hand the wall of the glacier towers up, with enormous precipitous cliffs incrusted with hanging ice, to the North Peak of the mountain, eight or nine thousand feet above us. About at right angles to the end of the glacier, and four thousand feet above it, is another glacier, which discharges by an almost perpendicular ice-fall upon the floor of the glacier below.[2] The left-hand wall of the glacier, described some pages back as a stupendous escarpment of ice-covered rock, breaks rapidly down into a comparatively low ridge, which sweeps to the right, encloses the head of the glacier, and then rises rapidly to the glacier above, and still rises to form the left-hand wall of that glacier, and finally the southern or higher peak of the mountain. So the upper glacier separates the two great peaks of the mountain and discharges at right angles into the lower glacier. And the walls of the lower glacier sweep around and rise to form the walls of the upper glacier, and ultimately the summits of the mountain. To reach the peaks one must first reach the upper glacier, and the southern or left-hand wall of the lower glacier, where it breaks down into the ridge that encloses the head of the glacier, is the only possible means by which the upper basin may be reached. This ridge, then, called by Parker and Browne the Northeast Ridge (and we have kept that designation, though with some doubt as to its correctness), presented itself as the next stage in our climb. [Sidenote: Last Year's Earthquake] Now just before leaving Fairbanks we had received a copy of a magazine containing the account of the Parker-Browne climb, and in that narrative Mr. Browne speaks of this Northeast Ridge as "a steep but practicable snow slope," and prints a photograph which shows it as such. To our surprise, when we first reached the head of the glacier, the ridge offered no resemblance whatever to the description or the photograph. The upper one-third of it was indeed as described, but at that point there was a sudden sharp cleavage, and all below was a jumbled mass of blocks of ice and rock in all manner of positions, with here a pinnacle and there a great gap. Moreover, the floor of the glacier at its head was strewn with enormous icebergs that we could not understand at all. All at once the explanation came to us--"the earthquake"! The Parker-Browne party had reported an earthquake which shook the whole base of the mountain on 6th July, 1912, two days after they had come down, and, as was learned later, the seismographic instruments at Washington recorded it as the most severe shock since the San Francisco disturbance of 1906. There could be no doubt that the earthquake had disrupted this ridge. The huge bergs all around us were not the normal discharge of hanging glaciers as we had at first wonderingly supposed; they were the incrustation of ages, maybe, ripped off the rocks and hurled down from the ridge by this convulsion. It was as though, as soon as the Parker-Browne party reached the foot of the mountain, the ladder by which they had ascended and descended was broken up. [Illustration: The Northeast Ridge shattered by the earthquake in July, 1912. The earthquake cleavage is plainly shown half-way down the ridge in the background. The Browne Tower is the uppermost point in the picture. The Parker Pass is along its base.] What a wonderful providential escape these three men, Parker, Browne, and La Voy had! They reached a spot within three or four hundred feet of the top of the mountain, struggling gallantly against a blizzard, but were compelled at last to beat a retreat. Again from their seventeen-thousand-foot camp they essayed it, only to be enshrouded and defeated by dense mist. They would have waited in their camp for fair weather had they been provided with food, but their stomachs would not retain the canned pemmican they had carried laboriously aloft, and they were compelled to give up the attempt and descend. So down to the foot of the mountain they went, and immediately they reached their base camp this awful earthquake shattered the ridge and showered down bergs on both the upper and lower glaciers. Had their food served they had certainly remained above, and had they remained above their bodies would be there now. Even could they have escaped the avalanching icebergs they could never have descended that ridge after the earthquake. They would either have been overwhelmed and crushed to death instantly or have perished by starvation. One cannot conceive grander burial than that which lofty mountains bend and crack and shatter to make, or a nobler tomb than the great upper basin of Denali; but life is sweet and all men are loath to leave it, and certainly never men who cling to life had more cause to be thankful. The difficulty of our task was very greatly increased; that was plain at a glance. This ridge, that the pioneer climbers of 1910 went up at one march with climbing-irons strapped beneath their moccasins, carrying nothing but their flagpole, that the Parker-Browne party surmounted in a few days, relaying their camping stuff and supplies, was to occupy us for three weeks while we hewed a staircase three miles long in the shattered ice. [Sidenote: Glacier Movement] It was the realization of the earthquake and of what it had done that convinced us that this Muldrow Glacier has a very slow rate of movement. The great blocks of ice hurled down from above lay apparently just where they had fallen almost a year before. At the points of sharp descent, at the turns in its course, at the points where tributary glaciers were received, the movement is somewhat more rapid. We saw some crevasses upon our descent that were not in existence when we went up. But for the whole stretch of it we were satisfied that a very few feet a year would cover its movement. No doubt all the glaciers on this side of the range are much more sluggish than on the other side, where the great precipitation of snow takes place. We told Johnny to look for us in two weeks. It was thirty-one days ere we rejoined him. For now began the period of suspense, of hope blasted anew nearly every morning, the period of weary waiting for decent weather. With the whole mountain and glacier enveloped in thick mist it was not possible to do anything up above, and day after day this was the condition, varied by high wind and heavy snow. From the inexhaustible cisterns of the Pacific Ocean that vapor was distilled, and ever it rose to these mountains and poured all over them until every valley, every glacier, every hollow, was filled to overflowing. There seemed sometimes to us no reason why the process should not go on forever. The situation was not without its ludicrous side, when one had the grace to see it. Here were four men who had already passed through the long Alaskan winter, and now, when the rivers were breaking and the trees bursting into leaf, the flowers spangling every hillside, they were deliberately pushing themselves up into the winter still, with the long-expected summer but a day's march away. The tedium of lying in that camp while snow-storm or fierce, high wind forbade adventure upon the splintered ridge was not so great to the writer as to some of the other members of the expedition, for there was always Walter's education to be prosecuted, as it had been prosecuted for three winters on the trail and three summers on the launch, in a desultory but not altogether unsuccessful manner. An hour or two spent in writing from dictation, another hour or two in reading aloud, a little geography and a little history and a little physics made the day pass busily. A pupil is a great resource. Karstens was continually designing and redesigning a motor-boat in which one engine should satisfactorily operate twin screws; Tatum learned the thirty-nine articles by heart; but naval architecture and even controversial divinity palled after a while. The equipment and the supplies for the higher region were gone over again and again, to see that all was properly packed and in due proportion. [Sidenote: The Language of Commerce] [Sidenote: "Talcum and Glucose"] As one handled the packages and read and reread the labels, one was struck by the meagre English of merchandisers and the poor verbal resources of commerce generally. A while ago business dealt hardly with the word "proposition." It was the universal noun. Everything that business touched, however remotely, was a "proposition." When last he was "outside" the writer heard the Nicene creed described as a "tough proposition"; the Vice-President of the United States as a "cold-blooded proposition," and missionaries in Alaska generally as "queer propositions." Now commerce has discovered and appropriated the word "product" and is working it for all it is worth. The coffee in the can calls itself a product. The compressed medicines from London direct you to "dissolve one product" in so much water; the vacuum bottles inform you that since they are a "glass product" they will not guarantee themselves against breakage; the tea tablets and the condensed pea soup affirm the purity of "these products"; the powdered milk is a little more explicit and calls itself a "food product." One feels disposed to agree with Humpty Dumpty, in "Through the Looking-Glass," that when a word is worked as hard as this it ought to be paid extra. One feels that "product" ought to be coming round on Saturday night to collect its overtime. The zwieback amuses one; it is a West-coast "product," and apparently "product" has not yet reached the West coast--it does not so dignify itself. But it urges one, in great letters on every package, to "save the end seals; they are valuable!" Walter finds that by gathering one thousand two hundred of these seals he would be entitled to a "rolled-gold" watch absolutely free! This zwieback was the whole stock of a Yukon grocer purchased when the supply we ordered did not arrive. The writer was reminded of the time when he bought several two-pound packages of rolled oats at a little Yukon store and discovered to his disgust that every package contained a china cup and saucer that must have weighed at least a pound. One can understand the poor Indian being thus deluded into the belief that he is getting his crockery for nothing, but it is hard to understand how the "gift-enterprise" and "premium-package" folly still survives amongst white people--and Indians do not eat zwieback. What sort of people are they who will feverishly purchase and consume one thousand two hundred packages of zwieback in order to get a "rolled-gold" watch for nothing? A sack of corn-meal takes one's eye mainly by the enumeration of the formidable processes which the "product" inside has survived. It is announced proudly as "degerminated, granulated, double kiln-dried, steam-ground"! But why, in the name even of an adulterous and adulterating generation, should rice be "coated with talcum and glucose," as this sack unblushingly confesses? It is all very well to add "remove by washing"; that is precisely what we shall be unable to do. It will take all the time and fuel we have to spare to melt snow for cooking, when one little primus stove serves for all purposes. When we leave this camp there will be no more water for the toilet; we shall have to cleanse our hands with snow and let our faces go. The rice will enter the pot unwashed and will transfer its talcum and glucose to our intestines. Nor is this the case merely on exceptional mountain-climbing expeditions; it is the general rule during the winter throughout Alaska. It takes a long time and a great deal of snow and much wood to produce a pot of water on the winter trail. That "talcum-and-glucose" abomination should be taken up by the Pure Food Law authorities. All the rice that comes to Alaska is so labelled. The stomachs and bowels of dogs and men in the country are doubtless gradually becoming "coated with talcum and glucose." [Sidenote: Sugar] It was during this period of hope deferred that we began to be entirely without sugar. Perhaps by the ordinary man anywhere, certainly by the ordinary man in Alaska, where it is the rule to include as much sugar as flour in an outfit, deprivation of sugar is felt more keenly than deprivation of any other article of food. We watched the gradual dwindling of our little sack, replenished from the base camp with the few pounds we had reserved for our return journey, with sinking hearts. It was kept solely for tea and coffee. We put no more in the sour dough for hot cakes; we ceased its use on our rice for breakfast; we gave up all sweet messes. Tatum attempted a pudding without sugar, putting vanilla and cinnamon and one knows not what other flavorings in it, in the hope of disguising the absence of sweetness, but no one could eat it and there was much jeering at the cook. Still it dwindled and dwindled. Two spoonfuls to a cup were reduced by common consent to one, and still it went, until at last the day came when there was no more. Our cocoa became useless--we could not drink it without sugar; our consumption of tea and coffee diminished--there was little demand for the second cup. And we all began to long for sweet things. We tried to make a palatable potation from some of our milk chocolate, reserved for the higher work and labelled, "For eating only." The label was accurate; it made a miserable drink, the milk taste entirely lacking, the sweetness almost gone. We speculated how our ancestors got on without sugar when it was a high-priced luxury brought painfully in small quantities from the Orient, and assured one another that it was not a necessary article of diet. At last we all agreed to Karstens's laconic advice, "Forget it!" and we spoke of sugar no more. When we got on the ridge the chocolate satisfied to some extent the craving for sweetness, but we all missed the sugar sorely and continued to miss it to the end, Karstens as much as anybody else. Our long detention here made us thankful for the large tent and the plentiful wood supply. That wood had been hauled twenty miles and raised nearly ten thousand feet, but it was worth while since it enabled us to "weather out the weather" here in warmth and comparative comfort. The wood no more than served our need; indeed, we had begun to economize closely before we left this camp. We were greatly interested and surprised at the intrusion of animal life into these regions totally devoid of any vegetation. A rabbit followed us up the glacier to an elevation of ten thousand feet, gnawing the bark from the willow shoots with which the trail was staked, creeping round the crevasses, and, in one place at least, leaping such a gap. At ten thousand feet he turned back and descended, leaving his tracks plain in the snow. We speculated as to what possible object he could have had, and decided that he was migrating from the valley below, overstocked with rabbits as it was, and had taken a wrong direction for his purpose. Unless the ambition for first ascents have reached the leporidæ, this seems the only explanation. At this camp at the head of the glacier we saw ptarmigan on several occasions, and heard their unmistakable cry on several more, and once we felt sure that a covey passed over the ridge above us and descended to the other glacier. It was always in thick weather that these birds were noticed at the glacier head, and we surmised that perhaps they had lost their way in the cloud. But even this was not the greatest height at which bird life was encountered. In the Grand Basin, at sixteen thousand five hundred feet, Walter was certain that he heard the twittering of small birds familiar throughout the winter in Alaska, and this also was in the mist. I have never known the boy make a mistake in such matters, and it is not essentially improbable. Doctor Workman saw a pair of choughs at twenty-one thousand feet, on Nun Kun in the Himalayas. [Sidenote: Avalanches] Our situation on the glacier floor, much of the time enveloped in dense mist, was damp and cold and gloomy. The cliffs around from time to time discharged their unstable snows in avalanches that threw clouds of snow almost across the wide glacier. Often we could see nothing, and the noise of the avalanches without the sight of them was at times a little alarming. But the most notable discharges were those from the great ice-fall, and the more important of them were startling and really very grand sights. A slight movement would begin along the side of the ice, in one of the gullies of the rock, a little trickling and rattling. Gathering to itself volume as it descended, it started ice in other gullies and presently there was a roar from the whole face of the enormous hanging glacier, and the floor upon which the precipitation descended trembled and shook with the impact of the discharge. Dense volumes of snow and ice dust rose in clouds thousands of feet high and slowly drifted down the glacier. We had chosen our camping-place to be out of harm's way and were really quite safe. We never saw any large masses detached, and by the time the ice reached the glacier floor it was all reduced to dust and small fragments. One does not recall in the reading of mountaineering books any account of so lofty an ice-fall. [Illustration: Cutting a staircase three miles long in the ice of the shattered ridge.] FOOTNOTES: [1] I have since learned that this mountain was named Mount Brooks by Professor Parker, and so withdraw the suggested name. [2] See frontispiece. CHAPTER III THE NORTHEAST RIDGE Some of the photographs we succeeded in getting will show better than any words the character of the ridge we had to climb to the upper basin by. The lowest point of the ridge was that nearest our camp. To reach its crest at that point, some three hundred feet above the glacier, was comparatively easy, but when it was reached there stretched ahead of us miles and miles of ice-blocks heaved in confusion, resting at insecure angles, poised, some on their points, some on their edges, rising in this chaotic way some 3,000 feet. Here one would have to hew steps up and over a pinnacle, there one must descend again and cut around a great slab. Our wisest course was to seek to reach the crest of the ridge much further along, beyond as much of this ice chaos as possible. But it was three days before we could find a way of approach to the crest that did not take us under overhanging icebergs that threatened continually to fall upon our heads, as the overhanging hill threatened Christian in the "Pilgrim's Progress." At last we took straight up a steep gully, half of it snow slope, the upper half ice-incrusted rock, and hewed steps all the five hundred feet to the top. Here we were about half a mile beyond the point at which we first attained the crest, with that half mile of ice-blocks cut out, but beyond us the prospect loomed just as difficult and as dangerous. We could cut out no more of the ridge; we had tried place after place and could reach it safely at no point further along. The snow slopes broke off with the same sharp cleavage the whole ridge displayed two thousand five hundred feet above; there was no other approach. [Sidenote: The Shattered Ridge] So our task lay plain and onerous, enormously more dangerous and laborious than that which our predecessors encountered. We must cut steps in those ice-blocks, over them, around them, on the sheer sides of them, under them--whatever seemed to our judgment the best way of circumventing each individual block. Every ten yards presented a separate problem. Here was a sharp black rock standing up in a setting of ice as thin and narrow and steep as the claws that hold the stone in a finger-ring. That ice must be chopped down level, and then steps cut all round the rock. It took a solid hour to pass that rock. Here was a great bluff of ice, with snow so loose and at such a sharp angle about it that passage had to be hewed up and over and down it again. On either side the ridge fell precipitously to a glacier floor, with yawning crevasses half-way down eagerly swallowing every particle of ice and snow that our axes dislodged: on the right hand to the west fork of the Muldrow Glacier, by which we had journeyed hither; on the left to the east fork of the same, perhaps one thousand five hundred feet, perhaps two thousand feet lower. At the gap in the ridge, with the ice gable on the other side of it, the difficulty and the danger were perhaps at their greatest. It took the best part of a day's cutting to make steps down the slope and then straight up the face of the enormous ice mass that confronted us. The steps had to be made deep and wide; it was not merely one passage we were making; these steps would be traversed again and again by men with heavy packs as we relayed our food and camp equipage along this ridge, and we were determined from the first to take no unnecessary risks whatever. We realized that the passage of this shattered ridge was an exceedingly risky thing at best. To go along it day after day seemed like tempting Providence. We were resolved that nothing on our part should be lacking that could contribute to safety. Day by day we advanced a little further and returned to camp. [Illustration: The shattered Northeast Ridge.] [Sidenote: The Hall of the Mountain King] The weather doubled the time and the tedium of the passage of this ridge. From Whitsunday to Trinity Sunday, inclusive, there were only two days that we could make progress on the ridge at all, and on one of those days the clouds from the coast poured over so densely and enveloped us so completely that it was impossible to see far enough ahead to lay out a course wisely. On that day we toppled over into the abyss a mass of ice, as big as a two-story house, that must have weighed hundreds of tons. It was poised upon two points of another ice mass and held upright by a flying buttress of wind-hardened snow. Three or four blows from Karstens's axe sent it hurling downward. It passed out of our view into the cloud-smother immediately, but we heard it bound and rebound until it burst with a report like a cannon, and some days later we saw its fragments strewn all over the flat two thousand feet below. What a sight it must have been last July, when the whole ridge was heaving, shattering, and showering down its bergs upon the glacier floors! One day we were driven off the ridge by a high wind that threatened to sweep us from our footholds. On another, a fine morning gave place to a sudden dense snow-storm that sent us quickly below again. Always all day long, while we were on that ridge, the distant thunder of avalanches resounded from the great basin far above us, into which the two summits of Denali were continually discharging their snows. It sounded as though the King of Denmark were drinking healths all day long to the salvoes of his artillery--that custom "more honored in the breach than in the observance." From such fancy the mind passed easily enough to the memory of that astonishing composition of Grieg's, "In the Hall of the Mountain King," and, once recalled, the stately yet staccato rhythm ran in one's ears continually. For if we had many days of cloud and smother of vapor that blotted out everything, when a fine day came how brilliant beyond all that lower levels know it was! From our perch on that ridge the lofty peaks and massive ridges rose on every side. As little by little we gained higher and higher eminence the view broadened, and ever new peaks and ridges thrust themselves into view. We were within the hall of the mountain kings indeed; kings nameless here, in this multitude of lofty summits, but that elsewhere in the world would have each one his name and story. And how eager and impatient we were to rise high enough, to progress far enough on that ridge that we might gaze into the great basin itself from which the thunderings came, the spacious hall of the two lords paramount of all the mountains of the continent--the north and south peaks of Denali! Our hearts beat high with the anticipation not only of gazing upon it but of entering it and pitching our tent in the midst of its august solitudes. To come down again--for there was as yet no spot reached on that splintered backbone where we might make a camp--to pass day after day in our tent on the glacier floor waiting for the bad weather to be done that we might essay it again; to watch the tantalizing and, as it seemed, meaningless fluctuations of the barometer for encouragement; to listen to the driving wind and the swirling snow, how tedious that was! [Sidenote: Camp on the Ridge] At last when we had been camped for three weeks at the head of the glacier, losing scarce an hour of usable weather, but losing by far the greater part of the time, when the advance party the day before had reached a tiny flat on the ridge where they thought camp could be made, we took a sudden desperate resolve to move to the ridge at any cost. All the camp contained that would be needed above was made up quickly into four packs, and we struck out, staggering under our loads. Before we reached the first slope of the ridge each man knew in his heart that we were attempting altogether too much. Even Karstens, who had packed his "hundred and a quarter" day after day over the Chilkoot Pass in 1897, admitted that he was "heavy." But we were saved the chagrin of acknowledging that we had undertaken more than we could accomplish, for before we reached the steep slope of the ridge a furious snow-storm had descended upon us and we were compelled to return to camp. The next day we proceeded more wisely. We took up half the stuff and dug out a camping-place and pitched the little tent. Every step had to be shovelled out, for the previous day's snow had filled it, as had happened so many times before, and it took five and one-half hours to reach the new camping-place. On Sunday, 25th May, the first Sunday after Trinity, we took up the rest of the stuff, and established ourselves at a new climbing base, about thirteen thousand feet high and one thousand five hundred feet above the glacier floor, not to descend again until we descended for good. We were now much nearer our work and it progressed much faster, although as the ridge rose it became steeper and steeper and even more rugged and chaotic, and the difficulty and danger of its passage increased. Our situation up here was decidedly pleasanter than below. We had indeed exchanged our large tent for a small one in which we could sit upright but could not stand, and so narrow that the four of us, lying side by side, had to make mutual agreement to turn over; our comfortable wood-stove for the little kerosene stove; yet when the clouds cleared we had a noble, wide prospect and there was not the sense of damp immurement that the floor of the glacier gave. The sun struck our tent at 4.30 A. M., which is nearly two and one-half hours earlier than we received his rays below, and lingered with us long after our glacier camp was in the shadow of the North Peak. Moreover, instead of being colder, as we expected, it was warmer, the minimum ranging around zero instead of around 10° below. [Illustration: Camp at 13,000 feet on Northeast Ridge.] [Sidenote: Clouds and Climate] The rapidity with which the weather changed up here was a continual source of surprise to us. At one moment the skies would be clear, the peaks and the ridge standing out with brilliant definition; literally five minutes later they would be all blotted out by dense volumes of vapor that poured over from the south. Perhaps ten minutes more and the cloud had swept down upon the glacier and all above would be clear again; or it might be the vapor deepened and thickened into a heavy snow-storm. Sometimes everything below was visible and nothing above, and a few minutes later everything below would be obscured and everything above revealed. This great crescent range is, indeed, our rampart against the hateful humidity of the coast and gives to us in the interior the dry, windless, exhilarating cold that is characteristic of our winters. We owe it mainly to this range that our snowfall averages about six feet instead of the thirty or forty feet that falls on the coast. The winds that sweep northward toward this mountain range are saturated with moisture from the warm waters of the Pacific Ocean; but contact with the lofty colds condenses the moisture into clouds and precipitates most of it on the southern slopes as snow. Still bearing all the moisture their lessened temperature will allow, the clouds pour through every notch and gap in the range and press resolutely onward and downward, streaming along the glaciers toward the interior. But all the time of their passage they are parting with their moisture, for the snow is falling from them continually in their course. They reach the interior, indeed, and spread out triumphant over the lowlands, but most of their burden has been deposited along the way. One is reminded of the government train of mules from Fort Egbert that used to supply the remote posts of the "strategic" telegraph line before strategy yielded to economy and the useless line was abandoned. When the train reached the Tanana Crossing it had eaten up nine-tenths of its original load, and only one-tenth remained for the provisioning of the post. So these clouds were being squeezed like a sponge; every saddle they pushed through squeezed them; every peak and ridge they surmounted squeezed them; every glacier floor they crept down squeezed them, and they reached the interior valleys attenuated, depleted, and relatively harmless. [Sidenote: Aneroids] The aneroids had kept fairly well with the mercurial barometer and the boiling-point thermometer until we moved to the ridge; from this time they displayed a progressive discrepancy therewith that put them out of serious consideration, and one was as bad as the other. Eleven thousand feet seemed the limit of their good behavior. To set them back day by day, like Captain Cuttle's watch, would be to depend wholly upon the other instruments anyway, and this is just what we did, not troubling to adjust them. They were read and recorded merely because that routine had been established. Says Burns: "There was a lad was born in Kyle, But whatna day o' whatna style, I doubt it's hardly worth the while To be sae nice wi' Robin." So they were just aneroids: aluminum cases, jewelled movements, army-officer patented improvements, Kew certificates, import duty, and all--just aneroids, and one was as bad as the other. Within their limitations they are exceedingly useful instruments, but it is folly to depend on them for measuring great heights. Perched up here, the constant struggle of the clouds from the humid south to reach the interior was interesting to watch, and one readily understood that Denali and his lesser companions are a prime factor in the climate of interior Alaska. Day by day Karstens and Walter would go up and resume the finding and making of a way, and Tatum and the writer would relay the stuff from the camp to a cache, some five hundred feet above, and thence to another. The grand objective point toward which the advance party was working was the earthquake cleavage--a clean, sharp cut in the ice and snow of fifty feet in height. Above that point all was smooth, though fearfully steep; below was the confusion the earthquake had wrought. Each day Karstens felt sure they would reach the break, but each day as they advanced toward it the distance lengthened and the intricate difficulties increased. More than once a passage painfully hewn in the solid ice had to be abandoned, because it gave no safe exit, and some other passage found. At last the cleavage was reached, and it proved the most ticklish piece of the whole ridge to get around. Just below it was a loose snow slope at a dangerous angle, where it seemed only the initial impulse was needed for an avalanche to bear it all below. And just before crossing that snow slope was a wall of overhanging ice beneath which steps must be cut for one hundred yards, every yard of which endangered the climber by disputing the passage of the pack upon his shoulders. [Illustration: A dangerous passage.] [Sidenote: The Primus Stove] Late in the evening of the 27th May, looking up the ridge upon our return from relaying a load to the cache, we saw Karstens and Walter standing, clear-cut, against the sky, upon the surface of the unbroken snow _above_ the earthquake cleavage. Tatum and I gave a great shout of joy, and, far above as they were, they heard us and waved their response. We watched them advance upon the steep slope of the ridge until the usual cloud descended and blotted them out. The way was clear to the top of the ridge now, and that night our spirits were high, and congratulations were showered upon the victorious pioneers. The next day, when they would have gone on to the pass, the weather drove them back. On that smooth, steep, exposed slope a wind too high for safety beat upon them, accompanied by driving snow. That day a little accident happened that threatened our whole enterprise--on such small threads do great undertakings hang. The primus stove is an admirable device for heating and cooking--superior, one thinks, to all the newfangled "alcohol utilities"--but it has a weak point. The fine stream of kerosene--which, under pressure from the air-pump, is impinged against the perforated copper cup, heated to redness by burning alcohol, and is thus vaporized--first passes through several convolutions of pipe within the burner, and then issues from a hole so fine that some people would not call it a hole at all but an orifice or something like that. That little hole is the weak spot of the primus stove. Sometimes it gets clogged, and then a fine wire mounted upon some sort of handle must be used to dislodge the obstruction. Now, the worst thing that can happen to a primus stove is to get the wire pricker broken off in the burner hole, and that is what happened to us. Without a special tool that we did not possess, it is impossible to get at that burner to unscrew it, and without unscrewing it the broken wire cannot be removed. Tatum and I turned the stove upside down and beat upon it and tapped it, but nothing would dislodge that wire. It looked remarkably like no supper; it looked alarmingly like no more stove. How we wished we had brought the other stove from the launch, also! Every bow on an undertaking of this kind should have two strings. But when Karstens came back he went to work at once, and this was one of the many occasions when his resourcefulness was of the utmost service. With a file, and his usual ingenuity, he constructed, out of the spoon-bowl of a pipe cleaner the writer had in his pocket, the special tool necessary to grip that little burner, and soon the burner was unscrewed and the broken wire taken out and the primus was purring away merrily again, melting the water for supper. We feel sure that we would have pushed on even had we been without fire. The pemmican was cooked already, and could be eaten as it was, and one does not die of thirst in the midst of snow; but calm reflection will hardly allow that we could have reached the summit had we been deprived of all means of cooking and heating. [Sidenote: Germless Air] On this ridge the dough refused to sour, and since our baking-powder was consumed in the fire we were henceforth without bread. A cold night killed the germ in the sour dough, and we were never again able to set up a fermentation in it. Doubtless the air at this altitude is free from the necessary spores or germs of ferment. Pasteur's and Tyndall's experiments on the Alps, which resulted in the overthrow of the theory of spontaneous generation, and the rehabilitation of the old dogma that life comes only from life, were recalled with interest, but without much satisfaction. We tried all sorts of ways of cooking the flour, but none with any success. Next to the loss of sugar we felt the loss of bread, and in the food longings that overtook us bread played a large part. On Friday, 30th May, the way had been prospected right up to the pass which gives entrance to the Grand Basin; a camping-place had been dug out there and a first load of stuff carried through and cached. So on that morning we broke camp, and the four of us, roped together, began the most important advance we had made yet. With stiff packs on our backs we toiled up the steps that had been cut with so much pains and stopped at the cache just below the cleavage to add yet further burdens. All day nothing was visible beyond our immediate environment. Again and again one would have liked to photograph the sensational-looking traverse of some particularly difficult ice obstacle, but the mist enveloped everything. Just before we reached the smooth snow slope above the range of the earthquake disturbance lay one of the really dangerous passages of the climb. [Sidenote: A Perilous Passage] It is easier to describe the difficulty and danger of this particular portion of the ascent than to give a clear impression to a reader of other places almost as hazardous. Directly below the earthquake cleavage was an enormous mass of ice, detached from the cleavage wall. From below, it had seemed connected with that wall, and much time and toil had been expended in cutting steps up it and along its crest, only to find a great gulf fixed; so it was necessary to pass along its base. Now from its base there fell away at an exceedingly sharp angle, scarcely exceeding the angle of repose, a slope of soft, loose snow, and the very top of that slope where it actually joined the wall of ice offered the only possible passage. The wall was in the main perpendicular, and turned at a right angle midway. Just where it turned, a great mass bulged out and overhung. This traverse was so long that with both ropes joined it was still necessary for three of the four members of the party to be on the snow slope at once, two men out of sight of the others. Any one familiar with Alpine work will realize immediately the great danger of such a traverse. There was, however, no avoiding it, or, at whatever cost, we should have done so. Twice already the passage had been made by Karstens and Walter, but not with heavy packs, and one man was always on ice while the other was on snow. This time all four must pass, bearing all that men could bear. Cautiously the first man ventured out, setting foot exactly where foot had been set before, the three others solidly anchored on the ice, paying out the rope and keeping it taut. When all the first section of rope was gone, the second man started, and when, in turn, his rope was paid out, the third man started, leaving the last man on the ice holding to the rope. This, of course, was the most dangerous part of this passage. If one of the three had slipped it would have been almost impossible for the others to hold him, and if he had pulled the others down, it would have been quite impossible for the solitary man on the ice to have withstood the strain. When the first man reached solid ice again there was another equally dangerous minute or two, for then all three behind him were on the snow slope. The beetling cliff, where the trail turned at right angles, was the acutely dangerous spot. With heavy and bulky packs it was exceedingly difficult to squeeze past this projection. Ice gives no such entrance to the point of the axe as hard snow does, yet the only aid in steadying the climber, and in somewhat relieving his weight on the loose snow, was afforded by such purchase upon the ice-wall, shoulder high, as that point could effect. Not a word was spoken by any one; all along the ice-wall rang in the writer's ears that preposterous line from "The Hunting of the Snark"--"Silence, not even a shriek!" It was with a deep and thankful relief that we found ourselves safely across, and when a few minutes later we had climbed the steep snow that lay against the cleavage wall and were at last upon the smooth, unbroken crest of the ridge, we realized that probably the worst place in the entire climb was behind us. Steep to the very limit of climbability as that ridge was, it was the easiest going we had had since we left the glacier floor. The steps were already cut; it was only necessary to lift one foot after the other and set the toe well in the hole, with the ice-axe buried afresh in the snow above at every step. But each step meant the lifting not only of oneself but of one's load, and the increasing altitude, perhaps aggravated by the dense vapor with which the air was charged, made the advance exceedingly fatiguing. From below, the foreshortened ridge seemed only of short length and of moderate grade, could we but reach it--a tantalizingly easy passage to the upper glacier it looked as we chopped our way, little by little, nearer and nearer to it. But once upon it, it lengthened out endlessly, the sky-line always just a little above us, but never getting any closer. [Sidenote: The Cock's Comb] Just before reaching the steepest pitch of the ridge, where it sweeps up in a cock's comb,[3] we came upon the vestiges of a camp made by our predecessors of a year before, in a hollow dug in the snow--an empty biscuit carton and a raisin package, some trash and brown paper and discolored snow--as fresh as though they had been left yesterday instead of a year ago. Truly the terrific storms of this region are like the storms of Guy Wetmore Carryl's clever rhyme that "come early and avoid the _rush_." They will sweep a man off his feet, as once threatened to our advance party, but will pass harmlessly over a cigarette stump and a cardboard box; our tent in the glacier basin, ramparted by a wall of ice-blocks as high as itself, we found overwhelmed and prostrate upon our return, but the willow shoots with which we had staked our trail upon the glacier were all standing. Long as it was, the slope was ended at last, and we came straight to the great upstanding granite slabs amongst which is the natural camping-place in the pass that gives access to the Grand Basin. We named that pass the Parker Pass, and the rock tower of the ridge that rises immediately above it, the most conspicuous feature of this region from below, we named the Browne Tower. The Parker-Browne party was the first to camp at this spot, for the astonishing "sourdough" pioneers made no camp at all above the low saddle of the ridge (as it then existed), but took all the way to the summit of the North Peak in one gigantic stride. The names of Parker and Browne should surely be permanently associated with this mountain they were so nearly successful in climbing, and we found no better places to name for them. There is only one difficulty about the naming of this pass; strictly speaking, it is not a pass at all, and the writer does not know of any mountaineering term that technically describes it. Yet it should bear a name, for it is the doorway to the upper glacier, through which all those who would reach the summit must enter. On the one hand rises the Browne Tower, with the Northeast Ridge sweeping away beyond it toward the South Peak. On the other hand, the ice of the upper glacier plunges to its fall. The upstanding blocks of granite on a little level shoulder of the ridge lead around to the base of the cliffs of the Northeast Ridge, and it is around the base of those cliffs that the way lies to the midst of the Grand Basin. So the Parker Pass we call it and desire that it should be named. [Illustration: The Upper Basin reached at last. Our camp at the Parker Pass at 15,000 feet.] [Sidenote: Karstens Ridge] And while names are before us, the writer would ask permission to bestow another. Having nothing to his credit in the matter at all, as the narrative has already indicated, he feels free to say that in his opinion the conquest of the difficulties of the earthquake-shattered ridge was an exploit that called for high qualities of judgment and cautious daring, and would, he thinks, be considered a brilliant piece of mountaineering anywhere in the world. He would like to name that ridge Karstens Ridge, in honor of the man who, with Walter's help, cut that staircase three miles long amid the perilous complexities of its chaotic ice-blocks. When we reached the Parker Pass all the world beneath us was shrouded in dense mist, but all above us was bathed in bright sunshine. The great slabs of granite were like a gateway through which the Grand Basin opened to our view. The ice of the upper glacier, which fills the Grand Basin, came terracing down from some four thousand feet above us and six miles beyond us, with progressive leaps of jagged blue sérac between the two peaks of the mountain, and, almost at our feet, fell away with cataract curve to its precipitation four thousand feet below us. Across the glacier were the sheer, dark cliffs of the North Peak, soaring to an almost immediate summit twenty thousand feet above the sea; on the left, in the distance, was just visible the receding snow dome of the South Peak, with its two horns some five hundred feet higher. The mists were passing from the distant summits, curtain after curtain of gauze draping their heads for a moment and sweeping on. We made our camp between the granite slabs on the natural camping site that offered itself, and a shovel and an empty alcohol-can proclaimed that our predecessors of last year had done the same. The next morning the weather had almost completely cleared, and the view below us burst upon our eyes as we came out of the tent into the still air. [Sidenote: Parker Pass] The Parker Pass is the most splendid coigne of vantage on the whole mountain, except the summit itself. From an elevation of something more than fifteen thousand feet one overlooks the whole Alaskan range, and the scope of view to the east, to the northeast, and to the southeast is uninterrupted. Mountain range rises beyond mountain range, until only the snowy summits are visible in the great distance, and one knows that beyond the last of them lies the open sea. The near-by peaks and ridges, red with granite or black with shale and gullied from top to bottom with snow and ice, the broad highways of the glaciers at their feet carrying parallel moraines that look like giant tram-lines, stand out with vivid distinction. A lofty peak, that we suppose is Mount Hunter, towers above the lesser summits. The two arms of the Muldrow Glacier start right in the foreground and reveal themselves from their heads to their junction and then to the terminal snout, receiving their groaning tributaries from every evacuating height. The dim blue lowlands, now devoid of snow, stretch away to the northeast, with threads of stream and patches of lake that still carry ice along their banks. And all this splendor and diversity yielded itself up to us at once; that was the most sensational and spectacular feature of it. We went to sleep in a smother of mist; we had seen nothing as we climbed; we rose to a clear, sparkling day. The clouds were mysteriously rolling away from the lowest depths; the last wisps of vapor were sweeping over the ultimate heights. Here one would like to camp through a whole week of fine weather could such a week ever be counted upon. Higher than any point in the United States, the top of the Browne Tower probably on a level with the top of Mount Blanc, it is yet not so high as to induce the acute breathlessness from which the writer suffered, later, upon any exertion. The climbing of the tower, the traversing to the other side of it, the climbing of the ridge, would afford pleasant excursions, while the opportunity for careful though difficult photography would be unrivalled. Even in thick weather the clouds are mostly below; and their rapid movement, the kaleidoscopic changes which their coming and going, their thickening and thinning, their rising and falling produce, are a never-failing source of interest and pleasure. The changes of light and shade, the gradations of color, were sometimes wonderfully delicate and charming. Seen through rapidly attenuating mist, the bold crags of the icy ridge between the glacier arms in the foreground would give a soft French gray that became a luminous mauve before it sprang into dazzling black and white in the sunshine. In the sunshine, indeed, the whole landscape was hard and brilliant, and lacked half-tones, as in the main it lacked color; but when the vapor drew the gauze of its veil over it there came rich, soft, elusive tints that were no more than hinted ere they were gone. [Illustration: Above all the range except Denali and Denali's Wife.] [Sidenote: The Himalayas] Here, with nothing but rock and ice and snow around, nine thousand feet above any sort of vegetation even in the summer, it was of interest to remember that at the same altitude in the Himalayas good crops of barley and millet are raised and apples are grown, while at a thousand feet or so lower the apricot is ripened on the terrace-gardens. Karstens and Walter had brought up a load each on their reconnoissance trip; four heavy loads had been brought the day before. There were yet two loads to be carried up from the cache below the cleavage, and Tatum and Walter, always ready to take the brunt of it, volunteered to bring them. So down that dreadful ridge once more the boys went, while Karstens and the writer prospected ahead for a route into the Grand Basin. The storms and snows of ten or a dozen winters may make a "steep but practicable snow slope" of the Northeast Ridge again. One winter only had passed since the convulsion that disrupted it, and already the snow was beginning to build up its gaps and chasms. All the summer through, for many hours on clear days, the sun will melt those snows and the frost at night will glaze them into ice. The more conformable ice-blocks will gradually be cemented together, while the fierce winds that beat upon the ridge will wear away the supports of the more egregious and unstable blocks, and one by one they will topple into the abyss on this side or on that. It will probably never again be the smooth, homogeneous slope it has been; "the gable" will probably always present a wide cleft, but the slopes beyond it, stripped now of their accumulated ice so as to be unclimbable, may build up again and give access to the ridge. The point about one thousand five hundred feet above the gable, where the earthquake cleavage took place, will perhaps remain the crux of the climb. The ice-wall rises forty or fifty feet sheer, and the broken masses below it are especially difficult and precipitous, but with care and time and pains it can be surmounted even as we surmounted it. And wind and sun and storm may mollify the forbidding abruptness of even this break in the course of time. [Sidenote: The Denali Problem] With the exception of this ridge, Denali is not a mountain that presents special mountaineering difficulties of a technical kind. Its difficulties lie in its remoteness, its size, the great distances of snow and ice its climbing must include the passage of, the burdens that must be carried over those distances. We estimated that it was twenty miles of actual linear distance from the pass by which we reached the Muldrow Glacier to the summit. In the height of summer its snow-line will not be higher than seven thousand feet, while at the best season for climbing it, the spring, the snow-line is much lower. Its climbing is, like nearly all Alaskan problems, essentially one of transportation. But the Northeast Ridge, in its present condition, adds all the spice of sensation and danger that any man could desire. FOOTNOTE: [3] See illustration facing p. 40. CHAPTER IV THE GRAND BASIN The reader will perhaps be able to sympathize with the feeling of elation and confidence which came to us when we had surmounted the difficulties of the ridge and had arrived at the entrance to the Grand Basin. We realized that the greater and more arduous part of our task was done and that the way now lay open before us. For so long a time this point had been the actual goal of our efforts, for so long a time we had gazed upward at it with hope deferred, that its final attainment was accompanied with no small sense of triumph and gratification and with a great accession of faith that we should reach the top of the mountain. [Sidenote: Heat and Cold] The ice of the glacier that fills the basin was hundreds of feet beneath us at the pass, but it rises so rapidly that by a short traverse under the cliffs of the ridge we were able to reach its surface and select a camping site thereon at about sixteen thousand feet. It was bitterly cold, with a keen wind that descended in gusts from the heights, and the slow movement of step-cutting gave the man in the rear no opportunity of warming up. Toes and fingers grew numb despite multiple socks within mammoth moccasins and thick gloves within fur mittens. From this time, during our stay in the Grand Basin and until we had left it and descended again, the weather progressively cleared and brightened until all clouds were dispersed. From time to time there were fresh descents of vapor, and even short snow-storms, but there was no general enveloping of the mountain again. Cold it was, at times even in the sunshine, with "a nipping and an eager air," but when the wind ceased it would grow intensely hot. On the 4th June, at 3 P. M., the thermometer in the full sunshine rose to 50° F.--the highest temperature recorded on the whole excursion--and the fatigue of packing in that thin atmosphere with the sun's rays reflected from ice and snow everywhere was most exhausting. We were burned as brown as Indians; lips and noses split and peeled in spite of continual applications of lanoline, but, thanks to those most beneficent amber snow-glasses, no one of the party had the slightest trouble with his eyes. At night it was always cold, 10° below zero being the highest minimum during our stay in the Grand Basin, and 21° below zero the lowest. But we always slept warm; with sheep-skins and caribou-skins under us, and down quilts and camel's-hair blankets and a wolf-robe for bedding, the four of us lay in that six-by-seven tent, in one bed, snug and comfortable. It was disgraceful overcrowding, but it was warm. The fierce little primus stove, pumped up to its limit and perfectly consuming its kerosene fuel, shot out its corona of beautiful blue flame and warmed the tight, tiny tent. The primus stove, burning seven hours on a quart of coal-oil, is a little giant for heat generation. If we had had two, so that one could have served for cooking and one for heating, we should not have suffered from the cold at all, but as it was, whenever the stew-pot went on the stove, or a pot full of ice to melt, the heat was immediately absorbed by the vessel and not distributed through the tent. But another primus stove would have been another five or six pounds to pack, and we were "heavy" all the time as it was. [Illustration: Traverse under the cliffs of the Northeast Ridge to enter the Grand Basin.] [Sidenote: The Labor of Packing] Something has already been said about the fatigue of packing, and one would not weary the reader with continual reference thereto; yet it is certain that those who have carried a pack only on the lower levels cannot conceive how enormously greater the labor is at these heights. As one rises and the density of the air is diminished, so, it would seem, the weight of the pack or the effect of the weight of the pack is in the same ratio increased. We probably moved from three hundred to two hundred and fifty pounds, decreasing somewhat as food and fuel were consumed, each time camp was advanced in the Grand Basin. We could have done with a good deal less as it fell out, but this we did not know, and we were resolved not to be defeated in our purpose by lack of supplies. But the packing of these loads, relaying them forward, and all the time steeply rising, was labor of the most exhausting and fatiguing kind, and there is no possible way in which it may be avoided in the ascent of this mountain. To roam over glaciers and scramble up peaks free and untrammelled is mountaineering in the Alps. Put a forty-pound pack on a man's back, with the knowledge that to-morrow he must go down for another, and you have mountaineering in Alaska. In the ascent of this twenty-thousand-foot mountain every member of the party climbed at least sixty thousand feet. It is this going down and doing it all over again that is the heart-breaking part of climbing. [Illustration: First camp in the Grand Basin--16,000 feet, looking up.] It was in the Grand Basin that the writer began to be seriously affected by the altitude, to be disturbed by a shortness of breath that with each advance grew more distressingly acute. While at rest he was not troubled; mere existence imposed no unusual burden, but even a slight exertion would be followed by a spell of panting, and climbing with a pack was interrupted at every dozen or score of steps by the necessity of stopping to regain breath. There was no nausea or headache or any other symptom of "mountain sickness." Indeed, it is hard for us to understand that affection as many climbers describe it. It has been said again and again to resemble seasickness in all its symptoms. Now the writer is of the unfortunate company that are seasick on the slightest provocation. Even rough water on the wide stretches of the lower Yukon, when a wind is blowing upstream and the launch is pitching and tossing, will give him qualms. But no one of the four of us had any such feeling on the mountain at any time. Shortness of breath we all suffered from, though none other so acutely as myself. When it was evident that the progress of the party was hindered by the constant stops on my account, the contents of my pack were distributed amongst the others and my load reduced to the mercurial barometer and the instruments, and, later, to the mercurial barometer alone. It was some mortification not to be able to do one's share of the packing, but there was no help for it, and the other shoulders were young and strong and kindly. [Sidenote: Tobacco] With some hope of improving his wind, the writer had reduced his smoking to two pipes a day so soon as the head of the glacier had been reached, and had abandoned tobacco altogether when camp was first made on the ridge; but it is questionable if smoking in moderation has much or any effect. Karstens, who smoked continually, and Walter, who had never smoked in his life, had the best wind of the party. It is probably much more a matter of age. Karstens was a man of thirty-two years, and the two boys were just twenty-one, while the writer approached fifty. None of us slept as well as usual except Walter--and nothing ever interferes with his sleep--but, although our slumbers were short and broken, they seemed to bring recuperation just as though they had been sound. We arose fresh in the morning though we had slept little and light. On the 30th May we had made our camp at the Parker Pass; on the 2d June, the finest and brightest day in three weeks, we moved to our first camp in the Grand Basin. On the 3d June we moved camp again, out into the middle of the glacier, at about sixteen thousand five hundred feet. Here we were at the upper end of one of the flats of the glacier that fills the Grand Basin, the sérac of another great rise just above us. The walls of the North Peak grow still more striking and picturesque here, where they attain their highest elevation. These granite ramparts, falling three thousand feet sheer, swell out into bellying buttresses with snow slopes between them as they descend to the glacier floor, while on top, above the granite, each peak point and crest ridge is tipped with black shale. How comes that ugly black shale, with the fragments of which all the lower glacier is strewn, to have such lofty eminence and granite-guarded distinction, as though it were the most beautiful or the most valuable thing in the world? The McKinley Fork of the Kantishna, which drains the Muldrow, is black as ink with it, and its presence can be detected in the Tanana River itself as far as its junction with the Yukon. It is largely soluble in water, and where melting snow drips over it on the glacier walls below were great splotches, for all the world as though a gigantic ink-pot had been upset. [Illustration: Second camp in the Grand Basin--looking down, 16,500 feet.] [Sidenote: The Flagstaff] While we sat resting awhile on our way to this camp, gazing at these pinnacles of the North Peak, we fell to talking about the pioneer climbers of this mountain who claimed to have set a flagstaff near the summit of the North Peak--as to which feat a great deal of incredulity existed in Alaska for several reasons--and we renewed our determination that, if the weather permitted when we had reached our goal and ascended the South Peak, we would climb the North Peak also to seek for traces of this earliest exploit on Denali, which is dealt with at length in another place in this book. All at once Walter cried out: "I see the flagstaff!" Eagerly pointing to the rocky prominence nearest the summit--the summit itself is covered with snow--he added: "I see it plainly!" Karstens, looking where he pointed, saw it also, and, whipping out the field-glasses, one by one we all looked, and saw it distinctly standing out against the sky. With the naked eye I was never able to see it unmistakably, but through the glasses it stood out, sturdy and strong, one side covered with crusted snow. We were greatly rejoiced that we could carry down positive confirmation of this matter. It was no longer necessary for us to ascend the North Peak. The upper glacier also bore plain signs of the earthquake that had shattered the ridge. Huge blocks of ice were strewn upon it, ripped off the left-hand wall, but it was nowhere crevassed as badly as the lower glacier, but much more broken up into sérac. Some of the bergs presented very beautiful sights, wind-carved incrustations of snow in cameo upon their blue surface giving a suggestion of Wedgwood pottery. All tints seemed more delicate and beautiful up here than on the lower glacier. On the 5th June we advanced to about seventeen thousand five hundred feet right up the middle of the glacier. As we rose that morning slowly out of the flat in which our tent was pitched and began to climb the steep sérac, clouds that had been gathering below swept rapidly up into the Grand Basin, and others swept as rapidly over the summits and down upon us. In a few moments we were in a dense smother of vapor with nothing visible a couple of hundred yards away. Then the temperature dropped, and soon snow was falling which increased to a heavy snow-storm that raged an hour. We made our camp and ate our lunch, and by that time the smother of vapor passed, the sun came out hot again, and we were all simultaneously overtaken with a deep drowsiness and slept. Then out into the glare again, to go down and bring up the remainder of the stuff, we went, and that night we were established in our last camp but one. We had decided to go up at least five hundred feet farther that we might have the less to climb when we made our final attack upon the peak. So when we returned with the loads from below we did not stop at camp, but carried them forward and cached them against to-morrow's final move. [Illustration: Third camp in the Grand Basin--17,000 feet, showing the shattering of the glacier walls by the earthquake. The rocks at the top of the picture are about 19,000 feet high and are the highest rocks on the south peak of the mountain.] [Sidenote: Last Camp] On Friday, the 6th June, we made our last move and pitched our tent in a flat near the base of the ridge, just below the final rise in the glacier of the Grand Basin, at about eighteen thousand feet, and we were able to congratulate one another on making the highest camp ever made in North America. I set up and read the mercurial barometer, and when corrected for its own temperature it stood at 15.061. The boiling-point thermometer registered 180.5, as the point at which water boiled, with an air temperature of 35°. It took one hour to boil the rice for supper. The aneroids stood at 14.8 and 14.9, still steadily losing on the mercurial barometer. I think that a rough altitude gauge could be calculated from the time rice takes to boil--at least as reliable as an aneroid barometer. At the Parker Pass it took fifty minutes; here it took sixty. This is about the height of perpetual snow on the great Himalayan peaks; but we had been above the perpetual snow-line for forty-eight days. We were now within about two thousand five hundred feet of the summit and had two weeks' full supply of food and fuel, which, at a pinch, could be stretched to three weeks. Certain things were short: the chocolate and figs and raisins and salt were low; of the zwieback there remained but two and one-half packages, reserved against lunch when we attacked the summit. But the meatballs, the erbswurst, the caribou jelly, the rice, and the tea--our staples--were abundant for two weeks, with four gallons of coal-oil and a gallon of alcohol. The end of our painful transportation hither was accomplished; we were within one day's climb of the summit with supplies to besiege. If the weather should prove persistently bad we could wait; we could advance our parallels; could put another camp on the ridge itself at nineteen thousand feet, and yet another half-way up the dome. If we had to fight our way step by step and could advance but a couple of hundred feet a day, we were still confident that, barring unforeseeable misfortunes, we could reach the top. But we wanted a clear day on top, that the observations we designed to make could be made; it would be a poor success that did but set our feet on the highest point. And we felt sure that, prepared as we were to wait, the clear day would come. [Illustration: The North Peak, 20,000 feet high. Our last camp in the Grand Basin, at 18,000 feet: the highest camp ever made in North America.] As so often happens when everything unpropitious is guarded against, nothing unpropitious occurs. It would have been a wonderful chance, indeed, if, supplied only for one day, a fine, clear day had come. But supplied against bad weather for two or three weeks, it was no wonder at all that the very first day should have presented itself bright and clear. We had exhausted our bad fortune below; here, at the juncture above all others at which we should have chosen to enjoy it, we were to encounter our good fortune. [Sidenote: Breathlessness] But here, where all signs seemed to promise success to the expedition, the author began to have fears of personal failure. The story of Mr. Fitzgerald's expedition to Aconcagua came to his mind, and he recalled that, although every other member of the party reached the summit, that gentleman himself was unable to do so. In the last stage the difficulty of breathing had increased with fits of smothering, and the medicine chest held no remedy for blind staggers. CHAPTER V THE ULTIMATE HEIGHT We lay down for a few hours on the night of the 6th June, resolved to rise at three in the morning for our attempt upon the summit of Denali. At supper Walter had made a desperate effort to use some of our ten pounds of flour in the manufacture of "noodles" with which to thicken the stew. We had continued to pack that flour and had made effort after effort to cook it in some eatable way, but without success. The sour dough would not ferment, and we had no baking-powder. _Is_ there any way to cook flour under such circumstances? But he made the noodles too large and did not cook them enough, and they wrought internal havoc upon those who partook of them. Three of the four of us were unwell all night. The digestion is certainly more delicate and more easily disturbed at great altitudes than at the lower levels. While Karstens and Tatum were tossing uneasily in the bedclothes, the writer sat up with a blanket round his shoulders, crouching over the primus stove, with the thermometer at -21° F. outdoors. Walter alone was at ease, with digestive and somnolent capabilities proof against any invasion. It was, of course, broad daylight all night. At three the company was aroused, and, after partaking of a very light breakfast indeed, we sallied forth into the brilliant, clear morning with not a cloud in the sky. The only packs we carried that day were the instruments and the lunch. The sun was shining, but a keen north wind was blowing and the thermometer stood at -4° F. We were rather a sorry company. Karstens still had internal pains; Tatum and I had severe headaches. Walter was the only one feeling entirely himself, so Walter was put in the lead and in the lead he remained all day. [Illustration: The South Peak from about 18,000 feet. The ridge with two peaks in the background is shaped like a horseshoe, and the highest point on the mountain is on another little ridge just beyond, parallel with the ridge that shows, almost at the middle point between the two peaks.] [Sidenote: Start to the Summit] [Sidenote: Cold] We took a straight course up the great snow ridge directly south of our camp and then around the peak into which it rises; quickly told but slowly and most laboriously done. It was necessary to make the traverse high up on this peak instead of around its base, so much had its ice and snow been shattered by the earthquake on the lower portions. Once around this peak, there rose before us the horseshoe ridge which carries the ultimate height of Denali, a horseshoe ridge of snow opening to the east with a low snow peak at either end, the centre of the ridge soaring above both peaks. Above us was nothing visible but snow; the rocks were all beneath, the last rocks standing at about 19,000 feet. Our progress was exceedingly slow. It was bitterly cold; all the morning toes and fingers were without sensation, kick them and beat them as we would. We were all clad in full winter hand and foot gear--more gear than had sufficed at 50° below zero on the Yukon trail. Within the writer's No. 16 moccasins were three pairs of heavy hand-knitted woollen socks, two pairs of camel's-hair socks, and a pair of thick felt socks; while underneath them, between them and the iron "creepers," were the soles cut from a pair of felt shoes. Upon his hands were a pair of the thickest Scotch wool gloves, thrust inside huge lynx-paw mitts lined with Hudson Bay duffle. His moose-hide breeches and shirt, worn all the winter on the trail, were worn throughout this climb; over the shirt was a thick sweater and over all the usual Alaskan "parkee" amply furred around the hood; underneath was a suit of the heaviest Jaeger underwear--yet until nigh noon feet were like lumps of iron and fingers were constantly numb. That north wind was cruelly cold, and there can be no possible question that cold is felt much more keenly in the thin air of nineteen thousand feet than it is below. But the north wind was really our friend, for nothing but a north wind will drive all vapor from this mountain. Karstens beat his feet so violently and so continually against the hard snow to restore the circulation that two of his toe-nails sloughed off afterward. By eleven o'clock we had been climbing for six hours and were well around the peak, advancing toward the horseshoe ridge, but even then there were grave doubts if we should succeed in reaching it that day, it was so cold. A hint from any member of the party that his feet were actually freezing--a hint expected all along--would have sent us all back. When there is no sensation left in the feet at all it is, however, difficult to be quite sure if they be actually freezing or not--and each one was willing to give the attempt upon the summit the benefit of the doubt. What should we have done with the ordinary leather climbing boots? But once entirely around the peak we were in a measure sheltered from the north wind, and the sun full upon us gave more warmth. It was hereabouts, and not, surely, at the point indicated in the photograph in Mr. Belmore Browne's book, that the climbing party of last year was driven back by the blizzard that descended upon them when close to their goal. Not until we had stopped for lunch and had drunk the scalding tea from the thermos bottles, did we all begin to have confidence that this day would see the completion of the ascent. But the writer's shortness of breath became more and more distressing as he rose. The familiar fits of panting took a more acute form; at such times everything would turn black before his eyes and he would choke and gasp and seem unable to get breath at all. Yet a few moments' rest restored him completely, to struggle on another twenty or thirty paces and to sink gasping upon the snow again. All were more affected in the breathing than they had been at any time before--it was curious to see every man's mouth open for breathing--but none of the others in this distressing way. Before the traverse around the peak just mentioned, Walter had noticed the writer's growing discomfort and had insisted upon assuming the mercurial barometer. The boy's eager kindness was gladly accepted and the instrument was surrendered. So it did not fall to the writer's credit to carry the thing to the top as he had wished. [Sidenote: Climbing-Irons] The climbing grew steeper and steeper; the slope that had looked easy from below now seemed to shoot straight up. For the most part the climbing-irons gave us sufficient footing, but here and there we came to softer snow, where they would not take sufficient hold and we had to cut steps. The calks in these climbing-irons were about an inch and a quarter long; we wished they had been two inches. The creepers are a great advantage in the matter of speed, but they need long points. They are not so safe as step-cutting, and there is the ever-present danger that unless one is exceedingly careful one will step upon the rope with them and their sharp calks sever some of the strands. They were, however, of great assistance and saved a deal of laborious step-cutting. At last the crest of the ridge was reached and we stood well above the two peaks that mark the ends of the horseshoe.[4] Also it was evident that we were well above the great North Peak across the Grand Basin. Its crest had been like an index on the snow beside us as we climbed, and we stopped for a few moments when it seemed that we were level with it. We judged it to be about five hundred feet lower than the South Peak. [Illustration: The climbing-irons.] But still there stretched ahead of us, and perhaps one hundred feet above us, another small ridge with a north and south pair of little haycock summits. This is the real top of Denali. From below, this ultimate ridge merges indistinguishably with the crest of the horseshoe ridge, but it is not a part of it but a culminating ridge beyond it. With keen excitement we pushed on. Walter, who had been in the lead all day, was the first to scramble up; a native Alaskan, he is the first human being to set foot upon the top of Alaska's great mountain, and he had well earned the lifelong distinction. Karstens and Tatum were hard upon his heels, but the last man on the rope, in his enthusiasm and excitement somewhat overpassing his narrow wind margin, had almost to be hauled up the last few feet, and fell unconscious for a moment upon the floor of the little snow basin that occupies the top of the mountain. This, then, is the actual summit, a little crater-like snow basin, sixty or sixty-five feet long and twenty to twenty-five feet wide, with a haycock of snow at either end--the south one a little higher than the north. On the southwest this little basin is much corniced, and the whole thing looked as though every severe storm might somewhat change its shape. So soon as wind was recovered we shook hands all round and a brief prayer of thanksgiving to Almighty God was said, that He had granted us our hearts' desire and brought us safely to the top of His great mountain. [Sidenote: The Instrument Readings] This prime duty done, we fell at once to our scientific tasks. The instrument-tent was set up, the mercurial barometer, taken out of its leather case and then out of its wooden case, was swung upon its tripod and a rough zero established, and it was left awhile to adjust itself to conditions before a reading was attempted. It was a great gratification to get it to the top uninjured. The boiling-point apparatus was put together and its candle lighted under the ice which filled its little cistern. The three-inch, three-circle aneroid was read at once at thirteen and two-tenths inches, its mendacious altitude scale confidently pointing at twenty-three thousand three hundred feet. Half an hour later it had dropped to 13.175 inches and had shot us up another one hundred feet into the air. Soon the water was boiling in the little tubes of the boiling-point thermometer and the steam pouring out of the vent. The thread of mercury rose to 174.9° and stayed there. There is something definite and uncompromising about the boiling-point hypsometer; no tapping will make it rise or fall; it reaches its mark unmistakably and does not budge. The reading of the mercurial barometer is a slower and more delicate business. It takes a good light and a good sight to tell when the ivory zero-point is exactly touching the surface of the mercury in the cistern; it takes care and precision to get the vernier exactly level with the top of the column. It was read, some half-hour after it was set up, at 13.617 inches. The alcohol minimum thermometer stood at 7° F. all the while we were on top. Meanwhile, Tatum had been reading a round of angles with the prismatic compass. He could not handle it with sufficient exactness with his mitts on, and he froze his fingers doing it barehanded. [Sidenote: The View] The scientific work accomplished, then and not till then did we indulge ourselves in the wonderful prospect that stretched around us. It was a perfectly clear day, the sun shining brightly in the sky, and naught bounded our view save the natural limitations of vision. Immediately before us, in the direction in which we had climbed, lay--nothing: a void, a sheer gulf many thousands of feet deep, and one shrank back instinctively from the little parapet of the snow basin when one had glanced at the awful profundity. Across the gulf, about three thousand feet beneath us and fifteen or twenty miles away, sprang most splendidly into view the great mass of Denali's Wife, or Mount Foraker, as some white men misname her, filling majestically all the middle distance. It was our first glimpse of her during the whole ascent. Denali's Wife does not appear at all save from the actual summit of Denali, for she is completely hidden by his South Peak until the moment when his South Peak is surmounted. And never was nobler sight displayed to man than that great, isolated mountain spread out completely, with all its spurs and ridges, its cliffs and its glaciers, lofty and mighty and yet far beneath us. On that spot one understood why the view of Denali from Lake Minchúmina is the grand view, for the west face drops abruptly down with nothing but that vast void from the top to nigh the bottom of the mountain. Beyond stretched, blue and vague to the southwest, the wide valley of the Kuskokwim, with an end of all mountains. To the north we looked right over the North Peak to the foot-hills below, patched with lakes and lingering snow, glittering with streams. We had hoped to see the junction of the Yukon and Tanana Rivers, one hundred and fifty miles away to the northwest, as we had often and often seen the summit of Denali from that point in the winter, but the haze that almost always qualifies a fine summer day inhibited that stretch of vision. Perhaps the forest-fires we found raging on the Tanana River were already beginning to foul the northern sky. [Illustration: Denali's Wife from the summit of Denali] It was, however, to the south and the east that the most marvellous prospect opened before us. What infinite tangle of mountain ranges filled the whole scene, until gray sky, gray mountain, and gray sea merged in the ultimate distance! The near-by peaks and ridges stood out with dazzling distinction, the glaciation, the drainage, the relation of each part to the others all revealed. The snow-covered tops of the remoter peaks, dwindling and fading, rose to our view as though floating in thin air when their bases were hidden by the haze, and the beautiful crescent curve of the whole Alaskan range exhibited itself from Denali to the sea. To the right hand the glittering, tiny threads of streams draining the mountain range into the Chulitna and Sushitna Rivers, and so to Cook's Inlet and the Pacific Ocean, spread themselves out; to the left the affluents of the Kantishna and the Nenana drained the range into the Yukon and Bering Sea. Yet the chief impression was not of our connection with the earth so far below, its rivers and its seas, but rather of detachment from it. We seemed alone upon a dead world, as dead as the mountains on the moon. Only once before can the writer remember a similar feeling of being neither in the world nor of the world, and that was at the bottom of the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, in Arizona, its savage granite walls as dead as this savage peak of ice. [Sidenote: The Dark Sky] Above us the sky took a blue so deep that none of us had ever gazed upon a midday sky like it before. It was a deep, rich, lustrous, transparent blue, as dark as a Prussian blue, but intensely blue; a hue so strange, so increasingly impressive, that to one at least it "seemed like special news of God," as a new poet sings. We first noticed the darkening tint of the upper sky in the Grand Basin, and it deepened as we rose. Tyndall observed and discussed this phenomenon in the Alps, but it seems scarcely to have been mentioned since. It is difficult to describe at all the scene which the top of the mountain presented, and impossible to describe it adequately. One was not occupied with the thought of description but wholly possessed with the breadth and glory of it, with its sheer, amazing immensity and scope. Only once, perhaps, in any lifetime is such vision granted, certainly never before had been vouchsafed to any of us. Not often in the summer-time does Denali completely unveil himself and dismiss the clouds from all the earth beneath. Yet we could not linger, unique though the occasion, dearly bought our privilege; the miserable limitations of the flesh gave us continual warning to depart; we grew colder and still more wretchedly cold. The thermometer stood at 7° in the full sunshine, and the north wind was keener than ever. My fingers were so cold that I would not venture to withdraw them from the mittens to change the film in the camera, and the other men were in like case; indeed, our hands were by this time so numb as to make it almost impossible to operate a camera at all. A number of photographs had been taken, though not half we should have liked to take, but it is probable that, however many more exposures had been made, they would have been little better than those we got. Our top-of-the-mountain photography was a great disappointment. One thing we learned: exposures at such altitude should be longer than those below, perhaps owing to the darkness of the sky. [Illustration: Robert Tatum raising the Stars and Stripes on the highest point in North America. This photograph was exposed upon a previous exposure.] [Sidenote: The Stars and Stripes] When the mercurial barometer had been read the tent was thrown down and abandoned, the first of the series of abandonments that marked our descent from the mountain. The tent-pole was used for a moment as a flagstaff while Tatum hoisted a little United States flag he had patiently and skilfully constructed in our camps below out of two silk handkerchiefs and the cover of a sewing-bag. Then the pole was put to its permanent use. It had already been carved with a suitable inscription, and now a transverse piece, already prepared and fitted, was lashed securely to it and it was planted on one of the little snow turrets of the summit--the sign of our redemption, high above North America. Only some peaks in the Andes and some peaks in the Himalayas rise above it in all the world. It was of light, dry birch and, though six feet in length, so slender that we think it may weather many a gale. And Walter thrust it into the snow so firmly at a blow that it could not be withdrawn again. Then we gathered about it and said the Te Deum. [Illustration: The saying of the Te Deum. This picture was snapped three times instead of once. Karstens' fingers were freezing and the bulb-release was broken. Only three figures were in the group.] It was 1.30 P. M. when we reached the summit and two minutes past three when we left; yet so quickly had the time flown that we could not believe we had been an hour and a half on top. The journey down was a long, weary grind, the longer and the wearier that we made a détour and went out of our way to seek for Professor Parker's thermometer, which he had left "in a crack on the west side of the last boulder of the northeast ridge." That sounds definite enough, yet in fact it is equivocal. "Which is the last boulder?" we disputed as we went down the slope. A long series of rocks almost in line came to an end, with one rock a little below the others, a little out of the line. This egregious boulder would, it seemed to me, naturally be called the last; Karstens thought not--thought the "last boulder" was the last _on_ the ridge. As we learned later, Karstens was right, and since he yielded to me we did not find the thermometer, for, having descended to this isolated rock, we would not climb up again for fifty thermometers. One's disappointment is qualified by the knowledge that the thermometer is probably not of adequate scale, Professor Parker's recollection being that it read only to 60° below zero, F. A lower temperature than this is recorded every winter on the Yukon River. [Sidenote: Possible Temperatures] A thermometer reading to 100° below zero, left at this spot, would, in my judgment, perhaps yield a lower minimum than has ever yet been authentically recorded on earth, and it is most unfortunate that the opportunity was lost. Yet I did not leave my own alcohol minimum--scaled to 95° below zero, and yielding, by estimation, perhaps ten degrees below the scaling--there, because of the difficulty of giving explicit directions that should lead to its ready recovery, and at the close of such a day of toil as is involved in reaching the summit, men have no stomach for prolonged search. As will be told, it is cached lower down, but at a spot where it cannot be missed. However, for one, the writer was largely unconscious of weariness in that descent. All the way down, my thoughts were occupied with the glorious scene my eyes had gazed upon and should gaze upon never again. In all human probability I would never climb that mountain again; yet if I climbed it a score more times I would never be likely to repeat such vision. Commonly, only for a few hours at a time, never for more than a few days at a time, save in the dead of winter when climbing is out of the question, does Denali completely unveil himself and dismiss the clouds from all the earth beneath him. Not for long, with these lofty colds contiguous, will the vapors of Cook's Inlet and Prince William Sound and the whole North Pacific Ocean refrain from sweeping upward; their natural trend is hitherward. As the needle turns to the magnet so the clouds find an irresistible attraction in this great mountain mass, and though the inner side of the range be rid of them the sea side is commonly filled to overflowing. [Sidenote: The Te Deum] Only those who have for long years cherished a great and almost inordinate desire, and have had that desire gratified to the limit of their expectation, can enter into the deep thankfulness and content that filled the heart upon the descent of this mountain. There was no pride of conquest, no trace of that exultation of victory some enjoy upon the first ascent of a lofty peak, no gloating over good fortune that had hoisted us a few hundred feet higher than others who had struggled and been discomfited. Rather was the feeling that a privileged communion with the high places of the earth had been granted; that not only had we been permitted to lift up eager eyes to these summits, secret and solitary since the world began, but to enter boldly upon them, to take place, as it were, domestically in their hitherto sealed chambers, to inhabit them, and to cast our eyes down from them, seeing all things as they spread out from the windows of heaven itself. Into this strong yet serene emotion, into this reverent elevation of spirit, came with a shock a recollection of some recent reading. Oh, wisdom of man and the apparatus of the sciences, the little columns of mercury that sling up and down, the vacuum boxes that expand and contract, the hammer that chips the highest rocks, the compass that takes the bearings of glacier and ridge--all the equipage of hypsometry and geology and geodesy--how pitifully feeble and childish it seems to cope with the majesty of the mountains! Take them all together, haul them up the steep, and as they lie there, read, recorded, and done for, which shall be more adequate to the whole scene--their records?--or that simple, ancient hymn, "We praise Thee, O God!--Heaven and earth are full of the majesty of Thy Glory!" What an astonishing thing that, standing where we stood and seeing what we saw, there are men who should be able to deduce this law or that from their observation of its working and yet be unable to see the Lawgiver!--who should be able to push back effect to immediate cause and yet be blind to the Supreme Cause of All Causes; who can say, "This is the glacier's doing and it is marvellous in our eyes," and not see Him "Who in His Strength setteth fast the mountains and is girded with power," Whose servants the glaciers, the snow, and the ice are, "wind and storm fulfilling His Word"; who exult in the exercise of their own intelligences and the playthings those intelligences have constructed and yet deny the Omniscience that endowed them with some minute fragment of Itself! It was not always so; it was not so with the really great men who have advanced our knowledge of nature. But of late years hordes of small men have given themselves up to the study of the physical sciences without any study preliminary. It would almost seem nowadays that whoever can sit in the seat of the scornful may sit in the seat of learning. [Sidenote: The Scientists] A good many years ago, on an occasion already referred to, the writer roamed through the depths of the Grand Cañon with a chance acquaintance who described himself as "Herpetologist to the Academy of Sciences" in some Western or Mid-Western State, and as this gentleman found the curious little reptiles he was in search of under a root or in a cranny of rock he repeated their many-syllabled names. Curious to know what these names literally meant and whence derived, the writer made inquiry, sometimes hazarding a conjectural etymology. To his astonishment and dismay he found this "scientist," whom he had looked up to, entirely ignorant of the meaning of the terms he employed. They were just arbitrary terms to him. The little hopping and crawling creatures might as well have been numbered, or called x, y, z, for any significance their formidable nomenclature held for him. Yet this man had been keenly sarcastic about the Noachian deluge and had jeered from the height of his superiority at hoary records which he knew only at second-hand reference, and had laid it down that if the human race became extinct the birds would stand the best chance of "evolving a primate"! Since that time other "scientists" have been encountered, with no better equipment, with no history, no poetry, no philosophy in any broad sense, men with no letters--illiterate, strictly speaking--yet with all the dogmatism in the world. Can any one be more dogmatic than your modern scientist? The reproach has passed altogether to him from the theologian. The thing grows, and its menace and scandal grow with it. Since coming "outside" the writer has encountered a professor at a college, a Ph.D. of a great university, who confessed that he had never heard of certain immortal characters of Dickens whose names are household words. We shall have to open Night-Schools for Scientists, where men who have been deprived of all early advantages may learn the rudiments of English literature. One wishes that Dickens himself might have dealt with their pretensions, but they are since his day. And surely it is time some one started a movement for suppressing illiterate Ph.D.'s. [Sidenote: The Psalmist and Dr. Johnson] Of this class, one feels sure, are the scientific heroes of the sensational articles in the monthly magazines of the baser sort, of which we picked up a number in the Kantishna on our way to the mountain. Here, in a picture that seems to have obtruded itself bodily into a page of letter-press, or else to have suffered the accidental irruption of a page of letter-press all around it, you shall see a grave scientist looking anxiously down a very large microscope, and shall read that he has transferred a kidney from a cat to a dog, and therefore we can no longer believe in the immortality of the soul; or else that he has succeeded in artificially fertilizing the ova of a starfish--or was it a jellyfish?--and therefore there is no God; not just in so many bald words, of course, but in unmistakable import. Or it may be--so commonly does the crassest credulity go hand in hand with the blankest scepticism--he has discovered the germ of old age and is hot upon the track of another germ that shall destroy it, so that we may all live virtually as long as we like; which, of course, disposes once for all of a world to come. The Psalmist was not always complaisant or even temperate in his language, but he lived a long time ago and must be pardoned; his curt summary stands: "Dixit insipiens!" But the writer vows that if he were addicted to the pursuit of any branch of physical knowledge he would insist upon being called by the name of that branch. He would be a physiologist or a biologist or an anatomist or even a herpetologist, but none should call him "scientist." As Doll Tearsheet says in the second part of "King Henry IV": "These villains will make the word as odious as the word 'occupy'; which was an excellent good word before it was ill-sorted." If Doctor Johnson were compiling an English dictionary to-day he would define "scientist" something thus: "A cant name for an experimenter in some department of physical knowledge, commonly furnished with arrogance and dogmatism, but devoid of real learning." Here is no gibe at the physical sciences. To sneer at them were just as foolish as to sneer at religion. What we could do on this expedition in a "scientific" way we did laboriously and zealously. We would never have thought of attempting the ascent of the mountain without bringing back whatever little addition to human knowledge was within the scope of our powers and opportunities. Tatum took rounds of angles, in practice against the good fortune of a clear day on top, on every possible occasion. The sole personal credit the present writer takes concerning the whole enterprise is the packing of that mercurial barometer on his back, from the Tanana River nearly to the top of the mountain, a point at which he was compelled to relinquish it to another. He has always had his opinion about mountain climbers who put an aneroid in their pocket and go to the top of a great, new peak and come down confidently announcing its height. But when all this business is done as closely and carefully as possible, and every observation taken that there are instruments devised to record, surely the soul is dead that feels no more and sees no further than the instruments do, that stirs with no other emotion than the mercury in the tube or the dial at its point of suspension, that is incapable of awe, of reverence, of worshipful uplift, and does not feel that "the Lord even the most mighty God hath spoken, and called the world from the rising of the sun even to the going down of the same," in the wonders displayed before his eyes. * * * * * We reached our eighteen-thousand-foot camp about five o'clock, a weary but happy crew. It was written in the diary that night: "I remember no day in my life so full of toil, distress, and exhaustion, and yet so full of happiness and keen gratification." [Sidenote: The Amber Glasses Again] The culminating day should not be allowed to pass without another tribute to the efficiency of the amber glasses. Notwithstanding the glare of the sun at twenty thousand feet and upward, no one had the slightest irritation of the eyes. There has never been an April of travel on the Yukon in eight years that the writer has not suffered from inflammation of the eyes despite the darkest smoke-colored glasses that could be procured. A naked candle at a road-house would give a stab of pain every time the eyes encountered it, and reading would become almost impossible. The amber glasses, however, while leaving vision almost as bright as without them, filter out the rays that cause the irritation and afford perfect protection against the consequences of sun and glare. There is only one improvement to make in the amber glasses, and that is some device of air-tight cells that shall prevent them from fogging when the cold on the outside of the glass condenses the moisture of perspiration on the inside of the glass. We use double-glazed sashes with an air space between on all windows in our houses in Alaska and find ourselves no longer incommoded by frost on the panes; some adaptation of this principle should be within the skill of the optician and would remove a very troublesome defect in all snow-glasses. If some one would invent a preventive against shortness of breath as efficient as amber glasses are against snow-blindness, climbing at great altitudes would lose all its terrors for one mountaineer. So far as it was possible to judge, no other member of the party was near his altitude limit. There seemed no reason why Karstens and Walter in particular should not go another ten thousand feet, were there a mountain in the world ten thousand feet higher than Denali, but the writer knows that he himself could not have gone much higher. FOOTNOTE: [4] The dotted line on the photograph opposite page 346 of Mr. Belmore Browne's book, "The Conquest of Mt. McKinley," does not, in the writer's opinion, represent the real course taken by Professor Parker, Mr. Belmore Browne, and Merl La Voy in their approach to the summit, and it is easy to understand the confusion of direction in the fierce storm that descended upon the party. If, as the dots show, the party went to the summit of the right-hand peak, they went out of their way and had still a considerable distance to travel. "Perhaps five minutes of easy walking would have taken us to the highest point," says Mr. Browne. It is probably more than a mile from the summit of the snow peak shown in the picture to the actual summit of the mountain. One who took that course would have to descend from the peak and then ascend the horseshoe ridge, and the highest point of the horseshoe ridge is perhaps two hundred feet above the summit of this snow peak. In the opinion that Professor Parker expressed to the writer, the dotted lines should bear much more to the left, making directly for the centre of the horseshoe ridge, which is the obvious course. But it should again be said that men in the circumstances and condition of this party when forced to turn back, may be pardoned for mistaking the exact direction in which they had been proceeding. CHAPTER VI THE RETURN The next day was another bright, cloudless day, the second and last of them. Perhaps never did men abandon as cheerfully stuff that had been freighted as laboriously as we abandoned our surplus baggage at the eighteen-thousand-foot camp. We made a great pile of it in the lee of one of the ice-blocks of the glacier--food, coal-oil, clothing, and bedding--covering all with the wolf-robe and setting up a shovel as a mark; though just why we cached it so carefully, or for whom, no one of us would be able to say. It will probably be a long time ere any others camp in that Grand Basin. While yet such a peak is unclimbed, there is constant goading of mountaineering minds to its conquest; once its top has been reached, the incentive declines. Much exploring work is yet to do on Denali; the day will doubtless come when all its peaks and ridges and glaciers will be duly mapped, but our view from the summit agreed with our study of its conformation during the ascent, that no other route will be found to the top. When first we were cutting and climbing on the ridge, and had glimpses, as the mists cleared, of the glacier on the other side and the ridges that arose from it, we thought that perhaps they might afford a passage, but from above the appearance changed and seemed to forbid it altogether. At times, almost in despair at the task which the Northeast Ridge presented, we would look across at the ice-covered rocks of the North Peak and dream that they might be climbed, but they are really quite impossible. The south side has been tried again and again and no approach discovered, nor did it appear from the top that such approach exists; the west side is sheer precipice; the north side is covered with a great hanging glacier and is devoid of practicable slopes; it has been twice attempted. Only on the northeast has the glacier cut so deeply into the mountain as to give access to the heights. June 8th was Sunday, but we had to take advantage of the clear, bright day to get as far down the mountain as possible. The stuff it was still necessary to pack made good, heavy loads, and we knew not what had happened to our staircase in our absence. [Sidenote: The Record] Having said Morning Prayer, we left at 9.30 A. M., after a night in which all of us slept soundly--the first sound sleep some had enjoyed for a long time. Contentment and satisfaction are great somnifacients. The Grand Basin was glorious in sunshine, the peaks crystal-clear against a cloudless sky, the huge blocks of ice thrown down by the earthquake and scattered all over the glacier gleamed white in the sunshine, deep-blue in the shadow. We wound our way downward, passing camp site after camp site, until at the first place we camped in the Grand Basin we stopped for lunch. Then we made the traverse under the cliffs to the Parker Pass, which we reached at 1.30 P. M. The sun was hot; there was not a breath of wind; we were exceedingly thirsty and we decided to light the primus stove and make a big pot of tea and replenish the thermos bottles before attempting the descent of the ridge. While this was doing a place was found to cache the minimum thermometer and a tin can that had held a photographic film, in which we had placed a record of our ascent. Above, we had not found any distinctive place in which a record could be deposited with the assurance that it would be found by any one seeking it. One feels sure that in the depth of winter very great cold must occur even at this elevation. Yet we should have liked to leave it much higher. Without some means, which we did not possess, of marking a position, there would, however, have been little use in leaving it amid the boulders where we hunted unsuccessfully for Professor Parker's instrument. We had hoped to be able to grave some sign upon the rocks with the geological hammer, but the first time it was brought down upon the granite its point splintered in the same exasperating way that the New York dealer's fancy ice-axes behaved when it was attempted to put them to practical use. "Warranted cast steel" upon an implement ought to be a warning not to purchase it for mountain work. Tool-steel alone will serve. Our little record cache at the Parker Pass, placed at the foot of the west or upward-facing side of the great slab which marks the natural camping site, should stand there for many years. It is not a place where snow lies deep or long, and it will surely be found by any who seek it. We took our last looks up into the Grand Basin, still brilliant in the sunshine, our last looks at the summit, still cloudless and clear. There was a melancholy even in the midst of triumph in looking for the last time at these scenes where we had so greatly hoped and endeavored--and had been so amply rewarded. We recalled the eager expectation with which we first gazed up between these granite slabs into the long-hidden basin, a week before, and there was sadness in the feeling that in all probability we should never have this noble view again. [Sidenote: Harper Glacier] Before the reader turns his back upon the Grand Basin once for all, I should like to put a name upon the glacier it contains--since it is the fashion to name glaciers. I should like to call it the Harper Glacier, after my half-breed companion of three years, who was the first human being to reach the summit of the mountain. This reason might suffice, but there is another and most interesting reason for associating the name Harper with this mountain. Arthur Harper, Walter's father, the pioneer of all Alaskan miners, "the first man who thought of trying the Yukon as a mining field so far as we know," as William Ogilvie tells us in his "Early Days on the Yukon"[5] (and none had better opportunity of knowing than Ogilvie), was also the first man to make written reference to this mountain, since Vancouver, the great navigator, saw it from the head of Cook's Inlet in 1794. Arthur Harper, in company with Al. Mayo, made the earliest exploration of the Tanana River, ascending that stream in the summer of 1878 to about the present site of Fairbanks; and in a letter to E. W. Nelson, of the United States Biological Survey, then on the Alaskan coast, Harper wrote the following winter of the "great ice mountain to the south" as one of the most wonderful sights of the trip.[6] It is pleasant to think that a son of his, yet unborn, was to be the first to set foot on its top; pleasantly also the office of setting his name upon the lofty glacier, the gleam from which caught his eye and roused his wonder thirty years ago, falls upon one who has been glad and proud to take, in some measure, his place. [Sidenote: Descent] Then began the difficulty and the danger, the toil and the anxiety, of the descent of the ridge. Karstens led, then followed Tatum, then the writer, and then Walter. The unbroken surface of the ridge above the cleavage is sensationally steep, and during our absence nearly two feet of new snow had fallen upon it. The steps that had been shovelled as we ascended were entirely obliterated and it was necessary to shovel new ones; it was the very heat of the day, and by the canons of climbing we should have camped at the Pass and descended in the early morning. But all were eager to get down, and we ventured it. Now that our task was accomplished, our minds reverted to the boy at the base camp long anxiously expecting us, and we thought of him and spoke of him continually and speculated how he had fared. One feels upon reflection that we took more risk in descending that ridge than we took at any time in the ascent. But Karstens was most cautious and careful, and in the long and intensive apprenticeship of this expedition had become most expert. I sometimes wondered whether Swiss guides would have much to teach either him or Walter in snow-craft; their chief instruction would probably be along the line of taking more chances, wisely. If the writer had to ascend this mountain again he would intrust himself to Karstens and Walter rather than to any Swiss guides he has known, for ice and snow in Alaska are not quite the same as ice and snow in the Alps or the Canadian Rockies. [Illustration: Beginning the descent of the ridge; looking down 4,000 feet upon the Muldrow Glacier.] The loose snow was shovelled away and the steps dug in the hard snow beneath, and the creepers upon our feet gave good grip in it. Thus, slowly, step by step, we descended the ridge and in an hour and a half had reached the cleavage, the most critical place in the whole descent. With the least possible motion of the feet, setting them exactly in the shovelled steps, we crept like cats across this slope, thrusting the points of our axes into the holes that had been made in the ice-wall above, moving all together, the rope always taut, no one speaking a word. When once Karstens was anchored on the further ice he stood and gathered up the rope as first one and then another passed safely to him and anchored himself beside him, until at last we were all across. Then, stooping to pass the overhanging ice-cliff that here also disputed the pack upon one's back, we went down to the long, long stretch of jagged pinnacles and bergs, and our intricate staircase in the masonry of them. Shovelling was necessary all the way down, but the steps were there, needing only to be uncovered. Passing our ridge camp, passing the danger of the great gable, down the rocks by which we reached the ridge and down the slopes to the glacier floor we went, reaching our old camp at 9.30 P. M., six and a quarter hours from the Parker Pass, twelve hours from the eighteen-thousand-foot camp in the Grand Basin, our hearts full of thankfulness that the terrible ridge was behind us. Until we reached the glacier floor the weather had been clear; almost immediately thereafter the old familiar cloud smother began to pour down from above and we saw the heights no more. [Sidenote: The Glacier Camp] The camp was in pretty bad shape. The snow that had fallen upon it had melted and frozen to ice, in the sun's rays and the night frosts, and weighed the tent down to the ground. But an hour's work made it habitable again, and we gleefully piled the stove with the last of our wood and used the last spoonfuls of a can of baking-powder to make a batch of biscuits, the first bread we had eaten in two weeks. Next day we abandoned the camp, leaving all standing, and, putting our packs upon a Yukon sled, rejecting the ice-creepers, and resuming our rough-locked snow-shoes, we started down the glacier in soft, cloudy weather to our base camp. Again it had been wiser to have waited till night, that the snow bridges over the crevasses might be at their hardest; but we could not wait. Every mind was occupied with Johnny. We were two weeks overstayed of the time we had told him to expect our return, and we knew not what might have happened to the boy. The four of us on one rope, Karstens leading and Walter at the gee-pole, we went down the first sharp descents of the glaciers without much trouble, the new, soft snow making a good brake for the sled. But lower down the crevasses began to give us trouble. The snow bridges were melted at their edges, and sometimes the sled had to be lowered down to the portion that still held and hauled up at the other side. Sometimes a bridge gave way as its edge was cautiously ventured upon with the snow-shoes, and we had to go far over to the glacier wall to get round the crevasse. The willows with which we had staked the trail still stood, sometimes just their tips appearing above the new snow, and they were a good guide, though we often had to leave the old trail. At last the crevasses were all passed and we reached the lower portion of the glacier, which is free of them. Then the snow grew softer and softer, and our moccasined feet were soon wet through. Large patches of the black shale with which much of this glacier is covered were quite bare of snow, and the sled had to be hauled laboriously across them. Then we began to encounter pools of water, which at first we avoided, but they soon grew so numerous that we went right through them. [Sidenote: Flowers] The going grew steadily wetter and rougher and more disagreeable. The lower stretch of a glacier is an unhandsome sight in summer: all sorts of rock débris and ugly black shale, with discolored melting ice and snow, intersected everywhere with streams of dirty water--this was what it had degenerated into as we reached the pass. The snow was entirely gone from the pass, so the sled was abandoned--left standing upright, with its gee-pole sticking in the air that if any one else ever chanced to want it it might readily be found. The snow-shoes were piled around it, and we resumed our packs and climbed up to the pass. The first thing that struck our eyes as we stood upon the rocks of the pass was a brilliant trailing purple moss flower of such gorgeous color that we all exclaimed at its beauty and wondered how it grew clinging to bare rock. It was the first bright color that we had seen for so long that it gave unqualified pleasure to us all and was a foretaste of the enhancing delights that awaited us as we descended to the bespangled valley. If a man would know to the utmost the charm of flowers, let him exile himself among the snows of a lofty mountain during fifty days of spring and come down into the first full flush of summer. We could scarcely pass a flower by, and presently had our hands full of blooms like schoolgirls on a picnic. But although the first things that attracted our attention were the flowers, the next were the mosquitoes. They were waiting for us at the pass and they gave us their warmest welcome. The writer took sharp blame to himself that, organizing and equipping this expedition, he had made no provision against these intolerable pests. But we had so confidently expected to come out a month earlier, before the time of mosquitoes arrived, that although the matter was suggested and discussed it was put aside as unnecessary. Now there was the prospect of a fifty or sixty mile tramp across country, subject all the while to the assaults of venomous insects, which are a greater hindrance to summer travel in Alaska than any extremity of cold is to winter travel. Not even the mosquitoes, however, took our minds from Johnny, and a load was lifted from every heart when we came near enough to our camp to see that some one was moving about it. A shout brought him running, and he never stopped until he had met us and had taken the pack from my shoulders and put it on his own. Our happiness was now unalloyed; the last anxiety was removed. The dogs gave us most jubilant welcome and were fat and well favored. [Sidenote: Johnny and the Sugar] What a change had come over the place! All the snow was gone from the hills; the stream that gathered its three forks at this point roared over its rocks; the stunted willows were in full leaf; the thick, soft moss of every dark shade of green and yellow and red made a foil for innumerable brilliant flowers. The fat, gray conies chirped at us from the rocks; the ground-squirrels, greatly multiplied since the wholesale destruction of foxes, kept the dogs unavailingly chasing hither and thither whenever they were loose. We never grew tired of walking up and down and to and fro about the camp--it was a delight to tread upon the moss-covered earth after so long treading upon nothing but ice and snow; it was a delight to gaze out through naked eyes after all those weeks in which we had not dared even for a few moments to lay aside the yellow glasses in the open air; it was a delight to see joyful, eager animal life around us after our sojourn in regions dead. Supper was a delight. Johnny had killed four mountain-sheep and a caribou while we were gone, and not only had fed the dogs well, but from time to time had put aside choice portions expecting our return. But what was most grateful to us and most extraordinary in him, the boy had saved, untouched, the small ration of sugar and milk left for his consumption, knowing that ours was all destroyed; and we enjoyed coffee with these luxurious appurtenances as only they can who have been long deprived of them. There are not many boys of fifteen or sixteen of any race who would voluntarily have done the like. [Illustration: Johnny Fred who kept the base camp and fed the dogs and would not touch the sugar.] The next day there was much to do. There were pack-saddles of canvas to make for the dogs' backs that they might help us carry our necessary stuff out; our own clothing and footwear to overhaul, bread to bake, guns to clean and oil against rust. Yet withal, we took it lazily, with five to divide these tasks, and napped and lay around and continually consumed biscuits and coffee which Johnny continually cooked. We all took at least a partial bath in the creek, cold as it was, the first bath in--well, in a long time. Mountain climbers belong legitimately to the great unwashed. It was a day of perfect rest and contentment with hearts full of gratitude. Not a single mishap had occurred to mar the complete success of our undertaking--not an injury of any sort to any one, nor an illness. All five of us were in perfect health. Surely we had reason to be grateful; and surely we were happy in having Him to whom our gratitude might be poured out. What a bald, incomplete, and disconcerting thing it must be to have no one to thank for crowning mercies like these! On Tuesday, the 10th June, we made our final abandonment, leaving the tent standing with stove and food and many articles that we did not need cached in it, and with four of the dogs carrying packs and led with chains, packs on our own backs and the ice-axes for staves in our hands, we turned our backs upon the mountain and went down the valley toward the Clearwater. The going was not too bad until we had crossed that stream and climbed the hills to the rolling country between it and the McKinley Fork of the Kantishna. Again and again we looked back for a parting glimpse of the mountain, but we never saw sign of it any more. The foot-hills were clear, the rugged wall of the glacier cut the sky, but the great mountain might have been a thousand miles off for any visible indication it gave. It is easy to understand how travellers across equatorial Africa have passed near the base of the snowy peaks of Ruwenzori without knowing they were even in the neighborhood of great mountains, and have come back and denied their existence. [Sidenote: Across Country] The broken country between the streams was difficult. Underneath was a thick elastic moss in which the foot sank three or four inches at every step and that makes toilsome travelling. The mosquitoes were a constant annoyance. But the abundant bird life upon this open moorland, continually reminding one as it did of moorlands in the north of England or of Scotland, was full of interest. Ptarmigan, half changed from their snowy plumage to the brown of summer, and presenting a curious piebald appearance, were there in great numbers, cackling their guttural cry with its concluding notes closely resembling the "ko-ax, ko-ax" of the Frogs' Chorus in the comedy of Aristophanes; snipe whistled and curlews whirled all about us. Half-way across to the McKinley Fork it began to rain, thunder-peal succeeding thunder-peal, and each crash announcing a heavier downpour. Soon we were all wet through, and then the rain turned to hail that fell smartly until all the moss was white with it, and that gave place to torrents of rain again. Dog packs and men's packs were alike wet, and no one of us had a dry stitch on him when we reached the banks of the McKinley Fork and the old spacious hunting tent that stands there in which we were to spend the night. Rather hopelessly we hung our bedding to dry on ropes strung about some trees, and our wet clothing around the stove. By taking turns all the night in sitting up, to keep a fire going, we managed to get our clothes dried by morning, but the bedding was wet as ever. Fortunately, the night was a warm one. [Sidenote: Glacial Streams] The next morning there was the McKinley Fork to cross the first thing, and it was a difficult and disagreeable task. This stream, which drains the Muldrow Glacier and therefore the whole northeast face of Denali, occupies a dreary, desolate bed of boulder and gravel and mud a mile or more wide; rather it does not occupy it, save perhaps after tremendous rain following great heat, but wanders amid it, with a dozen channels of varying depth but uniform blackness, the inky solution of the shale which the mountain discharges so abundantly tingeing not only its waters but the whole Kantishna, into which it flows one hundred miles away. Commonly in the early morning the waters are low, the night frosts checking the melting of the glacier ice; but this morning the drainage of yesterday's rain-storm had swollen them. Channel after channel was waded in safety until the main stream was reached, and that swept by, thigh-deep, with a rushing black current that had a very evil look. Karstens was scouting ahead, feeling for the shallower places, stemming the hurrying waters till they swept up to his waist. The dogs did not like the look of it and with their packs, still wet from yesterday, were hampered in swimming. Two that Tatum was leading suddenly turned back when half-way across, and the chains, entangling his legs, pulled him over face foremost into the deepest of the water. His pack impeded his efforts to rise, and the water swept all over him. Karstens hurried back to his rescue, and he was extricated from his predicament, half drowned and his clothes filled with mud and sand. There was no real danger of drowning, but it was a particularly noxious ducking in icy filth. The sun was warm, however, and after basking upon the rocks awhile he was able to proceed, still wet, though he had stripped and wrung out his clothes--for we had no dry change--and very gritty in underwear, but taking no harm whatever. I think Tatum regretted losing, in the mad rush of black water, the ice-axe he had carried to the top of the mountain more than he regretted his wetting. [Sidenote: Birds and Beasts] On the further bank of the McKinley Fork we entered our first wood, a belt about three miles wide that lines the river. Our first forest trees gave us almost as much pleasure as our first flowers. Animal life abounded, all in the especially interesting condition of rearing half-grown young. Squirrels from their nests scolded at our intrusion most vehemently; an owl flew up with such a noisy snapping and chattering that our attention was drawn to the point from which she rose, and there, perched upon a couple of rotten stumps a few feet apart, were two half-fledged owlets, passive, immovable, which allowed themselves to be photographed and even handled without any indication of life except in their wondering eyes and the circumrotary heads that contained them. Moose signs and bear signs were everywhere; rabbits, now in their summer livery, flitted from bush to bush. That belt of wood was a zoological garden stocked with birds and mammals. And we rejoiced with them over their promising families and harmed none. From the wood we rose again to the moorland--to the snipe and ptarmigan and curlews, some yet sitting upon belated eggs--to the heavy going of the moss and the yet heavier going of niggerhead. Our journey skirted a large lake picturesquely surrounded by hills, and we spoke of how pleasantly a summer lodge might be placed upon its shores were it not for the mosquitoes. The incessant leaping of fish, the occasional flight of fowl alone disturbed the perfect reflection of cliff and hill in its waters. At times we followed game trails along its margin; at times swampy ground made us seek the hillside. Thus, slowly covering the miles that we had gone so quickly over upon the ice of the lake two months before, we reached Moose Creek and the miners' cabins at Eureka late at night and received warm welcome and most hospitable entertainment from Mr. Jack Hamilton. It was good to see men other than our own party again, good to sleep in a bed once more, good to regale ourselves with food long strange to our mouths. Here we had our first intimation of any happenings in the outside world for the past three months and sorrowed that Saint Sophia was still to remain a Mohammedan temple, and that the kindly King of Greece had been murdered. Here also Hamilton generously provided us with spare mosquito-netting for veils, and we found a package of canvas gloves I had ordered from Fairbanks long before, and so were protected from our chief enemies. From Moose Creek we went over the hills to Caribou Creek and again were most kindly welcomed and entertained by Mr. and Mrs. Quigley, and discussed our climb for a long while with McGonogill of the "pioneer" party. Then, mainly down the bed of Glacier Creek, now on lingering ice or snow-drift, with the water rushing underneath, now on the rocks, now through the brush, crossing and recrossing the creek, we reached the long line of desolate, decaying houses known as Glacier City, and found convenient refuge in one of the cabins therein, still maintained as an occasional abode. On the outskirts of the "city" next morning a moose and two calves sprang up from the brush, our approach over the moss not giving enough notice to awake her from sleep until we were almost upon her. [Illustration: "Muk," the author's pet malamute.] [Sidenote: The Boat] Instead of pursuing our way across the increasingly difficult and swampy country to the place where our boat and supplies lay cached, we turned aside at midday to the "fish camp" on the Bearpaw, and, after enjoying the best our host possessed from the stream and from his early garden, borrowed his boat, choosing twenty miles or so on the water to nine of niggerhead and marsh. But the river was very low and we had much trouble getting the boat over riffles and bars, so that it was late at night when we reached that other habitation of dragons known as Diamond City. While we submerged our cached poling boat to swell its sun-dried seams, Walter and Johnny returned the borrowed boat, and, since the stream had fallen yet more, were many hours in reaching the fish camp and in tramping back. [Sidenote: The Beaver and the Indians] But the labor of the return journey was now done. A canvas stretched over willows made a shelter for the centre of the boat, and at noon on the second day men, dogs, and baggage were embarked, to float down the Bearpaw to the Kantishna, to the Tanana, to the Yukon. The Bearpaw swarmed with animal life. Geese and ducks, with their little terrified broods, scooted ahead of us on the water, the mothers presently leaving their young in a nook of the bank and making a flying détour to return to them. Sometimes a duck would simulate a broken wing to lure us away from the little ones. We had no meat and were hungry for the usual early summer diet of water-fowl, but not hungry enough to kill these birds. Beaver dropped noisily into the water from trees that exhibited their marvellous carpentry, some lying prostrate, some half chiselled through. It seemed, indeed, as though the beaver were preparing great irrigation works all through this country. Since the law went into effect prohibiting their capture until 1915 they have increased and multiplied all over interior Alaska. They are still caught by the natives, but since their skins cannot be sold the Indians are wearing beaver garments again to the great advantage of health in the severe winters. One wishes very heartily that the prohibition might be made perpetual, for only so will fur become the native wear again. It is good to see the children, particularly, in beaver coats and breeches instead of the wretched cotton that otherwise is almost their only garb. Would it be altogether beyond reason to hope that a measure which was enacted to prevent the extermination of an animal might be perpetuated on behalf of the survival of an interesting and deserving race of human beings now sorely threatened? Or is it solely the conservation of commercial resources that engages the attention of government? There are few measures that would redound more to the physical benefit of the Alaskan Indian than the perpetuating of the law against the sale of beaver skins. With the present high and continually appreciating price of skins, none of the common people of the land, white or native, can afford to wear furs. Such a prohibition as has been suggested would restore to Alaskans a small share in the resources of Alaska. Is there any country in the world where furs are actually needed more? Not only beaver, but nearly all fur and game animals have greatly increased in the Kantishna country. In the year of the stampede, when thousands of men spent the winter here, there was wholesale destruction of game and trapping of fur. But the country, left to itself, is now restocked of game and fur, except of foxes, the high price of which has almost exterminated them here and is rapidly exterminating them throughout interior Alaska. They have been poisoned in the most reckless and unscrupulous way, and there seems no means of stopping it under the present law. We saw scarcely a fox track in the country, though a few years ago they were exceedingly plentiful all over the foot-hills of the great range. Mink, marten, and muskrat were seen from time to time swimming in the river; a couple of yearling moose started from the bank where they had been drinking as we noiselessly turned a bend; brilliant kingfishers flitted across the water. So down these rivers we drifted, sometimes in sunshine, sometimes in rain, until early in the morning of the 20th June, we reached Tanana, and our journey was concluded three months and four days after it was begun. When the telegraph office opened at 8 o'clock a message was sent, in accordance with promise, to a Seattle paper, and it illustrates the rapidity with which news is spread to-day that a ship in Bering Sea, approaching Nome, received the news from Seattle by wireless telegraph before 11 A. M. But a message from the Seattle paper received the same morning asking for "five hundred more words describing narrow escapes" was left unanswered, for, thank God, there were none to describe. FOOTNOTES: [5] Ottawa: Thorburn & Abbott, 1913, p. 87. [6] "Mt. McKinley Region": Alfred H. Brooks, Washington, 1911, p. 25. CHAPTER VII THE HEIGHT OF DENALI, WITH A DISCUSSION OF THE READINGS ON THE SUMMIT AND DURING THE ASCENT The determination of the heights of mountains by triangulation is, of course, the method that in general commends itself to the topographer, though it may be questioned whether the very general use of aneroids for barometric determinations has not thrown this latter means of measuring altitudes into undeserved discredit when the mercurial barometer is used instead of its convenient but unreliable substitute. The altitude given on the present maps for Denali is the mean of determinations made by triangulation by three different men: Muldrow on the Sushitna[7] side in 1898, Raeburn on the Kuskokwim side in 1902, and Porter, from the Yentna country in 1906. In addition, a determination was made by the Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1910, from points near Cook's Inlet. "The work of the Coast Survey," writes Mr. Alfred Brooks, "is more refined than the rough triangulation done by our men; at the same time they were much further away." "It is a curious coincidence," he adds, "that the determination made by the Coast Survey was the mean which we had assumed from our three determinations" (twenty thousand three hundred feet). [Sidenote: Theodolites and Barometers] There are, however, two sources of error in the determination of the height of this mountain by triangulation--a general one and a particular one. The general one lies in the difficulty of ascertaining the proper correction to be applied for the refraction of the atmosphere, and the higher the mountain the greater the liability to this error; for not much is positively known about the angle of refraction of the upper regions of the air. The officers of the Trigonometrical Survey of India have published their opinion that the heights of the great peaks of the Himalayas will have to be revised on this account. The report of the Coast Survey's determination of the height of Denali claims a "co-efficient of refraction nearer the truth" than the figure used on a previous occasion; but a very slight difference in this factor will make a considerable difference in the result. The particular source of error in the case of this mountain lies in the circumstance that its summit is flat, and there is no culminating point upon which the cross-hairs of the surveying instrument may intersect. The barometric determination of heights is, of course, not without similar troubles of its own. The tables of altitudes corresponding to pressures do not agree, Airy's table giving relatively greater altitudes for very low pressures than the Smithsonian. All such tables as originally calculated are based upon the hypothesis of a temperature and humidity which decrease regularly with the altitude, and this is not always the case; nor is the "static equilibrium of the atmosphere" which Laplace assumed always maintained; that is to say an equal difference of pressure does not always correspond to an equal difference of altitude. There is, in point of fact, no absolute way to determine altitude save by running an actual line of levels; all other methods are approximations at best. But there had never been a barometric determination of the height of this mountain made, and it was resolved to attempt it on this expedition. To this end careful arrangements were made and much labor and trouble undergone. The author carried his standard mercurial mountain barometer to Fort Gibbon on the Yukon in September, 1912, and compared it with the instrument belonging to the Signal Corps of the United States army at that post. A very close agreement was found in the two instruments; the reading of the one, by himself, and of the other, by the sergeant whose regular duty it was to read and record the instrument, being identical to two places of decimals at the same temperature. [Sidenote: Readings on the Summit] Arrangements were made with Captain Michel of the Signal Corps at Fort Gibbon, when the expedition started to the mountain in March, 1913, to read the barometer at that post three times a day and record the reading with the reading of the attached thermometer. Acknowledgment is here made of Captain Michel's courtesy and kindness in this essential co-operation. The reading at Fort Gibbon which most nearly synchronizes with the reading on top of the mountain is the one taken at noon on the 7th June. The reading on top of the mountain was made at about 1.50 P. M., so that there was an hour and fifty minutes difference in time. The weather, however, was set fair, without a cloud in the sky, and had been for more than twelve hours before and remained so for thirty-six hours afterward. It would seem, therefore, that the difference in time is negligible. The reading at Fort Gibbon, a place of an altitude of three hundred and thirty-four feet above sea-level, at noon on the 7th June, was 29.590 inches with an attached thermometer reading 76.5° F. The reading on the summit of Denali, at 1.50 P. M. on the same day, was 13.617. The writer is greatly chagrined that he cannot give with the same confidence the reading of the attached thermometer on top of the mountain, but desires to set forth the circumstances and give the readings in his note-book records. The note-book gives the air temperature on the summit as 7° F., taken by a standard alcohol minimum thermometer, and it remained constant during the hour and a half we were there. The sun was shining, but a bitter north wind was blowing. But the reading of the thermometer attached to the barometer is recorded as 20° F. I am unable to account for this discrepancy of 13°. The mercurial barometer was swung on its tripod inside the instrument tent we had carried to the summit, a rough zero was established, and it was left for twenty minutes or so to adjust itself to conditions before an exact reading was taken. It was my custom throughout the ascent to read and record the thermometer immediately after the barometer was read, but it is almost certain that on this momentous occasion it was not done. Possibly the thermometer was read immediately the instrument was taken out of its leather case and its wooden case and set up, while it yet retained some of the animal heat of the back that had borne it, and the reading was written in the prepared place. Then when the barometer was finally read, no temperature of the attached thermometer was noted. This is the only possible explanation that occurs, and it is very unsatisfactory. It was not until we were down at the base camp again that I looked at the figures, and discovered their difference, and I could not then recall in detail the precise operations on the summit. It is hard to understand, ordinarily, how any man could have recorded the two readings on the same page of the book without noticing their discrepancy, but perhaps the excitement and difficulty of the situation combined to produce what Sir Martin Conway calls "high altitude stupidity." [Sidenote: In Exculpation] It is indeed impossible to convey to the reader who has never found himself circumstanced as we were an understanding of our perturbation of mind and body upon reaching the summit of the mountain: breathless with excitement--and with the altitude--hearts afire and feet nigh frozen. What should be done on top, what first, what next, had been carefully planned and even rehearsed, but we were none of us schooled in stoical self-repression to command our emotions completely. Here was the crown of nearly three months' toil--and of all those long years of desire and expectation. It was hard to gather one's wits and resolutely address them to prearranged tasks; hard to secure a sufficient detachment of mind for careful and accurate observations. The sudden outspreading of the great mass of Denali's Wife immediately below us and in front of us was of itself a surprise that was dramatic and disconcerting; a splendid vision from which it was difficult to withdraw the eyes. We knew, of course, the companion peak was there, but had forgotten all about her, having had no slightest glimpse of her on the whole ascent until at the one stroke she stood completely revealed. Not more dazzling to the eyes of the pasha in the picture was the form of the lovely woman when the slave throws off the draperies that veiled her from head to foot. Moreover, problems that had been discussed and disputed, questions about the conformation of the mountain and the possibilities of approach to it, were now soluble at a glance and clamored for solution. We held them back and fell at once to our scientific work, denying any gratification of sight until these tasks were performed, yet it is plain that I at least was not proof against the disturbing consciousness of the wonders that waited. It was bitterly cold, yet my fingers, though numb, were usable when I reached the top; it was in exposing them to manipulate the hypsometrical instruments that they lost all feeling and came nigh freezing. And breathlessness was naturally at its worst; I remember that even the exertion of rising from the prone position it was necessary to assume to read the barometer brought on a fit of panting. [Sidenote: Calculations for Altitude] With these circumstances in mind we will resume the discussion of the readings taken on the summit and their bearing upon the altitude of the mountain. It seems right to disregard the temperature recorded for the attached thermometer, and to use the air temperature, of which there is no doubt, in correcting the barometric reading. So they stand: Bar. Temp. 13.617 inches 7° F. The boiling-point thermometer stood at 174.9° F. when the steam was pouring out of the vent. They stand therefore: _Gibbon_ (334 feet altitude) _The Summit of Denali_ Bar. Ther. Bar. Ther. 29.590 76.5° F. 13.617 7° F. Now, the tables accessible to the writer do not work out their calculations beyond eighteen thousand feet, and he confesses himself too long unused to mathematical labors of any kind for the task of extending them. He was, therefore, constrained to fall back upon the kindness of Mr. Alfred Brooks, the head of the Alaskan Division of the United States Geological Survey, and Mr. Brooks turned over the data to Mr. C. E. Giffin, topographic engineer of that service, to which gentleman thankful acknowledgment is made for the result that follows. [Sidenote: Fort Gibbon and Valdez as Bases] Ignoring a calculation based upon a temperature of 20° F. on the summit, and another based upon a temperature of 13.5° F. on the summit (the mean of the air temperature and that recorded for the attached thermometer) and confining attention to the calculation which takes the air temperature of 7° F. as the proper figure for the correction of the barometer, a result is reached which shows the summit of Denali as twenty-one thousand and eight feet above the sea. It should be added that Mr. Giffin obtained from the United States Weather Bureau the barometric and thermometric readings taken at Valdez on 7th June about the same length of time after our reading on the summit as the reading at Gibbon was before ours. From these readings Mr. Giffin makes the altitude of the mountain twenty thousand three hundred and seventy-four feet above Valdez, which is ten feet above the sea-level. From this result Mr. Giffin is disposed to question the accuracy of the reading at Gibbon, though the author has no reason to doubt it was properly and carefully made. Valdez is much farther from the summit than Fort Gibbon and is in a different climatic zone. The calculation from the Valdez base should, however, be taken into consideration in making this barometric determination, and the mean of the two results, twenty thousand six hundred and ninety-six feet, or, roundly, _twenty thousand seven hundred feet_, is offered as the contribution of this expedition toward determining the true altitude of the mountain. The figures of Mr. Giffin's calculations touching the altitude of this mountain and also determining the altitudes of various salient points or stages of the ascent of the mountain are printed below: DENALI (MOUNT McKINLEY) USING AIR THERMOMETER READING +7° AND THE READING AT FORT GIBBON FOR SAME DATE Mount McKinley, barometric reading 13.617 in. Barometer reduced to standard temperature +.027 " Temp. 7° ------ 13.644 in. Fort Gibbon, barometric reading 29.590 in. Barometer reduced to standard temperature -.128 " Temp. 76.5° ------ 29.462 in. Mount McKinley, corrected barometer 13.644 in. 21,324 ft. Fort Gibbon, corrected barometer 29.462 " 400 " ------ 20,924 ft. Mean temperature, 41.7°--approximate difference in elevation 20,924 ft. -356 ft. Latitude, 64°--approximate difference in elevation 20,568 " +15 " Mean temperature, 41.7°--approximate difference in elevation 20,568 " +71 " Elevation lowest, 400--approximate difference in elevation 20,568 " +20 " ------ Elevation above Fort Gibbon 20,674 ft. Elevation of Fort Gibbon 334 " ------ _Elevation above sea_ 21,008 ft. USING THE THERMOMETRIC READING OF 7° AT MOUNT MCKINLEY AND THE U. S. WEATHER BUREAU READING AT VALDEZ FOR SAME DATE Mount McKinley, barometric reading 13.617 in. Barometer reduced to standard temperature +.027 " Temp. 7° ------ 13.644 in. Valdez, barometric reading 29.76 in. Barometer reduced to standard temperature .068 " ------ 29.692 in. Temp. 54° Mount McKinley, corrected barometric reading 13.644 in. 21,324 ft. Valdez, corrected barometric reading 29.692 " 190 " ------ 21,134 ft. Mean temperature, 30.5°--approximate difference in elevation 21,134 ft. -840 " Latitude, 62°--approximate difference in elevation 20,295 " +18 " Mean temperature, 30.5°--approximate difference in elevation 20,295 ft. +42 ft. Elevation lowest, 190--approximate difference in elevation 20,295 " +20 " ------ Elevation above Valdez 20,374 ft. Elevation of Valdez 10 " ------ _Elevation above sea_ 20,384 ft. ALTITUDES OF CAMPING STATIONS FIRST GLACIER CAMP Glacier Camp, barometric reading. 22.554 in. Temp. 81° Barometer reduced to standard temperature -.106 " ------ 22.448 in. Fort Gibbon, barometric reading 29.110 in. Temp. 74° Barometer reduced to standard temperature -.120 " ------ 28.990 in. Glacier Camp, corrected barometer 22.448 in. 7,791 ft. Fort Gibbon, corrected barometer 28.990 " 840 " ------ 6,951 ft. Mean temperature, 77.5°--approximate difference in elevation 6,951 ft. +393 " Latitude, 64°--approximate difference in elevation 7,343 " +5 " Mean temperature, 77.5°--approximate difference in elevation 7,343 " +74 " Elevation lowest, 840--approximate difference in elevation 7,343 " +3 " ------ Elevation above Fort Gibbon 7,426 ft. Elevation of Fort Gibbon 334 " ------ _Elevation above sea_ 7,760 ft. HEAD OF MULDROW GLACIER Muldrow Glacier, barometric reading 19.640 in. Temp. 36° Barometer reduced to standard temperature -.013 " ------- 19.627 in. Fort Gibbon, barometric reading 30.065 in. Temp. 71° Barometer reduced to standard temperature -.115 " ------- 29.950 in. Muldrow Glacier, corrected barometer 19.627 in. 11,441 ft. Fort Gibbon, corrected barometer 29.950 " (-)45 " ------ 11,486 ft. Temperature, 53.5°--approximate difference in elevation 11,486 ft. +79 " Latitude, 65°--approximate difference in elevation 11,565 " +8 " Mean temperature, 53.5°--approximate difference in elevation 11,565 " +63 " Elevation lowest, 45--approximate difference in elevation 11,565 " +6 " ------- Elevation above Fort Gibbon 11,642 ft. Elevation of Fort Gibbon 334 " ------- _Elevation above sea_ 11,976 ft. PARKER PASS Parker Pass, barometric reading 17.330 in. Temp. 43° Barometer reduced to standard temperature -.023 " ------- 17.307 in. Fort Gibbon, barometric reading 30.050 in. Temp. 69.5° Barometer reduced to standard temperature -.111 " ------ 29.939 in. Parker Pass, corrected barometer 17.307 in. 14,861 ft. Fort Gibbon, corrected barometer 29.939 " (-)35 " ------ 14,896 ft. Mean temperature, 56.25°--approximate difference in elevation 14,896 ft. +185 " Latitude, 64°--approximate difference in elevation 15,091 " +11 " At temperature of 56.25°--approximate difference in elevation 15,091 " +92 " Elevation lowest, -35°--approximate difference in elevation 15,091 " +11 " ------ Elevation above Fort Gibbon 15,195 ft. Elevation of Fort Gibbon 334 " ------ _Elevation above sea_ 15,529 ft. LAST CAMP Last Camp, barometric reading 15.220 in. Temp. 40° Barometer reduced to standard temperature -.016 " ------ 15.204 in. Fort Gibbon, barometric reading 29.660 in. Barometer reduced to standard temperature -.120 " Temp. 73.5° ------ 29.540 in. Last Camp, corrected barometer 15.204 in. 18,382 ft. Fort Gibbon, corrected barometer 29.540 " 329 " ------ 18,053 ft. Mean temperature, 56.75°--approximate difference in elevation 18,053 ft. +248 ft. Latitude, 64°--approximate difference in elevation 18,301 " +17 " Mean temperature, 56.75°--approximate difference in elevation 18,301 " +112 " Elevation lowest, 329--approximate difference in elevation 18,301 " +16 " ------ Elevation above Fort Gibbon 18,446 ft. Elevation of Fort Gibbon 334 " ------ _Elevation above sea_ 18,780 ft. FOOTNOTE: [7] "Sushitna" represents unquestionably the native pronunciation and the "h" should be retained. The reason for its elision current in Alaska is too contemptible to be referred to further. Perhaps the same genius removed this "h" who removed the "'s" from the "Cook's Inlet" of the British admiralty. One is not surprised when a post-office at Cape Prince of Wales is named "Wales" because one is not surprised at any banalities of the postal department--in Alaska or elsewhere, but one expects better things from the cultured branches of the government service. It is interesting to speculate what will happen to Revillagigedo Island, which Vancouver named for the viceroy of Mexico who was kind to him, when the official curtailer of names finds time to attend to _it_. If there be a post-office thereon it is probably already named "Gig." CHAPTER VIII EXPLORATIONS OF THE DENALI REGION AND PREVIOUS ATTEMPTS AT ITS ASCENT The first mention in literature of the greatest mountain group in North America is in the narrative of that most notable navigator, George Vancouver. While surveying the Knik Arm of Cook's Inlet, in 1794, he speaks of his view of a connected mountain range "bounded by distant stupendous snow mountains covered with snow and apparently detached from each other." Vancouver's name has grown steadily greater during the last fifty years as modern surveys have shown the wonderful detailed accuracy of his work, and the seamen of the Alaskan coast speak of him as the prince of all navigators. Not until 1878 is there another direct mention of these mountains, although the Russian name for Denali, "Bulshaia Gora," proves that it had long been observed and known. [Sidenote: Harper, Densmore, Dickey] In that year two of the early Alaskan traders, Alfred Mayo and Arthur Harper, made an adventurous journey some three hundred miles up the Tanana River, the first ascent of that river by white men, and upon their return reported finding gold in the bars and mentioned an enormous ice mountain visible in the south, which they said was one of the most remarkable things they had seen on their trip. In 1889 Frank Densmore, a prospector, with several companions, crossed from the Tanana to the Kuskokwim by way of the Coschaket and Lake Minchúmina, and had the magnificent view of the Denali group which Lake Minchúmina affords, which the present writer was privileged to have in 1911. Densmore's description was so enthusiastic that the mountain was known for years among the Yukon prospectors as "Densmore's mountain." Though unquestionably many men traversed the region after the discovery of gold in Cook's Inlet in 1894, no other public recorded mention of the great mountain was made until W. A. Dickey, a Princeton graduate, journeyed extensively in the Sushitna and Chulitna valleys in 1896 and reached the foot of the glacier which drains one of the flanks of Denali, called later by Doctor Cook the Ruth Glacier. Dickey described the mountain in a letter to the New York _Sun_ in January, 1907, and guessed its height with remarkable accuracy at twenty thousand feet. Probably unaware that the mountain had any native name, Dickey gave it the name of the Republican candidate for President of the United States at that time--McKinley. Says Mr. Dickey: "We named our great peak Mount McKinley, after William McKinley, of Ohio, the news of whose nomination for the presidency was the first we received on our way out of that wonderful wilderness." In 1898 George Eldridge and Robert Muldrow, of the United States Geological Survey, traversed the region, and Muldrow estimated the height of the mountain by triangulation at twenty thousand three hundred feet. [Sidenote: Herron, Brooks, Wickersham] In 1899 Lieutenant Herron crossed the range from Cook's Inlet and reached the Kuskokwim. It was he who named the lesser mountain of the Denali group, always known by the natives as Denali's Wife, "Mount Foraker," after the senator from Ohio. In 1902 Alfred Brooks and D. L. Raeburn made a remarkable reconnoissance survey from the Pacific Ocean, passing through the range and along the whole western and northwestern faces of the group. They were the first white men to set foot upon the slopes of Denali. Shortly afterward, in response to the interest this journey aroused among Alpine clubs, Mr. Brooks published a pamphlet setting forth what he considered the most feasible plan for attempting the ascent of the mountain. The next year saw two actual attempts at ascent. After holding the first term of court at Fairbanks, the new town on the Tanana River that had sprung suddenly into importance as the metropolis of Alaska upon the discovery of the Tanana gold fields, Judge Wickersham (now delegate to Congress) set out with four men and two mules in May, 1903, and by steamboat ascended to the head of navigation of the Kantishna. Heading straight across an unknown country for the base of the mountain, Judge Wickersham's party unfortunately attacked the mountain by the Peters Glacier and demonstrated the impossibility of that approach, being stopped by the enormous ice-incrusted cliffs of the North Peak. Judge Wickersham used to say that only by a balloon or a flying-machine could the summit be reached; and, indeed, by no other means can the summit ever be reached from the north face. After a week spent in climbing, provisions began to run short and the party returned, descending the rushing, turbid waters of that quite unnavigable and very dangerous stream, the McKinley Fork of the Kantishna, on a raft, with little of anything left to eat, and that little damaged by water. Judge Wickersham was always keen for another attempt and often discussed the matter with the writer, but his judicial and political activities thenceforward occupied his time and attention to the exclusion of such enterprises. His attempt was the first ever made to climb the mountain. DOCTOR COOK'S ATTEMPTS About the time that Judge Wickersham was leaving the north face of the mountain an expedition under Doctor Frederick A. Cook set out from Tyonek, on Cook's Inlet, on the other side of the range. Doctor Cook was accompanied by Robert Dunn, Ralph Shainwald (the "Hiram" of Dunn's narrative), and Fred Printz, who had been chief packer for Brooks and Raeburn, and fourteen pack-horses bore their supplies. The route followed was that of Brooks and Raeburn, and they had the advantage of topographical maps and forty miles of trail cut in the timber and a guide familiar with the country. Going up the Beluga and down the Skwentna Rivers, they crossed the range by the Simpson Pass to the south fork of the Kuskokwim, and then skirted the base of the mountains until a southwesterly ridge was reached which it is not very easy to locate, but which, as Doctor Brooks judges, must have been near the headwaters of the Tatlathna, a tributary of the Kuskokwim. Here an attempt was made to ascend the mountain, but at eight thousand feet a chasm cut them off from further advance. Pursuing their northeast course, they reached the Peters Glacier (which Doctor Cook calls the Hanna Glacier) and stumbled across one of Judge Wickersham's camps of a couple of months before. Here another attempt to ascend was made, only to find progress stopped by the same stupendous cliffs that had turned back the Wickersham party. "Over the glacier which comes from the gap between the eastern and western peaks" (the North and South Peaks as we speak of them), says Doctor Cook, "there was a promising route." That is, indeed, part of the only route, but it can be reached only by the Muldrow Glacier. "The walls of the main mountain rise out of the Hanna (Peters) Glacier," Cook adds. The "main mountain" has many walls; the walls by which the summit alone may be reached rise out of the Muldrow Glacier, a circumstance that was not to be discovered for some years yet. The lateness of the season now compelled immediate return. Passing still along the face of the range in the same direction, the party crossed the terminal moraine of the Muldrow Glacier without recognizing that it affords the only highway to the heart of the great mountain and recrossed the range by an ice-covered pass to the waters of the Chulitna River, down which they rafted after abandoning their horses. Doctor Cook calls this pass "Harper Pass," and the name should stand, for Cook was probably the first man ever to use it. [Sidenote: Robert Dunn] The chief result of this expedition, besides the exploration of about one hundred miles of unknown country, was the publication by Robert Dunn of an extraordinary narrative in several consecutive numbers of _Outing_, afterward republished in book form, with some modifications, as "The Shameless Diary of an Explorer," a vivid but unpleasant production, for which every squabble and jealousy of the party furnishes literary material. The book has a curious, undeniable power, despite its brutal frankness and its striving after "the poor renown of being smart," and it may live. One is thankful, however, that it is unique in the literature of travel. [Sidenote: Cook's Second Attempt] Three years later Doctor Cook organized an expedition for a second attempt upon the mountain. In May, 1906, accompanied by Professor Herschel Parker, Mr. Belmore Browne, a topographer named Porter, who made some valuable maps, and packers, the party landed at the head of Cook's Inlet and penetrated by motor-boat and by pack-train into the Sushitna country, south of the range. Failing to cross the range at the head of the Yentna, they spent some time in explorations along the Kahilitna River, and, finding no avenue of approach to the heights of the mountain, the party returned to Cook's Inlet and broke up. With only one companion, a packer named Edward Barrille, Cook returned in the launch up the Chulitna River to the Tokositna late in August. "We had already changed our mind as to the impossibility of climbing the mountain," he writes. Ascending a glacier which the Tokositna River drains, named by Cook the Ruth Glacier, they reached the amphitheatre at the glacier head. From this point, "up and up to the heaven-scraped granite of the top," Doctor Cook grows grandiloquent and vague, for at this point his true narrative ends. [Illustration: Approaching the range.] The claims that Doctor Cook made upon his return are well known, but it is quite impossible to follow his course from the description given in his book, "To the Top of the Continent." This much may be said: from the summit of the mountain, on a clear day, it seemed evident that no ascent was possible from the south side of the range at all. That was the judgment of all four members of our party. Doctor Cook talks about "the heaven-scraped granite of the top" and "the dazzling whiteness of the frosted granite blocks," and prints a photograph of the top showing granite slabs. There is no rock of any kind on the South (the higher) Peak above nineteen thousand feet. The last one thousand five hundred feet of the mountain is all permanent snow and ice; nor is the conformation of the summit in the least like the photograph printed as the "top of Mt. McKinley." In his account of the view from the summit he speaks of "the ice-blink caused by the extensive glacial sheets north of the Saint Elias group," which would surely be out of the range of any possible vision, but does not mention at all the master sight that bursts upon the eye when the summit is actually gained--the great mass of "Denali's Wife," or Mount Foraker, filling all the middle distance. We were all agreed that no one who had ever stood on the top of Denali in clear weather could fail to mention the sudden splendid sight of this great mountain. But it is not worth while to pursue the subject further. The present writer feels confident that any man who climbs to the top of Denali, and then reads Doctor Cook's account of his ascent, will not need Edward Barrille's affidavit to convince him that Cook's narrative is untrue. Indignation is, however, swallowed up in pity when one thinks upon the really excellent pioneering and exploring work done by this man, and realizes that the immediate success of the imposition about the ascent of Denali doubtless led to the more audacious imposition about the discovery of the North Pole--and that to his discredit and downfall. THE PIONEER ASCENT Although Cook's claim to have reached the summit of Denali met with general acceptance outside, or at least was not openly scouted, it was otherwise in Alaska. The men, in particular, who lived and worked in the placer-mining regions about the base of the mountain, and were, perhaps, more familiar with the orography of the range than any surveyor or professed topographer, were openly incredulous. Upon the appearance of Doctor Cook's book, "To the Top of the Continent," in 1908, the writer well remembers the eagerness with which his copy (the only one in Fairbanks) was perused by man after man from the Kantishna diggings, and the acute way in which they detected the place where vague "fine writing" began to be substituted for definite description. Some of these men, convinced that the ascent had never been made, conceived the purpose of proving it in the only way in which it could be proved--by making the ascent themselves. They were confident that an enterprise which had now baffled several parties of "scientists," equipped with all sorts of special apparatus, could be accomplished by Alaskan "sourdoughs" with no special equipment at all. There seems also to have entered into the undertaking a naïve notion that in some way or other large money reward would follow a successful ascent. The enterprise took form under Thomas Lloyd, who managed to secure the financial backing of McPhee and Petersen, saloon-keepers of Fairbanks, and Griffin, a wholesale liquor dealer of Chena. These three men are said to have put up five hundred dollars apiece, and the sum thus raised sufficed for the needs of the party. In February 1910, therefore, Thomas Lloyd, Charles McGonogill, William Taylor, Peter Anderson, and Bob Horne, all experienced prospectors and miners, and E. C. Davidson, a surveyor, now the surveyor-general of Alaska, set out from Fairbanks, and by 1st March had established a base camp at the mouth of Cache Creek, within the foot-hills of the range. Here Davidson and Horne left the party after a disagreement with Lloyd. The loss of Davidson was a fatal blow to anything beyond a "sporting" ascent, for he was the only man in the party with any scientific bent, or who knew so much as the manipulation of a photographic camera. [Sidenote: The Sourdough Climb] The Lloyd expedition was the first to discover the only approach by which the mountain may be climbed. Mr. Alfred Brooks, Mr. Robert Muldrow, and Doctor Cook had passed the snout of the Muldrow Glacier without realizing that it turned and twisted and led up until it gave access to the ridge by which alone the upper glacier or Grand Basin can be reached and the summits gained. From observations while hunting mountain-sheep upon the foot-hills for years past, Lloyd had already satisfied himself of this prime fact; had found the key to the complicated orography of the great mass. Lloyd had previously crossed the range with horses in this neighborhood by an easy pass that led "from willows to willows" in eighteen miles. Pete Anderson had come into the Kantishna country this way and had crossed and recrossed the range by this pass no less than eleven times. McGonogill, following quartz leads upon the high mountains of Moose Creek, had traced from his aerie the course of the Muldrow Glacier, and had satisfied himself that within the walls of that glacier the route would be found. And, indeed, when he had us up there and pointed out the long stretch of the parallel walls it was plain to us also that they held the road to the heights. From the point where he had perched his tiny hut, a stone's throw from his tunnel, how splendidly the mountain rose and the range stretched out! These men thus started with the great advantage of a knowledge of the mountain, and their plan for climbing it was the first that contained the possibility of success. From the base camp Anderson and McGonogill scouted among the foot-hills of the range for some time before they discovered the pass that gives easy access to the Muldrow Glacier. On 25th March the party had traversed the glacier and reached its head with dogs and supplies. A camp was made on the ridge, while further prospecting was carried on toward the upper glacier. This was the farthest point that Lloyd reached. On 10th April, Taylor, Anderson, and McGonogill set out about two in the morning with great climbing-irons strapped to their moccasins and hooked pike-poles in their hands. Disdaining the rope and cutting no steps, it was "every man for himself," with reliance solely upon the _crampons_. They went up the ridge to the Grand Basin, crossed the ice to the North Peak, and proceeded to climb it, carrying the fourteen-foot flagstaff with them. Within perhaps five hundred feet of the summit, McGonogill, outstripped by Taylor and Anderson, and fearful of the return over the slippery ice-incrusted rocks if he went farther, turned back, but Taylor and Anderson reached the top (about twenty thousand feet above the sea) and firmly planted the flagstaff, which is there yet. [Sidenote: Lloyd and McGonogill] This is the true narrative of a most extraordinary feat, unique--the writer has no hesitation in claiming--in all the annals of mountaineering. He has been at the pains of talking with every member of the actual climbing party with a view to sifting the matter thoroughly. For, largely by the fault of these men themselves, through a mistaken though not unchivalrous sense of loyalty to the organizer of the expedition, much incredulity was aroused in Alaska touching their exploit. It was most unfortunate that any mystery was made about the details, most unfortunate that in the newspaper accounts false claims were set up. Surely the merest common sense should have dictated that in the account of an ascent undertaken with the prime purpose of proving that Doctor Cook had _not_ made the ascent, and had falsified his narrative, everything should be frank and aboveboard; but it was not so. A narrative, gathered from Lloyd himself and agreed to by the others, was reduced to writing by Mr. W. E. Thompson, an able journalist of Fairbanks, and was sold to a newspaper syndicate. The account the writer has examined was "featured" in the New York Sunday _Times_ of the 5th June, 1910. In that account Lloyd is made to claim unequivocally that he himself reached both summits of the mountain. "There were two summits and we climbed them both"; and again, "When I reached the coast summit" are reported in quotation marks as from his lips. As a matter of fact, Lloyd himself reached neither summit, nor was much above the glacier floor; and the south or coast summit, the higher of the two, was not attempted by the party at all. There is no question that the party _could_ have climbed the South Peak, though by reason of its greater distance it is safe to say that it could not have been reached, as the North Peak was, in one march from the ridge camp. It must have involved a camp in the Grand Basin with all the delay and the labor of relaying the stuff up there. But the men who accomplished the astonishing feat of climbing the North Peak, in one almost superhuman march from the saddle of the Northeast Ridge, could most certainly have climbed the South Peak too. [Sidenote: The North Peak] They did not attempt it for two reasons, first, because they wanted to plant their fourteen-foot flagstaff where it could be seen through a telescope from Fairbanks, one hundred and fifty miles away, as they fondly supposed, and, second, because not until they had reached the summit of the North Peak did they realize that the South Peak is higher. They told the writer that upon their return to the floor of the _upper_ glacier they were greatly disappointed to find that their flagstaff was not visible to them. It is, indeed, only just visible with the naked eye from certain points on the upper glacier and quite invisible at any lower or more distant point. Walter Harper has particularly keen sight, and he was well up in the Grand Basin, at nearly seventeen thousand feet altitude, sitting and scanning the sky-line of the North Peak, seeking for the pole, when he caught sight of it and pointed it out. The writer was never sure that he saw it with the naked eye, though Karstens and Tatum did so as soon as Walter pointed it out, but through the field-glasses it was plain and prominent and unmistakable. When we came down to the Kantishna diggings and announced to the men who planted it that we had seen the flagstaff, there was a feeling expressed that the climbing party of the previous summer must have seen it also and had suppressed mention of it; but there is no ground whatever for such a damaging assumption. It would never be seen with the naked eye save by those who were intently searching for it. Professor Parker and Mr. Belmore Browne entertained the pretty general incredulity about the "Pioneer" ascent, perhaps too readily, certainly too confidently; but the men themselves must bear the chief blame for that. The writer and his party, knowing these men much better, had never doubt that _some_ of them had accomplished what was claimed, and these details have been gone into for no other reason than that honor may at last be given where honor is due. [Sidenote: Pete Anderson and Billy Taylor] To Lloyd belongs the honor of conceiving and organizing the attempt but not of accomplishing it. To him probably also belongs the original discovery of the route that made the ascent possible. To McGonogill belongs the credit of discovering the pass, probably the only pass, by which the glacier may be reached without following it from its snout up, a long and difficult journey; and to him also the credit of climbing some nineteen thousand five hundred feet, or to within five hundred feet of the North Peak. But to Pete Anderson and Billy Taylor, two of the strongest men, physically, in all the North, and to none other, belongs the honor of the first ascent of the North Peak and the planting of what must assuredly be the highest flagstaff in the world. The North Peak has never since been climbed or attempted. * * * * * In the summer of the same year, 1910, Professor Parker and Mr. Belmore Browne, members of the second Cook party, convinced by this time that Cook's claim was wholly unfounded, attempted the mountain again, and another party, organized by Mr. C. E. Rust, of Portland, Oregon, also endeavored the ascent. But both these expeditions confined themselves to the hopeless southern side of the range, from which, in all probability, the mountain never can be climbed. THE PARKER-BROWNE EXPEDITION To a man living in the interior of Alaska, aware of the outfitting and transportation facilities which the large commerce of Fairbanks affords, aware of the navigable waterways that penetrate close to the foot-hills of the Alaskan range, aware also of the amenities of the interior slope with its dry, mild climate, its abundance of game and rich pasturage compared with the trackless, lifeless snows of the coast slopes, there seems a strange fatuity in the persistent efforts to approach the mountain from the southern side of the range. It is morally certain that if the only expedition that remains to be dealt with--that organized by Professor Parker and Mr. Belmore Browne in 1912, which came within an ace of success--had approached the mountain from the interior instead of from the coast, it would have forestalled us and accomplished the first complete ascent. The difficulties of the coast approach have been described graphically enough by Robert Dunn in the summer and by Belmore Browne himself in the winter. There are no trails; the snow lies deep and loose and falls continually, or else the whole country is bog and swamp. There is no game. [Sidenote: Parker and Browne] The Parker-Browne expedition left Seward, on Resurrection Bay, late in January, 1912, and after nearly three months' travel, relaying their stuff forward, they crossed the range under extreme difficulties, being seventeen days above any vegetation, and reached the northern face of the mountain on 25th March. The expedition either missed the pass near the foot of the Muldrow Glacier, well known to the Kantishna miners, by which it is possible to cross from willows to willows in eighteen miles, or else avoided it in the vain hope of finding another. They then went to the Kantishna diggings and procured supplies and topographical information from the miners, and were thus able to follow the course of the Lloyd party of 1910, reaching the Muldrow Glacier by the gap in the glacier wall discovered by McGonogill and named McPhee Pass by him. Mr. Belmore Browne has written a lucid and stirring account of the ascent which his party made. We were fortunate enough to secure a copy of the magazine in which it appeared just before leaving Fairbanks, and he had been good enough to write a letter in response to our inquiries and to enclose a sketch map. Our course was almost precisely the same as that of the Parker-Browne party up to seventeen thousand feet, and the course of that party was precisely the same as that of the Lloyd party up to fifteen thousand feet. There is only one way up the mountain, and Lloyd and his companions discovered it. The earthquake had enormously increased the labor of the ascent; it had not altered the route. A reconnoissance of the Muldrow Glacier to its head and a long spell of bad weather delayed the party so much that it was the 4th June before the actual ascent was begun--a very late date indeed; more than a month later than our date and nearly three months later than the "Pioneer" date. It is rarely that the mountain is clear after the 1st June; almost all the summer through its summit is wrapped in cloud. From the junction of the Tanana and Yukon Rivers it is often visible for weeks at a time during the winter, but is rarely seen at all after the ice goes out. A close watch kept by friends at Tanana (the town at the confluence of the rivers) discovered the summit on the day we reached it and the following day (the 7th and 8th June) but not for three weeks before and not at all afterward; from which it does not follow, however, that the summit was not visible momentarily, or at certain hours of the day, but only that it was not visible for long enough to be observed. The rapidity with which that summit shrouds and clears itself is sometimes marvellous. As is well known, the Parker-Browne party pushed up the Northeast Ridge and the upper glacier and made a first attack upon the summit itself, from a camp at seventeen thousand feet, on the 29th June. When within three or four hundred feet of the top they were overwhelmed and driven down, half frozen, by a blizzard that suddenly arose. On the 1st July another attempt was made, but the clouds ascended and completely enveloped the party in a cold, wind-driven mist so that retreat to camp was again imperative. Only those who have experienced bad weather at great heights can understand how impossible it is to proceed in the face of it. The strongest, the hardiest, the most resolute must yield. The party could linger no longer; food supplies were exhausted. They broke camp and went down the mountain. The falling short of complete success of this very gallant mountaineering attempt seems to have been due, first to the mistake of approaching the mountain by the most difficult route, so that it was more than five months after starting that the actual climbing began; or, if the survey made justified, and indeed decided, the route, then the summit was sacrificed to the survey. But the immediate cause of the failure was the mistake of relying upon canned pemmican for the main food supply. This provision, hauled with infinite labor from the coast, and carried on the backs of the party to the high levels of the mountain, proved uneatable and useless at the very time when it was depended upon for subsistence. There is no finer big-game country in the world than that around the interior slopes of the Alaskan range; there is no finer meat in the world than caribou and mountain-sheep. It is carrying coals to Newcastle to bring canned meat into this country--nature's own larder stocked with her choicest supplies. But if, attempting the mountain when they did, the Parker-Browne party had remained two or three days longer in the Grand Basin, which they would assuredly have done had their food been eatable, their bodies would be lying up there yet or would be crushed beneath the débris of the earthquake on the ridge. CHAPTER IX THE NAMES PLACED UPON THE MOUNTAIN BY THE AUTHOR There was no intent of putting names at all upon any portions of this mountain when the expedition was undertaken, save that the author had it in his mind to honor the memory of a very noble and very notable gentlewoman who gave ten years of her life to the Alaskan natives, set on foot one of the most successful educational agencies in the interior, and died suddenly and heroically at her post of duty a few years since, leaving a broad and indelible mark upon the character of a generation of Indians. Miss Farthing lies buried high up on the bluffs opposite the school at Nenana, in a spot she was wont to visit for the fine view of Denali it commands, and her brother, the present bishop of Montreal, and some of her colleagues of the Alaskan mission, have set a concrete cross there. When we entered the Alaskan range by Cache Creek there rose directly before us a striking pyramidal peak, some twelve or thirteen thousand feet high. Not knowing that any name had been bestowed upon it, the author discharged himself of the duty that he conceived lay upon him of associating Miss Farthing's name permanently with the mountain range she loved and the country in which she labored. But he has since learned that Professor Parker placed upon this mountain, a year before, the name of Alfred Brooks, of the Alaskan Geological Survey. Apart from the priority of naming, to which, of course, he would immediately yield, the author knows of no one whose name should so fitly be placed upon a peak of the Alaskan range, and he would himself resist any effort to change it. Having gratified this desire, as he supposed, there had meantime arisen another desire,--upon reading the narrative of the Parker-Browne expedition of the previous year, a copy of which we were fortunate enough to procure just as we were starting for the mountain. It was the feeling of our whole company that the names of Professor Parker and Mr. Belmore Browne should be associated with the mountain they so very nearly ascended. When the eyes are cast aloft from the head of the Muldrow Glacier the most conspicuous feature of the view is a rudely conical tower of granite, standing sentinel over the entrance to the Grand Basin, and at the base of that tower is the pass into the upper glacier which is, indeed, the key of the whole ascent of the mountain. (See illustration opposite p. 40.) [Sidenote: Tower, Pass, and Ridge] We found no better place to set these names; we called the tower the Browne Tower and the pass the Parker Pass. The "pass" may not, it is true, conform to any strict Alpine definition of that term, but it gives the only access to the glacier floor. From the ridge below to the glacier above this place gives passage; and any place that gives passage may broadly be termed a pass. It was when this pass had been reached, after three weeks' toil, that the author was moved to the bestowal of another name by his admiration for the skill and pluck and perseverance of his chief colleague in the ascent. Those who think that a long apprenticeship must be served under skilled instructors before command of the technique of snow mountaineering can be obtained would have been astonished at Karstens's work on the Northeast Ridge. But it must be kept in mind that, while he had no previous experience on the heights, he had many years of experience with ice and snow--which is true of all of us except Tatum, and _he_ had two winters' experience. In the course of winter travel in the interior of Alaska most of the problems of snow mountaineering present themselves at one time or another. [Sidenote: Glacier] The designation "Northeast," which the Parker-Browne party put upon the ridge that affords passage from the lower glacier to the upper, is open to question. Mr. Charles Sheldon, who spent a year around the base of the mountain studying the fauna of the region, refers to the _outer_ wall of the Muldrow Glacier as the Northeast Ridge, that is, the wall that rises to the North Peak. Perhaps "East Ridge of the South Peak" would be the most exact description. But it is here proposed to substitute Harry Karstens's name for points-of-the-compass designations, and call the ridge, part of which the earthquake shattered, the dividing ridge between the two arms of the Muldrow Glacier, soaring tremendously and impressively with ice-incrusted cliffs in its lower course, the Karstens Ridge. Regarded in its whole extent, it is one of the capital features of the mountain. It is seen to the left in the picture opposite page 26, where Karstens stands alone. At this point of its course it soars to its greatest elevation, five or six thousand feet above the glacier floor; it is seen again in the middle distance of the picture opposite page 164. Not until this book was in preparation and the author was digging into the literature of the mountain did he discover the interesting connection of Arthur Harper, father of Walter Harper, narrated in another place, with Denali, and not until that discovery did he think of suggesting the name Harper for any feature of the mountain, despite the distinction that fell to the young man of setting the first foot upon the summit. Then the upper glacier appeared to be the most appropriate place for the name, and, after reflection, it is deemed not improper to ask that this glacier be so known. It has thus fallen out that each of the author's colleagues is distinguished by some name upon the mountain except Robert Tatum. But to Tatum belongs the honor of having raised the stars and stripes for the first time upon the highest point in all the territory governed by the United States; and he is well content with that distinction. Keen as the keenest amongst us to reach the top, Tatum had none the less been entirely willing to give it up and go down to the base camp and let Johnny take his place (when he was unwell at the head of the glacier owing to long confinement in the tent during bad weather), if in the judgment of the writer that had been the wisest course for the whole party. Fortunately the indisposition passed, and the matter is referred to only as indicating the spirit of the man. I suppose there is no money that could buy from him the little silk flag he treasures. It was also while this book was preparing that the author found that he had unwittingly renamed Mount Brooks, and the prompt withdrawal of his suggested name for that peak left the one original desire of naming a feature of the mountain or the range ungratified, and his obligation toward a revered memory unfulfilled. [Sidenote: Horns of the South Peak] Where else might that name be placed? For a long time no place suggested itself; then it was called to mind that the two horns at the extremities of the horseshoe ridge of the South Peak were unnamed. Here were twin peaks, small, yet lofty and conspicuous--part of the main summit of the mountain. The naming of one almost carried with it the naming of the other; and as soon as the name Farthing alighted, so to speak, from his mind upon the one, the name Carter settled itself upon the other. In the long roll of women who have labored devotedly for many years amongst the natives of the interior of Alaska, there are no brighter names than those of Miss Annie Farthing and Miss Clara Carter, the one forever associated with Nenana, the other with the Allakaket. To those who are familiar with what has been done and what is doing for the Indians of the interior, to the white men far and wide who have owed recovery of health and relief and refreshment to the ministrations of these capable women, this naming will need no labored justification; and if self-sacrifice and love, and tireless, patient labor for the good of others be indeed the greatest things in the world, then the mountain top bearing aloft these names does not so much do honor as is itself dignified and ennobled. These horns of the South Peak are shown in the picture opposite page 94; they are of almost equal height; the near one the author would name the Farthing Horn, the far one the Carter Horn. [Sidenote: Denali and His Wife] And now the author finds that he has done what, in the past, he has faulted others for doing--he has plastered a mountain with names. The prerogative of name-giving is a dangerous one, without definite laws or limitations. Nothing but common consent and usage ultimately establish names, but he to whom falls the first exploration of a country, or the first ascent of a peak, is usually accorded privilege of nomenclature. Yet it is a privilege that is often abused and should be exercised with reserve. Whether or not it has been overdone in the present case, others must say. This, however, the author will say, and would say as emphatically as is in his power: that he sets no store whatever by the names he has ventured to confer comparable with that which he sets by the restoration of the ancient native names of the whole great mountain and its companion peak. It may be that the Alaskan Indians are doomed; it may be that the liquor and disease which to-day are working havoc amongst them will destroy them off the face of the earth; it is common to meet white men who assume it with complacency. Those who are fighting for the natives with all their hearts and souls do not believe it, cannot believe it, cannot believe that this will be the end of all their efforts, that any such blot will foul the escutcheon of the United States. But if it be so, let at least the memorial of their names remain. When the inhabited wilderness has become an uninhabited wilderness, when the only people who will ever make their homes in it are exterminated, when the placer-gold is gone and the white men have gone also, when the last interior Alaskan town is like Diamond City and Glacier City and Bearpaw City and Roosevelt City; and Bettles and Rampart and Coldfoot; and Cleary City and Delta City and Vault City and a score of others; let at least the native names of these great mountains remain to show that there once dwelt in the land a simple, hardy race who braved successfully the rigors of its climate and the inhospitality of their environment and flourished, until the septic contact of a superior race put corruption into their blood. So this book shall end as it began. [Illustration: Map Showing Route of the Stuck-Karstens Expedition to the Summit of Mt. Denali (Mt. McKinley.) 1913] Transcriber's Notes Sidenotes were created from the unique headers on alternate pages of the original text, with some minor amendments. The following typos were corrected: corrected: original: on page: Iditarod Iditerod 5 La Voy LeVoy 41 La Voy Le Voy 97 (in footnote) whatna whatna' 63 (twice) nor or 103 Revillagigedo Revillegigedo 142 page 94 page 96 186 All Native American words were left with the accents given them intact. On page 38 a possible missing word "he" was not added due to uncertainty about the author's intentions: "... but the dogs must be tended, and the main food for them [he?] was yet to seek...." The five instances of "base-camp" were changed to comply with common usage: "base camp." 
37993	----	CLIMBING IN THE BRITISH ISLES _ENGLAND_ CLIMBING IN THE BRITISH ISLES _3 vols. 16mo. Sold separately._ I. ENGLAND. II. WALES. _In preparation._ III. SCOTLAND. _In preparation._ LONDON AND NEW YORK: LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. CLIMBING IN THE BRITISH ISLES _I.--ENGLAND_ BY W.P. HASKETT SMITH, M.A. MEMBER OF THE ALPINE CLUB WITH TWENTY-THREE ILLUSTRATIONS BY ELLIS CARR MEMBER OF THE ALPINE CLUB AND FIVE PLANS LONDON LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. AND NEW YORK: 15 EAST 16th STREET 1894 _All rights reserved_ CONTENTS Introduction The headings, for convenience of reference, are arranged in one continuous alphabetical series, comprising the following classes of subject: I. COUNTIES AND DISTRICTS WHICH ARE OF INTEREST TO THE MOUNTAINEER (_e.g._ Cumberland, Cornwall, Derbyshire, Ennerdale) II. PLACES WHICH ARE CONVENIENT AS CLIMBING CENTRES (_e.g._ Keswick, Patterdale, Wastdale Head) III. MOUNTAINS AND ROCKS WHICH AFFORD CLIMBS (_e.g._ Dow Crag, Pillar, Scafell) IV. CLIMBS OF REPUTATION, WITH DIRECTIONS FOR FINDING AND ACCOMPLISHING THEM (_e.g._ Deep Gill, Mickledoor, Napes Needle) V. TECHNICAL TERMS AND EXPRESSIONS (_e.g._ back-and-knee, chimney, toe-scrape) VI. LOCAL NAMES FOUND AMONG THE HILLS, WITH OCCASIONAL NOTES ON THEIR ORIGIN AND MEANING (_e.g._ bink, clough, gill, hause, hope) INTRODUCTION For some years past there has been a remarkably rapid increase in the number of men who climb for climbing's sake within the bounds of the British Isles. When any young and active Englishman sees a rock and is told that the ascent of it is regarded as a kind of feat, there is no doubt what he will want to do. He will obey what has been the instinct of the race at any time this forty years. But lately there has been a change. What was formerly done casually and instinctively has for the last dozen years or so been done systematically and of set purpose, for it is now recognised that hill-climbing in these islands may form part of a real mountaineering education. Many might-be mountaineers have missed their vocation because they were in the position of the prudent individual who would not go into the water until after he should have learned to swim: they did not become Alpine because they were afraid that they should make fools of themselves if they went on the Alps. Yet, had they only known it, they might have found without crossing the sea many a place which might have been to their undeveloped instincts what the little pond at the end of the garden has been to many a would-be skater--a quiet spot where early flounderings would be safe from the contemptuous glances of unsympathetic experts. Icemanship can only be acquired through a long apprenticeship, by tramping many a weary mile helplessly tied to the tail of a guide. But one principal charm of hill-climbing lies in the fact that it may be picked up by self-directed practice and does not demand the same preliminary subjection. The course of Alpine instruction can only be considered complete when Mr. Girdlestone's ideal of 'The High Alps without Guides' is realised (an ideal, be it clearly understood, which for fully ninety-nine out of every hundred climbers it would be downright madness to attempt to carry into practice); whereas, while rock-climbing may be enjoyed by amateurs without incurring the reproach of recklessness, they at the same time experience the exquisite pleasure of forming their own plans of attack, of varying the execution of them according to their own judgment, and finally of meeting obstacles, as they arise, with their own skill and with their own strength, and overcoming them without the assistance of a hired professional. Nowhere can the mere manual dexterity of climbing be better acquired than among the fells of Cumberland; excellent practising-ground presents itself on nearly every hill. Compared with real mountains the crags of Cumberland are but toys, but small as they are, they have made many and many a fine climber; and the man who has gone through a course of training among them, who has learnt to know the exact length of his own stride and reach, and to wriggle up a 'chimney' in approved style with shoulder, hip and knee, may boldly fly at higher game, and when he proceeds to tackle the giants of the Alps or Caucasus has no cause to be afraid of the result. As if with the express object of increasing their educational value to the mountaineer, the hilly parts of Great Britain are peculiarly subject to atmospheric changes. No one who has not experienced their effects would believe the extent to which mist, snow, and even rain can change the appearance of landmarks among the mountains; and, where landmarks are less abundant or less striking, even the buffeting of violent wind may cause an inexperienced man to change his direction unconsciously. Valuable experience in things of this kind may be gained even in summer, but in winter the conditions become more Alpine, and splendid practice may be had in the use of the axe and rope. Not that the latter should be neglected on difficult rocks at any time of the year. Even in places where it gives the leader no security and to some extent actually impedes him, the moral effect of it is good. It wonderfully increases those feelings of united and ordered effort, of mutual dependence and mutual confidence, and finally of cheery subordination of self, which are not the least of the virtues or the joys of mountaineering. How these opportunities may be used the novice will readily learn from Mr. Charles Pilkington's admirable chapters in the Badminton 'Mountaineering,' and from Dr. Claude Wilson's excellent little handbook on the same subject. It is the aim of the present work to enable him to find suitable places where the principles so admirably laid down by those authorities may be tested and applied, and to understand the descriptions--often involving difficult technical and local terms--which have been published of them. When anyone with climbing instincts finds himself in a strange place his first desire is to discover a climb, his second to learn what its associations are; what is it called, and why? has anyone climbed it, and what did he think of it? To such questions as these this book endeavours to provide an answer. It offers, in short, to the would-be climber a link, with the guidebook on the one hand and the local specialist on the other. It must always be remembered that a very fine rock may be a very poor climb. It may be impossible or it may be too easy, or, again, the material maybe dangerously rotten; and thus, though there are many places where men can and do obtain useful climbing practice, there is only one part of England to which resort is made simply for the sake of its climbing. In consequence of this fact the greater part of the book is devoted to the English Lakes, and especially to the south-west portion of them, where the best climbs of all are to be found. But in that district the art has been highly elaborated, and the standard of difficulty and dexterity is even dangerously high. If men would be content to serve an apprenticeship and to feel their way gradually from the easier climbs onward, they would excite less apprehension in the minds of those who know what these climbs are. If, on the other hand, they rush, as too many do, straight from the desk in a crowded city, with unseasoned lungs and muscles, in the cold and the wet, to attack alone or with chance companions whatever climb enjoys for the moment the greatest notoriety, frightful accidents are certain to occur. The books, too, which are kept specially for climbing records at some places in the Lakes, such as Dungeon Gill, Buttermere, and, notably, Wastdale Head, are misleading, owing to the widely different standards of difficulty among the various writers. Printed accounts are so few that this objection hardly applies to them. The most noteworthy beyond all doubt are the two articles written for _All the Year Round_, in November 1884, by Mr. C.N. Williamson, the late editor of _Black and White_. It would be hard to exaggerate the effect which these articles had in making the Lake climbs known. The same writer had previously contributed articles of less permanent value to the _Graphic_ and the _Daily News_. In 1837 two articles had appeared in the _Penny Magazine_ (see _Lord's Rake_); in 1859 the late Professor Tyndall had written of _Mickledoor_ in the _Saturday Review_, and more recently articles have appeared in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, by Mr. W. Brunskill and by Mr. H. A. Gwynne. The present writer contributed an article to the _Alpine Journal_ of August 1892, and one containing very clear illustrations of 'back-and-knee' work and of an episode in the long climb on the Pillar Rock to the pages of _Black and White_, in June 1892, while numerous articles have appeared from time to time in such local papers as the _Whitehaven News_ and the _West Cumberland Times_, and in the Manchester, Leeds, and Bradford press. Of guidebooks the only one of any value to climbers is Mr. Herman Prior's 'Pedestrian Guide.' Any value which the present book may have is largely due to the excellent drawings of Mr. Ellis Carr, who most kindly came forward to fill the place left by the lamented death of Professor A.M. Marshall. Much assistance has been derived from sketches and photographs kindly lent, those of Mr. Abraham, of Keswick, being especially useful. For the valuable article on 'Chalk' I am indebted to Mr. A.F. Mummery, whose knowledge of the subject is unrivalled; while Mr. J.W. Robinson, of Lorton, has zealously assisted in all matters connected with Cumberland; and I must gratefully acknowledge help given in other ways by Mr. J.E. Morris and the Rev. C.J. Buckmaster. CLIMBING IN THE BRITISH ISLES ENGLAND =Alum Pot=, the name of which is also found in such forms as _Allen_ and _Hellan_, lies just west of the Midland Railway, about halfway between Horton and Ribblehead stations, and on the north-east side of Ingleborough. It is one of the most striking and most famous of the Yorkshire potholes, being an elliptical opening in the limestone, 120 ft. long and 40 ft. wide, with a perpendicular depth of 200 ft. The exploration of it was begun by Mr. Birkbeck of Anley in 1847, who, assisted by Prof. Boyd Dawkins and a large party including three ladies, made a complete examination in 1870. =Angler's Crag=, on the south side of Ennerdale Water. The steep portion is about 300 ft. There are also some similar crags on _Grike_ and _Revelin_, close by; but none of them are worth a long walk, and the only resting-place near is the Angler's Inn, at the foot of Ennerdale Water. =Apron-strings.=--Throughout Scotland and the North of England the traditional explanation of large heaps of stones is that while some one (generally the Devil or Samson) was carrying the stones in his apron the strings broke and the stones fell in a heap. Many such heaps are to be found, bearing the name of 'apronful' or 'bratful,' which means the same thing. A good instance of the latter form is _Samson's Bratful_, in Cumberland, between the rivers Bleng and Calder. For another good instance see what is said about Wade's Causeway in _Murray's Handbook for Yorkshire_, at p. 206. =Aron.=--So Wilkinson (in his 'Select Views') calls _Great End_. It may be that he misunderstood his guide, who was, perhaps, speaking at the time of _Aaron Crags_, which are on _Sprinkling Fell_, and would be in the line of sight to any one coming up from _Borrowdale_. In fact, the path to _Sty Head_ passes not only _Aaron Crags_ on the left, but also _Aaron Slack_ on the right. It is, of course, tempting to suggest that Aron was the original Keltic name of Great End; but in Wales the name Aran is generally applied to mountains of very different appearance to _Great End_. =Arrowhead=, a prominent rock in the _Napes_ of _Great Gable_, being part of the ridge immediately west of _Eagle's Nest_. It was climbed on April 17, 1892, by a large party, including Messrs. Horace Walker, Baker, Slingsby, and others. In the following year, on the last day of March, this climb was repeated by Messrs. Solly, Schintz, Brant, and Bowen, who continued it right on to the top of the ridge. They kept rather more on the ridge itself than the former party had done on the way to the _Arrowhead_, and from that point the climb is along the crest of the ridge. It is not a difficult climb for an experienced party. The ridge has been called the _Arrowhead Ridge_. [Illustration: THE ARROWHEAD (South side of Great Gable)] =Ash Crag=, a rock in _Ennerdale_, near the _Black Sail_ end of the _Pillar Fell_. It is the writer's belief that this is the rock which the poet Wordsworth, in 'The Brothers,' has confused with the _Pillar Rock_. At least a lad belonging to an old Ennerdale family, the Bowmans of Mireside, was killed by falling from this rock at a date closely corresponding to that indicated in the poem. =Attermire=, one of the most picturesque limestone scars in Yorkshire. It is reached from Settle on the Midland Railway, and may be seen on the way to Malham Cove. =Back-and-knee=: the process of supporting or raising the body in a 'chimney' by pressure against opposite sides with back and knees, or, more usually, back and feet. =Band.=--This word forms part of many hill names in the North of England, and is also found in Scotland. Dr. Murray deals with it in the 'New English Dictionary,' but not in a satisfactory manner. He defines it as 'a long ridge-like hill of minor height or a long narrow sloping offshoot from a hill or mountain,' but it would be easy to adduce instances where this could have no application. The word is used by Douglas in his translation of Virgil to represent the Latin word 'jugum': Himself ascendis the hie _band_ of the hill; and from this Jamieson concluded that the word meant simply 'top of a hill'--a definition almost as unsuitable as the last. The late Mr. Dickinson, the leading authority on the Cumberland dialect, gave to the word the meaning of 'a boundary on high uninclosed land,' and indeed the frequent association of the word with personal names (often of clearly Scandinavian character) seems to indicate some territorial significance. =Bannerdale Crag= (C. sh. 57) may be taken on the way up _Saddleback_ from Troutbeck station on the line between Keswick and Penrith. About three miles up the stream is _Mungrisdale_, and still farther up along the course of the stream one fork leads to _Scales Tarn_ and another to _Bannerdale_, where there is a lead mine just north of the crags. There is a rocky face some 600 ft. to 800 ft. high, offering climbing, which is steep, but by no means first-rate. =Barf.=--From the southern shore of Bassenthwaite Water there is a fine steep scramble up this hill. On a bright winter's day it is rather inspiriting, and the views are good. The name is more frequent in Yorkshire, where, according to Phillips, it has the meaning of 'a detached low ridge or hill.' =Beachy Head=, close to Eastbourne, in Sussex, is a very fine bold chalk cliff, the first ascent of which is made about once in every two years, if we may believe all that we see in the papers. The truth is that there is a treacherous incline of some 600 ft., formed of chalk and grass, both very steep and often dangerously slippery; and during the Eastbourne season the coastguards at the top find their principal occupation in supplying mechanical assistance to exhausted clamberers; but for difficulty these cliffs will not for a moment compare with those of half the height which carry on the line westward to _Birling Gap_. The tops of these in many places literally overhang the sea, and there are few points where a climber could make the slightest impression upon them. On Beachy Head there is a dangerous-looking pinnacle, which was climbed (by dint of cutting a step or two) in April 1894, by Mr. E.A. Crowley. =Bear Rock=, a queerly-shaped rock on _Great Napes_, which in the middle of March 1889 was gravely attacked by a large party comprising some five or six of the strongest climbers in England. It is a little difficult to find, especially in seasons when the grass is at all long. =Beck.=--In the North of England (except in Northumberland and Durham, where 'burn' prevails) this is the usual word for a brook. It differs from a 'gill' in being more open, and having banks less rocky and a stream somewhat more copious. A gill may contain only a few drops of water, or none at all, and still preserve its self-respect, but not so a beck. Camden speaks of 'Beakes and Brookes.' =Bell= enters into many North Country hill-names. It is commonly said to indicate spots which were specially devoted to the worship of Baal, and many arguments have been based upon its occurrence and distribution. If there is anything in this assertion, the 'high places' for the worship of Baal must have been most capriciously selected. My own belief is that the term is purely descriptive and is applied to a convexity in the slope of a hill. In Lowland Scotch the phrase 'bell of the brae' is not uncommon and has the same significance. =Bell Rib End=, a short drop on the narrow south ridge of _Yewbarrow_. Though on a very small scale, it is not without interest, and was a favourite with Mr. Maitland, one of the early explorers of Wastdale. =Bield.=--This word not only occurs frequently in place names, but is still part of living speech in North England and South Scotland. It means shelter of any kind for man or beast, and in the latter case especially a fox or a sheep. It is also used as a verb; in fox hunting, for instance, the animal when run to earth is said to be 'bielded.' =Bink=: a long narrow grassy ledge. (N. of Eng.) =Black Sail.=--It has been suggested that this name, now borne by the pass from Wastdale to Ennerdale between Pillarfell and Kirkfell, may have originally been named from the mountain it crossed, and so may possibly now preserve an older name of one of those two mountains. Dr. Murray, writing to a local paper some years ago, did not hesitate to affirm positively that Pillar Fell is entirely due to the Ordnance surveyors, and that the original name was Black Sail, a fact which he said could be proved by historical evidence. It would be extremely interesting to see this evidence, but the name 'Pillar' certainly appears in maps published long before that of the Ordnance. (See _Sail_.) The pass (1,750 ft.) is very familiar to all climbing folk, being the ordinary way of reaching the Pillar Rock from Wastdale Head. It is generally preferred to _Wind Gap_ on account of greater variety of view and better 'going,' and some make use of it even for the purpose of reaching the Ennerdale side of _Great Gable_. The route, however, has one disadvantage. It is hot. It is no uncommon thing to hear enthusiastic frequenters of the Lakes complaining of the popular misapprehension that the sun never shines there, and urging that people are so unreasonable as to notice the wet but to disregard the warmth. Among these traducers of the Cumberland climate the frequenters of the Black Sail route are not found. Argue not with such; but some fair morning, when the reviler is most rampant, lead him gently into Mosedale and watch with calm delight while he pants painfully up the pass, trying his utmost to look cool, with the sun, which he has maligned, beating down squarely upon his back and exacting a merciless revenge. Many a time will he turn about and feign rapture at the taper cone of Yewbarrow and the bold outline of Scafell; often will his bootlace strangely come untied before his reverted glance catches the welcome gleam of Burnmoor Tarn; but long before that time his heart within him will have melted even as wax, and he will have registered a vow that, when next the Cumberland sunshine is discussed, the seat of the scornful shall know him no more. Mr. James Payn, having occasion to allude to 'dry weather' in the Lakes, adds demurely, 'which is said to have occurred about the year 1824'; but, from his own description of Black Sail, it is clear that he deeply rued the sarcasm: 'You will begin to find your pass quite sufficiently steep. Indeed, this is the severest pull of any of the cols in the District, and has proved the friend of many a gallant with his ladylove. To offer a young woman your hand when you are going up Black Sail is in my mind one of the greatest proofs of attachment that can be given, and, if she accepts it, it is tantamount to the everlasting "Yes!"' We may be sure that, before he reached the top, the witty novelist experienced remarkably 'dry weather,' and also some of those symptoms which elsewhere he has himself described with such scientific accuracy: 'Inordinate perspiration and a desperate desire for liquids; if the ascent be persisted in, the speech becomes affected to the extent of a total suspension of conversation. The temper then breaks down; an unseemly craving to leave our companion behind, and a fiendish resolution not to wait for him if his bootlace comes undone, distinguish the next stage of the climbing fever; all admiration of the picturesque has long since vanished, exuded, I fancy, through the pores of the skin: nothing remains but Selfishness, Fatigue, and the hideous reflection that the higher we go the longer will be our journey down again. The notion of malignant spirits occupying elevated regions--Fiends of the Fell--doubtless arose from the immoral experiences of the Early Climbers.' Green's _Guide_ (1819) records a touching instance of a husband's attentions surviving a test which we saw above, that even lovers find severe: 'This is a steep and craggy ascent, and so laborious to man that it might be imagined horses could not travel it; yet Mr. Thomas Tyson, of Wasdale Head, has conducted Mrs. Tyson over this stony ground while sitting on the back of her horse.' In Switzerland one might look back after a day's work, and fairly forget ups and downs so slight as Black Sail; but many of the guide books speak of it in terms which might apply to the Adler or the Felik Joch. For instance, _Black's Picturesque Guide_ (ed. 1872) says: 'The _hardy_ pedestrian with _very minute_ instructions _might_ succeed in finding his way over the mountains, yet every one who has crossed them will beware of the danger of the attempt and of the _occasional fatal consequences_ attending a diversion from the proper path.' This is highly encouraging; and the enterprising traveller who only breaks his neck two or three times in the course of the journey will be of good cheer, for he is making rather a prosperous expedition than otherwise. =Blea Crag=, an isolated square stone on the left of the path to the _Stake_, a long mile up _Longstrath_. It is climbed on the side which looks down the valley. Messrs. Jones and Robinson recorded their ascent of it in September 1893, but it seems that four or five years ago there were traces on it of a previous ascent. 'Crag' is not very commonly used of a single stone, as it is here and in the case of _Carl Crag_. =Borrowdale.=--'Divers Springes,' says old Leland in his 'Itinerary,' 'cummeth owt of Borodale, and so make a great _Lowgh that we cawle a Poole_.' The 'Lowgh' is, of course, Derwentwater, and Borrowdale is the heart of the finest scenery and the best climbing in England. It may be said to stretch from _Scafell_ to _Skiddaw_, and excellent headquarters for climbers may be found in it at _Lowdore_, _Grange_, _Rosthwaite_, and _Seatoller_. With the aid of its wad mines and its _Bowder Stone_, it probably did more during last century than anything else to arouse public interest in the Lake country. The natives were not famed for their intelligence, and many stories are told in support of their nickname of 'Borrowdale gowks.' There is another _Borrowdale_ in Westmorland, and _Boredale_ is perhaps the same name. =Bowder Stone= in _Borrowdale_ was already a curiosity about a century and a half ago, when it was visited by Mr. George Smith, the correspondent of the _Gentleman's Magazine_. Clarke, writing some years later, says it bore the alternative names of _Powderstone_ and _Bounderstone_; and being 'thirty-one yards long by eight yards high, must therefore weigh over 600 tons, and is said to be the largest self-stone in England.' It is not really a 'boulder' at all, but the word is rather loosely used in Cumberland. =Bow Fell= (2,960 ft.).--The name is probably the same as that of _Baugh Fell_, also called _Bow Fell_, in Yorkshire. This graceful peak, standing as it does at the head of several important valleys--_Eskdale_, _Langdale_, _Dunnerdale_, and _Borrowdale_--is a great feature in Lake scenery. There is not much rock-work on it, but a good deal of rough walking and scrambling. From _Borrowdale_ or _Wastdale_ it is approached by way of _Esk Hause_. On this side there is no climbing, except that _Hanging Knot_, as the N. end of Bow Fell is called, descends to _Angle Tarn_ in a long, steep, rocky slope which offers a pleasant scramble. On the _Eskdale_ side there is a gully or two which might be worth exploring. By inclining to the right hand on emerging at the top of _Hell Gill_, or to the left hand from the pony-track at the foot of _Rossett Gill_ we reach _Flat Crags_, huge glacier-planed slopes of rock, overlooked by what in winter is a fine _couloir_ of most alpine appearance. When Messrs. J. & A.R. Stogdon ascended it (_Alpine Journal_, v. p. 35) the inclination of the snow increased from 30° at the foot to 63° after 350 ft. or more, and there was a large cornice at the top. In the account which the same party inserted at the time in the Wastdale Head Book steeper angles are given. In summer it is merely an open scree-gully; but the insignificant-looking chimney just N. of it, and only separated from it by a narrow ridge, is quite worthy of attention, though it has but one pitch in it after the one at the foot. The descent is harder than the ascent, and takes about twenty minutes. There is a fine rocky walk along the S. ridge, called _Shelter Crags_ and _Crinkle Crags_, which descends towards the head of Dunnerdale, but it is extremely unfrequented. =Bram Crag= and _Wanthwaite Crag_ flank the coach road between _Threlkeld_ and _Grasmere_ on the east. The best part is rather more than two miles south of Threlkeld station. The climbing is somewhat similar to that about _Swarthbeck_ on Ullswater, but on better and sounder rock, and there is more of it. A good day's work will be found among these crags, and a fine specimen of a 'sledgate' is deserving of notice. =Brandreth= is between _Borrowdale_ and the head of _Ennerdale_. The name, which occurs elsewhere in the neighbourhood, denotes a tripod (literally a 'grate,' usually made with three legs). The meeting-point of three boundaries of counties, parishes, &c. is often so named. Brandreth has only one short bit of bold rock--one of the many _Raven Crags_. It is hardly worth a special journey, but may very easily be taken by any one who attacks _Great Gable_ from _Borrowdale_. =Brimham Rocks=, in Yorkshire, are very easily visited from Harrogate or from Pateley Bridge. From the latter they are only four miles to the eastward. The station for those who come from Harrogate is Dacre Banks, from which the Rocks may be reached in an hour's walking. They are of millstone grit and well deserve a visit, for nowhere are the grotesque forms which that material delights to assume more remarkable. Some resemble the sandstone forms common about Tunbridge Wells, and many might very well stand for Dartmoor Tors; but others at first sight seem so evidently and unmistakably to suggest human handiwork that one can feel no surprise at the common notion that they were fashioned by the ingenuity of the Druids. Several of them, though very small, can only be climbed with considerable difficulty. =Broad Stand=--a term commonly but, in my opinion, incorrectly used to denote a particular route by which the crags of _Scafell_ may be ascended direct from _Mickledoor_. There are numerous other places within a few miles of this into the names of which this word 'stand' enters, and a consideration of them leads me to the belief that it signifies 'a large grassy plot of ground awkward of access.' This is exactly what we find here. A break in the cliffs produces a large open space which is the key to the ascent by the _Mickledoor Chimney_, to that by the _North Climb_, and to that which, being the oldest, easiest, and most frequented, has arrogated to itself as distinctive the name of a feature which it should only share with the other two. Really all three routes are merely different ways of reaching the Broad Stand. One of the earliest recorded ascents is that of Mr. C.A.O. Baumgartner in September 1850, an account of which was sent by one of the people of the dale to the local paper in these terms: 'The Broad Stand, _a rocky and dangerous precipice_, situated between _Scaw Fell_ and the _Pikes_, an ascent which is perhaps more difficult than even that of the _Pillar Stone_.' The late Professor Tyndall climbed it in 1859, and described it in the _Saturday Review_ of that year. It evidently had a great reputation then, which was not, in his opinion, entirely deserved. It seems to have been known in 1837 (see the _Penny Magazine_) to the shepherds; and even in Green's time, at the beginning of the century, one or two daring spirits had accomplished the feat. =Buckbarrow= (C. sh. 79).--_Broadcrag_ (more north-east) is really part of it, and about 400 ft. high. Buckbarrow rises near the foot of Wastwater, opposite the best part of the Screes. When approached from the head of the lake it appears as two huge rocky steps; but, as in the case of _Eagle Crag_ in _Greenup_, the steps are not really in the same plane. Seen from the slopes of _Lingmell_, it forms the boundary between the mountains and the plain, to which it sinks in one very graceful concave curve. It is not lofty--there are perhaps some 400 ft. of rock--but by the shepherds it is reputed inaccessible. This is only true in the sense that there are stiff bits on it which have to be evaded. It is haunted by both the fox and the buzzard--connoisseurs on whose taste in rocks the climber can generally rely. There is also climbing in the whole line of rock (Broad Crag) which stretches away towards _Greendale_. Since 1884, when the writer first became acquainted with it, Buckbarrow has become rather popular, considering its remoteness from _Wastdale Head_.--At Christmas 1891 a strong party, led by Messrs. Robinson, Hastings, and Collie, ascended it 'from the fox's earth to the hawk's nest,' and on April 15, 1892, a party containing several of the same members climbed 'the first main gully on this [the north] side. There are two short chimneys at the end of this little gill--one in each corner, about ten to twelve yards apart.' The left one, up which Mr. Brunskill led, was considered the harder. Afterwards Dr. Collie led two of the party up the face of the cliff to the right of the next gully on the west, which is marked by a pitch of about fifty feet low down. To a house near the foot of Buckbarrow old Will Ritson and his wife retired, after giving up the inn which they had kept for so many years and made so famous at _Wastdale Head_. =Buresdale=, the proper name of the valley between Thirlmere and Threlkeld. Hutchinson, for instance, says: 'At the foot of _Wythburn_ is _Brackmere_ [i.e. Thirlmere], a lake one mile in length ... from the N. end of this mere issues the river Bure, which falls into Derwent below Keswick.' He also mentions Buresdale in connection with _Layswater_, yet another equivalent for Thirlmere. Guidebook writers seem to have conspired together to obliterate this name from the map, and to substitute for it the name _Vale of St. John_, which Sir Walter Scott made famous. To revive the name of the river would be an act of only posthumous justice, now that the Manchester waterworks have taken away all its water; but the valley is still there, and ought to be called by its genuine old name, which is of Scandinavian origin; compare with it the Bure river in Norfolk, and fishermen will recall similar names in Norway. =Burn=: the Scotch word for a brook is hardly found south of the river Wear. In Wythburn, Greenburn, and other cases it probably represents _borran_ (stone heap). =Buttermere=, a pleasant stopping-place from which many of the Cumberland fells can be explored. It is a good centre for _Grassmoor_, _Melbreak_ and the _Red Pike_ range, while _Borrowdale_ and _Ennerdale_ are quite within reach. Once a day the Keswick waggonettes swoop upon the place, bringing trippers by the score, but at other times it is a quiet and enjoyable spot. =Calf (The)= (2,220 ft.), in Yorkshire, near _Sedbergh_. _Cautley Crag_, on the E. side of it, is very steep. In this corner of the county the Yorkshire climber experiences the intense relief of seeing rocks which are neither chalk, limestone, nor millstone grit. =Camping.=--Camping out by rivers has always been more popular in England than the same form of airy entertainment among the mountains. The labour of carrying tents or sleeping-bags acts as the chief deterrent. It is true that some thirty years ago a distinguished member of the Alpine Club applied to Scafell Pike, and one or two other spots where England is loftiest, the practice, which he has carried out on many of the higher peaks of the Alps and Pyrenees, of watching sunset and sunrise from the loftiest possible _gîte_ which the mountain can afford. Mr. Payn, too, has given us a most humorous narrative of how he and his friends encamped on Fairfield. Also, about twenty years ago, four stalwart climbers from Penrith made a regular camping tour of the Lakes. Their tent was pitched on these spots: Penrith Beacon, Red Tarn on Helvellyn, in Langdale under Pike o' Stickle, Sty Head, in Ennerdale under Gable Crag, and on Honister. It weighed only 5-1/2 lbs., and yet had a floor space of 8 ft. by 8 ft. It may be that, just as bicyclists suffered by the scathing definition 'cads on casters,' so the enthusiasm of the camper may have received a check when he heard himself described with cruel terseness as 'a fool in a bag.' Perhaps, again, our climate is not one which offers much encouragement to any but the hardiest of campers. In the Lakes by far the most popular (and probably, therefore, the most convenient) place is the shore of Ullswater, where tents have been seen even in the depth of winter. =Carl Crag= lies on the sea-shore in Drigg parish. Mr. Jefferson says that it is of syenite, and measures in feet twelve by nine by five and a half, but it is deep in the sand. The legend is that while Satan was carrying it in his apron to make a bridge over to the Isle of Man, his _apron strings (q. vid.)_ broke and let it fall. It is probably an erratic. With the name compare _Carlhow_, _Carlwark_, &c. =Carrs=, in Lancashire, in the _Coniston_ range, north of the _Old Man_. It is craggy on the east side. In _Far Easdale_ there is a line of crag which bears the same name. Clearly neither can have anything to do with 'carrs' in its usual sense in the north, viz. 'low marshy ground.' =Castle Rock= (C. sh. 64).--This rock in _Borrowdale_ is said to have been crowned by a Roman fort. The west side is craggy for a couple of hundred feet. It may serve to occupy a few odd hours for any one stopping at _Grange_, _Rosthwaite_, or _Seatoller_. =Caw Fell= (C. sh. 73).--The name is possibly the same as _Calf_, _Calva_; compare also _Caudale_, _Codale_, &c. On the north side there is a craggy bit about 200 ft. high. =Chalk.=--Though this can hardly be regarded as a good rock for climbing, much excellent practice can be gained on it. As a general rule, it is only sufficiently solid for real climbing for the first twenty feet above high-water mark, though here and there forty feet of fairly trustworthy rock may be found. These sections of hard chalk are invariably those which at their base are washed by the sea at high tide; all others are soft and crumbly. [Illustration: CHALK CLIFFS NEAR DOVER] Whilst any considerable ascent, other than up the extremely steep slopes of grass which sometimes clothes the gullies and faces, is out of the question, traverses of great interest and no slight difficulty are frequently possible for considerable distances. A good _objectif_ may be found in the endeavour to work out a route to the various small beaches that are cut off from the outer world by the high tide and cliffs. The best instances of this sort of work are to be found along the coast to the eastward of Dover (between that town and St. Margaret's). Between the ledges by which these traverses are in the main effected, and the beach below, scrambles of every variety of difficulty may be found, some being amongst the hardest _mauvais pas_ with which I am acquainted. Owing to the proximity of the ground, they afford the climber an excellent opportunity of ascertaining the upper limit of his powers. Such knowledge is a possession of extreme value, yet in most other places it is undesirable to ascertain it too closely. Chalk, it must be remembered, is extremely rotten and treacherous, very considerable masses coming away occasionally with a comparatively slight pull. In any place where a slip is not desirable, it is unwise to depend exclusively on a single hold, as even the hardest and firmest knobs, that have stood the test of years, give way suddenly without any apparent reason. The flints imbedded in the chalk are similarly untrustworthy; in fact, if they project more than an inch or so, they are, as a rule, insecure. The surface of the chalk is smooth and slimy if wet, dusty if dry, and does not afford the excellent hold obtained on granite. As a whole it may be regarded as a treacherous and difficult medium, and one which is likely to lead those practising on it to be very careful climbers. To the westward of Dover (between it and Folkestone) a great amount of climbing on grass and crumbly chalk slopes can be obtained; almost every gully and face can be ascended from the sea, or the S.E. Railway, to the top. It is desirable to remember that in dry weather the grass and the earth which underlies it is of the consistency of sand, and great care is requisite; after rain the grass is of course slippery; but the underlying material adheres more firmly to the cliff. It is unnecessary to add that a slip on any of these slopes would almost certainly prove fatal. On the face of _Abbot's Cliff_, and to the westward (about halfway between Dover and Folkestone), some traverses may be effected at a height of 200 ft. or more above the base; they do not, however, compare for climbing with the traverses on the other side of Dover. As one goes westwards, the angle of the cliffs becomes less, and from _Abbot's Cliff_ towards Folkestone it is rarely necessary to use one's hands, though very nice 'balance' is essential, as the results of a slip would usually be serious. Above the _Warren_, still nearer Folkestone, the slopes become easy, and after heavy snow afford excellent _glissades_. The cliffs between Dover and St. Margaret's vary from 200 to 350 ft., whilst those between Dover and Folkestone vary from 250 to 500 ft. in height. In Sussex the chalk is well developed at and near _Beachy Head_, where it attains a height of some 600 ft. Just west of this come several miles of cliffs, lower indeed (about 300 ft.), but amazingly vertical. About _Flamborough Head_, in Yorkshire, this formation attains fine proportions, while as far west as Devonshire _Beer Head_ is upwards of 400 ft. high. =Chimney=: a recess among rocks resembling the interior of a chimney open on one side. (See _Back-and-knee_.) =Chockstone=: a northern word for a stone wedged between the sides of a gully. A short word for this is greatly needed, and I would suggest that it might be called a 'chock,' simply. =Clapham=, a station on the Midland Railway, is an excellent centre for _Ingleborough_ and the _Potholes_. =Clark's Leap=, near _Swirl's Gap_ on Thirlmere, is a jutting rock, so called from a suicide which took place there over 100 years ago. It is one of many local absurdities of the novel called 'The Shadow of a Crime' that this name is brought in as an antiquity in the eyes of characters supposed to be living two centuries ago. =Clough= (_Cleugh_, _Cloof_, _Cluff_, _Clowe_) is a North of England word for a kind of valley formed in the slope of a hill. The first cut in carving a shoulder of mutton produces a typical 'clough.' There is seldom any climbing about a genuine clough, because it implies soil rather than rock. Dr. Murray tells us that the word has no connection with the Icelandic 'klofi,' yet assigns to the latter word the origin of 'cloof,' in the sense of the fork of a tree, or of the human body. To a layman in such matters the two words bear a singular resemblance, both in sound and in sense. =Collier's Climb= on _Scafell_ was made by Messrs. Collier and Winser on April 2, 1893, and a very severe climb it is. It begins from the _Rake's Progress_ at a point 105 ft. west from the _North Climb_. After a direct ascent of about 40 ft., a grassy platform on the right (facing the wall) is reached. From here a narrow and somewhat awkward traverse leads back to above the first part of the climb. This traverse could probably be avoided by climbing directly upwards. There follows an easy ascent for 30 ft. still directly upwards. By traversing broad grassy ledges to the right--i.e. towards _Moss Gill_--one of the inclined cracks so plainly seen on the face of the cliff is reached, and the rest of the ascent made in it. The only severe difficulties in the climb are: 1. at the beginning, in leaving _Rake's Progress_; 2. at one point in the crack where there is not much handhold for 10 or 15 ft. =Combe Gill=, a fine gill in the north end of _Glaramara_. The climb is a little over two miles from _Rosthwaite_, and about a mile less from _Seatoller_. A very fine mass of rock (one of the many _Eagle Crags_) stands at the head of the little valley, and up the centre of this crag lies the way. It was climbed on September 1, 1893, by Messrs. J.W. Robinson and W.A. Wilson, whose account of it is as follows: 'This very fine gorge has three good-sized pitches in the lower part. These were passed by climbing the right-hand edge of the gill--interesting work. A return on to the floor of the gill was made near the top of the third pitch, when a little scrambling led to a very fine waterfall more than 100 ft. high. Here climb in the water as little as you can; then diverge slightly on to the right-hand wall of the gill just where the water spouts over a small recess; next traverse across a rather difficult slab into the cave under the final boulder, which is climbed on the left-hand and is the last difficulty.' =Coniston=, having the advantage of both railway and steamboat, is very accessible, and, notwithstanding this, it is agreeably free from the rush of excursionists. Practically it has one fine mountain--the _Old Man_--and no more, though _Bow Fell_ and the _Langdale Pikes_ are not entirely out of reach. There is much good scrambling in the rocks which fringe the _Old Man_ and _Wetherlam_, and superb climbing in _Dow Crag_. =Coniston Old Man.=--Quarrymen and miners have between them done an immense deal towards spoiling a very fine mountain. They have converted to base industrial uses the whole east side of the mountain, which Nature intended for climbers. They have not yet invaded _Doe Crag_ (q.v.), which is really part of it, but practically no one goes up the _Old Man_ proper, except for the sake of the view, which is magnificent, and no one ascends except from Coniston, varied in a few cases by working north along the summit ridge and descending via _Grey Friars_ on to the pass of _Wrynose_. =Copeland.=--Camden says of Cumberland: 'The south part of this shire is called _Copeland_ and _Coupland_, for that it beareth up the head aloft with sharpedged and pointed hilles, which the Britans tearme _Copa_.' Leland alludes to this when he makes a ludicrously pedantic suggestion: 'Capelande, part of Cumbrelande, may be elegantly caullid Cephalenia.' _Cop_ is found in Derbyshire also, as a hill-name, and hunting men will not need to be reminded of the Coplow in Leicestershire. [Illustration: CONISTON AND DOE CRAG] =Cornwall.=--To the true-souled climber, who can enjoy a tough bit of rock, even if it is only fifty, aye, or twenty feet high, the coast of Cornwall with its worn granite cliffs and bays has much to offer. It is interesting almost the whole way round the coast. Granite prevails, but at _Polperro_ we have cliffs belonging to the Lower Devonian period, and for some ten or twelve miles going west from _Chapel Point_ we find rocks of the Silurian order. At many points round the _Lizard Promontory_ there are remarkable rocks; but some of the finest cliff scenery in England is to be found between the _Logan Rock_ and the _Land's End_. These are on the regular tourist tracks, and conveniently reached from good hotels; but the north coast of Cornwall is here easy of access. There are fine cliffs about _Gurnard's Head_ and _Bosigran_, which are well worth a visit, from St. Ives or Penzance (7 or 8 miles). There is a small inn at _Gurnard's Head_. _Bedruthan Steps_ are well-known, and _Trevose Head_, _Pentire_ (Padstow), _Tintagel_ and _Penkenner Point_ are only a few of the many grand rock-scenes on this coast. =Coterine Hill.=--Leland, in his 'Itinerary,' says that Ure, Sawle, and Edon rise in this hill, and that 'the Hedde of Lune River by al Aestimation must be in _Coterine Hill_, or not far fro the Root of it,' adding that, in the opinion of Mr. Moore of Cambridge, the river Lune 'risith yn a hill cawlled _Crosho_, the which is yn the egge of Richemontshire.' There is _Cotter-dale_ on the Yorkshire slope of the hill in which these rivers rise, and the celebrated Countess of Pembroke, in 1663, when she crossed from _Wensleydale_ to _Pendragon Castle_, calls her journey 'going over _Cotter_, which I lately repaired,' the last words showing that it was a recognised pass. In all probability Leland's form represents '_Cotter End_,' by which name, though not given in most of the maps, part of the hill is still known. =Cove=: often means 'cave' in Yorkshire and Scotland, but as a rule it is a large recess in a hill-side. =Craven=--_Camden_ remarks that the country lying about the head of the river Aire is called in our tongue _Craven_, 'perchance of the British word _Crage_, that is a _Stone_. For the whole tract there is rough all over, and unpleasant to see to; which [with?] craggie stones, hanging rockes, and rugged waies.' Modern climbers, however, find it hardly rocky enough for them, at least above ground, and have been driven to invent a new variety of climbing--the subterranean. Exploration of the numerous _potholes_ which honeycomb the limestone hills has of late years become a favourite pastime, and, in truth, it combines science with adventure to a marked degree. Any one who tarries for any length of time among these Yorkshire dales should read Mr. H. Speight's handsome volume, which gives a very complete account of the beauties and the curiosities which they have to show. =Cross Fell=, in Cumberland, long enjoyed the reputation being one of the highest mountains in England, and as late as 1770 its height was calculated at 3,390 ft., which is some 500 ft. more than it is entitled to. It was earlier than most English mountains in becoming the object of scientific curiosity, and an account of it will be found in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for 1747. It is chiefly celebrated for the Helm Wind originating from it. =Cumberland= is the premier climbing county. The best centres are _Wastdale Head_, _Rosthwaite_ or _Seatoller_, _Buttermere_, _Keswick_ and _Eskdale_. The cream of the climbing is on those fells which are composed of rocks belonging to what is called 'the Borrowdale Series,' such as _Scafell Pillar_, _Gable_, _Bowfell_, and as a rule the finest climbs are found on the sides which face the north and east. _Cross Fell_ does not belong to the same mountain-system as those just mentioned, and offers little climbing. The best cliffs on the coast are about _St. Bees_ Head. =Cust's Gully=, on Great End.--To the large and increasing number of men who visit the Lakes in winter, perhaps no climb is better known than this. In the spring of 1880, a party, including one of the greatest of lady mountaineers, and over twenty members of the Alpine Club, ascended this 'very interesting chimney or couloir, which, being filled with ice and snow, gave unexpected satisfaction. There is a very remarkable natural arch in this couloir, which Mr. Cust claims to have been the first to discover, and he was therefore entrusted with the guidance of the party.' The orthodox approach is by way of Skew Gill, which is conspicuous at the right hand on nearing Sty Head from Wastdale. A short distance beyond the head of this gill our gully is seen rising on the right, marked by the conspicuous block of stone. Being, as the Scotch say, 'back of the sun,' this gully often holds snow till comparatively late in the season. Indeed, in winter, it is sometimes so much choked with snow that the arch disappears, and it is even said that self-respecting climbers, who recognise that a gully ought to be followed with strictness, have felt bound to reach the block by tunnelling, instead of walking over the top. In the spring of 1890 there was a tremendous fall of stones, by which the gully was nearly filled. Except in snow time, loose stones are an objection, and many find it more interesting to ascend by a small gully, almost a branch of 'Cust's,' on the right hand. As climbs neither of them will compare with the more eastern gullies. =Dale=: curiously used in Derbyshire for each separate section of a river valley, which elsewhere would form only one dale. =Dalegarth Force=, in Cumberland, near Boot, in Eskdale. The wall on the north side of this extremely pretty little fall is very low; but, being granite, offers one or two problems to the climber. _Stanley Gill_ is another name for the same place. =Dartmoor=, a high upland moor, forming a vast reservoir, from which most of the Devonshire rivers are fed. It is curious rather than beautiful, and more interesting to the geologist, the antiquary, and the fisherman than it is to the mountaineer. Yet it is instructive even to him, for the frequency of rain and mist and the paucity of landmarks which can be seen more than a few yards off, coupled with the necessity of constantly watching the ground, render it one of the easiest places in the world in which to lose one's way in any but the finest weather. There are no true hills, but here and there a gradual rise of the ground is seen, with a lump or two of granite grotesquely planted on the top of it. These are the _Tors_. As a rule they are very small, but often present problems to the climber, and are seldom without interest of some sort. A great many may be reached from Tavistock or the little inn at _Merivale Bridge_. =Dead Crags= (C. sh. 56) are lofty but disappointing rocks on the north side of Skiddaw. There is perhaps 500 ft. of steep crumbly rock, something like _Hobcarton_. =Deep Gill.=--The name is not infrequent; for example, there is one on the south side of _Great Gable_, east of the _Napes_, but now it is always called _Hell Gate_. The Deep Gill is on _Scafell_, and falls into the _Lord's Rake_. The first mention of it was made in August 1869 by Mr. T.L. Murray Browne, who wrote in the Visitors' Book at Wastdale Head: 'The attention of mountaineers is called to a rock on Scafell on the right (looking down) of a remarkable gill which cleaves the rocks of Scafell and descends into Lingmell Gill. It looks stiff.' The rock alluded to is the _Scafell Pillar_ and the gill is _Deep Gill_. It is well described by Mr. Slingsby in the _Alpine Journal_, vol. xiii. p. 93: 'After a couple of hundred steps had been cut in the snow in Lord's Rake and at the bottom of Deep Gill, which joins the former at right angles, we reached the first block--a large rock perhaps 15 ft. square--which overhangs the gill, and so forms a cave. Below the rock the snow was moulded into most fantastic shapes by occasional water-drips from above. At the right hand of the big rock a few small stones are jammed fast between it and the side of the ravine, and they afford the only route up above the rock. These stones can be reached from the back of the little cave, and occasionally from the snow direct. Hastings--who is a very powerful fellow and a brilliant climber--and I got on the stones, as we did last year. He then stood on my shoulder, and, by the aid of long arms and being steadied by me, he reached a tiny ledge and drew himself up. Mason and I found it no child's play to follow him with the rope. Some two hundred more steps in hard snow brought us to the only place where we could attack the second block. Here three fallen rocks stop the way, and on the left hand is the well-nigh ledgeless cliff which terminates far away overhead in the Sca Fell Pinnacle, or Sca Fell Pillar. On the right a high perpendicular wall effectually cuts off the gill from the terraces of Lord's Rake. On the left hand of the gill a small tongue of rock, very steep, juts out perhaps 40 ft. down the gully from the fallen block nearest to the Pinnacle wall, and forms a small crack, and this crack is the only way upward. From a mountaineer's point of view the stratification of the rocks here is all wrong. The crack ends in a chimney about 20 ft. high, between the wall and a smoothly polished boss of rock. Hastings, still leading, found the crack to be difficult, but climbed it in a most masterly way. All loose stones, tufts of grass and moss, had to be thrown down, and, in the absence of hand and foot hold, the knees, elbows, thighs, and other parts of the body had to do the holding on, whilst, caterpillar-like, we drew ourselves upward bit by bit. The chimney is best climbed by leaning against the Pinnacle wall with one's back and elbows, and, at the same time, by walking with the feet fly-like up the boss opposite. From the top of the boss a narrow sloping traverse, perhaps 12 ft. long, leads into the trough of the gill. With a rope this is an easy run; without one it would not be nice. A stone thrown down from here falls over both blocks and rolls down the snow out of the mouth of Lord's Rake on to the screes far away below. The crack, chimney, and traverse, short distance though it is, took us about an hour to pass. The climb from Deep Gill to the gap from which the Pinnacle is ascended is a very good one, which two men can do much better than one. The Pinnacle itself from the gap is perhaps 25 ft. high, and is really a first-rate little climb, where the hands and the body have to do the bulk of the work.' [Illustration: DEEP GILL, SCAFELL (The Lower Pitch)] The date of Mr. Slingsby's attempt was March 2, 1885, and that of his successful ascent March 28, 1886: but as early as 1882 this climb had been made, piecemeal, by the present writer, who, however, never, so far as he can remember, blended the different items into a continuous climb until the summer of 1884, when he descended the whole length of the gill in company with Mr. Chr. Cookson, of C.C.C., Oxford. A yet earlier descent of the gill had been made at Easter 1882 by Messrs. Arnold Mumm and J.E. King, of the same college, who found such a phenomenal depth of snow that the obstacles were buried, and they were able to walk from end to end without using their hands. The same thing happened again in January 1887, when Messrs. Creak and Robinson were able to walk up over both pitches without having even to cut a step. The lower pitch may also be passed by using a recess resembling one half of a funnel in the red rock of the vertical south wall of the gill. The worst part of this is where you leave the funnel and begin to coast round in order to re-enter the gill. The space comprised between the two pitches can be entered very easily by passing round the foot of the _Scafell Pillar_, or with much more difficulty down the vertical south wall. The upper pitch may be passed in two ways, besides the incline. One is by means of a narrow side gully, the upper stage of which is most easily passed by following the ridge which divides it from the main gill. The third way is the most direct and the most difficult, lying between the incline and the great block. Mr. Owen Jones seems to have invented it in the year 1892, and took up a party by it on that occasion with the assistance of a good deal of snow, and another party in the month of August 1893, when there was no snow at all. There is no more fashionable winter climb than _Deep Gill_, and about Christmas time the clink of the axe echoes among its crags from dawn to dusk. It is reached from Wastdale Head in about an hour and a half. The shoulder of _Lingmell_ has first to be rounded, and it makes little difference either in time or fatigue whether this be done comparatively high up or by taking the high road to the bridge near the head of the lake or by an intermediate course. At any rate, a long grind up _Brown Tongue_, in the hollow between _Lingmell_ and _Scafell_, cannot be avoided, and when the chaos called _Hollow Stones_ is reached a vast outburst of scree high up on the right hand indicates the mouth of _Lord's Rake_. After a laborious scramble up this scree the rake is entered, and only a few yards further the lower pitch of Deep Gill is seen on the left hand. =Deep Gill Pillar.=--See _Deep Gill_ and _Scafell Pillar_. =Derbyshire= is well endowed in point of rock scenery, but it is not really a climber's country. The rocks are of two kinds--the Limestone, of which Dovedale may be taken as a type, and the Millstone Grit, which prevails further north. The former shows many a sharp pinnacle and many a sheer cliff, but is often dangerously rotten, while the latter assumes strange, grotesque forms, and, when it does offer a climb, ends it off abruptly, just as one thinks the enjoyment is about to begin. It is, nevertheless, much more satisfactory than the limestone, and many pleasing problems may be found on it, especially in the neighbourhood of the _Downfall_ on _Kinder Scout_. For this Buxton or Chapel-en-le-Frith is of course a better centre than Matlock. =Devonshire.=--The inland climbing in this county is very limited. Of granite there are the _Tors_ of Dartmoor and the Dewerstone near Plymouth, and there is a remarkably fine limestone ravine at Chudleigh, but there is little else worthy of mention. But the coast of Devonshire is exceptionally fine, and perhaps no other county can show such a variety of fine cliffs. At _Beer Head_ we have chalk; at _Anstis Cove_, _Torbay_, and _Berry Head_ limestone; at _Start Point_ and _Stoke Point_ slate. For bold cliff scenery few parts of the Channel can rival the piece between _Start Point_ and _Bolt Tail_. On the north coast of Devon there are many striking cliffs. Among them may be noticed _Heddon's Mouth_, _Castle Rock_ (at Lynton), some rocks about Ilfracombe, the granite cliffs of _Lundy_, _Hartland Point_; in fact much of the coast from Clovelly right away to Bude in Cornwall is remarkably fine. =Dixon's Three Jumps=, on Blea Water Crag (High Street, Westmorland), so called from the famous fall here of a fox-hunter about the year 1762. Perhaps no one ever fell so far and yet sustained so little permanent injury. As an instance of 'the ruling passion strong in death,' or at least in appalling proximity to death, it may be mentioned that, on arriving at the bottom, he got on his knees and cried out, 'Lads, t' fox is gane oot at t' hee eend. Lig t' dogs on an' aa'l cum syun.' He then fell back unconscious, but recovered, and lived many years after. Another Dixon fell while fox-hunting on Helvellyn in 1858, but was killed. There is a monument to him on Striding Edge. =Dodd=: a round-topped hill. The word is common in the Lowlands and in the North of England. It is often said to mean a limb of a larger mountain, but Dodd Fell in Yorkshire would alone refute this, being the highest hill in its neighbourhood. =Doe Crag=, in Eskdale (C. sh. 74), is a bold rock, long reputed inaccessible, low down on the north side of the approach to _Mickledoor_ from the east. The Woolpack in Eskdale is the nearest inn. The rock, as a climb, is very inferior to its namesake at Coniston (see _Dow Crag_). =Door Head=, the _col_ between _Yewbarrow_ and _Red Pike_. There is capital scree here, and a very rapid descent into Mosedale may be made by it. Men who have spent the day on the Pillar sometimes return to Wastdale Head round the head of Mosedale, and wind up by racing down these screes from the _col_ to the stream below. The distance is about 650 yards, and the perpendicular drop about 1,200 ft. Anything less than five minutes is considered very 'good time.' =Doup=: any semicircular cavity resembling half an egg-shell (N. of Eng.). =Dow= (or =Doe=) =Crag=, in Lancashire, lies just west of _Coniston Old Man_, being only divided from it by _Goat's Water_. The climbing here is second to none. There are three or four superb gullies. Perhaps the best is in a line with the head of the tarn and the cairn on the _Old Man_, and another scarcely, if at all, inferior is nearly opposite a very large stone in the tarn. The first ascent of one was made by Mr. Robinson and the writer in the year 1886; that of the other by a party including Messrs. Slingsby, Hastings, E. Hopkinson, and the writer in July 1888. The last-mentioned (with indispensable aid from the rope) afterwards descended an intermediate gully of terrific aspect. [Illustration: DOE CRAG, CONISTON The lowest pitch of the central gully. The top of the wedged block is reached by mounting the shallow scoop on the left of the picture, and then coasting round into the gully again.] Towards the foot of the tarn the gullies are much less severe. Above is an illustration of the first pitch of the gully climbed in 1888. Mr. Hastings led up the shallow crevice seen on the left of the picture, and on reaching the level of the top of the pitch contoured the intervening buttress into the chimney again. This is no easy matter and required great care. =Dunald Mill Hole.=--One of the earliest descriptions of a '_Pothole_' will be found in the 'Annual Register' for 1760, where this curiosity is treated of at some length. It is a good specimen of a common type, and lies between Lancaster and Carnforth. =Dungeon Gill=, in Langdale, deserves mention in any treatise on British climbing, inasmuch as the poet Wordsworth has made it the scene of an early deed of daring performed by an idle shepherd boy-- Into a chasm a mighty block Hath fallen and made a bridge of rock, The gulf is deep below. The gulf and the mighty block are both there still; but there is more pleasure in seeing the former than there is excitement in crossing by the latter. =Eagle Crag.=--Rocks of this name are pretty numerous in the North of England, and, like the 'Raven Crags,' are, as might be expected, always bold and precipitous. _On Helvellyn._--Canon Butler, in his article on the Lakes in 1844, which appeared in _Longman's Magazine_, describes in an amusing manner an adventure which he had on this rock. It is on the right-hand side of the track from Patterdale to Grisedale Hause. _In Easdale_ (W. sh. 17).--This is easily found by following up the stream which runs into Easdale Tarn. There is not more than 200-300 ft. of crag, and much of it is very rotten, but with pretty bits of climbing here and there. Grasmere is the only place from which it is conveniently reached. _In Greenup_ (C. sh. 75) is as noble a rock as can be found in England. As seen from Borrowdale near Rosthwaite it has the appearance of two huge steps of rock, but the steps are really separate rocks, one behind the other--Eagle Crag and Pounsey Crag. Large portions of each of them are quite unclimbable, and much of them is too easy to be worth doing, so that the amount of interesting climbing to be met with is less than might be expected. Close by is Longstrath, where there is a little work which may be combined with this (see _Blea Crag_ and _Serjeant Crag_). The foot of Eagle Crag is reached from Rosthwaite or Seatoller in less than an hour. =Eagle's Nest=--one of the ridges of the _Napes_ lying between the _Needle_ and the _Arrowhead_. On April 15, 1892, Messrs. Slingsby, Baker, Solly, and Brigg ascended it and found it extremely difficult for 150 ft. At one point, about on a level with the top of the _Needle_, there is room for one person to sit down, and here the second man on the rope joined the leader and gave him a shoulder up. To this place they gave the name of the _Eagle's Nest_, and it is almost the only point at which any material help can be given to the leader. The part just above this they considered the stiffest part of the climb; but when they reached a patch of grass just below a slanting chimney the difficulties moderated. From the bottom to where the ridge joins the _Needle Ridge_ they took two hours and ten minutes. =Eel Crag.=--The word 'Eel,' we are told, is identical with 'Ill,' which is seen in _Ill Bell_ and the numerous _Ill Gills_, and means 'steep.' If so the name ought to be more frequent in the Lake country than it is, and it might be suggested that in some cases 'eagle' may have been worn down to 'eel.' There are two crags of the name in Cumberland, not very far apart. _In Coledale._--These rocks are steep, but too much broken up to be really worth a visit on their own account. However, after _Force Crag_ has been tried, these are conveniently near. _In Newlands_ (C. sh. 70).--Among the rocks which flank Newlands on the east much good material may be found. One is reminded a little of the Wastwater Screes, but of course these are not on anything approaching that scale. The greatest height of the craggy part is only about 400 ft. =Eight-foot Drop.=--On the Pillar Rock is the passage from the ridge of the _Curtain_ down onto the lower part of the _Steep Grass_. It figures in some of the earlier accounts as a formidable feature of the ascent. Nowadays it is known how much easier it is to keep on the flank of the curtain, and only leave it when at the top of the chimney which runs up from the head of _Steep Grass_. No 'drop' is, in fact, necessary; but the climb, though not in any sense difficult, is generally regarded as a good test of neatness of style. =Ennerdale.=--For a valley which not only is one of the largest and most impressive in the Lake country, but contains moreover a share of the most perfect mountain in broad England--Great Gable--and all of the most famous rock--the Pillar--singularly little is popularly known of Ennerdale. But, when we consider that the place is one which is, or should be, hallowed to all devout Wordsworthians as the scene of one of the finest productions of their poet, the thing becomes incomprehensible. To begin with, the guide-books have never done it justice. In area of paper covered with descriptions of it English Lakeland is probably many square miles ahead of any equal portion of the earth's surface. But guide-book writers love to stand upon the ancient ways; and any one who takes the trouble to compare West or Otley with the works of to-day must admit that, except in matters of detail, the advance has been incredibly small. The public are better judges of accuracy than of enterprise, and what pleases the public pays. These gentlemen, therefore, worthy and painstaking as they are, share to some extent in the narrow aspirations of the hireling, and, indeed, we are tempted to believe that their motives in shunning Ennerdale were not wholly foreign to the character of him who 'fleeth because he is afraid,' for they have brought up a terrible report of the dale. If, however, this has been a wise precaution on their part, a means of deterring any inquirer from exposing their want of energy, it has been rewarded with a large measure of success. Here is an inviting prospect for a timid traveller: 'Ennerdale Lake ... is so wild in the character of its shores and in its position among the mountains as to have caused more terrors and disasters to strangers than any other spot in the district. At every house from Wastdale Head to Ennerdale Bridge stories may be heard of adventures and escapes of pedestrians and horsemen in Mosedale and the passes of Black Sail and Scarf Gap' (Whellan's 'History of Cumberland,' 1860). Can it be wondered at that, in the face of such terrors as this, very few people find their way into Ennerdale, except those who with fear and trembling cross the head of it on their way between Buttermere and Wastdale Head? Every guide-book, indeed, mentions Ennerdale and the Pillar by name, because it gives an opportunity for quoting the well-worn lines from 'The Brothers,' after which a few meagre remarks may be expected to follow on the 'Pillar Mountain,' the 'Pillar Rock,' and 'Ennerdale Lake,' expressions of which not one, strictly speaking, is correct, for the proper name of the first is beyond all doubt 'Pillar _Fell_,' 'mountain' being an innovation of tourists and guide-book writers, who between them have made 'Pillar _Rock_' sound more familiar than the genuine name 'Pillar _Stone_,' and have almost ousted 'Broadwater' in favour of 'Ennerdale Lake.' Printed authorities are scanty, because Ennerdale is of very recent discovery. The early guide-books simply know nothing about it. West (1778) does not mention it, and the gifted authoress of that touching poem 'Edwina' did not even know how to spell its name: But chiefly, Ennersdale, to thee I turn, And o'er thy healthful vales heartrended mourn, Vain do thy riv'lets spread their curving sides While o'er thy glens the summer zephyr glides. And yet Mrs. Cowley was by no means indifferent to such points. Indeed, we owe the origin of this exquisite poem to her etymological zeal and to her desire to immortalise the brilliant suggestion that the name 'Wotobank' was derived from some one having once said, 'Woe to this bank!' It may even be that the spelling is a symbolical subtlety--a kind of refinement on 'word-painting' intended to shadow forth to less poetic minds, by the sinuosity of the superfluous 's,' the unique manner in which the rivulets of this happy valley are wont to 'spread their curving sides.' One of the earliest visitors to Ennerdale appears to have been the artist Smith, of Derby (1767), who sketched the lake, as did also Wilkinson in 1810. Wordsworth had been there before 1800, and Green's description shows that he was much struck by the scenery of upper Ennerdale. But, though visitors to Ennerdale have been and still are few, most of these few speak highly of its beauties, 'partly perhaps,' says Mr. Payn, 'in consequence of their having endured certain inconveniences (with which they are anxious that you should also become acquainted) when belated in that lovely spot.' The dale is not without its associations. Formerly it was a deer forest, the property of the Crown by forfeiture from the father of the ill-fated Lady Jane Grey. The Sandford manuscript speaks enthusiastically of 'the montaines and fforest of Innerdale, wher ther is reed dear and as great Hartts and Staggs as in any part of England. The bow-bearer is a brave gentleman.' But it is now many years since the last of the herd was destroyed, and no one living can remember the days when Ennerdale could show--what in almost any landscape is a crowning beauty--the stately figure of a great red stag. Certainly an element of romance has here been lost; but how can that be felt so long as here and there some aged man survives to keep green among the dalesmen the memory of 't' girt wild dog'? The stories told of this remarkable animal would fill volumes and form a highly interesting study in contemporary mythology; and yet, when we consider the state of unparalleled excitement into which the whole countryside was thrown at the time, and the assiduity with which it has ever since been talking over the events of that stirring period, we shall find cause to wonder, not that the story in some of its details should have acquired a slight legendary flavour, but rather that the great bulk of the incidents narrated should be so thoroughly well authenticated. Certainly it is a lesson in faith, and makes it easier to credit stories such as that which Ovid tells with so much spirit of the Calydonian boar; for if in the days of modern firearms a dog can defy a large district and kill a couple of sheep a day for nearly half a year together, there is less reason for doubting that in old days an amount of destruction and devastation which would not discredit a modern minister could be wrought by the unaided exertions of one malevolent pig. For months the dog was hunted and shot at, but seemed to lead a charmed life; in the excitement farming operations were terribly neglected, until at last, in the person of John Steel of Asby, arose the modern Meleager. Many a story is told of that exciting time, and one especially has hit the fancy of the dale. Until recently the custom was that fox-hunts should take place on one particular day of the week--a day the selection of which for a Southern meet would, however convenient, be regarded with considerable surprise. Possibly this custom was held to govern dog-hunting also; for one Sunday, as the Rev. Mr. Ponsonby (probably the identical 'homely priest' who is mentioned in 'The Brothers') was conducting Divine Service, the attentive cars of the congregation caught the sound of some commotion without, followed by the rush of hounds and the panting of human lungs. There could be no mistaking these signs. A faint murmur passed round the sacred building, 'T' girt dog!' and in an instant the reverend gentleman was the only male within the walls. A moment's pause, and then female sympathy and female curiosity triumphed, and the other and better half of the congregation disappeared. The story goes in Ennerdale (but for this we decline to vouch) that the aged pastor, casting a sorrowful glance upon the empty benches, hastily adjusted the robes of his office, and ere the last petticoat had fluttered from the porch was in full career to join the headlong hunt. For five months Ennerdale had been in a state of convulsive excitement, for the first and last time, it is said, 'syn t' Flud'; the honour of having enlivened the dale is fairly divided between the Deluge and the Dog. To see Ennerdale as it should be seen, and to get a clear idea of the surrounding district, there is no better plan than to mount from Buttermere to Red Pike--the Rigi of Cumberland--and from there follow with eye and, if necessary, map the following account of a 'run,' telling how 'oald Jobby o' Smeathat tallyho't a fox ya Sunday mworning, just as day brak, oot ov a borran o' steeans, abeunn Flootern Tarn, i' Herdas end; an' hoo it teukk ower be t' Cleugh gill an' t' hoonds viewt him sa hard 'at he teuk t' Broadwater an' swam 'cross t' hee end on't, an t' dogs went roond an' oop t' Side Wood ... an' they whisselt him oop be t' Iron Crag, an' be t' Silver Cwove an then throo t' Pillar, an' a gay rough bit o' grund it is. Hoo he shakt 'em off a bit theer, an' they at him agean an' meadd o' ring amang t' rocks. Hoo they ran him roond be Black Sail, an' Lizza hee faulds an' clam oot be t' Scarf Gap an' on to t' Wo' heead an' they beeldit 'am onder t' Brock Steeans an' he was seaff aneugh theer.' With or without the fox-hunt this view from Red Pike is magnificent, yet there are several others which run it very close. What, for instance, can be better, just at the clearing of a shower, than the look-out from the Pillar Fell on the opposite side of the valley? From the gloom and grandeur around it the eye travels right along to the smiling green of the open country beyond the lake bordered by a line of glittering sea. This view has one drawback in that you cannot at one time be looking both from the Pillar and at it; but then it is hardly possible to enter Ennerdale at all without seeing this rock, the real glory of the valley, from many effective points; and, moreover, no day there is complete without a quiet half-hour spent in floating on the lake about sunset; for, whether it be due to the westerly lie of the dale or to some other cause, the fact remains that the Ennerdale sunsets are not to be beaten among the Lakes. By the early morning light the upper part of the valley should be explored, and the marvellous view enjoyed from Haystacks: from the 'bulky red bluff of Grasmoor' on the right to the dark recess of Mosedale half seen upon the left all is beautiful; separated from Crummock and Buttermere, which are both well seen, by the steep Red Pike range, Broadwater throws in a dash of life to relieve the desolation of upper Ennerdale, while the richly coloured screes of Red Pike sweep down in striking contrast to the forbidding frown of the Pillar Fell. We have seen a fine water-colour sketch which renders this view with great fidelity. It has additional interest as the work of the first amateur who ever scaled the Pillar Stone--Lieut. Wilson, R.N. The scenery of Ennerdale, however, would not long have remained beautiful if the Ennerdale Railway Bill, promoted in 1883 and 1884, had been suffered to pass into law. That scheme was happily defeated, and the only modern touches added to the dale have been the galvanised wire railings recently erected along the sky-line, and the blue indicators set up on the Black Sail and Scarf Gap track. =Eskdale.=--There are two dales of the name in Cumberland, but the only one which is of interest to mountaineers is reached by the little railway from Ravenglass. Lodgings, largely used by Whitehaven people, are to be had, but the most convenient inn is the Woolpack, about a mile up the valley from the terminus of the line. From no place can _Scafell_, _The Pikes_, or _Bow Fell_ be more easily explored, while the Coniston range is quite within reach, and the Wastwater _Screes_ are more accessible than they are from Wastdale Head. The valley itself is only second to Borrowdale, and there are grand falls and deep pools in the Esk. There are also some good rocks, though not quite equal to the description of Hutchinson, who says that 'Doe Cragg and Earn Cragg are remarkable precipices, whose fronts are polished as marble, the one 160 perpendicular yards in height, the other 120 yards.' Both of these will be seen on the way up to _Mickledoor_, the former standing on the right-hand side at the foot of the steep ascent. It is strange that so few climbers ever go to this valley. =Esk Pike=, a name given by the shepherds to a peak of 2,903 ft., which stands at the head of the Esk valley. Being left nameless by the Ordnance six-inch map, it has attracted to itself the nearest name it could find, and is very commonly called _Hanging Knot_, which, in strictness, applies only to the north shoulder of Bow Fell, where it hangs over Angle Tarn. It would save some confusion if this name had a wider currency than it has. At the head of Eskdale there is a rather good gully, which was climbed at the end of September 1892 by Messrs. Brunskill and Gibbs, whose account of it is that 'its direction is W.N.W., and it consists first of a short pitch of about 10 ft.; then a slope of 20 ft. at an angle of 60°-65°, the holds in which are fairly good; and, last, another pitch at a somewhat similar angle, with an awkward corner of rock to round. Above this to the top is an easy scramble.' =Fairfield= (2,863 ft.), in Westmorland, sometimes called Rydal Head in old books, stretches down to Grasmere and Ambleside; but it is from Patterdale that it should be seen and climbed. One of the best things on it is _Greenhow End_, which stands at the head of Deepdale. The steep part, which is not wholly crag, is 400 or 500 ft. high, and faces N.E. This is the mountain which Miss Martineau so greatly longed to ascend, and every one knows Mr. Payn's account of how he encamped upon it. There is another _Fairfield_ in the Coniston Fells. =Falcon Crag=, a couple of miles from Keswick, beside the road to Borrowdale, is not more than 150 or 200 ft. high, but at many points so vertical as to be quite unclimbable. The steepest side is also the most exposed to the public gaze. On the south side there is a deep gully in which excellent scrambling is to be had. =Fellpole= is a much better word than its foreign equivalent, 'alpenstock'. Except in the depth of winter on the highest fells it is of much more use than an axe, which is, of course, indispensable when there is much snow or ice. On difficult rocks either axe or pole is a great incumbrance; but where there is much scree, or steep grass, or broken ground, all three of which abound on the Fells, a pole is a very great comfort on the descent. Of course, while being used for this purpose, it must be kept behind the body. On the steep nose of _Fleetwith_ a fatal accident occurred to a young woman solely in consequence of her attempting to descend with her stick held improperly in front of her. This is a fault which nearly all beginners commit. Nevertheless, it is perfectly legitimate to use the pole in that way if it is to break the force of an abrupt drop from rest to rest--as, for instance, when a slope is broken into binks separated by drops of from three to six feet. In such cases a jump is often dangerous, and the life of Mr. Pope, lost on _Great Gable_ in 1882, is only one of many which have been similarly sacrificed. =Force Crag= is reached from Keswick by way of Braithwaite station and the long _Coledale_ valley. Here the track of the disused mining tram is a well-engineered road direct to the foot of the crag, where the fragments of the baryta mine are littered about. The best climb is up to the basin, into which pours the force, and then, leaving the force on the right, ascend a steep, dry gully. The rock is very treacherous, being not only loose, but covered with long fringes of rotten heather. It is very difficult to get out, as the top part steepens rapidly. The force is very fatal to sheep. On one occasion the writer counted no less than six of their carcasses in the basin. =Froswick.=--It is most easily reached from Staveley or Windermere by following up the valley of the Kent, or from Ambleside by crossing the Garbourn Pass into the same valley. This hill resembles _Ill Bell_ and _Rainsborrow Crag_ in character, and has a very steep face towards the north-east, 300 or 400 ft. high. It is on sheet 20 of the Ordnance map of Westmorland. =Gaping Gill Hole=, in Yorkshire, on the south side of _Ingleborough_, is most easily got at from Clapham, on the Midland Railway. It lies higher up than the well-known _Clapham_ or _Ingleborough Cave_, and both should be visited in the same expedition. The actual funnel is about 8 ft. by 20 ft., and Mr. Birkbeck, of Settle, partly descended it many years ago. There is a ledge of rock about 190 ft. down, from which a plumb-line drops a further distance of 166 ft. Strangers often pass close to the place without finding it. =Gash Rock.=--We are indebted to Colonel Barrow for this name, which he bestowed on _Blea Crag_ in Langstrath apparently for no better reason than that he knew a man called Gash, who did not know the name of the rock, or how to climb it. This rock is the 'spy fortalice' spoken of in Prior's Guide. It is an upstanding block of squarish outline, conspicuous on the left hand as one ascends Langstrath from Borrowdale. It is climbed from the side which faces down the valley, and is rather a stiff little rock of its inches. It was climbed by Mr. Owen Jones and Mr. Robinson on September 6, 1893, but there is some doubt whether it had not been done before (see _Blea Crag_). =Gavel=--apparently the local form in the North of England of the Southern 'Gable.' In the older maps 'Great Gable' is usually spelt in this way, and for part of that mountain the name _Gavel Neese_ (i.e. nose) still lingers among the shepherds. Generally speaking, in the less frequented parts, where the names are used only by the shepherds, we find this form. Thus we have _Gavel Fell_ between Loweswater and Ennerdale, _Gavel-pike_ on St. Sunday Crag, _Gavelcrag_ on the south end of _High Street_, and again on _Seat Sandal_, and this form is used in the Lowlands of Scotland, while on the more frequented _Skiddaw_ we get _Gablegill_. In Icelandic, 'gafl' is said to mean 'the end of a house or of a ship.' =Gill= (or _Ghyll_).--In a large part of the North of England this is the regular word for a stream flowing between walls of rock. It is by many regarded as a test-word for Scandinavian settlements, and it is certainly more abundant in such districts, but notice should be taken of the fact that in Kent it is applied to the steep wooded slopes of a brook-valley. There is good authority for both spellings, but the less romantic of the two is to be preferred. =Gimmer Crag=, just behind the inns at _Dungeon Gill_ in _Langdale_, has good scrambling on it. Mr. Gwynne says of it: 'Between _Harrison Stickle_ and the _Pike O' Stickle_, commonly called the _Sugarloaf_, there is a splendid crag that is full of opportunities. This fine piece of rock, although it has the appearance of being easy, has the disadvantage of being wet, and therefore more or less dangerous. However, there are times even in the Lake District when the rain ceases and the sun shines, and it is then that the climber should gambol upon this crag.' =Glaramara=--a long broken hill stretching from Stonethwaite along the east side of Borrowdale to Esk Hause. Its name is only less disguised than its nature in the description given of it in the 'Beauties of England,' p. 65: 'Glamarara is a perpendicular rock of immense height.' Sir W. Scott has confused it with _Blencathra_. It contains very little climbing, but _Combe Gill_ and _Pinnacle Bield_ may be mentioned. =Gordale Scar=--a magnificent limestone ravine near _Malham Cove_, in Yorkshire, on the line of the great Craven Fault. Bell Busk is the nearest station, but Settle (6 miles) is generally more convenient. It has been prosaically compared to a winding street between enormously high houses, with a river falling out of the first-floor window of one of them. It is easy to pass out at the head, leaving the water on the right hand; but on the other side of the water there is quite a little climb, which, however, the writer has seen a lady do without assistance. =Goyal.=--This west-country word for a gully will not require explanation for readers of Mr. Blackmore's 'Lorna Doone.' =Grain=: the northern word for a prong, and hence the usual name for the branches of a stream. =Grassmoor= (2,791 ft.) in the older maps and guide-books (such as Robinson's) is often called Grasmere or Grasmire. The only climbs which it presents are on the side which drops steeply down towards the foot of Crummock Water, and the only inns within a convenient distance are at Scale Hill (1 mile) and Buttermere (3 miles). There are two gullies which furrow the mountain side nearly from top to bottom. The more southerly of these has two pitches in it close to the foot, and the upper of the two is generally thought as hard as anything on the mountain. The approved method of doing it is to keep the back to the rock until the top of the pitch is nearly reached, and then to break out on the south side. Above this pitch the gully is of little interest. The north gully is of more sustained merit, but, as seen from below, less prominent, and therefore easily overlooked. It may, however, be recognised by its liberal output of scree. It has three pitches near the foot, and in all three the hold is somewhat scanty. The first forms a narrow gully rising from left to right, and is the highest and hardest. Higher up than these a broad wall of rock some 40 ft. high cuts across the gully and gives a pretty climb. Above the wall there is a branch to the left containing one little pitch, but the main channel continues. Loose stones are now the only source of excitement, and climbers are recommended to get out to the right and finish the ascent along the rocky ridge of the bank. It is very safe climbing on this face, yet full of interest and instruction, and for the initiation of a 'young hand' nothing could be better. =Great End= (2,984 ft.) has not received justice at the hands of the Government map-makers, who have scamped their work most shockingly. The six-inch map would lead the innocent, stranger to imagine that he could ascend from Sprinkling Tarn by a smooth and gradual slope. The cliffs are on the right-hand side on the way from Sty Head to Esk Hause, and are reached from Wastdale or Borrowdale by way of Sty Head, and from Langdale by Rossett Gill. The best general view is from Sprinkling Tarn. Col. Barrow, when citing Great End in his book as an instance of a mountain with one impossible side, no doubt refers to these cliffs, which, however, long before he wrote, had been climbed in every direction. He might reasonably object to _Cust's Gully_, invented in 1880, as being quite at the end of the cliff; but from a point some way below the foot of that gully there is an easy passage, sloping up the face of the cliff very much like Jack's Rake on _Pavey Ark_, and this passage was descended by Mr. Cust in the same year that he discovered the gully. A little later a couple of ardent fox-hunters got into difficulties in one of the main gullies, and so drew more attention to these rocks. The whole face was pretty thoroughly explored by the present writer in the summer of 1882. Two very fine gullies face Sprinkling Tarn. _Great or Central Gully_, the nearer of the two to _Cust's_, is also the wider, but not quite so long as the other. It has a copious scree at the foot, and more than half-way up it divides into three. The central fork is grassy, that to the right is more abrupt, while the left-hand way lies for several yards up a wet slide of smooth and very steep rock. On the slide itself there is hold enough for comfort; but on getting off it at the head to the left hand there comes a bit on a disgustingly rotten buttress which even good climbers have often found very unpleasant. Above this the gully is more open and very easy, but splendid climbing may be had on either side of it. [Illustration: GREAT END FROM SPRINKLING TARN A, Position of _Brigg's climb_ (not seen); B, The east gully; C, The great central gully; D, _Cust's gully_.] _The South-East Gully_, as it is usually called, has its mouth only some 20 yards east from that of the last. Being much narrower, it is bridged by numerous 'choke-stones,' and, while less fine than the other in snow time, offers in summer a better and rather longer climb. Half-way up or less there is a fork, the dividing ridge forming quite a sharp _arête_. Above it the forks coalesce, and as it nears the top the climb can be varied a good deal. _Brigg's_ (or _Holmes'_) _Pitch_, of which a photograph will be found in the Climbers' Book at Wastdale Head, is still nearer to Esk Hause, which it faces. Mr. Holmes and the Messrs. Brigg, who climbed it on Easter Monday 1893, describe the difficulty as consisting in a cave formed quite at the foot of the cliff by a jammed stone, the top of which is reached by way of the rocks on the north side of it. =Great Gable= (2,949 ft.) may be ascended with equal ease from Wastdale or the head of Borrowdale, and is within easy reach of Buttermere. The simplest way up is by Sty Head, from which half an hour's rough walking lands one on to the top. The only alternative for Wastdale is 'Moses Sledgate,' alias _Gavel Neese_, a ridge of rather steep grass, which offers a very direct way. There is a bit of scrambling on White Napes, a rocky mass which tops the Neese. Beyond this _Westmorland's Cairn_ is left on the right hand and the summit cairn comes into sight. People coming from Buttermere usually go round the head of Ennerdale over Green Gable, and this is the way generally taken by Borrowdale visitors for the return journey. The climbing on this mountain is quite first-class. The _Napes_, _Napes Needle_, and _Kern Knotts_ are separately described, but in addition to these there are grand crags overlooking Ennerdale. These are referred to in Col. Barrow's book in the passage where he defies the Alpine Club to ascend the most difficult side of certain Lake mountains. [Illustration: PLAN OF GREAT GABLE A, _Westmorland's Cairn_; B, _White Napes_; C, E, _Little and Great Hell Gate_; D, _Great Napes_; F, _Napes Needle_.] [Illustration: GREAT GABLE FROM THE SOUTH-EAST A, _Kirkfell_; B, _Beckhead_; C, _White Napes_; D, _Great Napes_; E, _Westmorland's Cairn_; F, Summit; G, _Tom Blue_; H, _Kern Knotts_. The path to _Sty Head_ is seen mounting from left to right.] No one seems even to have looked at these crags till in 1882 Mr. Pope met his death on this side of the mountain. In that year the writer found that it was an easy matter to coast along the face of the cliff at about two-thirds of the height of it, and a year or two later that for all the ferocious appearance of these rocks there is a natural passage by which a mountain sheep of ordinary powers might ascend them. Close to this are the remains of a sort of hut of loose stones, evidently the refuge of some desperate fugitive of half a century or more ago. Local tradition speaks of a notorious distiller of illicit whisky, who was known to have a 'hide' somewhere in this wild neighbourhood. The top of the easy passage bears by prismatic compass 23° from the highest cairn, and is marked by a large stone. To the east of this spot there is fine climbing, the rocks being on a grand scale and difficult on that account. At intervals large masses are detached by such agencies as frost, and heavy falls result. One of these carried with it a slab pinnacle which, though only about 15 ft. high, was remarkably difficult. The writer, and Messrs. Hastings and Robinson gave themselves the trouble of climbing it, and consequently heard of its untimely departure with deep regret. In April 1890 Mr. J.W. Robinson greatly assisted subsequent climbers by inserting a sketch in the Wastdale Head book, and this sketch has been the usual basis of later work. Gable has the threefold excellence of being splendid to look at, splendid to look from, and splendid to climb; and one can easily understand the enthusiasm of Mr. F.H. Bowring, who has ascended it over one hundred times. =Green Crag.=--A good piece of rock, though not as sound as it might be, at the head of _Warnscale_, the recess between _Fleetwith_ and _Scarf Gap_. It is reached from Buttermere by way of Gatesgarth, and then by the quarry track which goes up on the south side of Fleetwith to _Dubs_. There is a fine gully in the crag which is unmistakable. A note of the ascent of it was made by Messrs. J.W. Robinson and W.A. Wilson in August 1889. =Griff=--a valley-name in east Yorkshire, probably connected with 'greave,' which is common in Derbyshire. Phillips says that the Yorkshire word means 'a narrow, rugged valley.' =Gurnard's Head=, in Cornwall, not far from St. Ives, is a fine promontory on which there is good climbing. It is here that the greenstone ends and the granite begins, prevailing from this point practically right on to the Land's End. =Hanging Knot.=--See also _Esk Pike_. The steep breast above Angle Tarn contains no continuous climb, but there are several good bits in the rocks and gullies which connect the terraces. =Hard Knot.=--'Eske,' says Camden, 'springeth up at the foote of _Hardknot_, an high steepe mountaine, in the top whereof were discovered of late huge stones and foundations of a castle not without great wonder, considering it is so steepe and upright that one can hardly ascend up to it.' This refers of course to the Roman camp, which is nowhere near the top. The 'mountaine' scarcely deserves the name; it is not high, and though rugged offers no climbing. Writers much later than Camden refer to it as if it were one of the highest hills in England. Even Gray, in his _Journal_, says 'Wrynose and Hardknot, two great mountains, rise above the rest.' [Illustration: HANGING KNOT FROM ANGLE TARN] The usually accurate West introduces in the funniest way both 'the broken ridge of Wrynose' and 'the overhanging cliff of Hardknot' into his description of the view from Belle Isle on Windermere, and says that they, with others,'form as magnificent an amphitheatre, and as grand an assemblage of mountains, as ever the genius of Poussin,' &c.; and then adds a note to say that they 'are named as being in the environs, and are in reality not seen from the island.' =Harrison Stickle=, 'the next neighbour of _Pavey Ark_, is another happy hunting-ground for beginners. There are at least four good routes up. There is one to the north-east which is fairly difficult. Due south there are two or three rather steep gills, that may be climbed with a certain amount of ease. But in no case should the climber, even on the easiest of these routes, omit to use the rope and take every precaution against preventable accidents.' Thus speaks Mr. Gwynne in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, and to his remarks little need be added, except that it must be borne in mind nothing on this group is quite in the same class as _Pavey Ark_. The obvious starting-point for either is Dungeon Gill at the very foot, where there are two inns, but Grasmere is within easy reach, being only about an hour further off. =Hause= (_hass_, _horse_, _-ourse_, _-ose_): used in the North for a pass. The word means 'neck' or 'throat,' the latter being the sense most felt in local names, where it refers more to lateral contraction than to vertical depression, being thus parallel to _gorge_ rather than to _col_. =Haystacks=, just east of Scarf Gap, has one craggy bit on it where, as appears from the curious map published in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for 1751, eagles then built. The name is often quoted as an instance of the Norse word which occurs in _Stack Polly_, and frequently on the Scotch coast, but West says it was called _Hayrick_ (_sic_) on account of its shape. =Hell Gate.=--A channel on _Great Gable_, just by the east end of the _Napes_. It is the outlet for immense quantities of scree. The older name, _Deep Gill_, has during the last twenty years being quite supplanted. The present name, if less pretty, is more precise, and saves confusion with the better known _Deep Gill_ on _Scafell_. =Hell Gill.=--There are many gills and becks bearing this name. Speaking of one in Yorkshire, Leland says it is 'a Bek called Hell Gill because it runnithe in such a deadely place. This Gill commithe to Ure.' The idea is amplified by Camden: 'Where Richmondshire bordereth upon Lancashire amongst the mountaines it is in most places so vast, solitary, unpleasant and unsightly, so mute and still also that the borderers dwelling thereby have called certaine riverets creeping this waie "Hellbecks." But especially that about the head of the river Ure, which having a bridge over it of one entier stone falleth downe such a depth, that it striketh in a certaine horror to as many as looke downe.' The best known Hell Gill, which at one time had considerable reputation as a climb, is quite near the foot of _Bowfell_ on the Langdale side. Though on a small scale, it is highly picturesque. The south fork is hardly passable in ordinary weather owing to a small waterfall, below which is a deep pool flanked by perpendicular walls of rock, and except in very dry seasons it is necessary to crawl up the red rotten slabs, steep, slimy, and wet, which form the north fork. The gill should be visited more often than it is, as it is directly on one of the best ways up the mountain from Dungeon Gill and Langdale generally. =Helm Crag.=--Colonel Barrow, speaking of this hill, observes that climbing among these rocks requires care. There are places quite as dangerous and as difficult as on any rock-work on the Alps. He was deterred from climbing the rock which is supposed to resemble a mortar, by a slab of rock slanting sideways, but in his opinion there was no great difficulty, except that arising from the absence of hold for hand and foot--an exception of some importance. =Helvellyn.=--A mountain which belongs equally to Grasmere and to Patterdale, though the latter has by far the finest side of it. _Striding Edge_ on this side was at one time considered to present terrors such as the hardy mountaineer was not likely to encounter elsewhere. This side is cut up into deep coves, which are exceedingly steep and afford many opportunities for scrambling, and near the path in Grisedale there is one of the numerous _Eagle Crags_. On the west side there is no climbing on the mountain itself, but on the range of _Dodds_, which runs away to the north, there is capital work to be found; see _Bram Crag_ and _Wanthwaite Crags_. It was in connection with Helvellyn that Colonel Barrow issued his famous challenge to the Alpine Club. After stating that he had ascended the mountain by every possible way of getting up it, and that it is the easiest of mountains to ascend from any direction that is possible, he continues: 'No one, I think, will venture the impossible, which may be found on all the highest mountains in the Lake District. They have their precipitous sides for adventurous climbers, who, I promise, will never get up them even if they have a mind to try--viz., these, _Great Gable_, _Great End_, _Helvellyn_, _Fairfield_, &c. Most of the difficult things in the Alps have been accomplished. Here is a new field for any of the adventurous climbers of our club: let them try these precipitous sides!' Helvellyn was long regarded as the loftiest of the Lake mountains, the height assigned to it by West being 3,324 ft., and even its tame grassy slopes towards _Wythburn_ were thought very terrible indeed. In the 'Beauties of England' Thirlmere is described as 'a scene of desolation which is much heightened by the appearance of the immense craggy masses, that seem to hang on the sides of Helvellyn, from whose slopes they have apparently been severed, but arrested in their tremendous progress down the mountain by the impulse of gravitation. Huge and innumerable fragments of rocks hang pendant from its sides, and appear ready to fall and overwhelm the curious traveller who dares to ascend its wild and fantastic heights.' =Heron Crag=, Eskdale.--A rock in _Eskdale_ (q.v.) which was long reputed inaccessible. It was supposed to be 120 yards high, and to have a front like polished marble. It will be found north of the Esk river, not far from _Throstlegarth_ (Cumberland, sheet 79). =High Level.=--This name was bestowed about the year 1880 on a particular route, by means of which the north-east foot of the _Pillar Rock_ may be reached from _Black Sail_ along the face of the mountain, thus avoiding the descent into Ennerdale and the subsequent laborious ascent to the rock. The saving in time is very considerable, but the way is so easily missed in thick weather that a stranger who attempted it would probably gain nothing but an exciting walk. After reaching the slight hollow between _Lookingstead_ and _Pillar Fell_, _Green Cove_ is seen below. Here a descent may be made at once, but it is better to proceed westward till about two dozen uprights of the iron railing are passed, and then to descend, keeping as much to the left as the cliffs will allow. The whole art of choosing a line along this face is to cross each successive cove as high up as may be done without getting impeded by rocky ground. The ridges which separate the coves mostly form small headlands, and just above each headland a strip of smooth grass crosses the ridge. Economy in time is usually of more importance at the end than at the beginning of a day, and it is well to know that, whereas from the foot of the rock to _Black Sail_ by way of the valley would take up the greater part of an hour, Mr. Hastings and the writer once timed themselves on the _High Level_, and found that they reached _Lookingstead_ in 18 minutes and the ford in Mosedale in seven minutes more. =High Stile=, in Cumberland, between Ennerdale and Buttermere, has a height of 2,643 ft., and on its north-west side a few good crags. It is best reached by following up the course of _Sour Milk Gill_ from the foot of Buttermere to _Bleaberry Tarn_, which can be reached from any of the inns in an hour's walking. In a note made in the Wastdale Head book in August 1887, Mr. Robinson called attention to these rocks, and he it is who has done most of the exploration here. The principal climbing is in and about a gully in the centre. A course may be taken up very steep grassy binks with the gully on the right hand. The gully itself was climbed direct in September 1893 by Messrs. Jones, Robinson and Wilson, and they found the second pitch very difficult. The same party also ascended 'a short, black-looking chimney away round on the left of the great crag, and nearer the top of the mountain.' The very hard upper pitch was passed on the right hand, and the final pull was by the arms alone. Both climbs are in full view from Rigg's Buttermere Hotel. The mountain is called _High Steel_ in some early maps, and in that of the Ordnance it comes on sheet 69. =High Street=, with the Roman road running all along its ridge, lies between Patterdale and Mardale Green, in Westmorland. It has a fine precipitous side towards the latter place at Blea Water (see _Dixon's Three Jumps_), and at the south end of it, about Gavel Crag and Bleathwaite Crag, there are some good rocky faces, which can be readily found by following up the course of the beck from Kentmere. =Hobcarton Crags= have a considerable repute, which they have only retained by reason of their not being very easily got at. The simplest way of reaching them from Keswick is to take the train to Braithwaite, then go up the straight Coledale until Force Crag is passed, then trace the stream which comes down the hill on the right. Hobcarton is just over the ridge, and the crags are on the left-hand side of the valley. A descent may be made of a ridge which forms the right bank of a gill, which runs from near the col where you are now standing; the gill itself is too rotten. The _Crags_ are very steep and very rotten; but there is one curiosity about them, in the shape of a continuous sloping ledge, growing very narrow indeed towards the top. It rises gradually in the direction of _Hopegillhead_. The crags are picturesque, but can be traversed in any direction without difficulty, and present no definite climb. Another way of reaching them from Keswick is by crossing Whinlatter Pass, and on the far side turning up the first valley to the left hand. =Honister=, one of the grandest crags in Cumberland, is reached from either Buttermere or Borrowdale. It is one of the chief attractions of the 'Buttermere Round' made by the breaks from Keswick. If quarrymen could only have been persuaded to let it alone, it would have been a delightful climbing ground; as things are, we can only look and long. Apart from the great crag there is a fine view of the lakes below from the summit (called _Fleetwith Pike_). Owing to its position near the black-lead mines, this was one of the earliest Lake mountains of which we have a recorded ascent. It was made before the middle of last century, and, so far as can be made out, these early mountaineers ascended from Seathwaite and passed to the northward of _Grey Knotts_, and so to the top of Fleetwith. 'The precipices were surprisingly variegated with apices, prominencies, spouting jets of water, cataracts and rivers that were precipitated from the cliffs with an alarming noise' [Sourmilkgill]. On reaching the apparent top, they were astonished to perceive a large plain to the west, and from thence another craggy ascent, which they reckoned at 500 yards. 'The whole mountain is called _Unnisterre_ or, as I suppose, Finisterre, for such it appears to be.' In about another hour two of the party gained this summit--'the scene was terrifying--the horrid projection of vast promontories, the vicinity of the clouds, the thunder of the explosions in the slate quarries, the dreadful solitude, the distance of the plain below, and the mountains heaped on mountains that were lying around us desolate and waste, like the ruins of a world which we only had survived excited such ideas of horror as are not to be expressed. We turned from this fearful prospect, afraid even of ourselves, and bidding an everlasting farewell to so perilous an elevation. We descended to our companions, repassed the mines, got to Seathwayte, were cheerfully regaled by an honest farmer in his _puris naturalibus_, and returned to Keswic about nine at night.' =Hope= (_-hop_, _-up_): used by Leland as equivalent to 'brook,' but usually taken to mean a retired upland valley. The Icelandic 'hop' is applied to landlocked bays. =Hough=--a hill name in east Yorkshire. Phillips says that it is equivalent to 'barf,' and means 'a detached hill.' It is pronounced 'hauf.' If this be the exact sense, it can hardly be the same word as 'heugh,' which is used further north for 'crag' or 'precipice,' and it is perhaps merely another form of 'how' or 'haugh.' =How= (_-oe_, _-ah_, _-a_, _-haw_): a Norse word for a burial mound, found all over the North of England. =Ice-axe.=--On the high Fells in time of snow an axe is a safeguard of vital importance. Quite apart, too, from the comfort and security which it alone can give, it is an implement which can only be properly manipulated after long practice, and consequently a beginner should eagerly avail himself of every opportunity of acquiring dexterity in the use of it. From Christmas to Easter there is nearly always snow enough on the fells of Cumberland to give excellent practice in step-cutting. =Ill Bell.=--A Westmorland hill forming a series of three with _Froswick_ and _Rainsborrow Crag_. Its north or north-easterly face is very steep for a height of about 300 ft. Staveley is perhaps the best starting-point for these three; but they can be managed quite easily from Ambleside or Mardale Green. _Ill Bell_ is on sheet 20 of the Ordnance map of Westmorland. =Ingleborough=, 2,361 ft., one of the most striking of the Yorkshire mountains, of which the poet Gray spoke as 'that huge creature of God.' Readers of the 'Heart of Midlothian' will remember how it reminded Jeannie Deans of her 'ain countrie.' The most exaggerated ideas of its height formerly prevailed. Even in 1770 it was commonly reckoned at 3,987 ft., and Hurtley actually gives 5,280 ft. Its top is only about four miles from Clapham, and ponies can go all the way. It is ascended far and away more frequently than any other Yorkshire hill, and consists mainly of limestone cliffs and slopes of shale, with a certain amount of millstone grit. Here are some very remarkable caves (see _Alum Pot_ and _Gaping Gill Hole_), and of some of these there is an early description by Mr. Adam Walker in the _Evening General Post_ for September 25, 1779, which is quoted by West, and an account of an ascent of it made in the year 1761 is also extant. =Jack's Rake= is a natural passage across the face of _Pavey Ark_ in Langdale. The first notice ever taken of it by any but shepherds was a note in the visitors' book belonging to the inn at Dungeon Gill by Mr. R. Pendlebury, who spoke highly of it, considering it to be a striking yet simple excursion among magnificent rock scenery. After a time the world came to look at _Pavey Ark_, and seeing an impossible-looking combination of ravine and precipice, concluded, not unnaturally, that it must be what Mr. Pendlebury had found a pleasant yet simple stroll. Under this delusion, they began to try to climb what is now known as the Great Gully in _Pavey Ark_, and did not expect to find a place anything like the real _Jack's Rake_. Mr. Gwynne, in 1892, says of it: 'Along the face of the cliff there runs a ledge that looks from below hardly wide enough for a cat to stand upon. However, if an attempt is made to climb it, it will be found wide enough for two fat men walking abreast. Towards the top it tapers off again, and the climber will have to do a bit of scrambling to get on to the summit of the precipice. This is a climb which offers no difficulty whatever, unless the climber is given to attacks of giddiness, and if that is the case there will hardly be any need to tell him that he has no business there at all. This ledge, however, offers a multitude of good opportunities to the climber. It runs obliquely across the face of the precipice, but it need not necessarily be followed throughout its length by the mountaineer who wishes for something a little more exciting. 'About halfway up there runs on to the ledge a chimney which, when it is not a small waterfall, forms a pleasant climb to some broken rock above, whence the summit is easily reached. If, however, the water in the chimney makes it uncomfortable and unpleasant for the climber, he may still arrive at the top of it by choosing a long bit of steep smooth rock to the left. There are two cliffs which afford fairly good hand and foot holds, and from there the top of the chimney is attained.' It is remarkable that a gallery more or less resembling this is found on many of the chief precipices in the Lakes. There is a steeper one on the Ennerdale Crags of _Great Gable_; there are two on the Ennerdale face of the _Pillar Rock_, and on _Scafell_ the _Rake's Progress_ and _Lord's Rake_ in their mutual relation closely resemble this rake and the wide gully at the north end of it. [Illustration: PAVEY ARK AND STICKLE TARN A, Narrow gully; B, Big gully; C, D, Smaller gullies; E, Wide scree gully. From the foot of E to A runs _Jack's Rake_.] =Kern Knotts= are on the south side of _Gable_, close to the _Sty Head_. There is a short but difficult gully here on the side facing Wastdale, which was climbed by Messrs. Owen Jones and Robinson in 1893, but described by them under the name of _Tom Blue_, a rock much higher up the mountain. =Keswick.=--Though rather too distant from the very best climbing, this is an excellent centre in point of variety. Of _Skiddaw_ and _Saddleback_ it enjoys a monopoly, while _Helvellyn_, _Gable_ and _Scafell Pikes_ are all within the compass of a day's work. The railway is a convenience, of course, but not as useful as one might expect in extending the field of operations, because most of the places to which it goes are of little interest. The town is very well supplied with driving facilities, such as coaches, breaks and omnibuses. The clay-slate of which the Skiddaw and Grassmoor groups are composed provides climbing of smaller quantity and inferior quality to that found among the harder rocks of what is called the 'Borrowdale Series,' but there are a few good scrambles west of Derwentwater, such as _Eel_ (or _Ill_) _Crag_, _Force Crag_, and _Hobcarton_. The nearest good rocks are in the neighbourhood of _Wallow Crag_, but there is no pleasure in climbing with a crowd of gaping excursionists below. A much pleasanter day may be spent in a visit to _Wanthwaite_. Of Keswick itself an early writer says that the poorer inhabitants subsist chiefly by stealing or clandestinely buying of those who steal the black-lead, which they sell to Jews and other hawkers; but whatever changes the character of the people has or has not undergone, it is not easy to believe that the scenery is the same as that which the early writers describe. Camden's tone is neutral: 'Compassed about with deawy hilles and fensed on the North side with that high mountaine _Skiddaw_ lieth _Keswike_;' but two centuries later, when the place began to be fashionable, this description would not have satisfied any one. The great characteristic of the scenery was considered to be its power of inspiring terror. Dr. Brown in his famous 'Letter' dwells upon the 'rocks and cliffs of stupendous height hanging broken over the lake in horrible grandeur, some of them a thousand feet high, the woods climbing up their steep and shaggy sides, where mortal foot never yet approached. On these dreadful heights the eagles build their nests, ... while on all sides of this immense amphitheatre the lofty mountains rise round, piercing the clouds in shapes as spiry and fantastic as the very rocks of Dovedale.... The full perfection of Keswick consists of three circumstances, _beauty_, _horror_ and _immensity_ united.' =Kirkfell= has two fine buttresses of rock at the back, facing Ennerdale, but they are broken up and so only fit for practice climbs. They are, however, not unfrequently assailed by climbers who imagine themselves to be scaling the crags of Great Gable. The direct ascent from Wastdale is one of the steepest lengths of grass slope to be found among these hills. The only gully on this fell is _Illgill_, which faces _Lingmell_ and contains two or three severe pitches. It is rather seldom visited, and is exposed to falling stones. =Lancashire.=--Though some of the rough country which borders on Yorkshire contains a rocky bit here and there, Lancashire climbing has no real interest except in that part of it which belongs to the Lake country. The climax of this part is reached in the neighbourhood of _Coniston_. South of the Lakes there are some limestone crags of striking form. The impression produced on Defoe by what we consider the exceptionally beautiful scenery of the Lune valley is curious. 'This part of the country seemed very strange and dismal to us (nothing but mountains in view and stone walls for hedges; sour oatcakes for bread, or clapat-bread as it is called). As these hills were lofty, so they had an aspect of terror. Here were no rich pleasant valleys between them as among the Alps; no lead mines and veins of rich ore as in the Peak; no coal-pits as in the hills about Halifax, but all barren and wild and of no use either to man or beast.' =Langdale.=--(See _Bowfell_, _Pavey Ark_ and _Pike o'Stickle_, _Gimmer Crag_, _Harrison Stickle_, _Oak How_.) By many thought the finest valley in Westmorland; the name is often written Langden or Langdon by old authorities. Dungeon Gill has always been a favourite haunt of climbing folk, and from this base strong walkers can easily manage to reach _Scafell_, _Gable_, _Coniston_, _Old Man_, or _Helvellyn_ in the day. =Limestone= is abundant in Derbyshire and Yorkshire, and forms the fine cliffs of Cheddar in Somerset, Berry Head in Devon, Anstis Cove and others; indeed most of the south coast of Devon and Cornwall east of Penzance is of this material. Chudleigh Rock and Morwell Rocks on the river Tamar are very striking. West, speaking of this rock in Lancashire, says, 'The whiteness and neatness of these rocks take off every idea of _horror_ that might be suggested by their bulk or form.' In England it is very rare to find limestone which is a satisfactory material on which to climb. =Lingmell=, called _Lingmoor_ by Wilkinson, is a mere shoulder of Scafell Pike. It has, however, some fine cliffs facing those of _Great Napes_ on Gable; between these two Housman thought a collision imminent. These used to be thought inaccessible, but were climbed by Mr. Bowring about 1880. There is a striking view of them from near Sty Head. The eye looks right along the dark ravine of Piers Gill, which is apparently overhung by the long line of these crags, rising from tongues of rock divided by huge fan-shaped banks of scree. There is a good deal of chance about the climbing here. It may be exciting, or you may just happen to avoid what difficulties there are. It is a very treacherous rock, especially low down, where curious long stone pegs are lightly stuck in the ground and come away at the first touch. A few feet below the top stands a curious pinnacle of forbidding appearance, of which a sensational photograph has been taken; but Mr. Robinson found one side from which the top is reached with ridiculous ease. Further west there are gullies facing Kirkfell which are worth climbing, though there is much unsound rock. (See also _Piers Gill_.) [Illustration: LINGMELL AND PIERS GILL] =Lingmoor=, rather over a mile south-east of Millbeck Inn, and near Oak How, is a little pinnacle of which a photograph and a description by Mr. H.A. Gwynne will be found in the Climbers' book at that place. In old maps the name is sometimes found applied to _Lingmell_. [Illustration: LORD'S RAKE AND RAKE'S PROGRESS A, The foot of _Moss Gill_; B, The foot of _Steep Gill_; C-D, _Lord's Rake_; C-A, Part of _Rake's Progress_.] =Lord's Rake.=--A well-known scree-shoot in the north face of Scafell, for the ascent of which from Mickledoor it offers an easy route without climbing. The earliest account of its being used for this purpose is in the _Penny Magazine_ for 1837 at p. 293: 'It is very laborious and looks dangerous, but in fact there is no risk except that of a sprained ankle. It is through the Lord's Rake, a shaft between two vertical walls of rock about five yards across all the way up, and twenty or twenty-five minutes' hard climbing on all fours up a slope of about 45°. The place must have been cut out by a watercourse, but is now dry and covered with light shingle. It looks right down into Hollow Stones (the deep vale between the Pikes and Scafell), and most fearful it does look, but it is not dangerous. When we reached the inn at Eskdale over Scafell my shepherd was very proud of having brought me through the Lord's Rake, and the people were much surprised. It seems to be rather a feat in the country. It is the strangest place I ever saw. It may be recommended to all who can bear hard labour and enjoy the appearance of danger without the reality.' 'Prior's Guide' contained the first good description of this rake. =Luxulion=, in Cornwall, is of interest to the mineralogist and the travelled mountaineer on account of its enormous block. According to Mr. Baddeley, this is the largest block in Europe, larger than any of the famous boulders at the head of the Italian lakes, and it may take rank with the largest known, the Agassiz blocks in the Tijuca mountains near Rio Janeiro. He gives the dimensions as 49 feet by 27 feet with 72 feet girth, yet makes no allusion to the _Bowder Stone_ in _Borrowdale_, which in another work he describes as being 60 feet long, 30 feet high, and weighing 1,900 tons. It would appear, therefore, that the _Bowder Stone_ is considerably larger than the largest stone in Europe without being so remarkable for size as another stone in England. =Malham Cove.=--A fine example of the limestone scenery of the Craven Fault. The river Aire gushes forth from the base of the cove, which can easily be seen in the same excursion as _Gordale Scar_. The nearest town is Skipton-in-Craven and the nearest station Bell Busk, but Settle is very little farther and will generally be found the most convenient starting-point. =Mardale Green=, at the head of Hawes Water, is a delightful and little visited spot. In the way of climbing it commands _High Street_, _Harter Fell_, _Froswick_, _Ill Bell_, and _Rainsborrow Crag_. The best near climbs are about _Bleawater_ and _Riggindale_. =Mellbreak.=--One of the few Cumberland fells which the indefatigable Colonel Barrow seems to have left unvisited; yet no one who stops at Scale Hill or Buttermere will consider wasted a day spent upon it. The proper course is to begin at the end which faces Loweswater village and ascend by _Frier's Gill_, a nice little climb. Having reached the top of the gill and then the summit plateau, proceed to the hollow about the middle of the mountain, and from there descend the highly curious _Pillar Rake_, which gradually slopes down towards the foot of Crummock Water. It is not a climb, but any one who is not content with the study of mountain form can find climbing in the little gullies which ascend the rocks above the rake. Sheet 63 of the Ordnance map of Cumberland contains it. =Mickledoor Chimney=, in the cliffs of Scafell, is not the easiest, but the most obvious point at which to attack them. It is conspicuous from the _Pikes_, and would probably be selected by any experienced stranger as the most vulnerable point. It was visited about the year 1869 by Mr. C.W. Dymond, who contributed to 'Prior's Guide' the earliest and best description of it. He says that, 'leaving _Mickledoor_ Ridge, you pass the fissure leading to _Broad Stand_, and continue descending steeply for two minutes, which brings you to a narrow gully in the rock, with a thread of water trickling down it over moss. This is the _cheminée_ to be ascended, and there is no special difficulty in it until you are near the top. Here the gully, of which the 'chimney' forms the lower section, is effectually blocked for some distance, and the only alternative is to climb out of it by the rock which forms the right wall, and which is about 12 ft. high, the lower six vertical and the upper a steep slant. This, which can only be scaled _à la_ chimney-sweep, is exceedingly difficult, as is also the gymnastic feat of escaping to _terra firma_ from the narrow shelf on which the shoulder-and-hip work lands you.' This is very clear and in the main correct, but there is another and easier exit much lower down called 'the Corner,' and there is a third exit only a few feet from the mouth of the chimney. All these are on the right hand, for the opposite bank is not only much higher and much smoother, but would lead to nothing if it were surmounted. It is not really necessary to enter the chimney at all, for the edge presented where the bank cuts the wall bounding the screes is quite assailable, and just right of it there is a point which may even be called easy; but two terrible accidents which have occurred at this spot prove the necessity of care. Until the extraordinarily dry season of 1893 the moss-grown block at the very head of the chimney had never been climbed. It was accomplished on the 12th of September by Mr. W.H. Fowler. By standing on the shoulders of a tall man he was able to reach a slight hold and to establish himself on a rough rectangular block forming the floor of a recess big enough to hold one man. The block above it was holdless, and overhanging and loose stones were a great nuisance. =Micklefell.=--The highest mountain in Yorkshire, but except on that account it possesses no special attraction. The best starting-point is the High Force Inn in Teesdale, 5 miles from Middleton. By making the round of the mountain from High Force to Appleby some very fine rock-scenery may be enjoyed. =Millstone grit.=--A material which is very abundant in Yorkshire and Derbyshire. It is fairly firm, but seldom affords a climb of any sustained interest. Few kinds of rock weather into such eccentric forms, and of this propensity _Brimham Rocks_ are a good example. It forms most of the 'Edges' in Derbyshire, and generally speaking a precipice at the top of a hill is of this material, while those at the foot are of limestone. =Moses' Sledgate= is a curious track, which has evidently been engineered with considerable care, running from near Seatoller in Borrowdale at the back of _Brandreth_, round the head of Ennerdale below _Green_ and _Great Gable_, and then over Beck Head and down Gavel Neese into Wastdale. The question is, who made it and for what purpose was it used? A few years ago, the writer, while climbing with two friends among the crags on the Ennerdale side of _Great Gable_, stumbled quite by chance on something which seemed to throw a side-light on the question. This was a ruined hut thickly overgrown with moss, and showing no trace of any wood having been employed in its construction. The spot had evidently been chosen primarily with a view to concealment, and the result of enquiries kindly made since then by one of my friends has been to elicit proof of certain traditions still lingering among the older inhabitants of these dales concerning a noted distiller of illicit spirits, who flourished and defied the law among these wild retreats. At the same time it is not easy to believe that a smuggler would have undertaken the construction of such a path as this. In the South of England, it is true that the smugglers were considerable roadmakers; but that was at a time when smuggling was a great and well-organised institution, and it seems much more probable in this case that Moses made use of an old path constructed for some purpose which had at that time been abandoned. The terms 'Moses' Path' and 'Moses' Trod' are also used to describe this track. It is not noticed in the guide-books, but something is said about it by Mrs. Lynn Linton. =Moss Gill=, on Scafell, is the next gully on the east or _Mickledoor_ side of _Steep Gill_. The name _Sweep Gill_ ('from the probable profession of the future first climber of its extraordinary vertical chimneys') was suggested for it by Mr. Gilson shortly after its discovery, but that name has been entirely superseded. The first mention of it in the Wastdale Head book is a note by the present writer in June 1889, recommending it to any one in search of a new and difficult climb. His party on that occasion was repulsed after reaching the great blocks, which have only been passed since by the aid of the artificial step subsequently cut in the rock. It was tried again a fortnight later by a party under Mr. R.C. Gilson, which got very nearly, but not quite as far. Two days later the same party explored the gill from above and descended in it for a considerable distance. It was not, however, till three and a half years later, at Christmas, 1892, that the climb was accomplished by Dr. J.N. Collie, G. Hastings, and J.W. Robinson, and their account of it is: [Illustration: MOSS GILL AND STEEP GILL A, _Moss Gill_ (Collie's exit); B, _Moss Gill_ (Collier's exit): C, Top of _Steep Gill_. Just below the point to which A and B converge is the artificial step.] 'The chief points in this climb are, First--to begin on the rock wall to the right of the foot of the gill and not in the very foot of the chimney itself, then enter the gill just below the first great pitch, which may be turned by climbing the wall on the right hand on to a grass ledge of considerable size, called the "_Tennis Court_"; enter the gill from here again, and pass into the cavern under the great boulder.' 'We found,' says Dr. Collie, 'that below the great slab which formed the roof, another smaller one was jammed in the gully, which, stretching across from side to side, formed the top of a great doorway. Under this we passed and clambered up on to the top of it. Over our heads the great rock roof stretched some distance over the gill. Our only chance was to traverse straight out along the side of the gill, till one was no longer overshadowed by the roof above, and then, if possible, climb up the face of rock and traverse back again above the obstacle into the gill once more. This was easier to plan than to carry out; absolutely no hand-hold, and only one little projecting ledge jutting out about a quarter of an inch and about two inches long to stand on, and six or eight feet of the rock wall to be traversed. I was asked to try it. Accordingly, with great deliberation, I stretched out my foot and placed the edge of my toe on the ledge. Just as I was going to put my weight on to it, off slipped my toe, and if Hastings had not quickly jerked me back, I should instantly have been dangling on the end of the rope. But we were determined not to be beaten. Hastings' ice-axe was next brought into requisition, and what followed I have no doubt will be severely criticised by more orthodox mountaineers than ourselves. As it was my suggestion I must take the blame. _Peccavi! I hacked a step in the rock_--and it was very hard work. But I should not advise any one to try and do the same thing with an ordinary axe. Hastings' axe is an extraordinary one, and was none the worse for the experiment. I then stepped across the _mauvais pas_, clambered up the rock till I had reached a spot where a capital hitch could be got over a jutting piece of rock, and the rest of the party followed. We then climbed out of the gill on the left, up some interesting slabs of rock. A few days later the gill was again ascended by a party led by Mr. J. Collier. They did not follow our track to the left after the overhanging rock had been passed, but climbed straight up, using a crack which looks impossible from down below, thus adding an extra piece of splendid climbing to the expedition.' Only four days after Dr. Collie, a party of five climbers, led by Dr. J. Collier, made the second ascent of Moss Gill. The description given by their precursors was of great assistance, and except that the gill was entered much lower, the same line was followed up to the traverse from the great boulder. Here, instead of climbing out to the sky line on the left side, the ascent of the gill itself was completed by climbing the vertical moss-grown wall on the right. This part was entirely new, and Dr. Collier's note of his variation, or we may say correction, for his climb is the more direct of the two, is that the ascent of the wall was made by using the cleft of the gill for about 15 ft., when a resting place was reached. Above this point they climbed about 15 ft., and then traversed out on the face of the wall for about 8 ft. by some ledges which afforded just sufficient hold. They then ascended vertically about 6 or 8 ft., re-entering the cleft above a small platform of jammed stones ('Sentry Box'). This gave a starting-point for the completion of the ascent, which was made by climbing out on to the face of the wall to enable the jammed stones at the top of the pitch to be turned. These last stones did not appear to be secure and were avoided. From this point the gill continues upward at an easy slope, with one pitch of about 15 ft. to the back of the small summit on the left of _Deep Gill_. Two days later the ascent was repeated by Dr. Collier in company with Professor H.B. Dixon and the late Professor A.M. Marshall, the latter of whom inserted in the Climbers' book a remarkably bold and effective outline sketch of the gill, with explanatory notes. Speaking of the climb, he said that Mr. Collier led throughout, and that the success of the climb was due entirely to him. The climb is a very fine one, and, except for the leader, is entirely free from danger. At the very awkward return from Tennis Court Ledge into the gully, the leader can by a short traverse fix himself directly above the rest of the party. During the traverse from the 'window' the leader can fix the rope over the 'belaying-pin.' In the great chimney the _Sentry Box_ is a place of absolute safety. The climb is difficult, but no part of the chimney is harder than the short rock face leading up to Tennis Court Ledge, and the most awkward traverse (if covered with snow) is the one from Tennis Court Ledge back into the gully. For a party of three 80 ft. of rope would be enough; 100 ft. perhaps better. On January 9, 1893, Mr. O.G. Jones attacked this formidable climb entirely by himself, following Mr. Collier's route up to the foot of the Great Chimney, and then Mr. Hastings' exit to the left. Heavy snow had fallen since the previous ascents and the climb appeared to be exceedingly difficult. Almost every hold had to be cleared of snow; essential precautions rendered the climb of five hours' duration, and it was not completed till after dark (5.45 p.m.). While clearing snow from the more remote portions of the _Collie traverse_ from the _window_, in search of the third step, the difficulty of balancing proved too great, and he fell into the gully below. A rope had been secured round the _window_ and thus prevented his passing beyond the snow patch on which he fell. The _window_ 'sill,' already loose, was on the verge of falling, and was therefore pushed over into the gully. Returning two days later, he found that the two lowest chimneys in the gill could be taken straight up, and that the simplest way of reaching Tennis Court Ledge is by 'backing up' the chimney till the level of the recess in the right-hand face is reached. 'The recess is near enough to be taken with a stride. It would seem that the Tennis Court Ledge and traverse back into the gully may be entirely dispensed with by continuing up the chimney, the small jammed stones being firm enough to render the necessary assistance. While making these suggestions concerning small details in the climb, it may be mentioned that at the _Collie traverse_, which the writer's experience leads him to think is the most dangerous piece in the gill, an axe may be of much help to a party. A man fixed on the _window sill_ may press the point of the axe into a conveniently placed notch in the slab facing him, so that the lower end of the handle shall supply a firm hand-hold for any one stretching round the third step. _Heights calculated by Mr. Jones._ Foot of Gill on Rake's Progress 2,625 ft. Snow Patch below Tennis Court Ledge 2,805 " Tennis Court Ledge 2,840 " Foot of jammed stone pitch 2,870 " Window in jammed stones 2,895 " Snow patch above 2,920 " Top of left-hand exit 3,140 " Top of Moss Gill proper 3,170 " It must, however, be borne in mind that these measurements, though useful for the purposes of comparison, cannot be absolutely correct, seeing that Scafell itself is only 3,162 ft. high. On February 11 Messrs. Slingsby, Woolley, and R. Williams found the gully very difficult owing to ice, and recorded an emphatic protest against any one following their example by attempting it, 'except when the rocks are dry and quite free from ice.' On the last day of March Messrs. Brunskill and Gibbs followed, with a slight improvement, Dr. Collier's route, and made the subjoined observations, taken apparently with greater care than those by Mr. Jones: Foot of Gill at Rake's Progress 2,570 ft. Snow Patch above jammed stones 2,865 " Top of Great Chimney or Moss wall 2,965 " Top of Gill (neck leading to Deep Gill Pisgah) 3,065 " It will be seen that while the points are all made lower than Mr. Jones's table, the height between the commencement of the climb and the snow patch above the jammed stones is exactly the same--295 ft. In this case an observation was taken at the cairn on the top of Scafell, and the aneroid stood at almost exactly the correct figure, which somewhat confirms the figures now given. =Napes.=--A collection of fine rocks, starting up like a stack of organ pipes on the south side of _Great Gable_. The extremity of them nearest to _Kirkfell_ is called _White Napes_, and sometimes Gable Horn. East of this is a gap known as _Little Hell Gate_. East of this comes _Great Napes_, and east of them again is _Great Hell Gate_, which is called Deep Gill in the Ordnance map. In September, 1884, a note by the present writer in the book at Wastdale Head drew attention to these excellent rocks. They are now one of the most favourite climbs in Wastdale, and contain the well-known _Needle_, the _Bear Rock_, and the _Arrowhead_, with their respective gullies and _arêtes_. Just west of _Hell Gate_ there is a considerable width of very large and steep rock, which continues nearly to the _Needle Ridge_, with only a few steep and shallow gullies, in which the grass is very rotten. West of this ridge there is a deep gully, grassy, but exceedingly steep. The ridge beyond this was ascended in April, 1892, by Messrs. Slingsby, Baker, Solly, and Brigg, who called it the _Eagle's Nest_ (q.v.). The narrow gully west of this ridge is apparently that which was climbed on December 29, 1890, by Mr. R.C. Gilson. He describes it as 'the gully on the left as you face the mountain of the gully coming down left of the _Needle_.' He proceeds to say that it presented no special difficulty, except at a point about one-third of the way up, where there was a large boulder and a smooth slab thinly glazed with ice. It was claimed as a first ascent when climbed on April 17, 1892, by Messrs. Solly and Schintz. West again of this is the ridge of the _Arrowhead_ (q.v.). We are here getting near the end of _Great Napes_, which are separated on the west from _White Napes_ by the scree gully which is called _Little Hell Gate_. =Napes Needle.=--A rock of very striking form, which, by an eminent mountaineer, has been compared to a violon-cello. It stands at the foot of the _Needle Ridge_ in the _Napes_, and was first climbed by the writer about the end of June, 1886. The second ascent was made on March 17, 1889, by Mr. G. Hastings, and the third by Mr. F. Wellford on June 22, Mr. J.W. Robinson following on August 12 in the same year. [Illustration: NAPES NEEDLE FROM THE WEST A, _Needle Ridge_; B is reached from below by means of a deep crack which goes right through the rock. In order to get to C from B it is necessary to pass round behind to the crack seen at D, along which one may pass to C, and thence direct to the top.] Miss Koecher (March 31, 1890) was apparently the first lady to ascend. It was first climbed from the west; the way on the opposite side is perhaps less severe, but longer and more varied. The rock is frequently photographed, and an illustrated article on it appeared in the _Pall Mall Budget_ of June 5, 1890. =Needle Ridge= is that ridge of the _Napes_ on _Great Gable_ which is immediately behind the _Napes Needle_. It was discovered in 1884 by the writer and Mr. Robinson, and ascended by them in a somewhat desultory fashion; that is to say, they cut in from the east side nearly at the top of the difficult face which forms its lower extremity, and also avoided the topmost piece by passing over on to the easy terrace on the west side of the ridge. The _arête_ was climbed in a strict and conscientious manner for the first time by the writer in 1886. This was a descent, and apparently the first strict ascent was made by Messrs. Slingsby, Hastings Hopkinson, and a brother of the writer. =North Climb.=--The first to describe this climb on Scafell was Mr. Seatree, who says: 'From the ridge we traversed a ledge of grass-covered rock [the Rake's Progress] to the right, until we reached a detached boulder, stepping upon which we were enabled to get hand-hold of a crevice 6 or 7 ft. from where we stood. To draw ourselves up so as to get our feet upon this was the difficulty; there is only one small foot-hold in that distance, and to have slipped here would have precipitated the climber many feet below. Having succeeded in gaining this foot-hold, we found ourselves in a small rectangular recess, with barely room to turn round. From here it was necessary to draw ourselves carefully over two other ledges into a small rift in the rocks, and then traverse on our hands and knees another narrow ledge of about 8 ft. to the left, which brought us nearly in a line with Mickledoor Ridge. From here all was comparatively smooth sailing.' This climb had been made many years before (1869) by Major Ponsonby Cundill, R.E., who left his stick in the deep crack behind the ledge which Mr. Seatree traversed on his hands and knees. The stick was found in 1884 by Mr. Chas. Cookson. This ledge, by the way, should certainly be walked or at least sidled in an upright attitude, otherwise ungainly gambollings are necessary when the time comes for stepping off at the other end. The descent of the _North Climb_ is decidedly difficult, unless the ascent has been made just previously, and the climb whether up or down is an excellent test of style. A couple of yards to the left there is an alternative to the 'rectangular recess,' and it is known as the 'Rift.' It is to be done by a wild struggle. It was at one time the wetter and harder of the two ways, but the conditions are now reversed. =Old Wall.=--On the east side of the Pillar Rock a natural line of rock runs down to the head of _Walker's Gully_, having, however, a narrow passage by means of which sheep may reach the Low Man. A hundred years ago or more, the shepherds built a wall of loose stones to stop the sheep, and though little of the wall remains, the name clings to the spot. At one time the _North-east Route_ was usually spoken of as the _Old Wall Way_. =Patriarch.=--By this name the Rev. James Jackson, of Sandwith in Cumberland, was very widely known. It is an abbreviation of one which he himself invented and assumed--'Patriarch of the Pillarites.' Some considerable mention of him is made by Mr. Williamson, but his readers will be glad to have further particulars, for this was a man of no ordinary stamp. Born at Millom just before the series of naval victories which closed the eighteenth century, he passed his boyhood in the thick of the Buonaparte struggle and shared in it personally when a mere lad. However, he soon changed the colour of his coat and entered the Church; but long before his connection with the Pillar he had ceased to take any active part in his profession. Thenceforward he lived at his ease, amusing himself by rambles and scrambles far and near among the fells. 'I have knocked about,' he said himself, 'among the mountains ever since, till I may almost say "I knaw iv'ry craag."' That he was somewhat of an egotist cannot be denied. In his letters as in his poems his own feats form the burden of his song. To this point all topics converged with the same certainty that all roads are said to lead to Rome. He was never tired of relating how, for instance, in his sixty-ninth year he had one day walked 46 miles in 14-1/2 hours, on the third day following 56 miles in 18 hours, and after a similar interval 60 miles in less than 20 hours, thus accomplishing within one week three walks, any one of which might well knock up many a man of half his age; how, on another occasion, he had found two brethren of his own cloth struggling feebly to surmount the difficulties of Rossett Gill; how, taking pity upon their tender years, he had transferred their knapsacks to his own venerable shoulders and, striding on before, encouraged them to complete their weary task. A man aged between sixty and seventy might fairly plume himself on such an exploit. He also rejoiced greatly in the fact that he had been the first student of St. Bees College--a distinction of which, as he justly said, no one could ever deprive him. But the feat on which he especially prided himself was one of bodily activity. During the third part of a century he held the living of Rivington, near Bolton-le-Moors. It chanced that the weathercock of his church had become loose, and the masons rather shrank from the risk of going up to secure it. Here was an opportunity which our friend could not forego; and Rivington witnessed the unwonted spectacle of a beneficed clergyman of the Church of England solemnly swarming up his own steeple and making fast the vane 'under circumstances of terror which made the workmen recoil from the task, and the gazing rustics turn sick with horror at the sight!' While walking proudly back to his parsonage he composed a commemorative epigram which will bear quotation: Who has not heard of Steeple Jack, That lion-hearted Saxon? Though I'm not he, he was my sire, For I am 'Steeple Jackson'! Indeed, his fancy was as lively as his limbs were supple. He was ever on the watch for some analogy or antithesis; ever producing some new alliteration or epigram expressive of such contrasts as that between his age and his activity. His favourite description of himself was 'senex juvenilis'--an idea which he frequently put into English, e.g.: If this in your mind you will fix When I make the Pillar my toy, I was born in 1, 7, 9, 6, And you'll think me a nimble old boy. On the late Mr. Maitland, a well-known climber, as only second to himself in age and ardour, he bestowed the title 'Maitland of Many Mounts' and 'Patriarch Presumptive of the Pillarites.' There is nothing strange in his thus designating a successor and bestowing titles of honour; for these are matter of royal privilege, and he looked upon himself as the Mountain Monarch and always expected climbers to attend his mimic court and pay him homage. But he had many a high-flown alias besides. When Mr. Pendlebury came under his notice he contrasted himself with the Senior Wrangler, rather neatly, as the 'Senior Scrambler'; after his ascent of the Pillar he dubbed himself 'St. Jacobus Stylites'; and many other titles are introduced into the occasional poems on which he expended much of his ingenuity. His bodily powers were not allowed to rust away. 'My adopted motto,' he said, 'is "Stare nescio,"' and some idea of his boundless love of enterprise may be formed from one of his letters: 'I have been twelve months afloat on the wide, wide sea. I have been beneath the falls of Niagara. I have sung "God save the King" in the hall of St. Peter's; I have ascended Vesuvius in the eruption of 1828; I have capped Snowdon in Wales and Slieve Donard in Ireland, and nearly all the hills in this district.... It only remains for me to mount the Pillar Rock!' Before the end of the following May this hope was gratified, and a proud moment it was for this veteran climber when, seated serenely on the summit, he was able to record in a Greek inscription (written, as he carefully notes, 'without specs') his ascent of the famous rock. Think of the life, the energy, the determination that must have been in him! Years seemed to be powerless to check the current of his blood. Where are we to look for another of his age--he was now in his eightieth year--showing any approach to the same combination of enterprise, pluck and bodily vigour? It cannot be wondered at that his success filled him with the keenest delight. He wrote off at once in high glee to his friends and felt quite injured if, in their reply or their delay in replying, he detected any sign of indifference to his exploit. But true to his motto 'Stare nescio,' he was not content with this. Within a month we find him expressing a fear that his title 'Patriarch of the Pillarites' might not be acknowledged by 'the Western division of the Order,' and announcing his intention of climbing the Pillar from the west also in order to secure his claim. He playfully proposes, moreover, that while he, 'the aged errant knight,' with his faithful squire toiled up from the west, a certain fair Pillarite should arrive at the summit from the east and crown his success on the spot by the bestowal on him of her hand and heart. According to all approved precedent the 'aged errant knight' ought to have bound his lady's favour around his clerical hat and ranged the mountains extorting from the passing tourist at the point of his alpenstock a confession of her peerless beauty; or for her sake betaken himself to the Rock and there passed nights of vigil and days of toil assisting distressed damsels in the terrible passage of the 'Slab.' Whatever he did, he made no attempt on the west route. Perhaps despair of the reward had cooled his zeal--zeal conditional like that of the Hindoo teacher who, when asked whether he professed the creed which he was anxious to teach, naïvely replied, 'I am not a Christian; but I expect to be one shortly--if sufficient inducement offers.' There is a sad and sharp contrast in turning from his high spirits and playful fancy to his sudden death. It has been described elsewhere. Though fourscore and two was (as he himself expressed it on the very day of his death) the 'howdah' on his back, it cannot be said that the ever-growing howdah had crushed its bearer. His vigour was unimpaired. Like Walter Ewbank, To the very last, He had the lightest foot in Ennerdale. Indeed, the same thing might have happened to a boy. It was an accident; but it might be rash to say that it was a misfortune, or that he would himself have regarded any other death as preferable. His life had already been longer and more varied than falls to ordinary men; but the change could not long have been delayed. A few months would have seen his faculties failing and his powers decayed. To a man of his habits and temperament inaction would have been the most terrible affliction, and though he might have dragged on for years, his strength would truly have been labour and sorrow. Two years before he had stood close to this very spot. 'Almost all the mountains,' he said, 'which I had known in youth, in manhood, and in old age were visible, and seemed to give me a kindly greeting "for auld lang syne." In the fervour of admiration I might have chanted, "Nunc dimittis, Domine, servum tuum in pace."' We may well believe that, had the old man foreseen his fate, he would have gladly welcomed it, and have found for it no fitter place among all his beloved mountains than this quiet cove almost within the shadow of the majestic rock. =Patterdale= is a place where a climber may spend a week or two with much enjoyment, though the quality of the rocks is by no means first-rate. It is the best centre for _Helvellyn_, _Fairfield_, and _St. Sunday Crag_, and convenient for _Swarthbeck_ and the whole _High Street_ range. On _Place Fell_, fine as it looks, there is not much worth climbing. _Deepdale_ and _Dovedale_ are both worth exploring. =Pavey Ark=, one of the Langdale Pikes, is easily reached in three-quarters of an hour from Dungeon Gill. On it will be found some splendid climbing, including the _Big Gully_, the _Little Gully_, _Jack's Rake_ (q.v.), and many minor points of interest. The two chief gullies stand on either side of a buttress of rock, the top of which forms a tooth on the sky line. The _Little Gully_ is on the south side of it, and is V-shaped, giving a very straightforward but pleasant climb. But the _Great Gully_ has two considerable difficulties, one low down and the other near the top. The lower is caused by a huge block covering a considerable cavern. The way is either right through the cavern and out again through a narrow hole, or up a high grassy bank on the right hand. In either case a narrow place is reached, walled in between the big block and a smaller one on the right hand. Here the difficulty is that the walls nearly meet towards the top, so that it is necessary, in order to get room for the head, to go rather 'outside.' However, a second man with a rope can hold the leader very securely, and a piece of rock having come away, the headroom is much more commodious than it used to be. Just below the level of _Jack's Rake_ there are some very 'brant and slape' inclines of wet or muddy rock, which most people consider the worst part of the climb. There is very little hold, and what there is was on the occasion of the first ascent lubricated by a film of fine mud. On reaching _Jack's Rake_ several variations may be made, and straight ahead there is a very neat little chimney. These upper rocks are of splendid gripping quality; rough as a cow's tongue, it would be quite difficult to make a slip on them. The Big Gully was climbed by the writer in the summer of 1882, and the small one in June 1886. In March 1887 Mr. Slingsby made a note about the former in the Wastdale Head book. He says that it took his party two hours and forty minutes, but his estimate of the height of the gully at 1,300 ft. is more than double of the truth, and must be due to a slip of the pen. [Illustration: PAVEY ARK (NEAR VIEW) A, Narrow gully; B, Big gully; C, D, Smaller gullies; E, Wide scree gully. From the foot of E to A runs _Jack's Rake_.] In the book at Millbeck there is a note by the same distinguished climber, dated May 30, 1887, in which he records an ascent of this gully made by Miss Mabel Hastings, and gives the height of it as 600 or 650 ft. =Penyghent.=--The sixth in height of the Yorkshire hills, but long supposed, on account of its finer shape, to be the highest of them all. As late as 1770 it was reckoned at 3,930 ft. It can be ascended from Horton station in little over an hour. Celtic scholars revel in the name; they practically agree that it means 'head of something,' but cannot accept each other's views as to what that something is. When Defoe was in this neighbourhood he saw 'nothing but high mountains, which had a terrible aspect, and more frightful than any in Monmouthshire or Derbyshire, especially _Pengent Hill_.' =Piers Gill=, in Wastdale, on the north front of _Lingmell_, has a vast literature of its own. As a rock ravine, not in limestone, it is only second to _Deep Gill_ on _Scafell_ and the great gully in the Wastwater _Screes_, both of which are far less easy of access than this, which can be reached from Wastdale Head in half an hour. The difficulties depend entirely on the quantity of water. One, the 'cave pitch,' may be passed at the cost of a wetting almost at any time; but above it is another, known as the 'Bridge Fall,' from a vast column of fallen rock which spans the stream a few yards above it, which is at all times difficult, and in nineteen seasons out of twenty wholly impossible. Until the unprecedented drought of 1893 it had never been climbed. Even then a less brilliant climber than Dr. Collier would scarcely have succeeded. His ascent was made on April 29, 1893, and his companions were Messrs. Winser, W. Jones, and Fairbairn. The big pitch was found to be 40 or 50 ft. high, the lowest part of it apparently overhanging. The first few feet were climbed about three feet to the right of the falling water, after which the leader was able to reach the other side of the gill by stretching his left foot across it just outside the water. By this means this great and hitherto insuperable difficulty was overcome. Unless we are entering on a cycle of dry seasons, the exploit is one which will not be repeated for some time. Various accidents and minor mishaps have taken place in Piers Gill. One is described by Mr. Payn, and the injured man was, I believe, a shepherd called Tom Hale. Mr. W.O. Burrows had a bad fall above the bridge, and people descending from the _Pikes_ are often pounded about the same spot. Some years ago a tourist had to pass the night in the gill without food, but protested that he was 'quite consoled by the beautiful scenery.' The discovery of the route up the east side of the _Pillar Rock_ was within an ace of being delayed for years, owing to the band of bold explorers who were to work it out becoming entangled in _Piers Gill_ while on their way to _Wastdale Head_. The name is spelt 'Pease' by Mr. Payn and by most of the early authorities, and judging by the analogy of other places in the North of England this would appear to be more correct. =Pike o' Stickle=, also known as _Steel Pike_ and sometimes as the _Sugarloaf_, drops into Langdale from the north in one continuous slope, which for length and steepness has not many rivals in England. The top piece of the hill is curiously symmetrical, and resembles a haycock or a thimble. It is not easy to find satisfactory climbs on it. Mr. Gwynne says of it: 'A very fine peak, that, viewed from the valley, has very much the appearance of the Mönch. It runs down towards the _Stake_ Pass in a spur, which must be the starting-point of most of the climbs on this mountain. There is a curious gully here, too, which is worthy of the climber's attention. It does not run from top to bottom, but suddenly begins about the middle of the crag. The difficulty is to get at this gully, and some pretty climbing can be obtained in the attempt.' =Pillar Rock.=--There are but three directions from which the _Pillar_ is commonly approached--namely, Ennerdale (Gillerthwaite), Buttermere, and Wastdale Head. In each case the guide-books (except Baddeley's) exhibit a suspicious shyness of specifying any time for the walk. Wherever the present writer gives times, they must be understood to be the quickest of which he happens to have made any note; for the best test of times is a 'reductio ad minima.' A journey may be indefinitely prolonged, but it cannot be shortened beyond a certain limit; thus, _Scafell Pike_ cannot be reached from Wastdale Head in much less than 60 minutes of hard going, while the walk up the Pillar Fell cannot be cut down much below 75 minutes. This supplies us with a trustworthy comparison, although for a hot day that pace is not to be recommended; in each case double the time is not more than a fair allowance. Never let yourself be hurried at starting, come home as hard as ever you like; it is the chamois-hunter's system, and by far the best. Baddeley seems to reverse the principle, for he allows 2 to 2-1/2 hours for the ascent via Black Sail, and says that it is shorter by Wind Gap; yet for the _descent_ from Wind Gap (which is, say, 20 minutes short of the summit) he gives as a fair allowance 2 to 3 hours. Perhaps he preferred conforming to what is apparently the approved fox-hunting style: [Illustration: PILLAR ROCK A, B, Summits of Shamrock; C, Shamrock gully; D, Pisgah; E, High Man; G, Curtain; H, Steep Grass; I, Foot of Great Chimney; I, K, Walker's gully; J, Low Man; L, J, West route; M, Waterfall; N, I, East Scree.] Harkaway! See, she's off! O'er hill and through whol We spank till we're gaily nar done, Than, hingan a lip like a motherless fwol, _Sledder heàmmward, but nit in a run_. [Illustration: PILLAR ROCK FROM THE NORTH A, _High Man_; B, _Low Man_; C, _Shamrock_; D, _Walker's gully_; E, Below this is the _waterfall_. The _terrace_ runs past the foot of Walker's gully to the foot of the _waterfall_.] [Illustration: PILLAR ROCK FROM THE SOUTH A, Top of rock and of _West Jordan climb_; B, Top of _Central Jordan climb_; C, Top of _East Jordan climb_; D, G, The _Curtain_; E, The _Notch_; F, The _Ledge_. The mass of rock in the foreground is _Pisgah_.] _From Ennerdale_: From Gillerthwaite, a farmhouse nearly a mile and a half above the lake, the Pillar is not far distant; but the direct way is exceedingly rough, and it will be found best to make use of the path up _Wingate Cove_, skirting round the mountain, when by that means a considerable height has been gained. The way is so rough that many people think it an economy of labour to go right on up the gap, and then left over the summit of the mountain. One of the best ways of approaching the Pillar is to sleep at the little inn at the foot of the lake and row up from there to the water head. For walking the whole way from the inn to the fell-top Baddeley allows 3 to 3-1/2 hours. _From Buttermere_: After crossing _Scarf Gap_ some keep to the track as far as the summit of the Black Sail Pass, and then turn to the right up the ridge of the Pillar Fell, while others adopt the more laborious plan of working upwards after descending the valley until nearly opposite the Rock, which in this way is certainly seen to much greater advantage. If the return be made by way of the mountain ridge, some little time may be saved by descending into Ennerdale down _Green Cove_, nearly half a mile short of Black Sail and 250 ft. higher; for Black Sail, being much nearer the head of the valley than either Scarf Gap or the Pillar, can only be used for going from one to the other at the expense of making a considerable _détour_. For the ascent, however, Green Cove is not so decidedly recommended, as many will prefer to make the round by the regular pass for the sake of the more gradual rise. _From Wastdale_: The vast majority of visitors come from this direction, and almost all follow the same track, plodding up from Mosedale to the top of _Black Sail_ and then turning left along the ridge of the mountain. Mosedale, by the way, must not be confused with any of the numerous other valleys of the same name: it sometimes appears in the form 'Moresdale' or 'Mossdale' (Moos-thal, near Laibach in Austria, is exactly parallel), and generally indicates scenery of a dreary character; for such valleys are often, as in this case, the half-drained beds of ancient lakes, by the loss of which the scenery has seriously suffered. [Illustration: PILLAR FELL] Ladies who ascend by Black Sail will find it best to keep to the path as long as possible, i.e. as far as the top of the pass, but others may save something by breasting the hill on the left soon after reaching _Gatherstone Head_, apparently a glacier mound, which rises just beyond where the track crosses the stream (Gatherstone Beck) which comes down from the pass. On reaching the ridge it is no doubt safer, especially if there be mist about, for those who are not familiar with the way to go right on to the flat top of the mountain; the proper point from which to commence the descent is easily found, in all weathers, by following the compass-needle from the cairn to the edge of the mountain; a rough and steep descent of 400 ft. follows, which in winter demands considerable care. At first the course is to the right, but it soon strikes a small ridge which curves down to the Rock. It is, however, a waste of labour to ascend to the summit of the mountain at all. The ridge of the mountain is divided into steps, and at the foot of the uppermost of these a deep cove called _Great Doup_ is seen on the right. It may be recognised even in a mist, as it is just beyond a curious rock running out with a narrow edged top many feet from the hill-side. Less than 100 yards down the Doup the falling scree has nearly buried the cairn and iron cross erected to the memory of the Rev. James Jackson. Beyond this, as soon as the big rocks on the left permit, the track skirts round, and after one or two ups and downs comes into full view of the famous Rock. If, however, the object be to reach the north or lowest side of the Rock, it is not necessary to descend into Ennerdale from Black Sail; for there is the _High Level_, a fine scramble all along the breast of the mountain from _Green Cove_--the first large hollow on the right, just beyond _Lookingsteads_; but the way is rather intricate, and unless properly hit off involves considerable fatigue and loss of time. At the very least half an hour will be required in either direction, and a stranger will certainly take much longer. Those who are anxious to pursue 't' bainest rwoad' may save ten minutes or more in the walk from Wastdale by making use of _Wind Gap_ at the head of Mosedale. Hard work it undeniably is, but more shady than Black Sail, and--when the way is familiar, though no one can go very far wrong, unless he clings to the main valley too long and goes up to _Blackem_ (Black Combe) _Head_--quicker also, occupying about ninety minutes. Mr. James Payn calls it (poetically) 'a sort of perpendicular shaft--a chimney such as no sweep would adventure, but would use the machine--which is said to be the dalesman's pass into Ennerdale; you may thank your stars that it is not _your_ pass.' It really adds little to the labour of this way and affords a far finer walk if the complete circuit of Mosedale be made along the hill-tops. Ascending behind the inn and keeping round just under _Stirrup Crag_--the north end of _Yewbarrow_, _Dore Head_ is soon reached, and it is easy walking by the _Chair_, _Red Pike_, _Black Crag_ and _Wind Gap_ on to the _Pillar Fell_. For the return to Wastdale _Wind Gap_ is very rough and hardly to be recommended. Mr. Baddeley is not very consistent about it, for he says, 'the best descent is by _Windy Gap_'; but again, 'the descent from _Windy Gap_ to Wastdale is, for reasons stated before, unsatisfactory'; and thereupon he recommends Black Sail. The latter gives a rapid descent--the inn may be reached in twenty-five minutes from the top of the pass; but a quicker return may be made by crossing the ridge after emerging from Great Doup, and shooting down _Wistow Crags_ into Mosedale by a large gully filled with deliciously fine scree. Should it be preferred to make the circuit of Mosedale on the return journey, an equally fine glissade may be enjoyed from _Dore Head_; but the screes require judicious selection and dexterity on the part of the slider. [Illustration: PILLAR ROCK FROM THE WEST A, Summit of _High Man_; B, _Pisgah_; C, _Low Man_; D, _Jordan Gap_. The _West route_ ascends from this side to the depression between A and C.] It may here be said that stout walkers may visit all the mountains of Wastdale Head in one day comfortably, and in few places is a finer walk to be found. Start, say, at 10 A.M. for Scafell; then, by Mickledoor, the Pike, Great End, Sty Head, Great Gable and Kirkfell to the Pillar, returning in the manner described above in time for dinner. In June 1864, as Ritson's Visitors' Book records, J.M. Elliott, of Trin. Coll. Camb., made this round, including Steeple and Yewbarrow, and found that it took eight and a half hours; probably, however, he came over Stirrup Crag and not Yewbarrow _top_, which would entail something like three miles extra walking. He approached Scafell by way of Mickledoor, returning from it to the same point, and those who do not know the Broad Stand well had better follow his example; for it is a bit of a climb, and the descent especially is not easy to find. By going to Mickledoor first (and there is no shorter way to Scafell) each man can see what he has before him, and decide for himself whether it would not be better to leave Scafell out of his programme. Before entering into the history of the Pillar it is almost indispensable to give a short general description of its main features in order to assist the comprehension of the facts narrated. Difficult as it must always be to find an image which shall supply a stranger with any clear idea of a mass so irregular and unsymmetrical as this, yet its general appearance and the arrangement of its parts may be roughly apprehended in the following manner:--Imagine a large two-gabled church planted on the side of a steep hill. From the western and loftier gable let there rise, at the end nearest the mountain, a stunted tower. Finally let the building be shattered and all but overwhelmed under an avalanche of _débris_. What will be the effect? Naturally the stream of stones will be much deeper above than below, and, while nearly burying the tower and upper ends of the roof, will flow along between the two gables and run off, as rainwater would do, at the far end. Angular fragments, however, remain at rest unless the slope is very steep, and consequently a long talus will be formed sloping down to the brink of the sudden drop at an angle of something like 45 degrees. Here we have a fair representation of the Pillar mass: the tower will be the High Man, and the gable from which it rises the Low Man. It will be readily understood that the second gable may be a source of some confusion to those who are ignorant that there is more than one, and from some points may disguise or altogether conceal the tower. This is why it is called the _Sham Rock_; but it is only from below that it would be recognised as part of the Pillar mass, for from above it is wholly insignificant. When viewed from immediately below, the tower is concealed behind the gable from which it rises, and the whole mass of rock bears a rough resemblance to the letter =M=; but from above, the High Man, with which alone the climber from the east side has to reckon, is also the only part of the rock which he is likely to observe. The result is that, when the Low Man is mentioned to anyone who knows only the Easy Way, the reply is usually on the model of the poet Wordsworth's only joke: 'Why, my good man, till this moment I was not even aware that there _was_ a Low Man!' Yet the Low Man is by far the finer object of the two, and its cliffs are at least six times as high as those of what is called the High Man. The only side from which the latter shows a respectable elevation is the west, where the scree lies much lower, because it has a free escape, instead of being pent up between the two gables like the east scree. In winter-time, when the inequalities are all smoothed over with a sheet of hard snow, both sides of the rock are rather dangerous, but especially the eastern, where a man who slipped would have the greatest difficulty in stopping himself before he shot over the precipitous gully at the end. This gully (occupying, as it were, the place of the water-pipe) is known, in allusion to an accident which occurred there in 1883, as _Walker's Gully_. When the question arises of how to climb the _High Man_, it is obvious that the scree just above it will be the nearest point to the summit; but equally obvious that the climb, though short, would be nearly vertical. The plan which at once suggests itself for getting to the top is to work round to the back of the rock and climb it from the top of the ridge behind. The ridge may be reached from either side, and in this fact we have the secret of two of the most important climbs. So much for the general appearance of the Pillar; but the part which admits of the easiest and most varied attack is the east wall of the _High Man_, and of this side it is necessary to give a more detailed description. This part of the rock is the only one which is at all well known to the general public, and its chief features, being well marked, have for the most part received, by common consent of climbers, distinctive names. In order to see the formation of the rock properly it is well worth the climber's while to descend for a few yards and mount the _Sham Rock_ on the other side of the east scree. The peculiar structure of the opposite wall may now be clearly seen. [Illustration: PILLAR ROCK FROM THE SOUTH-EAST A, _Pisgah_; B, _Jordan_; C, Summit; D, Top of _Curtain_; E, Corner between the _Curtain_ and the main rock.] On our left hand, between the mountain and the rock, is seen an outlying mass severed from the High Man by a deep square-cut gap. When the Pillar is looked at from the direction of the mountain-top, this gap is entirely concealed by the outlying piece, which then appears to present a fairly easy way direct to the summit. 'The climber (says Mr. Williamson) mounts gaily and with confidence, only to find himself cut off from the High Man by an impassable cleft.' He sees it indeed with his eyes, but he cannot go up thither. Hence the names--_Pisgah_ for the false rock, and _Jordan_ for the chasm. A very well-known Pillarite once proposed to bridge the cleft with a plank or ladder and hold a tea-party on the top. This very original idea was not carried into execution, but certainly, without some such application, the passage of _Jordan Gap_ is a formidable undertaking; for the north wall is only less vertical than the other, and though barely 60 ft. high--not much more, that is, than half as much as must be climbed by any other route--this is decidedly one of those cases in which the longer way round will prove to be the shorter way up. On the extreme right--and rather below us--is the nearly level top of the Low Man; while not far from where broken cliffs lead up to the higher rock a curious natural post standing on the ridge marks the point from which a small deep channel is seen to come down towards _Walker's Gully_. This channel is of small importance, except that high up on the southern bank of it the glacier markings are most distinctly to be seen. The channel itself soon curves more towards the north and plunges over the fearful cliff which faces the Liza, forming the key to the great climb on that face. From the foot of _Jordan Gap_ a broad smooth slope of rock runs horizontally along the face of the High Man, giving to it somewhat the formation of the 'pent-house wall' of a tennis court. The steepness of the scree, which runs down from left to right before our feet, makes the drop from this slope much greater at the Low Man end; but it will give no false idea of this side to say that, roughly speaking, the cliff is broken into three fairly equal portions, of about 60 ft. each, namely, a vertical wall above, connected with a steep and rugged part below by a smooth stretch sloping at an angle not far short of 40 degrees. The importance of this 'pent-house' is very great; for, as it gives an easy passage right across this face of the rock, every climb which is possible from below may be cut into from the side, and thus more than half the labour of the ascent is saved. Indeed, any mountain which allows its entire front to be traversed in this way by a passable ledge exposes every weak point in so reckless a manner that the attack becomes marvellously simplified. Lastly should be noticed two rough curtains of rock which run down from the top of the Stone near the centre, and enclose between them what is called the _Great Chimney_. This chimney is the key to the climb on this side. The curtain on the south of it is the only one which is at all complete, and as it forms a kind of _arête_ running up to the summit, it is known indifferently by either name--the _Curtain_ or the _Arête_. The easiest way to picture to oneself the features of the Great Chimney is to imagine a huge armchair, the 'seat' of which measures 20 yards from back to front and is tipped uncomfortably forward and downward at an angle of nearly 45 degrees. The _Curtain_ forms the right 'arm,' and from a level with the top of the 'back,' which is 50 ft. high, runs down very nearly but not quite as far as the front edge of the 'seat.' In the narrow space thus left lies the _Ledge_, which makes it possible to pass round under the end of the arm and gain the 'seat,' which is called the _Steep Grass_. The same point may also be reached by climbing, as an alternative to the _Ledge_, over the lower part of the 'arm' through a deep nick--the _Notch_; and in either case the joint between 'arm' and 'back,' being badly cracked, offers an easy way (the 'small chimney' or 'jammed-stone chimney') of reaching the top of the back, which is the edge of a small plateau forming the summit of the High Man. Lastly, it should be noticed that the _Steep Grass_ can only be reached from below by a severe climb of 70 ft.--the _Great Chimney_ climb. The side from which the Pillar is commonly climbed is not that by which the summit was first attained. The first successful attempt was made from the West, and it is doubtful whether for a quarter of a century any other route was known. But on the discovery of the Easy Way the older route was forgotten, and now enjoys a reputation for difficulty which is not deserved: it is looked upon as some little distinction to have accomplished it. In the preface to one of Wordsworth's poems the year 1826 is mentioned as the date of the first ascent. This is confirmed by a comparison of the second and third editions of Otley's 'Guide' (1825 and 1827), in the former of which the rock is declared unclimbable, while the latter mentions the victory of 'an adventurous shepherd.' The successful climber was not, however, a shepherd, but a cooper, named Atkinson, and living at Croftfoot, in Ennerdale. It is likely that his adventurous soul may have been fired by Otley's declaration that the rock was inaccessible. The perseverance of a friend has hunted out a contemporary notice of the ascent in the county paper, which remarks that, 'though the undertaking has been attempted by _thousands_, it was always relinquished as hopeless.' This proves, at all events, that even then the rock had a reputation. Subjoined is a list of those who have followed on Atkinson's track, so far as is known, up to 1873: J. Colebank (shepherd); W. Tyson (shepherd), and J. Braithwaite (shepherd); Lieut. Wilson, R.N.; C.A.O. Baumgartner; M. Beachcroft and C. Tucker. Summarising the various methods of ascending the rock, we may say that the west side first yielded in 1826; the east side probably about 1860; the south side in 1882, and the north side in 1891. The _Easy Way_ (as it is generally called) on the east side was discovered in 1863 by a party of Cambridge men led by Mr. Conybeare, and Mr. A.J. Butler, the late editor of the _Alpine Journal_. Mr. Leslie Stephen had visited the rock earlier in that year without finding a way up it, but in 1865 he was more successful, and wrote an account of it in Ritson's book; the account, as usual, was first defaced and afterwards stolen. The _Northeast_, or _Old Wall_, _way_ was discovered by Matthew Barnes, the Keswick guide, while with Mr. Graves, of Manchester. The central and western climbs from _Jordan_ were done by the writer in 1882, as was the eastern one in 1884, the last being scarcely justifiable under any circumstances, and especially without a rope. The direct climb of the _Great Chimney_ (starting on the south wall of it) was done about the same time, and curiously enough--for it is safe and comparatively easy--does not appear to have been done since. The long climb on the north face was accomplished by Messrs. Hastings, Slingsby, and the writer in 1891. It has been described in an illustrated article in _Black and White_ (June 4, 1892), and by Mr. Gwynne in the _Pall Mall Budget_. It should not be touched except by experienced climbers. =Pinnacle Bield=, on the east side of _Glaramara_, is a rocky part of the mountain and a famous stronghold for foxes. On the way up from _Langstrath_ there is a very steep bit for about 500 ft. =Pisgah.=--A name given in 1882 to the outlying rock on the south side of the Pillar Rock, from which it is severed by an all but impassable chasm, not seen until it bars the way. The term has in subsequent years been applied almost generically. =Pitch=: any sudden drop in the course of a rock gully, usually caused by some large stone choking the channel and penning back the loose stones behind it. Such a stone is then said to be 'jammed,' 'wedged,' or 'pitched,' and is sometimes called a 'chockstone' (q.v.). =Pot-holes= are frequent in the Yorkshire limestone. The rivers for considerable distances have underground courses. At each spot where the roof of one of these tunnels happens to fall in a 'pot-hole' is produced. They are very numerous about Settle and Clapham. Some are of very great depth and can only be explored with the aid of much cordage and many lights. The explorer of pot-holes has to face all the perils of severe rock climbing, and, moreover, to face them for the most part in the dark. It would be hard to imagine anything more weird than one of these darksome journeys, rendered doubly impressive by the roar of unseen waters and the knowledge that abrupt pitches of vast depth are apt to occur in the course of the channel without the slightest warning. (See _Alum Pot_, _Dunald Mill Hole_, _Gaping Gill Hole_.) =Pow=: a sluggish rivulet. =Professor's Chimney.=--A name bestowed by Messrs. Hopkinson on the exit most towards the left hand as one comes up _Deep Gill_ on _Scafell_. Out of this chimney, again to the left, diverges that which leads up to the neck between the _Scafell Pillar_ and its Pisgah. To this latter chimney the name is erroneously applied by many, though, indeed, they might urge with some reason that if it comes to a scramble for one name between two gullies the more frequented ought to get it. =Rainsborrow Crag.=--A noble rock in Kentdale, Westmorland. It is, perhaps, most easily got at from Staveley, but from Ambleside it is only necessary to cross the Garbourne Pass, and the crag is at once conspicuous. It is of the same type as _Froswick_ and _Ill Bell_, but finer and more sheer than either of them. =Rake=: a word common in Derbyshire, Yorkshire, and the Lakes, which has been much misunderstood. It usually happens to be a scree-gully, but the fundamental idea is straightness. =Rake's Progress.=--This is a natural gallery on the face of the Mickledoor crags of _Scafell_. It has been best described by Mr. Williamson, who says: '_Mickledoor_ may be reached by scrambling up the steeply sloping screes which form its Wastdale slope; but the easier and more romantic approach is by the grassy ledge, which will be seen projecting from the face of the Scafell precipice. This ledge or shelf is in but few places less than four feet wide. In places it is composed of shattered heaps of rock, which seem barely to keep their equilibrium; but though there is a precipice of considerable height on the left hand, the passage along the ledge is free from risk so long as the rock wall on the right is closely hugged. By one who watched from below the passage along the ledge of some of the early pioneers of lake climbing it was christened the _Rake's Progress_, and the name appears apt when it is remembered that the ledge leads from the lower limb of the _Lord's Rake_ to the _Mickledoor Ridge_.' The first published description of the _Rake's Progress_ is contained in a letter by the late Mr. Maitland to one of the local papers in October 1881. He there states that he had recently traversed it for the fifth time, but had not previously to that occasion visited Deep Gill. Several grand climbs start from the _Progress_, including _North Climb_, _Collier's Climb_, _Moss Gill_, _Steep Gill_, and the _Scafell Pillar_. =Raven Crag.=--This name is generally the sign of a hard, if not of a good, climb. One of the finest stands on the west side of Thirlmere, near the foot, or what used to be the foot of it before Manchester took it in hand; a second is on the _Pillar Fell_ just east of the rock; a third and fourth on _Brandreth_ and _Gable_, and indeed there is one on almost every fell. =Red Pike=, in Cumberland, overlooking Buttermere, is a syenite hill, and commands a glorious view, especially strong in lakes, but there is next to no climbing to be had on it. The best way up it is to follow the course of Ruddy Beck from the southernmost corner of Crummock Water, but the rocky amphitheatre in which Bleaberry Tarn lies is better seen if the somewhat rougher route by Sourmilkgill and its east bank be followed. =Red Pike=, also in Cumberland, is a Wastdale fell, and lies between _Yewbarrow_ and the _Steeple_. The north side of it has abundance of small climbs, which, with the exception of _Yewbarrow_, are, perhaps, more easily reached than any others from the inn at Wastdale Head; but they are little visited, because everyone wants to fly at the highest game and do the climbs which are most talked about. This fell is sometimes called _Chair_, from the fact of there being a curious stone seat on it near the ridge, and not far from _Door Head_. =Red Screes=, in Westmorland (2,541 ft.), are very steep in the direction of the Kirkstone (after which the pass of that name is said to be called), falling about 1,000 ft. in a horizontal distance of a quarter of a mile; but the ascent is not more than an exhilarating scramble. There is a well-known view from the top. =Rope.=--Some remarks on the use of the rope as a safeguard in climbing will be found in the Introduction. =Rossett Gill.=--A rough pass just over 2,000 ft. in height, which is the only approach from Langdale to Scafell, Gable, and the Wastdale fells generally. On the Langdale side you cannot go far wrong, but it is very rugged, so rugged that Mr. Payn has caustically observed that all expeditions in this region admit of being made by driving, by riding, or by walking, 'except Rossett Gill, which must be done on all fours.' On the Eskhause side the walking is perfectly easy, but mistakes are very liable to occur. On this high ground mists are extremely frequent, and blinding rain is abundant. The result is that people making for Langdale are surprised at having to mount again after the long descent to Angle Tarn, and often end by going away to the left down Langstrath, and find themselves to their great surprise in Borrowdale. The only safeguard is, of course, to bear clearly in mind that the ups and downs hereabout are considerable, and to arm oneself with map and compass. =Saddleback= (2,847 ft.) was at one time thought to be higher than its neighbour Skiddaw. To Mrs. Radcliffe, on the summit of the latter in 1795, the former was 'now preeminent over Skiddaw.' 'The Beauties of England' informs us that 'the views from the summit are exceedingly extensive, but those immediately under the eye on the mountain itself so tremendous and appalling that few persons have sufficient resolution to experience the emotions which those awful scenes inspire.' We have a very full account of an ascent made in 1793. The narrator says: 'When we had ascended about a mile, one of the party, on looking round, was so astonished with the different appearance of objects in the valley so far beneath us that he declined proceeding. We had not gone much further till the other companion (of the relator) was suddenly taken ill and wished to loose blood and return.' The great feature of the mountain is its southern front, which is cut away to form enormous cloughs, divided by narrow ridges. The latter are the Edges of Saddleback. Narrow Edge (as _Halls Fell top_ is now generally called) is the finest and most romantic. It runs up from Threlkeld, where there is a convenient station. The proper name of Broad Edge is _Gategill Fell_. Part of _Middle Tongue_ straight behind the lead-mine is also very narrow. A writer in the _Penny Magazine_ for 1837 speaks of 'the serrated precipices above Threlkeld,' and adds, 'One of these is called _Razor Edge_.' That name, however, has now for many years at least been used as the equivalent of _Sharp Edge_, which is on the east side of the mountain and on the north side of _Scales Tarn_, and at one time enjoyed a tremendous reputation as a perilous climb. The name of the mountain itself has been jeered at as a post-boy's name, and romantically-minded people use the name Blencathara, for which many Celtic etymons have been suggested. The most usual form seems to have been Blenkarthur, and only the more northern of the two peaks was so called. The quickest ascent of the mountain is from Threlkeld up _Narrow Edge_, but if the return is to Keswick, it should be made along the shoulder towards Skiddaw, and so by Brundholme Wood. =Sail.=--This word, in the opinion of Dr. Murray, the learned editor of the new 'English Dictionary,' signifies 'a soaring dome-shaped summit.' It occurs as a hill-name in the Grassmoor group, near Buttermere in Cumberland; but the characteristics required by the above definition are, to say the least, not conspicuously evident either there or in the other cases where this element is found in fell-country place-names. (See _Black Sail_.) =St. Bees.=--In Cumberland, on the west coast. Several accidents have occurred on the cliffs here. They are of sandstone, and incline to be rotten. The best are about _Fleswick Bay_. The height is only about 200 ft. The Rev. James Jackson--the Patriarch (q.v.)--lived at Sandwith close by, and was fond of climbing about on these cliffs. =St. John's Vale.=--A name of modern invention, which has ousted _Buresdale_ (q.v.). It is used in an article in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for 1754, and also in 'Gray's Journal,' which possibly misled Sir Walter Scott, whose poem caused it to meet with general acceptance. =St. Sunday Crag=, in Westmorland (sheet 19 of the Ordnance map), is of far more importance than _Helvellyn_ to the views of and from Ullswater. Moreover, it has some capital crags facing north-west, among which many a good rock-problem may be found. They were long a favourite scrambling-ground with Major Cundill, R.E., the inventor of the _North Climb_ on _Scafell_, and are within easy reach of Patterdale. =Scafell= (3,162 ft.) presents some fine rocks to Eskdale, but the grandest rocks, both to look at and to climb, are towards _Mickledoor_. As a climbing-ground it is perhaps even more popular than the _Pillar_, especially in winter. In consequence of this the ground has been gone over very closely by climbers of exceptional skill, and climbing of a somewhat desperate character has occasionally been indulged in. This applies mainly to the west side of Mickledoor. The other side is easier, and has long been more or less well known. Mr. Green says of it: 'The crags on the south-west [of Mickledoor], though seeming frightfully to oppose all passage, have been ascended as the readiest way to the top of Scafell, and, amongst other adventurers, by Mr. Thomas Tyson, of Wastdale Head, and Mr. Towers, of Toes [in Eskdale]; but Messrs. Ottley and Birkett contented themselves by proceeding for some distance in the direction of Eskdale, to a deep fissure, through which they scrambled to the top of Scafell.' It might be thought that this 'fissure' was 'Mickledoor Chimney,' but it is more likely that it was another and easier gully a good way farther down. Mr. Herman Prior's excellent 'Pedestrian Guide' (3rd edition, p. 194) has a very clear and accurate account of it from the pen of Mr. C.W. Dymond, who visited it about 1869, and another in Mr. C.N. Williamson's second article in _All the Year Round_ for November 8, 1884; and in the local press scores of descriptions have appeared. [Illustration: SCAFELL CRAGS A, Top of _Broad Stand_; B, _Pisgah_; C, _Scafell Pillar_; D, Head of _Deep Gill_.] The beginning of the climb is very easily overlooked by a stranger, being just a vertical slit about eighteen inches wide, by means of which it is easy to walk three or four yards straight into the mountain. It will be found by descending the Eskdale slope from Mickledoor ridge for twenty-one yards, and disregarding a much more promising point which presents itself midway and is noticed both by Professor Tyndall and Mr. Dymond. The floor of the proper 'adit' rises slightly towards the inner end, and consequently allows an easy exit to be made on the left-hand side. From this point three large steps in the rock, each 7 ft. to 10 ft. high have to be mounted, and many will be reminded of the ascent of the Great Pyramid. What builders call the 'riser' of each step is vertical, but the 'tread' of the two upper ones becomes very steep and smooth, and when there is ice about it, this is the chief danger of the climb. If a fall took place it would probably be to the left hand, in which direction the rock is much planed away, and forms a steep and continuous slope almost to the foot of the Mickledoor Chimney. [Illustration: PLAN OF SCAFELL A, _Broad Stand_; B, _Mickledoor Ridge_; C, _Scafell Pillar_; D, _Lord's Rake_; F, _Pikes Crag_; G, _Deep Gill_.] This slope is climbable, but far from easy. At the top of the steps the Broad Stand proper begins, at the head of which there is one little bit to climb, and then a walk among huge blocks of stone leads out on to the ridge of Scafell, close to the head of Deep Gill. The way is not easy to miss, but in descending--especially in misty weather--mistakes are often made, either in finding the entrance at the top or the steps at the bottom. The latter difficulty is the more serious, but may be obviated by keeping close to the foot of the cliff on the left hand and making straight for Mickledoor ridge; when further progress is barred, the exit is reached by a short descent to the right. =Scafell Pikes=--the highest mountain in England (3,210 ft.). Curiously enough the name seems to be very modern. Till quite the end of last century it was always known as 'The Pikes,' and it was only when careful surveys promoted it that it became necessary to add the name of its finer-shaped and better-known neighbour, to show what 'Pikes' were being spoken of. The present name, therefore, and the older form, 'Pikes of Scafell,' really mean 'The Pikes near Scafell.' On the Eskdale side there are a few climbs, including _Doe Crag_; but the best are on the side of _Great End_ and _Lingmell_, which are merely buttresses of it. [Illustration: SCAFELL PILLAR (SEEN ACROSS DEEP GILL)] =Scafell Pillar= stands between _Deep Gill_ and _Steep Gill_. It has a short side close to the summit ridge of _Scafell_, and a long side towards the _Rake's Progress_. The first ascent was made on the short side by the writer on September 3, 1884, and the first from the Rake's Progress by Mr. Robinson and the writer on the 20th of the same month. [Illustration: SCAFELL PILLAR AND THE UPPER PITCH OF DEEP GILL] They climbed by way of _Steep Gill_ on to the Low Man, and thence to the High Man. On July 15, 1888, a way was made up the outside of the rock from near the foot of _Steep Gill_ by Messrs. Slingsby, Hastings, E. Hopkinson, and the writer. Miss Corder made the first lady's ascent by the short way (August 1887), and Miss M. Watson the first by the outside route (June 1890), both ladies having the advantage of Mr. Robinson's escort. Marvellous feats of climbing and engineering have been performed by the brothers Hopkinson in their endeavours to make a way direct into _Deep Gill_, in which they have not entirely succeeded. =Scree=: the _débris_ of decaying rocks, forming a talus on the lower parts of a mountain. It is the Icelandic 'skrida.' =Screes (The).=--A long range flanking Wastwater on the south-west. They are often called the 'Wastdale' Screes, but it appears from Hutchinson that they were in his time known as the 'Eskdale' Screes, and--like most hills at that period--were said to be a mile high. Apparently in those days they thought less of the climbs on it than of the sheep-runs, which latter are in Eskdale. The rock is of very loose construction and comes away at a touch, or without one, sometimes many tons at a time; but it improves towards the foot of the lake, and the great bastion opposite Wastdale Hall is full of magnificent climbing. The writer, at the suggestion of Mr. G. Musgrave, tried the great gully both alone and in good company, namely, that of two of the party which ultimately succeeded. Dr. Collie contributed a vivid account of the first ascent to the _Scottish Mountaineering Journal_, a publication which should be better known to climbers. The party found no difficulty till they were in the left-hand branch above the point where the gully divides, and the first pitch gave them some trouble, as the stream, being frozen, formed a cascade of ice, and they were forced on to the buttress which divides the two gullies. Hastings was sent on to prospect, whilst I had to back him up as far as possible. With considerable trouble he managed to traverse back to the left into the main gully, using infinitesimal knobs of rock for hand and foot hold. We then followed him, and found ourselves in a narrow cleft cut far into the side of the hill. Perpendicular walls rose on either side for several hundred feet; above us stretched cascade after cascade of solid ice, always at a very steep angle, and sometimes perpendicular. Up these we cut our way with our axes, sometimes being helped by making the steps close to the walls on either side, and using any small inequalities on the rock-face to steady us in our steps. At last we came to the final pitch. Far up above at the top, the stream coming over an overhanging ledge on the right had frozen into masses of insecure icicles, some being 20 ft. to 30 ft. long. Obviously we could not climb up these. However, at the left-hand corner at the top of the pitch a rock was wedged, which overhung, leaving underneath a cave of considerable size. We managed to get as far up as the cave, in which we placed Robinson, where he hitched himself to a jammed boulder at the back. I was placed in a somewhat insecure position; my right foot occupied a capacious hole cut in the bottom of the icicles, whilst my left was far away on the other side of the gully on a small, but obliging, shelf in the rock-face. In this interesting attitude, like the Colossus of Rhodes, I spanned the gulf, and was anchored both to the boulder and to Robinson as well. Then Hastings, with considerable agility, climbed on to my shoulders. From that exalted position he could reach the edge of the overhanging stone underneath which Robinson was shivering, and was thus enabled to pull himself up on to the top. Robinson and I afterwards ascended this formidable place by means of the moral support of the rope alone. But I know that in my case, if that moral support had not been capable of standing the strain produced by a dead weight of about ten stone, I should probably have been spoiling a patch of snow several hundreds of feet lower down the gill. Above this pitch the climbing is easier as the gully opens out.' [Illustration: WASTWATER AND THE SCREES A, A long gully, not very difficult; B, The great gully, extremely difficult; C, A minor gully, also very difficult.] =Sergeant Crag.=--About half a mile up the valley of Longstrath, which bounds Glaramara on the east as Borrowdale does on the west, there is a line of crag on the left hand. The part nearest to Eagle Crag is called Sergeant Crag, and is some 300 ft. higher than the other, which is Bull Crag. In these rocks there is a very fine gully, discovered in 1886 by Mr. Robinson and the writer, for whom a high wet slab of smooth slate proved too difficult. In September last the former returned to the attack accompanied by Mr. O.G. Jones, who, taking a different and to all appearance more difficult way to the right, forced his way over the two stones which form the pitch. His companion followed by working out of the gill to the right and in again above the obstacle, and this way has commended itself to later climbers. 'There are six large pitches and several small ones. The total climb must be 500 ft., and the climbing is of exceptional interest all the way.' =Shamrock=, in Cumberland, stands just east of the _Pillar Rock_, divided from it only by _Walker's Gully_. Seen from _Scarf Gap_ it looks very well, and its outline can with difficulty be distinguished from that of the main rock. It derives its name (bestowed on it about 1882) from this deceptive character. The face of it towards the north affords a good climb, and on the east side there is a gully, which is choked near the top by a block, which makes one of the stiffest pitches in all Cumberland. It was first climbed, with the aid of deep snow, by a party led by Messrs. Hastings and E. Haskett Smith in March 1887, and in December 1890 Mr. Hastings succeeded in repeating his ascent without any snowdrift to help him, as did Dr. Collier exactly two years later. =Sharp Edge=, on Saddleback, runs along the north side of Scales Tarn. Mr. Prior's 'Guide' observes: 'The ascent (or descent) by this Edge is considered something of an exploit, but without sufficient reason. To a giddy head, indeed, it is unquestionably several degrees worse than Striding Edge, which it somewhat resembles; possibly, to a head so constituted, just without the limits of safety, as Striding Edge is decidedly well within them. The main difficulty lies in the descent of the cliff above the "Edge," and in the two or three rocky knolls by which this cliff connects itself with the latter, and from which there is an unpleasant drop on each side.... Excepting _head_, however, no other quality of a cragsman is required for Sharp Edge; the footing is ample, and the hands would be less called into requisition than even on Striding Edge.' This is a very just estimate, but it need hardly be said that not only Sharp Edge but also those on the Threlkeld side undergo marvellous changes in winter, and then give splendid chances of real mountaineering practice. =Shuttenoer= is mentioned by more than one of the old authorities as one of the rocks at Lowdore between which the water falls. My belief is that the intelligent travellers of that date, not having mastered the 'Cummerlan' mak o' toak,' mistook for the name of the rock what was merely intended for a casual description of it, namely, 'Shuttan' ower'--'shooting over,' 'projecting.' =Sike=: a rill in marshy ground. =Silver Howe= (1,345 ft.), near Grasmere, is only notable as being the scene of the annual fell race, or 'Guides' race,' as it is sometimes called, though there are few guides, and of them very few would have any chance of success in this race. The course is uphill to a flag and down again. The time is generally about ten minutes to go up and something less than five minutes to come down. It is a pretty race to watch, but the scientific interest for mountaineers would be increased if the course were free from all obstacles and of accurately measured height and length. =Skew Gill.=--A curious deep channel in the Wastdale side of Great End, giving a convenient approach to the foot of the gullies on the other side. To go by Grainy Gill and this one, and so up Cust's Gully, has for many years been the regulation expedition for the first day of a winter sojourn at Wastdale Head. =Skiddaw= (Cumberland, sh. 56) is 3,058 ft. high, 'with two heads like unto _Parnassus_,' as old Camden observed, and Wordsworth and others have repeated it after him. On this characteristic, which is not very strongly marked, many derivations of the name have been based. In older writings, however, the word much more commonly ends in _-ow_, a termination which in countless instances represents the well-known word 'how.' Whatever its name may signify, Skiddaw is not a mountaineer's mountain, and no amount of snow and ice can make it so. As a local bard has truly sung: Laal brag it is for any man To clim oop Skidder side; Auld wives and barns on Jackasses To tippy twop ma ride. It is true that there are great facilities for procuring gingerbeer on the way, but even that luxury is scarcely an adequate compensation for the complete absence of anything like a respectable rock on the mountain. Keswick has Skiddaw almost entirely to itself, and on the matter of routes it will be enough to say that by the back of Latrigg and the gingerbeer shanties is the easiest way, and by Millbeck and Carlside is the shortest and quickest, being made up of two miles of good road and of two of steep fell as against five miles of easy hillside. The mountain used to enjoy a great reputation, and is put first in Camden's 'Byword': Skiddaw, Lauvellin and Casticand Are the highest hills in all England, and the early climbers of it were deeply impressed with the importance of their adventurous undertaking. Mrs. Radcliffe, in 1795, ascended 'this tremendous mountain,' and says that when they were still more than a mile from the summit 'the air now became very thin,' and 'the way was indeed dreadfully sublime.' On reaching the top they 'stood on a pinnacle commanding the whole dome of the sky,' but unluckily 'the German Ocean was so far off as to be discernible only like a mist.' Even Hutchinson remarks that, on the top, 'the air was remarkably sharp and thin compared with that of the valley, and respiration seemed to be performed with a kind of oppression.' Skiddaw reserves what little natural ferocity it has for _Dead Crags_ on the north side, but there are also a few rocky bits on the side which faces Bassenthwaite Water. =Smoking Rock= is at the head of _Great Doup_, east of the _Pillar Stone_ and level with the ridge of the _Pillar Fell_. For fear of the name being adduced as a proof of recent volcanic action it is well to say that it is so called not as itself smoking, but because a well-known climber of the old school loved to smoke an evening pipe upon it. It affords a pleasant climb taken on the outside straight up from the foot. This was done by a party of four, of whom the writer was one, on June 5, 1889. See a note in the Wastdale Head Visitors' Book at p. 250. =Somersetshire= has little to attract the mountaineer, except the very remarkable limestone scenery on the south side of the Mendips at Cheddar, Ebber and Wookey. There are magnificent cliffs and pinnacles, especially at the first-named place, but not many bits of satisfactory climbing. The cliffs are rotten at one point, unclimbably vertical at another, and perhaps at a third the climber is pestered by clouds of angry jackdaws. Ebber Rocks are rather more broken, but on the whole the climbing is not worth much at either place, though the scenery both above ground and below it is such as no one ought to miss. =Stand.=--See under _Broad Stand_. =Steep Gill.=--On Scafell, forming the boundary of the Scafell Pillar on the Mickledoor side. It contains a very striking vertical chimney more than 50 ft. high, the upper part of which is rather a tight fit for any but the slimmest figures. At the foot of this chimney on the right-hand side there is an exit by which either the ridge of the Scafell Pillar can be reached or the chimney circumvented. The Gill becomes very wet and steep just below the top, and extreme care is necessary in following it out on to the neck between Scafell Pillar and the mountain. Except in dry weather this bit may be considered a little dangerous. It is usual and more interesting to work out here by a grass ledge on the right on to the Low Man. The Gill was discovered by the writer, and first climbed by him and Mr. Robinson in September 1884. A note by the former in the Visitors' Book at Wastdale Head describes it as 'a chimney of unusual steepness and severity.' The name is quite recent. =Steeple.=--In Cumberland, separated from _Pillar Fell_ by _Wind Gap_. There are some grand scrambles on the Ennerdale side of it, and it is extremely interesting to the student of mountain structure to note the points of parallelism between this group and that of _Scafell_, _Wind Gap_, of course, representing _Mickledoor_. =Stirrup Crag=, on the north end of Yewbarrow, is probably the very nearest climb to Wastdale Head, and may therefore be useful in cases when a wet day clears up towards evening and exercise within easy reach is required. The quickest way to it is to cross the beck by the bridge behind the inn and go up the hill straight to the rectangular clump of larches, and then on beyond it in the same direction. There is a nice little climb on an isolated bit of rock, noted by Mr. Robinson in the Wastdale book, at Easter in 1888. The little rock should be crossed from north to south and the same course continued up to the open fell above, after which a short descent towards Door Head, keeping rather to the left hand, will bring to light several small but pretty rock-problems. =Striding Edge=, a ridge on the east side of _Helvellyn_, is called in one of the old maps _Strathon Edge_. The difficulties of it have been absurdly exaggerated. Miss Braddon wrote amusingly about the exploits upon it of a certain gallant colonel, identified by Colonel Barrow with himself. In winter it is sometimes an exciting approach to _Helvellyn_, in summer just a pleasant walk. The idea of its danger probably arose from the celebrity given to the death of Charles Gough by the poems of Scott and Wordsworth. =Sty Head.=--This name applies to the top only of the pass from Borrowdale to Wastdale, though often incorrectly used to designate the whole way from Seathwaite to Wastdale Head. The natives always speak of the whole pass as _The Sty_ or _The Stee_. Hutchinson says, and the statement has been repeated by Lord Macaulay, that this was at one time the only road between Keswick and the West Coast. It has lately been proposed to construct a driving road across it, but the project is not likely to be carried out for some time. The way is not easy to find on a really dark night. Some years ago two tourists who had been benighted on the pass wrote a most amusing account of their experiences in the _Graphic_, and it is only a year or two since two well-known Cumberland climbers were caught in the same ignominious fashion. =Swarthbeck=, in Westmorland, and on the east shore of Ullswater and the west slope of _Arthur's Pike_, would appear to be identical with the 'chasm' noticed by Mr. Radcliffe in 1795. 'Among the boldest fells that breast the lake on the left shore are _Holling Fell_ and _Swarth Fell_, now no longer boasting any part of the forest of Martindale, but showing huge walls of naked rock and scars which many torrents have inflicted. One channel only in this dry season retained its shining stream. The chasm was dreadful, parting the mountain from the summit to the base.' It occurred to Messrs. T. and E. Westmorland, of Penrith, to explore it, and they found it to be a capital little climb. They published a bright and vigorous account of their climb in a Penrith paper, in consequence of which a good sprinkling of climbers have been induced to visit it. The writer has cause to remember the steepness of this gill, for on one occasion, just as the last few feet of the climb were being done, the alpenstocks, which had been a great impediment all the way up, slipped and fell, and were afterwards found on the scree at the very bottom. The steamers stop at Howtown, about a mile further up the lake, and the inn at that place is much the most convenient place to start from. =Tarn Crag= (Cumberland, sh. 57) is a precipitous bit of not very sound rock, perhaps 200 to 300 ft. in height, rising on the south-west side of Bowscale Tarn. There is a better-known crag of this name just by Scales Tarn on Saddleback, and, in fact, they are exceedingly numerous, which is natural enough, seeing that it is essential to every genuine tarn that it should be more or less under a precipice of some sort. =Toe-scrape.=--May be defined as 'foot-hold at or below its minimum.' =Tors=, on _Dartmoor_ (q.v.).--The word is also found in Derbyshire, though not there applied to quite the same kind of rock. The Ordnance also give it in some instances in the North of England; but there it is by no means clear that they have taken pains to distinguish it from the sound of the word 'haw' when there is a final _t_ in the preceding word. What, for instance, they call Hen Tor may be in reality Hent Haw. In Scotland _tor_ is, of course, a common component in place names. A few of the more interesting _tors_ are-- _Belliver Tor._--Turn squarely to the right two miles from Two Bridges on the Moreton Hampstead Road. _Blackingstone Rock._--A true tor, though not on Dartmoor. It is a fine piece of rock two miles east of Moreton Hampstead. It is of loaf-like form, and gave a difficult climb until a staircase of solid and obtrusive construction was put there. _Brent Tor._--A curious cone of volcanic rock a long mile south-west of Brentor Station, and fully four miles north of Tavistock. _Fur Tor._--About six miles in a northerly direction from Merivale Bridge, Two Bridges, or Princetown. _Hey Tor._--Four miles west of Bovey Tracy; was quite a nice climb, but has been spoilt by artificial aids. [Illustration: A TYPICAL TOR (HEY TOR, DARTMOOR)] _Links (Great) Tor._--About two miles east of Bridestow station. _Longaford Tor._--Strike off to the left about halfway between Two Bridges and Post Bridge. _Mis Tor (Great and Little)._--Two miles north from Merivale Bridge. They are fine objects, especially the larger. _Row Tor._--On the West Dart some four miles north of Two Bridges. It has a very striking block of granite on it. _Sheep's Tor._--About two miles east of Dousland Station. It is finely shaped. _Shellstone Tor._--Near Throwleigh, about halfway between Chagford and Oakhampton. _Staple Tor._--Under a mile north-west from Merivale Bridge, and four miles east of Tavistock. _Vixen Tor._--One mile from Merivale Bridge, or four miles north from Dousland Station. It is near the Walkham River, and is almost the only tor which has a distinct reputation as a climb. It is got at by means of the cleft shown in the illustration. Here it is usual to 'back up.' The struggles of generations of climbers are said to have communicated a high polish to the surface of the cleft. _Watern Tor._--Five or six miles west of Chagford, on the left bank of the North Teign. It has three towers of friable granite much weathered. _Yar Tor._--Halfway between Two Bridges and Buckland-in-the-Moor; it has a curiously fortified appearance. =Vixen Tor.=--One of the finest of the Devonshire _Tors_ (q.v.). [Illustration: VIXEN TOR (DARTMOOR)] =Walker's Gully= is the precipice in which ends the East Scree, between the _Pillar Rock_ and the _Shamrock_. It is named after an unfortunate youth of seventeen who was killed by falling over it on Good Friday, 1883. He had reached the rock with four companions, and found there two climbers from Bolton, who had been trying for nearly three hours to find a way up, and were apparently then standing in or near Jordan Gap. Seeing Walker, they shouted to him for advice as to the ascent. He thereupon endeavoured to join them by sliding down on the snow; but he had miscalculated the pace, and when he reached the rock at which he had aimed, it was only to find that his impetus was too powerful to be arrested. He shot off to one side, rolled over once or twice, and then darted away down the steep East Scree, passing the Bolton men, who could not see him owing to that position, and disappeared over the precipice. =Wallow Crag=, a long mile south of Keswick, is abrupt but not high, and somewhat incumbered by trees. It contains _Lady's Rake_, and _Falcon Crag_ is really a continuation of it. Both are too near Keswick to please climbers, who do not enjoy having their every movement watched by waggon-loads of excursionists. =Wanthwaite Crags= (Cumberland, sh. 64) rise on the east side of the stream which flows, or used to flow, from Thirlmere. There is good climbing in them, and they are easily reached from Keswick (1 hour), or Grasmere, taking the Keswick coach as far as the foot of Thirlmere; and Threlkeld station is nearer still (half an hour). The rocky part has a height of 600 to 700 ft. Bram Crag, just a little south, is really part of it. =Wastdale.=--There are two valleys of this name, one near Shap in Westmorland, and the other and more famous in Cumberland, at the head of Wastwater. It is the Chamouni of England, and would be the Zermatt also, only it lacks the charm of a railway. Fine climbs abound among the various fells which hem it closely in. (See under the heads of _Scafell_, _Lingmell_, _Great Gable_, _Pillar_, _Yewbarrow_, _Steeple_, _Red Pike_, and _Great End_.) A well-filled 'Climbing book' is kept at the inn, where also are some fine rock-views and a very complete set of large-scale maps. Men with luggage must drive up from Drigg Station; those who have none can walk over _Burnmoor_ from Boot Station in one hour and a half or less. =Westmorland=, as a climber's county, is second only to Cumberland. Langdale is perhaps the pick of it, but about Patterdale, Mardale, and Kentdale abundant work may be found, and there are few parts of the whole county which have not small local climbs of good quality set in the midst of charming scenery. Defoe's account of it is extremely amusing: 'I now entered _Westmorland_, a county eminent only for being the wildest, most barren, and frightful of any that I have passed over in _England_ or in _Wales_. The west side, which borders on _Cumberland_, is indeed bounded by a chain of almost unpassable Mountains, which in the language of the country are called _Fells_.... It must be owned, however, that here are some very pleasant manufacturing towns.' The notion of lake scenery being rendered tolerable by manufacturing towns is one which may be recommended to the Defence Society; but Mr. Defoe has not done yet: 'When we entered at the South Part of this County, I began indeed to think of the mountains of Snowden in North Wales, seeing nothing round me in many places but unpassable Hills whose tops covered with snow seemed to tell us all the pleasant part of England was at an end.' =Westmorland's Cairn= is a conspicuous object at the edge nearest to Wastwater of the summit plateau of _Great Gable_. There is a wide-spread impression that this cairn, which is built in a style which would do credit to a professional 'waller,' was intended to celebrate a climb; but Messrs. T. and E. Westmorland, of Penrith, who built it in July 1876, wished to mark a point from which they 'fearlessly assert that the detail view far surpasses any view from _Scafell Pikes_, _Helvellyn_, or _Skiddaw_, or even of the whole Lake District.' At the same time the short cliff on the edge of which the cairn stands is full of neat 'problems,' and it is customary to pay it a visit on the way to Gable Top after a climb on the _Napes_. =Wetherlam=, in Lancashire, is about 2,500 ft., and has some crags on the north side among which here and there good climbing may be found. They can be reached in about an hour and a half from either Coniston or the inn at Skelwith Bridge. In an article signed 'H.A.G.' (i.e. Gwynne), which appeared in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ in April 1892, the following description of a part of it is given: 'On the west face there is a bold cliff that stands between two steep gullies. The cliff itself can be climbed, and in winter either of the gullies would afford a good hour's hard step-cutting. Just now, after the late snowstorm, the mountaineer would have the excitement of cutting through a snow-cornice when he arrives at the top. The precipice itself is fairly easy. I happened to find it in very bad condition. All the rocks were sheeted with ice and extremely dangerous. In one part there was a narrow, steep gully ending in a fall. It was full of snow and looked solid. I had scarcely put my foot on it when the snow slipped away with a hiss and left me grabbing at a knob of iced rock that luckily was small enough for my grasp. This climb, however, in ordinary weather is by no means difficult.' =Whernside=, in Yorkshire, was considered even as late as 1770 to be the highest mountain in England, 4,050 ft. above the sea. =White Gill=, in Langdale, Westmorland, nearly at the back of the inn at _Millbeck_, derives its chief interest from the loss of the two Greens there, so graphically described by De Quincey. This and the other gills between it and _Stickle Tarn_ afford good climbing up the walls by which they are enclosed. =Winter Climbs.=--Only a few years ago a man who announced that he was going to the Lakes in the depth of winter would have been thought mad. Exclamations of this kind are even now not unfrequently called forth at that season of the year; yet they seem to have little or no effect in diminishing the number of those who year by year find themselves somehow attracted to the little inns which lie at the foot of Snowdon or of Scafell Pikes. On Swiss mountains winter excursions have been made even by ladies, and perhaps the British public was first rendered familiar with the idea by Mrs. Burnaby's book on the subject. But, in truth, the invention is no new one, and those bold innovators who first dared to break through the pale of custom and to visit North Wales or the Lakes in mid-winter were richly repaid for their audacity; for there is hardly any time of year at which a trip to Lakeland is more thoroughly enjoyable. In the first place, there is no crowd. You can be sure that you will get a bed, and that the people of the house will not be, as they too often are in the summer time, too much overworked to have time to make you comfortable, or too full of custom to care much whether you are comfortable or not. Out of doors there is the same delightful difference. You stride cheerily along, freed for a time from the din of toiling cities, and are not harassed at every turn by howling herds of unappreciative 'trippers.' The few who do meet on the mountains are all bent on the same errand and 'mean business'; half-hearted folk who have not quite made up their minds whether they care for the mountains or not, people who come to the Lakes for fashion's sake, or just to be able to say that they have been there, are snugly at home coddling themselves before the fire. You will have no companions but life-long lovers of the mountains, and robust young fellows whose highest ambition is to gain admission to the Alpine Club, or, having gained it, to learn to wield with some appearance of dexterity the ponderous ice-axes which are indispensable to the dignity of their position. Then what views are to be had through the clear, frosty air! How different are the firm outlines of those distant peaks from the hazy indistinctness which usually falls to the lot of the summer tourist! What sensation is more delightful than that of tramping along while the crisp snow crunches under foot, and gazing upward at the lean black crags standing boldly out from the long smooth slopes of dazzling white! There is no great variety of colour; for the rocks, though a few are reddish, are for the most part of grey in varying shades; yet there is no monotony. It is true that January days have one fault; they are too short. Or shall we not rather say that they seem so because--like youth, like life itself--they are delightful? They would not be too short if they were passed (let us say) in breaking stones by the roadside. After all, the hills hereabouts are not so big but that in eight or nine hours of brisk exertion a very satisfactory day's work can be accomplished. In short, youth and strength (and no one can be said to have left these behind who can still derive enjoyment from a winter's day on the Fells) can hardly find a more delightful way of spending a week of fine frosty weather. =Wrynose.=--The pass between Dunnerdale and Little Langdale, and the meeting-point of the three counties of Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire. It would seem that we are poorer than our ancestors by one mountain, for all the old authorities speak of this as a stupendous peak. _Defoe's Tour_ (1753) says: 'Wrynose, one of its highest Hills, is remarkable for its three Shire Stones, a Foot Distance each.' The name properly understood would have put them right. The natives pronounce it 'raynus,' and I have not the least doubt that it represents 'Raven's Hause.' Indeed, in early charters the form 'Wreneshals' is actually found, and the intermediate form 'Wrenose' is found in a sixteenth-century map. =Yewbarrow= (2,058 ft.; Cumberland sh. 74) is a narrow ridge a couple of miles long, which, seen end-on from the shore of Wastwater, has all the appearance of a sharp peak. There is climbing at the north end about _Door Head_ and _Stirrup Crag_, while towards the south end there are two very interesting square-cut 'doors' in the summit ridge, apparently due to 'intrusive dykes,' and beyond them the little climb called Bell Rib End. =Yorkshire= (see _Attermire_, _Calf_, _Craven_, _Gordale_, _Ingleborough_, _Malham_, _Micklefell_, _Penyghent_, _Pot-holes_, _Whernside_)--a county whose uplands fall naturally into three great divisions, only one of which, however, demands the attention of the mountaineer. The chalk _Wolds_ in the East Riding, and the moorland group formed by the _Hambleton_ and _Cleveland Hills_, may be dismissed here with a mere mention. The third division, which constitutes a portion of the _Pennine Chain_, and, entering the county from Westmorland and Durham on the north, stretches in an unbroken line down its western border to Derbyshire on the south, approaches more nearly to the mountain standard. Even in this division, however, only that portion which lies to the north of Skipton attains to any considerable importance. It is in this latter district--in _Craven_, that is, and in the valleys of the Yore, the Swale, and the Tees--that we must look for the finest hill scenery in Yorkshire. Most of these mountains consist of limestone, capped in many cases by millstone grit, and of such summits some twenty-five or thirty rise to a height of 2,000 ft. Very few of them, however, exhibit individuality of outline, and, with the exception of the low lines of limestone precipice which occasionally girdle them, and of the wasting mill-stone bluffs which, as in the case of _Pen-hill_ or _Ingleborough_, sometimes guard their highest slopes, they are altogether innocent of crag. If any climbing is to be found at all, it will probably be among the numerous 'pot-holes,' or on the limestone 'scars,' such as _Attermire_ or _Gordale_, which mark the line of the Craven Fault. The _Howgill Fells_, north of Sedburgh, form an exception to the above remarks. (See _Calf_.) Although the climber may find little opportunity to exercise his art among the Yorkshire mountains, yet the ordinary hill-lover will discover ample recompense for the time spent in an exploration of these hills and dales. The ascent of _Micklefell_, of _Great Whernside_, of _Penyghent_, or of _Ingleborough_, whilst not lacking altogether the excitement of mountain climbing, will introduce him to many scenes of novel character and of astonishing beauty. It is only fair to mention that the Yorkshire waterfalls are second to few in the kingdom. It is necessary to add a word or two with regard to the coast. The rapidly wasting cliffs to the south of Flamborough are too insignificant for further notice. Flamborough Head, where the chalk attains to a height of 436 ft., is noticed elsewhere. (See _Chalk_.) The line of coast from Flamborough to Saltburn, passing Filey, Scarborough, and Whitby, presents an almost unbroken stretch of cliff, which, however, will find greater favour with the landscape-lover than the climber. These cliffs, which consist chiefly of the oolite and lias series, are throughout crumbling and insecure, and are very frequently composed of little more than clay and shale. _Rockcliff_, or _Boulby Cliff_, however, near Staithes, merits a certain amount of attention. In addition to not a little boldness of outline, it enjoys--or, at any rate, enjoyed--the reputation of being the highest cliff (660 ft.) on the English coast. PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE LONDON THE BADMINTON LIBRARY. Edited by the DUKE OF BEAUFORT, K.G. and A.E.T. WATSON. ATHLETICS AND FOOTBALL. By MONTAGUE SHEARMAN. With an Introduction by SIR RICHARD WEBSTER, Q.C. M.P. With 51 Illustrations. Crown 8vo. 10_s._ 6_d._ BIG GAME SHOOTING. By CLIVE PHILLIPPS-WOLLEY. With Contributions by Sir SAMUEL W. BAKER, W.C. OSWELL, F.J. JACKSON, WARBURTON PIKE, F.C. SELOUS, LIEUT.-COL. R. HEBER PERCY, ARNOLD PIKE, Major ALGERNON C. HEBER PERCY, W.A. BAILLIE-GROHMAN, &c. Vol. I. Africa and America. 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43314	----	ADVENTURES ON THE ROOF OF THE WORLD SOME BOOKS ON MOUNTAINEERING =The Annals of Mont Blanc=: A Monograph. By C. E. MATHEWS, sometime President of the Alpine Club. With Map, 6 Swan-types and other Illustrations, and Facsimiles. Demy 8vo, cloth gilt, 21s. net. =The Life of Man on the High Alps=: Studies made on Monte Rosa. By ANGELO MOSSO. Translated from the Second Edition of the Italian by E. LOUGH KIESOW, in collaboration with F. KIESOW. With numerous Illustrations and Diagrams. Royal 8vo, cloth, 21s. =The Early Mountaineers=: The Stories of their Lives. By FRANCIS GRIBBLE. Fully Illustrated. Demy 8vo, cloth gilt, 21s. =The Climbs of Norman-Neruda.= Edited, with an Account of his last Climb, by MAY NORMAN-NERUDA. Demy 8vo, cloth, 21s. =In the Ice World of Himalaya.= By FANNY BULLOCK WORKMAN and WILLIAM HUNTER WORKMAN. With four large Maps and nearly 100 Illustrations. Demy 8vo, cloth gilt, 16s. Also a 6s. Edition. =From the Alps to the Andes.= By MATHIAS ZURBRIGGEN. Demy 8vo, cloth, 10s. 6d. net. =Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada.= By CLARENCE KING. Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s. net. =True Tales of Mountain Adventure= (for Non-Climbers, Young and Old). By Mrs AUBREY LE BLOND (Mrs Main). Demy 8vo, cloth, 10s. 6d. net. LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN. [Illustration: THE FINDING OF THE LAST BIVOUAC OF MESSRS. DONKIN AND FOX IN THE CAUCASUS. (P. 116.) From a drawing by Mr. Willink after a sketch by Captain Powell. Taken, by kind permission of Mr. Douglas Freshfield, from "The Exploration of the Caucasus." _Frontispiece._] ADVENTURES ON THE ROOF OF THE WORLD BY MRS AUBREY LE BLOND (MRS MAIN) AUTHOR OF "MY HOME IN THE ALPS," "TRUE TALES OF MOUNTAIN ADVENTURE," ETC. _ILLUSTRATED_ [Illustration: colophon] LONDON T. FISHER UNWIN PATERNOSTER SQUARE 1904 (_All rights reserved._) TO JOSEPH IMBODEN MY GUIDE AND FRIEND FOR TWENTY YEARS, I dedicate THESE RECORDS OF A PASTIME IN WHICH I OWE MY SHARE TO HIS SKILL, COURAGE, AND HELPFUL COMPANIONSHIP. PREFACE "Dear heart," said Tommy, when Mr Barlow had finished his narrative, "what a number of accidents people are subject to in this world!" "It is very true," answered Mr Barlow, "but as that is the case, it is necessary to improve ourselves in every possible manner, so that we may be able to struggle against them." Thus quoted, from _Sandford and Merton_, a president of the Alpine Club. The following True Tales from the Hills, if they serve to emphasise not only the perils of mountaineering but the means by which they can be lessened, will have accomplished the aim of their editor. This book is not intended for the climber. To him most of the tales will be familiar in the volumes on the shelves of his library or on the lips of his companions during restful hours in the Alps. But the non-climber rarely sees _The Alpine Journal_ and the less popular books on mountaineering, nor would he probably care to search in their pages for narratives likely to interest him. To seek out tales of adventure easily intelligible to the non-climber, to edit them in popular form, to point out the lessons which most adventures can teach to those who may climb themselves one day, has occupied many pleasant hours, rendered doubly so by the feeling that I shall again come into touch with the readers who gave so kindly a greeting to my _True Tales of Mountain Adventure_. In that work I tried to explain the principles of mountaineering and something of the nature of glaciers and avalanches. Those chapters will, I think, be found helpful by non-climbers who read the present volume. For much kindly advice and help in compiling this work I am indebted to Mr Henry Mayhew, of the British Museum, and to Mr Clinton Dent. Mrs Maund has enabled me to quote from a striking article by her late husband. Sir W. Martin Conway, Sir H. Seymour King, Messrs Tuckett, G. E. Foster, Cecil Slingsby, Harold Spender, and Edward Fitzgerald have been good enough to allow me to make long extracts from their writings. Messrs Newnes have generously permitted me to quote from articles which appeared in their publications, and the editor of _The Cornhill_ has sanctioned my reprinting portions of a paper from his magazine. I am also indebted to the editor of _M'Clure's Magazine_ for a similar courtesy. Mons. A. Campagne, Inspector of Water and Forests (France), allows me to make use of two very interesting photographs from his work on the Valley of Barège. Several friends have lent me photographs for reproduction in this work, and their names appear under each of the illustrations I owe to them. Messrs Spooner have kindly allowed me to use several by the late Mr W. F. Donkin. When not otherwise stated, the photographs are from my own negatives. I take this opportunity of heartily thanking those climbers, some of them personally unknown to me, whose assistance has rendered this work possible. E. LE BLOND. 67 THE DRIVE, BRIGHTON, _December 1903_. CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE PREFACE ix I. SOME TALES OF ALPINE GUIDES 1 II. TWO DAYS ON AN ICE-SLOPE 23 III. SOME AVALANCHE ADVENTURES 51 IV. A MONTH BENEATH AN AVALANCHE 65 V. A MONTH BENEATH AN AVALANCHE (_continued_) 81 VI. AN EXCITING CAUCASIAN ASCENT 99 VII. A MELANCHOLY QUEST 116 VIII. SOME NARROW ESCAPES AND FATAL ACCIDENTS 124 IX. A NIGHT ADVENTURE ON THE DENT BLANCHE 152 X. ALONE ON THE DENT BLANCHE 167 XI. A STIRRING DAY ON THE ROSETTA 182 XII. THE ZINAL ROTHHORN TWICE IN ONE DAY 195 XIII. BENIGHTED ON A SNOW PEAK 208 XIV. THE STORY OF A BIG JUMP 222 XV. A PERILOUS FIRST ASCENT 235 XVI. THUNDERSTORMS IN THE ALPS 257 XVII. LANDSLIPS IN THE MOUNTAINS 275 XVIII. SOME TERRIBLE EXPERIENCES 291 XIX. FALLING STONES AND FALLING BODIES 310 GLOSSARY 327 INDEX 329 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS The last bivouac of Messrs Donkin and Fox in the Caucasus _Frontispiece_ Christian Almer, Joseph Imboden, Jean Antoine Carrel, Alexander Burgener _To face page_ 3 The last steep bit near the top--At the end of a hot day--An instant's halt to choose the best way up a steep wall of rock--The ice-axes are stowed away in a crack, to be brought up by the last man " " 6 Auguste Gentinetta--Auguste Gentinetta on the way to the Matterhorn--The beginning of the climb up the Matterhorn--The spot where was the _bergschrund_ into which Mr Sloggett's party fell " " 8 Auguste Gentinetta on a mountain-top--The ice-cliffs over which Mr Sloggett's party would have fallen had they not been dashed into the _bergschrund_--The ruined chapel by the Schwarzsee--The last resting-place at Zermatt of some English climbers " " 11 On a snow ridge--A halt for lunch above the snow-line--Mrs Aubrey Le Blond " " 51 A cutting through an avalanche--The remains of an avalanche--An avalanche of stones--A mountain chapel " " 59 A mountain path--Peasants of the mountains--A village buried beneath an avalanche--Terraces planted to prevent avalanches " " 65 A typical Caucasian landscape " " 105 Melchior Anderegg, his son and grandchild " " 124 Crevasses and séracs--On the border of a crevasse--A snow bridge--Soft snow in the afternoon " " 133 The Bétemps Hut--Ski-ing--A fall on Skis--A great crevasse " " 137 The balloon "Stella" getting ready to start (p. 301)--A bivouac in the olden days--Boulder practice--The last rocks descending " " 148 Provisions for a mountain hotel--An outlook over rock and snow--Dent Blanche from Schwarzsee (winter)--Dent Blanche from Theodule Glacier (summer) " " 152 Hut on Col de Bértol--Ascending the Aiguilles Rouges--Summit of the Dent Blanche--Cornice on the Dent Blanche " " 156 Ambrose Supersax (p. 209)--View from the Rosetta " " 182 Climbing party leaving Zermatt--The Gandegg Hut--The Trift Hotel--Zinal Rothhorn from Trift Valley " " 195 Zinal Rothhorn--Top of a Chamonix Aiguille--A steep face of rock--"Leading strings" " " 202 A _bergschrund_--Homewards over the snow-slopes " " 230 The Ecrins--Clouds breaking over a ridge--Summit of the Jungfrau--Wind-blown snow " " 235 The Ecrins from the Glacier Blanc " " 247 Slab climbing--A rock ridge--On the Dent du Géant--The top at last " " 252 The second largest glacier in the Alps--On a ridge in the Oberland " " 259 Thirteen thousand feet above the sea--On the Furggen Grat--A "personally conducted" party on the Breithorn--Packing the knapsack " " 269 Monte Rosa from the Furggen Grat--The Matterhorn from the Wellenkuppe " " 272 A glacier lake--Amongst the séracs--Taking off the rope--Water at last! " " 297 The balloon "Stella" starting from Zermatt--A moment after " " 298 The Matterhorn from the Hörnli Ridge--The Matterhorn from the Furgg Glacier--Joseph Biner--The Matterhorn Hut " " 302 A hot day on a mountain-top--A summit near Saas--Luncheon _en route_ (winter)--Luncheon on a glacier pass (summer) " " 310 A tedious snow-slope--A sitting glissade--A glacier-capped summit--On the frontier " " 312 Unpleasant going--On the crest of an old moraine " " 317 An awkward bit of climbing--Guides at Zermatt--The Boval Hut--_Au revoir!_ " " 322 ADVENTURES ON THE ROOF OF THE WORLD CHAPTER I SOME TALES OF ALPINE GUIDES In a former work, I have given some details of the training of an Alpine guide, so I will not repeat them here. The mountain guides of Switzerland form a class unlike any other, yet in the high standard of honour and devotion they display towards those in their charge, one is reminded of two bodies of men especially deserving of respect and confidence, namely, the Civil Guards of Spain and the Royal Irish Constabulary. Like these, the Alpine guide oftentimes risks his health, strength--even his life--for persons who are sometimes in themselves the cause of the peril encountered. Like these, mere bodily strength and the best will in the world need to be associated with intelligence and foresight. Like these, also, keen, fully-developed powers of observation are essential. A certain climber of early days has wittily related in _The Alpine Journal_ a little anecdote which bears on this point. "Some years ago," writes the late Mr F. Craufurd Grove, "a member of this Club was ascending a small and easy peak in company with a famous Oberland guide. Part of their course lay over a snow-field sinking gradually on one side, sharply ended by a precipice on the other. The two were walking along, not far from the edge of this precipice, when the Englishman, thinking that an easier path might be made by going still nearer the edge, diverged a little from his companion's track. To his considerable surprise, the guide immediately caught hold of him, and pulled him back with a great deal more vigour than ceremony, well-nigh throwing him down in the operation. Wrathful, and not disinclined to return the compliment, the Englishman remonstrated. The guide's only answer was to point to a small crack, apparently like scores of other cracks in the _névé_, which ran for some distance parallel to the edge of the precipice, and about 15 feet from it. [Illustration: JEAN ANTOINE CARREL OF VALOURNANCHE. By Signor Vittorio Sella.] [Illustration: CHRISTIAN ALMER OF GRINDELWALD.] [Illustration: ALEXANDER BURGENER OF EISTEN (SAASTHAL).] [Illustration: JOSEPH IMBODEN OF ST. NICHOLAS. _To face p. 3._] "The traveller was not satisfied, but he was too wise a man to spend time in arguing and disputing, while a desired summit was still some distance above him. They went on their way, gained the top, and the traveller's equanimity was restored by a splendid view. When, on the descent, the scene of the morning's incident was reached, the guide pointed to the little crack in the _névé_, which had grown perceptibly wider. 'This marks,' he said, 'the place where the true snow-field ends. I feel certain that the ice from here to the edge is nothing but an unsupported cornice hanging over the tremendous precipice beneath. It might possibly have borne your weight in the early morning, though I don't think it would. As to what it will bear now that a powerful sun has been on it for some time--why, let us see.' Therewith he struck the _névé_ on the further side of the ice sharply with his axe. A huge mass, some 20 or 30 feet long, immediately broke away, and went roaring down the cliff in angry avalanche. Whereat the traveller was full of amazement and admiration, and thought how there, on an easy mountain and in smiling weather, he had not been very far from making himself into an avalanche, to his own great discomfort and to the infinite tribulation of the Alpine Club." A fatal accident was only narrowly averted by the skill of the famous guide Zurbriggen when making an ascent in the New Zealand Alps with Mr Edward Fitzgerald. I am indebted to this gentleman for permission to quote the account from his article in _The Alpine Journal_. The party were making the ascent of Mount Sefton, and were much troubled by the looseness of the rock on the almost vertical face which they had to climb. However, at last they reached a ridge, "along which," writes Mr Fitzgerald, "we proceeded between two precipices, descending to the Copland and to the Mueller valleys--some 6000 feet sheer drop on either hand. "We had next to climb about 300 feet of almost perpendicular cliff. The rocks were peculiarly insecure, and we were obliged to move by turns, wherever possible throwing down such rocks as seemed most dangerous. At times even this resource was denied us, so dangerous was the violent concussion with which these falling masses would shake the ridge to which we clung. I carried both the ice axes, so as to leave Zurbriggen both hands free to test each rock as he slowly worked his way upwards, while I did my utmost to avoid being in a position vertically beneath him. "Suddenly, as I was coming up a steep bit, while Zurbriggen waited for me a few steps above, a large boulder, which I touched with my right hand, gave way with a crash and fell, striking my chest. I had been just on the point of passing up the two ice axes to Zurbriggen, that he might place them in a cleft of rock a little higher up, and thus leave me both hands free for my climb. He was in the act of stooping and stretching out his arms to take them from my uplifted left hand, and the slack rope between us lay coiled at his feet. The falling boulder hurled me down head foremost, and I fell about 8 feet, turning a complete somersault in the air. Suddenly I felt the rope jerk, and I struck against the side of the mountain with great force. I feared I should be stunned and drop the two ice axes, and I knew that on these our lives depended. Without them we should never have succeeded in getting down the glacier, through all the intricate ice-fall. "After the rope had jerked me up I felt it again slip and give way, and I came down slowly for a couple of yards. I took this to mean that Zurbriggen was being wrenched from his foot-hold, and I was just contemplating how I should feel dashing down the 6000 feet below, and wondering vaguely how many times I should strike the rocks on the way. I saw the block that I had dislodged going down in huge bounds; it struck the side three or four times, and then, taking an enormous plunge of about 2000 feet, embedded itself in the glacier now called the Tuckett Glacier. "I felt the rope stop and pull me up short. I called to Zurbriggen and asked him if he were solidly placed. I was now swinging in the air like a pendulum, with my back to the mountain, scarcely touching the rock face. It would have required a great effort to turn round and grasp the rock, and I was afraid the strain which would thus necessarily be placed on the rope might dislodge Zurbriggen. "His first fear was that I had been half killed, for he saw the rock fall almost on top of me; but, as a matter of fact, after striking my chest it had glanced off to the right and passed under my right arm; it had started from a point so very near to me that it had not time to gain sufficient impetus to strike me with great force. Zurbriggen's first words were, 'Are you very much hurt?' I answered, 'No,' and again I asked him whether he were firmly placed. 'No,' he replied, 'I am very badly situated here. Turn round as soon as you can; I cannot hold you much longer.' I gave a kick at the rocks with one foot, and with a great effort managed to swing myself round. "Luckily there was a ledge near me, and so, getting some hand-hold, I was soon able to ease the strain on the rope. A few moments later I struggled a little way up, and at last handed to Zurbriggen the ice axes, which I had managed to keep hold of throughout my fall. In fact, my thoughts had been centred on them during the whole of the time. We were in too bad a place to stop to speak to one another; but Zurbriggen, climbing up a bit further, got himself into a firm position, and I scrambled up after him, so that in about ten minutes we had passed this steep bit. [Illustration: The last steep bit near the top.] [Illustration: An instant's halt to choose the best way up a steep wall of rock.] [Illustration: At the end of a hot day.] [Illustration: The ice-axes are stowed away in a crack, to be brought up by the last man. _To face p. 6._] "We now sat for a moment to recover ourselves, for our nerves had been badly shaken by what had so nearly proved a fatal accident. At the time everything happened so rapidly that we had not thought much of it, more especially as we knew that we needed to keep our nerve and take immediate action; but once it was all over we both felt the effects, and sat for about half an hour before we could even move again. I learned that Zurbriggen, the moment I fell, had snatched up the coil of rope which lay at his feet, and had luckily succeeded in getting hold of the right end first, so that he was soon able to bring me nearly to rest; but the pull upon him was so great, and he was so badly placed, that he had to let the rope slip through his fingers, removing all the skin, in order to ease the strain while he braced himself in a better position, from which he was able finally to stop me. He told me that had I not been able to turn and grasp the rocks he must inevitably have been dragged from his foot-hold, as the ledge upon which he stood was literally crumbling away beneath his feet. We discovered that two strands of the rope had been cut through by the falling rock, so that I had been suspended in mid-air by a single strand." The remainder of the way was far from easy, but without further mishap the party eventually gained the summit. That there are many grades of Alpine guides was amusingly exemplified once upon a time at the Montanvert, where in front of the hotel stood the famous Courmazeur guide, Emil Rey (afterwards killed on the Dent du Géant), talking to the Duke of Abruzzi and other first-rate climbers, while a little way off lounged some extremely indifferent specimens of the Chamonix _Societé des Guides_. Presently a tourist, got up with much elegance, and leaning on a tall stick surmounted by a chamois horn, appeared upon the scene, and addressed himself to Emil Rey. "Combien pour traverser la Mer de Glace?" he enquired. "Monsieur," replied Rey, removing his hat with one hand and with the other indicating the group hard by, "voila les guides pour la Mer de Glace! Moi, je suis pour la grande montagne!" [Illustration: Auguste Gentinetta, of Zermatt, 1903.] [Illustration: The climb up the Matterhorn by the ordinary Swiss route begins at the rocky corner to the left of the picture.] [Illustration: Auguste Gentinetta on the way to the Matterhorn.] [Illustration: The BERGSCHRUND, open when the accident to Mr. Sloggett's party took place, was above the ice cliff below which the man is standing. _To face p. 8._] One of the most wonderful escapes in the whole annals of mountaineering was that of a young Englishman, Mr Sloggett, and the well-known guide, Auguste Gentinetta, the second guide, Alphons Fürrer, being killed on the spot. They had made a successful ascent of the Matterhorn on 27th July 1900, and were the first of three parties on the descent. When nearly down the mountain, not far from the Hörnli ridge, an avalanche of stones and rocks swept them off their feet. Fürrer's skull was smashed, and he was killed immediately, and the three, roped together, were precipitated down a wall of ice. Their axes were wrenched from their grasp, and they could do nothing to check themselves. Gentinetta retained full consciousness during the whole of that awful descent, and while without the slightest hope that they could escape with their lives, he in no way lost his presence of mind. About 800 feet below the spot where their fall commenced was a small _Bergschrund_, or crack across the ice. This was full of stones and sand, and into it the helpless climbers were flung; had they shot over it nothing in this world could have saved them. Gentinetta, though much bruised and knocked about, had no bones broken, and he at once took means to prevent an even worse disaster than that which had already happened, for Mr Sloggett had fallen head downwards, with his face buried in sand, and was on the point of suffocation. Well was it for him that his guide was a man of promptness and courage. Without losing an instant Gentinetta pulled up his traveller and got his face free, clearing the sand out of his mouth, and doing all that mortal could for him. Mr Sloggett's jaw and two of his teeth were broken, but his other injuries were far less than might have been expected. Nevertheless, the position of the two survivors was still a most perilous one. They were exactly at the spot on to which almost every stone which detached itself from that side of the mountain was sure to fall, and their ice axes were lost, rendering it almost impossible for them to work their way to a place of safety. Still, to his infinite credit, the guide did not lose heart. By some means, which he now declares he is unable to understand, he contrived to climb, and to assist his gentleman, up that glassy, blood-stained wall, which even for a party uninjured, and properly equipped, it would have been no light task to surmount. This desperate achievement was rendered doubly trying by Gentinetta's being perfectly aware that if any more stones fell the two mountaineers must inevitably be swept away for the second time. At last they gained their tracks and sought a sheltered spot, where they could safely rest a little. Here they were joined by the other parties, who rendered invaluable help during the rest of the descent. The two sufferers finally arrived at the Schwarzsee Hotel, whence they were carried down the same evening to Zermatt. [Illustration: Auguste Gentinetta on a Mountain Top, 1903.] [Illustration: The ruined Chapel by the Schwarzsee.] [Illustration: The cliff of ice over which Mr. Sloggett's party must have precipitated if they had not been dashed into the BERGSCHRUND.] [Illustration: The last resting place at Zermatt of some English climbers. _To face p. 11._] The next day a strong party started for the scene of the accident to recover the body of the dead guide, Fürrer. It was a difficult and a dangerous task, and those who examined the wall down which the fall took place expressed their amazement that two wounded men, without axes, should have performed what seemed the incredible feat of getting up it. Both Mr Sloggett and Gentinetta made an excellent recovery, though they were laid up for many weeks after their memorable descent of the Matterhorn. The qualities found in a first-class guide include not only skill in climbing, but the ability to form a sound conclusion when overtaken by storm and mist. The following experience which took place in 1874, and which I am permitted by Mrs Maund to quote from her late husband's article in _The Alpine Journal_, proves, by its happy termination, that Maurer's judgment in a critical position was thoroughly to be relied on. Mr Maund had just arrived at La Bérarde, in Dauphiné, and he writes:-- "The morning of the 29th broke wet and stormy, and Rodier strongly advised me not to start; this, however, was out of the question, as I was due at La Grave on that day to keep my appointment with Mr Middlemore. After waiting an hour, to give the weather a chance, we started in drizzling rain at 5 A.M. Desolate as the Val des Étançons must always look, it appeared doubly gloomy that morning, with its never-ending monotony of rock and moraine unrelieved by a single patch of green. As we neared the glacier, the weather fortunately cleared, and the clouds, which till then had enveloped everything, began to mount with that marvellous rapidity only noticeable in mountain districts, leaving half revealed the mighty cliffs of the Meije towering 5000 feet almost sheer above us. As the wind caught and carried into the air the frozen sheets of snow on his summit, the old mountain looked like some giant bill distributer throwing his advertisements about. Entirely protected from the wind, we whiled away an hour and a half, searching with our telescope for any feasible line of attack. Having satisfied ourselves that on this side the mountain presented enormous, if not insurmountable, difficulties, we shouldered our packs and made tracks for the Brèche, which we reached at 11.45. "Meanwhile the weather had become worse again, and during the last part of the ascent it was snowing heavily; the wind too, from which we had been protected on the south side of the col, was so strong that we were absolutely obliged to crawl over to the north side. Our position was by no means a pleasant one; neither Martin nor I knew anything of the pass, and Rodier, who had told us overnight that he had crossed it more than once, seemed to know no more, and although sure of the exact bearing of La Grave, we could not, owing to the fast falling snow, see further than 300 or 400 yards in advance; added to this, it was intensely cold. Having paid Rodier 20 francs (a perfect waste of money, as it is impossible to mistake the way to the Brèche from the Val des Étançons, and, as I have said, he could not give us the least clue to the descent on the La Grave side), we dismissed him, hoping devoutly that he might break his--well, his ice axe, we'll say--on the way down. By keeping away to the right of the Brèche and down a steep slope, we crossed the crevasses which lay at its base without difficulty. We then bore to the left across a plateau, on which the snow lay very deep; floundering through this sometimes waist deep, we reached the upper ice-fall of the glacier, and after crossing several crevasses became involved in a perfect net-work of them. After a consultation, we determined to try to the right, but met with no better success, as again we were checked by an absolute labyrinth. At last, about five o'clock, we took to some rocks which divide the glacier into two branches. Meanwhile the snow was falling thicker and thicker, and, driven by the strong N.W. wind which caught up and eddied about what had already fallen, it appeared to come from every quarter at once. It was impossible to see more than a few yards in advance, and the rocks which under ordinary circumstances would have been easy, were, with their coating of at least 4 inches of snow, much the reverse, as it was quite impossible to see where to put hand or foot. Our only trust was in our compass, which assured us that while keeping to the backbone of this ridge we were descending in an almost direct line towards La Grave. "We had at most two hours of daylight before us, but there was still a hope that by following our present line we should get off the glacier before dark. How I regretted now the time lost in the morning. A little before seven we were brought to a standstill; our further direct descent was cut off by a precipice, while the rocks on either side fell almost sheer to the glaciers beneath. It was too late to think of looking for another road, so nothing now remained but to find the best shelter we could and bivouac for the night. We re-ascended to a small platform we had passed a short time before, and selecting the biggest and most sheltered bit of rock on it, we piled up the few movable stones there were about, to form the outside wall to our shelter, and having cleared away as much of the snow as we could from the inside, laid our ice axes across the top as rafters, with a sodden mackintosh--ironically called a waterproof by Mr Carter--over all for a roof. Despite this garment, I was wet to the skin. Luckily, we had each of us a spare flannel shirt and stockings in our knapsacks, but as the meagre dimensions of our shelter would not admit of the struggles attendant on a change, we were obliged to go through the operation outside. I tried to be cheerful, and Martin tried to be facetious as we wrung out our wet shirts while the snow beat on our bare backs, but both attempts were lamentable failures. If up to the present time my readers have not stripped in a snow-storm, let me strongly advise them never to attempt it. Having got through the performance as quickly as possible, we crawled into our shelter, but here again my ill luck followed me, for in entering I managed to tread on the tin wine-flask which Martin had thrown aside, and, my weight forcing out the cork, every drop of wine escaped. After packing myself away as well as I could in the shape of a pot-hook, Martin followed, and pot-hooked himself alongside me. We were obliged to assume this elementary shape, as the size of our shelter would not admit of our lying straight. All the provisions that remained were then produced. They consisted of a bit of bread about the size of a breakfast-roll, one-third of a small pot of preserved meat, about two ounces of raw bacon with the hide on, and half a small flask of a filthy compound called Genèpie, a sort of liqueur; besides this, we mustered between us barely a pipe-full of tobacco, and eight matches in a metal-box. The provisions I divided into three equal parts--one-third for that night's supper, and the remaining two-thirds for the next day. I need not enlarge on the miseries of that night. The wind blew through the chinks between the stones, bringing the snow with it, until the place seemed all chinks; then the mackintosh with its weight of snow would come in upon us, and we had with infinite difficulty to prop it up again, only to go through the same operation an hour later; at last, in sheer despair, we let it lie where it fell, and found to our relief it kept us warmer in that position. The snow never ceased one moment although the wind had fallen, and when morning broke there must have been nearly a foot of it around and over us. A more desolate picture than that dawn I have never seen. Snow everywhere. The rocks buried in it, and not a point peeping out to relieve the unbroken monotony. The sky full of it, without a break to relieve its leaden sameness, and the heavy flakes falling with that persistent silence which adds so much to the desolation of such a scene. "I was all for starting; for making some attempt either to get down, or to recross the col. Martin was dead against it--and I think now he was right. First of all, we could not have seen more than a few yards ahead; the rocks would have been considerably worse than they were the evening before, and if we had once got involved amongst the crevasses it was on the cards that we shouldn't get clear of them again; added to this, even if we could hit off the col, what with want of sleep and food, and the fatigue consequent on several hours' floundering in deep snow, we might not have strength to reach it. At any rate, we decided not to start until it cleared sufficiently to let us see where we were going. Our meagre stock of provisions was redivided into three parts, one of which we ate for breakfast. I then produced the pipe, but to our horror we found the matches were still damp. Martin, who is a man of resource, immediately opened his shirt and put the box containing them under his arm to dry. Meanwhile the snow never ceased, and the day wore on without a sign of the weather breaking. If it had not been for the excitement of those matches, I do not know how we should have got through that day; at last, however, after about six hours of Martin's fond embrace, one consented to burn, and I succeeded in lighting the pipe. We took turns at twelve whiffs each, and no smoke, I can conscientiously say, have I ever enjoyed like that one. During this never-ending day we got a few snatches of sleep, but the cold consequent on our wet clothes was so great, our position so cramped, and the rocks on which we lay so abominably sharp, that these naps were of the shortest duration. "A little before six the snow ceased, and for a moment the sun tried to wink at us through a chink in his snow-charged blanket, before he went to bed--long enough, however, for us to see La Grave far below, with every alp almost down to the village itself covered with its white mantle. "And then, as our second night closes in, the snow recommences, and we draw closer together even than before; for we feel that during the long hours to come we must economise to the fullest the little animal heat left in us. "That night I learnt to shiver, not the ordinary shivers, but fits lasting a quarter of an hour, during which no amount of moral persuasion could keep your limbs under control; and it was so catching! If either of us began a solo, the other was sure to join in, and we shivered a duet until quite exhausted. As we had nothing to drink, I had swallowed a considerable quantity of snow to quench my thirst, and this, acting on an almost empty stomach, produced burning heat within, while the cold, which was now intense, acting externally, induced fever and light-headedness, and once or twice I caught myself rambling. Martin, too, was affected in the same way. The long hours wore on, and still there was no sign of better weather. Towards midnight things looked very serious. Martin, who had behaved like a brick, thought 'it was very hard to perish like this in the flower of his age,' and I, too, thought of writing a line as well as I was able in my pocket-book, bequeathing its contents to my finder, then of sleeping if I could and waking up with the Houris; but I had the laugh of him afterwards, because he thought aloud and I to myself. However, this mood did not last long, and after shaking hands, I do not quite know why, because we had not quarrelled, we cuddled up again, and determined, whatever the weather, to start at daybreak. In half an hour the snow ceased, the wind backed to the S., and the temperature rose as if by magic; while the snow melting above trickled down in little streams upon us. We cleared the snow off the mackintosh, and putting it over us again, slept like logs in comparative warmth. When I awoke the sun was well up, and on looking round I could hardly realise the scene. Not a cloud in the sky! Not a breath of wind! The rocks around us, which yesterday were absolutely buried, were showing their black heads everywhere, and only a few inches of snow remained, so rapid had been the thaw; while far away to the N. the snow-capped summits of the Pennine Alps stood out in bold relief against the cloudless sky. "I woke Martin, and at a quarter to six, after thirty-five hours' burial, we crawled out of our shelter. At first neither of us could stand, so chilled were we by long exposure, and so cramped by our enforced position, but after a good thaw in the hot sun we managed to hobble about, and pack the knapsacks. After eating the few scraps that remained, we started at seven o'clock up the ridge that we had descended two days before. "We were very shaky on our legs at first, but at each step the stiffness seemed to wear off, and after half an hour we quite recovered their use; but there remained an all-pervading sense of emptiness inside that was not exhilarating. After ascending a short distance, and with my telescope carefully examining the rocks, we determined to descend to the glacier below us (the western branch), and crossing this get on to some more rocks beneath the lower ice-fall. If we could get down these our way seemed clear. "I won't trouble you with the details of the descent: suffice it to say that, without encountering any difficulty, we stepped on to grass about twelve o'clock, and descending green slopes, still patched here and there with snow (which would have provided sufficient Edelweiss for all the hats of the S.A.C.), we arrived safely at La Grave, after a pleasant little outing of fifty-six hours. Mr Middlemore, despairing of my coming, had started for England the night before, and had left Jaun to await my arrival. "After a hot bath, and some bread-crumbs soaked in warm wine, I went to bed, and the next morning I awoke as well as I am now, with the exception of stiffness in the knees, and a slight frost-bite on one hand. Martin, however, who, I suspect, had eaten a good deal on his arrival, was seized with severe cramp, and for some hours was very ill. "Two days' rest put us all to rights again." Though rivalry may be keen between first-class guides, and bitter things be said now and then in the heat of the struggle for first place, yet when a great guide has passed away, it is seldom that one hears anything but good of him. A pretty story is told--and I believe it is true--of the son of old Maquignaz of Valtournanche, which exemplifies this chivalrous trait. Maquignaz and Jean Antoine Carrel were often in competition in the early days of systematic climbing, and if not enemies, they were at any rate hardly bosom friends. Carrel's tragic and noble death on the Matterhorn will be recalled by readers of my _True Tales of Mountain Adventure_. Not very long ago a French climber was making an ascent of the Italian side of the Matterhorn, with "young" Maquignaz as guide. "Where did Carrel fall?" he innocently enquired, as they ascended the precipitous cliffs on the Breuil side of the mountain. Young Maquignaz turned sharply to him and exclaimed: "Carrel n'est pas tombé! _Il est mort!_" CHAPTER II TWO DAYS ON AN ICE-SLOPE There are few instances so striking of the capacity of a party of thoroughly experienced mountaineers to get out of a really tight place, as was the outcome of the two days spent by Messrs Mummery, Slingsby, and Ellis Carr, on an ice slope in the Mont Blanc district. The party intended trying to ascend the Aiguille du Plan direct from the Chamonix valley. Mr Ellis Carr has generously given me permission to make use of his account, which I quote from _The Alpine Journal_. He relates the adventures of himself and his two friends, whose names are household words to climbers, as follows:-- "Mummery, Slingsby, and I started at 4 P.M., with a porter carrying the material for our camp. This comprised a silk tent of Mummery's pattern, only weighing 1½ to 2 lbs.; three eider-down sleeping-bags, 9 lbs.; cooking apparatus of thin tin, 1½ lbs.; or, with ropes, rucksacks, and sundries, about 25 lbs., in addition to the weight of the provisions. Though not unduly burdened, the porter found the valley of boulders exceedingly troublesome, and in spite of three distinct varieties of advice as to the easiest route across them, made such miserably slow progress, often totally disappearing amongst the rocks like a water-logged ship in a trough of the sea, that we were forced to pitch our tents on the right moraine of the Nantillons Glacier, instead of near the base of our peak, as intended. The _gîte_, built up with stones on the slope of the moraine, with earth raked into the interstices, was sufficiently comfortable to afford Mummery and myself some sleep. A stone, however, far surpassing the traditional _gîte_ lump in aggressive activity, seemed, most undeservedly, to have singled out Slingsby as its innocent victim, and, judging by the convulsions of his sleeping-bag, and the sighs and thumps which were in full swing every time I woke up, it must have kept him pretty busy all night dodging its attacks from side to side. His account of his sufferings next morning, when Mummery and I were admittedly awake, fully confirmed and explained these phenomena, but on going for the enemy by daylight, he had the satisfaction of finding that he had suffered quite needlessly, the stone being loose and easily removed. We used Mummery's silk tent for the first time, and found that it afforded ample room for three men to lie at full length without crowding. The night, however, was too fine and still to test the weather-resisting power of the material, and as this was thin enough to admit sufficient moonlight to illuminate the interior of the tent, and make candle or lamp superfluous, we inferred that it might possibly prove to be equally accommodating in the case of rain and wind. It was necessary, moreover, on entering or leaving the tent, to adopt that form of locomotion to which the serpent was condemned to avoid the risk of unconsciously carrying away the whole structure on one's back. We started next morning about three o'clock, leaving the camp kit ready packed for the porter, whom we had instructed to fetch it during the day, and pushed on to the glacier at the foot of our mountain at a steady pace, maintained in my case with much greater ease than would have otherwise been possible by virtue of some long, single-pointed screw spikes inserted overnight in my boot soles; and I may here venture to remark that a few of these spikes, screwed into the boots before starting on an expedition where much ice-work is expected, appear to offer a welcome compromise between ponderous crampons and ordinary nails. They do not, I think, if not too numerous, interfere with rock-climbing, and can be repeatedly renewed when worn down. A slight modification in the shape would further facilitate their being screwed in with a box key made to fit.[1] "Leaving the rock buttress, the scene of our reconnaissance on the 11th, on the right, we struck straight up the glacier basin between it and the Aiguille de Blaitiére, which glacier appeared to me to be largely composed of broken fragments of ice mixed with avalanche snow from the hanging glaciers and slopes above. Keeping somewhat to the left, we reached the _bergschrund_, which proved to be of considerable size, extending along the whole base of the couloir, and crossed it at a point immediately adjoining the rocks on the left. The axe at once came into requisition, and we cut steadily in hard ice up and across the couloir towards the small rib or island of rock before-mentioned as dividing it higher up into two portions. The rocks at the base of this rib, though steep, gritty, and loose, offered more rapid going than the ice, and we climbed then to a gap on the ridge above, commanding a near view of the perpendicular country in front of us. Far above us, and immediately over the top of the right-hand section of the couloir, towered the ice cliffs of the hanging glacier we had tried to reach on the 11th, and beyond these again, in the grey morning light, we caught the glimpse of a second and even a third rank of _séracs_ in lofty vista higher up the mountain. As before observed, this section of the couloir seemed admirably placed for receiving ice-falls, and we now saw that it formed part of the natural channel for snow and _débris_ from each and all of these glaciers. We therefore directed our attention to our friend on the left, and after a halt for breakfast, traversed the still remaining portion of the dividing ridge, turning a small rock pinnacle on its right, and recommenced cutting steps in the hard ice which faced us. As has been before remarked, it is difficult to avoid over-estimating the steepness of ice-slopes, but, allowing for any tendency towards exaggeration, I do not think I am wrong in fixing the angle of the couloir from this point as not less than 50°. We kept the axe steadily going, and with an occasional change of leader, after some hours' unceasing work, found ourselves approaching the base of the upper portion of the couloir, which from below had appeared perpendicular. We paused to consider the situation. For at least 80 to 100 feet the ice rose at an angle of 60° to 70°, cutting off all view of the face above, with no flanking wall of rock on the right, but bounded on the left by an overhanging cliff, which dripped slightly with water from melting snow above. The morning was well advanced, and we kept a sharp look-out aloft for any stray stones which might fancy a descent in our direction. None came, and we felt gratified at this confirmation of our judgment as to the safety of this part of the couloir. However, the time for chuckling had not yet come. As I stated, we had halted to inspect the problem before us. Look as we might we could discover no possibility of turning the ice wall either to the right or left, and though, as we fondly believed and hoped, it formed the only barrier to easier going above, the terrible straightness and narrowness of the way was sufficient to make the very boldest pause to consider the strength of his resources. "How long _I_ should have paused before beating a retreat, if asked to lead the way up such a place, I will not stop to enquire, but I clearly remember that my efforts to form some estimate of the probable demand on my powers such a feat would involve were cut short by Mummery's quiet announcement that he was ready to make the attempt. Let me here state that amongst Mummery's other mountaineering qualifications not the least remarkable is his power of inspiring confidence in those who are climbing with him, and that both Slingsby and I experienced this is proved by the fact that we at once proceeded, without misgiving or hesitation, to follow his lead. We had hitherto used an 80-feet rope, but now, by attaching a spare 100-feet length of thin rope, used double, we afforded the leader an additional 50 feet. Mummery commenced cutting, and we soon approached the lower portion of the actual ice wall, where the angle of the slope cannot have been less than 60°. "I am not aware that any authority has fixed the exact degree of steepness at which it becomes impossible to use the ice axe with both hands, but, whatever portion of a right angle the limit may be, Mummery very soon reached it, and commenced excavating with his right hand caves in the ice, each with an internal lateral recess by which to support his weight with his left. Slingsby and I, meanwhile possessing our souls in patience, stood in our respective steps, as on a ladder, and watched his steady progress with admiration, so far as permitted us by the falling ice dislodged by the axe. "Above our heads the top of the wall was crowned by a single projecting stone towards which the leader cut, and which, when reached, just afforded sufficient standing-room for both feet. The ice immediately below this stone, for a height of 12 or 14 feet, was practically perpendicular, and Slingsby's definition of it as a 'frozen waterfall' is the most appropriate I can find. Here and there Mummery found it necessary to cut through its entire thickness, exposing the face of the rock behind. "On reaching the projecting stone the leader was again able to use the axe with both hands, and slowly disappeared from view; thus completing, without pause or hitch of any kind, the most extraordinary feat of mountaineering skill and nerve it has ever been my privilege to witness. "The top of the wall surmounted, Slingsby and I expected every moment to hear the welcome summons to follow to easier realms above. None came. Time passed, the only sounds besides the occasional drip of water from the rocks on our left, or the growl of a distant avalanche, being that of the axe and the falling chips of ice, as they whizzed by or struck our heads or arms with increasing force. The sounds of the axe strokes gradually became inaudible, but the shower continued to pound us without mercy for more than an hour of inaction, perhaps more trying to the nerves, in such a position, than the task of leading. The monotony was to some extent varied by efforts to ward off from our heads the blows of the falling ice, and by the excitement, at intervals, of seeing the slack rope hauled up a foot or so at a time. It had almost become taut, and we were preparing to follow, when a shout from above, which sounded from where we stood muffled and far away, for more rope, kept us in our places. It was all very well to demand more rope, but not so easy to comply. The only possible way to give extra length was to employ the 100 feet of thin rope single, instead of double, at which we hesitated at first, but, as Mummery shouted that it was absolutely necessary, we managed to make the change, though it involved Slingsby's getting out of the rope entirely during the operation. To any one who has not tried it I should hardly venture to recommend, as an enjoyable diversion, the process, which must necessarily occupy both hands, of removing and re-adjusting 180 feet of rope on an ice slope exceeding 60° at the top of a steep couloir some 1000 feet high. The task accomplished, we had not much longer to wait before the shout to come on announced the termination of our martyrdom. We went on, but, on passing in turn the projecting stone, and catching sight of the slope above, we saw at a glance that our hopes of easy going must, for the present, be postponed. Mummery, who had halted at the full extent of his tether of about 120 feet of rope, was standing in his steps on an ice slope quite as steep as that below the foot of the wall we had just surmounted. He had been cutting without intermission for two hours, and suggested a change. Being last on the rope, I therefore went ahead, cutting steps to pass, and took up the work with the axe. The ice here was occasionally in double layer, the outer one some 3 or 4 inches in thickness, which, when cut through, revealed a space of about equal depth behind, an arrangement at times very convenient, as affording good hand-holes without extra labour. I went on for some time cutting pigeon-holes on the right side of the couloir, and, at the risk of being unorthodox, I would venture to point out what appears to me the advantages of this kind of step on very steep ice. Cut in two perpendicular rows, alternately for each foot, the time lost in zigzags is saved, and no turning steps are necessary; they do not require the ice to be cut away so much for the leg as in the case of lateral steps, and are therefore less easily filled up by falling chips and snow. Being on account of their shape more protected from the sun's heat, they are less liable to be spoiled by melting, and have the further advantage of keeping the members of the party in the same perpendicular line, and consequently in a safer position. They also may serve as hand-holds. To cut such steps satisfactorily it is necessary that the axe be provided with a point long enough to penetrate to the full depth required for the accommodation of the foot up to the instep, without risk of injury to the shaft by repeated contact with the ice. "As we had now been going for several hours without food, and since leaving the rock rib, where we had breakfasted, had come across no ledge or irregularity of any kind affording a resting-place, it was with no little satisfaction that I descried, on the opposite side of the couloir, at a spot about 30 or 40 feet above, where the cliff on our left somewhat receded, several broken fragments of rock cropping out of the ice, of size and shape to provide seats for the whole party. We cut up and across to them, and sat down, or rather hooked ourselves on, for a second breakfast. We were here approximately on a level with the summit of our rock buttress of the 11th, and saw that it was only connected with the mountain by a broken and dangerous-looking ridge of ice and _névé_ running up to an ice-slope at the foot of the glacier cliffs. The gap in the latter was not visible from our position. The tower we had tried to turn appeared far below, and the intervening rocks of the buttress, though not jagged, were steep and smooth like a roof. The first gleams of sunshine now arrived to cheer us, and, getting under way once more, we pushed on hopefully, as the couloir was rapidly widening and the face of the mountain almost in full view. We had also surmounted the rock wall which had so long shut out the prospect on our left, and it was at this point that, happening to glance across the slabs, we caught sight of a large flat rock rapidly descending. It did not bound nor roll, but slid quietly down with a kind of stealthy haste, as if it thought, though rather late, it might still catch us, and was anxious not to alarm us prematurely. It fell harmlessly into the couloir, striking the ice near the rock rib within a few feet of our tracks, and we saw no other falling stones while we were on the mountain. "Leaving the welcome resting-place, Mummery again took the lead, and cut up and across the couloir, now becoming less steep, to a rib or patch of rocks higher up on the right, which we climbed to its upper extremity, a distance of some 70 or 80 feet. "Here, taking to the ice once more, we soon approached the foot of the first great snow-slope on the face, and rejoiced in the near prospect of easier going. At the top of this slope, several hundred feet straight before us, was a low cliff or band of rocks, for which we decided to aim, there being throughout the entire length of the intervening slope no suspicious grey patches to indicate ice. The angle was, moreover, much less severe, and it being once more my turn to lead, I went at it with the zealous intention of making up time. My ardour was, however, considerably checked at finding, when but a short distance up the slope, that the coating of _névé_ was so exceedingly thin as to be insufficient for good footing without cutting through the hard ice below. Instead, therefore, of continuing in a straight line for the rocks, we took an oblique course to the right, towards one of the hanging glaciers before referred to, and crossing a longitudinal crevasse, climbed without much difficulty up its sloping bank of _névé_. Hurrah! here was good snow at last, only requiring at most a couple of slashes with the adze end of the axe for each step. If this continued we had a comparatively easy task before us, as the rocks above, though smooth and steep, were broken up here and there by bands and streaks of snow. Taking full advantage of this our first opportunity for making speed, we cut as fast as possible and made height rapidly. We still aimed to strike the band of rocks before described, though at a point much more to the right, and nearer to where its extremity was bounded by the ice-cliffs of another hanging glacier; but, alas! as we approached nearer and nearer to the base of the cliffs, looming apparently higher and higher over our heads, the favouring _névé_, over which we had been making such rapid progress, again began to fail, and before we could reach the top of the once more steepening slope the necessity of again resorting to the pick end of the axe brought home the unwelcome conviction that our temporary respite had come to an end, and that, instead of snow above, and apart from what help the smooth rocks might afford, nothing was to be expected but hard, unmitigated ice. "We immediately felt that, as it was already past noon, the establishment of this fact would put a totally different complexion on our prospects of success, and, instead of reaching the summit, we might have to content ourselves with merely crossing the ridge. We continued cutting, however, and reached the rocks, the last part of the slope having once more become exceedingly steep. To turn the cliff, here unclimbable, we first spent over half an hour in prospecting to the right, where a steep ice-gully appeared between the rocks and the hanging glacier; but, abandoning this, we struck off to the left, cutting a long traverse, during which we were able to hitch the rope to rocks cropping out through the ice. The traverse landed us in a kind of gully, where, taking to the rocks whenever practicable, though climbing chiefly by the ice, we reached a broken stony ledge, large and flat enough to serve as a luncheon place, the only spot we had come across since leaving the rock rib, where it was possible really to rest sitting. Luncheon over, we proceeded as before, choosing the rocks as far as possible by way of change, though continually obliged to take to the ice-streaks by which they were everywhere intersected. This went on all the rest of the afternoon, till, when daylight began to wane, we had attained an elevation considerably above the gap between our mountain and the Aiguille de Blaitiére, or more than 10,900 feet above the sea. "The persistent steepness and difficulty of the mountain had already put our reaching the ridge before dark entirely out of the question, though we decided to keep going as long as daylight lasted, so as to leave as little work as possible for the morrow. "The day had been gloriously fine, practically cloudless throughout, and I shall never forget the weird look of the ice-slopes beneath, turning yellow in the evening light, and plunging down and disappearing far below in the mists which were gathering at the base of the mountain; also, far, far away, we caught a glimpse of the Lake of Geneva, somewhere near Lausanne. I had turned away from the retrospect, when an exclamation from Slingsby called me to look once more. A gap had appeared in the mists, and there, some 2700 feet below us, as it were on an inferior stage of the world, we caught a glimpse of the snow-field at the very foot of the mountain, dusky yellow in the last rays of the sun. Mummery was in the meantime continuing the everlasting chopping, in the intervals of crawling up disobliging slabs of rock, till twilight began to deepen into darkness, and we had to look about for a perch on which to roost for the night. The only spot we could find, sufficiently large for all three of us to sit, was a small patch of lumps of rocks, more or less loose, some 20 or 30 feet below where we stood, and we succeeded, just as the light failed, or about 8.30 P.M., and after some engineering, in seating ourselves side by side upon it. Our boots were wet through by long standing in ice-steps, and we took them off and wrung the water out of our stockings. The others put theirs on again, but, as a precaution against frost-bite, having pocketed my stockings, I put my feet, wrapped in a woollen cap, inside the rucksack, with the result that they remained warm through the night. The half hour which it took me next morning to pull on the frozen boots proved, however, an adequate price for the privilege of having warm feet. As a precaution against falling off our shelf we hitched the rope over a rock above and passed it round us, and to make sure of not losing my boots (awful thought!), I tied them to it by the laces. "After dinner we settled down to spend the evening. The weather fortunately remained perfect, and the moon had risen, though hidden from us by our mountain. Immediately below lay Chamonix, like a cheap illumination, gradually growing more patchy as the night advanced and the candles went out one by one, while above the stars looked down as if silently wondering why in the world we were sitting there. The first two hours were passed without very much discomfort, but having left behind our extra wraps to save weight, as time wore on the cold began to make itself felt, and though fortunately never severe enough to be dangerous, made us sufficiently miserable. Packed as we were, we were unable to indulge in those exercises generally adopted to induce warmth, and we shivered so vigorously at intervals that, when all vibrating in unison, we wondered how it might affect the stability of our perch. Sudden cramp in a leg, too, could only be relieved by concerted action, it being necessary for the whole party to rise solemnly together like a bench of judges, while the limb was stretched out over the valley of Chamonix till the pain abated, and it could be folded up and packed away once more. We sang songs, told anecdotes, and watched the ghostly effect of the moonlight on a subsidiary pinnacle of the mountain, the illuminated point of which, in reality but a short distance away, looked like a phantom Matterhorn seen afar off over an inky black _arête_ formed by the shadow thrown across its base by the adjoining ridge. We had all solemnly vowed not to drop asleep, and for me this was essential, as my centre of gravity was only just within the base of support; but while endeavouring to give effect to another chorus, in spite of the very troublesome _vibrato_ before referred to, I was grieved and startled at the sudden superfluous interpolation of two sustained melancholy bass notes, each in a different key and ominously suggestive of snoring. The pensive attitude of my companions' heads being in keeping with their song, in accordance with a previous understanding, I imparted to Mummery, who sat next to me, a judicious shock, but, as in the case of a row of billiard balls in contact, the effect was most noticeable at the far end, and _Slingsby_ awoke, heartily agreeing with me how weak it was of Mummery to give way thus. The frequent necessity for repeating this operation, with strengthening variations as the effect wore off, soon stopped the chorus which, like Sullivan's 'Lost Chord,' trembled away into silence. "The lights of Chamonix had by this time shrunk to a mere moth-eaten skeleton of their earlier glory, and I became weakly conscious of a sort of resentment at the callous selfishness of those who could thus sneak into their undeserved beds, without a thought of the three devoted explorers gazing down at them from their eyrie on the icy rocks. "From 2 to 4 o'clock the cold became more intense, aggravated by a slight 'breeze of morning,' and while waiting for dawn we noticed that it was light enough to see. "Daylight, however, did not help Mummery to find his hat, and we concluded it had retired into the _bergschrund_ under cover of darkness. "We helped each other into a standing position, and decided to start for the next patch of rocks above, from there to determine what chance of success there might be in making a dash for the summit, or, failing this, of simply crossing the ridge and descending to the Col du Géant. There was very little food left, and, as we had brought no wine, breakfast was reduced to a slight sketch, executed with little taste and in a few very dry touches. Owing to the time required to disentangle virulently kinked and frozen ropes, etc., the sun was well above the horizon when we once more started upwards, though unfortunately, just at this time, when his life-giving rays would have been most acceptable, they were entirely intercepted by the ridge of the Blaitiére. We started on the line of steps cut the night before, but soon after Mummery had recommenced cutting, the cold, or rather the impossibility, owing to the enforced inaction, to get warm, produced such an overpowering feeling of drowsiness that Slingsby and I, at Mummery's suggestion, returned to the perch, and jamming ourselves into the space which had before accommodated our six legs, endeavoured to have it out in forty winks. Mummery meanwhile continued step-cutting, and at the end of about half an hour, during which Slingsby and I were somewhat restored by a fitful dose, returned, and we tied on again for another attempt. "Surmounting the patches of rock immediately above our dormitory, we arrived at the foot of another slope of terribly steep, hard ice, some 200 feet in height. At the top of this again was a vertical crag 14 or 15 feet high, forming the outworks of the next superior band of rocks, which was interspersed with ice-streaks as before. A few feet from the base of this crag was a narrow ledge about 1 foot in width, where we were able to sit after scraping it clear of snow. Slingsby gave Mummery a leg up round a very nasty corner, and he climbed to a point above the crag, whence he was able to assist us with the rope up a still higher and narrower ledge. Beyond was another steep slope of hard ice, topped by a belt of rocks, as before. "Before reaching this point the cold had again begun to tell upon me, and I bitterly regretted the mistaken policy of leaving behind our extra wraps, especially as the coat I was wearing was not lined. As there was no probability of a change for the better in the nature of the going before the ridge was reached, I began to doubt the wisdom of proceeding, affected as I was, where a false step might send the whole party into the _bergschrund_ 3000 feet below; but it was very hard, with the summit in view and the most laborious part of the ascent already accomplished, to be the first to cry 'Hold!' I hesitated for some time before doing so, and the others meanwhile had proceeded up the slope. The rope was almost taut when I shouted to them the state of the case, and called a council of war. They returned to me, and we discussed what was practically something of the nature of a dilemma. To go on at the same slow rate of progress and without the sun's warmth meant, on the one hand, the possible collapse of at least one of the party from cold, while, on the other hand, to turn back involved the descent of nearly 3000 feet of ice, and the passage, if we could not turn it, of the couloir and its ghastly ice-wall. Partly, I think, to delay for a time the adoption of the latter formidable alternative, partly to set at rest any doubt which might still remain as to the nature of the going above, Mummery volunteered to ascend alone to the rocks at the summit of the ice-slope, though the chance of their offering any improved conditions was generally felt to be a forlorn hope. He untied the rope, threw the end down to us, and retraced his steps up the slope, in due time reaching the rocks some 100 or 130 feet above, but, after prospecting in more than one direction, returned to us with the report that they offered no improvement, and that the intersecting streaks were nothing but hard ice. He, however, was prepared to continue the attempt if we felt equal to the task. If we could at that moment have commanded a cup of hot soup or tea, or the woollen jackets which in our confidence in being able to reach the ridge we had left behind, I am convinced I should have been quite able to proceed, and that the day and the mountain would have been ours; but in the absence of these reviving influences and that of the sun, I was conscious that in my own case, at any rate, it would be folly to persist, so gave my vote for descending. As the food was practically exhausted, the others agreed that it would be wiser to face the terrible ordeal which retracing our steps involved (we did not then know that it meant recutting them), rather than continue the ascent with weakened resources and without absolute certainty of the accessibility of the summit ridge. "As Slingsby on the previous day had insisted on being regarded merely as a passenger, and had therefore not shared in the step-cutting, it was now arranged that he should lead, while Mummery, as a tower of strength, brought up the rear. Though it was past five o'clock, and of course broad daylight, a bright star could be seen just over the ridge of our mountain, not far from the summit--alas! the only one anywhere near it on that day. We started downwards at a steady pace, and soon were rejoicing in the returning warmth induced by the more continuous movement. Before we had gone far, however, we found that most of the steps were partially filled up with ice, water having flowed into them during the previous afternoon, and the work of trimming or practically recutting these was at times exceedingly trying, owing to their distance apart, and the consequent necessity of working in a stooping and cramped position. "But if the work was tough the worker, fortunately, was tougher still, and Mummery and I congratulated ourselves on being able to send such powerful reserves to the front. "The morning was well advanced before the sun surmounted the cold screen of the Blaitiére, but having once got to work he certainly made up by intensity for his tardy appearance. "The provisions, with the exception of a scrap or two of cheese and a morsel of chocolate, being exhausted, and having, as before stated, nothing with us in the form of drink, nothing was to be gained by a halt, though, as we descended with as much speed as possible, we kept a sharp look-out for any signs of trickling water with which to quench the thirst, which was becoming distressing. "Since finally deciding to return, we had cherished the hope that it might still be possible to turn the ice-wall by way of the great rock buttress, and made up our minds at any rate to inspect it from above. With this in view, when the point was reached where we had on the previous day struck the flank of the hanging glacier instead of continuing in the tracks which trended to the right across the long ice-slope, we cut straight down by the side of the glacier to its foot, and over the slope below, in the direction of the _séracs_ immediately crowning the summit of the buttress. "On nearer approach, however, it was manifest that even if by hours of step-cutting a passage from the ice to the rocky crest below could be successfully forced, descent by the latter was more than doubtful, while the consequences of failure were not to be thought of. "Driven, therefore, finally to descend by the couloir, we cut a horizontal traverse which brought us back into the old tracks, a short way above the point where the ice began to steepen for the final plunge, where we braced ourselves for the last and steepest 1000 feet of ice. Slingsby still led, and, on arriving at the spot below our second breakfast-place, where I had last cut pigeon-holes, joyfully announced that one of them contained water. He left his drinking cup in an adjoining step for our use as we passed the spot in turn, and the fact that it was only visible when on a level with our faces may give some idea of the steepness of the descent. The delight of that drink was something to remember, though only obtainable in thimblefuls, and I continued dipping so long that Mummery became alarmed, being under the impression that the cup was filled each time. "Mummery had previously volunteered, in case we were driven to return by the couloir, to descend first, and recut the steps and hand-holes in the ice-wall, and as we approached the brink we looked about for some projecting stone or knob of rock which might serve as a hitch for the rope during the operation. The only available projection was a pointed stone of doubtful security, somewhat removed from the line of descent, standing out of the ice at the foot of a smooth vertical slab of rock on the left. Round this we hitched the rope, Slingsby untying to give the necessary length. With our feet firmly planted, each in its own ice-step, we paid out the rope as Mummery descended and disappeared over the edge. It was an hour before he re-appeared, and this period of enforced inaction was to me, and I think to Slingsby, the most trying of the whole expedition. The want of food was beginning to tell on our strength, the overpowering drowsiness returned, and though it was absolutely essential for the safety of the party to stand firmly in the ice-steps, it required a strong effort to avoid dropping off to sleep in that position. We were fortunately able to steady ourselves by grasping the upper edge of the ice where it adjoined the rocky slab under which we stood. This weariness, however, must have been quite as much mental as physical from the long-continued monotony of the work, for when Mummery at last reappeared we felt perfectly equal to the task of descending. The rope was passed behind a boss of _névé_ ingeniously worked by Mummery as a hitch to keep it perpendicular, and I descended first, but had no occasion to rely upon it for more than its moral support, as the steps and hand-holds had been so carefully cut. I climbed cautiously down the icy cataract till I reached a point where hand-holds were not essential to maintain the balance, and waited with my face almost against the ice till Slingsby joined me. Mummery soon followed, and rather than leave the spare rope behind detached it from the stone and descended without its aid, his nerve being to all appearance unimpaired by the fatigues he had gone through. I had before had evidence of his indifference while on the mountains to all forms of food or drink, with the single exception, by the way, of strawberry jam, on the production of which he generally capitulates. "Rejoicing at having successfully passed the steepest portion of the ice-wall without the smallest hitch of the wrong sort, we steadily descended the face of the couloir. "Here and there, where a few of the steps had been hewn unusually far apart, I was fain to cut a notch or two for the fingers before lowering myself into the next one below. At last the rock rib was reached, and we indulged in a rest for the first time since turning to descend. "Time, however, was precious, and we were soon under way again, retracing our steps over the steep loose rocks at the base of the rib till forced again on to the ice. "Oh, that everlasting hard ice-slope, so trustworthy yet so relentlessly exacting! "Before we could clear the rocks, and as if by way of hint that the mountain had had enough of us, and of me in particular (I could have assured it the feeling was mutual), a flick of the rope sent my hat and goggles flying down to keep company with Mummery's in the _bergschrund_, and a sharp rolling stone, which I foolishly extended my hand to check, gashed me so severely as to put climbing out of the question for more than a week. As small pieces of ice had been whizzing down for some time from above, though we saw no stones, it was satisfactory to find our steps across the lower part of the couloir in sufficiently good order to allow of our putting on a good pace, and we soon reached the sheltering rock on the opposite side and the slopes below the _bergschrund_ wherein our hats, after losing their heads, had found a grave. The intense feeling of relief on regaining, at 5.55 P.M., safe and easy ground, where the lives of the party were not staked on every step, is difficult to describe, and was such as I had never before experienced. I think the others felt something like the same sensation. Fatigue, kept at bay so long as the stern necessity for caution lasted, seemed to come upon us with a rush, though tempered with the sense of freedom from care aforesaid, and I fancy our progress down the glacier snow was for a time rather staggery. Though tired, we were by no means exhausted, and after a short rest on a flat rock and a drink from a glacier runnel, found ourselves sufficiently vigorous to make good use of the remaining daylight to cross the intervening glaciers, moraines, and valley of boulders, before commencing to skirt the tedious and, in the dark, exasperating stony wastes of the Charmoz ridge. Sternly disregarding the allurements of numerous stonemen, which here seem to grow wild, to the confusion of those weak enough to trust them, we stumbled along amongst the stones to the brow of the hill overlooking the hotel, where shouts from friends greeted the appearance of our lantern, and, descending by the footpath, we arrived among them at 10.30 P.M., more than fifty-four hours after our departure on the 12th." [Illustration: ON A SNOW RIDGE.] [Illustration: MRS. AUBREY LE BLOND, 1903. By Royston Le Blond.] [Illustration: A HALT FOR LUNCH ABOVE THE SNOW LINE.] [Illustration: MRS. AUBREY LE BLOND. By Joseph Imboden. _To face_ p. 51.] CHAPTER III SOME AVALANCHE ADVENTURES We should never have got into such a position, but when definite orders are not carried out the General must not be blamed. The adventure might easily have cost all three of us our lives. This is how we came to be imperilling our necks on an incoherent snow-ridge 13,000 feet above the sea. It was the end of September, and my two guides and I were waiting at Zermatt to try the Dent Blanche, a proceeding which, later on, was amply justified by success. Much fresh snow had recently fallen, and the slopes of the mountains were running down towards the valleys faster than the most active chamois could have galloped up them. Idleness is an abomination to the keen climber, and doubly so if he be an enthusiastic photographer, and the sun shone each day from a cloudless sky. Something had to be done, but what could we choose? All the safe second-class ascents up which one might wade through fresh snow without risk, we had accomplished over and over again. Something new to us was what we wanted, and what eventually we found in the stately Hohberghorn. Now this peak is seldom ascended. It is overtopped by two big neighbours, and until these have been done, no one is likely to climb the less imposing peak. Furthermore, the Hohberghorn is a grind, and though we got enough excitement and to spare out of it, yet in our case the circumstances were peculiar. The view was certain to be grand, and, _faute de mieux_, we decided to start for it. On this occasion, in addition to my guide of many years' standing, the famous Joseph Imboden of St Nicholas, I had a second man, who had a great local reputation in his native valley at the other end of Switzerland (and deservedly so, as far as his actual climbing ability was concerned), but who had never been on a rope with Imboden before. This was the cause of the appalling risk we ran during our expedition. We arrived in good time at the hut, and found another party, who proposed going up the Dom, the highest mountain entirely in Switzerland (14,900 feet) next day. Our way lay together for a couple of hours over the great glacier, and we proceeded the following morning in magnificent weather towards our respective peaks. It was heavy work ploughing our way through the soft new snow, and we could not advance except very slowly. As a result, it was already mid-day when we gained the ridge of the Hohberghorn, not far below the summit. The sun streamed pitilessly down, the snow cracked and slipped at every step. To understand what followed, our position must now be made clear. Imboden, who led, was on the very crest of the ridge. Next to him on the rope, at a distance of about 20 feet, was my place, also on the ridge. At an equal distance behind me was the second guide. He was a trifle below the ridge, on the side to our left. We stood still for a moment, and then Imboden distinctly but very quietly remarked to the other man, "Be on your guard. At any moment now we may expect an avalanche." I never to this day can understand how he failed to grasp what this meant. It should have been obvious that it was a warning to look out, and at the first sign of approaching danger to step down on to the other side of the ridge. Had not this been a perfectly simple thing to do, we should not have continued the ascent, but the second guide failed us hopelessly when the critical moment came. Imboden, to avoid a small cornice or overhanging eave of snow to our right, now took a few steps along and below the ridge to the left, while the man behind me came in the tracks to the crest, and I followed the leader. From this position the last man could in an instant have been down the slope to his right, and have held us with the greatest ease. We advanced a yard or two further, and then the entire surface upon which we stood commenced to move! A moment more and we were struggling for our lives, dashing our axes through the rushing snow, and endeavouring to arrest our wild career, which, unless checked at once, would cause us to be precipitated down the entire face of the mountain, to the glacier below. Then it was that the firm bed of snow beneath the newer layer stood us in good stead. Our axes held, and, breathless, bruised and startled, we found ourselves clinging to the slope, while the avalanche, momentarily increasing in volume, thundered down towards the snow-fields below, where at length, heaped high against the mountain-side, it came to rest. We now took stock of the position. We were practically unhurt, but so confused and rapid had been the slip that the rope was entangled round us in a manner wonderful to behold. There was nothing to prevent us reaching the summit, for every atom of fresh snow had been swept away from the slope, so we continued our climb, and soon were able to rest on the top. To this day, Imboden and I always look back to our adventure on the Hohberghorn as the greatest peril either of us has ever faced. More than one instance has been recorded where, owing to the prompt action of the last man on the rope, fatal accidents on snow-ridges have been avoided. The two most famous occasions in Alpine annals[2] were when Hans Grass saved his party on Piz Palü, and when Ulrich Almer performed his marvellous feat on the Gabelhorn. It is true that in both these cases the risk was due to the breaking away of a snow-cornice, but the remedy was exactly the same as it ought to have been when our avalanche was started. I have only to add that we found the other party at the hut, much exhausted by their unsuccessful attempt on the Dom, and very anxious on our account, as they both heard and saw the avalanche which had so nearly ended our mountaineering career. The famous climber, Mr Tuckett, has very kindly allowed me to quote from _Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers_, the following description of a narrow escape from an avalanche while descending the Aletschhorn: "We had accomplished in safety a distance of scarcely more than 150 yards when, as I was looking at the Jungfrau, my attention was attracted by a sudden exclamation from Victor, who appeared to stagger and all but lose his balance. At first, the idea of some sort of seizure or an attack of giddiness presented itself, but, without stopping to enquire, I at once turned round, drove my good 8-foot ash-pole as deeply as possible through the surface layer of fresh snow into the firmer stratum beneath, tightened the rope to give Victor support, and shouted to Peter to do the same. All this was the work of an instant, and a glance at once showed me what had happened. Victor was safe for the moment, but a layer or _couche_ of snow, 10 inches to a foot in thickness, had given way exactly beneath his feet, and first gently, and then fleet as an arrow, went gliding down, with that unpleasant sound somewhat resembling the escape of steam, which is so trying to the nerves of the bravest man, when he knows its full and true significance. At first a mass 80 to 100 yards in breadth and 10 or 15 in length alone gave way, but the contagion spread, and ere another minute had elapsed the slopes right and left of us for an extent of at least half a mile, were in movement, and, like a frozen Niagara, went crashing down the ice-precipices and _séracs_ that still lay between us and the Aletsch glacier, 1800 to 2000 feet below. The spectacle was indescribably sublime, and the suspense for a moment rather awful, as we were clinging to an incline at least as steep as that on the Grindelwald side of the Strahleck--to name a familiar example--and it was questionable whether escape would be possible, if the layer of snow on the portion of the slope we had just been traversing should give way before we could retrace our steps. "Not a moment was to be lost; no word was spoken after the first exclamation, and hastily uttered, 'Au col! et vite!' and then in dead silence, with _bâtons_ held aloft like harpoons, ready to be plunged into the lower and older layers of snow, we stole quietly but rapidly up towards the now friendly-looking _corniche_, and in a few minutes stood once more in safety on the ridge, with feelings of gratitude for our great deliverance, which, though they did not find utterance in words, were, I believe, none the less sincerely felt by all of us. 'Il n'a manqué que peu à un grand malheur,' quietly remarked Victor, who looked exhausted, as well he might be after what he had gone through; but a _goutte_ of cognac all round soon set us right again, and shouting to Bennen, who was still in sight, though dwindled in size to a mere point, we were soon beside him, running down the _névé_ of our old friend, the Aren Glacier. The snow was now soft and the heat tremendous, and both Bennen and Bohren showed signs of fatigue; but a rapid pace was still maintained in spite of the frequent crevasses. Some were cleared in a series of flying leaps, whilst into others which the snow concealed, one and another would occasionally sink, amid shouts of laughter from his companions, who, in their turn, underwent a similar fate. To the carefully secured rope, which, with the alpenstock and ice axe, are the mountaineer's best friends, we owed it that these sudden immersions were a mere matter of joke; but even the sense of security which it confers does not altogether prevent a 'creepy' sensation from being experienced, as the legs dangle in vacancy, and the sharp metallic ring of the icy fragments is heard as they clatter down into the dark blue depths below." The higher and more snow-laden the mountain chain, the more risk is there from avalanches. It seems practically certain that Mr Mummery met his death in the Himalayas from an avalanche, and that Messrs Donkin and Fox and their two Swiss guides perished in the Caucasus from a like cause. Sir W. Martin Conway, in his book on the Himalayas, makes several allusions to avalanches, and on at least one occasion, some members of his party had a narrow escape. He relates the adventure as follows: [Illustration: A cutting through an immense avalanche which fell some months previously.] [Illustration: The remains of a large avalanche.] [Illustration: An avalanche of stones.] [Illustration: A mountain chapel near Zermatt where special prayers are offered for defence against avalanche. _To face_ p. 59.] "Zurbriggen and I had no more than set foot upon the grass, when we beheld a huge avalanche-cloud descending over the whole width of the ice-fall, utterly enveloping both it and a small rock-rib and couloir beside it. Bruce and the Gurkhas were below the rib, and could only see up the couloir. They thought the avalanche was a small one confined to it, and so they turned back and ran towards the foot of the ice-fall. This was no improvement in position, and there was nothing for them to do then but to run straight away from it, and get as far out to the flat glacier as they could. The fall started from the very top of the Lower Burchi peak, and tumbled on to the plateau above the ice-fall; it flowed over this, and came down the ice-fall itself. We saw the cloud before we heard the noise, and then it only reached us as a distant rumble. We had no means of guessing the amount of solid snow and ice that there might be in the heart of the cloud. The rumble increased in loudness, and was soon a thunder that swallowed up our puny shouts, so that Bruce could not hear our warning. Had he heard he could easily have reached the sheltered position we gained before the cloud came on him. Zurbriggen and I cast ourselves upon our faces, but only the edge of the cloud and an ordinary strong wind reached us. Our companions were entirely enveloped in it. They afterwards described to us how they raced away like wild men, jumping crevasses which they could not have cleared in cold blood. When the snow just enveloped them, the wind raised by it cast them headlong on the ice. This, however, was the worst that happened. The snow peppered them all over, and soaked them to the skin, but the solid part of the avalanche was happily arrested in the midst of the ice-fall, and never came in sight. When the fog cleared they were all so out of breath that for some minutes they could only stand and regard one another in panting silence. They presently rejoined us, and we halted for a time on the pleasant grass." In the olden days, before the great Alpine lines had tunnelled beneath the mountains and made a journey from one side of the range to the other in midwinter as safe and as comfortable as a run from London to Brighton, passengers obliged to cross the Alps in winter or spring were exposed to very real peril from avalanches. Messrs Newnes have courteously allowed me to make a short extract from an article which appeared in one of their publications, and in which is described the adventures of two English ladies who were obliged to return home suddenly from Innsbruck on account of the illness of a near relative. Their shortest route was by _diligence_ to Constance, over the Arlberg Pass, and although it was considered extremely dangerous at that time of year--the beginning of May 1880--they resolved to make the attempt. Much anxiety with regard to avalanches was felt in neighbouring villages, as the sun had lately been very hot, and the snow had become rotten and undermined. Owing to heavy falls during the previous winter, the accumulation of snow was enormous, and thus the two travellers set out under the worst possible auspices. The conductor of the _diligence_ warned them of the danger, and told them on no account to open a window or to make any movement which could shake the coach. He got in with them and sat opposite, looking very worried and anxious. They reached the critical part of their journey, and, to quote Mrs Brewer's words: "Suddenly a low, booming sound, like that of a cannon on a battlefield or a tremendous peal of thunder, broke on our ears, swelling into a deafening crash; and in a moment we were buried in a vast mass of snow. One of the immense piles from the mountain above had crashed down upon us, carrying everything with it. At the same moment we felt a violent jerk of the coach, and heard a kind of sound which expressed terror; but, happily, our vehicle did not turn over, as it seemed likely to do for a minute or so. There we sat--for how long I know not--scarcely able to breathe, the snow pressing heavily against the windows, and utterly blocking out light and air, so that breathing was a painful effort. And now came a curious sensation. It was an utter suspension of thought, and of every mental and physical faculty. "True, in a sort of unconscious way I became aware that the guard was sobbing out a prayer for his wife and children; but it had not the slightest effect on me. "We might have been buried days and nights for all I knew, for I kept no count of time. In reality, I believe it was but a couple of hours between the fall of the avalanche and the first moment of hope, which came in the form of men striking with pickaxes. The sound seemed to come from a long distance--almost, as it were, from another world. "The guard, roused by the noise, said earnestly: 'Ach Gott! I thank Thee.' And then, speaking to us, he said: 'Ladies, help is near!' "Gradually the sound of the digging and the voices of the men grew nearer, till at length one window was open--the one overlooking the valley; and the life-giving air stole softly in upon us. Even now, however, we were told not to move; not that we had any inclination to do so, for we were in a dazed, half-conscious condition. When at length we used our eyes, it was to note that the valley did not seem so deep, and that the villages with their church spires had disappeared; the meaning of it was not far to seek. "We were both good German scholars, and knew several of the dialects, so that we were able to learn a good deal of what had happened by listening to the men's talk. The school inspector in his terror had lost all self-control, and forgetful of the warnings given him, threw himself off the seat and leaped into space, thereby endangering the safety of all. He mercifully fell into one of the clumps of trees some distance down the slope, and so escaped without very much damage to himself, except shock to the system and bruises. The poor horses, however, fared infinitely worse. The weight of the snow lifted the rings from the hooks on the carriage, and at the same time carried the poor brutes down with it into the valley--never again to do a day's work. "The difficulties still before us were very serious. We could neither go backward nor forward, and there was danger of more avalanches falling. The next posting village was still far ahead, and there was no chance of our advancing a step until the brave body of men could cut a way through or make a clearance, and even then time would be required to bring back horses." The ladies were at last extricated from their still dangerous position, and amid a scene of the greatest excitement, arrived at a little Tyrolese village. The people could not do enough to welcome them, and every kindness was shown to them. Thus ended a wonderfully narrow escape for all who were concerned in the adventure. [Illustration: A mountain path.] [Illustration: A village completely buried beneath an avalanche.] [Illustration: Peasants of the mountains.] [Illustration: Terraces cut on the hill sides and planted with trees to prevent the fall of avalanches. _To face_ p. 65.] CHAPTER IV A MONTH BENEATH AN AVALANCHE One of the treasures of collectors of Alpine books is a small volume in Italian by Ignazio Somis. The British Museum has not only a copy of the original, but also a couple of translations, from one of which, published in 1768, I take the following account. I have left the quaint old spelling and punctuation just as they were; they accentuate the vividness and evident truth of this "True and Particular Account of the most Surprising preservation and happy deliverance of three women," who were buried for a month under an avalanche. The occurrence was fully investigated by Ignazio Somis, who visited the village of Bergemoletto, and obtained his narrative from the lips of one of the survivors. "In the month of February and March of the year 1755, we had in Turin, a great fall of rain, the sky having been almost constantly overcast from the ninth of February till the twenty-fourth of March. During this interval, it rained almost every day, but snowed only on the morning of the twenty-first of February, when the liquor of Reaumur's thermometer stood but one degree above the freezing point. Now, as it often snows in the mountains, when it only rains in the plain; it cannot appear surprising that during this interval, there fell vast quantities of snow in the mountains that surround us, and in course, several valancas[3] were formed. In fact, there happened so many in different places on the side of Aosta, Lanzo, Susa, Savoy, and the county of Nice, that by the end of March, no less than two hundred persons had the misfortune of losing their lives by them. Of these overwhelmed by these valancas, three persons, however, Mary Anne Roccia Bruno, Anne Roccia, and Margaret Roccia, had reason to think themselves in other respects, extremely happy, having been dug alive on the twenty-fifth of April, out of a stable, under the ruins of which, they had been buried, the nineteenth of March, about nine in the morning, by a valanca of snow, forty-two feet higher than the roof, to the incredible surprise of all those who saw them, and afterwards heard them relate how they lived all this while, with death, as we may say, continually staring them in the face. "The road from Demonte to the higher valley of Stura, runs amidst many mountains, which, joining one another, and sometimes rising to a great height, form a part of those Alps, by historians and geographers, called maritime Alps, separating the valley of Stura and Piedmont, from Dauphiny and the county of Nice. Towards the middle of the road leading to the top of these mountains, and on the left of the river Stura, we meet with a village called Bergemolo, passing through which village, and still keeping the road through the said valley, we, at about a mile distance, arrive at a little hamlet called Bergemoletto, containing about one hundred and fifty souls. From this place there run two narrow lanes, both to the right and left, one less steep and fatiguing than the other, and in some measure along two valleys, to the mountains. The summit of the mountain makes the horizon an angle much greater than 45°, and so much greater in some places, as to be in a manner perpendicular, so that it is a very difficult matter to climb it, even by a winding path. Now it was from the summit of the aforesaid mountains that fell the valancas of snow, which did so much mischief, and almost entirely destroyed the hamlet of Bergemoletto. "The bad weather which prevailed in so many other places, prevailed likewise in the Foresta of Bergemoletto. By this word Foresta, the Alpineers understand the villages dispersed over the vallies covered with small trees and bushes, and surrounded with high mountains; for it began to snow early in March, and the fall increased so much on the 16, 17, 18 and 19, that many of the inhabitants began to apprehend, and not without reason, that the weight of that which was already fallen, and still continued to fall, might crush their houses, built with stones peculiar to the country, cemented by nothing but mud, and a very small portion of lime, and covered with thatch laid on a roof of shingles and large thin stones, supported by thick beams. They, therefore, got upon their roofs to lighten them of the snow. At a little distance from the church, stood the house of Joseph Roccia, a man of about fifty, husband of Mary Anne, born in Demonte, of the family of Bruno; who, with his son James, a lad of fifteen, had, like his neighbours, got upon the roof of his house on the 19th in the morning in order to lessen the weight on it, and thereby prevent its destruction. In the meantime the clergyman who lived in the neighbourhood, and was about leaving home, in order to repair to the church, and gather his people together to hear mass; perceiving a noise towards the top of the mountains, and turning his trembling eyes towards the quarter from whence he thought it came, discovered two valancas driving headlong towards the village. Wherefore raising his voice he gave Joseph notice, instantly to come down from the roof, to avoid the impending danger, and then immediately retreated himself into his own house. "These two valancas met and united, so as to form but one valanca which continued to descend towards the valley, where, on account of the increase of its bulk, the diminution of its velocity and the insensible declivity of the plane it stopped and arrested by the neighbouring mountain, though it covered a large tract of land, did no damage either to the houses or the inhabitants. Joseph Roccia, who had formerly observed that the fall of one valanca was often attended with that of others, immediately came off the roof at the priest's notice, and with his son fled as hard as he could towards the church, without well knowing, however, which way he went; as is usually the case with the Alpineers, when they guess by the report in the air, that some valanca is falling or seeing it fall with their own eyes. The poor man had scarce advanced forty steps, when hearing his son fall just at his heels, he turned about to assist him, and taking him up, saw the spot on which his house, his stable, and those of some of his neighbours stood, converted into a huge heap of snow, without the least sign of either walls or roofs. Such was his agony at this sight, and at the thoughts of having lost in an instant, his wife, his sister, his family, and all the little he had saved, with many years increasing labour and economy, that hale and hearty, as he was, he immediately, as if heaven and earth were come together, lost his senses, swooned away, and tumbled upon the snow. His son now helped him, and he came to himself little by little; till at last, by leaning upon him, he found himself in a condition to get on the valanca, and, in order to re-establish his health there, set out for the house of his friend, Spirito Roccia, about one hundred feet distant from the spot, where he fell. Mary Anne, his wife, who was standing with her sister-in-law Anne, her daughter Margaret, and her son Anthony, a little boy two years old, at the door of the stable, looking at the people throwing the snow from off the houses, and waiting for the ringing of the bell that was to call them to prayers, was about taking a turn to the house, in order to light a fire, and air a shirt for her husband, who could not but want that refreshment after his hard labour. But before she could set out, she heard the priest cry out to them to come down quickly, and raising her trembling eyes, saw the foresaid valancas set off, and roll down the side of the mountain, and at the same instant heard a horrible report from another quarter, which made her retreat back quickly with her family, and shut the door of the stable. Happy it was for her, that she had time to do so; this noise being occasioned by another immense valanca, the whole cause of all the misery and distress, she had to suffer for so long a time. And it was this very valanca, over which Joseph, her husband was obliged to pass after his fit, in his way to the house of Spirito Roccia. "Some minutes after the fall of the valanca another huge one broke off driving along the valley and beat down the houses which it met in its course. This valanca increased greatly, by the snow over which it passed, in its headlong course, and soon reached with so much impetuosity, the first fallen valanca, it carried away great part of it; then returning back with this reinforcement, it demolished the houses, stopping in the valley which it had already overwhelmed in its first progress. So that the height of the snow, Paris measure, amounted to more than seventy-seven feet; the length of it to more than four hundred and twenty-seven and the breadth above ninety-four. Some people affirm that the concussion of the air occasioned by this valanca, was so great, that it was heard at Bergemolo, and even burst open some doors and windows at that place. This I know that nothing escaped it in Bergemoletto, but a few houses, the church, and the house of John Arnaud. "Being therefore gathered together, in order to sum up their misfortunes, the inhabitants first counted thirty houses overwhelmed; and then every one calling over those he knew, twenty-two souls were missing, of which number, was D. Giulio Caesare Emanuel, their parish priest, who had lived among them forty years. The news of this terrible disaster, soon spread itself over the neighbourhood, striking all those who heard it, with grief and compassion. All the friends and relations of the sufferers, and many others, flocked of their own accord, from Bergemolo and Demonte; and many were dispatched by the magistrates of these places, to try if they could give any relief to so many poor creatures, who, perhaps, were already suffocated by the vast heap of snow that lay upon them; so that by the day following, the number assembled on this melancholy occasion amounted to three hundred. Joseph Roccia, notwithstanding his great love for his wife and family, and his desire to recover part of what he had lost, was in no condition to assist them for five days, owing to the great fright and grief, occasioned by so shocking an event, and the swoon which overtook him at the first sight of it. In the meantime, the rest were trying, if, by driving iron-rods through the hardened snow, they could discover any roofs; but they tried in vain. The great solidity and compactness of the valanca, the vast extent of it in length, breadth and heighth, together with the snow, that still continued to fall in great quantities, eluded all their efforts; so that after some days' labour, they thought proper to desist from their trials, finding that it was throwing away their time and trouble to no purpose. The husband of poor Mary Anne, no sooner recovered his strength, than in company with his son, and Anthony and Joseph Bruno, his brothers-in-law who had come to his assistance from Demonte, where they lived, did all that lay in his power to discover the spot, under which his house, and the stable belonging to it, were situated. But neither himself, nor his relations, could make any discovery capable of affording them the smallest ray of comfort; though they worked hard for many days, now in one place, and now in another, unable to give up the thoughts of knowing for certain, whether any of their family was still alive, or if they had under the snow and the ruins of the stable, found, at once, both death and a grave. But it was all labour lost, so that, at length, he thought proper to return to the house of Spirito Roccia, and there wait, till, the weather growing milder, the melting of the snow should give him an opportunity of paying the last duty to his family, and recovering what little of his substance might have escaped this terrible calamity. "Towards the end of March, the weather, through the lengthening of the days, and the setting in of the warm winds, which continued to blow till about the twentieth of April, began to grow mild and warm; and, of course, the great valanca to fall away by the melting of the snow and ice that composed it; so that little by little, the valley began to assume its pristine form. This change was very sensible, especially by the eighteenth of April, so that the time seemed to be at hand for the surviving inhabitants of Bergemoletto to resume their interrupted labours, with some certainty of recovering a good part of what they had lost on the unfortunately memorable morning of the nineteenth of March. Accordingly, they dispersed themselves over the valanca, some trying in one place, and some in another, now with long spades, and another time with thick rods of iron, and other instruments proper to break the indurated snow. One of the first houses they discovered by this means, was that of Louisa Roccia, in which they found her dead body, and that of one of her sons. Next day, in the house called the confreria, that had two rooms on the ground floor, and one above them, they found the body of D. Giulio Caesare Emanuel, with his beads in his hand. Joseph Roccia, animated by these discoveries, set himself with new spirits about discovering the situation of his house, and the stable belonging to it; and with spades and iron crows, made several and deep holes in the snow, throwing great quantities of earth into them; earth mixed with water, being very powerful in destroying the strong cohesion of snow and ice. On the twenty-fourth, having made himself an opening two feet deep into the valanca, he began to find the snow softer and less difficult to penetrate; wherefore, driving down a long stick, he had the good fortune of touching the ground with it. "It was no small addition to Joseph's strength and spirit, to be thus able to reach the bottom; so that he would have joyfully continued his labour, and might perhaps on that very day, had it not been too far advanced, have recovered some part of what he was looking for, and found that which, assuredly, he by no means expected to meet with. When, therefore, he desisted for that time, it was with much greater reluctance than he had done any of the preceding days. The anxiety of Joseph, during the following night, may well be compared to that of the weather-beaten mariner, who finding himself, after a long voyage, at the mouth of his desired port, is yet, by the coming on of night obliged to remain on the inconstant waves till next morning. Wherefore, at the first gleam of light, he, with his son, hastened back to the spot, where the preceding day he had reached the ground with the stick, and began to work upon it again; but he had not worked long, when lo, to his great surprise, who should he see coming to his assistance but his two brothers-in-law Joseph and Anthony Bruno. "Anthony, it seems, the night between the preceding Thursday and Friday, being then in Delmonte, dreamed that there appeared to him, with a pale and troubled countenance, his sister Mary Anne Roccia, who, with an earnestness intermixed with grief and hope, called upon him for assistance in the following words: "'Anthony, though you all look upon me as dead in the stable where the valanca of snow overwhelmed me on the nineteenth of March, God has kept me alive. Hasten therefore to my assistance, and to relieve me from my present wretched condition; in you, my brother, have I placed all my hopes, dont abandon me; help, help I beseech you.' Anthony's imagination, was so affected by the thoughts of thus seeing his sister, and hearing her utter these piteous words, that he immediately started up, and calling out to his brother Joseph, he acquainted him with what he had seen and heard. They both, therefore, as soon as it was day, set out for Bergemoletto, where they arrived a little before eight, tired and out of breath, for they seemed to have their sister continually before their eyes, pressing them for help and assistance. Having therefore taken a little rest and refreshment, they set out again for the place, where Joseph Roccia, and many others, were hard at work in looking for the wrecks of their houses. Joseph had left the spot, where, the day before he thought he had reached the ground, and was trying to reach it in other places. His brothers-in-law immediately fell to work with him, and making many new holes in the snow, the interior parts of which were not so very hard, with the same iron rods, with earth and with long poles, they at last, about ten, discovered the so long sought for house, but found no dead bodies in it. Knowing that the stable did not lie one hundred feet from the house, they immediately directed their search towards it, and proceeding in the same manner, about noon, they got a long pole through a hole, from whence issued a hoarse and languid voice, which seemed to say: 'help, my dear husband, help, my dear brother, help.' The husband and brother thunderstruck, and at the same time encouraged by these words, fell to their work with redoubled ardour, in order to clear away the snow, and open a sufficient way for themselves, to the place from whence the voice came, and which grew more and more distinct as the work advanced. It was not long, therefore, before they had made a pretty large opening, through which (none minding the danger he exposed himself to) Anthony descended, as into a dark pit, asking who it was, that could be alive in such a place. Mary Anne knew him by his voice, and answered with a trembling and broken accent, intermixed with tears of joy. 'Tis I, my dear brother, who am still alive in company with my daughter and my sister-in-law, who are at my elbow. God, in whom I have always trusted, still hoping that he would inspire you with the thought of coming to our assistance, has been graciously pleased to keep us alive.' God, who had preserved them to this moment, and was willing they should live, inspired Anthony with such strength and spirits, that, notwithstanding the surprise and tenderness with which so joyful and at the same time so sad a sight must have affected him, had presence of mind enough to acquaint his fellow-labourers, all anxiously waiting for the report of his success, that Mary Anne, Margaret, and Anne Roccia were still alive. Whereupon Joseph Roccia, and Joseph Bruno, enlarging the passage as well as they could, immediately followed him into the ruins; whilst the other Alpineers, scattered over the valanca in quest of their lost substance, and the dead bodies of their relations, on the son's calling out to them, flocked round the mouth of the pit, to behold so extraordinary a sight; not a little heightened by that of two live goats scampering out of the opening. In the meantime, those who had descended into the hole, were contriving how to take out of it the poor and more than half dead prisoners, and convey them to some place, where they might recover themselves. The first thing they did was to raise them up, and take them out of the manger in which they had been so long stowed. They then placed them one by one on their shoulders, and lifted them up to those who stood round the mouth of the pit, who with very great difficulty took hold of them by the arms, and drew them out of their dark habitation. Mary Anne, on being exposed to the open air, and seeing the light, was attacked by a very acute pain in the eyes, which greatly weakened her sight, and was attended with so violent a fainting fit, that she had almost like to have lost, in the first moment of her deliverance, that life, which she had so long and with such difficulty preserved. But this was a consequence that might be easily foreseen. She had been thirty-seven days, secluded, in a manner entirely, from the open air; nor had the least ray of light, in all that time, penetrated her pupils. "Her son found means to bring her to herself with a little melted snow, there being nothing else at hand fit for the purpose, and the accident that happened her was improved into a rule for treating the companions of her misfortune. They, therefore, covered all their faces, and wrapped them up so well, as to leave them but just room to breathe, and in this condition took them to the house of John Arnaud, where Mary Anne was entirely recovered from her fit, by a little generous wine. They then directly placed them in some little beds put up in the stable, which was moderately warm, and almost entirely without light, and prepared for them a mess of rye meal gruel, mixed with a little butter; but they could swallow but very little of it." CHAPTER V A MONTH BENEATH AN AVALANCHE--(_continued_) "It is now proper I should say something of the most marvellous circumstance, attending this very singular and surprising accident, I mean their manner of supporting life, during so long and close a confinement. I shall relate what I have heard of it from their own mouths, being the same, in substance, with what Count Nicholas de Brandizzo, intendant of the city and province of Cuneo, heard from them on the sixteenth of May, when, by order of our most benevolent sovereign, he repaired to Bergemoletto, effectually to relieve these poor women, and the rest of the inhabitants, who had suffered by the valanca. "To begin then; on the morning of the twenty-ninth of March, our three poor women, expecting every minute to hear the bell toll for prayers, had in the mean time, taken shelter from the rigour of the weather, in a stable built with stones, such as are usually found in these quarters, with a roof composed of large thin stones, not unlike slate, laid on a beam ten inches square, and covered with a small quantity of straw, and with a pitch sufficient to carry off the rain, hail or snow, that might fall upon it. In the same stable were six goats, (four of which I heard nothing of) an ass and some hens. Adjoining to this stable, was a little room, in which they had fixed a bed, and used to lay up some provisions, in order to sleep in it in bad weather without being obliged to go for anything to the dwelling-house, which lay about one hundred feet from it. I have already taken notice, that Mary Anne was looking from the door of the stable at her husband and son, who were clearing the roof of its snow, when warned by a horrible noise, the signal by which the Alpineer knows the tumbling of the valancas, she immediately took herself in with her sister-in-law, her daughter, and her little boy of two years old, and shut the door, telling them the reason for doing it in such a hurry. Soon after they heard a great part of the roof give way, and some stones fall on the ground, and found themselves involved on all sides with a pitchy darkness; all which they attributed, and with good reason, to the fall of some valanca. Upon this, they for some time thought proper to keep a profound silence, to try if they could hear any noise, and by that means have the comfort of knowing that help was at hand, but they could hear nothing. They therefore set themselves to grope about the stable, but without being able to meet with anything but solid snow. Anne light upon the door, and opened it, hoping she had found out the way to escape the imminent danger they thought they were in of the buildings tumbling about their ears; but she could not distinguish the least ray of light, nor feel any thing but a hard and impenetrable wall of snow, with which she acquainted her fellow prisoners. They, therefore, immediately began to bawl out with all their might; 'help, help, we are still alive'; repeating it several times; but not hearing any answer, Anne put the door to again. They continued to grope about the stable, and Mary Anne having light upon the manger, it occurred to her, that, as it was full of hay, they might take up their quarters there, and enjoy some repose, till it should please the Almighty to send them assistance. The manger was about twenty inches broad, and lay along a wall, which, by being on one side supported by an arch, was enabled to withstand the shock, and upheld the chief beam of the roof, in such a manner, as to prevent the poor women from being crushed to pieces by the ruins. Mary Anne placed herself in the manger, putting her son by her, and then advised her daughter and her sister-in-law to do so too. Upon this, the ass which was tied to the manger, frightened by the noise, began to bray and prance at a great rate; so that, fearing lest he should bring the parapet of the manger, or even the wall itself about their ears; they immediately untied the halter, and turned him adrift. In going from the manger, he stumbled upon a kettle that happened to lie in the middle of the stable, which put Mary Anne upon picking it up, and laying it by her, as it might serve to melt the snow in for their drink, in case they should happen to be confined long enough to want that resource. Anne, approving this thought, got down, and groping on the floor till she had found it, came back to the manger. "In this situation the good women continued many hours, every moment expecting to be relieved from it; but, at last, being too well convinced, that they had no immediate relief to expect, they began to consider how they might support life, and what provisions they had with them for that purpose. Anne recollected that the day before she had put some chestnuts into her pocket, but, on counting them, found they amounted only to fifteen. Their chief hopes, therefore, and with great reason now rested on thirty or forty cakes, which two days before had been laid up in the adjoining room. The reader may well imagine, though Anne had never told me a word of it, with what speed and alertness she must, on recollecting these cakes, have got out of the manger, to see and find out the door of the room where they lay; but it was to no purpose; she roved and roved about the stable to find out what she wanted, so that she was obliged to come as she went, and take up her seat again amongst her fellow-sufferers, who still comforted themselves with the hopes of being speedily delivered from that dark and narrow prison. In the mean while, finding their appetite return, they had recourse to their chestnuts. The rest of the chestnuts they reserved for a future occasion. They then addressed themselves to God, humbly beseeching him to take compassion on them, and vouchsafe in his great mercy to rescue them from their dark grave, and from the great miseries they must unavoidably suffer, in case it did not please him to send them immediate assistance. They spent many hours in ejaculations of this kind, and then thinking it must be night, they endeavoured to compose themselves. Margaret and the little boy, whose tender years prevented their having any idea of what they had to suffer in their wretched situation, or any thought of death, and of what they must suffer, before they could be relieved, fell asleep. But it was otherwise with Mary Anne and Anne, who could not get the least rest, and spent the whole night in prayer, or in speaking of their wretched condition, and comforting one another with the hopes of being speedily delivered from it. As it seemed to them, after many hours, that it was day again, they endeavoured to keep up their spirits with the thoughts, that Joseph with the rest of their friends and relations not getting any intelligence of their situation, would not fail of doing all that lay in their power to come at them. The sensation of hunger was earliest felt by the two youngest; and the little boy crying out for something to eat, and there being nothing for him but the chestnuts, Anne gave him three. "I said, that these women seemed to have some notion of the approach of day and night, but I should never have dreamed in what manner this idea could be excited in them, shut up as they were in a body of ice, impervious to the least ray of light, had not they themselves related it to me. The hens shut up in the same prison, were it seems the clocks, which by their clucking all together, made them think the first day that it was night, and then again after some interval that it was day again. This is all the notion they had of day and night for two weeks together; after which, not hearing the hens make any more noise, they no longer knew when it was day or night. "This day the poor women and the boy supported themselves with their chestnuts; and at the return of the usual signal of night, the boy and Margaret went to sleep; while the mother and aunt spent it in conversation and prayer. On the next day the ass by his braying, gave now and then, for the last time, some signs of life. On the other hand, the poor prisoners had something to comfort themselves with; for they discovered two goats making up to the manger. This, therefore, was a joyful event, and they gave the goats some of the hay they sat upon in the manger, shrunk up with their knees to their noses. It then came into Anne's head to try if she could not get some milk from the milch goat; and recollecting that they used to keep a porringer under the manger for that purpose, she immediately got down to look for it, and happily found it. The goat suffered herself to be milked, and yielded almost enough to fill the cup which contained above a pint. On this they lived the third day. The night following the boy and the girl slept as usual, while neither of the two others closed their eyes. Who can imagine how long the time must have appeared to them, and how impatient they must have been to see an end to their sufferings? This, after offering their prayers to the Almighty, was the constant subject of their conversation. 'O, my husband,' Mary Anne used to cry out, 'if you two are not buried under some of the valancas and dead; why do not you make haste to give me, your sister, and children, that assistance which we so much stand in need of? We are thank God, still alive, but cannot hold out much longer, so it will soon be too late to think of us.' 'Ah, my dear brother,' added Anne, 'in you next to God, have we placed all our trust. We are alive, indeed, and it depends upon you to preserve our lives, by digging us out of the snow and the ruins, in which we lie buried.' 'But let us still hope,' both of them added, 'that as God has been pleased to spare our lives, and provide us with the means of prolonging it, he will still in his great mercy put it into the hearts of our friends and relations to use all their endeavours to save us.' To this discourse succeeded new prayers, after which they composed themselves as well as they could, in order to get, if possible, a little sleep. "The hens having given the usual signal of the return of day, they began again to think on the means of spinning out their lives. Mary Anne bethought herself anew of the cakes put up in the adjacent room; and upon which, could they but get at them, they might subsist a great while without any other nourishment. On the first day of their confinement, they had found in the manger a pitch fork, which they knew used to be employed in cleaning out the stable, and drawing down hay through a large hole in the hay-loft, which lay over the vault. Anne observed, that such an instrument might be of service in breaking the snow, and getting at the cakes, could they but recover the door leading into the little room. She, therefore, immediately got out of the manger, from which she had not stirred since the first day, and groping about, sometimes meeting with nothing but snow, sometimes with the wall, and sometimes loose stones, she, at length, light upon a door, which she took for the stable door, and endeavoured to open it as she had done the first day, but without success; an evident sign that the superincumbent snow had acquired a greater degree of density, and pressed more forcibly against it. She, therefore, made step by step, the best of her way back to the manger, all the time conversing with her fellow-sufferers; and taking the fork with her, continued to rove and grope about, till at last she light upon a smooth and broad piece of wood, which to the touch had so much the appearance of the little door, as to make her hope she had at last found what she had been so earnestly looking for. She then endeavoured to open it with her hand, but finding it impossible, told the rest that she had a mind to employ the pitch fork; but Mary Anne dissuaded her from doing so. 'Let us,' said she, 'leave the cakes where they are a little longer, and not endanger our lives any further, by endeavouring to preserve them. Who knows but with the fork, you might make such destruction, as to bring down upon our heads, that part of the stable that still continues together, and which, in its fall, could not fail of crushing us to pieces. No, God keep us from that misfortune. Lay down your fork Anne, and come back to us, submitting yourself to the holy will of the Almighty, and patiently accept at his hands whatever he may please to send us.' Anne, moved by such sound and affecting arguments and reasons, immediately let the fork fall out of her hands, and returned to the manger. 'Let us,' continued Mary Anne, 'let us make as much as we can of our nursing goats, and endeavour to keep them alive by supplying them with hay. Here is a good deal in the manger, and it occurs to me, that when that is gone, we may supply them from another quarter, for by putting up my hand, trying what was above me, I have discovered that there is hay in the loft, and that the hole to it is open, and just over our heads; so that we have nothing to do, but to pull it down for the goats, whose milk we may subsist upon, till it shall please God to dispose otherwise of us." This reasoning was not only sound in itself, but supported by facts; for ever since their confinement, they had heard stones fall from time to time upon the ground, and these stones could be no others than those of the building, which the shock of the valanca had first loosened, and which the weight it every day acquired by encreasing in density, afterwards enabled it to displace. Wherefore, had she happened to disturb with the pitch-fork, as there was the greatest reason to fear she might, any of those parts, which, united together, served to keep up the beam that supported the great body of snow, under which they lay buried, the fall of the stable, and their own destruction, must have infallibly been the consequence of it. "This day the sensation of hunger was more and more lively and troublesome, without their having anything to allay it with but snow, and the milk yielded them by one of the goats their fellow prisoners. I say one of the goats for as yet they had milked but one of them, thinking it would be useless, or rather hurtful, even if they could, to take any milk from that in kid. Anne had recourse to the other, and in the whole day, got from her about two pints of milk, on which, with the addition of a little snow, they subsisted." The little boy, unable to struggle against the terrible conditions, grew rapidly weaker and weaker, and the time had now come when he passed painlessly away. "The death of this poor child proved the severest trial that the three women, the two eldest especially, had to suffer during their long confinement; and from this unfortunate day, the fear of death, which they considered as at no great distance, began to haunt them more and more. The little nourishment, which the goat yielded the poor women, had made them suffer greatly on the preceding days; they were, besides, benumbed, or rather frozen with the intense cold. Add to this the necessary, but inconvenient and tormenting posture of their feet, knees, and every other part of their bodies; the snow, which melting over their heads, perpetually trickled down their backs, so that their clothes, and their whole bodies were perfectly drenched with it: they were often on the point of swooning away, and obliged to keep themselves from fainting, by handling the snow, and putting some of it into their mouths; the thirst with which their mouths were constantly burnt up; the thoughts, that in all this time no one had been at the pains to look for and relieve them; the consideration, that all they had hitherto suffered, was nothing in comparison of what they had still to suffer before they could recover their liberty, or sink under the weight of all the evils which encompassed them; all these, certainly, were circumstances sufficient to render them to the last degree, wretched and miserable. Add to this, that the milk of their fond and loving nurse, fell away little by little, till at length, instead of about two pints, which she, in the beginning used to yield, they could not now get so much as a pint from her. The hay that lay in the manger was all out, and it was but little the poor women could draw out of the hole which lay above them; so that as the goats had but little fodder, little sustenance could be expected from that which they thought proper to milk. These animals were become so tame and familiar, in consequence of the fondness shewn them, that they always came on the first call to the person that was to milk them, affectionately licking her face and hands. Anne, encouraged by this tameness of theirs, bethought herself of accustoming them to leap upon the manger, and from thence upon her shoulders, so as to reach the hole of the hay-loft, and feed themselves; so apt is hard necessity to inspire strength and ingenuity. She began by the goat that yielded them milk, helping her up into the manger, and then putting her upon her shoulders. This had the desired effect, the animal being thereby enabled to reach much further with its head, than they could with their hands. They did then the same by the other goat, from whom, as soon as she should drop her kid, they expected new relief. She, too, in the same manner, found means to get at the hay, which afforded the poor women some relief in the midst of their pressing necessity. After this day, the goats required no further assistance, they so soon learned to leap of themselves on the manger, and from thence on the women's shoulders. But we must not conclude that hunger was the chief of the poor women's sufferings; far from it. After the first days, during which it proved a sore torment to them, they through necessity, grew so accustomed to very little and very light nourishment, that they no longer felt any sensation of that kind, but lived contentedly on the small quantity of milk they could get from their goat, mixed with a little snow. Their breath was what gave them most uneasiness; for it began to be very difficult on the fifth or sixth day, every inspiration being attended with the sensation of a very heavy and almost insupportable load upon them. "They now had lost all means of guessing at the returns of night and day, and their only employment was to recommend themselves fervently to God, beseeching him to take compassion of them, and at length, put an end to their miseries, which increased from day to day. At last, their nurse growing dry, they found themselves without any milk, and obliged to live upon snow alone for two or three days, Mary Anne not approving an expedient proposed by her sister. This was to endeavour to find the carcasses of the hens; for as they had not heard them for some days past, they had sufficient reason to think they were dead; and then eat them, as the only thing with which they could prolong life. But Mary Anne, rightly judging that it would be almost impossible to strip them clean of their feathers, and that besides, the flesh might be so far putrified, as to do them more harm than good, thought proper to dissuade her sister from having recourse to this expedient. But the unspeakable providence of God, whose will it was that they should live, provided them with new means of subsistence, when least they expected it, by the kidding of the other goat. By this event, they judged themselves to be about the middle of April; wherefore, after offering God their most humble thanks, for having preserved them so long, in the midst of so many, and such great difficulties they again beseeched him to assist them effectually, till they could find an opportunity of escaping their doleful prison, and see an end to their great sufferings. Their hopes of this their humble supplication being heard, were raised on the appearance of this new supply, and on their reflecting that the snow begins to thaw in April, in consequence of which that about the stable would soon dissolve enough to let some ray of light break in upon them. Mary Anne told me, that, though she was thoroughly sensible of the badness of her condition, in which it was impossible for her to hold out much longer, and saw it every day grow worse and worse; she never, however, despaired of her living to be delivered. For my part, I cannot sufficiently admire the courage and intrepidity of Anne, who told me, that in all this time she never let a tear escape her but once. This was on its occurring to her, that, as they must at length perish for want, it might fall to her lot to die last. For the thought of finding herself amidst the dead bodies of her sister and her niece, herself too in a dying condition, terrified and afflicted her to such a degree, that she could no longer command her tears, but wept bitterly. "I observed, that the goat had kidded. This event afforded the poor women a new supply of milk, Anne for a while getting two porringers at a time from her, with which they recruited themselves a little. But as the goats began to fall short of hay, the milk of the only one that gave them any, began to lessen in proportion, so that at length they saw themselves reduced to a single, and even half a porringer. It was, therefore, happy for them, that the time drew nigh, in which God had purposed to rescue them from their horrible prison and confinement, and put an end to their sufferings. One time they thought they could hear a noise of some continuance at no great distance from them. This was probably the 20th, when the parish priest's body was found. And, upon it, they all together raised their weak and hoarse voices, crying out, 'Help, help!' but the noise ceased, and they this time neither saw nor heard anything else that might serve as a token of their deliverance being at hand. However, this noise alone was sufficient to make them address God with greater fervour than ever, beseeching him to have compassion on them, and to confirm them still more and more in their warm hopes, that the end of their long misery was not far off. In fact, they again heard another noise, and that nearer them, as though something had fallen to the ground. On this they again raised their voices, and again cried out, 'Help, help': but no one answered, and soon after the noise itself entirely ceased. Their opinion concerning this noise, and in this they certainly were not mistaken, was that it came from the people, who were at work to find them, and who left off at the approach of night, and went home with a design to return to their labour the next morning. After the noise of the body fallen to the ground in their neighbourhood, they seemed for the first time to perceive some glimpse of light. The appearance of it scared Anne and Margaret to the last degree, as they took it for a sure fore-runner of death, and thought it was occasioned by the dead bodies; for it is a common opinion with the peasants that those wandering wild-fires, which one frequently sees in the open country, are a sure presage of death to the persons constantly attended by them, which ever way they turn themselves; and they accordingly call them death fires. But Mary Anne, was very far from giving in to so silly a notion. On the contrary the light inspired her with new courage, and she did all that lay in her power to dissipate the fears of her sister and daughter, revive their hopes in God, and persuade them that their deliverance and the end of all their sufferings was at hand; insisting that this light could be no other than the light of heaven, which had, at last, reached the stable, in consequence of the valanca's melting, and still more in consequence of the constant boring and digging into it by their relations, in order to come at their dead bodies. Mary Anne guessed right for it was the next day that Anthony descended into the ruins of the stable, and to his unspeakable surprise found the poor women alive, blessing and exalting the most high, and restored them from darkness to light, from danger to security, from death to life, by drawing them out of the manger, and removing them to the house of Joseph Arnaud, where they continued to the end of July. "Thirty-seven entire days did these poor women live in the most horrible sufferings occasioned no less by filth and the disagreeable posture they were confined to, than by cold and hunger; but the Lord was with them. He kept them alive, and they are still living, in a new cottage built the same year in the Foresta of Bergemoletto, at no great distance from their former habitation." CHAPTER VI AN EXCITING CAUCASIAN ASCENT The following account of the ascent of Gestola, in the Central Caucasus, is taken from _The Alpine Journal_, and the author, Mr C. T. Dent, has most kindly revised it for this work, and has added a note as follows: "At the time (1886) when this expedition was made, the topography of the district was very imperfectly understood. The mountain climbed was originally described as Tetnuld Tau--Tau = Mountain. Since the publication of the original paper a new survey of the whole district has been carried out by the Russian Government and the nomenclature much altered. The peak of Tetnuld is really to the south of Gestola. The nomenclature has in the following extract been altered so as to correspond with that at present in use and officially sanctioned." The party consisted of Mr Dent, the late Mr W. F. Donkin, and two Swiss guides. They had safely accomplished the first part of their ascent of a hitherto unclimbed peak, and were on the ridge and face to face with the problem of how to reach the highest point. After describing the glorious scenery which lay around them, Mr Dent writes: "Woven in between all these peaks lay a wilderness of crevassed slopes, jagged rock ridges, and stretching glaciers, bewildering in their beauty and complexity. To see the wondrous sights that were crowded into those few minutes while we remained on the ridge, we would willingly have gone five times further and fared ten times worse. In high spirits we turned to the left (S.S.E.), and began our journey along the ridge which was to lead us to Gestola, ever keeping an eye on the snowy form of Tetnuld, and marvelling whether it would overtop our peak or not. For a few steps, and for a few only, all went well. The snow was in good order on the ridge, but we had to leave this almost immediately and make S.W. in order to skirt the heights which still intervened between us and our peak. The ice began to change its character. Two or three steps were cut with a few strokes of the axe, and then all went well again for a time. Then more steps, and a more ringing sound as the axe fell. We seemed, too, however we might press on, to make no impression on this first slope. Our doubt returned; the leader paused, drew up the rope, and bit at a fragment of ice as he gazed anxiously upwards over the face. No! we were on the right track, and must stick to it if we would succeed. For an hour and a quarter we kept at it in silence, save for the constant ringing blows of the axe. Our courage gradually oozed out, for when we had worked back to the ridge again, we seemed to have made no progress at all. The top of the mountain far above was already swathed in cloud, and a distant storm on the south side was only too obvious. Another little peak was won before we looked about again, but the summit seemed no nearer. The exertion had begun to tell and the pace became slower. Some one remarked that he felt hungry, and we all thereupon realised our empty state, so we fortified ourselves for further efforts on a dainty repast of steinbock, black bread a week old, and water--invigorating victuals and exhilarating drink, rather appropriate to the treadmill kind of exercise demanded. It is under conditions such as these that strange diet tells on the climber; but even more trying and more weakening than the poor quality of the food was the want of sleep from which we had suffered for a good many nights. In the language of science, our vital force and nervous energy were becoming rather rapidly exhausted, or, to put it more colloquially and briefly, we were awfully done. Three hours more at least was the estimate, and meanwhile the weather was growing worse and worse. Reflecting that all points fall to him who knows how to wait and stick to it, we pressed on harder to escape from the dispiriting thoughts that suggested themselves, and almost of a sudden recognised that the last of the deceptive little tops had been left behind us, and that we were fighting our way up the final peak. Better still, Tetnuld, which for so long had seemed to tower above us, was fast sinking in importance, and there really seemed now, as we measured the peak with the clinometer between the intervals of step-cutting, to be little difference between the two points. The air was so warm and oppressive that we were able to dispense with gloves. One of the guides suffered from intense headache, but the rest of us, I fancy, felt only in much the same condition as a man does at the finish of a hard-run mile race. The clouds parted above us for a while, mysteriously, as it seemed, for there was no wind to move them; but we could only see the slope stretching upwards, and still upwards. Yet we could not be far off now. Again we halted for a few seconds, and as we glanced above, we mentally took stock of our strength, for there was no question the pleasure had been laborious. Some one moved, and we were all ready on the instant. To it once more, and to the very last victory was doubtful. True, the summit had seemed close enough when the last break in the swirling clouds had enabled us to catch a glimpse of what still towered above; but our experience of Swiss snow mountains was long enough to make us sceptical as to apparent tops, and possibly the Caucasian giants were as prone to deceive as the human pigmies that crawled and burrowed at their bases. "Still anxious, still questioning success, we stepped on, and the pace increased as the doubt persisted. It is often said to be impossible, by those who don't try, to explain why the second ascent of a mountain always appears so much easier than the first; some explanation may be found in the fact that on a virgin peak the uncertainty is really increasing during the whole time, and the climax comes in the last few seconds. Every step upwards make success more probable, and at the same time, would make failure more disappointing. In fact, the only periods when we are morally certain of success on a new expedition are before the start and when victory is actually won. Still, we could hardly believe that any insuperable obstacle would now turn us back; yet all was new and uncertain, and the conditions of weather intensified the anxiety. The heavy stillness of the air seemed unnatural, and made the mind work quicker. The sensibility became so acute that if we ceased working and moving for a moment the silence around was unendurable, and seemed to seize hold of us. A distant roll of thunder came almost as a relief. A step or two had to be cut, and the delay appeared interminable. Suddenly, a glimpse of a dark patch of rocks appeared above looming through the mist. The slope of the ridge became more gentle for a few yards. Our attention was all fixed above, and we ascended some distance without noticing the change. Another short rise, and we were walking quickly along the ridge. We stopped suddenly; the rocks we had seen so recently, had sunk below us on our left, while in front the _arête_ could be followed with the eye, sloping away gradually for a few yards, and then plunging sharply down to a great depth. It was all over; through fair weather and through foul we had succeeded; and there was yet another peak to the credit of the Alpine Club. [Illustration: A TYPICAL CAUCASIAN LANDSCAPE. _To face_ p. 105. By Signor Vittorio Sella.] "It was not a time for words. Burgener turned to us and touched the snow with his hand, and we sat down in silence. Almost on the instant as we took our places a great burst of thunder rolled and echoed around--a grim salvo of Nature's artillery. The sudden sense of rest heightened the effect of the oppressive stillness that followed. Never have I felt the sense of isolation so complete. Gazing in front into the thin mists, the very presence of my companions seemed an unreality. The veil of wreathing vapour screened the huge panorama of the ice-world from our sight. The black thunderclouds drifting sullenly shut out the world below. No man knew where we were; we had reached our furthest point in a strange land. We were alone with Nature, far from home, and far from all that we were familiar with. Strange emotions thrilled the frame and quickened the pulse. Weird thoughts crowded through the mind--it was not a time for words. Believe me, under such conditions a man will see further across the threshold of the unknown than all the book-reading or psychological speculation in the world will ever reveal to him. "Coming back to considerations more prosaic and practical, we found that it was 1.15 P.M. We realised, too, that the ascent had been very laborious and exhausting, while there was no doubt that evil times were in store for us. There were no rocks at hand to build a cairn, but we reflected that the snow was soft, and that our footsteps would easily be seen on the morrow. The aneroid marked the height we had attained as 16,550 feet.[4] A momentary break in the mist gave us a view of Dych Tau, and we had just time to get a compass observation. After a stay of fifteen minutes we rose and girded ourselves for the descent. I think we all felt that the chief difficulty was yet to come, but we had little idea of what was actually to follow. Directly after we had left the summit a few puffs of wind began to play around and some light snow fell. Still, it was not very cold, and if the storm would only keep its distance all might be well. Down the first slope we made our way rapidly enough, and could have gone faster had we not deemed it wise to husband our strength as much as possible. In an hour and twenty minutes we reached the place where we had left the provisions and the camera. The feast was spread, but did not find favour. Never did food look so revolting. The bread seemed to have turned absolutely black, while the steinbock meat looked unfit to keep company with garbage in a gutter; so we packed it up again at once, more from a desire to hide it from our eyes than from any idea that it might look more appetising later on. Andenmatten's headache had become much worse, and he could scarcely at starting stand steady in his steps. Possibly his suffering was due to an hour or two of intensely hot sun, which had struck straight down on us during the ascent. I could not at the moment awaken much professional interest in his case, but the symptoms, so far as I could judge, were more like those experienced by people in diving-bells--were pressure effects in short--for the pain was chiefly in the skull cavities. I may not here enter into technical details, and can only remark now that though Andenmatten suffered the most it by no means followed on that account that his head was emptier than anybody else's. In due course we came to the ice-slope up and across which we had cut our way so laboriously in the morning; here, at least, we thought we should make good progress with little trouble; but the sun had struck full on this part of the mountain, and all the steps were flattened out and useless. Every single step ought to have been worked at with as much labour as in the morning, but it was impossible to do more than just scratch out a slight foothold, as we made our way round again to the ridge. Below, on the west side, the slope plunged down into the Ewigkeit, and our very best attention had to be given in order to avoid doing the same. It was one of the worst snow faces I ever found myself on, perhaps, under the conditions, the worst. The direction in which we were travelling and the angle of the slope made the rope utterly useless. Close attention is very exhausting: much more exertion is required to walk ten steps, bestowing the utmost possible care on each movement, than to walk a hundred up or down a much steeper incline when the angle demands a more accustomed balance. Not for an instant might we relax our vigilance till, at 5.30 P.M., we reached once more the ridge close to the place where we had forced our way through the cornice in the morning. "We had little time to spare, and hurrying up to the point, looked anxiously down the snow wall. A glance was sufficient to show that the whole aspect of the snow had entirely altered since the morning. Burgener's expression changed suddenly, and a startled exclamation, which I trust was allowed to pass unrecorded, escaped from him. Andenmatten brought up some stones and rolled them down over the edge; each missile carried down a broad hissing band of the encrusting snow which had given us foot-hold in the morning, and swept the ice-slope beneath as black and bare as a frozen pond; here and there near rocks the stones stopped and sank deeply and gently into the soft, treacherous compound. The light had begun to fail, and snow was falling more heavily as we pressed on to try for some other line of descent. A hundred yards further along the ridge we looked over again; the condition of the snow was almost the same, but the wall was steeper, and looked at its very worst as seen through the mist. Some one now suggested that we might work to the north-west end of the ridge and make our way down to the pass by the ice-fall. We tramped on as hard as possible, only to find at the end of our journey that the whole mass seemed abruptly cut away far above the Adine Col, and no line of descent whatever was visible. We doubled back on our tracks till we came within a few yards of the summit of a small peak on the ridge, the height of which was probably not less than 15,000 feet. Already the cold was numbing and our wet clothes began to stiffen; again we peered over the wall, but the rocks were glazed, snow-covered, and impossible. The leader stopped, looked right and left along the ridge, and said, 'I don't know what to do!' For the moment we seemed hopelessly entrapped; the only conceivable place of shelter for the night was a patch of rocks close to the summit of the peak near at hand, and for these we made. It was an utter waste of time. Apart from sleeping, we could not have remained there an hour, for we met the full force of the wind, which by this time had risen considerably, and was whirling the driving snow into every crack and cranny. What might have begun as a temporary rest would infallibly have ended in a permanent occupation. Indeed, the cold would have been far too intense that night for us to have lived on any part of the bleak ridge. The situation was becoming desperate. 'We must get down off the ridge and out of the wind.' 'Ay,' said Burgener, 'we must, I know; but where?' The circumstances did not call for reasonable answers, and so we said, 'Anywhere! To stay up here now means that we shall never get down at all.' Burgener looked up quickly as if to say no, but hesitated, and then muttered, 'That is true. Then what will you do? There is no way down anywhere along the wall with the snow as it is now. There are great ice-slopes a little way down.' As he spoke he leant over and looked along the wall for confirmation of his opinions. A little way off a rib of rock, blacker than the rest, showed through the mist. We both saw it at the same time; Burgener hesitated, looked at it again, and then facing round glanced at the prospect above. The wind was stronger and colder and the snow was driving more heavily. There was no room for doubt. We must put it to the touch and take the risk. We turned again, and in a few minutes had squeezed ourselves through the cornice, and were fairly launched on the descent. "We were now at a much higher level on the ridge than at the point we had struck in ascending. It was only possible to see a few yards down; the rocks looked appallingly steep, glazed, and grizzly, and we knew not what we were coming to. But at any rate we were moving, and in a stiller atmosphere soon forgot the cold. We went fast, but only by means of doing all we knew, for the climbing was really difficult. It was a case of every man for himself, and every man for the rest of the party. Now was the time to utilise all that we had ever learned of mountain craft. Never before, speaking for myself only, have I felt so keenly the pleasure of being united to thoroughly trustworthy and good mountaineers; it was like the rush of an eight-oar, where the sense of motion and the swish through the water alone are sufficient to make every member of the crew put all his strength into each stroke. The mind was too active to appreciate the pain of fatigue, and so we seemed strong again. Now on the rocks, which were loose and crumbly in parts, elsewhere big and glazed, now in deep snow, now on hard crusts, we fought our way down. So rapid was the descent that, when the opportunity offered, we looked anxiously through the mist in the hope of seeing the glacier beneath. Surely we had hit on a possible line of descent to the very bottom. But there was not a moment for the grateful repose so often engendered by enquiring minds on the mountains. We were racing against time, or at least against the malevolent powers of darkness. Down a narrow flat couloir of rock of no slight difficulty we seemed to go with perfect ease, but the rocks suddenly ceased and gave way to an ill-favoured snow-slope. The leader stopped abruptly and turned sharp to the right. A smooth ice-gully some 30 feet wide separated us from the next ridge of rock. The reason for the change of direction was evident enough when Burgener pointed it out. As long as the line of descent kept to the side that was more sheltered during the day from the sun, so long was the snow fairly good. Our leader judged quickly, and with the soundest reasoning, as it proved directly afterwards, that the line we had been following would infallibly lead, if pursued further, to snow as treacherous as that with which we were now so familiar. Across the ice-slope then we must cut, perhaps a dozen or fifteen steps. "The first two or three Burgener made vigorously enough, but when within 10 or 15 feet of the rocks the extra effort told. He faltered suddenly; his blow fell listlessly, and he leant against the slope, resting hands and head on his axe. 'I am almost exhausted,' he said faintly, as he turned round to us, while his quivering hands and white lips bore evidence to the severity of the exertion. So for a minute or two we stood in our tracks. A word of encouragement called up what seemed almost a last effort, some little notches were cut, and we gained the rocks again. A trickling stream of water was coursing down a slab of rock, and at this we gulped as eagerly as a fevered patient. Standing on the projecting buttress, we looked anxiously down, and caught sight at last of the glacier. It seemed close to us; the first few steps showed that Burgener's judgment was right; he had changed the line of descent at exactly the right moment, and at the best possible place. Down the last few hundred feet we were able to go as fast as before. The level glacier beneath seemed in the darkness to rise up suddenly and meet us. We tumbled over the _bergschrund_, ran down a short slope on the farther side of it, and stood in safety on the glacier, saved by as fine a piece of guiding as I have ever seen in the mountains. We looked up at the slope. To our astonishment all was clear, and I daresay had been so for long. Above, in a blue-black frosty sky, the stars were winking merrily; the mists had all vanished as by magic. No doubt the cold, which would have settled us had we stayed on the ridge, assisted us materially in the descent by improving the snow. "There seemed still just light enough to search for our tracks of the morning across the glacier, and we bore well to the right in the hope of crossing them. I fancy that the marks would have been really of little use, but, anyhow, we could not find them, and so made a wide sweep across the upper part of the snow basin. As a result we were soon in difficulty with the crevasses, and often enough it seemed probable that we should spend the rest of the night in wandering up and down searching for snow bridges. But we reached at last a patch of shale and rock, which we took to be the right bank of the little glacier we had crossed in the morning. Our clothes were wet, and the cold was becoming so sharp that it was wisely decided, against my advice, to push on if possible to the tent at once. For some three or four hours did we blunder and stumble over the moraine, experiencing not a few tolerably severe falls as we did so. Andenmatten selected his own line of descent, and in a few minutes we had entirely lost sight of him. It was too dark to find our way across the glacier, and we could only hope by following the loose stone ridge to make our way to the right place. So we stuck to the rocks, occasionally falling and nearly sticking on their detestably sharp points. Even a Caucasian moraine leads somewhere if you keep to it long enough, and as we turned a corner, the huge glimmering mass of Dych Tau, towering up in front, showed that the end of our journey was not far off. Presently the little white outline of the tent appeared, but we regarded it with apathy, and made no effort to quicken our movements, although the goal was in sight; it seemed to require, in our semi-comatose condition, almost an effort to stop. As we threw open the door of the tent the welcome sight of divers packets, neatly arranged in a corner, met our gaze. The head policeman had proved himself an honour to his sex, an exception to his compatriots, and a credit to the force. There were bread, sugar, rice, meat, and firewood--yet we neither spoke nor were moved. Andenmatten spurned the parcels with his foot and revealed the lowermost. A scream of delight went up, for they had found a packet of tobacco. The spell was broken, and once more all were radiant. Such is man. A strange compound--I refer to the tobacco--it proved to be, that would neither light nor smoke, and possessed as its sole property the power of violently disagreeing with the men. It was past midnight before the expedition was over. There were few preliminaries observed before going to bed. I don't think that even Donkin took more than a quarter of an hour in arranging a couch to his satisfaction, and placing a very diminutive air-cushion on anatomical principles in exactly the right place, while Andenmatten was fast asleep in two minutes, his head pillowed gently on some cold mutton, and his boots reposing under the small of his back. Something weighed on our minds as we too lay down and tried to sleep. The towering cone of Tetnuld, the distant view of Uschba, Elbruz, and the giant Dych Tau, the rock and snow-slopes, pictured themselves one after another as dissolving views on the white walls of the tent. The expedition was over, but the pleasure and the impressions it had evoked were not. Faster and faster followed the visions as in delirium. I sat up, and in the excitement of the moment dealt a great blow at the nearest object, which, as it chanced, was Andenmatten's ribs. I shouted out to my companion. A muffled 'hulloa' was the response, and he too rose up. 'What is it?' 'By Heavens! it is the finest climb we have ever made.' And so it was." CHAPTER VII A MELANCHOLY QUEST The accident in the Caucasus in 1888, by which Messrs Donkin and Fox and their two Swiss guides lost their lives, was one of the saddest that has ever happened in the annals of mountaineering. I will not dwell on it, but will rather pass on to the search expedition, a short account of whose operations will serve to illustrate how a thorough knowledge of mountaineering may be utilised in finding a conjectured spot in an unmapped region in the snow world. The year after the accident--for the season when it occurred was too advanced for a thorough search to be then undertaken--a party of four Englishmen, Messrs Douglas Freshfield, Clinton Dent, Hermann Woolley, and Captain Powell, with Maurer of the Bernese Oberland as leading guide, set out from England to try and ascertain how the accident happened, and, if possible, recover the remains. They succeeded, in the course of a profoundly interesting journey, in finding the last camp of their friends, and from Mr Clinton Dent's fine description in _The Alpine Journal_ I make, with his kind consent, the following extracts. They show how well the old school of climbers learnt all the routine of their art, and how superior is the trained mountaineer of any nationality to the inexperienced dweller amongst mountains, who is utterly unable to advance a single step upon them. Having journeyed to the district and got over all the easier ground at first met with, the party was now fairly embarked in the region of ice and snow. "The day was well advanced," writes Mr Dent, "and it is only on rare occasions in the Central Caucasus that the valleys and sky are free from cloud at such an hour. But not a vestige of mist was to be seen. The conditions were not merely of good omen, but were also in the hightest degree fortunate, for the object of our search seemed very minute in the presence of such gigantic surroundings. The air was clear and soft, and the snow in perfect order for walking. We worked our way due west, and gradually, as we turned the buttress of rock, a steep and broad ice-gully came into view, leading up to the pass. This consisted of a broad snow-topped depression, from 1500 to 1800 feet above the snow-field. On the right or east of the pass the ridge ran sharply up to the pinnacle already mentioned, while on the left the ridge, broken up on its crest by great towers of rock, stretched away to the summit of Dych Tau, the peak of which from our point of view was not visible. A careful inspection of the rocks with the telescope revealed nothing. A possible place for a bivouac might have been found at any point on the rocks below the pass, but no particularly likely spot was evident. It was conceivable too, of course, that the travellers had discovered a more suitable place on the Ullu Auz side, close to the summit of the pass. In any case our plan of action was clear, and we set forth without delay to ascend the wall. Two long ribs of rock lying on the right of the ice-gully offered the best means of access. Both looked feasible, but it was only after a moment's hesitation that the left-hand one was selected, as it seemed more broken, was broader, and ran up higher. If the right-hand rib had been chosen, we might conceivably have missed the object of our search altogether. We made our way up the rocks without any great difficulty. Half-melted masses of snow constantly hissed down the ice-gully as we ascended, and the great chasm that extends along the base of the cliff was choked for the most part with avalanche snow. The rocks were steep, but so broken as to offer good hand-and foot-hold. Still, the mind was sufficiently occupied in attending to the details of climbing to prevent the thoughts from wandering. Insensibly, we began to think little save of the view that would be revealed from the top of the pass. From time to time an opportunity would be found of gazing to the right or left, but progress was tolerably continuous. Maurer, who was leading, looked upwards now and again, as he worked out the best line of ascent, but the rocks were so steep that he could only see a very few feet. Just about mid-day, as he stopped for a moment to look upwards, I saw his expression suddenly change. 'Herr Gott!' he gasped out, 'der Schlafplatz!'[5] I think I shall never forget the thrill the words sent through me. We sprang up, scrambling over the few feet that still intervened, and in a moment were grouped on a little ledge just outside the bivouac. There was little enough to be seen at the first glance save a low horse-shoe shaped wall of stones, measuring some 6 feet by 8, and carefully built against an overhanging rock. The enclosure was full of drifted snow, raised up into a hump at the back, where it covered a large rücksack. On a ledge formed by one of the stones, a little tin snow spectacle-box caught the eye as it reflected the rays of the sun. For a few moments all was excitement as the presence of one object after another was revealed. 'See here,' cried Maurer, as he scooped away the snow with his hands, 'the sleeping-bags!' 'And here a rücksack,' said another. 'Look, they made a fire there,' called out a third, 'and here is the cooking kettle and the revolver.' Then came somewhat of a reaction, and for a few minutes we could but gaze silently at the place that told so clear a tale, and endeavour to realise to the full the evidence that had come upon us with such overwhelming suddenness. * * * * * "It is most probable that the accident occurred on the south side of the cliffs forming the eastern ridge of Dych Tau. The party must have been roped at the moment, and it is very reasonable to suppose that they were engaged in traversing one of the many ice and snow covered slopes that exist on this side. What the exact nature of the accident was matters little; but it may be remembered that the snow on such slopes and ledges often binds very lightly, and that there are no mountains, perhaps, where these places are more numerous or more treacherous than in the Caucasus. It was possibly one of those rare instances in which the rope was a source of danger and not of security to the party as a whole. Yet the rule is clear, and it amounts to this: if a place is too dangerous to cross with a party roped, lest the slip of one drag down all, then it is too dangerous to cross at all. So steep are the cliffs that a fall must have meant instantaneous death. As an example, a torn sleeping-bag which was thrown over the bivouac wall fell to the very bottom of the slope, and we saw it just above the _bergschrund_ as we descended. It was necessary to take down some of the articles discovered, for we might otherwise have found difficulty in convincing the natives of the success of the expedition, and this was an important point. The height of the pass is 14,350 feet, and of the bivouac about 14,000 feet. We left the bivouac at 3.30 P.M., the day being still perfectly cloudless. The ice-fall offered some little difficulty, one or two of the bridges by which we had crossed in the morning having broken down. Still we were able to keep to almost the same line as that adopted in ascending. * * * * * "No one familiar with the Caucasus would be willing to believe that any native could have reached the bivouac. The people are still very timorous on ice, and are wholly incapable of facing an ice-fall, much less of making any way through one. No native could have been got to the place even if in the train of competent mountaineers; alone, he would not have set foot on the glacier at all. "A day or two later we made our way down to the collection of villages known as Balkar, a good three and a half hours' walk from Karaoul. The place is not well spoken of, but we were hospitably received and entertained. In this, as in many other villages subsequently, the story of our search excited much interest. On every occasion the proceedings were almost exactly identical. As usual in the Caucasus, the natives all crowded into our apartment soon after arrival. Powell would then select some Russian-speaking man in authority, and announce through him that the results of our expedition would be made known to all who cared to hear them. The whole story was then told, and admirably Powell used to narrate it, winding up by pointing out how the people of the district were now exonerated from any suspicion that may have lain on them. Such suspicion, he used to add, had never been entertained by any English people. The account was always listened to in breathless silence. At the conclusion it was repeated by the chief to the natives in their own language. Then the rücksack was brought in and the articles found shown. These were always instantly accepted as absolute proof; the rusty revolver especially excited attention. Expressions of sorrow and brief interjections were always heard on all sides. Then the chief spoke to some such effect as follows: 'We are indeed rejoiced that you have found these traces. It relieves our people from an irksome and unjust suspicion. It is well that Englishmen came to our country for this search, for we believe that no others could have accomplished what you have done. We are all very grateful to you. Englishmen are always most welcome in our country. We are glad to receive them. Our houses are theirs, and the best we can do shall always be done for your countrymen.' In several places--at Chegem, for instance--words were added to this effect: 'We remember well Donkin and Fox; they were brave and good men, and we loved them. It is very sad to us to think that they are lost.'" A more detailed account of this melancholy quest will be found in Messrs Douglas Freshfield's and Vittorio Sella's work, _The Exploration of the Caucasus_. It is from this, the most beautifully illustrated of any book on mountaineering, that, with Mr Freshfield's kind permission and that of Mr Willink, I take the picture of the sleeping-place. The finished drawing was made by Mr Willink from a sketch by Captain Powell. CHAPTER VIII SOME NARROW ESCAPES AND FATAL ACCIDENTS Probably not half the narrow escapes experienced by climbers are ever described, even in the pages of the various publications of English and foreign Alpine Clubs, though when an accident by the breaking of a snow-cornice is just avoided, the incident is so terribly impressive that several accounts have found their way into print. Scarcely anything more startling than a certain occurrence on a ridge of the Mönch, which happened to the late Mr Moore and his two guides, Melchior and Jacob Anderegg, has ever been related. The party had succeeded in making the ascent of the Mönch from the Wengern Alp, it being only the third occasion when this long and difficult climb was accomplished, each of their predecessors spending _three days and three nights_ on the expedition. [Illustration: MELCHIOR ANDEREGG, OF MEIRINGEN.] [Illustration: A SON AND A GRANDCHILD OF MELCHIOR ANDEREGG, 1903. _To face_ p. 124.] Having gained the summit, the party proceeded to go down by the usual route towards the Trugberg. This follows a very narrow _arête_. "On the left hand," says Mr Moore in _The Alpine Journal_, "is an absolute precipice; on the right a slope, which might be called precipitous, falls to the Aletsch Glacier. The quantity of snow on the ridge was enormous, and the sun had begun to tell upon it. We knew too much to attempt to approach the upper edge, and kept at a distance of some 12 feet below it on the Aletsch side; lower down we dared not go, owing to the steepness of the slope and the danger of starting an avalanche. With Melchior in front it is unnecessary to say that we moved with the greatest caution. No man is more alive than he to the danger arising from a snow-cornice. He sounded with his axe at every step, and we went steadily along, anxious, but with every reason to believe that we were giving the cornice a wide berth. Suddenly came a startling cry from Melchior. At the same instant I felt myself stagger, and, instinctively swinging ever so slightly to the right, found myself the next moment sitting astride on the ridge. With a thundering roar the cornice on our left for a distance of some 200 yards went crashing down to the depths below, sending up clouds of snow-dust which completely concealed my companions from me. It was only by the absence of all strain on the rope that I knew--though at the moment I scarcely realised the fact--that they were, like myself, safe. As the dust cleared off, Melchior, also sitting astride of the ridge, turned towards me, his face white as the snow which covered us. That it was no personal fear which had blanched our leader's sunburnt cheeks his first words, when he could find utterance, showed. 'God be thanked!' said he; 'I never thought to see either of you there.' We had, in fact, escaped destruction by a hand's-breadth. As I believe, our right feet had been on the ridge, our left on the cornice; we had thus just sufficient firm standing-ground to enable us to make that instinctive movement to the right which had landed us _á cheval_, for Jacob had fallen in the same position as Melchior and myself. Few words were said; but words poorly express the emotions at such a moment. Melchior's axe had been carried down with the cornice as it fell, but had fortunately lodged on the face of the precipice 50 feet below. It was too precious to leave behind, so we let him down by the rope, and descending in a cat-like way peculiar to first-class guides when not hampered by _Herrshaft_, he regained it without difficulty. "Our further descent was uneventful." One of the greatest dangers of mountaineering is from falling stones, yet the number of fatal accidents from this cause is as few as the narrow escapes are many. As exciting an experience as can well be imagined took place on the Aiguille du Midi at Chamonix in 1871. The party consisted of Messrs Horace Walker and G. E. Foster. The latter wrote a graphic account in _The Alpine Journal_, and kindly allows me to make the following extracts. The guides were Jacob Anderegg and Hans Baumann, and the climbers wished to ascend from the Montanvert and be the first to go down the steep face of the mountain on the Chamonix side. After some difficulty in finding the route, for both the guides were unacquainted with the district, and Mr Walker alone knew in a vague sort of way that the peak was somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Géant ice-fall, they eventually stood on the top. It had taken them ten hours, and they sat for some time on the more sheltered Chamonix side, debating by what route they should descend. The slopes below were very steep, so they decided to retrace their steps to the foot of the rocks, and then, turning over on to the Chamonix side of the mountain, make their way as best they could down ice-filled gullies and precipitous rocks. All at first went well, and soon they commenced to cross the face of the cliff to gain a rocky buttress that offered a likely route some hundred feet below the top of the wall. "Jacob was leading," writes Mr Foster, "Walker next, I followed, and Baumann brought up the rear. Only one was moving at a time, and every one had the rope as taut as possible between himself and his neighbour. Jacob was crossing a narrow gully, when suddenly, without any warning, as though he had trod on the keystone of the wall, the whole face for some 30 or 40 feet above him peeled off, and with a crash like thunder, hundreds of tons of rocks precipitated themselves on him. In an instant he was torn from his hold, and hurled down the precipice with them. Fortunately, Walker was able to hold on, though the strain on him was something awful. As the uproar ceased, and silence even more impressive succeeded, we looked in one another's faces with blank dismay. From our position it was impossible to see what had become of Jacob, and only the tight rope told us that his body at least, living or dead, was still fastened to us. In a voice singularly unlike his own, Walker at length cried out, 'Jacob,' and our hearts sank within us as it passed without response. 'Jacob! Ach Jacob!' Walker repeated; and I trust none of my readers may ever know the relief we felt when the reply came back, 'Ich lebe noch.'[6] "From where I was I could not see him, but Walker craned over a rock, and then turned round. 'I see him. He is awfully hurt, and bleeding frightfully.' I then contrived to shift my position, and saw that he was indeed hurt. His face was black with blood and dirt, the skin torn from his bleeding hands, while his clothes in ribands threatened worse injuries still unseen. After a moment, he managed to recover his footing, and then untied the rope with trembling fingers, and crawled along the face of the cliff to the other side of the gully, where some snow offered means to stanch his wounds. "As soon as he was safe, Baumann called on us to stand still, and clambered carefully over the spot where the rocks had given way, our only road lying there. I followed, and then Walker, knotting up the rope to which Jacob had hung, crossed last. With Jacob below us, care was necessary in climbing so as to send no more loose fragments on his head, but we at last reached the spot where he was standing. Thanks to the snow, the bleeding had already stopped to a great extent, and with the aid of some sticking-plaster Walker had with him, and some torn strips from a pocket-handkerchief, we bound up his wounds as well as we could. He had had a marvellous escape; no fragment had struck him fully, the rock that had grazed his face having missed knocking out his brains from his presence of mind in throwing back his head. Fortunately, no bones were broken, though he was badly bruised all over, and after a quarter of an hour's rest and a good pull at the brandy-flask, he said he was ready to start again. "On taking hold of the rope to tie him on again, we were awestruck to find all its strands but one had been severed, so that his whole weight had hung literally on a thread. Strange as it may appear, the rock that had done this had probably saved his life by jerking him out of the line of fire. Still, all honour to Messrs Buckingham for their good workmanship, to which, and Walker's holding powers, we owe our escape from a miserable ending of our day's work. As it was, poor Walker's ribs had suffered sadly, and with two wounded men we recommenced our descent. "Naturally, our trust in the rocks was gone, and we took as soon as possible to the steep snow of the couloir. This, however, lay so thin on the ice, that we found we had only exchanged one danger for another. Baumann led and we followed, driving in our axe-heads at every step, but were soon forced to descend into a narrow gully, cut by avalanches, where the snow was deep enough to give better footing. The sides of this were above our heads, and the bottom not more than a foot wide, so that the danger from avalanches was very great, but for a time we descended safely. Then a startled shout from Walker warned me that something was wrong, and driving my axe desperately into the side, I found myself up to the neck in a snow avalanche. For a moment I thought all was up, but held on to the best of my powers. Then finding the stream did not stop, I looked back, and found Walker and Jacob had contrived to get out of the gully. With a shout to Baumann, I gave a desperate struggle, and followed their example, and instantly saw the snow I had held up surge over Baumann's head. For a moment he held on, then climbed out on my side. We waited till the avalanche had passed, two of us on one side of the gully and two on the other, and then Walker and Jacob jumped into it with a groan, as it shook their bruised bones, and climbed up to our side, and with an occasional look for Baumann's hat, which the avalanche had carried off with it, pursued our way. "So long and steep was the couloir, so thin and treacherous the snow layer on the ice, that a good hour elapsed before we reached the bottom, where a formidable _bergschrund_ cut off access to the glacier. Only at one point could we find a bridge, and that was where our old enemy, the avalanche gully, terminated, choking the crevasse with its snows, and spreading in a fan-like mass below. With some hesitation, as our recollection of it was not pleasant, and it was here all hard ice, Baumann cut his way down into it. We were scarcely all fairly in it, when we heard a tremendous crash above. Clearly, another avalanche was descending, this time composed of rocks. As it was 2000 feet above us, and would take some time to clear the distance, a short race for life ensued. Baumann cut steps with amazing rapidity. Fortunately, some half dozen only were necessary. With one eye on him and one keeping a sharp look-out for the advent of the unwelcome stranger, we hastened down, crossed the bridge, scampered down a slope, and merely stooping down to pick up Baumann's hat, which turned up here, got out of the way just in time, as an enormous mass of snow and rocks dashed over where we had stood not a minute before." This was the last adventure the party had that day from avalanches, but their troubles were as yet by no means over. Some formidable glacier work had to be accomplished before all was plain sailing. "Though we were now tolerably reckless, the difficulties in our way nearly beat us," Mr Foster goes on to say. "Three times we tried, and thrice in vain, though knife edges of the most revolting description were passed, and crevasses of fabulous width and depth jumped or got over as seemed best. Again and again we were forced to return. At length, when we were almost in despair, a way was found, and at 6.30, drenched by the storm which by this time had burst upon us, we reached the little hotel at the Pierrepointue." There are no climbing dangers which skill and care can more surely avert than those which are ever present on a crevassed, but snow-covered glacier. [Illustration: CREVASSES AND SÉRACS ON THE LOWER PART OF A GLACIER.] [Illustration: A SNOW BRIDGE OVER A CREVASSE.] [Illustration: ON THE BORDER OF A CREVASSE ABOVE THE SNOW LINE.] [Illustration: SOFT SNOW IN THE AFTERNOON ON A GLACIER. By Signor R. Cajrati Crivelli Mesmer. _To face_ p. 133.] Should a party fail to arrest the fall of one of its members, and have difficulty in pulling him above ground, however, the position may become most serious. If another party is within hail, matters are generally simple enough, yet even for four or five people it is not always the easiest thing in the world to haul up a companion who has disappeared into the bowels of the earth, especially if the folly of walking unroped has been indulged in. A good description of what might have been a serious business but for the skill and resource of a member of the party is given in the course of a description of some climbs in the Rocky Mountains. The writer, Mr Harold B. Dixon, says in _The Alpine Journal_: "A snow-covered crevasse crossed our route at right angles. The party in front, who were without ropes, saw the crevasse, and proceeded to leap it. All crossed in safety but the last man, who broke through the snow and disappeared. Through the hole the wide mouth of the crevasse was revealed, showing the danger of trusting to the frail bridge. It was obviously dangerous to recross without a rope, so his companions signalled to us for help, but for some time we failed to observe their signals. "Though stunned by the fall our friend was not materially damaged, but he was in a sufficiently awkward fix. Jammed between the narrowing walls of ice, he was unable to move a limb except his right arm. The crevasse did not drop perpendicularly, but the ice-wall bulged out from the side we stood on, and then curved over out of sight; we could not see down more than 18 feet. We stood in a little semicircle at the hole, and one short sentence was spoken: 'Some one must go down.' We looked at each other. Sahrbach and Baker are large and heavy men: it was obvious they must 'pass.' I am of lighter build; I proclaimed my 11 stone and readiness to go. But Collie went better. 'I am 9 stone 6,' was his deliberate statement. There was no means of seeing if this was a bluff, so we threw up our hands--the trick was his. Tying a stirrup loop for one foot and a noose round his waist, Collie attached himself to one rope, which was then joined to a second. Meanwhile the Americans were brought across the crevasse by the aid of another rope, and axes were fixed deep in the snow in suitable positions to fasten the rope to. Then we let Collie down as far as he would go. An anxious moment followed. 'I can't reach him,' came Collie's voice from below. Then, after a few minutes, 'Send down a slip knot on the other rope.' We made the knot and lowered the rope. How Collie managed it I don't know, for he could not reach his man, but he threw the loop round the prisoner's right arm, and then called on us to pull. At the second haul we felt something give, and our friend was pulled into an upright position, when Collie could just reach him with his left hand, and with this he tied a knot above the elbow of his right arm. By this knot we hauled him out of the narrow crevasse and on to the bulge of ice without difficulty. But as we pulled the rope cut into the snow, and we could not raise our burden within 6 feet of the surface. Then, while the rope was held taut, one of us worked the handle of an axe along under the rope by sitting on the snow and pushing it forward with his feet. In this way the rope was loosened, and we could haul up another 3 feet, and then Sahrbach, leaning over, reached his collar, and our half-frozen friend was deposited on the snow with an assortment of flasks, while we fished out Collie from his uncomfortable position. They were both very wet and cold, but no bones were broken." Here we see that even with a large party of competent people, it was no easy matter to rescue a comrade from his icy prison. The details are well given, and may be useful to any one so unfortunate as to require by personal experience a knowledge of what should be done under similar circumstances. The danger of crossing snow-covered glaciers when the party does not number more than two was brought home to those who heard of it by one of the most tragical events which has ever been recorded in the annals of mountaineering. A German, Dr Schäffer, had been celebrating his golden wedding at a small place on the Brenner on 22nd August 1900. He engaged a guide, by name Johann Offerer, and, sleeping at a hut, started early next morning. They reached the Wildlahner Glacier in an hour and a half from their sleeping quarters, and after traversing it for some distance came to a large crevasse. This the guide crossed safely on a snow bridge, but the tourist, a much heavier man, broke through, and pulled his companion down with him. They fell about 100 feet, with the result that the guide had a broken thigh and arm, while Dr Schäffer only bruised his knee. He put his coat round Offerer and left food beside him, and then tried to get out of the crevasse. After hours of toil and pain he managed to reach a ledge not very far below the mouth of the crevasse, but further he could not get. At last he gave up all hope, and sat down to die, first, however, writing a full account of the accident, and leaving a sum of money for the widow of his guide. It is to this pathetic last effort of his life that we owe our knowledge of what happened. The only other instance at all like it is the terrible accident on Mont Blanc in 1870, when eleven persons perished in a snow-storm, one of their number, Mr Bean, leaving details in his diary of the events immediately preceding the catastrophe. [Illustration: THE BETÉMPS HUT.] [Illustration: SKI-ING.] [Illustration: HOW A BEGINNER USUALLY ENDS A RUN.] [Illustration: A GREAT CREVASSE IN THE UPPER SNOW FIELDS. _To face_ p. 137.] It was only on 5th September, after a long search, that the remains of the two unfortunate men were discovered. The following is of special interest, because, of late years, the Norwegian sport of ski-ing has become exceedingly popular in Alpine winter resorts. It is impossible, however, owing to the great length of the ski, to go in difficult places on them, and therefore mountaineers have only used them when intending to ascend to points accessible entirely over snow-slopes, not much broken up by crevasses. The first fatal accident to a climbing party on ski took place in 1902, and may serve as a warning to those intending to traverse glaciers in winter on skis, or indeed even without them. I take my account from a translation from the Italian, which appeared in _The Alpine Journal_. The comments by the editor should be laid to heart. "A party of five gentlemen and four Zermatt guides left Zermatt on 24th February for the Bétemp Hut, with the intention of ascending the Signalkuppe and the Zumstein, _via_ the Grenz Glacier and the Capanna Margherita. "The 25th was spent in ski practice in the neighbourhood of the hut. On the 26th the whole party, with the exception of one guide who had brought a defective pair of skis, left the hut at 3.30 A.M. in weather marked by no adverse conditions of any kind. The Grenz Glacier was reached somewhat west of the point marked 3344 mètres on the Siegfried map. The party unroped, proceeded upwards on their skis towards the point marked 3496 mètres, the surface of the glacier, covered with deep snow, showing no crevasses nor the indications of any. About midway between 3300 mètres and the point 3344 mètres the caravan found itself on a gentle slope, when a muffled crack was heard, and Herr Koenig, Herr Flender, and one of the guides, Hermann Perren, were seen to sink almost simultaneously into a concealed crevasse about 6 feet in width, which ran in a direction parallel with the glacier, carrying with them a mass of snow about 65 feet in length and over 14 feet in thickness. Obviously, no amount of probing would have indicated the presence of the crevasse, and thus by an unfortunate coincidence the three men were standing at the same time over the hidden abyss without knowing it. One of the other guides was instantly lowered into the crevasse by the only available rope (the other being on Herr Flender's back), which proved to be just too short to reach Hermann Perren, who had fallen about 90 feet, and was standing upright against the side of the crevasse, held fast in a mass of snow which had left his head and one arm free. Two of the party hurried down to fetch another rope from the Bétemps Hut. In the meanwhile Perren had managed, after a struggle of two and a half hours, almost to set himself free, and was eventually drawn out safely, practically uninjured, save a slightly frost-bitten hand. The dead body of Herr Flender, found with his neck broken, partially covered with some 2 feet of hard snow, was then extricated, but in spite of persistent efforts the body of Herr Koenig was not recovered until the next day, when he was found lying face downwards under a mass of compact snow over 10 feet thick. Death in his case was instantaneous, caused by suffocation, the body bearing no signs whatever of external injury. Herr Koenig was laid to rest in the English cemetery at Zermatt, while the body of Herr Flender was conveyed by his relatives to its last resting-place at Düsseldorf. This is, we think, the first fatal accident which has occurred to a party of climbers on skis bound on a serious climbing expedition. The party on this occasion cannot with justice be accused of recklessness, for the apparent neglect of the usual precaution of putting on the rope on a snow-covered glacier will not be misunderstood by those accustomed to the use of skis, who will readily understand that the rope is practically impossible, and even dangerous, for a party on skis. "A remarkable feature of the accident was the thickness of the mass of snow which gave way under the three men, and demonstrates the extreme insecurity of winter snow on a crevassed glacier. It is possible that the three men were perhaps too close to each other at the time of the accident. "It is evident that winter climbers who wish to use skis must carry their lives in their own hands, and perhaps the safer plan for future expeditions of this kind will be to make the ascent roped in the usual way on snow _racquettes_ carrying the skis on the back. On the descent the risk of breaking through the snow covering during the rapid progress on skis would of course be very much less than on the ascent." One of the most fruitful causes of accidents on mountains is the underrating of difficulties by ignorant persons who, having been hauled up and let down precipices by a couple of sturdy guides in fine weather, proceed to inform their friends and acquaintances that "Nowadays the Matterhorn is mere child's play, don't cher know." A sorry tale is told by the famous climber, Mr Cecil Slingsby, who, himself accustomed to undertake the hardest climbs without guides, would be the first to discourage imitation in any unfit to follow in his steps. Writing of Skagastöldstind, in Norway, of which he made the first ascent, and which is still considered the most difficult of the fashionable climbs in that country, he says in _The Alpine Journal_: "In 1880 a young tourist, son of a rich banker, whom I will call Nils, desirous of emulating our exploits, attempted the mountain, and with the assistance of two good climbers, who shoved and hauled him up the rocks, succeeded in reaching the summit. Unfortunately, he afterwards wrote a pamphlet of sixty-six pages about the mountain, in which he underrated its difficulties. This pamphlet, I unhesitatingly assert, has been the main cause of a terrible tragedy which took place on Skagastöldstind. It was in this manner. At one of the series of huts built by the tourist club a young man, named Tönsberg, who had been partially deranged, was staying with his wife, and was deriving much benefit from the mountain air. Here he read this pamphlet, and inferred that though Skagastöldstind was undoubtedly a very fine mountain, yet the difficulties of its ascent had been much exaggerated, and that any one might make it. Upon this he set off with a lad seventeen years of age, at 9.30 P.M., in vile weather; walked through the night (in the middle of summer it is never dark), and reached a saetor (or châlet) at 3 A.M.; here they found Peter, one of Nils' guides, who refused to have anything more to do with the mountain. At last, by means of bribes, and by promising to turn back at once if the mountain should prove impracticable, Peter was persuaded to go forward; and at 6 o'clock they sallied out into the wet. Wind and snow soon assailed them, but Tönsberg would persist in his rash work. At 11 they reached the actual base of the peak, 4100 feet below the top. The lad was frost-bitten and could go no further; neither could Peter. They tried to tie the man with ropes, but he was too strong for them, and used his alpenstock against them, and it was no good. Soon afterwards he left them in the mist, and in twenty strides was out of sight. A month or five weeks after this his remains were found in a deep chasm between a glacier and the rocks, amidst crags at least 2000 feet higher up on the mountain. I may add that the valley Midt Maradal, out of which Skagastöldstind rises, is so difficult to approach, that though it contains rich pasturage at its lower end--a mine of wealth in Norway--its owner, a man of forty-five years, who has overlooked it hundreds of times and lives within three miles of it as the crow flies, had never been in it when I saw him last, and has asked me several times to guide him into it." Referring to an expedition from Mouvoison, which began, as do most climbs, over grass slopes, Mr Clinton Dent remarks in _Above the Snow Line_: "One ascent over a grass slope is very much like another, and description in detail would be as wearisome as the slopes themselves often prove. Yet it is worthy of notice that there is an art to be acquired even in climbing grass slopes. We had more than one opportunity on the present occasion of seeing that persons look supremely ridiculous if they stumble about, and we noticed also that, like a bowler when he has delivered a long hop to the off for the third time in one over, the stumbler invariably inspects the nails in his boots, a proceeding which deceives no one. It is quite easy to judge of a man's real mountaineering capacity by the way in which he attacks a steep grass slope. The unskilful person, who fancies himself perfectly at home among the intricacies of an ice-fall, will often candidly admit that he never can walk with well-balanced equilibrium on grass, a form of vegetable which it might be thought in many instances of self-sufficient mountaineers, would naturally suit them. There is often real danger in such places, and not infrequently the wise man will demand the use of the rope, especially when there are any tired members among the party. There is no better way of learning how to preserve a proper balance on a slope than by practising on declivities of moderate steepness, and it is astonishing to find how often those who think they have little to learn, or, still worse, that there is nothing to learn, will find themselves in difficulties on a mountain-side, and forced to realise that they have got themselves into a rather humiliating position. We may have seen, before now, all of us, distinguished cragsmen to whom an ascent of the Weisshorn or Matterhorn was but a mere stroll, utterly pounded in botanical expeditions after Edelweiss, and compelled to regain a position of security by very ungraceful sprawls, or, worse still, have to resort to the unpardonable alternative of asking for assistance." The following accounts of adventures on grass slopes, taken from _The Alpine Journal_, may serve to bear out the truth of Mr Dent's remarks: "On Monday, 31st August, Mr J. F. C. Devas, aged 26, accompanied by a friend, Mr A. G. Ferard, proceeded after lunch to take a stroll from the Riffel-Haus towards the Gorner Glacier by the Théodule path. Before reaching the glacier they returned, Mr Ferard by the ordinary route. Mr Devas, leaving the path to the left, attempted a short cut by climbing some wet and slippery rocks leading to a grass slope above. He reached a difficult place, immediately below the slope, beyond which he was unable to go. Mr Ferard made his way as speedily as possible to the grass slope and to within a few yards of his friend. While Mr Ferard was endeavouring to render assistance, Mr Devas, in trying to pull himself up, lost his footing and slid down about 70 feet to a ledge covered with turf, which it might have been hoped would have arrested his fall. Unfortunately, the impetus was sufficient to carry him over the ledge to a further distance of about 70 feet below. His friend hastened to the Riffel-Haus for assistance, and a number of guides and porters, accompanied by Mr Ferard and a French gentleman, hurried to the scene of the accident. Mr Devas, who had sustained a severe fracture of the skull, was brought back to the Riffel-Haus about 5 P.M., where he received the most unremitting care from M. Seiler's staff of servants. He was unconscious from the moment of the accident till he died at noon of the following day." Another writer gives an account of an adventure on a grass slope which, happily, had a less serious ending. He also attempted to make a short cut. "I entangled myself in an adventure which, as nearly as possible, ended in a catastrophe. Not caring to turn back, I followed a track past the châlets of Cavrera, in hope of being able to find a direct ascent over the steep lower ground that enclosed the head of the valley. It seemed as I advanced that among the ledges of rock and grass at the left-hand corner there would be access to the path above. A dubious and attenuated track which led me up in this direction after giving evidence of design in a few steps notched in the great gneiss slabs, vanished, leaving me to choose between the slabs which sloped up in front and a line of juniper bushes on the left of them. As the slabs at this spot could be walked upon, and higher up seemed to ease off again, I kept to the rocks without investigating the juniper belt. But walking exchanged itself for climbing, and I continued to ascend under the impression that I should shortly gain the inclination above. I came to a spot where I had to raise myself on to a small rounded knob of rock with a slight effort, there being no hand-hold above. From this vantage-ground I was able to repeat the process, still buoyed up with the belief that the easy part would be reached above, and to hoist myself on to the only remaining hold in the neighbourhood--a strong tuft of grass in a sort of half corner in the slabs--which supported one foot well, but one foot only. I now found I could go no further. The strata inclined downwards, so that the smooth and crackless slabs overlay one another like the slates on a house-roof, and there was no more hold for hand or foot apparent, while the slabs were far too steep for unsupported progression. The next discovery was a much more alarming one; I looked below, wondered why on earth I had come up such a place, and saw at a glance that I could not get down again. If I fell, moreover, it would not be by the line of my ascent, but down steeper rocks and to a lower depth. Generally in a dilemma in climbing there is a sort of instinctive feeling that an escape will be made at last, but now, for the first time, I was seized with a sentiment akin to despair. One chance only remained, and that was to take off my boots and stockings and try the slabs above. "The stories of extraordinary predicaments in the Alps one is apt to receive with some incredulity. I never altogether accepted the tale of the chamois-hunter's gashing his feet, and, needless to say, it did not occur to me to imitate him in this particular. For the rest, I can only promise the literal narration of circumstances _as they presented themselves to me at the time_. It is, indeed, sufficiently sensational without exaggeration. Well, it appeared at first impossible to take my boots off; I was facing the rocks with one toe on the turf, and the necessary manipulation could not be accomplished. What was to be done? This was, perhaps, the worst moment of the whole, as far as sensation went. However, by turning round, and planting my heel on the tuft and my back on the rock, I found myself in a secure and tolerably comfortable position. I now set to work and slung my boots separately round my neck as I took them off, pocketing the socks. All was done with deliberation; the laces were as usual untied with the button-hook in my cherished knife, and the latter was carefully returned to my pocket with the thought that if it went down it should be in my company. Meantime the necessary rigidity of position had to be preserved; there was only room in the turf for one heel, and for the point of my ice-axe, for which there was no other possible resting-place. Its preservation, indeed, that day was wonderful; at one time I felt a momentary temptation to throw it down in order to better the hold with the hand, but this would not bear a second thought. "I now lost no time in placing myself on the slabs. I found that I dare not move on them in an upright position, and had to seek support with both hands. My condition was not an enviable one, and in no direction could an effort to proceed be made without danger. The situation was as follows: If I could manage to advance in front, I should, eventually, reach the more easily inclined slabs, on which I could walk; but then it was some way. If I could cross the much shorter interval (some 15 feet) to the right, I should reach a grass band below the rocks at the side; but then there intervened a broad, black, glistening streak, where waters oozed down and where to tread was fatal. Suddenly, without any warning, I found myself going down. I remember no slip, but rather that it was as if all hold gave way at once under the too potent force of gravity. Anyhow I was sliding down the rocks, and that helplessly I made, I believe, little or no attempt to obtain fresh hold; I simply remained rigid in the position in which I was, waiting for the fatal momentum to come which should dash me below. The instants passed, and at each I expected the momentum to begin. I felt quite a surprise when, instead, the sliding mass slowly pulled up and came to a stoppage. The scales of fate had been most delicately balanced, and a hair's weight in the right one decided that this paper should be written. Had I floundered, like a non-swimmer out of his depth, I must have gone down; but the first moments of despondency past the opening for action had once for all brought with it that species of mechanical coolness which is the happy concomitant of so many forms of habitual physical occupation. [Illustration: The balloon "Stella" getting ready to start from Zermatt for the first balloon passage of the Alps, September, 1903. (_P. 301._)] [Illustration: A bivouac in the Alps in the olden days. By the late Mr. W. F. Donkin.] [Illustration: Boulder practice on an off day. _To face_ p 148.] [Illustration: The last rocks on the descent.] "If it be asked, what were my thoughts when I was going down, I can only reply that they chiefly amounted to a sort of dull feeling that I was actually in for a fall, being concentrated on waiting for its inevitable commencement; and that there was no such terror or disagreeable realisation of the situation as people are apt to assign to such moments. Such realisations exist most deeply in the imaginations of the non-combatants outside the fray. During the whole affair my attention was mainly directed to the physical combating with difficulties, and the passing reflections were partly indifferent, partly frivolous. A sort of acceptance of the position, indeed, possessed me, which almost amounted to a melancholy complacency, and, at most, perhaps, the customary 'When I get out of this' was changed as fast as it rose up in my imagination into a sadder 'If ever.' It was the feeling of the gamester or the soldier surprised at last by adverse odds, intent on his craft as at other times, but with a new and melancholy consciousness. "My first thought when I came to a standstill--I cannot have gone more than a couple of feet at most--was what I could do even then, with no more hold than before? But I placed myself again in my old position on the tuft; and reflecting that if I had been intended to go down I should have gone then, and almost feeling as if, having escaped that extremity of risk, I had a sort of security for the rest, I resolved without further hesitation to make a determined effort. I once more raised myself on my feet and decided to make a push across the slabs to the grass belt at all hazards; possibly, in case of slipping on the way, I might be able to make a desperate sort of rush for it. I now found two unevennesses in succession, which would allow the side of the foot to rest in them with some chance of staying, while I moved my body along, there being at no time hold for the hand. The second of these slight hollows was fortunately in the dread bank of moisture itself. Below, the rocks shelved away to a steep fall; in front, the grass tufts smiled on me nearer and nearer. While I was feeling along the slabs with the hand that held my ice-axe, the latter by chance fixed itself in a cavity that would otherwise have escaped my notice. It was just about the size and depth of a half-crown, and could not have been caught by the fingers, but the rigid iron stuck in it. This was perhaps the first bit of direct hold I had. A yard further on was another of the same size. But now I had passed the wet rock and was nearing the grass, and carefully launching my ice-axe, so as not to disturb my balance, I hooked it in the grass, and in another moment had reached its hospitable tufts. Creeping up the side, I at last found _terra firma_." CHAPTER IX A NIGHT ADVENTURE ON THE DENT BLANCHE Mr Cecil Slingsby has kindly allowed me to extract the following admirable account of a guideless ascent with two friends of the Dent Blanche. It will be noticed that during a very cold night they "avoided" their "brandy-flask like poison." When a climber is exhausted and help is near a flask of brandy is invaluable, but when a party has to spend a bitterly cold night in the open, it is madness to touch spirits at all. The effect of a stimulant is to quicken the action of the heart and drive the blood with increased rapidity to the surface. Here it is continually cooled, and before long the heart finds it has to work double hard to keep up the circulation. Therefore to take brandy in order to resist the cold for hours together is like stirring up a cup of hot fluid, whereby fresh surfaces are continually brought in contact with the air and cooled with far greater rapidity than if left quiet. The best companion a climber can have during a night out above the snow-line is a small spirit-lamp. With this he can amuse and fortify himself at intervals, melting snow and making tea or soup, which will be of real help in enabling the party to pass without injury through the ordeal. Doctors and climbers of experience will, I know, bear out what I say. The truth of it was once more shown not very long ago under the following circumstances: [Illustration: PROVISIONS FOR A MOUNTAIN HOTEL. By Royston Le Blond. _To face p. 152._] [Illustration: THE DENT BLANCHE FROM THE THEODULE GLACIER IN SUMMER.] [Illustration: AN OUTLOOK OVER ROCK AND SNOW.] [Illustration: THE DENT BLANCHE FROM THE SCHWARZSEE IN WINTER.] In August 1902 two French tourists with a guide and a porter set out to ascend Mont Blanc. The weather became very bad, nevertheless they pressed on, hoping to reach that veritable death-trap, the Vallot Hut. In this they failed, and as the hour was late they took the fatal course of digging a hole in the snow in which to pass the night. They were provided with brandy, and, doubtless in ignorance of the results it was sure to cause, they shared all they had. Both travellers died before morning, and the guides then attempted to descend to Chamonix. They seem to have been dazed, and to have lost their heads, and within a few minutes of each other each fell into a crevasse. The porter was killed on the spot, the guide was rescued, but little injured, after six hours' imprisonment. Will people ever realise that Mont Blanc, by reason of the very facility by which it may be ascended, is the most dangerous mountain a beginner can ascend? He is almost certain to chance on incompetent guides, and these, if the weather becomes bad, have not the moral force--indeed a first-class man would have something even more compelling--to insist on an immediate return. The size of the mountain is so great that to be lost on it is a risk a really good guide would simply refuse to face. To turn now to Mr Slingsby's narrative. His party had reached the _arête_ of the Dent Blanche without incident, and he writes: "The rocks on the crest of the ridge were in perfect order. The day was magnificent, and there was not the remotest sign of a storm. Climbers who were on neighbouring mountains on this day all speak of the fine weather. My friend, Mr Eric Greenwood, who was on the Rothhorn, told me that that peak was in capital condition, but that there was a strong N.W. wind blowing at the top. We had perfect calm. Mr Greenwood stopped on the snow _arête_ till a late hour in the afternoon, taking photographs, and neither his guides nor he had the slightest expectation of a thunderstorm. "We stuck faithfully to the ridge, and climbed up, and as nearly as possible over, each point as we reached it, because of the ice which shrouded the rocks almost everywhere on the west face. "We were forced on to the face of one little pinnacle, and had to use the greatest care. "Nowhere did we come to any place where we felt that our powers were overtaxed; still, the work was difficult, though not supremely so. "A few days later I met Mr Conway at Breuil, and I asked him what he meant in this case by the term, 'following the _arête_.' His interpretation, which is rather an elastic one, is this: 'Climb over the pinnacles if it is convenient to do so. If not convenient, shirk them by passing below their western bases.' This latter method was most probably impracticable on the occasion of our ascent, which fully accounts for the great difference between Mr Conway's 'times' and our own, as we certainly climbed at least as quickly as an average party on the Dent Blanche during the whole of our ascent. "The time sped merrily and quickly by, and the difficulties decreased as we hastened onward. Just as we left the last rocks a light filmy cloud, sailing up from the north, hovered for an instant over the top of the mountain, and then settled upon it; otherwise, though it had then become exceedingly cold, the sky was clear and the day perfect, and we could not help comparing our good fortune with that of those early climbers who fought their way upwards, step by step, against most ferocious gales. "After some tiring step-cutting on the gentler slopes above the rocks, which, like the west face, were sheathed in ice, we reached at last the south end of the little flat ridge which forms the summit of the Dent Blanche, where a small flagstaff is usually to be seen. Here there was an enormous snow cornice which overhung the eastern side. The little cloud merely clung to the cornice on the ridge, and evidently had no malice in it at all. None of us put down the time at which we reached the top. One of us thinks that it was just after four o'clock, but the memory of the two others is clear that it was between three and four; at any rate, of this we are all agreed, that it was not so late as 4.12, the hour when the author of _Scrambles in the Alps_ reached the summit in bad weather. My watch, being out of order, was left at Zermatt. "We left directly, and in less than a minute were out of the little cloud, which was uncommonly cold, and again we revelled in bright sunshine. We were under no apprehension of danger, nor had we any reason whatever to be anxious, as our way was clear enough: there was no doubt about that. We were in capital training, and we had, most certainly, a sufficiency of daylight still left to allow us to get well beyond every difficulty upon the mountain. Moreover, Solly, with his usual instinctive thoughtfulness, carried a lantern in his pocket, and we had left another lower down. Thus we had a most reasonable expectation of reaching the Stockje that evening, and Zermatt early the next morning. [Illustration: The hut on the Col de Bertol, where climbers now often sleep for the ascent of the Dent Blanche. By Mr. Leonard Rawlence.] [Illustration: A party ascending the Aiguilles Rouges (Arolla). The people can be seen on the sky-line to the left, at the top of the white streak. By Mr. Leonard Rawlence.] [Illustration: The summit of the Dent Blanche. By Mr. Leonard Rawlence.] [Illustration: Cornice on the summit of the Dent Blanche. By Mr. Leonard Rawlence. _To face p. 156._] "When we had come down for about an hour, we saw an occasional flash of lightning playing about the Aiguilles Rouges d'Arolla. This was the first indication that we had of foul weather. Soon afterwards a dark cloud crept up ominously over the shoulder of Mont Collon, and on to the Pigne d'Arolla. Still no cloud seemed to threaten us, but we hurried on very quickly. "On arriving at the col, just above the great rock tower, we turned down a little gully on the west face. Here, though the work was exceedingly difficult, we lost no time whatever, and undoubtedly we chose the best route. The storm, meanwhile, had crossed over the east Arolla ridge, and we saw the lightning flashing about the Aiguille de la Za and Dent Perroc, and the clouds, as they advanced, grew more and more angry looking. "We were advancing as quickly as the nature of the ground would allow on a buttress which supports the great tower on the west. It was then about six o'clock. We had, at the most, only 150 feet of difficult ground to get over, when a dark and dense cloud fell upon us, and it became, suddenly and almost without any warning, prematurely dark. Our axes emitted electric sparks, or rather faint but steady little flames, on both the adze and pick part; so also did our gloves, the hair of which stood out quite straight. A handkerchief, which I had tied over my hat, was like a tiara of light. This was very uncanny, but still deeply interesting. The sparks, when touched by the bare hand or the cheek, gave out no heat. There was no hissing to be heard on our axes or on the rocks, but Solly felt a sort of vibration about the spectacles which were on his forehead that he did not at all like, so he put them under his hat. "Under ordinary circumstances we should have put away our axes until the storm should had passed away. Of course we did not do this, nor indeed would any other member of the Alpine Club have done so if he had had the good fortune to be with us. We wished to get across the 150 feet which was the only difficulty yet remaining before us. Each one of us was quite capable of undertaking the work, and, in spite of the unusual darkness, we had sufficient light for the purpose. "Solly was leading across a difficult bit of rock, and clearing away the ice; Haskett-Smith was paying out the rope as required; I was perched firmly at the bottom end of a narrow and steep ledge round the corner of a crag above them with the rope firmly hitched. We were all working steadily and most carefully, and hoped in a few minutes to clear our last difficulty. All at once the whole mountain side seemed to be ablaze, and at the same time there was a muzzled, muffled, or suppressed peal of thunder, apparently coming out of the interior of the mountain--so much so that, if a great crevice had been opened in the rocks and fire had burst out from it, we should hardly have been more surprised than we were. Solly and Haskett-Smith each exclaimed, 'My axe was struck,' and each of them, naturally enough, let his axe go. Where to none knew. Solly, describing this, says, 'At the moment I was standing with my face towards the mountain, with my right arm stretched out, feeling for a firm foothold with my axe, which I held just under its head. For perhaps a minute the lightning was coming very fast; then came the noise, and I saw a curve of flame on the head of my axe. I involuntarily let it go. The whole place seemed one blaze of light, and I could distinguish nothing. The thought that rushed through my mind was--Am I blinded? the intensity of the light was so terrible. It is difficult to put such events in any order of time; but I think the noise or explosion came first, before the blaze of light, and the light seemed to flicker as if a series of flashes were coming. I hardly know whether my body or any part of my clothing was actually struck. My axe certainly was, and I think the rocks just by me were.' "Haskett-Smith said that his neck was burnt, and we saw later that a dark-brown band, an inch and a quarter wide, had been burnt exactly half way round his neck. I was untouched. All the sparks disappeared with the flash. "Now the matter was serious enough, as we had only one axe, and we felt that we had had a most providential escape. There is little doubt that, if this had occurred upon the crest of the ridge above us, the electric current would have been much stronger, and the consequences much worse. "My two companions then climbed up to the little ledge where I was sitting, to wait at least until the storm should pass away. Whilst Solly was doing this, a tremendous gust of wind swept up from the N.W., and nearly carried him off his feet. "The storm lasted much longer than we expected it to do, and by the time it had vanished it was quite dark. All climbers will readily agree with me when I say that the storm, seen from such a point of view, where the mountain forms are so wild, and their guardian glaciers so vast and glittering, was indescribably grand--so much so that, even under our circumstances, there was a kind of grim enjoyment which we could not help feeling. "I put my axe upon a higher ledge for safety's sake. When the storm had gone by we took stock of our goods. Solly had a lantern. We each had two shirts, scarfs, and unusually warm clothing. We had plenty of food, some cold tea, and a flask of brandy. We knew well that we must stop where we were until morning. It was hard luck certainly, as there was only one narrow prison moat between us and freedom. Once over these 150 feet, we could have reached the Stockje by lantern light. Of this I am certain. But no man living could cross the moat except in daylight. "Haskett-Smith, who is a marvellous man for making all sort of hitches, knots, and nooses, managed to get a capital hitch for our rope, and lashed us to the rock most skilfully. The ledge was steep, and varied from 1½ to 2 feet wide. As we could not sit back to back, which is the best plan when possible, we did the next best thing, and sat, squatted, or leaned, face to back. Solly, who sat at the bottom, had a loose piece of friable rock which supported one foot. I was in the middle, with my knees up to my chin, on a steep slope, but was supported by Solly's back and by a singularly sharp little stone on which I squatted. Haskett-Smith leaned with his back against a corner, and with his knees against my back. Each of us had a rücksack, which helped to keep out the cold. We made a good meal of potted meat, bread, chocolate, and an orange, and left a box of sardines and other food for the morning. "Several short but heavy snow and hail showers fell after the thunderstorm had subsided, but we were thankful that there was no rain. The wind got up too, and whistled wildly through the crags above us. Fortunately, a screen of rock above our ledge partly sheltered us. We faced a grim and grisly little pinnacle on the west face of the mountain, which became, hour after hour, if possible, more ghostly. How we did hate it, to be sure. A light in a châlet near Ferpécle shone like a beacon for some hours, which was a pleasant contrast to the near view of the ghost, but it seemed to be a terribly long way off. We kept up our spirits capitally, and from previous experience I, at least, knew how thankful we ought to be that no member of our party was of a pessimistic turn of mind. At the same time, we were fully aware how serious the matter was, but we were determined to get well through it, helped, we trusted, by a power not our own. "Our greatest trouble during the night arose from the consciousness that Mr Schuster, Herr Seiler, and other friends at Zermatt would be very anxious about us, and we often spoke of it with regret. "We were most careful to keep moving our hands and feet all the night, and, though the temptation to indulge in sleep was very great, we denied ourselves this luxury. After two o'clock an increased vigilance was necessary, as the sky became clearer, and the cold much more intense. Mr Aitkin's guides, who were then bivouacking above the Stockje, 'complained much of the cold.' We probably suffered less than they did, as, at our great altitude, the air was doubtless much drier than below. At the same time, gentlemen who were occupying comfortable beds in luxurious hotels in the Vispthal thought the night was unusually warm. Haskett-Smith imagined the whole night that Solly was another member of the A.C., and invariably addressed him by the wrong name. This hallucination was, no doubt, the result of the electric shock. "Shortly before 5 A.M. we opened our sardine-box, which was no easy task, as our outer gloves were like iron gauntlets. We made a good meal of petrified fish, frozen oranges, and bread. We avoided our brandy-flask like poison on the whole expedition. "We soon discovered the lost axes below us, half embedded in hard snow. Then we began to move. Solly took my axe, and with much difficulty, and at the expense of a good deal of time, cut down to and recovered one of the missing ones. We found, however, that it was then far too cold, and we were too benumbed to work safely, so we returned to our ledge again until eight o'clock. Long before this hour the ghostly pinnacle was gilded by the morning sun, and, if possible, we hated it more than ever, as no warm rays could reach the place where we were for hours to come. On telling several of the leading guides in Zermatt about waiting until eight o'clock on the ledge, they all said that it was quite early enough for us to move after spending a night out in the cold, and that they had done exactly the same under similar circumstances. We were sure we were right; still their testimony is valuable. Messrs Kennedy and Hardy, when they had their 'Night Adventure on the Bristenstock,' say they were 'obliged to stamp about for some twenty minutes in order to restore circulation, or we should not have had sufficient steadiness to have continued our descent in safety.' Well, these gentlemen had neither waistcoats nor neckties, and had only a lump of bread and one bottle of wine. We were at least well fed and warmly clad, but we had no room to stamp about. Having now two axes, we were able to work again with renewed confidence in our powers. We saw the third axe lying half imbedded in the snow a long way below us, and about a rope's length from some firm rocks. The hail and snow, which had partly covered the rocks, increased the difficulty, and the ice in which we had to cut steps was unusually hard. In fact, our 150 feet were gained with much difficulty, and, by the exercise of great caution and severe labour, at last, after much time and manoeuvring, we recovered the third axe, and were indeed happy. "Two minutes later we stood in bright sunshine, and such was its invigorating power that in ten minutes all our stiffness had vanished. My hat blew off here, and rolled on its stiffened brim at a tremendous pace down a couloir of ice. Fortunately, I had a woollen helmet which Miss Richardson had knitted for me. We hastened on very quickly in order to relieve, as soon as possible, the anxiety which we well knew our friends at Zermatt were enduring. "When on the snow ridge between points 3912 mètres and 3729 mètres we heard voices far below us on the west, and soon saw what we knew afterwards to be Mr Aitkin, Imboden, and a porter. They had abandoned their intention of climbing the Dent Blanche 'on account of bad weather.' Indeed, Miss Richardson, who had spent the night at the Stockje, was told by Imboden that 'in such weather it would be impossible, and probably would remain so for a day or two; therefore, they might as well go to Ferpécle and do another col the next day.' "Seeing that the party were above the route to Ferpécle, we knew at once that they were looking for us. Imboden shouted out to us, 'Where do you come from?' We pointed to the Dent Blanche, and they immediately turned towards Zermatt, and we only missed them by about five minutes at the usual breakfast place. "Now, as we knew that there was no need for us to hurry, we rested, and made a most hearty breakfast, as we had left on the rocks a whole chicken, some ham, bread, plums, and a bottle of white wine. "On crossing the glacier to the Wandfluh rocks our axes and rücksacks hissed like serpents for a long time, while we saw in the distance the storm which overtook Mr Macdonald on the Lyskamm that very morning; and none of us liked the renewal of electric energy, which may well be believed. A heavy mist also threatened us. Mr Aitkin had a similar experience to ours. "We descended by way of the Wandfluh, and above the Stockje untied the rope which we had had on for thirty-eight hours; and such is the virtue of the Alpine knot that we were as firmly tied at the end of this time as we were when we first put on the rope. "On the Zmutt Glacier we bathed our hands repeatedly in the glacier pools as a safeguard against possible frost-bites with entirely satisfactory results. On the glacier we were delighted to meet Mr E. T. Hartley, who welcomed us most warmly, and told us of the anxiety of our friends; he, however, and one good lady in Zermatt said all the time that we should return safe and sound again. Just off the glacier we met three porters provided with blankets and provisions sent by the kind thoughtfulness of Mr Schuster and Herr Seiler. "We rested at the Staffel Alp, where we had some most refreshing tea, and reached Zermatt in the evening." CHAPTER X ALONE ON THE DENT BLANCHE I am indebted to Mr Harold Spender, the author of a fine description of the accident in 1899 on the Dent Blanche, for permission to reprint the greater portion of it, and also to the proprietors of _McClure's Magazine_ and of _The Strand Magazine_, in which publications it first appeared. The safe return of one of the party is alluded to in _The Alpine Journal_ as one of the most wonderful escapes in the whole annals of mountaineering. "Mr F. W. Hill, whose narrative in _The Alpine Journal_ necessarily forms the best evidence as to the incidents, says that it was Glynne Jones who wanted to climb the Dent Blanche by its western _arête_--a notably difficult undertaking, and one that has probably only twice been achieved. "Glynne Jones had discussed the possibilities of the undertaking with his own guide, Elias Furrer, of Stalden, and they had come to the conclusion that the conditions were never likely to be more favourable than in this August of 1899. Glynne Jones, therefore, asked Mr Hill to accompany them, and to bring along with him his own guide, Jean Vuignier, of Evolena. Both guides knew their climbers very well; for Furrer had been with Glynne Jones on and off for five years, and Vuignier had climbed at Zermatt with Hill the year before. But Mr Hill, who had promised to take his wife to Zermatt over the Col d'Herens, refused to go. Glynne Jones accordingly secured a second guide in Clemens Zurbriggen, of Saas-Fée, a young member of a great climbing clan. Vuignier, however, was so disappointed at his employer's refusal, that Mr Hill, finding that his wife made no objection, finally consented to join the party. Thus, with the addition of Mr Hill and his guide, the expedition numbered five members. They left Arolla on Sunday morning, 27th August, with a porter carrying blankets. They intended to sleep on the rocks below the _arête_. Arriving at the Bricolla châlets, a few shepherds' huts high up the mountain, at four in the afternoon, they changed their minds, sent the blankets down to Arolla, and slept in the huts. "They started at three o'clock in the morning in two parties, the first consisting of Furrer, Zurbriggen, and Jones, roped in that order, and the second of Vuignier and Hill. They crossed the glacier and reached the ridge in good time. 'It was soon very evident,' says Mr Hill in his narrative, 'that the climbing was going to be difficult, as the rocks were steep slabs, broken and easy occasionally, but, on the whole, far too smooth.' Rock-climbers do not particularly care how steep a rock may be so long as it is broken up into fissures which will give hold to the feet and hands. In the steepest mountains of the Dolomite region, for instance, the rocks are thus broken, and therefore mountains can be climbed easily which, from their bases, look absolutely inaccessible. "As they progressed up and along the ridge the climbing became more and more difficult. They had to go slowly and with extreme caution, and often they were in doubt as to the best way to proceed. Sometimes, indeed, there seemed no possible route. In these places Furrer, who seems to have been accepted as the leader of the party, would detach himself from the rope and go forward to find a passage. "On entering upon this part of the climb the two parties had joined ropes, and were now advancing as one, and roped in this order--Furrer, Zurbriggen, Glynne Jones, Vuignier, and Hill. "It is evident that between nine o'clock and ten climbing had become exceedingly arduous. 'In two or three places,' says Mr Hill, 'the only possible way was over an overhanging rock up which the leader had to be pushed and the others helped from above and below.' This gives us a graphic picture of the nature of the climb. Nothing is more fatiguing than to climb over a rock which is in the least degree overhanging. Mr Hill tells me that Furrer showed him his finger-tips at breakfast-time--9 A.M.--and that they were severely cut. "Yet no one must imagine for an instant that the party was in the least degree puzzled or vexed. There is nothing so exhilarating as the conflict with danger, and it generally happens in climbing a mountain that the party is merriest at the most difficult places. Mr Hill, indeed, tells us that they were in the 'highest spirits.' 'Climbing carefully,' he says, 'but in the highest spirits, we made good progress, for at ten o'clock it was agreed we were within an hour of the summit.' It was at this point and time that the accident occurred. "They had been forced below the ridge by the difficulty of the rocks, and had come to a place where their obvious route lay up a narrow gully, or sloping chimney. On an ordinary day it is possible that they would have found no difficulty in going forward, but a few days before there had been rain, and probably snow, on these high rock summits. At any rate, the rocks were 'glazed'; covered, that is, with a film of ice, probably snow melted and re-frozen, just sufficiently thick to adhere, and sufficiently slippery to make the fingers 'slither' over the rocks. If the climber cannot clear away the ice with his ice-axe, he must go round another way, and if the rocks are steep the first course becomes obviously impossible. That was the condition of affairs at ten o'clock on the morning of 28th August 1899. "In a party of five roped together, with 30 feet of rope between each member, the amount of space covered by the party will obviously be 40 yards; and it frequently happens that those who are roped last cannot see the leaders. Mr Hill, as we have seen, was roped last, and by the time he reached the level of the other climbers Furrer had already turned away from the gully and was attempting to climb to the ridge by another route. To the left of the gully in front of them was a vertical rock face stretching for about 30 feet. Beyond this was a smooth-looking buttress some 10 feet high, by climbing which the party could regain the ridge. When Hill came up with the rest, Furrer was already attempting to climb this buttress. "But the buttress was quite smooth, and Furrer was at a loss to find a hold. Unable to support himself, he called to Zurbriggen to place an axe under his feet for him to stand on. In this way he might be able to reach with his hands to the top of the buttress. There was nothing unusual in this method of procedure. In climbing difficult rocks, when the hand-holds are far up, it is frequently the custom to help the climber by placing an ice-axe under his feet. But in this case Furrer discovered that he could not climb the buttress with the help of Zurbriggen alone, and he would probably have done more wisely if he had abandoned the attempt. But, instead of that, he called Glynne Jones to help Zurbriggen in holding him up. "'Apparently,' says Mr Hill, 'he did not feel safe, for he turned his head and spoke to Glynne Jones, who then went to hold the axe steady.' "From Mr Hill's own explanations the situation was as follows: The leading climber, Furrer, was grasping the rock face, standing on an ice-axe held vertically by Zurbriggen and Glynne Jones. These two were forced, in order to hold the ice-axe securely, to crouch down with their faces to the ground, and were, therefore oblivious of what was going on above them. But the important point is, that their four hands were occupied in holding the ice-axe, and that as they were standing on a narrow ledge, with a very sharp slope immediately below, these two men were in a helpless position. They were unready to stand a shock. Thus, at the critical moment, out of a party of five climbers, three had virtually cast everything on a single die! "Mr Hill, standing level with the rest of the party, could see quite clearly what was happening. He was about 60 feet distant from them, the guide Vuignier being roped between them at an equal distance of some 30 feet from each. Furrer could now stand upright on the axe, which was firmly held by four strong hands, and could reach with his own fingers to the top of the buttress. It was a perilous moment. It is the rule with skilled climbers that you should never leave your foot-hold until you have secured your hand-hold. The natural issue would have been that Furrer, finding it impossible to secure on the smooth rock a steady grip with his hands, should have declined to trust himself. But the science of the study is one thing and the art of the mountain another. There are moments when a man does not know whether he has secured a steady grip or an unsteady, and the question can only be answered by making the attempt. If the party blundered at all, it was in allowing the second and third men to be so completely occupied with holding the axe that there was no reserve of power to hold up Furrer in case of a slip. But it is easy to speak after the event. "What Hill now saw was this: He saw Furrer reach his hands to the top of the buttress, take a grip, and attempt to pull himself up. But his feet never left the ice-axe beneath, for in the process of gripping his hands slipped. And then, as Hill looked, Furrer's body slowly fell back. It seemed, he has told himself, to take quite a long time falling. Furrer fell backwards, right on to the two oblivious men beneath him, causing them to collapse instantly, knocking them off their standing-place, and carrying them with him in his fall from the ridge. 'All three,' says Mr Hill in his narrative, 'fell together.' Instinctively he turned to the wall to get a better hold of the rock, and therefore did not see the next incident in the fatal sequence. Vuignier, as we have seen, was standing 30 feet from the first three, and the weight of three human bodies swinging at the end of the rope must have come directly on him. He was, apparently, taken by surprise, and immediately pulled off the rock. Hill heard that terrible sound--the scuffle and rattle of stones that meant the dragging of a helpless human being into space--and he knew, or thought he knew, that his own turn would come in a moment; but as he clung there to the rock, waiting for the inevitable end, there was a pause. Nothing happened. "After a few endless seconds of time he faced round and found himself alone. Looking down, he saw his four companions sliding down the precipitous slopes at a terrific rate, without a cry, but with arms outstretched, helplessly falling into the abyss. Between him and them, and from his waist, there hung 30 feet of rope swinging slowly to and fro. The faithful Vuignier had probably fastened the rope securely round some point of rock to protect his master. The full weight of the four bodies had probably expended itself on the rock-fastening of the rope, and thereby saved the life of the fifth climber. Dazed and astonished to find himself still in the land of the living, Mr Hill stood for some time watching his comrades fall, until, sickened, he turned away to face his own situation. "It was not very promising. He was without food, drink, or warm clothing. No man alone could climb down by the ridge up which those five experts had climbed in the morning. And in front lay a difficulty which had already destroyed his friends when attempting to overcome it by mutual help. It seemed impossible. "Perhaps it was fortunate that Hill was not only a mathematician, but a man of characteristic mathematical temperament--cool, unemotional, long-headed. Most men in his situation would have gone mad. Some would have waited right there till starvation overcame them or a rescue party arrived. But there was little or no chance of a rescue party, and Mr Hill was certainly not the man to wait for starvation. It was a curious irony that probably at that very moment there was a party on the summit of the Dent Blanche. Mr Hill's party had seen two climbers on the south _arête_ at half-past eight o'clock, and again about an hour later. At this moment they were probably at the summit. But Mr Hill had no means of communicating with them, and the hour's climb which lay between him and them might as well have been the length of Europe. An hour later he himself heard a faint 'cooey' (the party were probably on the way down)--a jovial, generous hail from men unconscious of any catastrophe. "Mr Hill's immediate task was to regain the ridge and reach the summit. At the moment of the accident he was some 60 feet from the fatal buttress, and now wisely made no attempt to get near it. Instead, he moved to circumvent the glazed gully from its other side. After long and tedious efforts, lasting for a period of time which he cannot now even approximately estimate, he succeeded in his flanking movement, and finally, with great labour and peril, climbed back to the ridge by a slope of frozen snow and ice broken with rocks. It would be difficult to imagine anything more terrible than this lonely climb over ice-covered rocks, the painful cutting of steps up an almost precipitous wall, with a precipice many thousand feet deep at his back, down which the smallest slip would send him to certain death. But at last he regained the ridge, and the difficulties of ascent were now mainly overcome. In about another hour he found himself on the summit--a solitary, mournful victor. It was there he heard the shout from the other party. But he could not see them or make them hear, and so he made his way down with all reasonable speed, hoping to overtake them. "Hill had climbed the Dent Blanche in the previous year with a guided party, and therefore, to some extent, knew the route. Without much difficulty he was able to follow the ridge as far as possible down to the lowest _gendarme_, a pile of rock with a deep, narrow fissure. Then a sudden mist hid everything from view, and it was impossible to see the way off the _gendarme_. He tried several routes downward in the mist, but at last wisely resolved to wait till it lifted. While he was searching, a snow-storm and a cold wind came up. 'They drove me,' says Mr Hill in his plain way, 'to seek shelter in the lee of the rocks.' There he tied himself with his rope, and, to avoid the danger of falling off in a moment of sleep, still further secured himself by an ice-axe wedged firmly in front of him--poor protections to a man absolutely without food or wraps, clinging to the side of an abyss in the searching cold and stormy darkness of mist and snow, wedged under the eave of an overhanging rock, and only able to sit in a cramped posture. But Mr Hill was no ordinary man. If the Fates were asking for his life he determined to sell it dearly, sustained in his resolve by the thought of that waiting wife, unconscious of ill, below in Zermatt. "It must have been, at this time, past mid-day on Monday, 28th August. "The storm lasted all that Monday, and Monday night, and Tuesday morning. All through those dreadful hours of darkness Hill sat in the cleft of rock, sleeping most of the time, but always half-frozen with the cold, and whenever he awoke obliged to beat himself to regain his natural warmth. Happily, he was well protected against the falling snow by the eave of the overhanging rock, but it covered his knees and boots, causing him intense cold in the feet. "At last, at mid-day on Tuesday, the mist cleared and the sun shone again in a sky of perfect blue. He could now resume his descent. To climb over snow-covered rocks in a roped party is difficult enough, but to do it alone is to risk your life many times over. But there was no alternative. "At last the rocks ended and the worst of the peril was over. He had reached the snow _arête_, where not even the heavy fall of snow had quite obliterated the tracks of those who had gone in front of him. These helped him to find his way. But the steps had mostly to be recut, and that must have been very fatiguing after his previous experiences. The next difficulty was the lower part of the Wandfluh, a bold wall of rock which leads down first to the Schonbuhl and then to the Zmutt Glaciers, and which, at its base, ends in a steep precipice that can be descended only by one gully. Here Mr Hill's memory failed him. He could not remember which was the right gully. This was, perhaps, the most terrible trial of all. If he could find that gully his task was almost accomplished. The rest of the descent to Zermatt is little more than a walk. But hour after hour passed; he descended gully after gully, only to find himself blocked below by one precipice after another. In one of these attempts he dropped his ice-axe, without which he could never hope to return alive. Unless he could recover it he was a dead man. But, no, it was not quite lost. There it lay, far below him, on the rocks. Slowly and painfully he descended the gully to fetch it. At last he reached it. In this quest he wasted a whole hour! "At last he discovered a series of chimneys to the extreme right of the Wandfluh and leading down to the glacier. Letting himself down these steep chimneys, he found himself at last, on Tuesday evening, on the high moraines of the Zmutt Glacier. He must have reached the glacier about six o'clock, but he had only the sun to reckon by. Here the steep descent ends, and there is but a stony walk of two and a half hours down the glacier by a path which leads to the Staffel Alp Inn. The sun set while he was still on the moraine, and he has a vivid recollection of seeing the red 'Alpengluh' on Monte Rosa. But as the darkness grew it became more and more difficult to keep to the path. "Here at last his marvellous strength began to fail him. He had no snow-glasses, and his eyes were suffering from the prolonged glare of the snow. A sort of waking trance fell on him. As he stumbled forward, over the stones of that horrible moraine, he imagined that his companions were still alive and with him. He kept calling to them to 'come along.' 'It is getting late, you fellows,' he shouted; 'come along.' "At last he was brought up by a great rock. In the darkness he had wandered below the path. The rock entirely barred his way. He had a vague illusion that it was a châlet, and wandered round it searching for a door. At last he settled down by it in a semi-conscious condition. Then he must have fallen asleep, probably about ten o'clock. The sleep lasted about twelve hours, and was better than meat and drink. To most men it would have ended in death. "When he woke up at ten o'clock on Wednesday morning, in broad daylight, he soon saw that he had been sleeping quite near the path. A few minutes' scramble brought him back to it, and he soon came to a little wooden refreshment-house, about an hour below the Staffel Inn, which he had passed in the darkness. He went up to the woman at the hut and asked for some beer! He had only fifty centimes in his pocket; one of his dead companions had held the purse. He volunteered no complaint; but the woman was sympathetic, and soon found out whence he came. She then gave him a little milk and some dry bread--all she had. After a short rest he resumed his way to Zermatt, distant about half an hour, and reached the village at 11.30. As he was walking down the main street past the church he met his wife. "He told her simply what had happened. Then he had lunch. 'I was now ravenous,' he says, 'and devoured a beefsteak, with the help of a glass of whisky and soda, and a bottle of champagne.' Within an hour or two he was entirely recovered." CHAPTER XI A STIRRING DAY ON THE ROSETTA Amongst the many rock scrambles in the neighbourhood of St Martino in the Dolomites of Tyrol, the Rosetta when ascended by the western face can be counted on to awaken an interest in the most stolid of climbers. I am indebted to the courtesy of a girl friend for the loan of her mountaineering diary, and permission to make extracts from its very interesting contents, of which her account of an ascent of the Rosetta will, I feel sure, be read with keen enjoyment by climbers and non-climbers alike. That a young English girl on her first visit to the mountains should carry out with such success so difficult an expedition, is much to the credit of both herself and her guides. Her brother accompanied her, and the climb took place on 10th August 1898. [Illustration: AMBROSE SUPERSAX. (P. 209.)] [Illustration: FROM THE ROSETTA. By Signor Vittorio Sella. _To face_ p. 182.] "A cautious bang at my door, a faint 'Si!' from me, and steps departing. Then I lit a candle and dressed. But it was the critical moment when the dawn comes quickly, and I blew it out in five minutes and watched the blue light brighten on the dusky outlines of the white church and houses. The Cimone was growing pink as I got on my heavy hob-nailed boots, and, taking my tennis shoes also, I tramped softly down to breakfast. Bettega, our leading guide, was there, with his cordial smile and hand-shake, and G---- and Tavernaro soon appeared. We were off before long, taking with us a porter in addition to the two guides, and G---- and I let Bettega see plainly that we thought this a little superfluous, but later on we were glad we had him. I must admit that I never met such good-natured and thoughtful guides, nor such excellent ones. After passing through forest, we had to ascend up steep shingle, and as this steepened I reeled a little, my feet being not as yet well used to this sort of work. Bettega, however, put his hand behind him, I crooked my fingers into his, and that gave me all the balance I needed. Finally we crossed some snow, and sitting on a little platform under a towering rock, we perceived that the way we were to ascend the Rosetta would be a very different experience to the climb by the ordinary route. "At this point I took off my skirt, and removed my boots, putting on tennis shoes instead. The rubber soles of these are far safer than nails on the smooth and slabby Dolomite rock. "The guides jabbered between themselves; Bettega smiled sublimely and looked utterly in his element, but Tavernaro seemed rather subdued; he is under the moral influence of Bettega, for though Tavernaro may have more education and cleverness he rounds upon his comrade at times owing to his excitable disposition. But on the mountains he slinks at Bettega's elbow, as the two roll along with the peculiar mountaineer's bending stride on level ground, and Tavernaro never asks a price or arranges for an excursion without consulting Bettega. But, on the other hand, Bettega lives in fear of Tavernaro's lively tongue, so it is about balanced! "Having finished our meal, we set off. I was roped to Bettega, who led. After about five minutes Bettega, who till then had held in his hand all the rope we were not using, dropped it in a big coil, and told me to 'Remain firm' where I was. He then climbed upwards for a few minutes, but I did not watch, for though my head had not swum at all as yet, I wasn't too sure of it, and the rock face was very sheer, so I neither looked up nor down, but sat with my cheek against the rock and held on! But all went merrily. Tavernaro occasionally placed one of my feet, which was placeless, and we got up the first _camino_, or rocky chimney, fairly well. 'Wait a moment, signorina,' said Bettega, and then he disappeared overhead--literally disappeared, for he was quite hidden when he cried cheerily, 'Come! Come!' I got up, and found a very small _posto_ or tiny platform on which to wait, with a disagreeably obtrusive precipice below it. Above was a second _camino_, which looked smooth and gloomy. I leant affectionately against the rock, pondering deeply of anything except 'empty space.' 'The signorina is all right there?' enquired Bettega solicitously. 'To be sure she is!' cried Tavernaro gaily, as he leant over me against the rock. Then up clomb Bettega, and G---- advanced slowly and surely from below. As the minutes went by I shut my eyes, and was gloomily thankful when the summons came from above. Looking up, I could just see Bettega's bushy black head and flannel cap couched amongst the rocks. Fifteen feet up the _camino_ a big stone was wedged, and between this and the back of the chimney one had to pass, emerging above at the top of the wall. G---- having now reached the _posto_, I began to go up, with Tavernaro closely following me. Bit by bit I climbed; a grab, a hoist, a foot tucked into a crevice on either side of the _camino_, a long reach with my arm, a steady pull--and likewise, it must be confessed, a pull from the rope!--and so up, up again. The rock wall was abominably straight and holeless. Under the stone, with the three members placed on ledges or in cracks, I in vain sought a point of rest for the fourth before hauling. 'Good heavens!' I exclaimed in melancholy undertones, and a gurgling chuckle from below showed that Tavernaro sympathised. 'Here you are, signorina,' he said, giving me his shoulder for a momentary foot-hold. With that instant of support I swung up on to the stone, and so to the next _posto sicuro_, or safe spot. G---- came up without help, but he assured me that it was a really hard place. "Of course I don't pretend I did it all myself. Quite half a dozen times I doubt if I could have got up without material aid from the cord, or from Tavernaro below. Once, in a _camino_, the latter gave me a butt with his head, which made me reflect how great a man was lost to the game of football, while the way he placed my feet was a great help to one who, as a novice, had not yet learnt to study the foot-holds in advance. "We now reached a place where a third _camino_ ran up above us, while an awkward traverse led to another on the right. Here I heard Tavernaro remonstrate with Bettega on the route he had taken, but the latter said, very decidedly, that he intended going straight on, so Tavernaro, as usual, subsided, but became very quiet. He had never before ascended this _camino_, which was a discovery of Bettega's, but no doubt he had heard about it. "We began to climb it, Bettega first and I following him closely. It had rained heavily the previous day, and all the loose stones had been washed to the very edge of the ledges. Not having been cautioned about these, and intent on getting up, I let several fall. 'Hi! Gently with the stones!' gasped Tavernaro from below, and when he reached my side I saw that his knuckles were bleeding. 'Have you hurt yourself?' I enquired. 'No, it is you who have done it, and you've twice nearly killed your brother,' he replied, but G---- told me to tell Tavernaro he had sent down a much worse stone than any of mine, whereat he looked resigned, and remarked, 'Oh, yes, these things can't always be avoided.' "'Stay quietly where you are, and wait till I tell you to come on,' Bettega now remarked. I crouched in a very narrow chimney for a little, watched not--a hundred pities--and heard Bettega go up beyond. Not more than three minutes elapsed before his deep voice sang out: 'Now, come up!' and though I replied: 'I'm coming,' I wondered how I was to do it. We were near the top of the chimney. Further up, it became too narrow for any human form to squeeze into. One had therefore to come out of it to the right and climb up and over a huge bulging mass of rock about 15 feet high, which overhung the precipice. This mass of gently bulging rock was worn smooth by rain and stones. There was no proper foot-hold, hardly the tiniest crack. _How_ had Bettega managed it? I got up the cold, damp chimney as far as I could, leant gasping against the rock, and felt near the end of my courage. Tavernaro was stowed away yards below, G---- also out of sight, Bettega invisible above. There was just the cord, pulling me away from the inhospitable rocks, and at my very heels an abyss of 2000 feet. I made one bold grab on the smooth wall, but speedily retired to the end of the _camino_, and feebly yelled, 'Wait! Ah, I can't do it!' 'All right! Catch hold of this cord!' came the answer, and a loop of rope was let slowly down. I seized it, contrived to get one foot on to a tiny, weeny point, came out of the chimney, and heard Bettega call, 'To the right, signorina!' 'To the right; that's all very well!' I muttered fiercely, and felt my hand slipping; my foot gave, my fingers ran down the rope, the cord round my waist tightened, I pushed my arm through the loop of the free rope with one last effort, and then finding no support of any kind for my feet, was ignominiously pulled, kicking, up the precipice by Bettega, who, firmly fixed with both feet against rocks, hauled me up most joyously hand over hand. "'But, Michele, how did _you_ manage to get up?' I panted, as I sank on a ledge, and gazed in awed admiration at him. 'Well, not like that, signorina!' he said, with his honest laugh; 'I really came up by pressure. There are no hand-grips, so you have to do without.' 'It's marvellous! It's stupendous!' murmured I, really awed by the man's power. Then we both listened for Tavernaro's coming, and a proper little comedy, for us two at least, ensued. Of course one could see nothing, the rock bulged too much, but one could hear Tavernaro's voice some 20 feet below, as he groped about, swearing softly. Five minutes went by and all was still, so Bettega began haranguing him. 'More to the right, Tony; you must come out, don't go too high in the chimney!' Then--'Look out, Tony, I'll send you the rope-end!' But an ominous '_No_,' quickly answered this proposal. A guide's honour is very sensitive on this point. Another three or four minutes passed. 'How is Tavernaro getting on?' I whispered, and Bettega replied, smiling broadly, 'He wishes to try.' "Some gasps from the direction of the chimney were now heard, and Bettega again expostulated gently. 'Look here, Tony, we are old friends; take the rope!' '_No_' in gloomy defiance. 'Oh, if we were alone it would be different, but we must not keep the rest of the party waiting, and the signorina may take cold.' This was all in _patois_, but I caught some of it, and here struck in quickly, 'Oh, not at all!' Bettega looked surprised, and resumed more energetically his exhortations to Tony to pocket his pride and accept the loop of rope. At last Tony, who must have been within 10 feet of the top and so at the worst spot, suddenly jerked on to the proffered cord, and was up the next moment, hatless, with huge beads of sweat on his forehead and his black hair as straight as matches. There was a great rent in the side of one of his hands, which bled profusely. What struck me most, however, was the expression of suffering and shaken confidence on his face. Tavernaro ranks only second to Bettega and Zecchini, and was asked to go to the Caucasus and other distant mountains. He just stumbled to a safe spot, wrung his left hand, and panted out, 'Jesu Maria! it was cruel!' I fear that Bettega's smile was more triumphant than sympathetic. Nevertheless, he enquired kindly for Tavernaro's hand, but for fully two minutes the latter's loquaciousness was lost. The look of anguish on his face meant, I think, that he had seen death pretty near to him. He told us that he went far too much into the crack on the left, and had remained sticking in it till his hands got so cold he feared he would lose his grip. If he had, he was lost, and probably G---- also, so he had actually held on with his head and left his cap jammed in the crack. I called to G---- to hook the rope over a point of rock in case Tavernaro fell, and this he had done, but even so the frightful jerk might have torn him down, and in any case Tavernaro must have been either killed or frightfully hurt, as he had, I should think, about 30 feet of rope out. "While I was in the throes of the difficult part, Papa's cap fell off my head, but Tavernaro caught it and brought it up. He was in an awful state of mind about his own cap, which had his guide's badge, etc., on it, and begged me to call down to my brother about it. I did so, but G---- replied several times with some asperity that he had enough to do to get himself up. 'Why can't he bring it up in his mouth?' cried Tavernaro excitedly, and, in the end, G---- brought it in his belt. "My opinion is that both G---- and Tavernaro ran a great risk, and that Tavernaro was fully aware of it, and, for a few minutes after, was not a little shaken. "After half an hour at this notable spot Bettega resumed the ascent. 'I hope we shall have nothing more so difficult,' I said eagerly, and Bettega replied soothingly that it became 'much less arduous,' but the chimney we were now in was gloomy and slippery, at best very sheer. The guides had resumed their coats, which they had taken off for the bad bit. At the end of the chimney we came to a high overhanging wall, at the foot of which Tavernaro and I reposed, while Bettega climbed over it and disappeared. 'Come!' and I rose wearily. Bettega kept that cord very tight on me, and it certainly, as Tavernaro afterwards said, inclined to pull me to the right, away from the best holds, for the wall was comparatively easy, though perpendicular, and I ought not to have swung out quite free from it! But that is what I did. As I rose from the second grip with the right hand, my muscles suddenly relaxed, I lost hold, gave a sigh to signify 'It's no good!' and swung clear out, dangling over 2000 feet of precipice on a single cord which nearly cut me in two. G---- and Tavernaro were much excited below, suddenly seeing me appear hurtling overhead. Of course, in a moment, I swung in again, grabbed afresh, and with terrific tightening of the rope from Bettega, got up in no time. As I swung in the air, I remember G----, in a curiously calm voice, asking, 'Are you all right?' and Tavernaro crying, 'Don't be afraid, signorina, it's all right!' "Five minutes later we left the huge iron walls of rock, and emerged suddenly on to the flat. Here one realised what breadth and width meant, as opposed to height and profundity. In two seconds Bettega and I romped to the top, where the cairn of stones marking the highest point rose, and shaking hands heartily I gasped with intense feeling, 'O Michele, how grateful I am to you! Twice to-day I owe you my life!' a debt he utterly disclaimed, remarking that whatever he had done was merely in the day's work, and that on him rested the responsibility of bringing us up that way; as of course it did. Our porter was waiting for us on the summit, and we sat down there, while Bettega and Tavernaro, still looking impressed, knelt attentively to take off our light shoes and put on our nailed boots instead." The party descended by the ordinary route, a pleasant change after all the difficult work they had accomplished during the upward climb. The foregoing account gives what is rare amongst the descriptions beginners usually furnish of anything particularly hard they may have undertaken, for the writer has obviously jotted down, within a few hours of her return, an exact impression of how things struck her during the day. It is refreshing to find some one who admits that at certain points her courage nearly gave out, and at others that her guide had to assist her with the rope, for we know that while the very best climbers have had to train their nerves and muscles before they became what they are, some of the very worst are most ready to exclaim that they never felt fear or accepted assistance, and that a certain mountain up which they were heaved like sacks of corn and let down like buckets in a well is "a perfect swindle; any fool could go up it!" Unluckily, every fool does, and each one prepares the way for an appallingly increasing death-roll. The ascent of the Rosetta by the western face must not be condemned as an imprudent expedition on the occasion just mentioned. True, there was a novice in the party, but she was the only inexperienced member of it. They had ample guiding power, they were properly equipped, and they had good weather. Tavernaro had an offer of help at the critical moment, and availed himself of it when he saw there was real danger. It will be noticed that the four climbers were on two separate ropes. This is usual in the Dolomites, but the majority of experienced mountaineers condemn the practice even on rocks, while on snow it is positive madness. It was owing to this, that, as related in the foregoing narrative, the lady's brother and Tavernaro ran a greater risk than was at all necessary. [Illustration: A CLIMBING PARTY STARTING FROM ZERMATT FOR THE HUT.] [Illustration: THE TRIFT HOTEL.] [Illustration: THE GANDEGG HUT, NEAR ZERMATT.] [Illustration: THE ZINAL ROTHHORN (to the right) FROM THE TRIFT VALLEY. _To face p. 195._] CHAPTER XII THE ZINAL ROTHHORN TWICE IN ONE DAY Ignorance of what the future has in store is often not a bad thing. Had I realised that at the hour when we ought to have been at Zinal we should be sitting--and for the second time in one day--on the top of the Rothhorn, we should hardly have set out in so light-hearted a fashion from the little inn in the Trift Valley, above Zermatt, at 4 A.M. on 14th September 1895. The party consisted of my two guides, Joseph and Roman Imboden, father and son, and myself, and our idea was to cross the fine peak of the Rothhorn, 13,855 feet high, from Zermatt to Zinal. I had been up that mountain before, and so, on many previous occasions, had Imboden, but, oddly enough, he had never been down the other side. Roman, however, had once or twice made the traverse, and, in any case, we knew quite enough about the route from hearsay to feel sure we could hit it off even without Roman's experience. Some fresh snow had fallen a few days previously, and the slabby part of the Rothhorn on the north side was unpleasantly white, besides which there was a strong and bitterly cold wind. We pretty well abandoned all idea of getting down on the other side when we saw how unfavourably things were turning out, and though I felt greatly disappointed I never have and never would urge a guide in whom I have confidence to undertake what he considers imprudent. We left the matter open till the last minute, however, and took both the knapsacks to the top, where we arrived at 9.15. Warming ourselves in a sunny and sheltered corner of the by no means inhospitable summit, we had some food and a pleasant rest. I cannot say if the meal and the cheering effects of the sunshine made things look different, but it is a fact that after, perhaps, an hour's halt, Imboden shouldered his knapsack and remarked to me, "Come along, ma'am, as far as the end of the ridge; we will just have a look." Hope awakened in me, and scrambling to my feet I followed him. The wind was certainly high; I had difficulty even on those easy rocks in keeping my footing; how, I wondered, should we manage when the real climbing began? I had read of an _arête_ of rock, little broader than one of the blunt knives we had used at breakfast, and the idea of passing along it with a shrieking gale trying to tear us from our perch was not alluring. Presently we reached the spot where one quits the gentle slope and comparatively broad ridge, and embarks on the profile of a slender and precipitous face of rock, with nearly vertical forehead and small and infrequent cracks for hands and feet. We were going to do more than look at it, apparently; we were about to descend it, for without any further remark Imboden began to get ready, letting Roman pass ahead. Taking hold of the rope between his son and himself he told me to stand aside while he gradually paid it out as Roman went down. The first yard or two consisted of slabs, set at a high angle. Then the ridge abruptly curved over and one saw nothing but air till the eye rested on the glacier thousands of feet below. In a few minutes Roman had disappeared, and the steady paying out of the rope alone indicated that he was climbing downwards. After a time he reached almost the end of his tether of about 30 feet--for we were on a very long rope--and his father called out, "Rope up!" "Let the lady come to the edge and give me a little more," came a voice from far down. Putting the final loop into my hand and bidding me sit down, Imboden held me hard by the cord behind until the tautness of the piece between Roman and me showed it was time to be moving. I then advanced very cautiously to what seemed like the edge of the world. Turning round with my face to the rock I had my first glance below. Far down was the top of Roman's hat, and as he saw the advancing soles of my boots he grinned with appreciation, feeling that now we really were embarked on the enterprise. "There's a good place down here, ma'am, come along!" he called up, with one toe on a ledge 3 inches wide, two fingers thrust into a crack, and the rope held out of his way by being put, the remark concluded, between his teeth. I had no doubt it was a nice place when one got there, but meanwhile I had to make the best use I could of my eyes to find a suitable assortment of hand-and foot-holes. Soon I, too, was clinging to the face of the precipice, and Imboden was left above out of sight and before long almost out of hearing. The wind here was far less trying as we were sheltered by the topmost pinnacle of the mountain. To me the feeling of danger from a gale on a rock peak is due even more to the difficulty of hearing what one's companions are saying than to the risk of one's balance being upset. It is extremely disconcerting, when a climber, descending steep rocks and anxious to make a long but perhaps an easy step downwards to good foot-hold, calls for more rope, and is promptly swung clear out into space by an invisible guide above, who has misunderstood his orders. When a party is accustomed to work together, this sort of thing seldom happens, still it makes all the difference in the pleasure of negotiating difficult rocks if the air is calm. Our only trouble now was owing to the fresh snow, but this had partially consolidated, and we got down steadily and safely, gradually leaving behind the cold wind which whistled amongst the crags above. It was early in the day, and we went slowly, stopping once or twice to photograph where warm and sheltered resting-places of comfortable proportions tempted us to linger. The rocky knife edge was unpleasantly sharp for the arms bent over it, but useful ledges down the side helped to distribute the weight and amuse and occupy the mind. When finally we reached the end of the rocks, and had nothing but snow between us and the Mountet Hut, we considered ourselves as good as there, and made a long halt on the last stones. We were wrong, however. "My boy, I will go ahead now," remarked Imboden, stepping off into the snow. He went a few paces, and then looked first all round him and lastly at us. "_Blue ice!_" he muttered, with intense disgust. "Blue ice right down to the bottom!" We shrugged our shoulders; Imboden was ahead doing the work; we could afford to be philosophical. I should not like to say how many strokes of the axe each step required, but the slope was steep, a slip could not be risked, and Imboden hewed out great foot-holds in the slippery wall. After this had gone on for some time he paused. "Upon my word," remarked he, "it will take us the rest of the day to get down at this rate! I shall try another way." So we turned and remounted the slope, and sitting down once more on the stones, Imboden traced out a possible route down the face of the mountain, bearing diagonally across it. It looked dullish; besides, thought I, after all, we don't particularly want to go to Zinal. Roman put into words what, I think, sprung simultaneously into both our minds. "Let us go back to Zermatt over the top of the Rothhorn again!" "Yes, let us do that!" I exclaimed. Imboden gazed from one to the other of us in amazement. "Go back over the top of the Rothhorn?" he repeated. "Why, we should simply be out all night!" Roman didn't answer, but his eyes wandered persistently up the _arête_. His father now began to calculate, and by some strange process of arithmetic he came to the conclusion that if we hurried very much it was just possible that we might get off the difficult part of the peak before night overtook us. Still, he was far from reconciled to the idea, while every moment Roman and I liked it better. Imboden saw how keen we were, and presently exclaimed: "Well, I'll go if you both want it, but we must be quick; if we spend the night on the top of the Rothhorn and a storm comes on, we may simply lose our lives!" There was no need however, to tell Roman to be quick. He was told off to lead, and I followed, with Imboden last. The memory of that ascent has remained in my mind as a confused dream. Every scrap of my attention was given to holding on and pulling myself upwards, never pausing, except in the very worst places, to see what either of the guides was doing, and, with every foot-and hand-hold fresh in my memory, I was full of a delightful sense of security which muscles in first-class condition and complete absence of any sensation of fatigue fully justified. We rose at an incredible pace, and after an hour and twenty-five minutes of splendid exercise, we threw ourselves once more on the flat little top of the Rothhorn. We had now only the descent by the ordinary route between us and Zermatt, and this seemed a small matter compared to what we had accomplished that day. We did not remain long on the summit, and the first part of the descent was quickly ended. We had now reached that point on the mountain where it is necessary to leave the ridge and go down for some distance on the precipitous north face. This bit of the climb, always requiring great care on account of the smoothness and steepness of the rock, was on this occasion particularly difficult because of the powdery snow which covered everything, and the bitterly cold wind to which here, and, luckily for us, here only, we were exposed. The associations of these slabs are not of a nature to reassure the timid climber. Many years ago, in fact on the very first occasion when the Rothhorn was ascended from the Zermatt side, a startling incident took place near this spot. The party consisted of Messrs Dent and Passingham, with Alexander Burgener, Ferdinand Imseng, and Franz Andermatten as guides, and they were descending the mountain when the exciting occurrence described by Mr Dent happened.[7] He has kindly allowed me to reprint his account. [Illustration: THE ZINAL ROTHHORN FROM THE BREAKFAST PLACE ON THE WELLENKUPPE.] [Illustration: A STEEP FACE OF ROCK. _To face p. 202._] [Illustration: THE TOP OF A CHAMONIX AIGUILLE. By Signor Cajrati Crivelli Mesmer] [Illustration: "LEADING STRINGS."] "Down the first portion of the steep rock slope we passed with great caution, some of the blocks of stone being treacherously loose, or only lightly frozen to the face. We had arrived at the most difficult part of the whole climb, and at a rock passage which at that time we considered was the nastiest we had ever encountered. The smooth, almost unbroken face of the slope scarcely afforded any foot-hold, and our security almost entirely depended on the rope we had laid down in our ascent. Had not the rope been in position we should have varied our route, and no doubt found a line of descent over this part much easier than the one we actually made for, even without any help from the fixed cord. Imseng was far below, working his way back to the _arête_, while the rest of the party were holding on, moving but slowly, with their faces to the mountain. Suddenly I heard a shout from above; those below glanced up at once: a large flat slab of rock, that had afforded us good hold in ascending, but proved now to have been only frozen in to a shallow basin of ice, had been dislodged by the slightest touch from one of the party above, and was sliding down straight at us. It seemed an age, though the stone could not have had to fall more than 10 feet or so, before it reached us. Just above me it turned its course slightly; Franz, who was just below, more in its direct line of descent, attempted to stop the mass, but it ground his hands against the rock and swept by straight at Imseng. A yell from us hardly awoke him to the danger; the slab slid on faster and faster, but just as we expected to see our guide swept away, the rock gave a bound for the first time, and as, with a startled expression, he flung himself against the rock face, it leapt up, and, flying by within a few inches of his head, thundered down below. A moment or two of silence followed, and then a modified cheer from Imseng, as subdued as that of a 'super' welcoming a theatrical king, announced his safety, and he looked up at us with a serious expression on his face. Franz's escape had been a remarkably lucky one, but his hands were badly cut about and bruised. In fact, it was a near thing for all of us, and the mere recollection will still call up that odd sort of thrill a man experiences on suddenly recollecting at 11 P.M. that he ought to have dined out that evening with some very particular people. Had not the rock turned its course just before it reached Franz, and bounded from the face of the mountain over Imseng's head, one or more of the party must unquestionably have been swept away. The place was rather an exceptional one, and the rock glided a remarkably long distance without a bound, but still the incident may serve to show that falling stones are not a wholly imaginary danger." A far more serious occurrence, however, took place on the north side of the Rothhorn in 1894, involving the loss of a life, the rest of the party escaping in a miraculous manner. I take my account of the disaster from _The Alpine Journal_. "On 20th September an accident occurred on the Zinal Rothhorn, in which Joseph Marie Biner, a well-known Zermatt guide, lost his life. The other members of the party were Dr Peter Horrocks and Peter Perren, both of whom are to be congratulated on their very narrow escape. The party had already effected the ascent of the mountain, and were descending towards Zermatt. On reaching the well-known _Blatte_ overlooking the Durand Glacier, the usual precautions were observed. Biner, who was leading, crossed the awkward slab, and planted himself firmly on the opposite side. Perren, who was last, was standing behind and holding on to a fair-sized rock, round which he was paying out the rope; while Dr Horrocks crossed the slab, and Biner gradually pulled in the slack. Suddenly, the rock in which Perren placed such confidence came out, and bounded down the mountain side. Perren slid rapidly down the steep rocks; Dr Horrocks, who had no foot-hold and very little hand-hold, was jerked from his position, turning a somersault, and becoming momentarily stunned from his head striking against the rock. The strain on the rope was too great for Biner to withstand, and he was dragged down too. The whole party half tumbled, half slid, down the very steep smooth rocks for 30 feet or 40 feet, when the rope between Dr Horrocks and Perren caught behind a projecting rock, and brought them both to a standstill. Perren found himself landed in a small patch of soft snow some 15 feet below the rock, which had so fortunately engaged the rope, while Dr Horrocks, some 7 feet higher up, though at first suspended with his back to the steep rocks, was very soon able to get more or less foot-hold. Poor Biner had the extra length of his own rope still to fall, and, when the strain came, the rope broke, according to one account, half-way between him and Dr Horrocks; according to another, rather nearer to the latter. Biner fell down on to the Durand Glacier, some 2000 feet below, whence his mutilated body was recovered by a search party which crossed the Trift Pass, carried the body down to Zinal, and so by road and train brought it to Zermatt, where the funeral took place. Dr Horrocks and Perren were rescued from their dangerous position some ten or twelve minutes after the accident occurred, by the guides Emile Gentinetta and Edouard Julen, who were following down the mountain with another party." To return to ourselves. We steadily progressed down the cold and snowy face, with rope kept taut and paid out slowly as, one by one, we moved lower. I need not follow our climb, which was without incident, and while it was still daylight, we reached the snow ridge, on the stones just below, which in ascending it is usual to pause for breakfast. We were particularly anxious to be off the stony rocks below and to gain the little glacier and pass over the moraine before dark, but this we could not manage, so in spite of our lantern we wandered about on those odious rocks for hours before we found the gully by which alone it is possible to get off them. Our various attempts entailed the descent of slippery chimneys leading to the top of black precipices, with nothing to be done but scramble up again, merely to embark in other chimneys with precisely similar consequences. I got so sick of the whole thing that I would gladly have dozed under a rock and awaited daylight. The guides, however, stuck to the business, and after a positive nightmare of gullies they at last hit off the right and only one. I have seldom felt greater satisfaction than when I stepped off those detestable rocks on to the snow, shimmering beneath our feet in the starlight. We had now only to cross the glacier and make our way down an exceedingly steep but well-defined foot-path over the sharply-crested moraine. Once we had left this behind us we had nothing more than grass-slopes between us and the Trift Inn. As soon as we reached this final stage in our day's work, we selected the most comfortable-looking hollow, and hanging the lantern to an axe stuck upright in the ground, we prepared, at a somewhat unorthodox hour and within only thirty minutes of the hotel, to enjoy a well-earned meal. CHAPTER XIII BENIGHTED ON A SNOW PEAK In a most interesting account of a mountain adventure which, by the courtesy of the writer, Sir H. Seymour King, I am enabled to reprint from _The Alpine Journal_, we are once more reminded that a party of thoroughly competent and robust mountaineers can come without evil after-effects out of a night of great hardship which would have undoubtedly proved fatal to ill-equipped and inexperienced amateurs and guides, such as those accompanying Mr Burckhardt, who perished from exposure on the Matterhorn.[8] After describing a previous ascent, Sir H. Seymour King goes on to say: "A few days later we went to Mürren, with the intention of carrying out a long-cherished plan of mine and testing the possibility of ascending the Silberhorn from the Roththal. Previous ascents had proved so lengthy, necessitating, I think, in nearly every case, the passing of a night on the rocks or the glacier, that I thought it would be highly desirable if some shorter route could be discovered. I had an idea that the route by the western _arête_ would prove to be the one sought for. Unfortunately, we were delayed in making an attempt by bad weather until the 23rd of September, which is undoubtedly too late in the year for so difficult an expedition. "I left the Hôtel Silberhorn with Ambrose Supersax and Louis Zurbrücken as guides, and a porter, at ten o'clock on the morning of the 23rd of September, and followed for some distance the usual path to the Jungfrau Hut; at length, leaving the Roththal path on the right, we struck off into a goat track, which leads by narrow ledges round the shoulder of the great bluffs forming the northern boundary of the Roththal. In this way gaining the face of the alp fronting Mürren, we made our way to the base of the 'Strahlplatten,' where we had determined to encamp for the night. "The nights were already lengthening out, and where we were it was not light before six, and it was not possible to move earlier than five; punctually at that hour we started. We took only one knapsack with us, leaving the rest of the things with the porter, whom we instructed to stay where he was until he saw whether we were going to return the same way or not, as we thought it was quite possible we might have to pass another night at the same place. We therefore arranged with him that when we got to a certain point on the ridge, if we intended to return, we would wave our hats; but if we made no sign, he might pack up his things and go home, as in that case he might understand that we had determined either to descend from the Silberhorn across the glacier to the Wengern Alp, or else make our way over the Jungfrau, and pass the night in the Bergli Hut. "Now let me try for a moment to describe the appearance of the rock face up which we purposed making our way on to the _arête_. From where we were the _arête_ appeared to run nearly due east and west. At the west it terminated in the precipices which face Mürren, and at the east with the peak whence we had arranged to signal to our porter. From this peak a ridge descended towards the valley bounding the side facing us. On that side the rock face itself was divided into two compartments by a well-marked ridge running down the middle, giving the appearance of two couloirs leading to the _arête_; the whole side was composed of extremely smooth rocks, with very little foot-hold or hand-hold which would be extremely dangerous, if not impossible, to attempt, if they were not dry. Fortunately, we found them perfectly free from either water or ice, and, with the exception of one difficult piece, which it took us some little time to surmount, we found nothing to check us until we were just under the _arête_. We ascended by the right-hand couloir, if I may so term it, and then made for the gap on the ridge at the extreme westerly end. Just below this gap we experienced some difficulty, owing to the excessive smoothness of the rocks, but finally reached the gap I have mentioned a little before nine. "I need not say that our hopes rose high, and that we were in the very best of spirits, and when we finally stood in the gap itself we began to think the worst part of the work was over. We soon found, however, that it had hardly begun; it was all very well being in the gap, but the problem was how to get from there on to the _arête_ itself; for, though the latter was not more than 20 feet above us, the peculiar formation of the rocks rendered every attempt to get on to it fruitless. The rocks hung over on every side. We exhausted ourselves in vain attempts to surmount them. An hour soon passed away, and after each of us in turn had failed, we sat down disconsolately to consider the situation under the lee of the ridge, so as to be out of the way of the biting north wind which was blowing. Looking round as we sat mournfully consuming some breakfast, I spied a bottle in a crevice, and found it contained the names of Mr C. E. Matthews and Herr E. von Fellenberg, with Melchior Anderegg and two other guides; it was undated, but recounted how they had reached this spot and had been obliged to return without achieving their object, which apparently was identical with our own. This was the last straw, and exasperated Ambrose to the highest degree. That we should have gone through so much only to have gained the same spot where another party several years before had arrived was too much for his equanimity. He vowed he would never go back, and nothing under heaven should turn him back, he would get on to the ridge. We might do as we liked, he meant to stay there until he had. All of which I pointed out to him was very fine talk, but, as men were at present constructed, it did not appear to me possible to climb an acute angle. Ambrose, however, persisted that he would make another attempt to get on to the ridge, and, as it was quite hopeless anywhere on the side by which we had ascended, he roped himself, and insisted on being let down the northern face of the mountain. "With great skill he managed to work himself along the face for the full length of the rope, and the first 100 feet being exhausted, a second of 80 feet was tied to it, and this again paid out to its utmost length; still he could find no way up to the ridge. He thereupon demanded that the rope should be let go, and, in spite of our remonstrances at the danger he was running, he pulled it in, slung it on his back, and proceeded, while we sat down and waited with no little anxiety lest some accident should befall him. "For half an hour we neither saw nor heard anything of him, and our shouts remained unanswered. Zurbrücken muttered at intervals something about 'Dummheit,' and was evidently very uneasy. Suddenly we heard a shout from above, which told us he had succeeded in ascending the wall above him, and getting on to the ridge, down which he was actually coming at the moment, and the next minute he was peering over the point where we had been stuck. "It was really a magnificent exhibition both of pluck and skill, and Ambrose deserves the highest credit for his success. Letting the rope over, and fastening it well to a piece of rock, he first hauled up the ice axes and knapsacks, and then we each in turn were half hauled, and half climbed to the place where he stood. I know when I arrived at the top I was nearly speechless from the terrible exertion it was necessary to make, and the pressure of the rope on my ribs; I could only lie on my back and gasp feebly for brandy! "However, it was imperative to proceed; more than two hours had been wasted here, and it was nearly eleven o'clock. The way in front of us looked fairly plain and easy, and our hopes once again began to rise; but soon, as we proceeded along the ridge, it became narrower and narrower, until from walking we were reduced to kneeling, and at last could only proceed _à cheval_; in this elegant position we struggled along for some little distance, until the _arête_ widening out again permitted us once more to stand up; but here we found the rocks much more difficult, and finally absolutely impossible. At the foot of the peak at the easterly end of the ridge which I have before mentioned we were forced off the _arête_ on to a wall of ice which led to the summit; the slope was at a very sharp angle, the ice very hard and blue, and at last became so steep that we were forced back on to the rocks, and with some considerable difficulty reached the summit; from there we could see the Silberhorn in front of us jutting out like a great white promontory into a frozen sea. It being then one o'clock, we saw there was no possibility of our getting back the same way that evening, so we made no sign to our porter, whom we could see watching us far down below. "The formation of the ridge here is somewhat curious. After a slight descent it broadens out into a small and much crevassed glacier, shut in on the further side by a level snow wall, the promontory which I have mentioned above. The _arête_ of this wall appears to run level from the rock ridge to its northern termination; indeed, I am of opinion that the highest point is on the rock ridge itself, and that the extreme end of the ridge facing the Wengern Alp is a few feet lower than the rocks overlooking the Roththal. "We speedily crossed the little intervening glacier, or snow-field, and commenced to ascend diagonally the snow wall, but found the snow in such a dangerous condition, lying as it was loosely on the surface of ice, that from the fear of starting an avalanche we once more made our way back to the ridge which formed the continuation of the _arête_ along which we had been climbing. Here the rocks were extremely difficult, being interspersed with ice and very rotten. I think this was one of the most difficult parts of the expedition. It was half-past three when we reached the final summit, and then made our way along the snow ridge nearly to its extremity. The snow _arête_ was very narrow, and in its then condition not very pleasant to traverse; the day too was far advanced, and we had no time to spend in much exploration, so we returned as quickly as we could to the ridge which leads down to the Silberlücke; we were already getting very doubtful as to whether we should get any shelter for the night. We had reached the narrow rock _arête_ joining the Silberhorn with the precipices of the Jungfrau; in the middle was the narrow gap called the Silberlücke, and to that we crawled down and halted a moment to consider whether it would not be better to descend on to the glacier and strike across to the Wengern Alp; but we knew from the results of previous expeditions that crossing the glacier would probably take four, if not five hours. None of us had ever been across it; it was then four o'clock, and it would be dark at six. Our only hope lay in getting across the Jungfrau before the daylight finally died out. In the gap we found a ladder left by some previous explorer, and two or three pieces of wood; and after debating whether we had not better pass the night there, finally decided to push on for the Jungfrau. "Our chance of escaping a night in the open air depended mainly on two points: first, whether the snow leading to the Jungfrau was in fairly good condition; and, secondly, whether anybody whose steps we could make use of for descending had been on the mountain that day. A few minutes settled the first question; we found that the slopes leading up to the upper snow-field which circles round the base of the Jungfrau were hard as ice, and we were soon laboriously cutting steps upwards. We pushed on with all speed, but step-cutting is at the best a slow operation, and before we got into the Roththal track the lengthening shadows had almost overtaken us. We hurried on and managed to get across the _bergschrund_ before the last rays of sunlight left the summit of the Jungfrau. As we surmounted the final rocks I turned for a minute to look across Switzerland, and was rewarded by one of the most beautiful spectacles it has ever been my good fortune to witness. The valleys were filled with mist, but the setting sun tinged their surface with a deep crimson glow; the last rays were still lingering round Mont Blanc and one or two of the higher mountains; where we stood was still filled with golden light from the last rays of the sinking sun. The sky was perfectly clear, and the panorama which unrolled itself before our eyes with its mingled light and shadow was one of the most wonderful that lover of mountain scenery could desire to gaze on. A justification for the erection of a hut on the summit of the Jungfrau might almost be found in the possibility of obtaining such a view. "But we had no time for indulging in rhapsodies; a bitter north wind was still blowing so keenly, that the upper leather of our boots had frozen stiff as boards while we walked. The moon was well up, and if only our second hope were realised, and some one had been on the mountain that day, we might find a refuge from the wind in the Bergli or Concordia Huts. We tumbled rather than scrambled down the rocks by the flickering moonlight, until we reached the well-known point where it is necessary to strike across the face just above the Roththal Sattel. Our last hope was dashed to the ground. No one had been there that day, and if we were to get down it must be by our own efforts. So Ambrose at once set to work to cut steps across the face. We had been there a fortnight before, and gone up and down the Jungfrau without cutting hardly a step; now the face was all blue ice, and in five minutes I made up my mind that the risk of such a descent was too much to take. "The wall above the great _bergschrund_ was in shadow, the _bergschrund_ last year was especially formidable, and we were all too exhausted safely to face the freezing wind on such a steep ice-slope in the dark. We returned, therefore, to the rocks, and, after a brief consultation, decided to pass the night there as best we could. We managed to find a corner shut in on two sides by rock about 5 feet high, from the floor of which we set to work to rake out the snow with our axes. The snow had drifted to a considerable depth, and its excavation gave us a good quantity of heat to start the night with, but our boots refused to thaw, and do what we would our feet would not get warm. "Our provisions being nearly exhausted, we agreed only to take a mouthful of brandy and a little bread that night, and keep the bulk of the provisions until next morning, when we expected to be in a more or less exhausted condition, as the cold was very great, and it was obvious that we had a pretty severe ordeal before us. It was by this time half-past seven o'clock. We put on our gloves and gaiters, buttoned up our coats, and after making a seat apiece out of three smooth stones, sat down as close together as we could, and commenced to smoke. "The night was beautifully clear, but far away to the south we could see a great thunderstorm raging over the Italian hills, and were in no little trepidation lest it should be coming up in our direction, as indeed a storm had done in exactly a similar way a week before; but the north wind kept it at bay, and we luckily had not a snow-storm to face in addition to the other discomforts. "The night passed slowly enough; it was necessary to keep shuffling our feet and beating our arms together the whole night long without cessation, in order to prevent being frost-bitten, and it was even more difficult to keep awake. The hours, however, passed somehow, and at half-past four the first primrose streaks in the sky heralded the coming day. By five o'clock the welcome face of the sun peeped over the Trugberg, and we began to prepare for a start. "Our first thought was breakfast, but this solace was denied us; the wine and brandy had frozen during the night, and were solid lumps of ice; the bread required nothing less than an ice-axe to cut it, and then probably would have flown into chips like a log of wood; the three remaining eggs we possessed had been converted during the night into icicles; there was nothing for it, therefore, but to start hungry and thirsty. Ambrose proposed that he and Zurbrücken should first cut the steps, and then come back for me, but after a very few minutes' exposure to the wind they were obliged to return and wait until the sun had warmed them a little, the biting cold of the night and exhaustion from want of sleep rendered it impossible to face the work of step-cutting in such a bitter wind. We resumed our seats, therefore, and waited another hour, and then commenced our descent to the _bergschrund_. We had to cut steps the whole way down, and very glad I was we had not attempted it in the dark, as I think it would have been almost impossible to get over without an accident. "We pushed on steadily, but the night had taken all the spurt out of us, and our progress across the Jungfrau Firn was not very rapid. We hoped to find water under the Mönch Joch, where we had found a good supply a fortnight previously, but the wind had prevented the snow melting at the time we reached the spot, and there was nothing for it but to press on to Grindelwald, and it was not until we reached the end of the Viescher Glacier that we found any water to drink. At the Bäregg we got some ginger nuts to eat, and by three o'clock in the afternoon were being hospitably welcomed by the Bosses at the 'Bär,' whose welcome was never more appreciated. These estimable hosts soon had an excellent dinner ready, and by half-past four I was driving to Interlaken to rejoin the rest of my party." CHAPTER XIV THE STORY OF A BIG JUMP Through the kindness of Dr Kennedy, I am enabled to reprint from his new edition of _The Alps in 1864_, by the late Mr A. W. Moore, an admirable account of the first passage of the Col de la Pilatte in Dauphiné. This expedition has become classical, thanks to Mr Whymper's fine description of it,[9] so it is interesting to read what impression the adventures of the day made on another member of the party. The first part of the expedition was easy, but, wrote Mr Moore, "before getting near the foot of the couloir, we had something to do in threading a way up and through the huge chasms into which the glacier was broken. Croz was here thoroughly in his element, and led the way with great skill and determination, passing one obstacle after another, and bearing gradually to the left towards the enemy. At every step we took, it became more apparent that nature had never intended any one to pass this way, and had accordingly taken more than usual pains to render the approach to the couloir difficult and dangerous. Below the highest _bergschrund_ were a series of smaller ones, arranged systematically one above the other, stretching completely across a very steep slope, so that they could not be turned, but must each in succession be attacked _en face_. Fortunately at this early period of the season, and with so much snow, the difficulty was less considerable than it would have been under other circumstances, and, exercising every precaution, we finally passed the last of the outer lines of defence, and had nothing but a short steep slope between us and the final _schrund_, above which the couloir rose more unfriendly than ever, as we approached it nearer. I had been sorely puzzled in my mind how we were going to get across this chasm, as from below it appeared to have a uniform width of about 10 feet, the upper edge, as usual, much higher than the lower, and no visible bridge at any point. On getting up to it, however, we found that on the extreme right it had been choked by a considerable mass of snow, the small remains of which at one point formed a narrow, rotten, and most insecure bridge, over which Croz cautiously passed, and made himself firm in the soft snow above. Walker, Whymper, Mons. Renaud, myself, and Almer, then followed, as if we were treading on eggs, and all got safely over, much to our relief, as there really appeared no small chance of the bridge going to grief before we were all across, which would have been awkward for those on the wrong side. "It was just 9.30 when we fairly took to this extraordinary gully, which, above the _bergschrund_ was certainly not more than 12 feet wide, and gradually narrowed in its upward course. For the first few steps we trod in a sufficiency of soft snow in good condition, but, to our dismay, this soon sensibly diminished both in quantity and quality, until at last there was nothing but the old, disgusting, powdery snow resting on hard ice. The axe accordingly came into play; but if steps were cut of the ordinary size, we should never get to the top till night, so Croz just hacked out sufficient space for the feet to cling to, and worked away as fast as possible, cautioning us emphatically to look out, and to hold on well with our axes while each step was being cut. Another argument in favour of rapid progress arose from the palpable danger in which we were. The centre of the couloir was occupied by a deeply-scored trough, evidently a channel for stones and avalanches, while the space on either side was so narrow that in case of a large fall we could scarcely expect to escape unharmed. Looking up to see what was likely to come down, we discovered at the very head of the couloir a perpendicular or slightly overhanging wall of _névé_, some 30 feet in height, and lower down, projecting over the rocks on our left, an enormous mass of icicles, on which the sun was playing, and, of course, momentarily loosening their tenure to the rocks. At the moment we were exactly in the line which they must follow, if they fell, as they evidently would before long, so we lost no time in crossing the stone channel to the other side, where the great mass was scarcely likely to come, and we might probably ward off any stray fragments. I received a lively hint as to the effect of a _large_ mass of ice coming suddenly down on one's head, by the effect of a blow from a comparatively small piece, which Croz hewed out from one of the steps. Being so far down in the line, it had time to gain momentum before it struck me, which it did on the head with such violence that for a few moments I felt quite sick and stupid. The incident will give a very good idea of the steepness of the slope on which we were. I had too much to think of to measure it with a clinometer, but it was certainly steeper than any part of the couloir leading to the Col des Ecrins, the greatest inclination of which was 54°. At one point a little water trickled over the rocks, which the two front men managed to get a suck at, but those behind were out of reach, and the footing was too precarious for more than a minute's halt, not to mention occasional volleys of small stones which shot by us, and might be the precursors of large ones. I don't think that I ever experienced a greater feeling of insecurity than during the whole of this ascent, which was unavoidably long. What with the extreme steepness of the slope, and the necessary vagueness of the steps, which were made additionally unsafe by the powdery snow which filled them up as soon as they were cut, I felt that a slip was a by no means unlikely contingency, and was glad enough upon occasions to find Almer's hand behind, giving me a friendly push whenever a particularly long stride had to be made. When we were nearing the top, our attention was attracted by a tremendous uproar behind us, and, looking round, we were just in time to see a prodigious avalanche falling over the cliffs of the Pic de Bonvoisin, on the other side of the valley. It was at least a quarter of a mile in length, and many minutes elapsed before the last echoes of its fall died away. We were now so near the great snow-wall that it was time to begin to circumvent it; so, crossing the couloir again, we clambered up the rocks on that side in order to get out of it, hoping to be able from them to get on to the main ridge to the left of the wall, which itself was quite impassable. As Almer had expected, the snow was here very thin over the rocks, and what little there was, was converted into ice, so that the climbing was most difficult and perilous, and we had no small trouble to get on at all. However, we managed to scramble up, and found ourselves overlooking a gully running parallel, and of a similar character, to the one we had been ascending, but free from snow and ice, and much more precipitous. On our side it was quite impossible to get on to the main ridge as an impracticable rock rose above our heads, and it was, therefore, necessary to step across this second couloir. I never made a nastier step; the stride was exceedingly long, there was nothing in particular to stand on, and nothing at all but a smooth face of rock to hold on by, so that we had literally to trust to the natural adhesiveness of our hands. Fortunately, there was sufficient rope to allow the man in front to cross and get on to the main ridge, and make himself fast before his successor followed, so we attacked the difficulty in turn. I got over somehow, but did not like it at all; lifted myself on to the ridge, Almer followed, and at 10.45 A.M., the Col was gained. "During our ascent of the couloir, the weather, though doubtful, had not been unfavourable, but, just as we got on to the ridge, a cloud swooped down, and enveloped us in its dense folds, and at the same moment it began to snow violently. Luckily Croz, who was first on the top, had been able to satisfy himself that we _were_ above the Glacier de la Pilatte, and got a glimpse of what lay between us and it; but the state of the atmosphere was, nevertheless, sufficiently disappointing, as we were unable to fix with accuracy the exact position of our gap with reference to the peak of Les Bans, and the highest point of the Boeufs Rouges, or to determine its height. From the Brèche de la Meije, we had seen clearly that we were then considerably lower than any point on the ridge south of the Glacier de la Pilatte, and, taking this into consideration, together with the apparent height of our gap, seen from the valley below, we estimated the height of the Col, which we proposed to call Col de la Pilatte, at about 11,500 feet. It is certainly not much below this, and is, therefore, probably the highest pass yet effected in the Dauphiné Alps. [Illustration: A VERY TAME BERGSCHRUND. By Mr. Leonard Rawlence.] [Illustration: HOMEWARD OVER THE SNOW-SLOPES.] "It was no less provoking to have missed the view of the Ecrins and Ailefroide, which we had expected to be particularly fine. But there was no help for it, and no prospect of immediate improvement; so, without halting for a minute, we commenced the descent in the same order as before. All we could see was a steep ice-wall, stretching downwards from our feet, the actual ridge not being more than a couple of feet wide. What was the length of the wall, or what lay below it, we could not discover, but had a shrewd suspicion that we should anyhow find a considerable _bergschrund_. Croz steered to the left, and began cutting steps diagonally downwards. The snow was in a much worse condition than it had been in the couloir; there was more of it, but it was so exceedingly soft, that our feet pressed through it to the hard ice, as though it had been water, and we were very rarely able to trust to it without cutting a step. We should have been better pleased had there been no snow at all, as the whole slope, the angle of which was about 50°, was in just the proper condition for an avalanche. I never saw Almer so nervous, and with reason; for, as he himself said, while he implored us not to move from one step into another before we felt that one foot at least was secured, this was just one of those places where no amount of skill on the part of Croz or himself could entirely prevent the chance of a serious accident. It was a wonder how we did manage to stick to some of the steps, the objectionable character of which was increased from their being cut along the side of the slope, a position in which it is always more difficult to get from one to the other than when they are cut straight up or down. As we got lower down there was more snow, which, though softer than ever, was so steep that we could tread tolerably secure steps on it, by help of which we worked down, until we found ourselves brought up short on the upper edge of the expected _bergschrund_. Croz had hoped to hit this at a point where it was partially choked, but he was disappointed, as the chasm yawned below us, entirely unbridged. A glance right and left showed that there was no more assailable point within reach, so Croz gave out the unwelcome intelligence that if we wished to get over we must jump and take our chance. The obstacle appeared to be about 10 feet wide, of uncomfortable depth, and the drop from the upper to the lower edge about 15 feet. From the lower edge the glacier sloped away, only less steep than the wall on which we were, of which it was a continuation, but cut off by this sudden break. There was, however, so much soft snow that we should fall easy, and the only difficulty, therefore, was to take a sufficiently fair spring to clear the chasm; for, good as I believed my rope to be, I should have been sorry to see any one suspended by it, with a sudden jerk, over such a gulf as that we had beneath us. Walker was untied, so as to give rope enough to Croz, who then boldly sprung over, and landed heavily on the lower edge in the snow, where he stood to receive the rest of the party. Walker followed, and then Whymper, leaving Mons. Renaud, myself, and Almer above. Mons. Renaud advanced to the edge, looked, hesitated, drew back, and finally declared that he could not jump it; he felt perfectly convinced that he should be unable to clear the distance, and should jump in instead of over. We encouraged him, but without effect, and at last proposed to lower him down, when the others would hook hold of his legs somehow and pull him across. Almer and I, therefore, made our footing as secure as possible, anchored ourselves with our axes, and made all ready to lower our friend, but his courage failed him at the last moment, and he refused to go. We were now obliged to use stronger arguments, as it was snowing fast, and time was passing, so we pointed out that, if we wished to return ever so much, we could not get the others back across the _schrund_, and that, in point of fact, there was no chance--over he _must_ go. Again did he advance to the edge, again draw back, but finally, with a despairing groan, leaped, and just landed clear of the chasm, but, instead of letting his rope hang loose, he held it in one hand, and thereby nearly pulled me over head foremost. Then came my turn, and I must confess that, when I stood in the last step from which I had to spring, I did not like the look of the place at all, and, in fact, felt undeniably nervous. But I had not been one of the least backward in objurgating Mons. Renaud, so felt constrained to manifest no hesitation myself, whatever might be my private feelings. I, therefore, threw over my axe and spectacles, gathered myself up, and took the leap. The sensation was most peculiar. I had not the faintest idea whether I should or should not clear the chasm, but the doubt was soon solved by my landing heavily on the further side, rather to the right of the rest of the party. The heavy load on my back sent me forwards on my face, and I shot down the slope with tremendous velocity, head foremost, until I was suddenly stopped by the tightening round my waist of the rope, the other end of which was held by Almer above. My first impression was, that half my ribs were crushed in; as it was, my wind was so completely bagged by the severity of the jerk that I could not speak, but laughed hysterically, until nature's bellows had replenished my unlucky carcass. The incident was so far satisfactory that it showed the enormous strength of the rope, and also how severe a shock a man like Almer, standing in a most insecure position, can bear unmoved when he is prepared for it. My weight, unloaded, is 10½ stone, and the strain on the rope was certainly nearly as great as though I _had_ jumped into the crevasse. Almer now followed us over, and at 11.35 we were all together without accident below the _schrund_, which, with the wall above it, was as ugly-looking a place as I would wish to see. "We now floundered down the slope of soft snow, without taking much care, as we imagined that henceforward it was all plain sailing, but were abruptly checked in our pace by coming upon a huge crevasse, of great length and breadth, but covered over in places. Several attempts were made to cross at one of these points, but without success, as the breadth was too great, and the snow unsubstantial in the extreme, and a long _détour_ was necessary before we were able to get over near its eastern extremity. This proved to be the beginning of a new series of troubles, as the chasms became more and more numerous and complicated, until the slope which we had imagined would be so easy, resolved itself into a wall of gigantic _séracs_, the passage of which tasked our energies to the utmost. The difficulty of the position was increased by our still being enveloped in a mist so thick that we could not see a distance of 20 feet below us, and were in a happy state of ignorance as to whether we were steering properly, or were only plunging deeper into the mire. Nothing, however, could exceed the energy and skill with which Croz threaded his way through the labyrinth which surrounded us. He never once had to retrace his steps, but, cutting along the sides of some crevasses and underneath others, he steadily gained ground. In spite of the generally deep snow, a good deal of step-cutting was necessary here and there, and we had nearly an hour of most exciting work before the inclination of the glacier diminished, and at 12.30 P.M., for the first time since leaving the Col, we stood at ease upon a flat plain of snow. But how long would it last? A fog on an unknown glacier always suggests to my desponding mind the probability of marching round and round in a circle, and finally having to pass the night in a crevasse, so that I, personally, was particularly relieved when, just as we emerged from the _séracs_, the mist suddenly lifted sufficiently to let us see a long way over the glacier in front, which displayed itself to our admiring eyes perfectly level and uncrevassed." [Illustration: THE ECRINS FROM THE SUMMIT OF THE GRANDE RUINE.] [Illustration: _The summit of the Jungfrau._ (_P. 217._) _To face p. 235._] [Illustration: CLOUDS BREAKING LIKE A GIANT WATERFALL ON A MOUNTAIN RIDGE.] [Illustration: SNOW (NOT CLOUD) BLOWN BY A TERRIFIC WIND FROM A MOUNTAIN RIDGE.] CHAPTER XV A PERILOUS FIRST ASCENT Mr Whymper has also immortalised the first ascent of the Ecrins. Here is the account Mr Moore wrote in his diary of that eventful day: "It must be confessed that the higher we climbed, the greater became our contempt for our peak. It certainly seemed that, once over the _bergschrund_, we ought very soon to be on the top, and so persuaded was I of this, that I hazarded the opinion that by 9.30 we should be seated on the highest point. Whymper alone was less sanguine; and, probably encouraged by the result of his former bet, on hearing my opinion, offered to bet Walker and myself two francs that we should not get up at all, an offer which we promptly accepted. We were now sufficiently near to the _bergschrund_ to be able to form some idea of its nature and difficulty. It certainly was a formidable-looking obstacle running completely along the base of the final peak, or rather ridge from which the peak itself rose. For a long distance the chasm was of great width, and, with its upper edge rising in a wall of ice, fringed with icicles, to a height of, perhaps, 30 feet above the lower edge, was obviously quite impassable. But on the extreme right (looking up), the two lips so nearly met that we thought we might be able to get over, and on the extreme left, it seemed possible, by a considerable _détour_, to circumvent the enemy, and get round his flank. We finally determined on the latter course, as, to the right, the slope above the chasm seemed to be steeper than at any other point. After the first start, we had been steering tolerably straight forwards up the centre of the glacier, and were now approaching the _bergschrund_, just under the highest peak of the mountain, at about its most impracticable point. The more direct course would have been to attack it on the right, but, for the reason above stated, we chose the opposite end, so had to strike well away to the left diagonally up the slope. We here first began to suspect that our progress would not be quite so easy and rapid as we had hoped, as the snow became less abundant, and the use of the axe necessary. Still we worked away steadily, until, at 8.10 A.M., in one hour and forty minutes from the Col, we turned the _bergschrund_, and were fairly on its upper edge, clinging to an ice-step which promised to be only the first of an unpleasantly long series. "Above us the slope stretched up to some rocks, which continued without interruption to the main ridge, a prominent point on which was just above our heads. The rocks looked quite easy, and it seemed that, by making for them just under the small peak, we should be able to work round the latter, and get on to the main ridge to the right of it without serious difficulty. Almer led, and wielded his axe with his usual vigour, but the ice was fearfully hard, and he found the work very severe, as the steps had to be cut sufficiently large and good to serve for our retreat, if need be. After each blow, he showered down storms of fragments which came upon the hands and legs of his followers with a violence that rendered their position the reverse of pleasant. Still the rocks kept their distance, and it was a long time before we scrambled on to the lowest of them, only to find that, although from below they had appeared quite easy, they were in reality very steep, and so smooth that it was scarcely possible to get along them at all, the hold for hands and feet being almost nil. The rocky peak, too, above us turned out to be much further off than we had supposed, and, to reach the point on the main ridge to the right of it, we had before us a long and difficult climb up and along the face of the rocks. The prospect was not pleasant, but we scrambled along the lower part of the rocks for a short time, and then Almer started off alone to reconnoitre, leaving us rather disconsolate, and Walker and myself beginning to think that there was a considerable probability of our francs, after all, finding their way into Whymper's pocket. Croz did not approve of the rocks at all, and strongly urged the propriety of getting down on to the ice-slope again, and cutting along it above the _bergschrund_ until we should be immediately under the peak, and then strike straight up towards it. He accordingly cast loose the rope, and crawling cautiously down, began cutting. I am not very nervous, but, as I saw him creeping alone over the ice-covered rocks, I felt an unpleasant qualm, which I was doomed to experience several times before the end of the day. Just as Croz had begun to work Almer returned, and reported that things ahead were decidedly bad, but that he thought we could get on to the _arête_ by keeping up the rocks. We passed his opinion down to Croz, and, while he was digesting it, we communicated to Almer what Croz had been saying to us. Now, up to the present time no two men could have got on better, nor more thoroughly agreed with each other, than Croz and Almer. We had been slightly afraid that the natural antipathy between an Oberlander and a Chamouniard would break out upon every occasion, and that a constant series of squabbles would be our daily entertainment. We were, however, agreeably disappointed, as Almer displayed such an utter abnegation of self, and such deference to Croz's opinion, that had the latter been the worst-tempered fellow in the world, instead of the really good fellow that he was, he could not have found a cause of quarrel. Upon this occasion, although Almer adhered to his own opinion that it would be better to keep to the rocks, he begged us to follow the advice of Croz, who was equally strong in favour of the ice, should he, on further consideration, prefer that course. Croz protested emphatically against the rocks, but left it to us to decide, but in such a manner that it was plain that a decision adverse to his wishes would produce a rumpus. The position was an awkward one. The idea of cutting along a formidably-steep slope of hard ice immediately above a prodigious _bergschrund_ was most revolting to us, not only on account of the inevitable danger of the proceeding, but also because of the frightful labour which such a course must entail on the two men. On the other hand, a serious difference with Croz would probably destroy all chance of success in our attempt. So convinced, however, were we that the rocks offered the most advisable route that we determined to try the experiment on Croz's temper, and announced our decision accordingly. The effect was electric; Croz came back again in the steps which he had cut, anger depicted on his countenance, giving free vent to the ejaculations of his native land, and requesting us to understand that, as we had so chosen, we might do the work ourselves, that he would do no more. Affairs were evidently serious, so each of us cried _peccavi_, and, to calm his irritation, agreed, it must be confessed against our better judgment, to adopt his route. Almer was more amused than annoyed, and concurred without a word, so the storm blew over; the sky was again clear, and we resumed our labours, which, during the discussion, had been suspended for a few minutes. "The half-dozen steps that led us to the ice were about the most unpleasant I ever took. The rocks were glazed with ice; there was nothing in particular to hold on by, and without the trusty rope I should have looked a long time before trusting myself to move. As it was, I was very considerably relieved when we were all standing in the steps, and Croz, again roped on to us, began at 9.35 to cut in front. I must do him the justice to say that, so soon as we were committed to his line of march, he worked splendidly, bringing the whole force of his arm to bear in the blows with which he hewed the steps. Never halting for a moment nor hesitating, he hacked away, occasionally taking a glance behind to see that all was right. We could not but admire the determination with which he laboured, but the exertion was fearful, and we became momentarily more of opinion that our original decision was the wisest. The slope on which we were was inclined at an angle of 50°, never less, sometimes more, for the most part of hard blue ice, bare of snow. This was bad enough; but far worse were places which we occasionally came to, where there was a layer of soft, dry, powdery snow, without cohesion, so that it gave no footing, and steps had to be cut through it into the ice below, steps which were filled up almost as soon as cut, and which each man had to clear out with his hands before trusting his feet in them. All the time the great _bergschrund_ yawned about 100 feet below us, and the knowledge of this fact kept us well on the alert, although, from the steepness of the slope below, the chasm itself was not visible. One hears people talk occasionally of places where the rope should not be used, because one person slipping might entail the loss of the whole party; but I never heard a guide give vent to any such idea, and certain I am that had any one of us now proposed to take off the rope and go alone on that account, Almer and Croz would never have allowed it, and, indeed, would not have advanced another step. It must be admitted, however, that all along this slope, had one of us unfortunately slipped, the chance of the others being able to hold him up would have been very small, and the probability of the party in their fall being shot over, instead of into, the _bergschrund_, still smaller. But, in my opinion, the use of the rope on such places gives so much more confidence, if it is no real protection, that the chances of a slip are much diminished, and certainly a party can progress more rapidly. For an hour Croz kept on his way unwearied, cutting the steps for the most part beautifully, but occasionally giving us rather a long stride, where every one held on like grim death, while each man in succession passed. But at last even his powerful frame required rest; so Almer relieved him, and went to the front. "All this time we had risen but little, but we were now very nearly under the highest peak, and it was necessary to think of getting on to the ridge; so we at last fairly turned our faces to the slope, and began cutting straight up what appeared to be a great central couloir. Unlike most couloirs, this one did not run without interruption to the ridge above, but came to an abrupt termination at a considerable distance below it, leaving an intervening space of rock, which promised some trouble. But we were yet far from the lowest point of these rocks, and every step towards them cost no small amount of time and labour. I have rarely been on harder ice, and, as blow after blow fell with so little apparent result in raising us towards our goal, an inexpressible weariness of spirit and a feeling of despair took possession of me. Nevertheless we _did_ mount, and at 11.30, after two hours of terribly hard work (for the guides), we grasped with our hands the lowest of the crags. To get on them, however, was no easy task, as they were exceedingly smooth, and coated with ice. Almer scrambled up, how I know not, and, taking as much rope as possible, crawled on until he was _fest_, when, by a combined operation of pulling from above and pushing from below, each of us in turn was raised a few steps. We hoped that this might be an exceptional bit, and that higher up matters would improve. But it was a vain hope; the first few steps were but a foretaste of what was to follow, and every foot of height was gained with the greatest difficulty and exertion. As we climbed with the tips of our fingers in some small crevice, and the tips of our toes just resting on some painfully minute ledge, probably covered with ice or snow, one question gradually forced itself upon us, almost to the exclusion of the previously absorbing one, whether we should get to the top of the mountain, and this was, how on earth we should ever get down again--get down, that is to say, in any other state than that of _débris_. The idea that it would be possible to descend these rocks again, except with a rush in the shape of an avalanche, seemed rather absurd; and at last, some one propounded the question to Almer and Croz, but those worthies shirked the answer, and gave us one of those oracular replies which a good guide always has at the tip of his tongue when he is asked a question to which he does not wish to give a straightforward response, to the effect that we should probably get down somehow. They were, perhaps, of opinion that one thing at a time was sufficient, and that they had work enough to settle the question of how we were to get up. Our progress was unavoidably slow, and the positions in which one was detained, while the man in front was going the full length of his tether, were far from agreeable; while hanging on by my eyelids, the view, seen between my legs, of the smooth wall of rock and ice on which we had been so long engaged, struck me as being singularly impressive, and gave me some occupation in discussing mentally where I should stop, if in an oblivious moment I chanced to let go. But to all things must come an end, and, at 12.30 P.M., with a great sigh of relief, we lifted ourselves by a final effort on to the main ridge, which had so long mocked at our efforts to reach it, and, to our huge delight, saw the summit of the mountain on our right, led up to by a very steep _arête_ of rocks, but evidently within our reach. "The work of the last four hours and a half had been so exciting that we had forgotten to eat, and, indeed, had not felt the want of food; but now the voice of nature made itself heard, and we disposed ourselves in various positions on the ridge, which in many places we might have straddled, and turned our attention to the provisions. As we sat facing the final peak of the Ecrins, we had on our left the precipice which falls to the head of the Glacier Noir. Without any exaggeration, I never saw so sheer a wall; it was so smooth and regular that it might have been cut with a knife, as a cheese is cut in two. Looking over, we saw at once that, as we had thought probable, had we been able to get from La Bérarde on to the ridge at the head of the Glacier du Vallon, it would have been impossible to get down on to the Glacier Noir, as the cliffs are almost as precipitous as those down which we were looking. On the right bank of the Glacier Noir towered the dark crags of the Pelvoux, Crête du Pelvoux, and Ailefroide, a most glorious sight, presenting a combination of, perhaps, the finest rock-forms in the Alps; I certainly never saw so long and steep a line of cliffs, rising so abruptly from a glacier. "At 12.50 we started again, Almer leading. We had first to cross a very short but very narrow neck of snow, and Almer had scarcely set foot on this, when a great mass of snow, which had appeared quite firm and part of the ridge, suddenly gave way, and fell with a roar to the Glacier Noir below. Almer's left foot was actually on this snow when it gave way. He staggered, and we all thought he was over, but he recovered himself and managed to keep steady on the firm ridge. It is true he was roped; but the idea of a man being dropped with a sudden jerk, and then allowed to hang suspended, over that fearful abyss, was almost too much for my equanimity, and for the second time a shudder ran through my veins. This little isthmus crossed, we tackled the rocks which rose very steeply above our heads, and climbed steadily up along the _arête_, generally rather below the edge on the side of the Glacier de l'Encula. The work was hard enough, but easier than what we had gone through below, as the rocks were free from ice, and the hold for hands and feet was much better, so that there was no fear of slipping. I don't think a word was said from the time we quitted our halting-place until we were close to the top, when the guides tried to persuade us to go in front, so as to be the first to set foot on the summit. But this we declined; they had done the work, let them be the first to reap the reward. It was finally settled that we should all go on together as much as possible, as neither party would give way in this amicable contest. A sharp scramble in breathless excitement ensued, until, at 1.25 P.M., the last step was taken, and we stood on the top of the Ecrins, the worthy monarch of the Dauphiné Alps. [Illustration: THE ECRINS (IN THE CENTRE) FROM THE GLACIER BLANC. By Signor Vittorio Sella. _To face p. 247._] "In that supreme moment all our toils and dangers were forgotten in the blissful consciousness of success, and the thrill of exultation that ran through me, as I stood, in my turn, on the very highest point of the higher pinnacle--a little peak of rock with a cap of snow--was cheaply purchased by what we had gone through. Close to us was a precisely similar point, of much the same height, which scarcely came up to the rank of a second summit. It could have been reached in a few seconds from our position, but, as our point was actually the higher of the two, and was also more convenient for sitting down, we remained where we were. I must confess to a total inability to describe the wonderful panorama that lay extended before us. I am not one of those happily constituted individuals who, after many hours of excitement, can calmly sit on the apex of a mountain, and discuss simultaneously cold chicken and points of topography. I am not ashamed to confess that I was far too excited to study, as I ought to have done, the details of a view which, for extent and variety, is altogether without a parallel in my Alpine experience. Suffice it to say that over the whole sky there was not one single cloud, and that we were sitting on the most elevated summit south of Mont Blanc, and it may fairly be left to the imagination to conceive what we saw, as, at an elevation of 13,462 feet, we basked in the sun, without the cold wind usually attendant at these heights. There was not a breath of air, and the flame of a candle would have burnt steadily without a flicker. In our immediate neighbourhood, after the range of the Pelvoux, before described, the most striking object was the great wall of the Meije, the western summit of which, from here, came out distinctly the highest. The Aiguilles d'Arves stood out exceedingly well, and, although 2000 feet lower than our position, looked amazingly high. Almost the only trace of civilisation we could distinctly make out was the Lautaret road, a portion of which, probably near the entrance of the valley leading to the Glacier d'Arsines, was plainly visible. On the side of the mountain towards La Bérarde, what principally struck us was a very great and extensive glacier, apparently not marked on the map, which appeared to be an arm of the Glacier du Vallon, but far more considerable itself than the whole glacier is depicted on the French map. Of the extent of the view, and the wonderfully favourable condition of the atmosphere, a fair idea may be gained from the fact that we clearly identified the forms and ridges of the Matterhorn and Weisshorn, the latter at a distance of 120 miles, as the crow flies, and that those were by no means the most distant objects visible. [Illustration: SLAB CLIMBING. By Mr. Leonard Rawlence.] [Illustration: A NARROW ROCK RIDGE. By Mr. Leonard Rawlence.] [Illustration: ON THE DENT DU GÉANT. By the late Mr. W. F. Donkin.] [Illustration: THE TOP AT LAST! _To face p. 252._] "So soon as the first excitement consequent on success had subsided, we began seriously to meditate upon what during the ascent had frequently troubled us, viz. the descent. With one consent we agreed that unless no other route could be found, it would be most unadvisable to attempt to go down the way we had mounted. The idea of the rocks, to be followed by the ice-slope below--in a doubly dangerous state after being exposed all day to the scorching sun--was not to be entertained without a shudder. The only alternative route lay along the opposite _arête_ to that which had led us to the top, and, although we could not see far in this direction, we determined, after very little discussion, to try it. Accordingly, after twenty minutes' halt, we each pocketed a small fragment of the stone that was lying on the snow, and, regretting that we had no bottle to leave, and no materials with which to construct a cairn, took our departure at 1.45 from the lofty perch which, I fancy, is not likely to receive many subsequent visitors. Passing immediately below the second point before mentioned, so that our hands almost rested on it, and also several similar pinnacles, our work commenced. I never, before or since, was on so narrow an _arête_ of rock, and really from step to step I was at a loss to imagine how we were to get on any further. We kept, as a rule, just below the edge, as before, on the side of the Glacier de l'Encula, along a series of ledges of the narrowest and most insecure character; but we were always sufficiently near the top to be able to look over the ridge, down the appalling precipices which overhang, first the Glacier Noir, and later, the Glacier du Vallon. Of course, every single step had to be taken with the greatest care, only one person moving in turn, and the rest holding on for dear life, Croz coming last to hold all up. In spite of the great difficulty of the route, the obstacles were only such as required more or less time to surmount, and although the slightest nervousness on the part of any one of us would have endangered the whole party and delayed us indefinitely, in the absence of that drawback we got on pretty well. We were beginning to hope that the worst was over, when Almer suddenly stopped short, and looked about him uneasily. On our asking him what was the matter, he answered vaguely that things ahead looked bad, and that he was not sure that we could pass. Croz accordingly undid the rope, as also did Almer, and the two went forward a little, telling us to remain where we were. We could _not_ see what was the nature of the difficulty, but we _could_ see the countenances of the men, which sufficiently showed us that the hitch was serious. Under any other circumstances we should have been amused at Almer's endeavours to communicate his views to Croz in an amazing mixture of pantomime, bad German, and worse French. He evidently was trying to persuade Croz of something, which Croz was not inclined to agree to, and we soon made out that the point at issue was, whether we could get over this particular place, or whether we must return to the summit, and go down the way we had come. Croz was of the latter opinion, while Almer obstinately maintained that, bad as the place was, we _could_ get over it, and proceeded to perform some manoeuvres, which we could not clearly see, by way of showing the correctness of his opinion. Croz, however, was unconvinced, and came back to us, declaring plainly that we should have to return. We shouted to Almer, who was still below, but he evidently had not the slightest intention of returning, and in a few moments called upon us to come on, an injunction which we cheerfully obeyed as, in our opinion, anything would be preferable to a retreat, and Croz perforce followed. A very few steps showed us the nature of the difficulty. The _arête_ suddenly narrowed to a mere knife-edge of _rock_, while on one side a smooth wall, some 4000 feet in height, fell sheer towards the Glacier du Vallon, and on the other side, above the Glacier de l'Encula, the slope was not much less steep and equally smooth. To pass below the ridge on either side was obviously quite impossible; to walk along the ridge, which was by no means level, was equally so, and the only way of getting over the difficulty, therefore, was to straddle it, an operation which the sharpness of the ridge, putting aside all other considerations, would render the reverse of agreeable. However, there, perched in the middle of this fiendish place, sat Almer, with one leg over Glacier du Vallon and the other over the Glacier de l'Encula, calm and unmoved, as if the position was quite an everyday one. He had not got the rope on, and as he began moving along the ridge we shrieked at him to take care, to which he responded with a '_ja, gewiss!_' and a chuckle of satisfaction. We threw him the end of the rope, and then cautiously moved, one at a time, towards him. I must confess that when I found myself actually astride on this dizzy height I felt more inclined to remain there for ever, contemplating the Glacier du Vallon, on to which I might have dropped a stone, than to make my way along it. The encouraging voice of Almer, however, urged me on, and I gradually worked myself along with my hands until I was close up to him and Walker, with no damage save to the seat of my trousers. Whymper and Croz followed. From this point forwards we had for half-an-hour, without exception, the most perilous climbing, I ever did. We crept along the cliffs, sometimes on one side of the ridge, sometimes on the other, frequently passing our arms over the summit, with our feet resting on rather less than nothing. Almer led with wonderful skill and courage, and gradually brought us over the worst portion of the _arête_, below which the climbing was bad enough, but not quite such nervous work as before, and we were able to get along rather quicker. At length, at 3.45, in two hours from the top, we were not far above the well-marked gap in the ridge, between the highest peak and the one marked on the French map 3980 mètres, or 13,058 feet. There we thankfully left the _arête_, and, turning to the right, struck straight down the ice-slope towards the _bergschrund_. Almost every step had to be cut, but, in spite of all he had done, Almer's vigour seemed unimpaired, and resolutely declining Croz's offers to come to the front, he hacked away, so that we descended steadily, if slowly. We could not see the _bergschrund_, and were therefore uncertain for what exact point to steer, for we knew that at only one place would it be possible to get over it at all, where from below we had seen that the two edges nearly met--at all others the breadth and height would be far too great for a jump. For some distance we kept straight down, but after a time bore rather to the left, cutting diagonally along the slope, which was inclined at an angle of 52°, and, below us, curled over so rapidly, that we _could_ see the glacier on to which we wished to descend, but _could not_ see what lay between us and it. Passing over a patch of ice-covered rocks which projected very slightly from the general level of the slope, we were certain that we could not be far above the _schrund_, but did not quite see how we were to get down any further without knowing whether we _were_ above a practicable point or not. It was suggested that one of the party should be let down with a rope, but, while we were discussing who should be the one, Almer cut a few steps more, and then, stooping down and craning over, gave a yell of exultation, and exclaimed that it was all right, and that we might jump over. By a marvellous bit of intuition, or good luck, he had led us to the only point where the two edges of the chasm so nearly met that we could get across. He cut down as low as possible, and then, from the last step, each man, in turn, sprang without difficulty on to the lower edge of the crevasse, and at 4.45 the problem of getting off the mountain was solved. "The return from this point was uneventful." A few days later Mr Moore had an amusing conversation with a chance acquaintance, who made a remark that has since been often quoted. Mr Moore relates it as follows:-- "At the door of the hotel was standing a young Frenchman, with whom we got into conversation, observing that we had just made the ascent of the highest mountain in the country. 'Oh,' replied he, 'sans doute, le Pic de Belledonne'; a rather elevated Rigi in the neighbourhood. We informed him that our conquest was not the Pic de Belladonne, but the Pic des Ecrins, on hearing which he smiled blandly, never having heard the name before, and, evidently meditating how he might avoid showing his ignorance, finally contented himself with a spasmodic 'Ah!' After a short pause, he inquired whether we had been up Mont Blanc, and, on _my_ replying in the negative, went on to say that _he_ had, about ten days before. We were astonished, as, without wishing to reflect on the appearance of the worthy Gaul, I must say that he did not give us the idea of a man capable of such a performance. However, we, in our turn, smiled blandly, and inquired whether, so early in the season, he had found the ascent difficult, and whether he had had a good view from the _summit_. 'From the summit!' said he; 'I did not go to the summit.' We ventured to inquire how high his wanderings had reached. 'Mon Dieu!' replied he, 'jusqu'au Montanvert!' Our politeness was not proof against this, so we broke off the conversation abruptly, and retired to indulge our merriment unchecked." The Ecrins is now frequently climbed. A new way up the rocky south side was discovered by a Frenchman, and is now usually taken for the ascent, the descent being accomplished by the north face which the party that included Mr Moore went up by and which has just been described. The route is now well known, and thus it is possible to hit off the easiest passages, but the traverse of what is known to the guides as 'the Couloir Whymper' always requires the greatest care. CHAPTER XVI THUNDERSTORMS IN THE ALPS The fatal accident caused by lightning on the Wetterhorn in 1902 has emphasized the curious fact that, except on that occasion, and once before, many years ago, when Mrs Arbuthnot was killed on the Schildthorn, no lives[10] have been lost in a thunderstorm on the Alps. This is the more remarkable when we glance through books on mountaineering, and notice how often climbers have been exposed to the full fury of summer storms, and what narrow escapes they have had. In July 1863, Mr and Mrs Spence Watson, with two friends and two guides, made an excursion from the Æggischhorn to the high glacier pass of the Jungfraujoch, an admirable account of the day's adventures having been contributed by Mr Watson to _The Alpine Journal_, from which I extract the following details. After starting on a lovely morning, the weather changed, and when they got to the pass they encountered a severe storm of wind, snow, and hail. They quickly turned to descend, the snow falling so heavily that they could not for a time see their old tracks. Suddenly a loud peal of thunder was heard, "and shortly after," writes Mr Watson, "I observed that a strange singing sound like that of a kettle was issuing from my alpenstock. We halted, and finding that all the axes and stocks emitted the same sound, stuck them into the snow. The guide from the hotel now pulled off his cap, shouting that his head burned, and his hair seemed to have a similar appearance to that which it would have presented had he been on an insulated stool under a powerful electrical machine. We all of us experienced the sensation of pricking or burning in some part of the body, more especially in the head and face, my hair also standing on end in an uncomfortable but very amusing manner. The snow gave out a hissing sound, as though a shower of hail were falling; the veil in the wide-awake of one of the party stood upright in the air; and on waving our hands, the singing sound issued loudly from the fingers. Whenever a peal of thunder was heard the phenomenon ceased, to be resumed before its echoes had died away. At these times we felt shocks, more or less violent, in those portions of the body which were most affected. By one of these shocks my right arm was paralysed so completely that I could neither use nor raise it for several minutes, nor, indeed, till it had been severely rubbed by Claret, and I suffered much pain in it at the shoulder joint for some hours. At half-past twelve the clouds began to pass away, and the phenomenon finally ceased, having lasted twenty-five minutes. We saw no lightning, and were puzzled at first as to whether we should be afraid or amused. The young guide was very much alarmed, but Claret, who had twice previously heard the singing (unaccompanied by the other symptoms), laughed so heartily at the whole affair that he kept up our spirits." [Illustration: ON A RIDGE IN THE OBERLAND.] [Illustration: THE SECOND LARGEST GLACIER IN THE ALPS. By Royston Le Blond. _To face p. 259._] The position of the party, was, however, by no means safe, yet though I have often heard the buzzing of ice-axes and rocks when in a thunderstorm on the mountains, I have never seen any ill effects from it. A little later another description appears in _The Alpine Journal_, by Mr C. Packe, who, during the descent of a peak in the Pyrenees, was astonished to hear a curious creaking sound proceeding from behind him. He was carrying various heavy articles at the time, and imagined that the noise was due to the straining of the straps of his knapsack. He presently unslung his load, and was amazed to find a strange buzzing noise proceeding from his rifle, "as though it had been an air gun trying to discharge itself. As I held it away from me, pointed upwards," he continues, "the noise became stronger, and as I in vain sought to account for it, I thought it possible that some large insect--a bee or beetle--might have got down the barrel, and be trying to escape. I held the barrel downwards, with a view to shake it out; but on lowering the gun the sound at once ceased, but was renewed as often as I raised it." It then began to occur to Mr Packe that the sound was electrical, and he felt sure this was so when he found that his alpenstock had joined in the buzzing. He therefore made a hasty retreat out of the highly charged upper regions. Several peals of thunder had previously been heard but no lightning was seen. A violent storm had, however, been experienced in a neighbouring district. That similar conditions may seem delightful to one man and entirely odious to another will strike whoever reads the following short extract from an account of a climb in the Pyrenees made by Mons. Henri Brulle. It was translated by Count Russell for _The Alpine Journal_, and runs as follows: "Another time I crossed the Vignemale alone, _en col_, under conditions which made this expedition the pleasantest of my souvenirs. A furious storm was raging. Enveloped in the morning in a dense fog, annoyed in the steep couloirs of the Cerbillonas by vultures which swept over me like avalanches, just grazing me with their long wings, assailed during three hours by hailstones of such size that they bruised and stunned me, deafened by thunder, and so electrified that I was hissing and crepitating, I notwithstanding reached the summit at half-past four in the evening, amidst incessant detonations. In descending the glacier I got lost in a labyrinth of crevasses, and while balancing myself on an ice-wave I nearly dropped my ice-axe. As a climax, night came on as black as ink, and I had to grope and feel my way down the endless valley of Ossoue. It was eleven o'clock at night when I reached Gavarnie, almost starved and quite exhausted, but having lived the crowning day of my life." Here is indeed Mark Tapley in the flesh! Captain E. Clayton relates in _The Alpine Journal_ an adventure that nearly cost him his life. "On 17th August last I left the Hochjoch Haus with Gabriel Spechtenhauser with the intention of ascending the Weisskugel at the head of the Oetzthal. The weather for the past week had been very changeable, but when we started at 3 A.M. it was fine and starlight. A German gentleman with two guides and two others with two guides started at the same time. As long as the aid of a lantern was desirable we kept together, but as it grew light Gabriel and I gradually drew ahead. As day broke clouds began to gather, and when we halted for breakfast at 6.10 A.M. they hung so heavy on the Weisskugel that after breakfast, instead of going straight on, we diverged to the top of the rocks leading down towards Kurzras, with the intention of waiting a short time to see what the weather would do, and if it did not mend, of going down to Kurzras, where a friend was awaiting me. "At these rocks we were overtaken by the single German gentleman with his guides, who had outstripped the other party. Before long the weather seemed to improve, the clouds on the Weisskugel got lighter, the sky seemed bright to the north, and we thought that very soon everything would be quite clear. The German quickly made a fresh start, but Gabriel and I waited to finish our pipes. However, we soon passed the other party, and, passing over a minor summit, where we left the rope, reached the real summit at 8.30 A.M. We had heard one or two peals of thunder on the way, but none appeared very close, and they seemed to be getting more distant. The summit was still in cloud, but it did not seem thick, and I thought it would soon blow away. But almost directly we reached the top it began to hail, and we went down a few steps on the rocky ridge that falls towards the Langtauferer Glacier, to be somewhat sheltered. "Here I remember handing Gabriel my map to put in his pocket to keep dry, and knew nothing more till I woke to the consciousness that he was lifting me up from where I was lying on the rocks, some 20 feet, I suppose, lower than the point where we had been standing. I was bleeding from a cut on the head, and my right arm was very painful, and turned out afterwards to be broken. Gabriel said that he had been knocked down also, but not rendered insensible, and, falling on his hands towards the upward slope, was not hurt. He also said that he was to a certain extent conscious of there having been a sudden glare and explosion, but I knew nothing of it. The German and his two guides, who at the time were just below the first summit, but not within sight of us, were so alarmed at the lightning and thunder, that they turned at once and never stopped till they reached Kurzras. The other party, who had not got beyond the rocks where we halted during the ascent, waited there for us, and Joseph Spechtenhauser, one of their guides, came to meet us and see if we wanted assistance. However, I was quite myself when I came to, which was directly Gabriel lifted me up, and the mountain is so easy that my disabled arm was of little consequence. I did not notice any more thunder or lightning after the flash that knocked us down, and the day cleared up to a lovely one. I have every reason to be pleased with Gabriel's kindness and attention to me without regard to himself, and very much regret that my accident prevented me from carrying out any of the other expeditions which I had promised myself the pleasure of making in his company." One of the most exciting accounts of an adventure in the Alps is Mr Tuckett's description of "A Race for Life,"[11] on the Eiger. Hardly less stirring is a paper in _The Alpine Journal_ by the same famous climber, from which he most kindly allows me to give a long quotation, telling of a narrow escape during one of the most appalling thunderstorms that could be experienced. The party were making the ascent of the Roche Melon, a peak 11,593 feet high not far from the Mont Cenis. The weather was unsettled, and grew worse as they mounted. "Proceeding very cautiously through the whirling wreaths of vapour lest we should suddenly drop over upon Italy and hurt it--or ourselves--we struck up the 'final incline'--as an American companion of mine once dubbed the cone of Vesuvius as we looked down upon it from its rim--and at 11.15 stood beside the ruins of the signal and enjoyed a very magnificent view of nothing in particular. As we had plenty of time at our disposal--three and a half hours sufficing for the descent to Susa--and the wind was keen and damp, our first proceeding was to search for the chapel, which we knew must be quite close to the summit of the peak; and, about 30 feet lower down, on the southern side, which was entirely free from snow, we came upon a tight little wooden building, some 6 or 7 feet long and high by 5 broad, very carefully constructed, with flat bands of thin iron on the outside covering the lines of junction of the planks, so as effectually to keep out both wind and moisture. Opposite the door, which we found carefully bolted, was a wooden shelf against the wall serving as an altar, on which stood a small bronze statuette of the Virgin, whilst on either hand hung the usual curious medley of votive paintings, engravings, crosses, tapers etc., not to mention certain pious scribblings. Taking great care to disturb nothing, we arranged a loose board and our packs on the rather damp floor so as to form a seat, and waited for the clouds to disperse and disclose the superb panorama that we knew should here be visible. "Here I may be allowed to mention that a chapel, said to have been originally excavated in the rock, and subsequently buried under ice or snow, was here dedicated to the Virgin by a crusader of Asti, Boniface by name, of the house of Rovero, in fulfilment of a vow made whilst a captive in the hands of the Saracens. More recently the present wooden structure has taken its place, and every year, on 5th August, pilgrims resort to it in considerable numbers. Lower down on the Susa side is a much more substantial structure, at a height of 9396 feet, called the Cà d'Asti, in allusion to the circumstances of its foundation. The last is a solidly, not to say massively, constructed circular edifice of stone and mortar, some 15 or 16 feet in diameter, and perhaps rather more in height, with a vaulted roof of solid masonry covered externally with tiles, and surmounted by an iron cross. Seen from below, it stands out boldly on a mass of crags which conceal the actual summit of the Roche Melon, and close by are some low sheds, which appear ordinarily to serve as shelter for flocks of sheep browsing on the grassy slopes around, but on the night preceding the festa of 5th August, furnish sleeping quarters for the assembled pilgrims, who attend mass in the adjoining chapel, if the weather, as frequently happens, does not permit of its being celebrated on the summit of the mountain, in what is probably the most elevated shrine in Europe. * * * * * "The Roche Melon stands just in the track of the great storms which, brewed in the heated plains of Lombardy and Piedmont, come surging up through the valley of the Dora Riparia, and burst, hurling and crashing over the depression of Mont Cenis, to find or make a watery grave in the valley of the Arc. Of their combined fierceness and grandeur we were soon to have only too favourable an opportunity of judging, for scarcely more than five minutes after we had comfortably established ourselves under shelter, suddenly, without a moment's warning, a perfect _mitraille_ of hail smote the roof above us, tore through the mist like grape-shot through battle-smoke, and whitened the ground like snow. We closed the door carefully, for now came flash after flash of brilliant lightning, with sharp, angry, snapping thunder, which, if we had been a quarter of an hour later, would have made our position on the exposed northern side anything but pleasant. We congratulated ourselves on our good fortune, but were glad to pitch our axes amongst the _débris_ of rock above us and await patiently the hoped-for dispersal of the fog. In a few minutes the hail ceased, the mist became somewhat brighter, rifts appeared in all directions, and, issuing forth, we were amply rewarded by such glimpses of the wonderful view as, if not fully satisfactory for topographical purposes, were, in a picturesque and artistic point of view, indescribably grand and interesting. The extent of level country visible is a remarkable feature in the view from the Roche Melon, as also in that from the summit of the Pourri, where Imseng not a little amused me on first catching sight of the plains of France stretching away till lost in the haze, by shouting in a fit of uncontrollable enthusiasm, 'Ach! Das ist wunderschön!--ganz eben!'[12] "We had not had more than time enough to seize the general features of the panorama and admire the special effects with their ever-changing and kaleidoscopic combinations, when the mist once more swooped upon us, again to be followed by hail, lightning, and thunder, and a fresh clearance. But this second visitation left behind it a further souvenir in the shape of a phenomenon with which most mountaineers are probably more or less familiar, but which I never met with to the same extent before--I allude to an electrified condition of the summit of the mountain and all objects on its surface by conduction. As the clouds swept by, every rock, every loose stone, the uprights of the rude railing outside the chapel, the ruined signal, our axes, my lorgnette and flask, and even my fingers and elbows, set up "'a dismal universal hiss.' It was as though we were in a vast nest of excited snakes, or a battery of frying-pans, or listening at a short distance to the sustained note of a band of _cigali_ in a chestnut wood--a mixture of comparisons which may serve sufficiently to convey the impression that the general effect was indescribable. I listened and looked and tried experiments for some time, but suddenly it burst out with an energy that suggested a coming explosion, or some equally unpleasant _dénouement_, and, dropping my axe, to whose performance I had been listening, I fairly bolted for the chapel. [Illustration: 13,300 FEET ABOVE THE SEA.] [Illustration: ON THE FURGGEN GRAT.] [Illustration: A "PERSONALLY CONDUCTED" PARTY ON THE BREITHORN.] [Illustration: PACKING THE KNAPSACK AFTER LUNCH. _To face p. 269._] "We had now spent a couple of hours on the summit, and had succeeded in getting, bit by bit, a sight of most of the principal features of the very remarkable view, with the exception of Monte Viso, which persistently sulked; so at 1.15, as there seemed a probability of the weather becoming worse before it improved, we quitted our excellent shelter, and, after putting everything in order and carefully closing and bolting the door, sallied forth into the mist, which was again enshrouding the mountain, apparently as the advance guard of the fiercest storm in the neighbourhood, which we had for some time been watching as it swept solemnly towards us down the valley of the Dora. "There is a sort of track, rather than well-defined path, down the bare, rocky, and _débris_-covered southern face of the mountain, but in the fog and momentarily increasing gloom of the coming tempest it was not always very easy to distinguish it. Still, we descended rapidly, and in less than half an hour had dropped down some 2000 feet to a point where, during an instant's lift, we descried the outline of the Cà d'Asti five minutes below us, just as the edge of the coming hail smote us with a fury which it was hard at times to face. We dashed on--it was a regular _sauve qui peut_--blinded and staggering under the pitiless pelting and the fury of the blast, gained the door of the chapel, which faced the storm, deposited our axes outside, and darted in, thankful again to find ourselves under so good a roof just when it was most needed. "For, if there had been at times wild goings on upon the summit during the morning, they were merely a faint prelude to the elemental strife which now raged around. The wind roared and the hail hissed in fiendish rivalry, and yet both seemed silenced when the awful crashes of thunder burst above and about us. We were in the very central track and focus of the storm, and, as we sat crouched upon the floor, the ground and the building seemed to reel beneath the roar of the detonations, and our heads almost to swim with the fierce glare of the lightning. I had carefully closed the door, not only to keep the wind and hail out, but also because lightning is apt to follow a current of air, and, to the right on entering, at about the height of a man, was a small unglazed window some 2 feet square. Opposite the door was the altar, on the step of which I seated myself. Imseng took a place by my side, between me and the window, whilst Christian perched himself on the coil of rope with his back to the wall, not far from the door, and between it and the window. A quarter of a hour may have gone by when a flash of intense vividness seemed almost to dart through the window, and so affected Imseng's nerves that he hastily quitted his seat by me and coiled himself up near Christian, remarking that 'that was rather too close to be pleasant.' Then came four more really awful flashes, followed all but instantaneously by sharp, crackling thunder, which sounded like a volley of bullets against a metal target, and then a fifth with a slightly increased interval between it and the report. I was just remarking to Christian that I thought the worst was past, and that we should soon be liberated, adding, 'How fortunate we are for the second time to-day to get such shelter just in the nick of time,' when--crash! went everything, it seemed, all at once: "'No warning of the approach of flame, Swiftly like sudden death it came.' If some one had struck me from behind on the bump of firmness with a sledge-hammer, or if we had been in the interior of a gigantic percussion shell which an external blow had suddenly exploded, I fancy the sensation might have resembled that which I for the first instant experienced. We were blinded, deafened, smothered, and struck, all in a breath. The place seemed filled with fire, our ears rang with the report, fragments of what looked like incandescent matter rained down upon us as though a meteorite had burst, and a suffocating sulphurous odour--probably due to the sudden production of ozone in large quantities--almost choked us. For an instant we reeled as though stunned, but each sprang to his feet and instinctively made for the door. What my companions' ideas were I cannot tell; mine were few and simple--I had been struck, or was being struck, or both; the roof would be down upon us in another moment; inside was death, outside our only safety. The door opened inwards, and our simultaneous rush delayed our escape; but it was speedily thrown back, and, dashing out into the blinding hail, we plunged, dazed and almost stupefied, into the nearest shed. For the next few minutes the lightning continued to play about us in so awful a manner that we were in no mood calmly to investigate the nature or extent of our injuries. It was enough that we were still among the living, though I must own that, at first, I had a fearful suspicion that poor Imseng was seriously wounded. He held his head between his hands, and rolled it about in so daft a manner, and was so odd and unnatural in his movements generally, that it struck me his brain might have received some injury. I, for my part, was painfully conscious of a good deal of pain in the region of the right instep, and I saw that one of Christian's hands was bleeding, and that he was holding both his thighs as if in suffering. [Illustration: MONTE ROSA FROM THE FURGGEN GRAT.] [Illustration: THE MATTERHORN FROM THE WELLENKUPPE. _To face p. 272_.] "Gradually the storm drew off towards the Mont Cenis, and, with minds free from the tension of imminent peril, we had time to take stock of our condition. It was a relief to see Imseng let go his head and observe that it remained erect; to hear Christian say that his thighs were getting better; and to find, on examining my foot, that the mischief was nothing more than a flesh wound, which was bleeding but slightly. My hat, indeed, was knocked in, my pockets filled with stones and plaster, and my heart, it may be, somewhat nearer my mouth than usual, but otherwise we could congratulate ourselves, with deep thankfulness on a most marvellous escape from serious harm. "On comparing our impressions, Imseng declared that the lightning had entered through the window, struck the altar, glanced off from it to the wall, and then vanished, whilst Christian and I agreed in the belief that the roof had been the part struck, and the flash had descended almost vertically upon us. Quitting our place of refuge and repairing to the chapel, we encountered a scene of ruin which at once confirmed the correctness of our views. The lightning had evidently first struck the iron cross outside and smashed in the roof, dashing fragments of stone and plaster upon us which, brilliantly illuminated, looked to our dazed and confused vision like flakes of fiery matter. It had then encountered the altar, overturning the iron cross and wooden candlesticks only 3 feet from the back of my head as I sat on the step, tearing the wreath of artificial flowers or worsted rosettes strung on copper wire which surrounded the figure of the Virgin, and scattering the fragments in all directions. Next it glanced against the wall, tore down, or otherwise damaged, some of the votive pictures (engravings), and splintered portions of their frames into 'matchwood.' The odour of ozone was still strong, the water from the melting hail was coming freely through the roof, and the walls were in two places cracked to within 5 feet of the ground. In fact, as a chapel, the building was ruined, though showing little traces, externally, of the damage done, so that it is possible--unless a stray shepherd happened to look in--that its condition would for the first time become known upon the arrival of the pilgrims on the eve of 5th August. "We stood long watching our departing foe, and then three very sobered men dropped down silently and quickly that afternoon upon Susa, thinking of what might have been our fate." CHAPTER XVII LANDSLIPS IN THE MOUNTAINS "Sir W. Martin Conway has been good enough to allow me to extract from _The Alps from End to End_ the following account of the destruction of Elm. Mountain falls have a special interest for all who travel in Switzerland, where the remains of so many are visible. "The Himalayas are, from a geological point of view, a young set of mountain ranges; they still tumble about on an embarrassingly large scale. The fall, which recently made such a stir, began on 6th September 1893. That day the Maithana Hill (11,000 feet), a spur of a large mountain mass, pitched bodily rather than slid, into the valley. "'Little could be seen of the terrible occurrence, for clouds of dust instantly arose, which darkened the neighbourhood and fell for miles around, whitening the ground and the trees until all seemed to be snow covered. The foot of the hill had been undermined by springs until there was no longer an adequate base, and in the twinkling of an eye a large part of the mountain slid down, pushed forward, and shot across the valley, presenting to the little river a lofty and impervious wall, against which its waters afterwards gathered. Masses of rocks were hurled a mile away, and knocked down trees on the slopes across the valley. Many blocks of dolomitic limestone, weighing from 30 to 50 tons, were sent like cannon-shots through the air. The noise was terrific, and the frightened natives heard the din repeated at intervals for several days, for the first catastrophe was succeeded by a number of smaller slides. Even five months after the mountain gave way, every rainy day was succeeded by falls of rocks. A careful computation gives the weight of the enormous pile of rubbish at 800,000,000 tons.' "The Himalayas are indeed passing through their dramatic geological period, when they give rise to such landslips as this at relatively frequent intervals. Plenty of landslips quite as big have been recorded in the last half-century, and, amongst the remote and uninhabited regions of the great ranges, numbers more of which no record is made constantly happen. The catastrophic period has ended for the Alps. Landslips on a great scale seldom occur there now; when they do occur, the cause of them is oftener the activity of man than of natural forces. But of a great landslip in the Alps details are sure to be observed, and we are enabled to form a picture of the occurrence. When the Alps tremble the nations quake; the Himalayas may shudder in their solitudes, but the busy occidental world pays scant attention, unless gathering waters threaten to spread ruin afar. Of the Gohna Lake we have been told much, but little of the fall that caused it. Eye-witnesses appear not to have been articulate. We can, however, form some idea of what it was like from the minute and accurate account we possess of a great and famous Alpine landslip. I refer to that which buried part of the village of Elm, in Canton Glarus, on 11th September 1881.[13] "Elm is the highest village in the Sernf Valley. Its position is fixed by the proximity of a meadow-flat of considerable extent. Above this three minor valleys radiate, two of which are separated from one another by a mountain mass, whose last buttress was the Plattenbergkopf, a hill with a precipitous side and a flat and wooded summit, which used to face the traveller coming up the main valley. It was this hill that fell. "The cause of the fall was simple, and reflects little credit on Swiss communal government. About half-way up the hill there dips into it a bed of fine slate, excellent for school-slates. In the year 1868 concessions were given by the commune for working this slate for ten years without any stipulation as to the method to be employed. Immense masses of the rock were removed. A hole was made 180 mètres wide, and no supports were left for the roof. It was pushed into the mountain to a depth of 65 mètres! In 1878, when the concessions lapsed, the commune, by a small majority, decided to work the quarry itself. Every burgher considered that he had a right to work in the quarry when the weather was unsuitable for farm labour. The place was therefore overcrowded on wet days, and burdened with unskilful hands. The quarry, of course, did not pay, and became a charge on the rates, but between eighty and one hundred men drew wages from it intermittently. "The roof by degrees became visibly rotten. Lumps of rock used to fall from it, and many fatal accidents occurred. The mass of the mountain above the quarry showed a tendency to grow unstable, yet blasting went forward merrily, and no precautions were taken. Cracks opened overhead in all directions; water and earth used to ooze down through them. Fifteen hundred feet higher up, above the top of the Plattenbergkopf, the ground began to be rifted. In 1876 a large crack split the rock across above the quarry roof, and four years later the mass thus outlined fell away. In 1879 serious signs were detected of coming ruin on a large scale. A great crack split the mountain across behind the top of the hill. The existence of this crack was well known to the villagers, who had a special name for it. It steadily lengthened and widened. By August 1881 it was over four mètres wide, and swallowed up all the surface drainage. Every one seems then to have agreed that the mountain would ultimately fall, but no one was anxious. The last part of August and the first days of September were very wet. On 7th September masses of rock began to fall from the hill; more fell on the 8th, and strange sounds were heard in the body of the rock; work was at last suspended in the quarry. On the 10th a commission of incompetent people investigated the hill, and pronounced that there was no immediate danger. They, however, ordered that work should cease in the quarry till the following spring, whereat the workmen murmured. All through the 10th and the morning of the 11th falls of rock occurred every quarter of an hour or so. Some were large. They kept coming from new places. The mountain groaned and rumbled incessantly, and there was no longer any doubt that it was rotten through and through. "The 11th of September was a wet Sunday. Rocks and rock-masses kept falling from the Plattenberg. The boys of the village were all agog with excitement, and could hardly be prevented by their parents from going too near the hill. In the afternoon a number of men gathered at an inn in the upper village, just at the foot of the labouring rocks, to watch the falls. They called to Meinrad Rhyner, as he passed, carrying a cheese from an alp, to join them, but he refused, 'not fearing for himself, but for the cheese.' Another group of persons assembled in a relative's house to celebrate a christening. A few houses immediately below the quarry were emptied, but the people from them did not move far. At four o'clock Schoolmaster Wyss was standing at his window, watch in hand, registering the falls and the time of their occurrence. Huntsman Elmer was on his doorstep looking at the quarry through a telescope. Every one was more or less on the _qui vive_, but none foresaw danger to himself. "Many of the people in the lower village, called Müsli, which was the best part of a mile distant from the quarry, and separated from it by a large flat area, were quite uninterested. They were making coffee, milking cows, and doing the like small domestic business. "Suddenly, at a quarter past five, a mass of the mountain broke away from the Plattenbergkopf. The ground bent and broke up, the trees upon it nodded, and folded together, and the rock engulfed them in its bosom as it crashed down over the quarry, shot across the streams, dashing their water in the air, and spread itself out upon the flat. A greyish-black cloud hovered for a while over the ruin, and slowly passed away. No one was killed by this fall, though the _débris_ reached within a dozen yards of the inn where the sightseers were gathered. The inhabitants of the upper village now began to be a little frightened. They made preparations for moving the aged and sick persons, and some of their effects. People also came up from the lower villages to help, and to see the extent of the calamity. Others came together to talk, and the visitors who had quitted the inn returned to it. Some went into their houses to shut the windows and keep out the dust. No one was in any hurry. "This first fall came from the east side of the Plattenbergkopf; seventeen minutes later a second and larger fall descended from the west side. The gashes made by the two united below the peak, and left its enormous mass isolated and without support. The second fall must have been of a startling character, for Schoolmaster Wyss forgot his watch after it. It overwhelmed the inn and four other houses, killed a score of persons, and drove terror into all beholders, so that they started running up the opposite hill. Oswald Kubli, one of the last to leave the inn, saw this fall from close at hand. He was standing outside the inn when he heard some one cry out: 'My God, here comes the whole thing down!' Every one fled, most making for the Düniberg. 'I made four or five strides, and then a stone struck Geiger and he fell without a word. Pieces from the ruined inn flew over my head. My brother Jacob was knocked down by them.' Again a dark cloud of dust enveloped the ruin. As it cleared off, Huntsman Elmer could see, through his glass, the people racing up the hill (the Düniberg) 'like a herd of terrified chamois.' When they had reached a certain height most of them stood still and looked back. Some halted to help their friends, others to take breath. "'Of those who were before me,' relates Meinrad Rhyner, 'some were for turning back to the valley to render help, but I called to them to fly. Heinrich Elmer was carrying boxes, and was only twenty paces behind me when he was killed. There were also an old man and woman, who were helping along their brother, eighty years old; they might have been saved if they had left him. I ran by them, and urged them to hasten.' "Of all who took refuge on the Düniberg, only six escaped destruction by the third fall, and they held on their way, and went empty-handed. Ruin overtook the kind and the covetous together. "At this time, before the third fall, fear came also upon the cattle. A cow, grazing far down the valley, bellowed aloud and started running for the hillside with tail out-straightened. She reached a place of safety before her meadow was overwhelmed. Cats and chickens likewise saved themselves, and two goats sought and found salvation on the steps of the parsonage. "During the four minutes that followed the second fall every one seems to have been running about, with a tendency, as the moments passed, to conclude that the worst was over. Then those who were watching the mountain from a distance beheld the whole upper portion of the Plattenbergkopf, 10,000,000 cubic mètres of rock, suddenly shoot from the hillside. The forest upon it bent 'like a field of corn in the wind,' before being swallowed up. 'The trees became mingled together like a flock of sheep.' The hillside was all in movement, and 'all its parts were playing together.' The mass slid, or rather shot down, with extraordinary velocity, till its foot reached the quarry. Then the upper part pitched forward horizontally, straight across the valley and on to the Düniberg. People in suitable positions could at this moment clearly see through beneath it to the hillside beyond. They also saw the people in the upper village, and on the Düniberg, racing about wildly. No individual masses of rock could be seen in the avalanche, except from near at hand; it was a dense cloud of stone, sharply outlined below, rounded above. The falling mass looked so vast that Schoolmaster Wyss thought it was going to fill up the whole valley. A cloud of dust accompanied it, and a great wind was flung before it. This wind swept across the valley and overthrew the houses in its path 'like haycocks.' The roofs were lifted first, and carried far, then the wooden portions of the houses were borne bodily through the air, 'just as an autumn storm first drives off the leaves and then the dead branches themselves from the trees.' In many cases wooden ruins were dropped from the air on to the top of the stone _débris_ when the fall was at an end. Eye-witnesses say that trees were blown about 'like matches,' that houses were 'lifted through the air like feathers,' and 'thrown like cards against the hillside,' 'that they bent, trembled, and then broke up like little toys' before the avalanche came to them. Hay, furniture, and the bodies of men were mixed with the house-ruins in the air. Some persons were cast down by the blast and raised again. Others were carried through the air and deposited in safe positions; others, again, were hurled upward to destruction and dropped in a shattered state as much as a hundred mètres away. Huntsman Elmer relates as follows: "'My son Peter was in Müsli (nearly a mile from the quarry) with his wife and child. He sought to escape with them by running. On coming to a wall, he took the child from his wife and leaped over. Turning round, he saw the woman reach out her hand to another child. At that moment the wind lifted him, and he was borne up the hillside. My married daughter, also in Müsli, fled with two children. She held the younger in her arms and led the other. This one was snatched away from her, but she found herself, not knowing how, some distance up the hillside, lying on the ground face downwards, with the baby beneath her, both uninjured.' "The avalanche, as has been said, shot with incredible swiftness horizontally across the valley. It pitched on to the Düniberg, struck it obliquely, and was thus deflected down the level and fertile valley-floor, which it covered in a few seconds, to the distance of nearly a mile and over its whole width, with a mass of rock _débris_ more than 30 feet thick. Most of the people on the hillside were instantly killed, the avalanche falling on to them and crushing them flat, 'as an insect is crushed into a red streak under a man's foot.' Only six persons here escaped. Two of them were almost reached by the rocks, the others were whirled aloft through the air and deposited in different directions. One survivor describes how the dust-cloud overtook him, 'and came between him and his breath!' He sank face downwards on the ground, feeling powerless to go further. Looking back, he saw 'stones flying above the dust-cloud. In a moment all seemed to be over. I stood up and climbed a few yards to a spring of water to wash out the dust, which filled my mouth and nose' (all survivors on the Düniberg had the same experience). 'All round was dark and buried in dust.' "It was only when the avalanche had struck the Düniberg and began to turn aside from it--the work of a second or two--that the people in the lower village, far down along the level plain, had any suspicion that they were in danger. Twenty seconds later all was over. Some of them who were on a bridge had just time to run aside, not a hundred yards, and were saved, but most were killed where they stood. The avalanche swept away half the village. Its sharply defined edge cut one house in two. All within the edge were destroyed, all without were saved. Almost the only persons wounded were those in the bisected house. Huntsman Elmer with his telescope, and Schoolmaster Wyss with his watch, whose houses were just beyond the area of ruin, beheld the dust-cloud come rolling along, 'like smoke from a cannon's mouth, but black,' filling the whole width of the flat valley to about twice the height of a house. The din seemed to them not very great, and the wind, which, in front of the cloud, carried the houses away like matchwood, did not reach them. Others describe the crash and thunder of the fall as terrific; it affected people differently. All agree that it swallowed up every other sound, so that shrieks of persons near at hand were inaudible. The mass seemed to slide or shoot along the ground rather than to roll. One or two men had a race for life and won it, but most failed to escape who were not already in a place of safety. Fridolin Rhyner, an eleven-year-old boy, kept his head better than any one else in the village, and succeeded in eluding the fall. He saw, too, 'how Kaspar Zentner reached the bridge as the fall took place, and how he started running as fast as he could, but was caught by the flood of rocks near Rhyner's house; he jumped aside, however, into a field, limped across it, got over the wall into the road, and so just escaped.' "The last phase of the catastrophe is the hardest to imagine, and was the most difficult to foresee. The actual facts are these. Ten million cubic mètres of rock fell down a depth (on an average) of about 450 mètres, shot across the valley and up the opposite (Düniberg) slope to a height of 100 mètres, where they were bent 25° out of their first direction, and poured, almost like a liquid, over a horizontal plane, covering it, uniformly, throughout a distance of 1500 mètres and over an area of about 900,000 square mètres to a depth of from 10 to 20 mètres. The internal friction of the mass and the friction between it and the ground were insignificant forces compared with the tremendous momentum that was generated by the fall. The stuff flowed like a liquid. No wonder the parson, seeing the dust-cloud rolling down the valley, thought it was only dust that went so far. His horror, when the cloud cleared off and he beheld the solid grey carpet, beneath which one hundred and fifteen of his flock were buried with their houses and their fields, may be imagined. He turned his eyes to the hills, and lo! the familiar Plattenbergkopf had vanished and a hole was in its place. "The roar of the fall ceased suddenly. Silence and stillness supervened. Survivors stood stunned where they were. Nothing moved. Then a great cry and wailing arose in the part of the village that was left. People began to run wildly about, some down the valley, some up. As the dust-cloud grew thinner the wall-like side of the ruin appeared. It was quite dry. All the grass and trees in the neighbourhood were white with dust. Those who beheld the catastrophe from a distance hurried down to look for their friends. Amongst them was Burkhard Rhyner, whose house was untouched at the edge of the _débris_. He ran to it and found, he said, 'the doors open, a fire burning in the kitchen, the table laid, and coffee hot in the coffee-pot, but no living soul was left.' All had run forth to help or see, and been overwhelmed--wife, daughter, son, son's wife, and two grandchildren. 'I am the sole survivor of my family.' Few were the wounded requiring succour; few the dead whose bodies could be recovered. Here and there lay a limb or a trunk. On the top of one of the highest _débris_ mounds was a head severed from its body, but otherwise uninjured. Every dead face that was not destroyed wore a look of utmost terror. The crushed remains of a youth still guarded with fragmentary arms the body of a little child. There were horrors enough for the survivors to endure. The memory of them is fresh in their minds to the present day. "Such was the great catastrophe of Elm. The hollow in the hills, whence the avalanche fell, can still be seen, and the pile of ruin against and below the Düniberg; but almost all the rest of the _débris_-covered area has been reclaimed and now carries fields, which were ripening to harvest when I saw them. The fallen rocks, some big as houses, have been blasted level; soil has been carried from afar and spread over the ruin. A channel, 40 feet deep or more, has been cut through it for the river, so that the structure of the rock-blanket can still be seen. The roots of young trees now grasp stones that took part in that appalling flight from their old bed of thousands of years to their present place of repose. The valley has its harvests again, and the villagers go about their work as their forefathers did, but they remember the day of their visitation, and to the stranger coming amongst them they tell the tragic tale with tears in their eyes and white horror upon their faces." CHAPTER XVIII SOME TERRIBLE EXPERIENCES All must have noticed, summer after summer, in the daily papers, a recital from time to time under some such heading as, "Perils of the Alps," of a variety of disasters to Germans or Austrians on mountains the names of which are unfamiliar to English people or even to English climbers. Many young men, of little leisure and of slight means, develop a passionate love for the peaks of their native land. The minor ranges of Austria and Germany offer few difficulties to really first-class, properly equipped parties, but nasty places can be found on most of them, and the very fact that they do not boast of glaciers removes the chief argument against solitary ascents. The Rax, near Vienna, is a mountain which can be reached in a few hours from that city, and while a good path has been laid out to the summit, many other routes requiring climbing--by climbing I mean the use of the hands--are available for the hardier class of tourists. One route in particular, that from the Kaiserbrunn through the Wolfsthal, appears to be really difficult, and is unfit for a man to ascend alone unless he is a climber of great skill. A terrible experience fell to the lot of a young Viennese compositor, employed on the _Neue Freie Presse_, and by name Emil Habl. He set out by himself to make the expedition referred to, and, having fallen and broken his leg, he managed, thanks to his pluck and endurance, to escape with his life. "Despite injuries which made it impossible for him to stand," says a writer in one of Messrs Newnes' publications, from which I am courteously permitted to quote, "he yet succeeded in conveying himself from the scene of his accident into the valley in the neighbourhood of human dwellings. Three dreadful days and three awful nights lasted that memorable descent--a descent which can easily be made in two hours by any one able to walk. It may almost certainly be said that the case is without a parallel in the annals of Alpine accidents." Herr Habl had ascended the Rax on previous occasions, and twice before by the Wolfsthal. It is the custom on many of the easier Austrian mountains to mark the way by painted strips on the rocks. These are sometimes very useful, but occasionally they tempt the tourist into tracks which may be beyond his powers, or lure him on till, at last, losing sight of them, he is induced to strike out a route--and perhaps an impracticable one--for himself. The Wolfsthal route up the Rax is marked in green, but the paint had worn off in many places, and after a time Herr Habl could no longer trace it. At last the way was barred by a precipice, but while pausing in uncertainty beneath it, the climber noticed two iron clamps fixed far apart on the face of the cliff, and argued that they must at one time have supported ladders and formed, perhaps, part of a hunter's path. He made an attempt to scramble up the rock, in spite of the absence of the ladder, but when more than 30 feet up saw that it was impossible to scale it. He therefore determined to return, but a loose stone, giving way beneath him, he was precipitated from his precarious hold, and fell with a crash straight to the bottom. This happened at about 7.30 A.M., and for a long time he lay unconscious. When he came to himself again he was suffering greatly. "The first thing I noticed," he says, "was a terrible pain in my right leg, my head, and left side; I was also bleeding profusely from several wounds. At the same time, considering the fearful fall I had had, I felt thankful I had not been killed outright. On trying to get up I discovered, to my utter horror, that I had broken my right shin-bone. It was quite impossible to rise. The break was about 6 inches below the knee, and at the first glance I knew it to be a very bad fracture. It was what the doctors call an 'open' fracture--that is, the bone projected through the skin." It was in vain that he shouted for help. Tourists seldom pass that way, and it was useless to expect any one to hear him. To make matters worse, the weather had changed, and rain now fell heavily. But Herr Habl did not lose courage. He writes: "Unless I wanted miserably to die a long-drawn-out, hideous death from hunger and thirst, I knew _I must save myself_. I decided not to lose another moment in fruitless brooding, and waiting, and shouting, but to act at once. "I perceived that first of all I must set my broken leg and bandage it in some rough fashion. In spite of the agony it caused me, I rolled over and over the ground in different directions like a bale of goods--a few yards here and a few yards there--until I had collected a sufficient quantity of fallen branches, bits of fir and moss; this strange collecting process took me some hours. The next thing was to tear off the sleeves of my shirt and such other parts of my underwear as I could spare. On my mountain excursions I always took with me a box containing iodoform gauze and cambric; and now these things were more than welcome. "At last, then, I was ready to begin the operation. But, good heavens, what agony! My deadliest enemy I would not wish such excruciating pains as I suffered when setting the poor splintered bone--which, be it remembered, was not broken straight across. The dreadful splinters, indeed, dug deep into my flesh. Not regarding the pain (although nearly fainting therewith) I exerted my whole force, and at last succeeded in getting the bone into what, as far as I could judge, was its right position. Then I wound the iodoform gauze round it, and over that I put the cambric, the bits of underclothing, and a layer of moss. Next in the queer operation came my alpenstock and some boughs in place of splints; and finally I tied the whole together with the string, my hat-line, and neck-tie." During the rest of the day the agonising descent continued, down rocks which were difficult even for a sound man to ascend. As evening approached Herr Habl bethought him of the need of food, but, alas! all was gone from his knapsack, doubtless left at the spot where the bandages had been put on. To regain this point was out of the question, so berries and leaves were resorted to, to appease the craving of hunger. That night was passed in pain and weariness. The rain never ceased, the poor wounded man was soaked to the skin. The next day, from dawn to dark the fearful descent continued, and was followed by another night of indescribable misery. The morning after Herr Habl could hardly drag himself a yard, and the temptation to lie down and await the end was very great. Still, for the sake of his parents at home, he continued his efforts, though bleeding now from the contact of the sharp rocks over which he pushed himself in a half-lying, half-sitting posture. By four o'clock that afternoon it seemed as if human endurance could bear no more, and for two hours he lay in an awful apathy he could not shake off. Then, when all hope seemed over, help came, for he heard the sound of human voices, and this so stirred him that once more he began to crawl downward, though unable to obtain any reply to his cries for assistance. Another night passed, and during it, for the first time, he got some sleep. The next morning, he once more dragged his poor lacerated body downwards and at last came in sight of some houses. Calling feebly for help, he was delighted beyond measure to receive an answer, and soon he was carried to Hôtel Kaiserbrunn, and the same evening transported to the hospital at Vienna. He concludes his most interesting account by remarking: "I do not think that my accident, terrible as it is, has cured me of my love of mountaineering. But certainly the remembrance of those three terrible days and nights will deter me from again undertaking difficult climbs by myself." [Illustration: A GLACIER LAKE. By Royston Le Blond.] [Illustration: TAKING OFF THE ROPE AT THE END OF THE CLIMB.] [Illustration: AMONGST THE SÈRACS.] [Illustration: WATER AT LAST. _To face p. 297._] An adventure, having a happier termination, befell some friends of mine in the Bregaglia group, owing to the marking of a route with paint. The district was but little known to them, so they were glad to follow where the marks led. One of the party, writing in _The Alpine Journal_, says: "The descent began by a grass ledge. After a few yards this was suddenly closed by overhanging rocks. François, who was first, appeared to us to plunge down a precipice. He answered our criticism by pointing to the red triangles. They indicated the only means of advance. It was requisite to go down a dozen feet of nearly vertical rock by the help of two grass tufts, and then for several yards to walk across a horizontal crack which gave foot-hold varying from 2 inches to nothing. Nominal support--help in balance--could be gained at first by digging axes into grass overhead; further on hand-hold was obtainable. François walked across without a moment's hesitation, but we did not despise the rope. This _mauvais pas_ would not, perhaps, trouble younger cragsmen. It came upon us unprepared and when somewhat tired. But to indicate a route including such an obstacle to unsuspecting tourists as a Station Path is surely rash. A practical joke that may lead to fatal results should only be resorted to under exceptional circumstances--as, for example, in the case of an hotel bore. There can be little doubt that in this instance the Milanese section entrusted their paint-pot to a conscious, if unconscientious, humorist; for we found afterwards that he had continued his triangles through the village, along the high road, and finished up only on the ticket office." The following terrible experience did not, it is true, happen to a party of mountaineers, but as _The Alpine Journal_, from which I take my account, has considered a notice of it appropriate to its pages, I include it amongst my tales. "A distinguished aeronaut, Captain Charbonnet, of Lyons, married a young girl from Turin. On the evening of their wedding, in October, 1893, they set out in Captain Charbonnet's balloon 'Stella,' and covered about 10 miles on their way towards Lyons. "Next morning, accompanied by two young Italians named Durando and Botto, one of whom had made many previous ascents with Captain Charbonnet, they started again. Stormy weather seemed to be brewing, and after rising to a height of 3000 mètres they were caught in a current. At Saluggia they nearly touched ground, then leapt up again to 4000, and presently to 6000 mètres. About 2.30 P.M. the balloon began to descend rapidly, and they had some difficulty in stopping it at 3000 mètres. [Illustration: The balloon "Stella" starting from Zermatt to make the first passage of the Alps by balloon. _To face page 293._] [Illustration: A moment after the balloon started.] "Here they were in dense clouds, and bitterly cold; quite ignorant, moreover, of their position. Captain Charbonnet made his crew lie down in the car, himself leaning out in order to try if he could catch a glimpse of any point from which he could learn his bearings. The balloon was drifting at a great rate, and nothing could be done to check it. Presently there was a shock, and Captain Charbonnet was thrown to the bottom of the car, by a heavy blow over his left eye. "The balloon rebounded, and dashing across a gully struck the other side of it, and it finally settled down on a steep rocky spur on the east side of the Bessanese (3632 mètres = 11,917 feet), just above the small glacier of Salau. It had struck the wall of the mountain which faces the Rifugio Gastaldi, at a height of about 3000 mètres (9843 feet). "The aeronauts reached the ground a good deal shaken and bruised, but none of them, except the leader, suffering from any serious injuries.... Their sole provision was one bottle of wine; but they were fairly well off for covering, and they cut up the balloon to supply deficiencies. In the night a violent storm came on, to add to their misery. In spite of his injuries, Captain Charbonnet kept up the spirits of his companions as well as might be, but towards morning his powers failed, and when day dawned his young wife, a girl of eighteen, had some difficulty in bringing him round. "They started to descend the snow-slope, Durando going first, and making steps to the best of his power with his feet 'and with a long key which he happened to have in his pocket.' Of course they had neither nails nor poles; and, by a fatal imprudence, they did not tie themselves together, though ropes must have been in plenty in the wreck of the balloon. "Presently Charbonnet slipped. He was held up by his wife and Botto; but a few minutes later he disappeared into a hidden crevasse. The others could see him far below, but as he neither moved nor answered their call, they rightly assumed that he was beyond the reach of any human help, and proceeded downwards. "With infinite difficulty, owing to their utter ignorance of the country, and after another night spent in the open air, they found a path which brought them to the hut under the Rocca Venoni. Thence a shepherd guided them to the Cantina della Mussa, where they were at first taken for deserters or spies; the lady, it should be said, had been obliged to put on a suit of her husband's clothes, her own having been torn to pieces. "The sight of her hair and bracelets convinced the inhabitants of the true state of the case; a telegram was sent to Turin, and a message to Balme, and a search party came up from the latter place in the afternoon. Captain Charbonnet's body was recovered the next day. It was found at the bottom of a crevasse more than 60 feet deep, and completely doubled up; but medical examination showed that his death was primarily due to the injury received when the balloon first struck." The first passage of the Alps by balloon was made in September 1903, by Captain Spelterini, of Zürich, accompanied by Dr Hermann Seiler and another friend. They started from Zermatt, crossed the Mischabel group, passed over the valley of Saas, then rose above the Weissmies range, and approached the Lago Maggiore so closely that they were able to converse with the passengers of a steamer. They then rose again and spent the night above the mountains not far from the Gotthard. The next day it would have been possible to clear the Bernese Alps and descend somewhere near Lucerne, but though Dr Seiler, who is a climber and was fully equipped for a descent above the snow line, urged the attempt being made to cross the chain, Captain Spelterini and his friend, unused to the aspect of the higher peaks, considered it more prudent to descend, and so the expedition came to an end after twenty hours aloft, during which no discomfort from cold was experienced. When an accident happens in the Alps involving loss of life, it is not difficult to learn whatever facts may be known with regard to it, but when climbers have a narrow escape from death the occurrence is often hushed up and nothing said or written about the matter. And yet it is just the narrow escapes that furnish the most interesting Alpine narratives. Amongst them are few more exciting than a mishap on the Matterhorn which happened in 1895, and is admirably described by an onlooker, Mr Ernest Elliot Stock, in the pages of one of Messrs Newnes' periodicals, from which I am courteously permitted to quote a portion of the tale. Mr Stock's party consisted of himself, his sister, Mr Grogan (the well-known traveller who first crossed Africa from South to North), Mr Broadbent, and the guides, P. A. and Alois Biner, Peter Perrin, and Zurmatter. An American of no climbing experience, with Joseph Biner and Felix Julen, was on the mountain at the same time, and both parties having made the ascent by the ordinary route, were coming down the same way, and had descended in safety to just below "Moseley's Platte" when the incident which so nearly cost them their lives took place. They were on a steep slope, and the American party was slightly in advance. Mr Stock writes: [Illustration: THE MATTERHORN FROM THE HÖRNLI RIDGE.] [Illustration: THE MATTERHORN FROM THE FURGG GLACIER.] [Illustration: JOSEPH BINER.] [Illustration: THE MATTERHORN HUT. _To face p. 302_] "We had been working slowly, and at a slight zig-zag, down this for some 150 feet, only one member of the party moving at a time, and keeping carefully within the steps cut by the leader, when suddenly a flat stone, some 6 inches across, became detached from a small pile either to the side of or directly behind me--possibly loosened by our passage or picked up by the rope as it tautened between myself and Peter Biner, who came next. Peter's cry of warning was echoed by his brother at the tail of the party, and I half turned to see it slipping past on the right. "Reaching out with my axe I endeavoured to stop it, but its impetus had become too great. Getting upon its edge it rolled and struck a small rock; then jumped some 20 feet down the ice-slope, narrowly missing Perrin and 'America,' and struck again upon a larger and flatter rock, when, amidst a flight of smaller stones, it bounded outwards and downwards, striking the leading guide, Joseph Biner, full and square on the head. He fell as though he had been shot, dragging 'America' after him amidst a perfect shower of snow and stones. Julen, who came third, with the greatest presence of mind drove his ice-axe hard and deep into the ice, took a turn round it with his left arm, and, though dragged violently from his steps, to our intense relief held on. "But we were in an awkward plight. Poor Joseph half lay, half hung, without movement, at the end of some 30 feet of rope, bleeding copiously from a deep gash in the head and another across the forehead caused by his fall; 'America' clung to a small rock projecting from the snow, beating a tattoo with his boots on the ice and wailing dismally; Julen held the two by favour of his ice-axe and firmly planted feet only. For a space no one moved, excepting to get such anchorage as was possible upon the spur of the moment, each expecting a rope-jerk, the forerunner of a swift and battered end in the ice-fall of the Furgg Glacier thousands of feet below. "The guides for a time seemed utterly stunned by the catastrophe, and to all suggestions could only reply with muttered prayers and exclamations. So exasperating did this become at last, with the thought of the man below bleeding to death, if not dead already, that Mr Grogan, who had vainly been endeavouring to bring the guides to a sense of the position, quietly slipped the rope, and, amid a storm of protest from them, traversed out some distance to avoid a patch of loose stones, and descended inwards again, cutting his steps as he went, till he reached a spot immediately below the wounded man. Poor Joseph hung with his head buried in a patch of snow, and in an extremely awkward position to reach from above. Mr Grogan, however, refused to be daunted by the difficulties, and we were treated to a fine piece of ice-craft during his descent." After a little time Mr Grogan managed to cut a seat in the slope of ice and placing the still breathing but insensible man in it, he bandaged the wounds on his head, and before long had the satisfaction of seeing him recover his senses. With great difficulty, as he was very weak and shaken, poor Joseph was helped down the mountain, and at last every one arrived safe and sound at the lower hut. There is no doubt that Joseph owed his life to Mr Grogan's skill, promptness, and courage. Had the travellers in the party following "America's" been of the usual type of tourist, who is hauled up and let down the Matterhorn, one dare not think what would probably have been the result, for the description Mr Stock gives of the behaviour of his guides seems in no way exaggerated. I edit this account in sight of the very spot where the accident occurred, and I have made careful enquiries here as to the accuracy of the story, and am assured that it is true in every detail. It is a pleasure to feel that a fellow-countryman should show so brilliant an example to those who were not willing and probably would have hardly been able to rescue their comrade, although to attempt such a task was one of the prior obligations of their profession. To be bombarded by falling stones in the Alps is bad enough. To be hurled from one's foot-hold by a flock of eagles seems to me even more appalling. Though on one occasion, when on the slopes of a bleak and rocky peak in Lapland, in company with my husband, a pair of eagles came screaming so close to us that we drove them away by brandishing our ice-axes and throwing stones at them, I did not till recently believe that there could be positive danger to a climbing party from an onslaught by these birds. It was only a few weeks ago that taking up one of Messrs Newnes' publications I came upon an account of a tragedy in the Maritime Alps caused by an attack from eagles. On applying to the editor of the magazine in question, he kindly allowed me to make some extracts from a striking article by Mons. Antoine Neyssel. This gentleman with a friend, Mons. Joseph Monand, was making a series of ascents in the Maritime Alps with Sospello as their headquarters. From here they took a couple of guides and got all ready for a climb on the following morning, 23rd July. During the evening the amazing news reached them that a postman, while crossing a high pass, had been attacked and nearly killed by eagles. They at once went into the cottage where the poor man lay unconscious on two chairs, a pool of blood beneath him and his clothes torn to ribbons. A few days later he died from the terrible injuries he had received. Though much shocked at the sad event, the climbers believed that their party of four would be quite safe, for each man had an ice-axe and some carried rifles. So the next morning they set out, and, ascending higher and higher, reached the glacier and put on the rope. They had forgotten all about the ferocious birds when suddenly, as they traversed the upper edge of a crevasse near the summit of their peak, the leading guide stopped with an exclamation of horror. Close to them the ground was strewn with feathers and marked with blood, doubtless the spot where the postman was attacked. They passed on, however, and remembering that they were a party of four, felt reassured. But soon after weird cries came to their ears from below, followed by the whirr and beating of great wings. Looking cautiously over the abyss, they saw a fight of eagles in progress; feathers flew in the air and strange sounds came out of the seething mass. It seemed to rise towards them, and in their insecure position on the edge of a crevasse, they were badly placed to resist an attack. The foot-hold was of frozen and slippery snow. Suddenly the eagles burst up and around them. The guides immediately cut the rope and each person did what he could to save himself. "Wherever possible," says Mons. Neyssel, "we simply raced over the frozen snow like maniacs. In another moment they dashed upon us like an avalanche. I heard a shot--I suppose Monand fired, but I did not: I do not know why. The attack was quite too dreadful for words. Speaking for myself, I remember that the eagles struck me with stunning force with their wings, their hooked beaks, and strong talons. Every part of my body seemed to be assailed simultaneously. It was a fierce struggle for life or death. Strangely enough, I remember nothing of what happened to my companions. I neither saw nor heard anything of them after the first great rush of the eagles. It is a miracle I was not hurled to death into the crevasse. "Do not ask me how long this weird battle lasted. It may have been five or six minutes, or a quarter of an hour. I do not know. I grew feebler, and felt almost inclined to give up the struggle, when the blood began to trickle down my face and nearly blinded me. I knew that every moment might be my last, and that I might be hurled into the crevasse. Strangely enough, the prospect did not appal me. From this time onward I defended myself almost mechanically, inclined every moment to give up and lie down. "I gave no thought to the guides and my poor friend Monand. If I am judged harshly for this, I regret it; but I could not help it. All at once I heard loud, excited voices, but thought that these were merely fantastic creations of my own brain. In a moment or two, however, I could distinguish a number of men laying about them fiercely with sticks, and beating off the eagles." The villagers, having watched the ascent through a telescope had come to the rescue and had saved the lives of the writer and his two guides. His poor friend, however, was dashed into the crevasse, at the bottom of which his body was found five days later. CHAPTER XIX FALLING STONES AND FALLING BODIES I am indebted to the editor of _The Cornhill_ and the author of an article entitled "The Cup and the Lip" for permission to reprint portions of a paper containing much shrewd wisdom, several accounts of narrow escapes, and withal of a wittiness and freshness that brings to the reader a keen blast of Alpine air and the memory, if by chance he be a climber, of his own early days upon the mountains. [Illustration: A HOT DAY IN SUMMER ON A MOUNTAIN TOP.] [Illustration: A SUMMIT NEAR SAAS.] [Illustration: LUNCHEON ON THE WAY TO THE HUT IN WINTER.] [Illustration: LUNCHEON IN SUMMER ON THE TOP OF A GLACIER PASS. _To face p. 310._] The writer, after remarking that even in these days when the traveller, by the purchase of a few climbing requisites, is inclined to consider himself a mountaineer before he has ever set foot on a peak, goes on to say that, in reality, "for the most of us the craft is long to learn, the conquering hard. And in the experience of many there are two distinct phases. There is the time when, flushed with youth and victory, you seem to go on from strength to strength, faster from year to year, more confident in foot and hand, more scornful of the rope which you have seen so often used, not as a means of safety, but as an assistance to the progression of the weaker brethren, until one day your foot unaccountably finds the step too small, or the bit of rock comes away in your hand, or the outraged spirit of the mountains smites you suddenly with a stone, and all is changed. Henceforth every well-worn and half-despised precaution has a new meaning for you; it becomes a point of honour to walk circumspectly, to turn the rope round every helpful projection when the leader moves, and to mark and keep your distance; and you begin to catch a little of the wisdom of your fathers. It is not until the slip comes--as it comes to all--that you believe a slip is possible; and were it not for slips the continual advance of cup to lip might become in time monotonous and irksome, and mountaineering nothing but a more laborious and elaborate form of walking up a damp flight of stairs. But when it has come, and there has passed away the result of the consequent shock to your self-esteem, and to other even more sensitive portions of your person, there succeeds a new pride of achievement, and you will have the advantages of the converted sinner over the ninety-and-nine just persons whose knickerbockers are still unriven. Furthermore, you will have commenced the graduate stage of your mountaineering education. Unlucky, too, will you be if your experience has not given you something more than a juster estimate of your own moral and physical excellence; for your misfortune, if you have chosen your companions aright, will suddenly turn your grumbling hireling into a friend as gentle and as patient as a nurse, and disclose in those who were your friends qualities of calm and steadfastness never revealed in the fret of the valley; while, if you need wine and oil for your wounds, when you reach home again, you will find in the inn some English doctor, asking nothing better than to devote the best part of his holiday to the gratuitous healing of the stranger. [Illustration: A TEDIOUS SNOW SLOPE TO ASCEND.] [Illustration: A SITTING GLISSADE AND A QUICK DESCENT.] [Illustration: A GLACIER-CAPPED SUMMIT.] [Illustration: ITALY TO THE LEFT, SWITZERLAND TO THE RIGHT. _To face p. 312._] "The form of my own awakening was not such as to require wine or oil or consolation, and indeed, had I spoken of it at the time, would have scarcely escaped ridicule. We had reached the summit of our pass, and the guides and myself had decided that the steep wall of snow on the further side was an admirable place for a glissade. Accordingly, we went through the inevitable ritual of the summit, consumed as much sour bread and wine as we could, with unerring inaccuracy applied the wrong names to all the newly disclosed mountain-tops, adjusted the rope and prepared for the descent. Unfortunately, we omitted to explain the particular form of pleasure in which we were about to indulge to my companion, who was ignorant alike of mountaineering and the German tongue. The result was simple: the second guide, who was in front, set off with his feet together and his axe behind him; I followed in as correct an imitation of his attitude as I could induce my body to assume; but the novice stood still on the crest of the pass to 'await in fitting silence the event,' and the rope tightened. The jerk, after nearly cutting me in two, laid me on my back in the snow, and was then transmitted to the guide, who was also pulled off his feet and plunged head foremost down. Our combined weights drew after us both my companion and the chief guide, who was taken unawares, and both came crushing upon me. We rolled over and over, mutually pounding one another as we rolled; hats and spectacles and axes preceded us, and huge snowballs followed in our wake, until, breathless and humiliated, we had cleared the _schrund_, and came to an ignominious halt on the flat snow below. "This was no very rude introduction to my climbing deficiencies, but before the end of the season I had felt fear at the pit of my stomach. We (that is A. T. and myself) had scrambled up an Austrian mountain, and, on our way down, had come to where the little glacier intervenes between the precipice and the little moraine heaps above the forest. The glacier would hardly deserve the name in any other part of the Alps, so small is it; but it makes up for what it lacks in size by its exceeding steepness; the hardness of its ice, and the ferocity (if one may attribute personal characteristics to Nature) of the rock walls which keep in its stream on either hand, hem it in so closely that I think it must be always in deep shadow, even in the middle of a June day. "Here you must cross it very nearly on a level, and then skirt down its further side between ice and rock for a few feet before you come to a suitable place for the crossing of the big crevasse below you; and then a short slide down old avalanche _débris_ shoots you deliciously into the sun again. The crossing of the glacier in the steps cut by the numerous parties who have passed on previous days is an extremely simple affair. But you must not hurry, for a slip could not be checked, and would probably finish in the before-mentioned crevasse. We started, however, in some fear; for a party ascending the mountains favoured us with continual showers of stones of all sizes, and the higher they climbed the more viciously came their artillery. Hence I was nervous and apt to go carelessly when we reached the middle of the ice, and here the noise began. I heard a strange, whizzing, whirring noise which sounded strangely familiar, accompanied by a physical shiver on my part and a curious knocking together of the knees; again and again it came, followed each time by a slight dull thud; and, looking at the rocks below us on each side, I saw a little white puff of dust rising at every concussion. Then I knew why the sound seemed familiar. I was reminded how, as a panting schoolboy, I had toiled up a long dusty road to a certain down with a rifle much too large for me, in the vain hope of shooting my third-class, and how, as we bruised our shoulders at the 200 yards' range, another young gentleman firing at the 400 yards at the parallel range on the left, had mistaken his mark and fired across our heads at the target beyond us on the right. Everything was present: the indescribable whirring of the bullet, its horrible invisibility while it flew, and the grey little cloud as it flattened itself on the white paint of the target. The sensation was horrible, the tendency to hurry irresistible, and but for my companion I should have risked slip and crevasse and everything to get out of the line of fire. But my companion remained absolutely steady; while he poured forth curses in every language and every _patois_ ever spoken in the Italian Tyrol, he still moved his feet as deliberately, improved the steps with as much care and minuteness as if he were a Chamonix guide conducting a Frenchman on the Mer de Glace. I know he felt the position as acutely as I did, for when, a week later, we had to cross the same place under a similar fire, and the third member of the party was sent on in front with a large rope to recut the steps, he turned to me with impressive simplicity, and said, '_Adesso è quello in grande pericolo_. If he is hit, we cannot save him.' How long we took to cross I do not know. But when at last we reached the other bank we cast the rope off with one impulse, and, bending under the shelter of the rocks, ran where I had found climbing hard in the morning, jumped the _bergschrund_, fell and rolled down the snow under a final volley from the mountain, and lay long by the stream panting and safe. "I suspect the danger here was far more apparent than real. My next adventure with a falling stone was more real than I like to think of. Four of us had been scrambling round the rocks beside the Ventina Glacier, and were returning to our camp to lunch. By bad luck, as it turned out, I reached level ground first, and, lying on my back amongst great boulders, watched with amusement the struggles of my companions who were about a hundred feet above me, apparently unable to get up or down. They were screaming to me, but the torrent drowned their voices, and I smoked my pipe in contentment. _Suave mari magno._ At last they moved, and with them the huge rock which they had been endeavouring to uphold and shouting to me to beware of. It crashed down towards me, but I determined to stop where I was. The roughness of the ground would have hindered my escape to any distance, and I calculated on stepping quickly aside when my enemy had declared himself for any particular path of attack. So I did, but the stone at that moment broke in pieces, and, quick as I was with desperation, one fragment was quicker still. It caught me, glancing as I turned between the shoulder and the elbow, only just touching me, as I suppose, for the bone was quite unhurt. Up I went into the air and down I came among the stones, with all the wind knocked out of me, large bruises all over me, not hurt, but very much frightened. [Illustration: UNPLEASANT GOING OVER LOOSE STONES.] [Illustration: ON THE CREST OF AN OLD MORAINE. _To face p. 317._] "Such experiences as this leave no very lasting impression, and might just as easily happen were the party accompanied by the best of guides. But I hardly think that any guide would have been crack-brained enough to take part in two expeditions which taught me what it feels like to slip on rock and ice respectively. The first slip took place during the winter. With one companion I was climbing in a long and not very difficult gully on a Welsh mountain. The frost had just broken, and there was more water in the pitches than was quite pleasant. It was very cold water, and my hands, which had been frost-bitten the week before, were still swathed in bandages. Hence progress was very slow, and at last my friend took the lead to spare me. He was climbing over a big overhanging stone jammed between the walls of the gully and forming an excellent spout for the water, which was thus poured conveniently down his neck. I stood on the shelving floor of the gully in perfect safety, and watched the shower-bath, which was gradually exhausting him. He asked for his axe, and I, in a moment of madness, came near and handed it up; his legs, which were all I could then see of him, were kicking in the water about 5 feet above my head. What happened next I do not know, but I shall always maintain that, seeing an eligible blade of grass above him, he plunged the adze in and hauled with both hands. The blade resented such treatment, and came out. Anyhow he fell on my head, and we commenced a mad career down the way we had ascended, rather rolling than falling, striking our heads and backs against the rocks, and apparently destined for the stony valley upon which we had looked down between our legs for hours. People who have escaped drowning say that, in what was their struggle for life, their minds travelled back over their whole history. I know that my brain at this moment suddenly acquired an unusual strength. In a few seconds we were safe, but in those seconds there was time for centuries of regret. There was no fear; that was to come later. But I felt vividly that I was present as a spectator of my own suicide, and thought myself a feeble kind of fool. Had it been on the Dru or the Meije, I thought, it might have been worth it, but, half-drowned, to plunge a poor 40 feet over the next pitch on a hill not 3000 feet high, with a carriage road in sight, and a girl driving in the cows for milking in Nant Francon! We did not roll far, and stuck between the walls of the gully, where they narrowed. Then I arose and shook myself, unhurt. My companion made me light his pipe, which cheered me very much, and we each partook of an enormous mutton sandwich. Help was near, for another party of three was climbing in the next gully, and came to our shouts; one ran down to the farm for a hurdle, the rest began the descent. For hours we seemed to toil, for my companion, though with admirable fortitude he supported the pain of movement, had temporarily no power over his legs and the lower part of his body. I could do little, but the others worked like blacks, and just at dark we reached the farm and the ministrations of a Welsh doctor, who told my friend, quite erroneously, that there was nothing the matter with him, pointed out a swelling on my face as big as a pigeon's egg, which, he said, would probably lead to erysipelas, and then departed into the darkness. "A fall on ice has something in it more relentless, though, until the last catastrophe, less violent. We had all been victims to the flesh-pots of the valley, and were, perhaps, hardly fit for a long ice-slope, when we began to cut up the last few feet to gain the _arête_ of our mountain. The incline seemed to me very steep, and, third on the rope, I was watching the leader at his labours, half pitying him for his exertions, half envying him his immunity from the ice fragments which he was sending down to me. Below me the fourth man had barely left the great flat rock on which we had breakfasted; there was no reason to think of danger; when to my horror I saw the leader cut a step, put out his foot slowly, and then very slowly and deliberately sway over and fall forwards and downwards against the ice. We were in a diagonal line, but almost immediately beneath one another, and he swung quietly round like a pendulum, his axe holding him to the slope, until he was immediately beneath the second man. Very slowly, as it seemed, the rope grew taut; the weight began to tug at his waist; and then he, too, slowly and reflectively in the most correct mountaineering attitude, as though he were embarking upon a well-considered journey, began to slide. Now was the time for me to put into practice years of patient training. I dug my toes in and stiffened my back, anchored myself to the ice, and waited for the strain. It was an unconscionable time coming, and, when it came, I still had time to think that I could bear it. Then the weight of 27 stone in a remorseless way quietly pulled me from my standpoint, as though my resistance were an impudence. Still, like the others, I held my axe against the ice and struggled like a cat on a polished floor, always seeing the big flat rock, and thinking of the bump with which we should bound from it, and begin our real career through the air; when suddenly the bump came and we all fell together in a heap on to the rock and the fourth man, who had stepped back upon it, my crampons running into his leg, and my axe, released from the pressure, going off through the air on the very journey which I had anticipated for us all. The others were for a fresh attack on the malicious mountain; but I was of milder mood, and very soon, torn and wiser, we were off on a slower but more convenient path to the valley than had seemed destined for us a few minutes before. But our cup was not yet full. Having no axe with which to check a slip, I was placed at the head of the line, and led slowly down, floundering a good deal for want of my usual support. The great couloir was seamed across with a gigantic crevasse, the angle of the slope being so sharp that the upper half overhung, and we had only crossed in the morning by standing on the lower lip, cutting hand-holes in the upper, and shoving up the leader from the shoulder of the second man: hence, in descending, our position was similar to that of a man on the mantel-shelf who should wish to climb down into the fire itself. We chose the obvious alternative of a jump to the curb, which was, I suppose, about 15 feet below us and made of steep ice with a deep and deceptive covering of snow. I jumped and slid away with this covering, to be arrested in my course by a rude jerk. I turned round indignant; but my companions were beyond my reproaches. One by one, full of snow, eloquent, and bruised, they issued slowly from the crevasse into which I had hurled them, and, heedless of the humour of the situation, gloomily urged me downwards. "Some hours still passed before we reached our friendly Italian hut, left some days before for a raid into Swiss territory; there on the table were our provisions and shirts as we had left them, and a solemn array of bottles full of milk carried up during our absence by our shepherd friends; and there, on the pile, in stinging comment on our late proceedings, lay a slip of paper, the tribute of some Italian tourist, bearing the inscription 'Omaggio ai bravi Inglesi ignoti.' We felt very much ashamed. "When the soup has been eaten and the pipes are lighted, and you sit down outside your hut for the last talk before bed, you will find your guides' tongues suddenly acquire a new eloquence, and, if you are a novice at the craft, will be almost overwhelmed by the catalogue of misfortune which they will repeat to you. And so, too, upon us in the winter months comes the temptation to dwell on things done long ago and ill done, and, as we write of the sport for others, we give a false impression of peril and hardihood in things that were little more than matter for a moment's laughter. I too must plead guilty to a well-meant desire to make your flesh creep. [Illustration: AN AWKWARD BIT OF CLIMBING.] [Illustration: GUIDES AT ZERMATT.] [Illustration: A LARGE PARTY FOR A SMALL HUT.] [Illustration: AU REVOIR. _To face p. 322._] "Mountaineering by skilled mountaineers is about as dangerous as hunting in a fair country, and requires about as much pluck as to cross from the Temple to the Law Courts at midday. Difficult mountaineering is for the unskilled about as dangerous as riding a vicious horse in a steeplechase for a man who has never learnt to ride. But the tendency in those who speak or write of it for the outer world who are not mountaineers is to conceal a deficiency of charm of style by an attempt to slog in the melodramatic, and I plead guilty at once. "So we think and write as though to us our passion for the hills were a fancy of the summer, a mere flirtation. Yet no one has lost the first bloom of his delight in Alpine adventure before the element of sternness has come to mar his memory and bind more closely his affections. You find the mildly Horatian presence of death somewhere near you, and that at a moment when, whatever your age and strength, and whatever your infirmities, you are at the full burst of youth; when Nature has been kindest she has been most capricious, and has flaunted her relentless savagery just when she has bent to kiss you. The weirdest rocks rise from Italian gardens, and the forms of hill seem oldest when you are most exultant--immortal age beside immortal youth. Yet is it not this, 'the sense of tears,' in things which are not mortal which must mark your Alpine paths with memories as heavy and as definite as those inscriptions which tell of obscure and sudden death on every hillside, and invite your prayers for the woodcutter and the shepherd? You too will have seen friends go out into the morning whom you have never welcomed home. There is a danger, sometimes encountered recklessly, sometimes ignorantly, but sometimes--hard as it may be to understand the mood--not in the mere spirit of the idle youth, but met with and overcome, or overcoming, in a resolution which knows no pleasure in conquest save when the essay is fierce, and is calmly willing to pay the penalty of failure. While for ourselves we enjoy the struggle none the less because we have taken every care that we shall win, they freely give all; and for such there is surely no law. While by every precept and example we impress the old rules of the craft on our companions and our successors, how can we find words of blame for those who have at least paid the extreme forfeit, and found 'the sleep that is among the lonely hills'? "The penalty for failure is death; not always exacted at the first slip, for Nature is merciful and ofttimes doth relent; but surely waiting for those who scorn the experience of others and slight her majesty in wilfulness, in ignorance, in the obstinate following of a fancy, in the vain pursuit of notoriety. The rules are known, and those who break them, and by precept and example tempt to break them those whom they should teach, wrong the sport which they profess to love. "In this game as in any other, it should be a point of honour for us not to make the sport more difficult for others, and not to bring unnecessary sorrow upon the peasants, who help us to play it, and upon their families. It should be a point of honour to play the game, and, if disaster comes in playing it, we have at least, done our best." GLOSSARY ALP A mountain pasture, usually with chalets tenanted only in summer. ARÊTE A ridge. BERGSCHRUND A crevasse between the snow adhering to the rocks and the lower portion of the glacier. COL A pass between two peaks. COULOIR A gully, usually filled with snow or stones. CREVASSE A crack in a glacier, caused by the movement of the ice over an uneven bed or round a corner. FIRN The snow of the upper regions, which is slowly changing into glacier ice. GRAT A ridge. JOCH A pass between two peaks. KAMM A summit ridge. MORAINE An accumulation of stones and sand which has fallen from bordering slopes on to a glacier. Medial moraines are formed by the junction of glaciers, their lateral moraines joining. MOULIN A glacier mill, or shaft through the ice, formed by a stream which has met a crevasse in its course, and plunging into its depths has bored a hole right through the glacier and often into the rock beneath. NÉVÉ The French of _Firn_. (See Firn.) RÜCKSACK The bag type of canvas knapsack now invariably used by guides and climbers. SCHRUND A crevasse. (See Crevasse.) SÊRAC A cube of ice, formed by transverse crevasses, and found where a glacier passes over steep rocks. This part of a glacier is called an ice-fall. INDEX A Abruzzi, Duke of, 8 Adine Col, 108 Æggischhorn, 257 Ailefroide, 228, 245 Aitkins, Mr, 162 Aletsch Glacier, 125 Aletschhorn, avalanche on, 55 Almer, Christian, 223, 237 Almer, Ulrich, 55 Andenmatten, 108 Anderegg, Jacob, 126, 127 Anderegg, Melchior, 125, 212 Andermatten, Franz, 202 Arbuthnot, Mrs, 257 Arc, Valley of, 266 Aren Glacier, 57, 61 Arlberg Pass, 61 Arolla, 168 Arves, Aiguilles d', 248 Asti, 265 B Baker, Mr, 134 Balloon (crossing Alps), 298 Balme, 300 Bans, Les, 228 Baumann, Hans, 127 Bean, Mr, 136 Bennen, 57 Bergemoletto, 65 Bergli Hut, 210 Bessanese, 299 Bettega, 183 Biner, Alois and P., 302 Biner, Joseph, 204, 302 Blaitiére, Aiguille de, 26, 37 Blanc, Mont, 136, 153 Blanche, Dent, 51, 152, 167 Boeufs Rouges, 228 Bohren, 58 Boniface, 265 Bonvoison, Pic de, 226 Botto, 298 Bregaglia group, 296 Brenner, 136 Brewer, Mrs, 61 Bricolla châlets, 168 Bristenstock, 164 Broadbent, Mr, 302 Bruce, Major, 59 Brulle, Mons. H., 260 Burckhardt, Mr, 208 Burchi peak, 59 Burgener, Alexander, 104, 202 C Cà d'Asti, 265 Carr, Mr Ellis, 23 Carrel, J. A., 21 Caucasus, 58, 99, 116 Cenis, Mont, 264 Cerbillonas, the, 260 Chamonix, 8, 23, 126, 153 Charbonnet, Captain, 298 Charmoz ridge, 50 Claret, 258 Clayton, Captain, 261 Collie, Dr Norman, 134 Constance, 60 Conway, Sir W. M., 155, 275 Copland Valley, 4 Croz, Michel, 222, 238 D Dauphiné, 11 Dent, Mr C. T., 99, 116, 142, 202 Devas, Mr J. F. C., 144 Dixon, Mr H. B., 133 Dolomites, 182 Dom, 52 Donkin, Mr W. F., 58, 99, 116 Dora Riparia, Valley of, 266 Düniberg, 282 Durand Glacier, 204 Durando, 298 Dych Tau, 105 E Ecrins, 228, 235 Ecrins, Col des, 225 Eiger, 264 Elbruz, 115 Elm, landslip of, 275 Elmer, Huntsman, 280 Encula, Glacier de l', 246 Étançons, Val des, 11 F Fellenberg, E. Von, 212 Ferard, Mr A. G., 144 Fitzgerald, Mr E., 3 Flender, Herr, 138 Foster, Mr G. E., 126 Fox, Mr, 116 Freshfield, Mr Douglas, 116 Fürrer, Alphons, 8 Furrer, Elias, 167 G Gabelhorn, Ober, 55 Gastaldi, Rifugio, 299 Gavarnie, 261 Géant, Dent du, 257 Geneva, Lake of, 37 Gentinetta, A., 8 Gentinetta, E., 206 Gestola, 99 Glace, Mer de, 8 Glarus, Canton, 277 Gohna Lake, 277 Grass, Hans, 55 Greenwood, Mr Eric, 154 Grogan, Mr, 302 Grove, F. Craufurd, 2 Gurkhas, 59 H Habl, Herr Emil, 292 Hardy, Mr, 164 Hartley, Mr E. T., 166 Hill, Mr, 167 Himalayas, 58, 275 Hochjoch Haus, 261 Hohberghorn, 52 Hörnli, 9 Horrocks, D. P., 204 I Imboden, Joseph, 52, 165, 195 Imboden, Roman, 195 Imseng, Ferdinand, 202, 267 Innsbruck, 60 Interlaken, 221 J Jones, Mr Glynne, 167 Julen, Edouard, 206 Julen, Felix, 302 Jungfrau, 55, 210 Jungfrau Hut, 209 K Kaiserbrunn, 292 Kennedy, Dr, 164, 222 King, Sir H. S., 208 Koenig, Herr, 138 Kubli, Herr Oswald, 281 Kurzras, 261 L La Bérarde, 11, 245 La Grave, 11 Langtauferer Glacier, 262 Lapland, 306 Lausanne, 37 Lucerne, 301 Lyons, 298 M Maggiore, Lago, 301 Maithana Hill, fall of, 275 Maquignaz, 21 Maritime Alps, 305 Martino, St, 182 Matthews, Mr E. C., 211 Matterhorn, 8, 21, 248, 302 Maund, Mr, 11 Maund, Mrs, 11 Maurer, 11, 116 Meije, 12, 248 Meije, Brèche de la, 12, 228 Middlemore, Mr, 11 Midi, Aiguille du, 126 Mischabel group, 301 Monand, Mons. J., 306 Mönch, 124 Montanvert, 8 Moore, Mr A. W., 124, 222, 235 "Moseley's Platte," 302 Mouvoison, 142 Mueller Valley, 4 Mummery, Mr, 23, 58 Mürren, 208 Müsli, 280 Mussa, Cantina della, 300 N Nant Francon, 319 Nantillons Glacier, 24 Neyssel, Mons. Antoine, 306 Noir, Glacier, 245 O Oetzthal, 261 Offerer, J., 136 Ossoue, Valley of, 261 P Palü, Piz, 55 Passingham, Mr, 202 Packe, Mr C., 259 Pelvoux, 245 Pelvoux, Crête du, 245 Perren, H., 138 Perren, P., 204 Pilatte, Col de la, 222 Plan, Aiguille du, 23 Plattenbergkopf, 277 Pourri, Mont, 267 Powell, Captain, 116, 123 Pyrenees, 259 R Rax, the, 291 Renaud, Mons., 223 Rey, Emil, 8 Rhyner, Fridolin, 287 Rhyner, Meinrad, 280 Richardson, Miss, 165 Rocca Venoni, 300 Roccia, Family of, 68 Roche Melon, 264 Rocky Mountains, 133 Rodier, 11 Rosetta, 182 Rothhorn, Zinal, 195 S Saas, Valley of, 301 Sahrbach, 134 Schäffer, Dr, 136 Schildthorn, 257 Schuster, Mr, 162 Schwarzsee Hotel, 10 Sefton, Mount, 4 Seiler, Herr, 145, 162 Seiler, D. H., 301 Sernf Valley, 277 Silberhorn, 208 Skagastöldstind, 140 Ski accident, 137 Slingsby, Mr Cecil, 23, 140, 152 Sloggett, Mr, 8 Smith, Mr Haskett-, 158 Solly, Mr, 156 Somis, Ignazio, 65 Sospello, 306 Spechtenhauser, 261 Spelterini, Captain, 301 Spender, Mr H., 167 Strahlplatten, 209 Stock, Mr E. E., 302 Stockje, 156 Supersax, Ambrose, 209 Susa, 265 T Tavernaro, 183 Tetnuld Tau, 99 Tönsberg, 141 Trift Valley, 195 Tuckett, Mr F., 55, 264 Tuckett Glacier, 5 Turin, 298 U Uschba, 115 V Vallon, Glacier du, 245 Vallot Hut, 153 Valtournanche, 21 Ventina Glacier, 316 Vignemale, 260 Viso, Monte, 269 Vuignier, Jean, 168 W Walker, Mr, 223, 235 Walker, Mr Horace, 126 Wandfluh, 166, 179 Watson, Mr and Mrs, 257 Weisshorn, 248 Weisskugel, 261 Weissmies, 301 Wengern Alp, 124, 210 Willink, Mr, 123 Wildlahner Glacier, 136 Wolfsthal, 292 Woolley, Mr H., 116 Whymper, Mr E., 222, 235 Wyss, Schoolmaster, 280 Z Zentner, Kaspar, 287 Zermatt, 10, 51, 139, 181, 301 Zmutt Glacier, 166, 179 Zurbriggen, 3, 59 Zurbriggen, Clemens, 168 Zurbrücken, Louis, 209 Zurmatter, 302 PRINTED AT THE EDINBURGH PRESS, 9 AND 11 YOUNG STREET FOOTNOTES: [1] These are now known as Mummery nails, and are often used by climbers. [2] _True Tales of Mountain Adventure_, pp. 42 and 43. [3] Or, in modern phraseology, "avalanches." [4] Mountain aneroids generally overstate the heights. The height of Gestola is now computed at 15,932 feet, and that of Tetnuld at 15,918 feet. [5] "Good God! The Sleeping-place!" [6] "I am still living." [7] _Above the Snow Line_, by Clinton Dent. [8] _True Tales of Mountain Adventure_, p. 269. [9] _True Tales of Mountain Adventure_, p. 134. [10] At the moment of going to press, I must note a fatal accident on the mountains due to lightning, namely, the death of the guide, Joseph Simond, on the Dent du Géant. This I had overlooked. [11] See _True Tales of Mountain Adventure_. [12] "Ah! That is really wonderfully beautiful!" [13] All details connected with this avalanche were collected on the spot, and shortly afterwards published in a volume, _Der Bergsturz von Elm_, by E. Buss and A. Heim. Zürich, 1881. * * * * * Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber: The baloon "Stella"=> The balloon "Stella" {pg xiv} sufficient to carry of the=> sufficient to carry off the {pg 82} Kaisserbrunn, 292=> Kaiserbrunn, 292 {index} 
35652	----	RICK DALE _A STORY OF THE NORTHWEST COAST_ BY KIRK MUNROE AUTHOR OF "SNOW-SHOES AND SLEDGES" "THE FUR-SEAL'S TOOTH" THE "MATES" SERIES ETC. ILLUSTRATED BY W. A. ROGERS NEW YORK AND LONDON HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS [Illustration: THE ICE ABOVE GIBRALTAR] CONTENTS I. A POOR RICH BOY II. THE RUNAWAY III. ALARIC TAKES A FIRST LESSON IV. THE "EMPRESS" LOSES A PASSENGER V. FIRST MATE BONNY BROOKS VI. PREPARING TO BE A SAILOR VII. CAPTAIN DUFF, OF THE SLOOP "FANCY" VIII. AN UNLUCKY SMASH IX. "CHINKS" AND "DOPE" X. PUGET SOUND SMUGGLERS XI. A VERY TRYING EXPERIENCE XII. A LESSON IN KEDGING XIII. CHASING A MYSTERIOUS LIGHT XIV. BONNY'S INVENTION, AND HOW IT WORKED XV. CAPTURED BY A REVENUE-CUTTER XVI. ESCAPE OF THE FIRST MATE AND CREW XVII. SAVED BY A LITTLE SIWASH KID XVIII. LIFE IN SKOOKUM JOHN'S CAMP XIX. A TREACHEROUS INDIAN FROM NEAH BAY XX. AN EXCITING RACE FOR LIBERTY XXI. A CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY XXII. TWO SHORT BUT EXCITING VOYAGES XXIII. ALARIC TODD'S DARKEST HOUR XXIV. PHIL RYDER PAYS A DEBT XXV. ENGAGED TO INTERPRET FOR THE FRENCH XXVI. PREPARING FOR AN ASCENT XXVII. BONNY COMMANDS THE SITUATION XXVIII. ON THE EDGE OF PARADISE VALLEY XXIX. MOUNT RAINIER PLACED UNDERFOOT XXX. BLOWN FROM THE RIM OF A CRATER XXXI. A DESPERATE SITUATION XXXII. HOW A SONG SAVED ALARIC'S LIFE XXXIII. LAID UP FOR REPAIRS XXXIV. CHASED BY A MADMAN XXXV. A GANG OF FRIENDLY LOGGERS XXXVI. IN A NORTHWEST LOGGING CAMP XXXVII. WHAT IS A HUMP-DURGIN? XXXVIII. ALARIC AND BONNY AGAIN TAKE TO FLIGHT XXXIX. BONNY DISCOVERS HIS FRIEND THE TRAMP XL. A FLOOD OF LIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS THE ICE ABOVE GIBRALTAR ALARIC MAKES HIS FIRST DECISION "'VELL, I TELL YOU; I GIFS T'VENTY-FIFE'" BONNY'S INVENTION STARTED THE ARRIVAL AT SKOOKUM JOHN'S BONNY SEIZED A TRUCK, AND ALARIC A MATTRESS "BONNY WAS JERKED BACKWARD" "THEY WERE PARALYZED WITH TERROR" RICK DALE CHAPTER I A POOR RICH BOY Alaric Dale Todd was his name, and it was a great grief to him to be called "Allie." Allie Todd was so insignificant and sounded so weak. Besides, Allie was a regular girl's name, as he had been so often told, and expected to be told by each stranger who heard it for the first time. There is so much in a name, after all. We either strive to live up to it, or else it exerts a constant disheartening pull backward. Although Alaric was tall for his age, which was nearly seventeen, he was thin, pale, and undeveloped. He did not look like a boy accustomed to play tennis or football, or engage in any of the splendid athletics that develop the muscle and self-reliance of those sturdy young fellows who contest interscholastic matches. Nor was he one of these; so far from it, he had never played a game in his life except an occasional quiet game of croquet, or something equally soothing. He could not swim nor row nor sail a boat; he had never ridden horseback nor on a bicycle; he had never skated nor coasted nor hunted nor fished, and yet he was perfectly well formed and in good health. I fancy I hear my boy readers exclaim: "What a regular muff your Alaric must have been! No wonder they called him 'Allie'!" And the girls? Well, they would probably say, "What a disagreeable prig!" For Alaric knew a great deal more about places and people and books than most boys or girls of his age, and was rather fond of displaying this knowledge. And then he was always dressed with such faultless elegance. His patent-leather boots were so shiny, his neckwear, selected with perfect taste, was so daintily arranged, and while he never left the house without drawing on a pair of gloves, they were always so immaculate that it did not seem as though he ever wore the same pair twice. He was very particular, too, about his linen, and often sent his shirts back to the laundress unworn because they were not done up to suit him. As for his coats and trousers, of which he had so many that it actually seemed as though he might wear a different suit every day in the year, he spent so much time in selecting material, and then in being fitted, and insisted on so many alterations, that his tailors were often in despair, and wondered whether it paid to have so particular a customer, after all. They never had occasion, though, to complain about their bills, for no matter how large these were or how extortionate, they were always paid without question as soon as presented. From all this it may be gathered that our Alaric was not a child of poverty. Nor was he; for Amos Todd, his father, was so many times a millionaire that he was one of the richest men on the Pacific coast. He owned or controlled a bank, railways, steamships, and mines, great ranches in the South, and vast tracts of timber lands in the North. His manifold interests extended from Alaska to Mexico, from the Pacific to the Atlantic; and while he made his home in San Francisco his name was a power in the stock-exchanges of the world. Years before he and his young wife had made their way to California from New England with just money enough to pay their passage to the Golden State. Here they had undergone poverty and hardships such as they determined their children should never know. Of these Margaret, the eldest, was now a leader of San Francisco society, while John, who was eight years older than Alaric, had shown such an aptitude for business that he had risen to be manager of his father's bank. There were other children, who had died, and when Alaric came, last of all, he was such a puny infant that there was little hope of his ever growing up. Because he was the youngest and a weakling, and demanded so much care, his mother devoted her life to him, and hovered about him with a loving anxiety that sought to shield him from all rude contact with the world. He was always under the especial care of some doctor, and when he was five or six years old one of these, for want of something more definite to say, announced that he feared the child was developing a weak heart, and advised that he be restrained from all violent exercise. From that moment poor little "Allie," as he had been called from the day of his birth, was not only kept from all forms of violent exercise and excitement, but was forbidden to play any boyish games as well. In place of these his doting mother travelled with him over Continental Europe, going from one famous medical spring, bath, or health resort to another, and bringing up her boy in an atmosphere of luxury, invalids, and doctors. The last-named devoted themselves to trying to find out what was the matter with him, and as no two of them could agree upon any one ailment, Mrs. Todd came to regard him as a prodigy in the way of invalidism. Of course Alaric was never sent to a public school, but he was always accompanied by tutors as well as physicians, and spent nearly two years in a very select private school or _pension_ near Paris. Here no rude games were permitted, and the only exercise allowed the boys was a short daily walk, in which, under escort of masters, they marched in a dreary procession of twos. During all these years of travel and study and search after health Alaric had never known what it was to wish in vain for anything that money could buy. Whatever he fancied he obtained without knowing its cost, or where the money came from that procured it. But there were three of the chief things in the world to a boy that he did not have and that money could not give him. He had no boy friends, no boyish games, and no ambitions. He wanted to have all these things, and sometimes said so to his mother; but always he was met by the same reproachful answer, "My dear Allie, remember your poor weak heart." At length it happened that while our lad was in that dreary _pension_, Mrs. Todd, worn out with anxieties, cares, and worries of her own devising, was stricken with a fatal malady, and died in the great château that she had rented not far from the school in which her life's treasure was so carefully guarded. A few days of bewilderment and heart-breaking sorrow followed for poor Alaric. Many cablegrams flashed to and fro beneath the ocean. There was a melancholy funeral, at which the boy was sole mourner, and then one phase of his life was ended. In another week he had left France, and, escorted by one of his French tutors, was crossing the Atlantic on his way to the far-distant San Francisco home of which he knew so little. He had now been at home for nearly three months, and of all his sad life they had proved the most unhappy period. His father, though always kind in his way, was too deeply immersed in business to pay much attention to the sensitive lad. He did not understand him, and regarded him as a weakling who could never amount to anything in the world of business or useful activity. He would be kind to the boy, of course, and any desire that he expressed should be promptly gratified; at the same time he could not help feeling that Alaric was a great trial, and wishing him more like his brother John. This bustling, dashing elder brother had no sympathy with Alaric, and rarely found time to give him more than a nod and a word of greeting in passing, while his sister Margaret regarded him as still a little boy who was to be kept out of sight as much as possible. So the poor lad, left to himself, without friends and without occupation, found time hanging very heavily on his hands, and wondered why he had ever been born. Once he ventured to ask his father for a saddle-horse, whereupon Amos Todd provided him with a pair of ponies, a cart, and a groom, which he said was an outfit better suited to an invalid. Alaric accepted this gift without a protest, for he was well trained to bearing disappointments, but he used it so rarely that the business of giving the horses their daily airing devolved almost entirely upon the groom. It was not until Esther Dale, one of the New England cousins whom he had never seen, and a girl of his own age, made a flying visit to San Francisco as one of a personally conducted party of tourists, that Alaric found any real use for his ponies. Esther was only to remain in the city three days, but she spent them in her uncle's house, which she refused to call anything but "the palace," and which she so pervaded with her cheery presence that Amos Todd declared it seemed full of singing birds and sunshine. Both Margaret and John were too busy to pay much attention to their young cousin, and so, to Alaric's delight, the whole duty of entertaining her devolved on him. He felt much more at his ease with girls than with boys, for he had been thrown so much more into their society during his travels, and he thought he understood them thoroughly; but in Esther Dale he found a girl so different from any he had ever known that she seemed to belong to another order of beings. She was good-looking and perfectly well-bred, but she was also as full of life and frisky antics as a squirrel, and as tireless as a bird on the wing. On the first morning of her visit the cousins drove out to the Cliff House to see the sea-lions; and almost before Alaric knew how it was accomplished he found Esther perched on the high right-hand cushion of the box-seat in full possession of reins and whip, while he occupied the lower seat on her left, as though he were the guest and she the hostess of the occasion. At the same time the ponys seemed filled with an unusual activity, and were clattering along at a pace more exhilarating than they had ever shown under his guidance. After that Esther always drove; and Alaric, sitting beside her, listened with wondering admiration to her words of wisdom and practical advice on all sorts of subjects. She had never been abroad, but she knew infinitely more of her own country than he, and was so enthusiastic concerning it that in three days' time she had made him feel prouder of being an American than he had believed it possible he ever would be. She knew so much concerning out-of-door life, too--about animals and birds and games. She criticised the play of the baseball nines, whom they saw one afternoon in Golden Gate Park; and when they came to another place where some acquaintances of Alaric's were playing tennis, she asked for an introduction to the best girl player on the ground, promptly challenged her to a trial of skill, and beat her three straight games. During the play she presented such a picture of glowing health and graceful activity that pale-faced Alaric sat and watched her with envious admiration. "I would give anything I own in the world to be able to play tennis as you can, Cousin Esther," he said, earnestly, after it was all over and they were driving from the park. "Why don't you learn, then?" asked the girl, in surprise. "Because I have a weak heart, you know, and am forbidden any violent exercise." The boy hesitated, and even blushed, as he said this, though he had never done either of those things before when speaking of his weak heart. In fact, he had been rather proud of it, and considered that it was a very interesting thing to have. Now, however, he felt almost certain that Esther would laugh at him. And so she did. She laughed until Alaric became red in the face from vexation; but when she noticed this she grew very sober, and said: "Excuse me, Cousin Rick. I didn't mean to laugh; but you did look so woe-begone when you told me about your poor weak heart, and it seems so absurd for a big, well-looking boy like you to have such a thing, that I couldn't help it." "I've always had it," said Alaric, stoutly; "and that is the reason they would never let me do things like other boys. It might kill me if I did, you know." "I should think it would kill you if you didn't, and I'm sure I would rather die of good times than just sit round and mope to death. Now I don't believe your heart is any weaker than mine is. You don't look so, anyway, and if I were you I would just go in for everything, and have as good a time as I possibly could, without thinking any more about whether my heart was weak or strong." "But they won't let me," objected Alaric. "Who won't?" "Father and Margaret and John." "I don't see that the two last named have anything to do with it. As for Uncle Amos, I am sure he would rather have you a strong, brown, splendidly built fellow, such as you might become if you only would, than the white-faced, dudish Miss Nancy that you are. Oh, Cousin Rick! What have I said? I'm awfully sorry and ashamed of myself. Please forgive me." CHAPTER II THE RUNAWAY For a moment it seemed to Alaric that he could not forgive that thoughtlessly uttered speech. And yet the girl who made it had called him Cousin "Rick," a name he had always desired, but which no one had ever given him before. If she had called him "Allie," he knew he would never have forgiven her. As it was he hesitated, and his pale face flushed again. What should he say? In her contrition and eagerness to atone for her cruel words Esther leaned towards him and laid a beseeching hand on his arm. For the moment she forgot her responsibility as driver, and the reins, held loosely in her whip-hand, lay slack across the ponies' backs. Just then a newspaper that had been carelessly dropped in the roadway was picked up by a sudden gust of wind and whirled directly into the faces of the spirited team. The next instant they were dashing madly down the street. At the outset the reins were jerked from Esther's hand; but ere they could slip down beyond reach Alaric had seized them. Then, with the leathern bands wrapped about his wrists, he threw his whole weight back on them, and strove to check or at least to guide the terrified animals. The light cart bounded and swayed from side to side. Men shouted and women screamed, and a clanging cable-car from a cross street was saved from collision only by the prompt efforts of its gripman. The roadway was becoming more and more crowded with teams and pedestrians. Alaric's teeth were clinched, and he was bareheaded, having lost his hat as he caught the reins. Esther sat beside him, motionless and silent, but with bloodless cheeks. They were on an avenue that led to the heart of the city. On one side was a hill, up which cross streets climbed steeply. To keep on as they were going meant certain destruction. All the strain that Alaric could bring to bear on the reins did not serve to check the headlong speed of the hard-mouthed ponies. With each instant their blind terror seemed to increase. Several side streets leading up the hill had already been passed, and another was close at hand. Beyond it was a mass of teams and cable-cars. "Hold on for your life!" panted Alaric in the ear of the girl who sat beside him. As he spoke he dropped one rein, threw all his weight on the other, and at the same instant brought the whip down with a stinging cut on the right-hand side of the off horse. The frenzied animal instinctively sprang to the left, both yielded to the heavy tug of that rein, and the team was turned into the side street. The cart slewed across the smooth asphalt, lunged perilously to one side, came within a hair's-breadth of upsetting, and then righted. Two seconds later the mad fright of the ponies was checked by pure exhaustion half-way up the steep hill-side. There they stood panting and trembling, while a crowd of excited spectators gathered about them with offers of assistance and advice. "Do they seem to be all right?" asked Alaric. "All right, sir, far as I can see," replied one of the men, who was examining the quivering animals and their harness. "Then if you will kindly help me turn them around, and will lead them to the foot of the hill, I think they will be quiet enough to drive on without giving any more trouble," said the boy. When this was done, and Alaric, after cordially thanking those who had aided him, had driven away, one of the men exclaimed, as he gazed after the vanishing carriage: "Plucky young chap that!" "Yes," replied another; "and doesn't seem to be a bit of a snob, like most of them wealthy fellows, either." Meanwhile Alaric was tendering the reins to the girl who had sat so quietly by his side without an outcry or a word of suggestion during the whole exciting episode. "Won't you drive now, Cousin Esther?" "Indeed I will not, Alaric. I feel ashamed of myself for presuming to take the reins from you before, and you may be certain that I shall never attempt to do such a thing again. The way you managed the whole affair was simply splendid. And oh, Cousin Rick! to think that I should have called _you_ a Miss Nancy! Just as you were about to save my life, too! I can never forgive myself--never." "Oh yes you can," laughed Alaric, "for it is true--that is, it was true; for I can see now that I have been a regular Miss Nancy sort of a fellow all my life. That is what made me feel so badly when you said it. Nobody ever dared tell me before, and so it came as an unpleasant surprise. Now, though, I am glad you said it." "And you will never give anybody in the whole world a chance to say such a thing again, will you?" asked the girl, eagerly. "And you will go right to work at learning how to do the things that other boys do, won't you?" "I don't know," answered Alaric, doubtfully. "I'd like to well enough; but I don't know just how to begin. You see, I'm too old to learn from the little boys, and the big fellows won't have anything to do with such a duffer as I am. They've all heard too much about my weak heart." "Then I'd go away to some place where nobody knows you, and make a fresh start. You might go out on one of your father's ranches and learn to be a cowboy, or up into those great endless forests that I saw on Puget Sound the other day and live in a logging camp. It is such a glorious, splendid life, and there is so much to be done up in that country. Oh dear! if I were only a boy, and going to be a man, wouldn't I get there just as quickly as I could, and learn how to do things, so that when I grew up I could go right ahead and do them?" "All that sounds well," said Alaric, dubiously, "but I know father will never let me go to any such places. He thinks such a life would kill me. Besides, he says that as I shall never have to work, there is no need for me to learn how." "But you must work," responded Esther, stoutly. "Every one must, or else be very unhappy. Papa says that the happiest people in the world are those who work the hardest when it is time for work and play the hardest in play-time. But where are you driving to? This isn't the way home." "I am going to get a new hat and gloves," answered the boy, "for I don't want any one at the house to know of our runaway. They'd never let me drive the ponies again if they found it out." "It would be a shame if they didn't, after the way you handled them just now," exclaimed Esther, indignantly. Just then they stopped before a fashionable hat-store on Kearney Street, and while Alaric was debating whether he ought to leave the ponies long enough to step inside he was recognized, and a clerk hastened out to receive his order. "Hat and gloves," said Alaric. "You know the sizes." The clerk answered, "Certainly, Mr. Todd," bowed, and disappeared in the store. "See those lovely gray 'Tams' in the window, Cousin Rick!" said Esther. "Why don't you get one of them? It would be just the thing to wear in the woods." "All right," replied the boy; "I will." So when the clerk reappeared with a stylish derby hat and a dozen pair of gloves Alaric put the former on, said he would keep the gloves, and at the same time requested that one of the gray Tams might be done up for him. As this order was filled, and the ponies were headed towards home, Esther said: "Why, Cousin Rick, you didn't pay for your things!" "No," replied the boy, "I never do." "You didn't even ask the prices, either." "Of course not," laughed the other. "Why should I? They were things that I had to have anyway, and so what would be the use of asking the prices? Besides, I don't think I ever did such a thing in my life." "Well," sighed the girl, "it must be lovely to shop in that way. Now I never bought anything without first finding out if I could afford it; and as for gloves, I know I never bought more than one pair at a time." "Really?" said Alaric, with genuine surprise. "I didn't know they sold less than a dozen pair at a time. I wish I had known it, for I only wanted one pair. I've got so many at home now that they are a bother." That very evening the lad spoke to his father about going on a ranch and learning to be a cowboy. Unfortunately his brother John overheard him, and greeted the proposition with shouts of laughter. Even Amos Todd, while mildly rebuking his eldest son, could not help smiling at the absurdity of the request. Then, turning to the mortified lad, he said, kindly but decidedly: "You don't know what you are asking, Allie, my boy, and I couldn't think for a moment of allowing you to attempt such a thing. The excitement of that kind of life would kill you in less than no time. Ask anything in reason, and I shall be only too happy to gratify you; but don't make foolish requests." When Alaric reported this failure to Esther a little later, she said, very gravely: "Then, Cousin Rick, there is only one thing left for you to do. You must run away." CHAPTER III ALARIC TAKES A FIRST LESSON On the day following that of the runaway, Esther Dale resumed her position as a personally conducted tourist, and departed from San Francisco, leaving Alaric to feel that he had lost the first real friend he had ever known. Her influence remained with him, however, and as he thought of her words and example his determination to enter upon some different form of life became indelibly fixed. That very day he drove again to the park, this time with only his groom for company, and went directly to the place where the game of baseball had been in progress the afternoon before. As he hoped, another was about to begin, though there were not quite enough players to make two full nines. Hearing one of the boys say this, and discovering an acquaintance among them, Alaric jumped from his cart, and, going up to him, asked to be allowed to fill one of the vacant positions. Reg Barker was freckle-faced and red-headed, clad in flannels, with sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and was adjusting a catcher's mask to his face when Alaric approached. As the latter made known his desire, Reg Barker, who was extremely jealous of the other's wealth and fame as a traveller, regarded him for a moment with amazement, and then burst into a shout of laughter. "Hi, fellows!" he called, "here is a good one--best I ever heard! Here's Allie Todd, kid gloves and all, wants to play first base. What do you say--shall we give him a show?" "Yes," shouted one; "No," cried another, as the boys crowded about the two, gazing at Alaric curiously, as though he belonged to some different species. "We might make him captain of the nine," called out one boy, who had just gone to the bat. "No, he'd do better as umpire," suggested Reg Barker. "Don't you see he's dressed for it? I don't know, though; I'm afraid that would come under the head of cruelty to children, and we'd have the society down on us." As Alaric, with a crimson face and a choking in his throat, sought in vain for some outlet of escape from his tormentors who surrounded him, and at the same time longed with a bitter longing for the power to annihilate them, a lad somewhat older than the others forced his way through the throng and demanded to know what was the row. He was Dave Carncross, the pitcher, and one of the best amateur players of his age on the coast. "It's Miss Allie Todd," explained Reg Barker, "and her ladyship is offering to show us how to play ball." "Shut up, Red Top," commanded the new-comer, threateningly. "When I want any of your chaff I'll let you know." Then turning to Alaric, he said, pleasantly, "Now, young un, tell me all about it yourself." "There isn't much to tell," replied the boy, in a low tone, and with an instinctive warming of his heart towards the sturdy lad who had come to his rescue. "I wanted to learn how to play ball, and knowing Reg Barker, asked him to teach me; that's all." "And he insulted you, like the young brute he is. I see. Red Top, if you won't learn manners any other way I shall have to thrash them into you. So look out for yourself. Now, you new fellow, your name's Todd, isn't it?" "Yes." "And your father is Amos Todd, the millionaire?" Alaric admitted that such was the case. "Well, I know you, or, rather, my father knows your father. In fact, I think they have some business together; and after this whenever you choose to come out here if I'm around I'll see that you are treated decently. As for learning to play ball, the mere fact that you want to shows that you are made of good stuff, and I don't mind giving you a lesson right now. So, stand out here, and let's see if you can catch." Thus saying, the stalwart young pitcher, who held a ball in his hand, ran back a few rods, and, with a seemingly careless swing of his arm, threw the ball straight and swift as an arrow directly at Alaric, who instinctively held out his hands. Had he undertaken to stop a spent cannon-ball the boy could hardly have been more amazed at the result. As the ball dropped to the ground he felt as though he had grasped a handful of red-hot coals. Both his kid gloves were split right across the palms, and the smart of his hands was so great that, in spite of his efforts to restrain them, unbidden tears sprang to his eyes. A shout of laughter arose from the spectators of this practical lesson; but Dave Carncross, running up to him and recovering the dropped ball, said, cheerily: "Never mind those duffers, young un. They couldn't do any better themselves once, and you'll do better than any of them some time. First lessons in experience always come high, and have to be paid for on the spot; but they are worth the price, and you'll know better next time than to stop a hot ball with stiff arms. What you want to do is to let 'em give with the ball. See, like this." Here Dave picked up a bat, struck the ball straight up in the air until it seemed to be going out of sight, and running under it as it descended, caught it as deftly and gently as though it had been a wad of feathers. "There," said he, "you have learned by experience the wrong way of catching a ball, and seen the right way. I can't stop to teach you any more now, for our game is waiting. What you want to do, though, is to go down town and get a ball--a 'regulation dead,' mind--take it home, and practise catching until you have learned the trick and covered your hands with blisters. Then come back here, and I will show you something else. Good-bye--so long!" With this the good-natured fellow ran off to take his place in the pitcher's box, leaving Alaric filled with gratitude, and glowing with the first thrill of real boyish life that he had ever known. For a while he stood and watched the game, his still-tingling hands causing him to appreciate as never before the beauty of every successful catch that was made. He wondered if pitching a ball could be as difficult as catching one, or even any harder than it looked. It certainly appeared easy enough. He admired the reckless manner in which the players flung themselves at the bases, sliding along the ground as though bent on ploughing it with their noses; while the ability to hit one of those red-hot balls with a regulation bat seemed to him little short of marvellous. In fact, our lad was, for the first time in his life, viewing a game of baseball through his newly discovered loophole of experience, and finding it a vastly different affair from the same scene shrouded by an unrent veil of ignorance. After he had driven away from the fascinating game, his mind was still so full of it that when, in passing the children's playground, he was invited by Miss Sue Barker, sister of red-headed Reg, to join in a game of croquet, he declined, politely enough, but with such an unwonted tone of contempt in his voice as caused the girl to stare after him in amazement. He procured a regulation baseball before going home, and then practised with it in the court-yard behind the Todd palace until his hands were red and swollen. Their condition was so noticeable at dinnertime that his father inquired into the cause. When the boy confessed that he had been practising with a baseball, his brother John laughed loud and long, and asked him if he intended to become a professional. His sister only said, "Oh, Allie! How can you care to do anything so common? And where did you pick up the notion? I am sure you never saw anything of the kind in France." "No," replied the boy; "I only wish I had." His father said, "It's all right, my son, so long as you play gently; but you must be very careful not to over-exert yourself. Remember your poor weak heart and the consequences of too violent exercise." "Oh, bother my weak heart!" cried the boy, impatiently. "I don't believe my heart's any weaker than anybody else's heart, and the doctor who said so was an old muff." At this unheard-of outbreak on the part of the long-suffering youngest member of the family, John and Margaret glanced significantly at each other, as though they suspected his mind was becoming affected as well as his body; while his father said, soothingly, as though to an ailing child: "Well, well, Allie, let it go. I am sorry that you should forget your manners; but if the subject is distasteful to you, we won't talk of it any more." "But I want to talk of it, father. I am sorry that I spoke as I did just now; but you can't know what an unhappy thing it is to be living on in the way I am, without doing anything that amounts to anything, or will ever lead to anything. Won't you let me go on to a ranch, or somewhere where I can learn to be a man?" "Of course, my boy," replied Amos Todd, still speaking as soothingly as he knew how. "I will let you go anywhere you please, and do what you please, just as quickly as I can find the right person to take care of you, and see that you do nothing injurious. How would you like to go to France with Margaret and me this summer? I am thinking of making the trip." "I would rather go to China, or anywhere else in the world," replied the boy, vehemently. "I am tired to death of France and Germany and Switzerland and Italy, and all the other wretched European places, with their _bads_ and _bains_ and _spas_ and Herr Doctors and _malades_. I want to go into a world of live people, and strong people, and people who don't know whether they have any hearts or not, and don't care." "Well, well, son, I will try and arrange something for you, only don't get excited," said Amos Todd, at the same time burying himself in his evening paper so as to put an end to the uncomfortable interview. In spite of the unsatisfactory ending of this conversation, Alaric felt greatly encouraged by it, and during the week that followed he devoted himself as assiduously to learning to catch a baseball as though that were the one preparation needful for plunging into a world of live people. Morning, noon, and evening he kept his groom so busy passing ball with him that the exercising of the ponies was sadly neglected in consequence. With all this practice, and in spite of bruised hands and lame fingers, he at length became so expert that he began to think of hunting up his friend Dave Carncross, and presenting himself for an examination in the art of ball-catching. Every now and then he asked his father if he had not thought of some plan for him, and the invariable answer was: "It's all right, Allie; I've got a scheme on foot that's working so that I can tell you about it in a few days." In the meantime the date of Amos Todd's departure for Europe with his daughter was fixed. Shortly before its arrival the former called Alaric aside, and, with a beaming face, announced that he had at length succeeded in making most satisfactory arrangements. "You said you wanted to go to China, you know," he continued; "so I have laid out a fine trip for you to China, and India, and Egypt, and all sorts of places, and persuaded a most excellent couple, a gentleman and his wife, to go along and take care of you. He is a professor and she is a doctor, so you will be well looked after, and won't have the least bit of responsibility or worry." CHAPTER IV THE "EMPRESS" LOSES A PASSENGER Professor Maximus Sonntagg, a big man with a beard, and his wife, Mrs. Dr. Ophelia Sonntagg, who was thin and mysterious, had come out of the East to seek their fortunes in the Golden City about a year before, but up to this time without any great amount of success. The former was a professor of almost everything in the shape of ancient and modern art, languages, history, and a lot of other things, concerning all of which he wrote articles for the papers, always signing his name to them in full. The Mrs. Doctor had learned the art of saying little, looking wise, and shaking her head as she felt the pulse of her patients. These people had managed to scrape an acquaintance with Amos Todd, whom the Professor declared to be the only patron of art in San Francisco worth knowing, and to whom he gave some really valuable advice concerning the purchase of certain paintings. Thus it happened that when the busy millionaire, in seeking to provide a safe and congenial amusement for the son whom he firmly believed to be an invalid, conceived the idea of sending him around the world by way of China, he also thought of the Sonntaggs as most suitable travelling companions for him. Where else could he find such a combination of tutor and physician, a man of the world to take his place as father, and a cultivated woman to act as mother to his motherless boy? When he proposed the plan to the Sonntaggs, they declared that they would not think of giving up the prosperous business they had established in San Francisco, even for the sake of obliging their dear friend Mr. Amos Todd. With this the millionaire made them an offer of such unheard-of munificence that, with pretended reluctance, they finally accepted it, and he went on his way rejoicing. The next evening the Sonntaggs dined at Amos Todd's house for the purpose of making Alaric's acquaintance. The Professor patted him on the shoulder, and, in a patronizing manner, hoped they should learn much and enjoy much together. The Mrs. Doctor surveyed him critically, and held his hand until the boy wondered if she would ever let it go. Finally she shook her head, sighed deeply, and, turning to his father, said: "I understand the dear boy's case thoroughly. What he needs is intelligent treatment and motherly care. I can give him both, and unhesitatingly promise to restore him to you at the end of a year, if nothing occurs to prevent, strong, well, and an ornament to the name of Todd." Alaric found no difficulty in forming an opinion of the Sonntaggs, and wondered if going to France with his father and sister would not be preferable to travelling in their company. So occupied was he with this question that he hardly ate a mouthful of the sumptuous dinner served in honor of the guests--a fact that was noted with significant glances by all at the table. It was planned that very evening that the Pacific should be crossed in one of the superb steamships sailing from Vancouver, in British Columbia, and a despatch was sent off at once to engage staterooms. The journey was to be begun two days later, for that was the date on which Amos Todd and his daughter were to start for France; and though the _Empress_ would not sail from Vancouver for a week after that, the house would be closed, and it was thought best for Alaric to travel up the coast by easy stages. During those two days of grace the poor lad's mind was in a ferment. He had no desire to go to China or anywhere else outside of his own country. Having travelled nearly all his life, he was so tired of it that travelling now seemed to him one of the most unpleasant things a boy could be compelled to undertake. He did not want to go to France, of course, and decided that even China in company with the Sonntaggs would be better than Europe. Still, he tried to escape from going away at all, and asked his brother John to let him stay with him and go to work in the bank; but John Todd answered that he was too busy a man to have the care of an invalid, and that their father's plan was by far the best. Then, as a last resort, Alaric went to the park, hoping to meet Dave Carncross, and determined, if he did, to lay the whole case before him, and ask his advice. Even here fate seemed against him; for, from a strange boy of whom he made inquiry, he learned that Carncross had left the city a day or two before, though where he had gone the boy did not know. So preparations for the impending journey went busily forward, and Alaric, who felt very much like a helpless victim of misfortune, could find no excuse for delaying them. Even in the preparations being made for his own comfort he was given no active part. Everything that he was supposed to need and did not already possess was procured for him. His father presented him with a superb travelling-bag, fitted with all possible toilet accessories in silver and cut glass, but the boy would infinitely have preferred a baseball bat, and a chance to use it. At length the day for starting arrived, and, with as great reluctance as he had ever felt in his life, Alaric entered the carriage that was to convey the Todds to the Oakland ferry. Crossing the bay, they found the Sonntaggs awaiting them on the other side, where the whole party entered Amos Todd's palatial private car that was attached to the Overland Express. In this way they travelled together as far as Sacramento, where Alaric bade his father and sister good-bye. Then he and his newly appointed guardians boarded the special car provided for them, and in which they were to proceed by the famous Shasta route to the far North. Up to this point the Sonntaggs had proved very attentive, and had striven by every means to make themselves agreeable to their fellow-travellers. From here on, however, the Professor spent most of his time in smoking and sleeping, while his wife devoted herself to reading novels, a great stack of which had been provided for the journey. Alaric, thus left to his own devices, gazed drearily from the car window, rebelling inwardly at the lonely grandeur with which he was surrounded, and wishing with all his heart that he were poor enough to be allowed to travel in one of the ordinary coaches, in which were several boys of his own age, who seemed to be having a tantalizingly good time. They were clad in flannels, knickerbockers, and heavy walking-shoes, and Alaric noted with satisfaction that they wore gray Tam o' Shanter caps, such as he had procured at Esther Dale's suggestion, and was now wearing for the first time. They left the train at Sisson, and Alaric, standing on the platform of his car, gathered from their conversation that they were about to climb Mount Shasta, the superb rock-ribbed giant that lifted his snow-crowned head more than fourteen thousand feet in the air a few miles from that point. What wouldn't he give to be allowed to join the merry party and make the adventurous trip with them? He had been familiar with mountains by sight all his life, and had always longed to climb one, but had never been given the opportunity. It was small consolation to notice one of the boys draw the attention of the others to him, and overhear him say: "Look at that chap travelling in a special car like a young millionaire. I say, fellows, that must be great fun, and I'd like to try it just for once, wouldn't you?" The others agreed that they would, and then the group passed out of hearing, while Alaric said to himself: "I only wish they could try travelling all alone in a special car, just to find out how little fun there is in it." The following morning Portland, Oregon, was reached, and here the car was side-tracked that its occupants might spend a day or two in the city. The Sonntaggs seemed to have many acquaintances here, for whom they held a reception in the car, gave a dinner at the Hotel Portland, and ordered carriages in which to drive about, all at Amos Todd's expense. In these diversions Alaric was at liberty to join or not, as he pleased, and he generally preferred to remain behind or to wander about by himself. The same programme was repeated at Tacoma and Seattle, in the State of Washington, and at Vancouver, in British Columbia. In the last-named place Alaric's chief amusement lay in watching the lading of the great white ship that was to bear him away, and the busy life of the port, with its queer medley of Yankees and Britishers, Indians and Chinamen, tourists, sailors, and stevedores. The last-named especially excited his envious admiration--they were such big men, and so strong. [Illustration: ALARIC MAKES HIS FIRST DECISION] At length the morning of sailing arrived, and as the mighty steamship moved majestically out of the harbor, and, leaving the brown waters of Burrard Inlet behind, swept on into the open blue of the Gulf of Georgia, the boy was overwhelmed with a great wave of homesickness. Standing alone at the extreme after end of the promenade-deck, he watched the fading land with strained eyes, and felt like an outcast and a wanderer on the face of the earth. After a while the ship began to thread a bewildering maze of islands, in which Professor Sonntagg made a slight effort to interest his moody young charge; but finding this a difficult task, he quickly gave it up, and joined some acquaintances in the smoking-room. Alaric had not known that the _Empress_ was to make one stop before taking her final departure from the coast. So when she was made fast to the outer wharf at Victoria, on the island of Vancouver, the largest city in British Columbia, and its capital, he felt like one who receives an unexpected reprieve from an unpleasant fate. As it was announced that she would remain here two hours, the Sonntaggs, according to their custom, at once engaged a carriage to take them to the most interesting places in the city. This plan had been suggested by Amos Todd himself, who had bidden them spare no expense or pains to show his son all that was worth seeing in the various cities they might visit; and that the boy generally declined to accompany them on these excursions was surely not their fault--at least, they did not regard it so. The truth was that Alaric had taken a dislike to these pretentious people from the very first, and it had grown so much stronger on closer acquaintance that now he was willing to do almost anything to avoid their company. Thus on this occasion he allowed them to drive off without him, while he strolled alone to the head of the wharf, tossing his beloved baseball, which he had carefully brought with him on this journey, from hand to hand as he walked. "Hello! Give us a catch," shouted a cheery voice; and, looking up, Alaric saw a merry-faced, squarely built lad of his own age standing in an expectant attitude a short distance from him. Although he was roughly dressed, he had a bright, self-reliant look that was particularly attractive to our young traveller, who without hesitation tossed him the ball. They passed it back and forth for a minute, and then the stranger lad, saying, "Good-bye; I must be getting along; wish I could stop and get better acquainted, though," ran on with a laugh, and disappeared in the crowd. An hour later Alaric was nearly half a mile from the wharf, when the steamer's hoarse whistle sounded a warning note that signified a speedy departure. He turned and began to walk slowly in that direction, and a few minutes later a carriage containing the Sonntaggs dashed by without its occupants noticing him. At sight of them Alaric paused. A queer look came into his face; it grew very pale, and then he deliberately sat down on a log by the way-side. There came another blast of the ship's whistle, and then the tall masts, which he could just see, began slowly to move. The _Empress_, with the Sonntaggs on board, had started for China, and one of her passengers was left behind. CHAPTER V FIRST MATE BONNY BROOKS Alaric Todd's sensations as he sat on that log and watched the ship, in which he was supposed to be a passenger, steam away without him were probably as curious as any ever experienced by a boy. He had deliberately abandoned a life of luxury, as well as a position that most people are striving with all their energies to obtain, and accepted in its place--what? He did not know, and for the moment he did not care. He only knew that the Sonntaggs were gone beyond a chance of return at least for some weeks, and that during that time there was no possible way in which they could reach him or communicate with his family. He realized that he was in a strange city, not one of whose busy population either knew or cared to know a thing about him. But what of that? If they did not know him they could never call him by the hated name of "Allie." If he succeeded in making friends, it would be because of himself, and not on account of his father's wealth. Above all, those now about him did not know and should never know, if he could keep it, that he was thought to be possessed of a weak heart. Certainly if excitement could injure his heart, it ought to be completely ruined at the present moment, for he had never been so excited in his life, and doubted if he ever should be again. With it all the lad was filled with such an exulting sense of liberty that he wanted to jump and shout and share with every passer-by the glorious news that at length he was free--free to be a boy among boys, and to learn how to become a man among men. He did not shout, nor did he confide his happiness to any of those who were coming up from the wharf, where they had just witnessed the departure of the great ship; but he did jump from the log on which he had been sitting and fling his baseball high in the air. As it descended and he caught it with practised skill, he was greeted by the approving remark: "Good catch! Couldn't do it better myself!" and looking round he saw the lad with whom he had passed ball a short time before. "It seems mighty good," continued the stranger, "to see a baseball again, and meet a fellow who knows how to catch one. These chaps over here don't know anything about it, and I've hardly seen a ball since I left Massachusetts. You don't throw, though, half as well as you catch." "No," replied Alaric, "I haven't learned that yet. You see, I've only just begun." "That so? Wish I had a chance to show you something about it, then, for I used to play on the nine at home." "I wish you could, for I want awfully to learn. Why can't you?" "Because I don't live here, and, do you know, I didn't think you did, either. When I saw you awhile ago, I had a sort of idea that you belonged aboard the _Empress_, and were going in her to China, and I've been more than half envying you ever since. Funny, wasn't it?" "Awfully!" responded Alaric. "And I'm glad it isn't true, for I don't know of anything I should hate more than to be going to China in the _Empress_. But I say, let's stop in here and get something to eat, for I'm hungry--aren't you?" "Of course I am," laughed the other; and with this the two boys, who were already strolling towards the city together, turned into the little road-side bake-shop that had just attracted Alaric's attention. Here he ordered half a sheet of buns, two tarts, and two glasses of milk. These being served on a small table, Alaric paid for them, and the newly made acquaintances sat down to enjoy their feast at leisure. "What I want to do," said Alaric, continuing their interrupted conversation, "is to get back to the States as quickly as possible." "That's easy enough," replied the other, holding his tart in both hands and devouring it with infinite relish. "There's a steamer leaves here at eight o'clock this evening for Seattle and Tacoma. But you don't live here then, after all?" "No, I don't live here, nor do I know any one who does, and I want to get away as quickly as I can; for I am looking for work, and should think the chances for finding it were better in the States than here." "_You_ looking for work?" said the other, slowly, and as though doubting whether he had heard aright. At the same time he glanced curiously at Alaric's white hands and neatly fitting coat. "You don't look like a fellow who is looking for work." "I am, though," laughed Alaric; "and as I have just spent the last cent of money I had in the world, I must find something to do right away. That's the reason I want to get back to the States; but I don't know about that steamer. I suppose they'd charge something to take me, wouldn't they?" "Well, rather," responded the other. "But I say, Mister--By-the-way, what is your name?" "Dale--Rick Dale," replied Alaric, promptly, for he had anticipated this question, and was determined to drop the Todd part of his name, at least for the present. "But there isn't any Mister about it. It's just plain Rick Dale." "Well, then, plain Rick Dale," said the other, "my name is Bonny Brooks--short for Bonnicastle, you know; and I must say that you are the most cheerful-appearing fellow to be in the fix you say you are that I ever met. When I get strapped and out of a job I sometimes don't laugh for a whole day, especially if I don't have anything to eat in that time." "That's something I never tried, and I didn't know any one ever did for a whole day," remarked Alaric. "How queer it must seem!" "Lots of people try it; but they don't unless they have to, and it don't seem queer at all," replied Bonny, soberly. "But what kind of work are you looking for, and what pay do you expect?" "I am looking for anything I can find to do, and will work for any pay that is offered." "It would seem as if a fellow ought to get plenty to do on those terms," said Bonny, "though it isn't so easy as you might think, for I've tried it. How do you happen to be looking for work, anyway? Where is your home, and where are your folks?" "My mother is dead," replied Alaric, "and I suppose my father is in France, though just where he is I don't know. Our home was in San Francisco, and before he left he tried to fix things all right for me; but they turned out all wrong, and so I am here looking for something to do." "If that don't beat anything I ever heard of!" cried Bonny Brooks, in a tone of genuine amazement. "If I didn't know better, I should think you were telling my story, or that we were twins; for my mother is dead, and my father, when last heard from, was on his way to France. You see, he was a ship captain, and we lived in Sandport, on Cape Cod, where, after my mother died, he fixed up a home for me with an aunt, and left money enough to keep me at school until he came back from a voyage to South America and France. We heard of his reaching Brazil and leaving there, but never anything more; and when a year passed Aunt Nancy said she couldn't support me any longer. So she got me a berth as cabin-boy on a bark bound to San Francisco, and then to the Sound for lumber to China. I wanted to go to China fast enough, but the captain treated me so badly that I couldn't stand it any longer, and so skipped just before the ship sailed from Port Blakely. The meanest part of it all was that I had to forfeit my pay, leave my dunnage on board, and light out with only what I had on my back." "That's my fix exactly," cried Alaric, delightedly. "I mean," he added, recollecting himself, "that my baggage got carried off, and as I haven't heard from it since, I don't own a thing in the world except the clothing I have on." "And a baseball," interposed Bonny. "Oh yes, a baseball, of course," replied Alaric, soberly, as though that were a most matter-of-fact possession for a boy in search of employment. "But what did you do after your ship sailed away without you?" "Starved for a couple of days, and then did odd jobs about the river for my grub, until I got a chance to ship as one of the crew of the sloop _Fancy_, that runs freight and passengers between here and the Sound. That was only about a month ago, and now I'm first mate." "You are?" cried Alaric, at the same time regarding his young companion with a profound admiration and vastly increased respect. "Seems to me that is the most rapid promotion I ever heard of. What a splendid sailor you must be!" Although the speaker was so ignorant of nautical matters that he did not know a sloop from a schooner, or from a full-rigged ship, for that matter, he had read enough sea stories to realize that the first mate of any vessel was often the most important character on board. "Yes," said Bonny, modestly, "I do know a good deal about boats; for, you see, I was brought up in a boating town, and have handled them one way and another ever since I can remember. I haven't been first mate very long, though, because the man who was that only left to-day." "What made him?" asked Alaric, who could not understand how any one, having once attained to such an enviable position, could willingly give it up. "Oh, he had some trouble with the captain, and seemed to think it was time he got paid something on account of his wages, so that he could buy a shirt and a pair of boots." "Why didn't the captain pay him?" "I suppose he didn't have the money." "Then why didn't the man get the things he wanted, and have them charged?" "That's a good one," laughed Bonny. "Because the storekeeper wouldn't trust him, of course." "I never heard of such a thing," declared Alaric, indignantly. "I thought people could always have things charged if they wanted to. I'm sure I never found any trouble in doing it." "Didn't you?" said Bonny. "Well, I have, then," and he spoke so queerly that Alaric realized in a moment that he had very nearly betrayed his secret. Hastening to change the subject, he asked: "If you took the mate's place, who took yours?" "Nobody has taken it yet, and that's what I'm after now--hunting for a new hand. The captain couldn't come himself, because he's got rheumatism so bad that it's all he can do to crawl out on deck and back again. Besides, it's the first mate's place to ship the crew, anyhow." "Then," asked Alaric, excitedly, "why don't you take me? I'll work hard and do anything you say?" "You?" cried Bonny, regarding his companion with amazement. "Have you ever sailed a boat or helped work a vessel?" "No," replied Alaric, humbly; "but I am sure I can learn, and I shouldn't expect any pay until I did." "I should say not," remarked the first mate of the _Fancy_, "though most greenhorns do. Still, that is one thing in your favor. Another is that you can catch a ball as well as any fellow I ever knew, and a chap who can do that can learn to do most anything. So I really have a great mind to take you on trial." "Do you think the captain will agree to it?" asked Alaric, anxiously. "Of course he will, if I say so," replied Bonny Brooks, confidently; "for, as I just told you, the first mate always hires the crew." CHAPTER VI PREPARING TO BE A SAILOR During the conversation just recorded the boys by no means neglected their luncheon, for both of them had been very hungry, and by the time they arrived at an understanding in regard to Alaric's engagement not a crumb of food nor a drop of milk was left before them. While to Bonny Brooks this had proved a most welcome and enjoyable repast, to Alaric it marked a most important era of his life. To begin with, it was the first meal he had ever paid for out of his own pocket, and this alone was sufficient to give it a flavor that he had never discovered in the rich food by which his appetite had heretofore been tempted. Then during this simple meal he had entered upon his first friendship with a boy of his own age, for the liking that he had already taken for Bonny Brooks was evidently returned. Above all, during that brief lunch-hour he had conducted his first independent business operation, and now found himself engaged to fill a responsible position in active life. To be sure, he was only taken on trial, but if good intentions and a determination to do his very best could command success, then was his position assured. How fortunate he was, after all! An opening, a chance to prove what he could do, was all that he had wanted, and behold! it was his within the first hour of his independent life. How queer that it had come through his baseball too, and how strangely one thing seemed to lead to another! Now Alaric was impatient for a sight of the vessel that was to be the scene of his future labors, and anxious to begin them. He had so little idea of what a sloop was that he even wondered if it would be propelled by sails or steam. He was inclined to think that it must be the latter, for Bonny had spoken of his craft as carrying passengers, and Alaric had never known any passenger boats except such as were driven by steam. So he pictured the _Fancy_ as a steamer, not so large as the _Empress_, of course, but fairly good-sized, manned by engineers, stokers, stewards, and a crew of sailors. With this image in his mind, he regarded his companion as one who had indeed attained a lofty position. So busy was our hero with these thoughts that for a full minute after the lads left the bake-shop he did not utter a word. Bonny Brooks was also occupied with a line of thought that caused him to glance reflectively at his companion several times before he spoke. Finally he broke out with: "I say, Rick Dale, I don't know about shipping you for a sailor, after all. You see, you are dressed altogether too fine. Any one would take you for the captain or maybe the owner if you were to go aboard in those togs." "Would they?" asked Alaric, gazing dubiously down at his low-cut patent-leather shoes, black silk socks, and light trousers accurately creased and unbagged at the knees. Besides these he wore a vest and sack-coat of fine black serge, an immaculate collar, about which was knotted a silk neck-scarf, and a narrow-striped cheviot shirt, the cuffs of which were fastened by gold sleeve-links. Across the front of his vest, from pocket to pocket, extended a slender chain of twisted gold and platinum, at one end of which was his watch, and at the other a gold and platinum pencil-case. "Yes, they would," answered Bonny, with decision; "and you've got to make a change somehow, or else our bargain must be called off, for you could never become a sailor in that rig." Here was a difficulty on which Alaric had not counted, and it filled him with dismay. "Couldn't I change suits with you?" he asked, anxiously. "I shouldn't think mine would be too fine for a first mate." "Not if I know it," laughed Bonny. "They'd fit me too much one way and not enough another. Besides, they are shore togs any way you look at 'em, and not at all the things to go to sea in. The cap'n would have a fit if you should go aboard dressed as you are. So if you want to ship with us, I'm afraid you'll have to buy a new outfit." "But I haven't any money, and you say they won't charge things in this town." "Of course they won't if they don't know you; but you might spout your ticker, and make a raise that way." "Might what?" "Shove up your watch. Leave it with your uncle, you know, until you earned enough to buy it back." "Do you mean sell it?" "No. They'd ask too many questions if you tried to sell it, and wouldn't give much more, anyway. I mean pawn it." "All right," replied Alaric. "I'm willing, only I don't know how." "Oh, I'll show you quick enough, if you really want to do it." As Alaric insisted that he was willing to do almost anything to procure that coveted sailor's outfit, Bonny led him to a mean-looking shop, above the door of which hung three golden balls. The dingy windows were filled with a dusty miscellany of watches, pistols, and all sorts of personal property, while the opening of the door set loose a musty odor of old clothing. As this came pouring forth Alaric instinctively drew back in disgust; but with a sudden thought that he could not afford to be too fastidious in the new life he had chosen, he conquered his repugnance to the place and followed Bonny inside. A gaunt old Hebrew in a soiled dressing-gown stood behind a small counter. As Alaric glanced at him hesitatingly, Bonny opened their business by saying, briskly: "Hello, uncle! How are you to-day? My friend here wants to make a raise on his watch." "Let's see dot vatch," replied Mr. Isaacs, and Alaric handed it to him, together with the chain and pencil-case. It was a fine Swiss chronometer, with the monogram A.D.T. engraved on its back; and as the pawnbroker tested the quality of its case and peered at the works, Alaric noted his deliberate movements with nervous anxiety. Finally the man said: "I gifs you den tollars on dot vatch mit der chain und pencil trown in." Alaric would have accepted this offer at once, but Bonny knew better. "Ten nothings!" he said. "You'll give us fifty dollars, uncle, or we'll take it down to Levi's." "Feefty tollar! So hellup me grashus! I vould be alretty bankrupted of I gif feefty tollars on effery vatch. Vat you dake me for?" "Take you for an old fraud," replied the unabashed first mate of the _Fancy_. "Of course you would be bankrupted, as you ought to have been long ago, if you gave fifty dollars on every turnip that is brought in; but you could well afford to advance a hundred on this watch, and you know it." "Veil, I tell you; I gifs t'venty-fife." [Illustration: "'VELL, I TELL YOU. I GIFS YOU TVENTY-FIFE'"] "Fifty," said Bonny, firmly. "Dirty, und nod von cend more, so hellup me." "Fifty." "Dirty-fife?" "We'll split the difference, and call it forty-five." "I gifs you fordy oud of charidy, seeing you is so hart up." "It's a bargain," cried Bonny. "Hand over your cash." "How could you talk to him that way?" asked Alaric, admiringly, as the boys left the shop, he minus his watch and chain, but with forty dollars and a pawn-ticket in his pocket. "I couldn't once," laughed Bonny; "but it's one of the things poor folks have to learn. If you are willing to let people impose on you they'll be mighty quick to do it, and the only way is to bluff 'em from the start." The next place they entered was a sailor's slop-shop, in which were kept all sorts of seafaring garments and accessories. Here, advised by Bonny, Alaric invested fourteen dollars and seventy-five cents in a blue knit jersey, or sweater, a pair of stout woollen trousers, two flannel shirts, two suits of heavy underclothing, several pairs of cotton socks, and a pair of canvas shoes. Expressing a desire to make a change of clothing at once, he was shown a retired corner where he might do so, and from which he emerged a few minutes later so altered in appearance that it is doubtful if his own father would have recognized him. "That's something like it!" cried Bonny. "Isn't it?" replied Alaric, surveying himself with great satisfaction in a mirror, and fully convinced that he now looked so like a sailor that no one could possibly mistake him for anything else. "Don't you think, though, that I ought to have the name of the sloop embroidered across the front of this sweater? All the sailors I have ever seen had theirs fixed that way." "I suppose it would be a good idea," replied Bonny, soberly, though filled with inward laughter at the suggestion. "But perhaps you'd better wait until you see if the ship suits you, and whether you stay with us or not." "Oh, I'll stay," asserted Alaric. "There's no fear but what I will, if you'll only keep me." "Going yachting, sir?" asked the shopkeeper, politely, as he carefully folded Alaric's discarded suit of fine clothing. "No, indeed," replied the boy, scornfully; "I'm going to be a sailor on the sloop _Fancy_, and I wish you would send those things down to her at once." Ere the man could recover from his astonishment at this request sufficiently to make reply, Bonny interrupted, hastily: "Oh no, Rick! we'll take them with us. There isn't time to have 'em sent." "I should guess not," remarked the shopkeeper, in a very different tone from the one he had used before. "But say, young feller, if you're going to be a sailor you'll want a bag, and I've got a second-hand one here almost as good as new that I'll sell cheap. It come to me with a lot of truck from the sale of a confiscated sealer; and seeing that it's got another chap's name painted on it, I'll let you have it for one bob tuppence-ha'penny, and that'll make even money between us." Thus saying, the man produced a stout canvas bag, such as a sailor uses in place of a trunk. The name plainly painted across it, in black letters, was "Philip Ryder", but Alaric said he didn't mind that, so he took the bag, thrust his belongings, including his cherished baseball, into it, and the two boys left the shop. "By-the-way," asked Alaric, hesitatingly, "don't I need to get some brushes and things?" "What for?" "Why, to brush my hair, and--" "Oh no," interrupted the other. "There's a comb on board, and, besides, we can't stop for anything more. I've been gone so long now that I expect the old man is madder'n a wet hen by this time." So Bonny led the way to the wharves, and to a narrow slip between two of them that just then was occupied by but a single craft. She was a small sloop, not over forty feet long, though of good beam, evidently very old, and so dingy that it was hard to believe she had ever been painted. Her sails, hanging unfurled in lazy jacks, were patched and discolored; her running rigging was spliced, the standing rigging was sadly in need of setting up, her iron-work was rusted, and her spars were gray with age. "There's the old packet," said Bonny, cheerfully. "Where?" asked Alaric, gazing vaguely down the slip and utterly ignoring the disreputable craft close at hand. "Why, right here," answered the other, a trifle impatiently. "Don't you see the name '_F-A-N-C-Y_' on her stern? She isn't much to look at, I know, but she's a hummer to go, and a mighty good sea-boat. She's awfully comfortable, too. Come aboard and I'll show you." With this the cheery young fellow, who had actually come to a belief that the shabby old craft was all he claimed for her, tossed his friend's recent purchase to the deck of the sloop, and began to clamber after it down a rickety ladder. With all his bright visions of a minute before rudely dispelled, and with a heart so heavy that he could find no words to express his feelings, Alaric followed him. CHAPTER VII CAPTAIN DUFF, OF THE SLOOP "FANCY" As the newly engaged crew of the sloop _Fancy_ slowly and awkwardly descended the slippery ladder leading down to his ship, he experienced his first regrets at the decisive step he had taken, and doubts as to its wisdom. The real character of the sloop as shown by a single glance was so vastly different from his ideal, that for a moment it did not seem as though he could accept the disreputable old craft as even a temporary home. Never before had he realized how he loathed dirt and disorder, and all things that offended his delicately trained senses. Never before had he appreciated the cleanly and orderly forms of living to which he had always been accustomed. He could not imagine it possible to eat, sleep, or even exist on board such a craft as lay just beneath him, and his impulse was to fly to some remote place where he should never see nor hear of the _Fancy_ again. But even as he was about to do this the sound of Bonny's reassuring voice completely changed the current of his thoughts. Was not the lad who had brought him to this place a very picture of cheerful health, and just such a strong, active, self-reliant boy as he longed to become? Surely what Bonny could endure he could! Perhaps disagreeable things were necessary to the proper development of a boy. That thought had never come to him before, but now he remembered how much his hands had suffered before they were trained to catch a regulation ball. Besides all this, had not Bonny hesitated before consenting to give him a trial, and had he not insisted on coming? Had he not also confidently asserted that all he wanted was a chance to show what he was good for, and that nothing save a dismissal should cause him to relinquish whatever position was given him? After all, no matter how bad things might prove on the sloop, there would always be plenty of fresh air and sunshine, besides an unlimited supply of clean water. He could remember catching glimpses, in foreign cities, of innumerable pestilential places in which human beings were compelled to spend whole lifetimes, where none of these things was to be had. Yes, he would keep on and make the best of whatever presented itself, for perhaps things would not prove to be as bad as they seemed; and, after all, he was willing to endure a great deal for the sake of continuing the friendship just begun between himself and Bonny Brooks. He remembered now having once heard his father say that a friendship worth having was worth fighting for. If that were the case, what a coward he would be to even think of relinquishing his first real friendship without making an effort to retain it. By the time all these thoughts had flashed through the boy's mind he had gained the sloop's deck, where he was startled by an angry voice that sounded like the bellow of an enraged bull. Turning quickly, he saw his friend Bonny confronted by a big man with a red face and bristling beard. This individual, supported by a pair of rudely made crutches, was standing beside the after companion-way, and glaring at the bag containing his own effects that had been tossed down from the wharf. "Ye've got a hand, have ye?" roared this man, whom Alaric instinctively knew to be the captain. "Is this his dunnage?" "Yes, sir," replied the first mate. "And I think--" "Never mind what you think," interrupted the captain, fiercely. "Send him about his business, and pitch his dunnage back on the wharf or pitch it overboard, I don't care which. Pitch it! d'ye hear?" "But Captain Duff, I think--" "Who asked ye to think? I do the thinking on board this craft. Don't ye suppose I know what I'm talking about? I tell ye I had this Phil Ryder with me on one cruise, and I'll never have him on another! An impudent young puppy as ever lived, and a desarter to boot. Took off two of my best men with him, too. Oh, I know him, and I'd Phil him full of his own rifle-bullets ef I had the chance. I'd like to Ryder him on a rail, too." "You are certainly mistaken, sir, this time, for--" "Who, I? You dare say I'm mistaken, you tarry young swab you!" roared the man, his face turning purple with rage. "Oh, ef I had the proper use of my feet for one minute I'd show ye! Put him ashore, I tell ye, and do it in a hurry too, or you'll go with him without one cent of wages--not one cent, d'ye hear? I'll have no mutiny where I'm cap'n." Poor Alaric listened to this fierce outbreak with mingled fear and dismay. Now that the situation he had deemed so surely his either to accept or reject was denied him, it again seemed very desirable. He was about to speak up in his own behalf when the angry man's last threat caused him to change his mind. He could not permit Bonny to suffer on his account, and lose the position he had so recently attained. No, the very first law of friendship forbade that; and so, stepping forward to claim his bag, he said, in a low tone: "Never mind me, Bonny; I'll go." "No, you won't!" retorted the young mate, stoutly, "or, if you do, I'll go with you; and I'll have my wages too, Captain Duff, or know the reason why." Without paying the slightest attention to this remark, the man was staring at Alaric, whom he had not noticed until this moment. "Who is that land-lubber togged out like a sporty salt?" he demanded. "He's the crew I hired, and the one you have just bounced," replied Bonny. "What's his name?" "Rick Dale." "What made you say it was Phil Ryder, then?" "I didn't, sir. You--" "Don't contradict me, you unlicked cub! Can he shoot?" "No, sir," replied Alaric, as Bonny looked at him inquiringly. "All right. I wouldn't have him aboard if he could. Why don't he take his thundering dunnage and go for'ard, where he belongs, and cook me some grub when he knows I haven't had anything to eat sence sunup? Why don't he, I say?" With this Captain Duff turned and clumped heavily to the other side of the deck; while Bonny, hastily picking up the bag that had been the innocent cause of all this uproar, said, in a low voice: "Come on, Rick; it's all right." As they went forward together he dropped the bag down a tiny forecastle hatch. Then, after asking Alaric to cut some kindlings and start a fire in the galley stove, which was housed on deck, he dove into the cabin to see what he could find that could be cooked for dinner. When he reappeared a minute later he found his crew struggling with an axe and a chunk of hard wood, from which he was vainly attempting to detach some slivers. He had already cut two deep gashes in the deck, and in another moment would probably have needed crutches as badly as the captain himself. "Hold on, Rick!" cried the young mate, catching the axe-helve just as the weapon was making another erratic descent. "I find those grocery chaps haven't sent down any stores. So do you just run up there. It's two doors this side of Uncle Isaac's, you know, and hurry them along. I'll 'tend to the fire while you are gone." Gladly exchanging his unaccustomed, and what he considered to be very dangerous, task of wood-chopping for one that he felt sure he could accomplish creditably, Alaric hastened away. He found the grocer's easily enough, and demanded of the first clerk he met why the stores for the sloop _Fancy_ had not been sent down. "Must have been the other clerk, sir, and I suppose he forgot all about 'em; but I'll attend to the order at once, sir," replied the man, who took in at a glance Alaric's gentlemanly bearing and the newness of his nautical garb. "Have 'em right down, sir. Hard bread, salt junk, rice, and coffee, I believe. Anything else, sir?" "I'm sure I don't know," replied Alaric. "Going to take a run on the _Fancy_ yourself, sir?" "Yes." "Then of course you'll want some soft bread, a few tins of milk, half a dozen jars of marmalade, and a dozen or so of potted meats?" "I suppose so," assented the boy. "Step this way, sir, and let me show you some of our fine goods," suggested the clerk, insinuatingly. In another part of the building he prattled glibly of pâté-de-foie-gras, and Neufchâtel cheese, truffles, canned mushrooms, Albert biscuit, anchovy paste, stuffed olives, Wiesbaden prunes, and a variety of things--all of which were so familiar to the millionaire's son, and had appeared so naturally on all the tables at which he had ever sat, that he never for a moment doubted but what they must be necessities on the _Fancy_ as well. Of ten million boys he was perhaps the only one absolutely ignorant that these luxuries were not daily articles of food with all persons above the grade of paupers; and as he was equally without a knowledge of their cost, he allowed the clerk to add a dozen jars of this, and as many pots of that, to his list, until even that wily individual could think of nothing else with which to tempt this easy-going customer. So, promising that the supplies just ordered should be sent down directly, he bowed Alaric out of the door, at the same time trusting that they should be honored with his future patronage. Bethinking himself that he must have a toothbrush, and that it would also be just as well to have his own comb, in spite of Bonny's assurance that the ship's comb would be at his service, the lad went in search of these articles. When he found them he was also tempted to invest in what he regarded as two other indispensables--namely, a cake of fine soap and a bottle of eau-de-Cologne. He had gone quite a distance for these things, and occupied a full half-hour in getting them. As he retraced his steps towards the wharves he passed the slop-shop in which his first purchases of the day had been made, and was greeted by the proprietor with an inquiry as to whether old Duff had taken aboard his cargo of "chinks and dope" yet. Not understanding the question, Alaric did not answer it; but as he passed on he wondered what sort of a cargo that could be. By the time he regained the wharf to which the _Fancy_ was moored the flooding tide had raised her to a level with it, and on her deck Alaric beheld a scene that filled him with amazement. The stores that he had ordered had arrived. The wagon in which they had come stood at one side, and they had all been taken aboard. One of the two men who had brought them was exchanging high words and even a shaking of fists with the young first mate of the sloop, while the other was presenting a bill to the captain and insisting upon its payment. Captain Duff, foaming at the mouth and purple in the face, was speechless with rage, and could only make futile passes with one of his crutches at the man with the bill, who dodged each blow with great agility. As Alaric appeared this individual cried out: "Here's the young gent as ordered the goods now!" "Certainly," said Alaric, advancing to the sloop's side. "I was told to order some stores, and I did so." "Oh, you did, did ye! you thundering young blunderbuss?" roared Captain Duff, finding his voice at last. "Then suppose you pay for 'em." "Very well," replied the lad, quietly, thinking this an official command that must be obeyed. A minute later peace was restored, Captain Duff was gasping, and his first mate was staring with amazement. The bill had been paid, the wagon driven away, and Alaric was again without a single cent in his pockets. CHAPTER VIII AN UNLUCKY SMASH Captain Duff's first order after peace was thus restored and he had recovered the use of his voice, temporarily lost through amazement at the spectacle of a sailor before the mast paying out of his own pocket for a ship's stores, and stores of such an extraordinary character as well, was that the goods thus acquired should be immediately transferred to his own cabin. So Bonny, with Alaric to assist, began to carry the things below. The cabin was very small, dirty, and stuffy. It contained two wide transom berths, one on each side, a table bearing the stains of innumerable meals and black with age, and two stools. There was a clock nailed to the forward bulkhead; beneath it was fastened a small, cheap mirror, and beside this, attached to a bit of tarred twine, hung the ship's comb. One of the two berths was overlaid with a mattress, several soiled blankets, and a tattered quilt. It formed the captain's bed, and it also served as a repository for a number of tobacco-boxes and an assortment of well-used pipes. In the other berth was a confusion of old clothing, hats, boots, and whatever else had been pitched there to get it out of the way. Here the captain proposed to have stored the providential supply of food that had come to him as unexpectedly as that furnished by the ravens to the prophet Elijah. The air of the place was so pervaded with a combination odor of stale tobacco smoke, mouldy leather, damp clothing, bilge-water, kerosene, onions, and other things of an equally obtrusive nature, that poor Alaric gasped for breath on first descending the short but steep flight of steps leading to it. He deposited his burden and hurried out as quickly as possible, in spite of the fact that Captain Duff, who sat on his bunk, had begun to speak to him. On his next trip below the lad drew in a long breath of fresh air just before entering the evil-smelling cabin, and determined not to take another until he should emerge from it. In his haste to execute this plan he dropped his armful of cans, and, without waiting to stow them, had gained the steps before realizing that the captain was ordering him to come back. Furious at hearing his command thus disregarded, the man reached out with one of his crutches, caught it around the boy's neck, and gave him a violent jerk backward. The startled lad, losing his foothold, came to the floor with a crash and a loud escaping "Ah!" of pent-up breath. At the same moment the cabin began to be pervaded with a new and unaccustomed odor so strong that all the others temporarily withdrew in its favor. "Oh murder! Let me out," gasped Captain Duff, as he scrambled for the companion-way and a breath of outer air. "Of all the smells I ever smelled that's the worst!" "What have you broken, Rick?" asked Bonny, anxiously, thrusting his head down the companion-way. He had been curiously reading the unfamiliar labels on the various jars, pots, and bottles, and now fancied that his crew had slipped down the steep steps with some of these in his arms. "Whew! but it's strong!" he continued, as the penetrating fumes greeted his nostrils. "Is it the truffles or the pate grass or the cheese?" "I'm afraid," replied Alaric, sadly, as he slowly rose from the cabin floor and thrust a cautious hand into one of his hip-pockets, "that it is a bottle of eau-de-Cologne." "Cologne!" cried Bonny, incredulously, as he caught the word. "If these foreign kinds of grub are put up in cologne, it's no wonder that I never heard of them before. Why, it's poison, that's what it is, and nothing less. Shall I heave the rest of the truck overboard, sir?" "Hold on!" cried Alaric, emerging with rueful face from the cabin in time to catch this suggestion. "It isn't in them. It was in my pocket all by itself." "I wish it had stayed there, and you'd gone to Halifax with it afore ever ye brought the stuff aboard this ship!" thundered the captain. "Avast, ye lubber! Don't come anigh me. Go out on the end of the dock and air yourself." So the unhappy lad, his clothing saturated with cologne, betook himself to the wharf, where, as he slowly walked up and down, filling the air with perfume, he carefully removed bits of broken glass from his moist pocket, and disgustedly flung them overboard. While he was thus engaged, the first mate, under the captain's personal supervision, was fumigating the cabin by burning in it a bunch of oakum over which was scattered a small quantity of tobacco. When the atmosphere of the place was thus so nearly restored to its normal condition that Captain Duff could again endure it, Bonny finished stowing the supplies, and then turned his attention to preparing supper. Meanwhile Alaric had been joined in his lonely promenade by a stranger, who, with a curious expression on his face as he drew near the lad, changed his position so as to get on the windward side, and then began a conversation. "Fine evening," he said. "Is it?" asked Alaric, moodily. "I think so. Do you belong on that sloop?" "Yes." "Able looking craft, and seems to have good accommodations. Where does she run to from here?" "The Sound," answered Alaric, shortly, for he was not in a humor to be questioned. "What does she carry?" "Passengers and cargo." "Indeed. And may I ask what sort of a cargo?" "You may." "Well, then, what sort?" persisted the stranger. "Chinks and dope," returned Alaric, glancing up with the expectation of seeing a look of bewilderment on his questioner's face. But the latter only said: "Um! About what I thought. Good-paying business, isn't it?" "If it wasn't we wouldn't be in it," replied the boy. "No, I suppose not; and it must pay big since it enables even the cabin-boy to drench himself with perfumery. Good-night; you're too sweet-scented for my company." Ere Alaric could reply the stranger was walking rapidly away, and Bonny was calling him to supper. The first mate apologized for serving this meal on deck, saying that the sloop's company generally ate together in the cabin, but that Captain Duff objected to the crew's presence at his table on this occasion. "So," said Bonny, "I told him he might eat alone, then, for I should come out and eat with you." "I hope he will always feel the same way," retorted Alaric, "for it doesn't seem as though I could possibly stay in that cabin long enough to eat a meal." "Oh, I guess you could," laughed Bonny. "Anyway, it will be all right by breakfast-time, for the smell is nearly gone now. But I say, Rick Dale, what an awfully funny fellow you are anyway! What in the world made you pay for all that truck? It must have taken every cent you had." "So it did," replied Alaric. "But what of that? It was the easiest way to smooth things over that I knew of." "It wouldn't have been for me, then," rejoined Bonny, "for I haven't handled a dollar in so long that it would scare me to find one in my pocket. But why didn't you let them take back the things we didn't need?" "Because, having ordered them, we were bound to accept them, of course, and because I thought we needed them all. I'm awfully tired of such things myself, but I didn't know you were." "What! olives and mushrooms and truffles, and the rest of the things with queer names? I never tasted one of them in my life, and don't believe the captain did, either." "That seems odd," reflected Alaric. "Doesn't it?" responded Bonny, quizzically. "And that cologne, too. What ever made you buy it?" "I don't know exactly. Because I happened to see it, I suppose, and thought it would be a useful thing to have along. A little of it is nice in your bath, you know, or to put on your handkerchief when you have a headache." "My stars!" exclaimed Bonny. "Listen to that, will you! Why, Rick, to hear you talk, one would think you were a prince in disguise, or a bloated aristocrat of some kind!" "Well, I'm not," answered Alaric, shortly. "I'm only a sailor on board the sloop _Fancy_, who has just eaten a fine supper and enjoyed it." "Have you, really?" asked the other, dubiously. "It didn't seem to me that just coffee without any milk, hard bread, and fried salt pork were very fine, and I was afraid that perhaps you wouldn't like 'em." "I do, though," insisted Alaric. "You see, I never tasted any of those things before, and they are first-class." "Well," said Bonny, "I don't think much of such grub, and I've had it for more than a year, too; but, then, every one to his liking. Now, if you are all through, let's hustle and clear away these dishes, for we are going to sail to-night, you know, and I've got to notify our passengers. You may come with me and learn the ropes if you want to." "But we haven't any cargo aboard," objected Alaric. "Oh, that won't take long. A few minutes will fix the cargo all right." Alaric wondered what sort of a cargo could be taken aboard in a few minutes, but wisely concluded to wait and see. So the dishes were hastily washed in a bucket of sea-water and put away. Then, after a short consultation with Captain Duff in the cabin, Bonny reappeared, and, beckoning Alaric to follow him, both lads went ashore and walked up into the town. Although it was now evening, Bonny did not seek the well-lighted business streets, but made his way to what struck Alaric as a peculiarly disreputable neighborhood. The houses were small and dingy, and their windows were so closely shuttered that no ray of light issued from them. At length they paused before a low door, on which Bonny rapped in a peculiar manner. It was cautiously opened by a man who held a dim lamp over his head, and who evidently regarded them with suspicion. He was reassured by a few words from the young mate; the door was closed behind them, and, with the stranger leading the way, while Alaric, filled with curiosity, brought up the rear, all three entered a narrow and very dark passage, the air of which was close and stifling. CHAPTER IX "CHINKS" AND "DOPE" The dark passage into which the lads had just been ushered was short, and was ended by a door of heavy planking before Alaric found a chance to ask his companion why they had come to such a very queer and mysterious place. The opening of that second door admitted them to another passage equally narrow, but well-lighted, and lined with a number of tiny rooms, each containing two bunks arranged like berths one above the other. By the dim light in these rooms Alaric could see that many of these berths were occupied by reclining figures, most of whom were Chinamen, though a few were unmistakably white. Some were smoking tiny metal-bowled pipes with long stems, while others lay in a motionless stupor. The air was heavy with a peculiarly sickening odor that Alaric recognized at once. He had met it before during his travels among the health resorts of Continental Europe, in which are gathered human wrecks of every kind. Of them all none had seemed to the lad so pitiable as the wretched victims of the opium or morphine habit, which is the most degrading and deadly form of intemperance. This boy, so ignorant of many of the commonest things of life, and yet wise far beyond his years concerning other phases, had often heard the opium habit discussed, and knew that the hateful drug was taken in many forms to banish pain, cause forgetfulness of sorrow, and produce a sleep filled with beautiful dreams. He knew, too, of the sad awakenings that followed--the dulled senses, the return, with redoubled force, of all the unhappiness that had only been driven away for a short time, and the cravings for other and yet larger doses of the deadly stuff. He had heard his father say that opium, more than any other one thing, was the curse of China, and that one of the principal reasons why the lower grades of Chinese ought to be excluded from the United States was that they were introducing the habit of opium smoking, and spreading it abroad like a pestilence. Knowing these things, Alaric was filled with horror at finding himself in a Chinese opium den, and wondered if Bonny realized the true character of the place. In order to find out he gained his comrade's side, and asked, in a low tone: "Do you know, Bonny, what sort of a place this is?" "Yes, of course. It is Won Lung's joint." "I mean, do you know what the men in those bunks are doing?" "Certainly," replied Bonny, cheerfully. "They're hitting the pipe." Perplexed as he was by these answers, Alaric still asked another question. "But do you know what they are smoking in those pipes?" "To be sure I do," answered the other, a trifle impatiently. "It's dope. Most any one would know that. Didn't you ever smell it before?" "Dope!" Once before had Alaric heard the word during that eventful day, and he had even used it himself, without knowing its meaning. Now it flashed across him. Dope was opium, and that hateful drug was to form the sloop's cargo. The idea of such a thing was so repugnant to him that he might have entered a protest against it then and there, had not a sudden change of scene temporarily diverted his attention from the subject. The passage they had been traversing ended in an open court, so foreign in its every detail that it appeared like a bit from some Chinese city lifted bodily and transported to the New World. The dingy buildings surrounding it were liberally provided with balconies, galleries, and odd little projecting windows, all of which were occupied by Chinamen gazing with languid interest at the busy scene below. From most of the galleries hung rows of gayly colored paper lanterns, which gave the place a very quaint and festive aspect. On the pavement were dozens of other Chinamen, with here and there a demure-looking little woman and a few children. Heaps of queer-looking luggage, each piece done up in matting and fastened with narrow strips of rattan, were piled in the corners. At one side was an immense stove, or rather a huge affair of brick, containing a score or more of little charcoal stoves, each fitted for the cooking of a single kettle of rice or pot of tea. About this were gathered a number of men preparing their evening meal. Many of the others were comparing certificates and photographs, a proceeding that puzzled Alaric more than a little, for he was so ignorant of the affairs of his own country that he knew nothing of its Chinese Exclusion Law. He began to learn something about it right there, however, and subsequently discovered that while Chinese gentlemen, scholars, and merchants are as freely admitted to travel, study, or reside in the United States as are similar classes from any other nation, the lower grades of Chinese, rated as laborers, are forbidden by law to set foot on American soil. This is because there are such swarming millions of them willing to work for very small wages, and live as no self-respecting white man could live; that, were they allowed to enter this country freely, they would quickly drive white laborers from the field and leave them to starve. Then, too, they bring with them and introduce opium-smoking, gambling, lotteries, and other equally pernicious vices. Besides all this, the Chinese in the United States, with here and there an exception, have no desire to become citizens, or to remain longer than is necessary to scrape together the few hundreds of dollars with which they can return to their own land and live out the rest of their days in luxury. Many thousands of Chinese laborers had come to the United States before the exclusion law was passed, and these, by registering and allowing themselves to be photographed for future identification, obtain certificates which, while not permitting them to return if they once leave the country, allow them to remain here undisturbed. Any Chinaman found without such a protection is liable to be arrested and sent back to his own land. These certificates, therefore, are so valuable that Chinamen going home with no intention of ever returning to this country find no difficulty in selling their papers to others, who propose to try and smuggle themselves into the United States from Canada or Mexico. There are always plenty who are anxious to make this attempt, for if they once get a foothold they can earn better wages here than anywhere else in the world. Of course, the purchaser of a certificate must look something like the attached photograph, and correspond to the personal description contained in it. To do this a Chinaman will scar his features with cuts or burns if necessary, and will make himself up to resemble any particular photograph as skilfully as a professional actor. This, then, is what many of those whom Alaric and Bonny now encountered were doing, for the place into which they had come was a Chinese hotel in which all newly arrived Chinamen found shelter while waiting for work or for a chance to smuggle themselves into the United States, which is what ninety-nine out of every one hundred of them propose to do if possible. As the lads stood together on the edge of this novel scene, while their guide went from group to group making to each a brief announcement, Alaric, seizing this first opportunity for acquiring definite information, asked: "What on earth are we here for, Bonny?" "To find out how many passengers are ticketed for to-night's boat and get them started," was the reply. "You don't mean that our passengers are to be Chinamen?" "Yes, of course. I thought I told you so first thing this morning when you asked me what the sloop carried." "No. You only said passengers and freight." "I ought to have said 'chinks.' But what's the odds? 'Chinks' are passengers, aren't they?" "Do you mean Chinamen? Are 'chinks' Chinamen?" "That's right," replied Bonny. "Well," said Alaric, who had been on the Coast long enough to imbibe all a Californian's contempt for natives of the Flowery Kingdom, "if I'd known that 'chinks' meant Chinamen, and dope meant opium, I should have been too much ashamed of what the _Fancy_ carried ever to tell any one about it." "I hope you won't," responded Bonny. "There isn't any necessity for you to that I know of." "But I have already. There was a man on the wharf while I was getting aired who asked me what our cargo was. Just to see what he would say I told him 'chinks and dope,' though I hadn't the slightest idea of what either of them meant." "My! but that's bad!" cried Bonny, with an anxious look on his face. "I only hope he wasn't a beak. They've been watching us pretty sharp lately, and I know the old man is in a regular tizzy-wizzy for fear we'll get nabbed." Before Alaric could ask why they should be nabbed, Won Lung, the proprietor of the establishment, who also acted as interpreter, came to where they were standing, greeted Bonny as an old acquaintance, looked curiously at Alaric, and announced that thirty-six of his boarders had procured tickets for a passage to the Sound on the _Fancy_. "We can't take but twenty of 'em on this trip," said the young mate, decidedly. "And with their dunnage we'll have to stow 'em like sardines, anyway. The others must wait till next time." "Mebbe you tlake some man in clabin, some mebbe in fo'c's'le," suggested Won Lung, blandly. "Mebbe we don't do anything of the kind," replied Bonny. "The trip may last several days, and I know I for one am not going to be crowded out of my sleeping-quarters. So, Mr. Lung, if you send down one man more than twenty he goes overboard. You savey that?" "Yep, me sabby. Allee same me no likee." "Sorry, but I can't help it. And you want to hustle 'em along too, for we are going to sail in half an hour. Got the stuff ready?" "Yep, all leddy. Two hun'l poun'." "Good enough. Send it right along with us." A few minutes later our lads had left Won Lung's queer hotel and were out in the quiet streets accompanied by two Chinese coolies, who bore heavy burdens slung from the ends of stout bamboo poles carried across their shoulders. As Bonny seemed disinclined to talk, Alaric refrained from asking questions, and the little party proceeded in silence through unfrequented streets to the place where their sloop lay. Here the burdens borne by the coolies were transferred to the cabin, where this part of the cargo was left with Captain Duff, and Alaric had no knowledge of where it was stowed. While the captain was thus busy below, Bonny was giving the crew his first lesson in seamanship by pointing out three ropes that he called jib, throat, and peak halyards, showing him how to make them fast about their respective belaying-pins, and impressing upon him the importance of remembering them. Shortly after this the score of long-queued passengers arrived with their odd-looking packages of personal belongings, were taken aboard in silence, and stowed in the hold until Alaric wondered if they were piled on top of one another like sticks of cord-wood. Then the mooring-lines were cast off, and the _Fancy_ drifted noiselessly out of the slip with the ebbing tide. Once clear of it the jib was hoisted, and she began to glide out of the harbor before a gentle, off-shore breeze. CHAPTER X PUGET SOUND SMUGGLERS The great landlocked body of salt water known as Puget Sound, penetrating for nearly one hundred miles the northwestern corner of Washington, the Northwest State, is justly termed a smuggler's paradise. It pierces the land in every direction with a perfect net-work of inlets, channels, and bays lined with endless miles of forest, frowning cliffs, and snuggly hidden harbors. The upper end of the Sound, where its width entitles it to be called a gulf, is filled with an archipelago of rugged islands of all sizes and shapes, thinly settled, and offering innumerable secure hiding-places for small boats. Here and there along the shores of the Sound are Indian reservations uncleared and unoccupied save by dwindling remnants of the once populous coast tribes. These Indians, though retaining their tribal names among themselves, are all known to the whites under the one designation of "Siwash," a corruption of the French _sauvage_. On the eastern side of the Sound are the important American cities of Seattle and Tacoma; while at its extreme southern end stands Olympia, Washington's capital. On its western side, and just north of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, that connects the Sound with the ocean, is located the Canadian city of Victoria, from which all the smuggling operations of these waters are conducted. From Victoria to the American island of San Juan on the east, the largest of the archipelago already mentioned, the distance is only twelve miles, while it is but twenty miles across the Strait of Fuca to the American mainland on the south. These two points being so near at hand, it is easy enough to run a boat-load of opium or Chinamen over to either of them in a night. For such a passage each Chinaman is compelled to pay from fifteen to twenty dollars, while opium yields a profit of four or five dollars a pound. Smuggling from Victoria is thus such a lucrative business that many men of easy conscience are engaged in it. Both the island route and that by way of the strait present the serious drawbacks of having their landing-places so remote from railroads and cities that, though the frontier has been passed, there is still a dangerous stretch of territory to be crossed before either of these can be reached. In view of this fact, it occurred to one of the more enterprising among the Victoria smugglers to undertake a greater risk for the sake of greater profits, and run a boat nearly one hundred miles up the Sound to some point in near vicinity to one of its large cities. He had just the craft for the purpose, and finally secured a captain who, having recently lost a schooner through seizure by the American authorities for unlawful sealing in Bering Sea, was reckless and desperate enough for the new venture. As this man undertook the run for a share of the profits, he was inclined to reduce all expenses to their very lowest limits, and had already made a number of highly successful trips. Although the fare to each Chinaman by this new line was twenty-five dollars, it offered such superior advantages as to be liberally patronized, and the boat was always crowded. In the meantime the American authorities had discovered that much illegal opium and many illegal Chinamen were entering their country through a new channel that seemed to lead to the vicinity of Tacoma. The recently appointed commander of a United States revenue-cutter determined to break up this route, and capture, if possible, these boldest of all the Sound smugglers. For some weeks he watched in vain, overhauled and examined a number of innocent vessels, and with each failure became the more anxious to succeed. At length he sent his third lieutenant to Victoria, of course out of uniform, to gain what information he could concerning any vessel that seemed likely to be engaged in smuggling. This officer, after spending several days in the city without learning anything definite, was beginning to feel discouraged, when one afternoon, as he was strolling near the docks, he noticed two lads walking ahead of him who looked something like sailors. One of them had evidently just purchased a new outfit of clothing, and carried a canvas bag on which his name was painted in black letters. Making a mental note of this name, the officer followed the lads, out of curiosity to see what kind of a craft they would board. When he saw the _Fancy_ he said to himself: "Tough-looking old packet. I wonder if that young chap with the bag can be one of her crew?" Without approaching the sloop so closely as to attract attention, he lingered in her vicinity until Alaric went up-town to procure supplies, when the officer still kept him in sight. He even entered the store in which the lad was dealing, and here his curiosity was stimulated by the young sailor's varied and costly order. "That sloop must make an extraordinary amount of money somehow," he reflected. So interested had he now become that he even followed Alaric while the lad made his subsequent purchases. Finally he found himself again near the sloop just as the lad who had excited his curiosity was ordered to the wharf to air himself after his unfortunate experience with the bottle of cologne. At length the officer addressed him, and by dint of persistent questions became confirmed in his suspicions that the dingy old sloop cruised to the Sound with Chinamen and opium. Having gained the information he wanted thus easily and unexpectedly, the officer returned to his hotel for supper and to write a despatch that should go by that night's boat. After delivering this on board the steamer, he determined to take one more look at the suspected sloop; and, strolling leisurely in that direction, reached the wharf just in time to see her glide out from the slip and head for the open sea. Here was an emergency that called for prompt action; and, running back to the hotel, the young man paid his bill, secured his bag, and gained the steamer just as that fine American-built vessel was about to take her departure for ports of the upper Sound. Shortly afterwards, a little beyond the harbor mouth, the big, brilliantly lighted steamer swept past a small dimly outlined craft, on whose deck somebody was waving a lantern so that she might not be run down. Of course it has been understood long ere this that the sloop _Fancy_ was a smuggler. She was not only that, but was also the boldest, most successful, and most troublesome smuggler on Puget Sound. The one person at all acquainted with the shabby old craft and as yet unaware of her true character was Alaric Todd. His slight knowledge of smugglers having been gained through books, he thought of them as being only a sort of half pirates, either Spanish or French, who flourished during the last century. Thus, although he did not approve of either the sloop's passengers or cargo, it did not occur to him that they were being carried in defiance of law until about the time that the steamer's lights were disappearing in the distance. The boy's hands were still smarting from an unaccustomed hauling on ropes that had resulted in hoisting the big main-sail, and now he lay on deck well forward, where he had been told to keep a sharp lookout and report instantly any vessel coming within his range of vision. Before a fresh beam wind the _Fancy_ was slipping rapidly through the water, with Captain Duff steering, Bonny doing odd jobs about deck, and the passengers confining themselves closely to the hold. After the young mate had waved his signal lantern to the steamer, he extinguished both it and the side lights that had been burning until now, leaving the binnacle lamp carefully shaded as the only light on board. With nothing more to do at present, he threw himself down beside Alaric, and the boys began a low-voiced conversation. "What made you put out those lights?" asked the latter. "I thought all ships carried lights at night." "We don't," laughed Bonny. "They'd give us away to the cutters, and we'd be picked up in less'n no time. I'm mighty glad that steamer isn't a revenue-boat." "Why?" "Because she's so fast. There's only one craft on the Sound can beat her, and that's the _Flyer_, running between Tacoma and Seattle. This _City of Kingston_ is a good one, though. She used to be a crack Hudson River boat, and came out here around the Horn; or, rather, not exactly that, but through the Strait of Magellan. That's a tough place, I can tell you." "I suppose it is," replied Alaric. "But, Bonny, tell me something more about those cutters. Why should they want to catch us?" "For running 'chinks' and 'dope.'" "What harm is there in that? Is it against the law?" "I should rather say it was. There's a duty of ten dollars a pound on one, and the others aren't allowed in at any price." "Then I don't see how we are any different from regular smugglers." "That's what some folks call us," replied Bonny, with a grin. "They are mostly on the other side, though. In Victoria they call us free-traders." "It doesn't make any difference what anybody calls us," retorted Alaric, vehemently, "so long as we ourselves know what we are. It was a mean thing, Bonny Brooks, that you didn't tell me this before we started." "Look here, Rick Dale! do you pretend you didn't know after seeing the 'chinks' and the 'dope' and all that was going on? Oh, come, that's too thin!" "I don't care whether it's thin or thick," rejoined Alaric, stoutly. "I didn't know that I was shipping to become a pirate, or you may be very certain I'd have sat on that log till I starved before going one step with you." "What do you mean by calling me a pirate?" demanded Bonny, indignantly. "I'm no more a pirate than you are, for all your fine airs." In his excitement Bonny had so raised his voice that it reached the ears of Captain Duff, who growled out, fiercely: "Stow yer jaw, ye young swabs, and keep a sharp lookout for'ard--d'ye hear?" "Aye, aye, sir," responded the young mate, rising as though to end the unpleasant conversation, and peering keenly into the gloom. But Alaric was not inclined to let the subject drop; and, with an idea of continuing their talk in so low a tone that it could not possibly reach the captain's ears, he too started to rise. At that moment the sloop gave a quick lurch that caused him to plunge awkwardly forward. He was only saved from going overboard by striking squarely against Bonny, who was balancing himself easily in the very eyes of the vessel, with one foot on the rail. The force of the blow was too great for him to withstand. With a gasping cry he pitched headlong over the bows and disappeared from his comrade's horrified gaze. CHAPTER XI A VERY TRYING EXPERIENCE "Stop her! Stop the boat, quick! Bonny is overboard" shouted Alaric, frantically, as he realized the nature of the catastrophe that had just occurred through his awkwardness. As he shouted he sprang to the jib-halyard, and, casting it off, allowed the sail to come down by the run, his sole idea of checking the headway of a sailing craft being to reduce her canvas. He was about to let go both throat and peak halyards, and so bring down the big main-sail also, when, with a bellow of rage and a marvellous disregard of his lameness, Captain Duff rushed forward and snatched the ropes from the lad's hands. "You thundering blockhead!" he roared. "What d'ye mean by lowering a sail without orders? H'ist it again! H'ist it, d'ye hear?" "But Bonny is overboard!" cried Alaric. "And you want to leave him to drown, do ye? Don't ye know that if he's alive he's drifted astarn by this time? Ef you had any sense you'd be out in the dinghy looking fur him." Alaric knew that the dinghy was the small boat towing behind the sloop, for he had heard the young mate call it by that name, and now he needed no further hint as to his duty. He had pushed Bonny overboard, and he must save him if that might still be done. If not, he was careless of what happened to himself. Nothing could be worse than, or so bad as, to go through life with the knowledge that he had caused the death of a fellow-being--one, too, whom he had already come to regard as a dear friend. Thus thinking, he ran aft, cast loose the painter of the dinghy, drew the boat to the sloop's stern, and, dropping into it, drifted away in the darkness. He had never rowed a boat, nor even handled a pair of oars, but he had seen others do so, and imagined that it was easy enough. It is not often that a first lesson of this kind is taken alone, at midnight, amid the tossing waters of an open sea, and it could not have happened now but for our poor lad's pitiful ignorance of all forms of athletics, including those in which every boy should be instructed. Without a thought for himself, nor even a comprehension of his own peril, Alaric fitted the oars that he found in the bottom of the boat to their row-locks, and began to pull manfully in what he supposed was the proper direction. He pulled first with one oar and then with the other; then making a wild stroke with both oars that missed the water entirely, he tumbled over backwards. Recovering himself, he prepared more cautiously for a new effort, and this time, instead of beating the air, thrust his oars almost straight down in the water. Then one entered it, while the other, missing it by a foot or so, flew back and struck him a violent blow. Up to this time the lad had kept up a constant shouting of "Bonny! Oh, Bonny!" or "Hello, Bonny!" but that blow bereft him of so much breath that for a minute he had none left with which to shout. Now, too, for the first time, he gained a vague idea of his own perilous situation. There was nothing in sight and nothing to be heard save the ceaseless dashing of waters and a melancholy moaning of wind. The sky was so overcast that not even a star could extend to him a cheery ray of light. The boy's heart sank, and he made another attempt at a shout, as much to raise his own spirits as with any hope of being heard. Only a husky cry resulted, for his voice was choked, and he again strove to row, with the thought that any form of action would be better than idleness amid such surroundings. If his oars seemed vicious before, they were doubly so now that he was wearied, and they stubbornly resisted his efforts to make them work as he knew they could and ought. At length he let go of one of them for an instant, while he wiped the trickling perspiration from his eyes. The moment it was released, the provoking bit of wood, as though possessed of a malicious instinct, slid from its rowlock, dropped into the water, and floated away. Alaric made a wild but ineffectual clutch after it that allowed a quantity of water to slop into the boat, and gave him the idea that it was sinking. With an access of terror the poor lad sprang to his feet, and, forgetful of the object that had brought him into his present situation, screamed: "Bonny! Oh, Bonny! Save me! Don't leave me here to drown!" Then a spiteful wave so buffeted the boat that he was toppled over and fell sprawling in the bottom. That was the blackest and most despairing moment of his life; but even as it came to him he fancied he heard a whispered answer to his call, and lifted his head to listen. Yes, he heard it again, so faint and uncertain that it might be only the mocking scream of some sea-bird winging a swift flight through the blackness. Still the idea filled him with hope, and he called again with a cry so shrill and long-drawn that its intensity almost frightened him. Now the echoing hail was certain, and it came to him with the unmistakable accents of a human voice. Again he shouted: "Bonny! Oh, Bonny!" and again came the answer, this time much nearer: "Hello, Rick Dale! Hello!" "Hello, Bonny! Hello!" How could it be that Bonny had kept himself afloat so long? What wonderful powers of endurance he must possess! How should he reach him? There was but a single oar left, and surely no one could propel a boat with one oar. He tried awkwardly to paddle, but after a few seconds of fruitless labor gave this up in despair. What could he do? Must he sit there idle, knowing that his friend was drowning within sound of his voice, and for want of the aid that he could give if he only knew how? It was horrible and yet inevitable. He was helpless. Once more was his own peril forgotten, and his sole distress was for his friend. Again he shouted, with the energy of despair: "Bonny! Oh, Bonny! Can't you get to me? I'm in a boat." Then came something so startling and so astonishing that he was almost petrified with amazement. Instead of a weak, despairing answer, coming from a long distance, there sounded a cheery hail from close at hand: "All right, old man! I'm coming. Cheer up." What had happened? Was his friend endowed with supernatural powers that enabled him to traverse the sea at will? Alaric gazed about him on all sides, almost doubting the evidence of his senses. Then, with a flutter of canvas and a rush of water from under her bows, the tall form of the sloop loomed out of the blackness almost beside him. "Sing out, Rick. Where are you?" "Here I am. Oh, Bonny, is it you?" "Yes, of course. Look out! Catch this line." The end of a rope came whizzing over the boat, and Alaric, catching it, held on tightly. He was seated on the middle thwart, and the moment a strain came on the line the boat turned broadside to it, heeled until water began to pour in over her gunwale, and Alaric, unable to hold on an instant longer, let go his hold. He heard an exclamation of "Thundering lubber!" in Captain Duff's voice, and then the sloop was again lost to sight. Again Alaric was in despair, though he could still hear the shouting of orders and a confused slatting of sails. After a little the sloop was put about, and a shouting to determine the locality of the drifting boat was recommenced. Still it seemed to Alaric a tedious while before she approached him for a second time, and Bonny once more sung out to him to stand by and catch a line. "Make it fast in the bow this time," he called, as he flung the coil of rope. Again Alaric succeeded in catching it, and, obeying instructions, he scrambled into the bow of the boat, where he knelt and clung to the line for dear life, not knowing how to make it fast. In a moment there came a jerk that very nearly pulled him overboard; and the boat, with its bow low in the water from his weight, while its stern was in the air, took a wild sheer to one side. Again water poured in until she was nearly swamped, and again was the line torn from Alaric's grasp. "You blamed idiot!" roared Captain Duff. "You don't desarve to be saved! I'll give ye just one more try, and ef you don't fetch the sloop that time we'll leave ye to navigate on your own hook." As the previous manoeuvres were repeated for a third time, poor Alaric, sitting helplessly in his waterlogged dinghy, shivered with apprehension. How could he hold on to that cruel line that seemed only fitted to drag him to destruction? This time it took longer to find him, and he was hoarse with shouting before the _Fancy_ again approached. "He don't know enough to do anything with a line, Cap'n Duff," said Bonny. "So if you'll throw the sloop into the wind and heave her to, I'll bring the boat alongside." With this, and without waiting for an answer, the plucky young sailor, who had already divested himself of most of his clothing, sprang into the black waters and swam towards the vaguely discerned boat. In another minute he had gained her, clambered in, and was asking the amazed occupant for the other oar. "It's lost overboard," replied Alaric, gloomily, feeling that the case was now more desperate than ever. "Oh, Bonny! Why--?" "Never mind," cried the other, cheerily. "I can scull, and that will answer just as well as rowing. Perhaps better, for I can see where we are headed." Alaric had deemed it impossible to propel a boat with a single oar; but now, to his amazement, Bonny sculled the dinghy ahead almost as rapidly as he could have rowed. The sloop was out of sight, but the flapping of her sails could be plainly heard, and five minutes later the young mate laid his craft alongside. Captain Duff was too angry for words, and fortunately too busy in getting his vessel on her course to pay any attention just then to the lad whose awkwardness and ignorance had caused all this trouble and delay. "Skip for'ard," said Bonny, in a low tone, "and I'll come directly." As Alaric, with a thankful heart, obeyed this injunction, he marvelled at the size and steadiness of the sloop, and wondered how he could ever have thought her small or unstable. A few minutes later Bonny, only half dressed, joined him, and said, "If you'll lend me your trousers, old man, you can turn in for the rest of the night, and I'll stand your watch; mine are too wet to put on just yet, and I think you'll be safer below than on deck, anyway." Like a person in a dream, and without asking one of the many questions suggesting themselves, Alaric obeyed. Earlier in that most eventful day he had regarded that dark and stuffy forecastle with disgust, and vowed he would never sleep in it. Now, as he snuggled shivering between the blankets of the first mate's own bunk, it seemed to him one of the coziest, warmest, and most comfortable sleeping-apartments he had ever known. CHAPTER XII A LESSON IN KEDGING For a long time Alaric lay awake in his narrow bunk, listening to the gurgle of waters parted by the sloop's bow, but a few inches from his head, and reflecting upon the exciting incidents of the past hour. It had all been so terrible and yet so unreal. On one thing he determined. Never again would he enter a boat alone without having first learned how to row, and to swim also. How splendidly Bonny had come to his rescue, and yet how easily! What was it he had called making a boat go with only one oar? Alaric could not remember; but at any rate it was a wonderful thing to do, and he determined to master that art as well. What a lot he had to learn, anyhow, and how important it all was! He had longed for the ability to do such things, but never until now had he realized their value. How well Bonny did them, and what a fine fellow he was, and how the heart of the poor rich boy warmed towards this self-reliant young friend of a day! Could it be but one day since their first meeting? It seemed as though he had known Bonny always. But how had the young sailor regained the sloop after being knocked overboard? That was unaccountable, and one of the most mysterious things Alaric had ever heard of. He longed for Bonny to come below, that he might ask just that one question; but the mate was otherwise engaged, and the crew finally dropped asleep. Through the remainder of the night the sloop sailed swiftly on her course; but she could not make up for that lost hour, and by dawn, though she had passed the light on Admiralty Head, and was well to the southward of Port Townsend, the very stronghold of her enemies, for it is the port of entry for the Sound, she was still far from the hiding-place in which her captain had hoped to lie by for the day. However, he knew of another nearer at hand, though not so easy of access, and to this he directed the vessel's course. It did not seem to Alaric that he had been asleep more than a few minutes when he was rudely awakened by being hauled out of his bunk and dropped on the forecastle floor. At the same time he became conscious of a voice, saying: "Wake up! Wake up, Rick Dale! I've been calling you for the last five minutes, and was beginning to think you were dead. Here it is daylight, with lots of work waiting, and you snoozing away as though you were a young man of elegant leisure. So tumble out in a hurry, or else you'll have the cap'n down on you, and he's no light-weight when he's as mad as he is this morning." Never before in all his luxurious life had Alaric been subjected to such rough treatment, and for a moment he was inclined to resent it; but a single glance at Bonny's smiling face, and a thought of how deeply he was indebted to this lad, caused him to change his mind and scramble to his feet. "Here are your trousers," continued the young mate, "and the quicker you can jump into them the better, for we've a jolly bit of kedging to attend to, and need your assistance badly." Filled with curiosity as to what a "jolly bit of kedging" might be, and also pleased with the idea that he was not considered utterly useless, Alaric hastily dressed and hurried on deck. There the sight of a number of Chinamen recalled with a shock the nature of the craft on which he was shipped, and for an instant he was tempted to refuse further service as a member of her crew. A moment's reflection, however, convinced him that the present was not the time for such action, as it could only result in disaster to himself and in extra work being thrown upon Bonny. The sun had not yet risen, and on one side a broad expanse of water was overlaid with a light mist. On the other was a bold shore covered with forest to the water's edge, and penetrated by a narrow inlet, off the mouth of which the sloop lay becalmed. Bonny was already in the dinghy, which held a coil of rope having a small anchor attached to one end. The other end was on board the sloop and made fast to the bitts. "When I reach the end of the line and heave the kedge overboard, you want to haul in on it," said the young mate, "and when the sloop is right over the kedge, let go your anchor. Do you understand?" "Yes, I think so." The tide had just turned ebb, and was beginning to run out from the inlet as Bonny dropped the kedge-anchor overboard, and Alaric, beginning to pull with a hearty will on that long, wet rope, experienced the first delights of kedging. Captain Duff, puffing at a short black pipe, sat by the tiller and steered, while the Chinese passengers, squatted about the deck, watched the lad's efforts with a stolid interest. At length the end of the rope was reached, and Alaric, with aching back and smarting hands, but beaming with the consciousness of a duty well performed, imagined his task to be ended. "Let go your anchor," ordered Captain Duff. When this was done, and the cable made fast so that the sloop should not drift back when the kedge was lifted, Bonny heaved up the latter and got it into the dinghy. Then he sculled still farther into the inlet until the end of the long line was once more reached, when he again dropped the small anchor overboard, and poor Alaric found, to his dismay, that the whole tedious operation was to be repeated. In addition to what he had done before, the heavy riding anchor was now to be lifted from the bottom. As the boy essayed to haul in its cable with his hands, Captain Duff, muttering something about a "lubberly swab," stumped forward, and showing him how to use the windlass for this purpose, condescended to hold the turn while the perspiring lad pumped away at the iron lever. When the anchor was lifted, he was directed to again lay hold of the kedge-line and warp her along handsomely. Alaric made signs to the Chinamen that they should help him; but they, being passengers who had paid for the privilege of idleness on this cruise, merely grinned and shook their heads. So the poor lad tugged at that heart-breaking line until his strength was so exhausted that the sloop ceased to make perceptible headway. At this Captain Duff, who was again nodding over the tiller, suddenly woke up, rushed among his passengers with brandished crutch, roaring an order in pidgin English that caused them to jump in terror, lay hold of the line, and haul it in hand over hand. Three times more was the whole weary operation repeated, until at length the sloop was snugly anchored behind a tree-grown point that effectually concealed her from anything passing in the Sound. "Nice, healthy exercise, this kedging," remarked Bonny, cheerfully, as he came on board. "You may call it that," responded Alaric, gloomily, "but I call it the most killing kind of work I ever heard of, and if there is any more of it to be done, somebody else has got to do it. I simply won't, and that's all there is about it." "Oh phsaw!" laughed the young mate, as he lighted a fire in the galley stove and began preparations for breakfast. "This morning's job was only child's play compared with some you'll have before you've been aboard here a month." "Which I never will be," replied Alaric, "for I'm going to resign this very day. I suppose this is the United States and the end of the voyage, isn't it?" "It's the States fast enough; but not the end of the run by a good bit. We've another night's sail ahead of us before we come to that. But you mustn't think of resigning, as you call it, just as you are beginning to get the hang of sailoring. Think how lonely I should be without you to make things lively and interesting--as you did last night, for instance." "I shall, though," replied Alaric, decidedly, "just as quick as we make a port; for if you think I'm going to remain in the smuggling business one minute longer than I can help, you're awfully mistaken. And what's more, you are going with me, and we'll hunt for another job--an honest one, I mean--together." "I am, am I?" remarked Bonny. "After you calling me a pirate, too. I shouldn't think you'd care to associate with pirates." "But I do care to associate with you," responded Alaric, earnestly, "for I know I couldn't get along at all without you. Besides, after the splendid way you came to my rescue last night, I don't want to try. But I say, Bonny, how did you ever manage to get back on board after tumbling--I mean, after I knocked you--into the water? It seems to me the most mysterious thing I ever heard of." "Oh, that was easy enough!" laughed the young mate, lifting the lid of a big kettle of rice, that was boiling merrily, as he spoke. "You see, I didn't wholly fall overboard. That is, I caught on the bob-stay, and was climbing up again all right when you let the jib down on top of me, nearly knocking me into the water and smothering me at the same time. When I got out from under it you were gone, and a fine hunt we had for you, during which the old man got considerably excited. But all's well that ends well, as the Japs said after the war was over; so now if you'll make a pot of coffee, I'll get the pork ready for frying." "But I don't know how to make coffee." "Don't you? I thought everybody knew that. Never mind, though; I'll make the coffee while you fry the meat." "I don't know how to do that, either." "Don't you know how to cook anything?" "No. I don't believe I could even boil water without burning it." "Well," said Bonny, "you certainly have got more to learn than any fellow old enough to walk alone that I ever knew." The sloop remained in her snug hiding-place all that day, during which her captain and first mate devoted most of their time to sleeping. The Chinamen spent the greater part of the day on shore, while Alaric, following Bonny's advice, made his first attempt at fishing. So long as he only got bites he had no trouble; but when he finally caught an enormous flounder his occupation was gone, for he had no second hook, and could not imagine how the fish was to be removed from the one to which it was attached. So he let it carefully down into the water again, and made the line fast until Bonny should wake. When that happened, and he triumphantly hauled in his line, he found, to his dismay, that his hook was bare, and that the fish had solved his problem for him. In the meantime there was much activity that day on board a certain revenue-cutter stationed in the upper Sound, and shortly after dark, about the time the smuggler _Fancy_ was again getting under way, several well-manned boats left the government vessel to spend the night in patrolling certain channels. CHAPTER XIII CHASING A MYSTERIOUS LIGHT The commander of the revenue-cutter had received from his lieutenant a detailed description of the sloop _Fancy_, together with what other information that officer had gathered concerning her destination, lading, and crew. As a result of this interview it was determined to guard all passages leading to the upper Sound; and during the hours of darkness the cutter's boats, under small sail, cruised back and forth across the channels on either side of Vashon Island, one of which the sloop must take. They showed no lights, and their occupants were not allowed to converse in tones louder than a whisper. While half of each crew got what sleep they might in the bottom of the boat, the others were on watch and keenly alert. In the stern-sheets of each boat sat an officer muffled in a heavy ulster as a protection against the chill dampness of the night. The night was nearly spent and dawn was at hand when the weary occupants of one of these patrol-boats were aroused into activity by two bright lights that flashed in quick succession for an instant well over on the western side of their channel, which was the one known as Colvos Passage. "It is a signal," said the officer, as he headed his boat in that direction. "Silence, men! Have your oars ready for a chase." Shortly afterwards another light appeared on the water in the same general direction, but farther down the channel. It showed steadily for a minute, and was then lost to view, only to reappear a few moments later. After that its continued appearance and disappearance proved most puzzling, until the officer solved the problem to his own satisfaction by saying: "The careless rascals have come to anchor, and are sending their stuff ashore in a small boat. That light is the lantern they are working by; but I wouldn't have believed even they could be so reckless as to use it. Douse that sail and unship the mast. So. Now, out oars! Give 'way!" As the boat sprang forward under this new impulse, its oars, being muffled in the row-locks, gave forth no sound save the rhythmic swish with which they left the water at the end of each stroke. The row was not a long one, and within five minutes the boat was close to the mysterious light. No sound came from its vicinity, nor was there any loom of masts or sails through the blackness. Were they close to it, after all? Might it not be brighter than they thought, and still at a distance from them? Its nature was such that the officer could not determine even by standing up, and for a few moments he was greatly puzzled. He could now see that the land was at a greater distance than a smuggler would choose to cover with his small boats when he might just as well run his craft much closer. What could it mean? Suddenly he gave the orders: "'Way enough! In oars! Look sharp there for'ard with your boat-hook!" The next moment the twinkling light was alongside, and its mystery was explained. It was an old lantern lashed to a bit of a board that was in turn fastened across an empty half-barrel. A screen formed of a shingle darkened one side of the lantern, so that, as the floating tub was turned by wind or wave, the light alternately showed and disappeared at irregular intervals. That the lieutenant who was the victim of this simple ruse was angry goes without saying. He was furious, and could he have captured its author just then, that ingenious person might have met with rough usage. But there seemed little chance of capturing him, for although the officer felt certain that this tub had been launched from the very smuggler he was after, he had no idea of where she now was, or of what direction she had taken. All he knew was that somebody had warned her of danger in that channel, and that she had cleverly given him the slip. He could also imagine the "chaff" he would receive from his brother officers on the cutter when they should learn of his mortifying experience. When, after cruising fruitlessly during the brief remainder of the night, he returned to his ship and reported what had taken place, he was chaffed, as he expected, but was enabled to bear this with equanimity, for he had made a discovery. On the shingle that had shaded the old lantern he found written in pencil as though for the passing of an idle half-hour, and apparently by some one who wished to see how his name would look if he were a foreigner: "Philip Ryder, Mr. Philip Ryder, Monsieur Philippe Ryder, Signor Filipo Ryder, Señor Félipe Ryder, and Herr Philip Ryder." "It's the name of the young chap who led me such a chase in Victoria, and finally gave me the information I wanted concerning the sloop _Fancy_," said the lieutenant to his commanding officer, in reporting this discovery. "Which would seem to settle the identity of the sloop we are after, and prove that she is now somewhere close at hand," replied the commander. "Yes, sir; and it also discloses the identity of the young rascal who is responsible for this trick, though from his looks I wouldn't have believed him capable of it. He is the one I told you of who was so scented with cologne as to be offensive. I remember well seeing the name Philip Ryder on his dunnage-bag." The sun was just rising, and at this moment a report was brought to the cabin, from a masthead lookout, to the effect that a small sloop was disappearing behind a point a few miles to the southward. "It may be your boat, and it may be some other," said the commander to the third lieutenant. "At any rate, it is our duty to look him up. So you will please get under way again with the yawl, run down to that point, and see what you can find. If you meet with your young friend Ryder either afloat or ashore, don't fail to arrest and detain him as a witness, for in any case his testimony will be most important." The _Fancy_ had hauled out of her snug berth soon after sunset that same night, and fanned along by a light breeze, held her course to the southward. Both our lads were stationed forward to keep a sharp lookout, though with a grim warning from Captain Duff that if either of them fell overboard this time, he might as well make up his mind to swim ashore, for the sloop would not be stopped to pick him up. "Cheerful prospect for me," muttered Alaric. "Never mind, though, Mr. Captain, I'm going to desert, as did the Phil Ryder of whom you seem so fond. I am going to follow his example, too, in taking your first mate with me." As on the previous night, the lads found an opportunity to talk in low tones; and filled with the idea of inducing Bonny to leave the sloop with him, Alaric strove to convince him of the wickedness of smuggling. "It is breaking a law of your country," he argued; "and any one who breaks one law will be easily tempted to break another, until there's no saying where he will end." "If we didn't do it, some other fellows would," replied Bonny. "The chinks are bound to travel, and folks are bound to have cheap dope." "So _you_ are breaking the law to save some other fellow's conscience?" "No, of course not. I'm doing it for the wages it pays." "Which is as much as to say that you would break any law if you were paid enough." "I never saw such a fellow as you are for putting things in an unpleasant way," retorted the young mate, a little testily. "Of course there are plenty of laws I couldn't be hired to break. I wouldn't steal, for instance, even if I were starving, nor commit a murder for all the money in the world. But I'd like to know what's the harm in running a cargo like ours? A few Chinamen more or less will never be noticed in a big place like the United States. Besides, I think the law that says they sha'n't come in is an unjust one, anyway. We haven't any more right to keep Chinamen out of a free country than we have to keep out Italians or anybody else." "So you claim to be wiser than the men who make our laws, do you?" asked Alaric. Without answering this question, Bonny continued: "As for running in a few pounds of dope, we don't rob anybody by doing that." "How about robbing the government?" "Oh, that don't count. What's a few dollars more or less to a government as rich as ours?" "Which is saying that while you wouldn't steal from any one person, you don't consider it wicked to steal from sixty millions of people. Also, that it is perfectly right to rob a government because it is rich. Wouldn't it be just as right to rob Mr. Vanderbilt or Mr. Astor, or even my--I mean any other millionaire? They are rich, and wouldn't feel the loss." "I never looked at it in that way," replied Bonny, thoughtfully. "I thought not," rejoined Alaric. "And there are some other points about this business that I don't believe you ever looked at, either. Did you ever stop to think that every Chinaman you help over the line at once sets to work to throw one of your own countrymen out of a job, and so robs him of his living?" "No; I can't say I ever did." "Or did it ever occur to you that every cargo of opium you help to bring into the country is going to carry sorrow and suffering, perhaps even ruin, to hundreds of your own people?" "I say, Rick Dale, it seems to me you know enough to be a lawyer. At any rate, you know too much to be a sailor, and ought to be in some other business." "No, Bonny, I don't know half enough to be a sailor; but I do know too much to be a smuggler, and I am going to get into some other business as quick as I can. You are too, now that you have begun to think about it, for you are too honest a fellow to hold your present position any longer than you can help. By-the-way, what would happen if a cutter should get after us to-night?" "That depends," replied the first mate, sagely, glad to feel that there were some legal questions concerning which he was wiser than his companion. "They might fire on us, if we didn't stop quick enough to suit 'em, and blow us out of the water. They might capture us, clap us into irons, and put us into a dark lock-up on bread and water. The most likely thing is that we would all be sent to the government prison on McNeil's Island. From there the chinks would be hustled back to Victoria, and the old man would get out on bond; but you and I would be held as witnesses until a court was ready to condemn the vessel and cargo. That would probably take some months, perhaps a year. Then the case would be appealed, and we'd be kept in prison for another year or so. "And I suppose if we ever got out we would always be watched and suspected," suggested Alaric, who had listened to all this with almost as much dismay as though it were an actual sentence. "Well, I'll never be caught, that's all. I'll drift away in the dinghy first." In saying this the boy threatened to do the very most desperate thing he could think of. "I believe I'd go with you," said Bonny. "Now, though, I must go and get ready our private signal, for we are getting close to the most dangerous place." CHAPTER XIV BONNY'S INVENTION, AND HOW IT WORKED Bonny walked aft, exchanged a few words with Captain Duff, and then disappeared in the cabin, where he remained for some minutes. When he again came on deck he bore a box in which was a lighted lamp provided with a bright reflector. Only one side of the box was open, and this space the lad carefully shielded with his hat. The sloop was just entering Colvos Passage, between Vashon Island and the mainland, and was nearer the western shore than the other. Holding his box as far down as he could reach over the landward side of the vessel, Bonny turned its opening towards the shore, and allowed the bright light to stream from it for a single second. Then by quickly reversing the box the light was made to disappear. A moment later it was shown again, this time with a piece of red glass held in the front of the lamp. This red light, after appearing for a single second, was also made to vanish, and another quick flash of white light took its place. A minute or so later the whole operation was repeated, and the white, red, and white signal was again flashed to the wooded shore. At the fourth time of displaying the signal it was answered by two white flashes from the shore. There was a moment of suspense, and then Bonny exclaimed, in a low tone, "Great Scott! They're after us!" Extinguishing his light, he again dived below, this time into the forecastle. When he reappeared he bore the float and lighted lantern already described. Alaric had noticed this queer contrivance the day before, and, while wondering at its object, had amused himself by idly scribbling on a smooth shingle that he found inside the tub. Now this same shingle was hastily lashed to the lantern, and the whole affair was launched overboard. At the same time the sloop was put about, and leaving this decoy light floating and bobbing behind her as though it were in a boat, she sped away towards the eastern side of the channel. When Bonny rejoined Alaric at the lookout station he asked, with a chuckle: "What do you think of that for a scheme, Rick? It's my own invention, and I've been longing for a chance to try it every trip; but this is the very first time we have needed anything of the kind. I only hope the light won't get blown out, or the whole business get capsized before the beaks capture it. My! how I'd like to see 'em creeping up to it, and hear their remarks when they find out what it really is!" "What does all this flashing of lights and setting lanterns adrift mean, anyway?" asked Alaric, who was much puzzled by what had just taken place. "Means there's a revenue-boat of some kind waiting for us in the channel, and that we are dodging him. The lights I showed made our private signal, and asked if the coast was clear. Skookum John didn't get on to 'em at first, or maybe he wasn't in a safe place for answering. When he saw us and got the chance, though, he flashed two lights to warn us of trouble. Three would have meant 'All right, come ahead'; but two was a startler. It was the first time we've had that signal; also it's the first chance I've had to test my invention." [Illustration: "BONNY'S INVENTION STARTED ON ITS JOURNEY"] "Do you mean that you actually expect that floating lantern to attract the revenue people, so they will go to examine it, instead of coming after us?" "Attract 'em! Of course it will. They'll go for it the same as June bugs go for street electrics, and then they'll wish they had spent their time hunting for us instead." Ever since leaving the dancing light Bonny had not been able to take his eyes from it, so anxious was he to discover whether or not it served the purpose for which it was intended. It grew fainter and smaller as the sloop gained distance on her new course. Then all at once it seemed to rise from the water, and an instant later disappeared. "They've got it, and lifted it aboard!" cried Bonny, delightedly. And in his exultation he called out, "The beaks have doused the glim, Cap'n Duff!" "Douse your tongue, ye swab, and keep your eyes p'inted for'ard!" was the ungracious reply muttered out of the after darkness. "What an old bear he is!" murmured Alaric, indignantly. "Yes; isn't he?--a regular old sea-bear? But I don't mind him any more than I would a rumble of imitation thunder. I say, though, Rick, isn't this jolly exciting?" "Yes," admitted the other, "it certainly is." "And you want me to quit it for some stupid shore work that'll make a fellow think he's got about as much life in him as a clam?" "No, I don't; for I am certain there are just as exciting things to be done on shore as at sea; and if you'll only promise to come with me I'll promise to find something for you to do as exciting as this, and lots honester." "I've a mind to take you up," said Bonny, "and I would if I thought you had any idea how hard it is to find a job of any kind. You haven't, though, and because you got this berth dead easy you think you'll have the same luck every time. But we must look sharp now for another light from Skookum John." By this time the sloop had again tacked, and was headed diagonally for the western shore. "Who is Skookum John?" asked Alaric. "Skookum? Why, he's our Siwash runner, who is always on the lookout for us, and keeps us posted." "What is a Siwash?" "Well, if you aren't ignorant! 'Specially about languages. Why, Siwash is Chinook for Indian. There's his light now! See? One, two, three. Good enough! We've given 'em the slip once more, and everything is working our way." By the time Bonny had reported this bit of news to Captain Duff, and held the tiller while the old sea-dog cautiously lighted the pipe he had not dared smoke all night, dawn was breaking, and the skipper began to look anxiously for the harbor he had hoped to make by sunrise. As it grew lighter Bonny pointed out the now distant masts of the cutter they had so successfully passed a short time before, and said, with a cheerful grin: "There's the old kettle that thought she could clip the _Fancy's_ wings, and bring her to with a round turn. But she missed it this time, as she will many another if I'm not mistaken." Captain Duff also sighted the far-away cutter, and, nervous as an owl at being caught outside his hiding-place by daylight, laid all the blame of their late arrival on poor Alaric. "If it hadn't been for your fool antics of two nights ago," he said, "we'd made this port a good hour afore sun this morning. You're as wuthless as ye look, and ye look to be the most wuthless young swab I ever had aboard ship, barring one. He was another just such white-faced, white-handed, mealy-mouthed specimen as you be. Couldn't eat ship's victuals till I starved him to it, and finally got me into the wust scrape of my life. Now I shouldn't be one mite surprised ef you'd put me into another hole mighty nigh as deep. So you want to quit your nonsense and 'tend strictly to business, or I'll make ye jump. D'ye hear? I'll make ye jump, I say." Alaric acknowledged that he heard, and then walked forward to light the galley fire and set a kettle of water on to boil, for he was very hungry, and proposed to have some breakfast as quickly as possible. The sloop rounded a long point and came to anchor in a wooded cove, apparently as wild as though they were its discoverers. A couple of Chinamen, who had evidently camped there all night, waited to greet their countrymen on the beach, to which Bonny at once began to transfer his passengers, a few at a time, in the dinghy. As fast as they were landed they were led back into the woods and started towards Tacoma, which was but a few miles distant. Alaric, who was determined not to remain aboard the sloop longer than was necessary to get the breakfast to which he felt entitled after his night's work, managed to get his canvas bag on deck unseen by Captain Duff, and slip it into the dinghy as the boat was about to make its last trip. "Hide it on shore for me, Bonny," he said. "All right; I will if you'll promise not to skip until we've had another talk on the subject." "Of course I promise; for I'm not going without you." "Then perhaps you won't go at all," laughed Bonny. So the bag was taken ashore and concealed in a thicket a little to one side, and Bonny came back to prepare breakfast, for which Alaric had the water already boiling. When this meal was nearly ready, and as the boys were sniffing hungrily at the odors of coffee and frying meat, Captain Duff suddenly appeared on deck. "Go up on that point, you foremast hand--I can't remember your thundering name--and watch the cutter while me and the mate eats. After that one of us 'll relieve ye. Ef she moves, or even shows black smoke, you let me know, d'ye hear?" Wishing to rebel, but not daring to, and feeling that he should surely starve if kept from his breakfast many minutes longer, Alaric obeyed this order. He managed to secure a couple of hard biscuit with which to comfort his lonely watch, and then Bonny set him ashore. Picking up his bag and carrying it with him, the boy clambered to the point, and, selecting a place from which he could plainly see the cutter, began his watch, at the same time munching his dry biscuit with infinite relish. Much of the water intervening between him and the cutter was hidden from view by near-by undergrowth, and the necessity for scanning it never occurred to him. After a while Bonny came to relieve him and allow him to go to breakfast. "Have you really made up your mind to desert the ship?" asked the young mate, noticing that Alaric had his bag with him. "Yes, I really have," answered the other; "and you will come with me, won't you, Bonny?" "I don't know," replied the latter, undecidedly. "Somehow I can't make it seem right to desert Captain Duff and leave him in a fix. Seems to me we ought to stay with him until he gets back to Victoria, anyway. Besides, I'd lose my wages, and there must be nearly thirty dollars due me by this time. But you go along to your breakfast, and after that we'll talk it all over. Haven't seen anything, have you?" "No, not a sign, but--Hello! What's that?" "Caught, as sure as you're born!" cried Bonny, in a tone of suppressed excitement. Then, the two lads, peering through the bushes, watched a boat, flying the flag of the United States Revenue Marine and filled with sturdy bluejackets, enter the cove and dash alongside the smuggler _Fancy_. CHAPTER XV CAPTURED BY A REVENUE-CUTTER The sight of that armed boat making fast to the sloop, and its agile occupants springing on board, was so startling to the two lads taking in its every detail from their point of vantage on shore, that if excitement could have affected Alaric Todd's heart it would certainly have done so at that moment. As it was, he did not even realize that his heart was beating unusually fast. His mind was too full of other thoughts just then for him to remember that he had a heart. He only realized that the vessel of which he had formed the crew had fallen into the clutches of outraged law, and that for the present at least her career as a smuggler was at an end. Now that she was really captured, he was conscious of a regret that after successfully eluding her enemies so long she should, after all, fall into their hands. He even felt sorry for Captain Duff, surly old bear that he was. At the same time he was thankful not to be on board the captured craft, and rejoiced in the thought that this sudden change of affairs would sweep away all Bonny's scruples, and leave him free to seek some occupation other than that of being a smuggler. As for that young sailor himself, his feelings were equally contradictory with those of his companion, though his sympathies leaned more decidedly towards the side of the law-breaker. "Poor Cap'n Duff!" he exclaimed, in a low tone. "This is tough luck for him; and I must say, Rick Dale, that the whole thing is pretty much your fault, too. If you'd kept a half-way decent lookout you'd have seen that yawl when she was two miles off. Then we could have got under way, and given her the slip as easy as you please. Now you and I have lost our job, while Cap'n Duff will lose his and his boat besides. I'll never see my wages, either; and, worst of all, in spite of my invention working so smooth, these revenue fellows have got the laugh on us. I say it's too bad, though to be sure it does let us out of the smuggling business. I expect it will be a long time, though, before I get another job as first mate, or any other kind of a job that will be worth having." "But, Bonny," interposed Alaric, anxious to defend his own reputation, "I wasn't told to look out for boats, but only to watch the cutter, and I hardly took my eyes off of her until you came." "That's all right; only by the time you've knocked round the world as much as I have you'll find out that any fellow who expects to get promoted has got to do a heap of things besides those he's told to do. What he is told to do is generally only a hint of what he is expected to do. But just listen to the old man. Isn't he laying down the law to those chaps, though?" The voices of those on the sloop came plainly to the ears of the hidden lads, and above them all roared and bellowed that of Captain Duff, as though he expected to overwhelm his enemies by sheer force of bluster. "Chinamen!" he shouted--"Chinamen! No, sir, you won't find no Chinamen about this craft, nor nothing else onlawful. "Smell 'em, do ye? Smell 'em! So do I now, and hev ever sence you revenooers come aboard. Seems like ye can't get the parfume out of your clothing. "Going to seize the sloop anyway, be ye? Wal, ye kin do it, seeing as I'm all alone and a cripple. There'll come a day of reckoning, though--a day of reckoning, d'ye hear? I'm a free-born American citizen, and I'll protest agin this outrage till they hear me clear to Washington." "He's heard over a good part of Washington this minute," whispered Bonny. "But what are they talking about now?" "Phil Ryder!" the captain was shouting. "Philip Ryder! No, sir, there ain't no one of that name aboard this craft, nor hain't ever been as I know of. I did know a Phil Ryder once, but--What's that ye say? That'll do? Wa'l, it won't do, ye gold-mounted swab, not so long as I choose to keep on talking. Look out there, or I'll brain ye sure as guns! Look out, I--" This last exclamation was directed to a couple of sturdy bluejackets, who, obeying a significant nod from their officer, seized the irate captain by either arm, hustled him down into his own cabin, and drew the slide. Then leaving these two aboard the _Fancy_, the others re-entered their boat and began to pull towards shore, with the evident intention of making a search for the missing members of the sloop's crew as well as for her recent passengers. "Hello!" cried Bonny, softly, "this thing is beginning to get rather too interesting for us, and the sooner we light out the better." So the lads started on a run, and had gone but a few rods when Alaric, catching his toe on a projecting root, was tripped up and fell heavily. With such force was he flung to the ground that for several minutes he was too sick and dizzy to rise. When he finally regained his feet, and expressed a belief that he could again run, it was too late. The boat's crew were already scattering through the woods, and one man detailed to search the point was coming directly towards the place where the boys were concealed. It seemed inevitable that they should be discovered, and Alaric, already giving himself up for lost, was beginning to see visions of the government prison on MacNeil's Island, when Bonny spied one avenue of escape that was still open to them. "Scrooch low!" he whispered, "and follow me as softly as you can." Alaric obeyed, and the young sailor began to move as rapidly as possible towards the beach. With inexcusable carelessness the lieutenant had left his boat hauled up on the shore without a man to guard her. Bonny noticed this, and also that the sloop's dinghy still lay where he had left it. If they could only reach the dinghy unobserved they would stand a much better chance of making an escape by water than by land. So the boys crept cautiously through the undergrowth without attracting the attention of their only near-by pursuer, until they reached the beach, where a cleared space of about one hundred feet intervened between them and their coveted goal, and this they must cross, exposed to the full view of any who might be looking that way. They paused for an instant, drew long breaths, and then made a dash into the open. Almost with the first sound of rattling pebbles beneath their feet came a yell from behind. The bluejacket had discovered them, and was leaping down the steep slope in hot pursuit. "Run, Rick! You've got to run!" panted Bonny. "Give me the bag." Snatching the canvas bag from Alaric's hand as he spoke, the active young fellow darted ahead and flung it into the dinghy. "Now shove!" he cried. "Shove, with all your might!" It was all they could do to move the boat, for the tide had fallen sufficiently to leave it hard aground, and with their first straining shove they only gained a couple of feet; the next put half her length in the water, and with a third effort she floated free. "Tumble in!" shouted Bonny, and Alaric obeyed literally, pitching head foremost across the thwarts with such violence that but for his comrade's hold on the opposite side the boat would surely have been capsized. With the water above his knees, Bonny gave a final shove that sent the boat a full rod from shore, and in turn tumbled aboard. He was none too soon; for at that moment the sailor reached the spot they had just left, and, rushing into the water, began to swim after them with splendid overhand strokes. Bonny snatched up the dinghy's single oar, and, seeing that they would be overtaken before he could get the boat under way, brandished it like a club, threatening to bring it down on the man's head if he came within reach. A single glance at the lad's resolute face convinced the swimmer that he was in dead earnest, and realizing his own helplessness, he wisely turned back. Then with a shout of derision Bonny began to scull the dinghy towards open water, while the sailor strove with unavailing efforts to launch the heavy yawl. Without troubling themselves any further about him, the lads turned their attention to the sloop, which they were now approaching. The two men left in charge had watched with great interest the scene just enacted so close to them, but in which, having no boat at their disposal, they were unable to participate. Now one of them shouted: "Come aboard here, you young villains! What do you mean by running off with government property?" "What do you mean by eating my breakfast?" replied Alaric, hungrily, as he noticed the men making a hearty meal off the food they had discovered in the sloop's galley. "Your breakfast, is it, son? So you belong to this craft, do you? Come aboard and get it, then." "Don't you wish we would?" retorted Bonny, jeeringly, as he stopped sculling and allowed the dinghy to drift just beyond reach from the sloop. "I say, though, you might toss us a couple of hardtack." "What? Feed you young pirates with rations that's just been seized by the government? Not much. I'm in the service, I am." Just then a bright object flashed from one of the little round cabin windows and fell in the dinghy. It was a box of sardines. Tins of potted meat, mushrooms, and other delicacies followed in quick succession. One or two fell in the water and were lost; but most of them reached their destination, and were deftly caught by Alaric, whose baseball experience was thus put to practical use. So before the bewildered guards fully realized what was taking place the dinghy was fairly well provisioned. At length one of them seemed to comprehend the situation, and sprang in front of the open port just in time to stop with his legs a flying tumbler of raspberry jam. As it broke and streamed down over his white duck trousers the boys in the dinghy shouted with laughter, and nearly rolled overboard in their irrepressible mirth. All at once there came a hoarse shout from the same cabin port. "Look astarn, ye lubbers! Look astarn!" So occupied had the lads been with the sloop that they had given no thought to what might be taking place on shore, but at this warning a startled glance in that direction filled them with dismay. Another sailor, attracted by the shouts on the beach, had returned to the assistance of his mate, and together they had succeeded in launching the yawl. Then, pulling very softly, they had slipped up on the unwary lads, until they were so close that one of them had quit rowing, and crept forward to the bow, where he crouched with an outstretched boat-hook, that in another second would be caught over the dinghy's sternboard. CHAPTER XVI ESCAPE OF THE FIRST MATE AND CREW The situation certainly looked hopeless for our lads, and the men on the sloop were already shouting derisively at them. Alaric caught another mental glimpse of the government prison, and even Bonny's stout heart experienced an instant of despair. He was still standing and holding the oar that he had used in sculling. Moved by a sudden impulse, and just as the extended boat-hook was dropping over the stern of the dinghy, he struck it a smart blow with his oar, and had the good fortune to send it whirling from the sailor's grasp. With a second quick motion the lad set his oar against the stem of the yawl, that was within four feet of him, and gave a vigorous shove. The slight headway of the heavy craft was checked, and the lighter dinghy forged ahead. "Oh, you will, will you, you young rascal?" cried the sailor, angrily, as he leaped back to his thwart, and bent to his oar with furious energy. His companion followed his example, and under the impetus of their powerful strokes the yawl sprang forward. At the same time Bonny, facing backward, and working his oar with both hands, was sculling so sturdily that the dinghy rocked from side to side until it seemed to Alaric that she must certainly capsize. She was making such splendid headway, though, that the much heavier yawl could not gain an inch. Its crew, unable to see the fugitive dinghy without turning their heads, and having no one to steer for them, were placed at a disadvantage that Bonny was quick to detect. Watching his opportunity, he caused his craft to swerve sharply to one side, and the yawl, holding her original course for some seconds before his manoeuvre was discovered, his lead was thus materially increased. Although not a very swift race, this novel chase proved as close and exciting a contest as had ever been seen on the Sound. The men on the sloop yelled with delight; and Alaric, filled with renewed hopes of escape on seeing that the distance between dinghy and yawl was not diminished, thrilled with excitement and shouted encouraging words to his comrade. In spite of all this, Bonny's strength and powers of endurance were so much less than those of the sturdy fellows in the yawl that he realized the impossibility of maintaining his position much longer. With strained muscles, and his breath coming in panting gasps, he glanced wildly about like a hunted animal in search of some avenue of escape. There was none other than that he was taking; and with a sinking heart he knew that, unless some miracle were interposed in their behalf, he and his companion must speedily be captured. But the miracle was interposed, and in the simplest possible manner; for just as Bonny was ready to drop his oar from exhaustion a shrill, long-drawn whistle sounded from the now distant beach. Its effect on the crew of the yawl was magical. They stopped rowing, looked at each other, and consulted. Then they gazed at the retreating dinghy and hesitated. They felt it to be their duty to continue the pursuit, but they also knew the penalty for disobeying an order from a superior, and that whistle was an unmistakable order for them to go back. The cutter's third lieutenant had returned from his expedition into the woods with three wretched Chinamen, whom, despite their eagerly produced certificates, he had seen fit to make prisoners. He was amazed to find the yawl gone from where he had left it, and the details of the chase in which it was engaged being hidden from him by the intervening sloop, he gave the whistle signal for its immediate return. As the crew of the yawl hesitated between duty and obedience, the peremptory whistle order was repeated louder and shriller than before. This decided the wavering sailors, and, reluctantly turning their boat, they began to pull towards shore, one of them shaking his fist at the boys as they went. As for the fugitives, they could hardly believe the evidence of their senses. Was the chase indeed given over, and were they free to go where they pleased? It seemed incredible. Just as they were on the point of being captured, too, for Bonny now confided to Alaric that he couldn't have held out at that pace one minute longer. As he said this the tired lad sat down for a short rest. Almost immediately he again sprang to his feet, and, thrusting his oar overboard, began to scull with one hand. "It won't do for us to be loafing here," he explained, "for I expect those fellows have been called back so that the whole crowd can chase us in the sloop." "Oh, I hope not," said Alaric; "I'm awfully tired of running away." "So am I," laughed Bonny--"tired in more ways than one; but if fellows bigger than we are will insist on chasing us, I don't see that there is anything for us to do but run. There! thank goodness we've rounded the point at last, and got out of sight of them for a while at any rate." "Where are you going now, and what do you propose to do next?" asked Alaric, who, fully realizing his own helplessness in this situation, was willing to leave the whole scheme of escape to his more experienced companion. "That's what I'm wondering. Of course it won't do to stay out here very long, for in less than fifteen minutes the sloop will be shoving her nose around that point. Nor it wouldn't be any use to try and get to Tacoma--at least, not yet a while--for that's where they'll be most likely to hunt for us. So I think we'd better cross the channel, turn our boat adrift, and make our way overland to Skookum John's camp. It isn't very sweet-smelling, and they don't feed you any too well--that is, not according to our ideas--but just because it is such a mean kind of a place no one will ever think of looking for us there. Besides, Skookum's a very decent sort of a chap, and he'll keep us posted on all that happens in the bay. So if you don't mind roughing it a bit--" "No, indeed," interrupted Alaric, eagerly. "I don't mind it at all. In fact, that is just what I want to do most of anything, and I've always wished I could live in a real Indian camp. The only Indians I ever saw were in the Wild West Show, in Paris." "Have you been to Paris?" asked Bonny, wonderingly. "Yes, of course, I was there for--I mean yes, I've been there. But, Bonny, what makes you think of turning this boat adrift? Wouldn't we find her useful?" "I suppose we might; but she isn't our boat, you know, and you wouldn't keep a boat that didn't belong to you just because it might prove useful, would you?" "No, certainly not," replied Alaric, rather surprised to have his companion take this view of the question. "I would try to hand her over to the rightful owner." "So would I," agreed Bonny, "if I knew who he was; but after what has just happened I don't know, and so I am going to turn her adrift in the hope that he will find her. Besides, it wouldn't be safe to leave her on shore, because she would show anybody who happened to be looking for us just where we had landed." "That's a much better reason than the other," said Alaric. During this conversation the dinghy had been urged steadily across the channel, and was now run up to a bold bank, where the boys disembarked. After removing Alaric's bag and the several cans of provisions so thoughtfully furnished them by Captain Duff, Bonny gave the boat a push out into the channel, down which the ebbing tide bore her, with many a twist and turn, towards the more open waters of the Sound. "To be left in this way in an unknown wilderness makes me feel as Cortez must have done when he burned his ships," reflected Alaric, as he watched the receding craft. "I don't think I ever heard about that," said Bonny, simply. "Did he do it for the insurance?" "Not exactly," laughed Alaric; "and yet in a certain way he did, too. I'll tell you all about it some time. Now, what are you going to do next?" "Climb that bluff, lie down under those trees while you eat something, and watch for the sloop," answered Bonny, as though his programme had all been arranged beforehand. They did this, and Alaric was so hungry that he made away with a whole box of sardines and a tin of deviled ham. He wondered a little if they would not make him ill, but did not worry much, for he was rapidly learning that while leading an out-of-door life one may eat with impunity many things that would kill one under ordinary conditions. He had just finished his ham, and was casting thoughtful glances towards a bottle of olives, when Bonny exclaimed, "There she is!" Sure enough, the sloop, with the cutter's yawl in tow, was slowly beating out past the point on the opposite side of the channel. She stood well over towards the western shore, and the tide so carried her down that when she tacked she was close under the bluff on which the boys, stretched at full length and peering through a fringe of tall grasses, watched her. She came so near that Alaric grew nervous, and was certain her crew were about to make a landing at that very spot. With a vision of MacNeil's Island always before him, he wanted to run from so dangerous a vicinity and hide in the forest depths; but Bonny assured him that the sloop would go about, and in another moment she did so, greatly to Alaric's relief. They could see that Captain Duff was still confined below, and they even heard one of the men sing out to the officer in command: "There it is now, sir, about two miles down the channel. I can see it plain." "Very good," answered the lieutenant; "keep your eye on it, and note if they make a landing. If they don't, we'll have them inside of half an hour." "Yes, you will," said Bonny, with a grin. As the sloop passed out of hearing the lads crept back from the edge of the bluff, gathered up their scanty belongings, and started through the forest towards the place where Bonny believed Skookum John's camp to be located. Although it lay somewhere down the coast in the same direction as that taken by the sloop, it never occurred to either of them that her new commander might stop there to make inquiries concerning them. Thus when, after an hour of hard travel, they came suddenly on the camp, located beside a tumbling stream in a rocky hollow that opened directly on the water, they were terrified at sight of the cutter's yawl lying in the mouth of the creek, and the revenue-officer standing on shore engaged in earnest conversation with Skookum John himself. As they hastily drew back into the forest shadows they saw the former wave his arm comprehensively towards the country lying back of the camp. Then he shook hands with the Indian and stepped into his boat. Just as it was about to shove off, a villanous cur, scenting the newcomers, darted towards their hiding-place, barking furiously. CHAPTER XVII SAVED BY A LITTLE SIWASH KID The attention of the departing revenue-officer being attracted by the barking dog, he paused, and glanced inquiringly in that direction. It was a critical moment for our lads, who knew not whether to run, which would be to reveal their presence at once, or to try and kill the dog, with probably the same result. Fortunately they were spared the necessity of a decision, for a little girl, whom up to this moment they had not noticed, though she was quietly at play with a family of clam-shell dolls directly in front of them, took the matter into her own hands. She had just arranged her score or so of dolls in _potlatch_ order, with the most favored near at hand, when the dog, charging that way, threatened to upset the whole company. To avert such a catastrophe the child snatched up a stick, and springing forward in defence of her property, began to belabor him with such a hearty will, and scream at him so shrilly, as to entirely divert his attention from his original object. Taking advantage of this diversion in their favor, the boys stole softly away, and after making a long détour through the forest, cautiously approached the coast a mile or more from Skookum John's camp, but where they could command a wide view of the Sound. Here they had the satisfaction of seeing the yawl, under sail, standing off shore, and a full half-mile from it. The sloop was not visible, nor was the cutter. "How could he have known just where to look for us?" asked Alaric, who had been greatly alarmed at the imminence of their recent danger. "He couldn't have known," replied Bonny. "It was only a good guess. I suppose he overhauled our boat, and, finding her empty, made up his mind that we had landed somewhere. Of course he couldn't tell on which shore to look, but, noticing John's camp, thought it would be a good idea to find out if the Indians had seen anything of us. Of course they hadn't, and now that he has left, it will be safe enough for us to go back." "Do you really think so? Isn't there any other place to which we can go?" asked Alaric, whose dread of being captured by the revenue-officers was so great as to render him overcautious. "Plenty of them, but no other that I know of within reach, where we could find food, fire to cook it, and a boat to carry us somewhere else; for there aren't any white settlers or any other Indians that I know of within miles of here." In spite of this assurance Alaric was so loath to venture that the boys spent several hours in discussing their situation and prospects before he finally consented to revisit Skookum John's camp. By this time the day was drawing to its close, and the lengthening forest shadows, flung far out over the placid waters of the Sound, were so suggestive of a night of darkness and hunger amid all sorts of possible terrors as to outweigh all other considerations. So the boys plunged into the twilight gloom of the thick-set trees, and began the uncertain task of retracing the way by which they had come. As neither of them was a woodsman, this soon proved more difficult than they had expected. The trees all looked alike, and they made so many turns to avoid prostrate trunks and masses of entangled branches that within half an hour they came to a halt, and each read in the troubled face of the other a confirmation of his own fears. They had certainly lost their way, and could not even tell in which direction lay the sea-shore they had so recently left. Bonny thought it was in front, while Alaric was equally certain that it still lay behind them. "If we could only make a fire," said the former, "I wouldn't mind so much staying right where we are till daylight; but I should hate to do so without one. Haven't you any matches?" "Not one," replied Alaric; "but I thought you always carried them." "So I do; but I used them all on that old lantern last night. I almost wish now I'd never invented that thing, and that they had caught us. They wouldn't have starved us, at any rate, and perhaps the prison isn't so very bad, after all." "I don't know about that," rejoined Alaric, stoutly. "To my mind a prison is the very worst thing, worse even than starving. After all, this doesn't seem to me so bad a fix as some from which I've already escaped. Going to China, for instance, or drifting alone at night in a small boat." "What do you mean by going to China?" asked Bonny, wonderingly. "Hark!" exclaimed the other, without answering this question. "Don't you hear something?" "Nothing but the wind up aloft." "Well, I do. I hear some sort of a moaning, and it sounds like a child." "Maybe it's a bear or a wolf, or something of that kind," suggested Bonny, whose notions concerning wild animals were rather vague. "Of course it may be," admitted Alaric; "but it sounds so human that we must go and find out, for if it is a child in distress we are bound to rescue it." "Yes, I suppose we are; only if it proves to be a bear, I wonder who will rescue us." Alaric had already set off in the direction of the moaning; and ere they had taken half a dozen steps Bonny also heard it plainly. Then they paused and shouted, hoping that if the sound came from a bear the animal would run away. As they could hear no evidences of a retreat, and as the moaning still continued, they again pushed on. It was now so dark that they could do little more than feel their way past trees, over logs, and through dense beds of ferns. All the while the sound by which they were guided grew more and more distinct, until it seemed to come from their very feet. At this moment the moaning ceased, as though the sufferer were listening. Then it was succeeded by a plaintive cry that went straight to Alaric's heart. He could dimly see the outline of a great log directly before him. Stooping beside it and groping among the ferns, his hands came in contact with something soft and warm that he lifted carefully. It was a little child, who uttered a sharp cry of mingled pain and terror at being picked up by a stranger. "Poor little thing!" exclaimed the boy. "I am afraid it is badly injured, and shouldn't be one bit surprised if it had broken a limb. I must try and find out so as not to hurt it unnecessarily." "Well," said Bonny, in a tragic tone, "they say troubles fly in flocks. I thought we were in a pretty bad fix before; but now we surely have run into difficulty. Whatever are we to do with a baby?" "Bonny!" cried Alaric, without answering this question, "I do believe it's the little Indian girl who drove away the dog, and something is the matter with one of her ankles." "Skookum John's little Siwash kid!" exclaimed Bonny, joyfully. "Then we can't be so very far from his camp. Now if we only knew in which direction it lay." As if in answer to this wish there came a cry, far-reaching and long drawn: "Nittitan! Nittitan! Ohee! Ohee!" For several hours Skookum John and his eldest son, Bah-die, had been searching the woods for two white lads whom the third lieutenant of the cutter claimed to have lost. He had promised the Indian a reward of twenty-five dollars if he would bring them to the cutter, and Skookum John had at once set forth with the idea of earning this money as speedily as possible. Little Nittitan, his youngest daughter, whom he loved above all others, noted his going, and after a while decided to follow him. When darkness put an end to the Indian's fruitless search and he returned to his camp, he found it in an uproar. Nittitan was missing, and no one could imagine what had become of her. For a moment the bereaved father was stunned. Then he prepared several torches, and, accompanied by Bah-die, set forth to find her. At the edge of the forest he raised a mighty cry that he hoped would reach the little one's ears. To his amazement it was answered by a cheery "Hello! Hello there, Skookum John!" "Ohee! Ohee!" shouted the Indian. "Here's your _tenas klootchman_" (little woman), came the voice from the forest, and the happy father knew that he who shouted had found the lost child and was bringing her to him. [Illustration: THE ARRIVAL AT SKOOKUM JOHN'S] On the outskirts of his camp he stood and waited, with blazing torch uplifted above his head, and an expectant group of women and half-grown children huddled behind him. He was greatly perplexed when a few minutes later a tall white lad whom he had never before seen emerged from the forest bearing the lost child in his arms. There was another behind him, though, who was promptly recognized, for Skookum John knew Bonny Brooks well, and instantly it came to him that these were the boys whom the revenue-man claimed to have lost. And they had found his little one. How glad he was that his own search for them had been unsuccessful! But this was not the time to be thinking of them. There was his own little Nittitan. He must have her in his arms and hold her close before he could feel that she was really safe. He stepped forward to take her, but the strange lad drew back, and Bonny cried out: "_Kloshe nanitsh, Skookum. Tenas klootchman la pee, hyas sick_," by which he conveyed the idea that the little woman had hurt her foot quite badly. Then he added, "It's all right, Rick. He understands that he must handle her gently." So Alaric relinquished his burden, and the swarthy father, rejoicing but anxious, bore the child to a rude hut of brush and cedar mats, the open front of which was faced by a brightly blazing fire. Here he laid her gently down on a soft bear-skin and knelt beside her. Alaric, who seemed to consider the child as still under his care, knelt on the opposite side and began to feel very carefully of one of the little ankles. He had not spent all his life in company with doctors without learning something of their trade, and after a brief examination he announced to Bonny that there were no broken bones, but merely a dislocation of the ankle-joint. "I don't know anything about it," said Bonny, "but I should think that would be just as bad." "No, indeed! A dislocation is not serious if promptly attended to. You explain to him that I am a sort of a doctor, and can make the child well in a few seconds if he will let me. Then I want him to hold her while I pull the joint into place." So Bonny explained that his friend was a _hyas doctin_ or great medicine-man who could make Nittitan well _hyak_ (quick), and the anxious father, having implicit faith in the white man's skill, consented to allow Alaric to make the attempt. The little one uttered a sharp cry, as, with a quick wrench, the dislocated bone was snapped into place, and Alaric, with flushed face, but very proud of what he had done, regained his feet. "Now," he said, "let them bathe the ankle in water as hot as the child can bear, and by to-morrow she'll be all right. And, Bonny, if you know how to ask for anything to eat, for goodness' sake take pity on the starving poor, and say it quick." CHAPTER XVIII LIFE IN SKOOKUM JOHN'S CAMP Skookum John, which in Chinook means "Strong John," was a Makah, or Neah Bay, Indian, whose home was at Cape Flattery, on the shore of the Pacific, and at the southern side of the entrance to the superb strait of Juan de Fuca. He was a _Tyhee_, or chief, among his people, for he was not only their biggest man, being a trifle over six feet tall, while very few of his tribe exceeded five feet nine inches in height, but he was the boldest and most successful hunter of whales among them. This alone would have given him high rank in the tribe, for to them the whales that frequent the warm waters of the coast are what buffalo were to the Indians of the great plains. The Makahs are fish-eaters, and while they catch and dry or smoke quantities of salmon, halibut, and cod, they esteem the whale more than all other denizens of the sea, because there is so much of him, because he is so good to eat, and because he furnishes them with the oil which they use on all their food, as we use butter, and which they trade for nearly every other necessity of their simple life. They hunt the whale in big open canoes hewn from logs of yellow-cedar, long-beaked and wonderfully carved, painted a dead black outside and bright red within. Formerly they used sails of cedar matting, but now they are made of heavy drilling or light duck. Eight men go in a whaling-canoe--one to steer, one to throw the slender harpoons, and six to wield the long paddles, the blades of which are wide at the upper end and gradually narrow to a point below, which is the very best way to make all paddles except those used for steering. In these canoes Skookum John and his people chase whales far out to sea, sometimes following them for days without returning to land. Every time they get near enough to one of the monsters they hurl into him a harpoon, to the head of which is attached, by a length of stout kelp, a float made of a whole seal-skin sewn up and inflated. The heavy drag of these floats eventually so tires the whale that he is at the mercy of his enemies, and they tow him ashore in triumph. The big Siwash, being an expert whaleman, had much oil to trade, and made frequent visits to Victoria for this purpose. Here, being an intelligent man and keenly noticing all that he saw, he learned much concerning the whites and their ways, besides picking up a fair knowledge of their language. So it happened that when the smugglers who proposed to operate in the upper Sound began to cast, about for some trustworthy person, who would also be free from suspicion, to look out for their interests in that section, and keep them posted as to the whereabouts of cutters, they very wisely selected Skookum John, and offered him inducements that he could not afford to refuse. He, of course, knew nothing of the laws they proposed to violate, nor did he care, for political economy had never been included in Skookum John's studies. So the Makah Tyhee closed his substantial house of hewn planks on Neah Bay, and, with all his wives and children--of whom Bah-die was the eldest and little Nittitan the youngest--and his dogs and canoes, and much whale oil, and many mats, he made the long journey to the place in which we find him. Here he established a summer camp of brush huts, and ostensibly went into the business of fishing for the Tacoma market. He had brought his big whaling-canoe, and the little paddling canoes in which his children were accustomed to brave the Pacific breakers apparently for the fun of being rolled over and over in the surf. Above all, he had brought a light sailing-canoe which was fashioned with such skill that its equal for speed and weatherly qualities had never been seen among canoes of its size on the coast. It was in this swift craft that he darted about the Sound at night to discover the movements of revenue-men, watch for signals from incoming smugglers, and flash in return the lights that told of safety or danger. Although not possessed of a high sense of honor, Skookum John was loyal to his employers, because it paid him to be so, and because no one had ever tempted him to be otherwise. At the same time he was not above performing a service for the other side, provided it would also pay, and so he did not hesitate to promise the cutter's third lieutenant that in return for twenty-five dollars he would use every effort to find and return to him the lost boys. As the lieutenant had not seen fit to mention the capture of the smuggling sloop that morning, or to say that the boys in question formed part of her crew, he had no idea that one of them was the lad with whom he had arranged his entire system of night signals. When he did learn of the blow that threatened to retire him from business, and the reason why the revenue-men were so desirous of finding the lost boys, he began to wish that he saw his way clear to the winning of that reward, for twenty-five dollars is a large sum to be made so easily. But the revenue-men wanted _two_ boys, and the only other one besides Bonny at present available, was the young medicine-man, the _hyas doctin_, who had not only found his dearly loved Nittitan in the dark _hyas stick_ (forest), but had so marvellously mended what he firmly believed to have been a broken leg. The old Siwash was not honorable, and he was very mercenary. At the same time, he was grateful, and would have suffered much to prevent harm from coming to the lad who had placed him under such obligations. He was also superstitious, and rather afraid of the powers of a _hyas doctin_. So he determined to make the boys as comfortable as possible, and keep them with him until he could communicate with the _Tyhee_ of the _piah-ship_ (steamer). If two lost boys were worth twenty-five dollars, one lost boy must be worth at least half that sum; while it was just possible that he might obtain the whole reward for one boy. In that case, Bonny must be handed over to those who were willing to pay for him; for business is business even among the Siwash, and charity begins at home all over the world. Of course, Skookum John did not use these expressions, for he was not acquainted with them, but what he thought meant exactly the same thing. In consequence of these reflections, all of which passed the Indian's mind in the space of a few seconds, Bonny had no time to make a request for food before the very best that the camp afforded was placed before them. There were small square chunks of whale-skin, as black and tough as the heel of a rubber boot. It was expected that these would be chewed for a moment, until the impossibility of masticating them was discovered, and that they would then be swallowed whole. After them came boiled fishes heads, of which the eyes were considered the chief delicacy, and these were followed by several kinds of dried and smoked fish, including salmon and halibut, besides bits of smoked whale looking like so many pieces of dried citron. All of these were to be dipped in hot whale oil before being eaten. Then came another course of fish--this time fresh and plain boiled--which the Indians ate with a liberal supply of whale oil. Then boiled potatoes which were also dipped in oil after each bite. The crowning glory of the feast was a small quantity of hard bread, which for a change was dipped in whale oil and eaten dripping, and with this was served a mixture of huckleberries and oil beaten to a paste. In regard to this liberal use of oil it must be said that Skookum John's whale oil was universally acknowledged to be the sweetest and most skilfully prepared to prevent rancidity of any in the Neah Bay village, and his family regarded it with the same pride that the proprietors of the best Orange County dairy do the finest products of their churn. It was therefore a great disappointment to them that Alaric did not appreciate it, and after trying a small quantity on a bit of potato, refused a further supply. He even seemed to prefer pâté-de-foie-gras, of which the boys had a single jar. This he opened in honor of the occasion, and with it to spread over his bread and potatoes, a liberal helping of the boiled fish, and an innumerable number of smoked halibut strips boiled after a manner taught him by Bonny, the millionaire's son made a supper that he declared was one of the very best he had ever eaten. In order that their new-found friends might not feel too badly over Alaric's refusal to partake more liberally of their whale oil, Bonny gave them to understand that it was not because he disliked it, but not being accustomed to rich food, he was afraid of making himself ill if he indulged in it too freely. At this meal the young sailor tasted both pâté-de-foie-gras and whale oil for the first time, and after carefully considering the merits of the two delicacies, declared that he could not tell which was the worse, and that as it would be just as difficult to learn to like one as the other, he thought he would devote his energies to the oil. After supper a rude shelter against the chill dampness of the night was constructed of small poles covered with a number of the useful bark mats, of which the Indian women of that coast make enormous quantities. A few armfuls of spruce-tips were cut and spread beneath it, a couple of mats were laid over these, two more were provided for covering, and Alaric's first camp bed was ready for him. Both lads were so dead tired that they needed no second invitation to fling themselves down on their sweet-scented couch, and were asleep almost instantly. As Skookum John and Bah-die had also been out all the night before, they were not long in following the example of their guests, and so within an hour after supper the whole camp was buried in a profound slumber. By earliest daylight of the next morning the older Indian was up and stirring about very softly so as not to awaken the strangers. He was about to make an effort to earn that twenty-five dollars, and believed that by careful management it might be his before noon. He planned to notify the commander of the cutter that while he could deliver one of the desired lads into his hands, the other had taken a canoe and gone to Tacoma, where he would no doubt be readily found. If the _Tyhee_ of the _piah-ship_ agreed to pay him the offered reward or even half of it for one lad, he would ask that a boat might be sent to the camp for him. In the meantime he would return first and invite both boys to go out fishing--Bonny in a canoe with him, and the other in a second canoe with Bah-die, who would be instructed to take his passenger out of sight somewhere up the coast. Then the cutter's boat would be allowed to overtake his canoe, and Bonny would be handed over to those who wanted him, without trouble. It was an admirably conceived plan, and the old Siwash chuckled over it as he softly launched his lightest canoe, stepped into it, and paddled swiftly away. CHAPTER XIX A TREACHEROUS INDIAN FROM NEAH BAY To his great disappointment, Skookum John could not find the cutter that he had heretofore so carefully avoided and was now so anxious to discover. She no longer lay where he had seen her the day before. He even went far enough into Commencement Bay to take a look at Tacoma harbor and identify the several steamers lying at its wharves. The cutter was not among them, and he made the long trip back to his own camp in a very disgusted frame of mind. At the same time he was determined to redouble his efforts to gain that reward, for with the prospect of losing it it began to assume an increased value. With one source of income cut off, it was clearly his duty to provide another. And how could he do this better than by securing the good-will of those on board the white _piah-ship_? There was no danger of them being captured and driven out of business, and if he could only get them into the habit of paying him for doing things, he could see no reason why they should not continue to do so indefinitely. The old Siwash had already persuaded himself that they would give him twenty-five dollars for one _tenas man_ (boy), and by the same course of reasoning he now wondered if they might not be induced to give him fifty dollars for two boys. It was possible, and certainly worth trying for. If they should consent, he could not see how, in justice to himself and his family, he could refuse to give up the _hyas doctin_ (Alaric) along with the _tenas shipman_ (young sailor). After all, the former had not placed him under such a very great obligation, for he would have found Nittitan himself in a very few minutes. As for curing her of her injury, the hurt could not have been anything serious or she would not have gone to sleep so quickly. Yes, for fifty dollars he would certainly deliver both of his young guests to the _shipman Tyhee_. He would be a fool to do otherwise, and Skookum John had never yet been called a fool. Besides, it was not likely that the boys would come to any harm on board the cutter, for the _Boston men_ (whites) were very good to those of their own tribe, never treating them cruelly, as they did the poor Siwash, whom they had even forbidden to kill and rob shipwrecked sailors found on their coast. Yes, indeed, both boys must be given up, and that fifty dollars reward received as quickly as possible. It was all a very rational process of reasoning, and one that even white people sometimes employ to convince themselves that a thing they want to do is the right thing to do, even though their consciences may assure them to the contrary. So the cunning old Indian, having persuaded himself that his meditated treachery was pure benevolence, reached his camp in good spirits in spite of his disappointment, and determined to make the stay of the boys so pleasant that they should offer no objection to remaining with him until the return of the cutter to those waters. It was a glorious morning, and the dimpled Sound was flooded with unclouded sunlight that even shot long golden shafts into the depths of its bordering forest. Myriads of fish were leaping from the sparkling water, cheerful voices sounded from the camp, and the smoke of burning cedar filled the air with its delicate perfume. The boys had been awake and out for an hour, and Alaric was fairly intoxicated with the glorious freedom of that wild life, of which this was his first taste. Already had he taken a swimming-lesson, and although in his ignorance he had recklessly plunged into water that would have drowned him had not Bonny and Bah-die pulled him out, he was confident that he had swum one stroke before going down. Upon Skookum John's return his guests sat down with him to a breakfast which their ravenous appetites enabled them to eat with a hearty enjoyment, though it consisted only of fish, fish, and yet more fish. "But it is such capital fish!" explained Alaric. "Isn't it?" replied Bonny, tearing with teeth and fingers at a great strip of smoked salmon. "And the oil isn't half bad, either." After they had finished eating, and their host had lighted his pipe, he told Bonny that his early morning trip had been taken out of his anxiety for their safety, and to discover the whereabouts of their enemies, the revenue-men. "_They mamook klatawa?_" (Have they gone away?) inquired Bonny. "_No; piah-ship mitlite Tacoma illahie_" (No; steamer stay in Tacoma). "_Shipman Tyhee cultus wau wau_" (The sailor chief made much worthless talk). "_Mesika wau wau Tyhee?_ (Did you talk to the captain?) inquired Bonny, anxiously. "_Ah ah, me wau wau no klap tenas man. Alta piah-ship kopet Tacoma illahie. Mesika mitlite Skookum John house._" By this sentence he conveyed to Bonny the idea that he had told the captain the boys were not to be found. At the same time he extended to them the hospitality of his camp for so long as the cutter should remain at Tacoma. When Bonny repeated this conversation to Alaric, the latter exclaimed: "Of course we would better stay here, where we are safe until the cutter goes away, even if it is a week from now. I hope it will be as long as that, for I think this camp is one of the jolliest places I ever struck." "All right," replied Bonny. "If you can stand it, I can." So the boys settled quietly down and waited for something to happen, though it seemed to Alaric as though something of interest and importance were happening nearly all the time. To begin with, they built themselves a brush hut under Bah-die's instruction, the steep-pitched roof of which would shed rain. Then they both took lessons from the same teacher in sailing and paddling a canoe. The supply of fish for the camp had to be replenished daily, and this duty devolved entirely upon the younger children, for Bah-die went always with his father to draw the big seine net, in which they caught fish for market. As the lads were anxious to earn their board, they sometimes went in the big boat, and sometimes in the small canoes with the children, by which means they learned all the different ways known to the Indians of catching fish. With all this, Alaric's swimming-lessons were not neglected for a single day, and he often took baths both morning and evening, so fascinated was he with the novel sport. In return for what Bah-die taught him, he undertook to train the young Siwash in the art of catching a baseball. The latter having watched him and Bonny pass the ball and catch it with perfect ease, one day held out his hands, as much as to say, "Here you go; give us a catch." Alaric, who held the ball at that moment, let drive a swift one straight at him. When Bah-die dropped it, and clapped his smarting hands to his sides with an expression of pained astonishment on his face, the white lad knew just how he felt. He could plainly recall the sensations of his own experience on that not-very-long-ago day in Golden Gate Park; and while he sympathized with Bah-die, he could not help exulting in the fact that he had discovered one boy of his own age more ignorant than he concerning an athletic sport. Then he set to work to show the young Siwash how to catch a ball just as Dave Carncross had shown him, and in so doing he experienced a genuine pleasure. He was growing to be like other boys, and the knowledge that this was so filled him with delight. Nearly every day Skookum John sailed over to Tacoma, ostensibly to carry his fish, but really to discover whether or not the cutter had returned, and each night he came back glum with disappointment. Bonny often asked to be allowed to go to the city with him, as he was impatient to be again at work; but the Indian invariably put him off on the plea that if the cutter-men discovered one whom they were so anxious to capture in his canoe, they would punish him for having afforded the fugitive a shelter. The young sailor could not understand why the cutter remained so long in one place, for he had never known her to do such a thing before, and many a talk did he and Alaric have on the subject. "They must be waiting in the hope of catching us," Alaric would say, "and the mere fact that they are so anxious to find us shows how important it is for us to keep out of the way." So time wore on until our lads had spent two full weeks in the Siwash camp, and had become heartily sick of it. To be sure, Alaric had grown brown and rugged, besides becoming almost an adept in the several arts he had undertaken to master. His hands were no longer white, and their palms were covered with calloused spots instead of blisters. He was now a fair swimmer, could paddle a canoe with some skill, and understood its management under sail. He knew not only how to catch fish, but how to detach them from the hook. He could catch a baseball nearly as well as Dave Carncross himself, besides being able to throw one with swiftness and precision. He was learning to cook certain things, mostly of a fishy nature, in a rude way, and had gone through several trying experiences in trying to wash his own underclothing. Having broken his comb into half a dozen pieces by sitting down on it, he had allowed Bonny to cut his hair as short as possible with a pair of scissors borrowed from one of the squaws. The result, while wholly satisfactory to Alaric, who fortunately had no mirror in which to see himself, was so unique that Bonny was impelled to frequent laughter without apparent cause. Two things, however, distressed Alaric greatly, and one was his clothing, which was not only ragged, but soiled beyond anything he had ever dreamed of wearing. His canvas shoes, from frequent soakings and much walking on rocks, were so broken that they nearly dropped from his feet. His woollen trousers were shrunken and bagged at the knees, while his blue sweater, besides being torn, had faded to a brownish red. With all this he was comforted by the reflection that he still had a good suit in reserve that he could wear whenever they should be free to go to the city. His other great trial was the food of that Siwash camp. He had never been particularly fond of fish, and now, after eating it alone three times a day for two weeks, the very thought of fish made him ill. He loathed it so that it seemed to him he would almost rather go to prison, with a chance of getting something else to eat, than to remain any longer on a fish diet. From both these trials Bonny suffered nearly as much as his companion. One day when the boys had just decided that they could not stand this sort of thing any longer, they were out fishing in the swift-sailing canoe with Bah-die, Skookum John having gone in the larger boat to Tacoma. While they gloomily pursued their now distasteful employment a sail-boat containing two white men ran alongside to obtain bait. As these were the first of their own race with whom the boys had found an opportunity to talk since coming to that place, Bonny began to ply them with questions. Among others he asked: "What is the revenue-cutter doing at Tacoma all this time? Has she broken down?" "She isn't there," replied one of the men. "Isn't there?" repeated Bonny, incredulously. "No; nor hasn't been for upwards of two weeks. We are expecting her back every day, though." Then the men sailed away, leaving our lads to stare at each other in speechless amazement. CHAPTER XX AN EXCITING RACE FOR LIBERTY "What do you suppose it all means?" asked Alaric, as the boat containing the two white men sailed away. "If it is true, it means that somebody has been fooling us, and you know who he is as well as I do," replied Bonny, who did not care to mention names within Bah-die's hearing. "If I'm not very much mistaken, it means also that he is trying to hold on to us until the cutter comes back. You know they offered him a reward to find us." "Only twenty-five dollars," interposed Alaric, who could not imagine anybody committing an act of treachery for so small a sum. "That would be a good deal to some people. I don't know but what it would be to me just now." "If I had once thought he was after the money," continued Alaric, "I would have offered him twice as much to deal squarely with us." "Would you?" asked Bonny, with a queer little smile, for his comrade's remarks concerning money struck him as very absurd. "Where would you have got it?" "I meant, of course, if I had it," replied the other, flushing, and wondering at his own stupidity. "But what do you think we ought to do now?" "Sail over to Tacoma as quick as we can, and see whether the cutter is there or not. When we find that out we'll see what is to be done next." "But we may meet John on the way." "I don't care. That's a good idea, though. I've been wondering how we should get our friend here to agree to the plan." Then turning to Bah-die, and speaking in Chinook, Bonny suggested that as the fishing was not very good and there was a fine breeze for sailing, they should run out into the Sound and meet the big canoe on its way back from Tacoma, to which plan the young Siwash unsuspectingly agreed. Half an hour later the swift canoe was dashing across the open Sound before a rattling breeze that heeled her down until her lee gunwale was awash, though her three occupants were perched high on the weather side. The city was dimly visible in the distance ahead, and near at hand the big canoe which they were ostensibly going to meet was rapidly approaching. Bonny was steering, and Bah-die held the main-sheet, while the jib-sheets were intrusted to Alaric. Skookum John had already recognized them, and as they came abreast of him motioned to them to put about; but Bonny, affecting not to understand, resolutely maintained his course. They were well past the other craft, which was coming about as though to follow them, before Bah-die realized that anything was wrong. Then obeying an angry order shouted to him by his father, he let go the main-sheet without warning, causing the canoe to right so violently as to very nearly fling her passengers overboard, and attempted to wrest the steering-oar from Bonny's hand. Seeing this, and with the desperate feeling of an escaped prisoner who sees himself about to be recaptured, Alaric sprang aft, seized the young Indian by the legs, and with a sudden output of all his recently acquired strength, pitched him headlong into the sea. Then catching the main-sheet, he trimmed it in. Down heeled the canoe until it seemed as though she certainly must capsize; but Alaric, looking very pale and determined, held fast to the straining rope, and would not yield an inch. It was well that he had learned this lesson, and was possessed of the courage to apply it, for the canoe did not gather headway an instant too soon. Bah-die, emerging from his plunge furious with rage, was swimming towards her, and made a frantic attempt to grasp the gunwale as she slipped away. His clutching fingers only missed it by the fraction of an inch, and before he could make another effort the quick-moving craft was beyond his reach. He was too wise to attempt a pursuit, and turned, instead, to meet the big canoe, which was approaching him. "That was a mighty fine thing to do, Rick Dale!" cried Bonny, admiringly, "and but for you we should be on our way back to that hateful camp at this very moment. Of course they may catch us yet with that big boat, but we've got a show and must make the most of it. So throw your weight as far as you can out to windward, and don't ease off that sheet unless you see solid water pouring in over the gunnel." "All right," replied Alaric, shortly, almost too excited for words. Both lads realized that after what had just taken place it would be nearly as unpleasant to fall into the hands of Skookum John as into those of the revenue-men themselves, and both were determined that this should not happen if they could prevent it. But could they? Fast as they were sailing, it seemed to Alaric as though the big canoe rushing after them was sailing faster. Bonny dared not take his attention from the steering long enough to even cast a glance behind. Managing the canoe was now more difficult than before, because they had lost one hundred and fifty pounds of live ballast. When Alaric looked at the water flashing by them it seemed as though he had never moved so fast in his life, while a glance at the big boat astern almost persuaded him that they were creeping at a snail's pace. It was certain that the long, wicked-looking beak of the pursuing craft was drawing nearer. Finally it was so close at hand that he could distinguish the old Indian's scowling features and the expression of triumph on Bah-die's face. The lad's heart grew heavy within him, for the city wharves were still far away, and with things as they were the chase was certain to be ended before they could be reached. All at once an exclamation from Bonny directed his attention to another craft coming up the Sound and bearing down on them as though to take part in the race. It was a powerful sloop-yacht standing towards the city from the club-house on Maury Island, and its crew were greatly interested in the brush between the two canoes. Either by design or accident, the yacht, which was to windward of the chase, stood so close to the big canoe as to completely blanket her, and so take the wind from her sails that she almost lost headway. Then, as though to atone for her error, the yacht bore away so as to run between pursuer and pursued, and pass to leeward of the smaller canoe. As the beautiful craft swept by our lads with a flash of rushing waters, glinting copper, and snowy sails, a cheery voice rang out: "Well done, plucky boys! Stick to it, and you'll win yet!" Alaric could not see the speaker, because of the sail between them, but the tones were so startlingly familiar that for a moment he imagined the voice to belong to the stranger who had talked with him on the wharf at Victoria, and whom he now knew for a revenue-officer. If that were the case, they were indeed hopelessly surrounded by peril. He was about to confide his fears to Bonny, when like a flash it came to him that the voice was that of Dave Carncross, whom he had not seen since that memorable day in Golden Gate Park. Although he had no desire to meet this friend of the ball-field under the present circumstances, he was greatly relieved to find his first suspicion groundless, and again directed his attention to the big canoe, which, although she had lost much distance, was again rushing after them. The boy now noticed for the first time, not more than half a mile astern of her, a white steamer with a dense column of smoke pouring from her yellow funnel, and evidently bound for the same port with themselves. Soon afterwards they had passed the smeltery, saw-mills, and lumber-loading vessels of the old town, and were approaching the cluster of steamships lying at the wharves of the Northern Pacific Railway, which here finds its western terminus. Off these the yacht had already dropped her jib and come to anchor. The big canoe was again overhauling them, and looked as though she might overtake them, after all. A boat from the yacht was making towards the wharves, and Bonny, believing that it would find a landing-place, slightly altered his course so as to follow the same direction. All at once Alaric, who was again gazing nervously astern, cried out: "Look at that steamer! I do believe it is going to run down the big canoe." Bonny glanced hastily over his shoulder, and uttered an exclamation of dismay. "Great Scott! It's the cutter," he gasped. "And they are right on top of us. Now we are in for it." "They are speaking to John, and he is pointing to us," said Alaric. "Never mind them now," said Bonny. "Ease off your sheet a bit, and 'tend strictly to business. We've still a chance, and can't afford to make any mistakes." A few minutes later, just as a yawl was putting off from the cutter's side, the small canoe rounded the end of a wharf and came upon a landing-stage. On it the yacht's boat had just deposited a couple of passengers, who, with bags in their hands, were hastening up a flight of steps. "Here, you!" cried Bonny to one of the yacht's crew who stood on the float, "look out for this canoe a minute. We've got to overtake those gentlemen. Come on, Rick." Without waiting to see whether this order would be obeyed, the boys ran up the flight of steps and dashed away down the long wharf. They had no idea of where they should go, and were only intent on finding some hiding-place from the pursuers, whom they believed to be already on their trail. As they were passing a great ocean steamer whose decks were crowded with passengers, and which was evidently about to depart, a carriage drew up in front of them, so close that they narrowly escaped being run over. As its door was flung open a voice cried out: "Here, boys! Get these traps aboard the steamer. Quick!" With this a gentleman sprang out and thrust a couple of bags, a travelling-rug, and a gun-case into their hands. A lady with a little boy followed him. He snatched up the child, and the whole party ran up the gang-plank of the steamer as it was about to be hauled ashore. Our lads had accepted this chance to board the steamer without hesitation, and now ran ahead of the others. The clerk at the inner end of the gang-plank allowed them to pass, thinking, of course, that they would deposit their burdens on deck and immediately return to the wharf. With an instinct born of long familiarity with ocean steamers, Alaric made his way through the throng of passengers to the main saloon, and Bonny followed him closely. Here they placed their burdens on a table, and, with Alaric still in the lead, disappeared through a door on the opposite side. Two minutes later the great ship began to move slowly from the wharf, and our lads, from a snug nook on the lower deck, watched with much perturbation a revenue-officer, who had evidently just landed from the cutter, come hurrying down the wharf. CHAPTER XXI A CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY The revenue-cutter whose appearance caused Alaric and Bonny so much anxiety had, indeed, been absent from Tacoma for two weeks, as the man in the sail-boat told them. On their first night in the Siwash camp she had gone to Port Townsend to turn over the captured smuggler _Fancy_ to the collector at that place. Knowing how important the testimony of her crew would be during the proceedings against her, the commander of the cutter intended to return to the upper Sound and to institute a thorough search for them the very next day. Before he could carry out this plan news was received that an American ship was ashore near Cape Flattery, one hundred miles away in the opposite direction, and the cutter was despatched to her assistance. Although the task of saving the ship was successfully accomplished, and she was finally pulled off the reef on which she had struck, it was nearly two weeks before the cutter was again at liberty to devote her attention to smugglers. With only a slight hope of finding those whom he so greatly wanted as witnesses, but thinking he might possibly gain some information concerning them from Skookum John, the commander of the cutter headed his vessel up the Sound, steamed through Colvos Passage, and sent his third lieutenant ashore in the yawl to make inquiries at the Siwash camp. This officer found only women and children at home, but learned that the owner of the camp had gone to Tacoma. As he was about to depart without having discovered anything concerning those of whom he was in search, curiosity prompted him to glance into a hut that appeared newer and much neater than the others. Here, to his amazement and great satisfaction, the first object that caught his eye was the well-remembered canvas dunnage-bag that he had seen in Victoria, and which still bore the name "Philip Ryder" on its dingy surface. "Ho, ho! Master Ryder! So we are on your trail at last, are we?" soliloquized the officer. "This is a clew of which we must not lose sight, and so I guess I'll just take it along and hold on to it until we can return it to you in person." Thus it happened that Alaric's bag was carried aboard the cutter, where its contents excited a great deal of curiosity, and that vessel was headed towards Tacoma in the hope of finding the lads, who were supposed to be with Skookum John. The big canoe was discovered when in the very act of going about and standing back towards the city, as though to escape from the approaching cutter, and a full head of steam was instantly crowded on in pursuit. Great was the disappointment when, on overtaking her, she was found to contain only Indians. These, however, eagerly directed attention to a smaller canoe ahead, in which could be distinguished two figures, apparently those of white men, and the cutter renewed her chase. Before she could overtake this second craft it was lost to sight behind a wharf, and a lieutenant was hastily sent ashore in a boat to trace its occupants. He found the empty canoe in charge of a yacht sailor, who said that those who had come in her were somewhere up on the wharf, and without waiting for further particulars the officer followed after them. When he reached the group of spectators assembled to witness the departure of the great steamer that was just moving out, he asked one of them if he had seen two persons running that way within a minute. One of them, whom he mentioned as being the younger, he described as being a tall, gentlemanly appearing and neatly dressed lad, while the other, he said, was a sailor. It must be remembered that while the lieutenant had noted Alaric's appearance very closely when in Victoria, he had never seen Bonny's face, and did not even discover whether he had belonged to the sloop or not. In fact, he afterwards had reason to believe that the youth whom he saw with Alaric at that time could not have been mate of the _Fancy_, for, to save their own credit, the sailors whom the lads eluded on the morning of the sloop's capture described him as a fellow of great size and unusual strength. Now the gentleman of whom he made inquiries answered that he had seen a number of persons running just as the ship's moorings were cast off. "There were a couple of young chaps," he said, "very ragged and dirty-looking, who ran aboard the last thing, as if afraid of being left; but I didn't see them come off again, and I expect they belong to the ship. Then there was another couple who seemed in a great hurry, and ran shouting after a carriage that was just starting up-town. They stopped it, got in, and drove off. One of them was, as you say, a very gentlemanly appearing lad, and the other was so evidently a sailor that I expect they're the two you are looking for." "I shouldn't wonder if they were," replied the officer, delighted at having thus quickly discovered the trail. "Did you happen to hear them give the driver any directions?" "Yes. The young chap said, 'Hotel Tacoma.'" Thanking the gentleman for his information, the lieutenant hurried away, boarded an up-town trolley-car, and a few minutes later stood in the office of the great hotel scanning its register. A single glance was sufficient, for the two last names on the page, so recently entered that the ink was hardly dry, assured him that his search was successful. They were both in the same handwriting, and read---- PHILIP RYDER, _Alaska_. JALAP COOMBS, " "Pretty smart dodge," chuckled the lieutenant, as he walked away, "to hail from such an indefinite place as Alaska. This Philip Ryder is certainly a sharp chap. It is plain enough now that he left that bag in the Siwash camp as a blind to throw us off the track. What a pile of money those smugglers must make, though. Here is one of them, apparently a simple deck-hand, who buys the choicest groceries to be had in Victoria, bathes in cologne-water, throws away a suit of clothes so handsome that I should be only too glad to wear them myself, and now puts up at the swellest hotel in the city. It certainly is a great business." While thinking these things the lieutenant was hurrying back towards the cutter, to make report of what he had discovered to his superior officer. After listening to all he had to say, that gentleman decided to continue the investigation himself; and an hour later he, with his third lieutenant, both out of uniform, appeared at the hotel, followed by a sailor bearing a canvas dunnage-bag. Going into one of the small writing-rooms, which happened to be unoccupied, the commander wrote a name on a plain card and sent it up to Mr. Philip Ryder, with a request that the gentleman would consent to see him on a matter of business. Then, with the canvas bag on the floor beside him, he waited alone, having desired the lieutenant to keep out of sight until sent for. Inside of three minutes a bell-boy ushered into the room a well-dressed, squarely built youth, with a resolute face and honest blue eyes that looked straight into those of the commander. "Mr. Ellery, I believe," he said, glancing at the card still held in his hand. The commander bowed slightly, and then asked, "Is your name Philip Ryder?" "It is." "Is this your property?" Here the commander indicated the canvas bag that lay with its painted name uppermost. The youth stepped forward to get a better view of the article in question, started as though surprised, and then answered, "Yes, sir, I believe it is; but I must confess a great curiosity as to how it came here." "Why so?" "Because when I last heard of it it was on board a vessel that had just been seized by a revenue-cutter." "Exactly; and that vessel was seized for smuggling by a cutter under my command." "Pardon me, sir, but I think you are mistaken," objected Phil, "for I am intimately acquainted with the commander of the cutter in question, while you are a stranger to me." "I beg leave to say that I think I know what I am talking about," retorted the other, stiffly, "and I may as well inform you at once that I not only was, but am still, in command of the cutter that seized your smuggling craft some two weeks ago. I am here for the purpose of causing the arrest and detention of yourself and the mate of that vessel, both of whom will be wanted as witnesses for the government during the forthcoming proceedings to be instituted against Captain Duff." "And I, sir," replied Phil, hotly, "beg leave to say that you don't know any more of what you are talking about than I do. Although I have sailed with Captain Duff and know him well, I am not a smuggler, and never have been. Moreover, I can summon witnesses this very minute who will identify me and testify as to my character." With this Phil stepped to the bell, and rang it so violently that half a dozen bell-boys came tumbling into the room at once. "Go to No. 20," said the youth to one of these, "and ask the gentleman who is there to kindly step down here for a minute." "And you, boy!" thundered the commander to another, his face flushed with anger, "find the gentleman who came here with me, and inform him that I desire his presence immediately." The lieutenant was the first to arrive. "Is this your Philip Ryder?" demanded the commander, at the same time pointing to the youth who stood opposite. "No, sir, he is not," replied the lieutenant, promptly. "Who is he, then?" asked the other, staggered by this answer. "Begging the gentleman's pardon, this _is_ Mr. Philip Ryder, as I can swear," interrupted a fourth individual, who had just entered. "Hello, Carncross! You here? And you know this young man?" "Certainly I do, sir. I met his father, Mr. John Ryder--the famous mining expert, you know--at my father's house in San Francisco last winter, and came to call on him here as soon as I heard of his arrival in Tacoma. He and his son arrived on to-day's steamer from Alaska, where Phil Ryder has just completed a most notable exploration on snow-shoes and sledges of the Yukon Valley. By-the-way, he is also a friend of your old friend Captain Matthews." "What! Not Israel Matthews, of the _Phoca_? You don't say so! Mr. Ryder, allow me to shake hands with you, and offer my humble apologies for this absurd mistake." With a general hand-shaking and exchange of introductions, they all sat down for an hour of mutual explanations. During these it was discovered that Phil and Jalap Coombs had remained at the wharf some time after the others of their party left, to look after their numerous pieces of baggage, and so did not come up to the hotel until just as the steamer that had brought them was departing for Seattle. At the end of an hour the revenue-officers were as puzzled as ever over the disappearance of the present owner of the famous Philip Ryder bag and his companion. But suddenly Carncross exclaimed: "I think I know what became of them! I remember now seeing the two chaps who came in that canoe run down the wharf and board the Alaska steamer just as she was starting for Seattle, and I'll warrant you that's where they are at this minute. Tough-looking young customers they were, too." "In that case," said the commander, rising, "I must be getting under way for Seattle as quickly as possible. I only wish that I might have you both down to dine with me this evening; but business before pleasure. And so, hoping for a future opportunity of extending the hospitality of the ship, I will wish you both a very good night." CHAPTER XXII TWO SHORT BUT EXCITING VOYAGES As the Alaska steamer on which Alaric and Bonny so unexpectedly took passage moved from the Tacoma wharf, and they lost sight of the officer who had so nearly overtaken them, they congratulated each other over their escape. "I tell you, Rick Dale, that was a close shave," said Bonny. "Wasn't it, though! But it seems to me, Bonny, that smuggling must be one of the worst crimes a person can commit, judging from the anxiety those fellows show to capture us. I knew it was bad, but I hadn't any idea it was so serious." "It does look as if we were wanted," admitted Bonny; "but we've thrown 'em off the track this time, so they won't bother us any more. Didn't we do it neatly?" "Yes, we certainly did. But where do you suppose we are going now?" "Haven't the least idea, and don't care. Maybe to China, maybe to San Francisco, and maybe to Alaska. Yes, I think this must be an Alaska ship, for I remember now seeing a big Eskimo dog taken ashore just as we came aboard, and Alaska is where they come from. If she is bound for Alaska, though, she'll stop at Port Townsend and Victoria on the way, and we must lie low until after we pass the first. It would never do to be put off there, for that's headquarters for the whole revenue business, and they'd scoop us in quick enough. I wouldn't mind Victoria so very much, though." "I should," objected Alaric, who feared that the Sonntaggs might have telegraphed from Japan to have him apprehended and forwarded to them. "I don't like Victoria, and neither do I want to go to any of the places you mentioned." "Very well," laughed Bonny, who, with a sense of freedom, had regained all his light-heartedness. "Just send word to the captain where you want to go, and he'll probably be pleased to take you there." For an hour or so longer the boys discussed their plans and prospects. Then, as it was growing dark and they were becoming very hungry, Bonny proposed to skirmish around and see what the chances were for obtaining something to eat. Bidding Alaric remain in hiding until his return, the young sailor sallied forth. In a moment he reappeared with the news that the ship was putting in at Seattle and was already close to the wharf. "That's good," said Alaric. "Seattle is much better for us than Port Townsend, or Victoria, San Francisco, China, or even Alaska. So I move we go ashore and try our luck here." This was what they were obliged to do, whether or no, for the ship was hardly moored before they were discovered by one of the mates. Berating them for a couple of rascally young stowaways, this man chased them down the gang-plank with terrific threats of what he would do if he ever caught them on the ship again. "Whew-w!" gasped Alaric, after they had run to a safe distance. "It seems to me that working your way through the world consists mainly in being chased by people who are bigger and stronger than you are." "Yes," remarked Bonny, philosophically. "I've noticed that. It's the same way with sparrows and dogs too; the strong ones are always picking or growling at those that are weaker. Being chased, though, is better than being caught, and we haven't been that yet. Now let's go up-town and see about a hotel." This mention of a hotel reminded Alaric of his previous visit to Seattle and the great "Rainier," away up at the hill-side, in which he had spent the day. At that time he had not paid any more attention to it than to any other of the hundreds of hotels in which he had been a guest, but now a thought of the dinner being served in its brilliantly lighted dining-room caused him to realize how very hungry he was more than anything else could have done. But Rainier dinners were not for poor boys, and with a regretful sigh he followed his comrade in another direction. It is hard to say how our lads expected to obtain the meal for which they longed; but whatever hopes they had were doomed to disappointment, for after wandering about the streets a couple of hours their hunger was as unsatisfied as ever. Finally Bonny asked a policeman if there was not some place in all that great city where a hungry boy without one cent in his pocket could get something to eat. "There's a free soup-kitchen on Yessler Avenue," answered the man, "but it's closed for the night now, and you can't get anything there before seven o'clock to-morrow morning. But what do strong young fellows like you want of soup-kitchens? Why ain't ye at work, earning an honest living? Tramps is no good, anyway, and if you don't chase yourselves out of this I'll run ye in. See?" Seven o'clock to-morrow morning! How could they wait? And yet there seemed nothing else to be done. Slowly and despondently the lads made their way back to the wharf on which they had landed, for even that seemed a better place in which to pass the long night hours than the unfriendly streets. They eluded the vigilance of a night watchman, and gained the shelter of a pile of hay bales, on which they stretched themselves wearily. "I'd almost rather be in China, or even a well-fed smuggler," announced Alaric. "Wouldn't I?" responded Bonny; "and won't I if ever I get another chance? I don't believe anything would seem wrong to a fellow as hungry as I am, if it only brought him something to eat. Even chewing hay is some comfort." At length they fell into an uneasy sleep, from which they were awakened a few hours later by the sound of voices close at hand. In one of these they instantly, and with sinking hearts, recognized that of their relentless pursuer, the revenue-cutter's third lieutenant. The other person was evidently answering a question, for he was saying: "Yes, sir, I seen a couple of young rascals such as you describe chased off the Alaska boat by the mate. They started up-town, but I make no doubt they'll be back here sooner or later. Such as them is always hanging around the docks." "If they do come around, and you can catch them, just hold on to them, for they are wanted by the government, and there is a reward offered for them," said the officer. "Aye, aye, sir. I'll nab 'em for ye if they comes this way again," was the answer; and then both speakers moved out of hearing towards the upper end of the wharf. The poor, hunted lads, trembling at the narrowness of their escape, peered after the retreating forms. Then Bonny's attention was attracted to the lights of a white side-wheel steamer lying at the outer end of the wharf that seemed on the point of departure. "Look here, Rick," he whispered, "this place is growing too hot for us, and we've got to get out of it. There's the _City of Kingston_, and she is going to Victoria or Tacoma, I don't know which. Either of them would be better for us than Seattle just now, though, because in Victoria the revenue folks couldn't touch us, and in Tacoma they won't be looking for us. What do you say? Shall we try for a passage on her?" "Yes," replied Alaric. "I suppose so, for it is certain that we must get away from here somehow. I hope she won't take us to Victoria, though." So the young fugitives stole down the wharf in darkest shadows to where a force of men were busily at work by lantern-light, trucking freight up a broad gang-plank from the steamer's lower deck, and at the same time carrying aboard the small quantity that was to go somewhere else. Among this was a lot of household goods. "Now," whispered Bonny, "we've got to be quick, for there isn't much more to be done. I'll run aboard with one of these trucks, while you grab a chair or something from that pile of stuff and follow after. Each of us must hide on his own hook in the first place he comes to, and if we don't find a chance to get together on the trip, we'll meet on the wharf at the first place she stops. Sabe?" "Yes. Go ahead." So Bonny boldly picked up one of several idle trucks that lay near by, and rattled it down the gang-plank with every appearance of bustling activity. As he trundled it aft along the dimly lighted deck he was greeted by a gruff voice from the darkness with: "Get that truck out of here. Didn't you hear me say I didn't need any more of 'em?" "Aye, aye, sir," answered the pretended stevedore, facing promptly about and wheeling his truck away. In a place where there seemed to be no one looking he set it gently down, and walked forward as boldly as though executing some order just received. Away up in the bows of the steamer he found a great coil of rope, in which he snuggled down like a bird in a nest. Alaric was not quite so fortunate. He watched Bonny disappear with his truck in the dark interior of the boat, and then, taking a mattress from the pile of household goods, marched aboard with it in his arms. Walking aft with his awkward burden, he stumbled across the truck that Bonny had left in the passage and sprawled at full length. As luck would have it, the mattress, loosed from his grasp, struck the mate who was coming that way and nearly knocked him down. [Illustration: "BONNY SEIZED A TRUCK, AND ALARIC A MATTRESS"] Springing furiously forward, the man aimed a kick at the prostrate lad, called him a clumsy lunkhead, ordered him to wheel the truck up on to the wharf, and threatened to discharge him on the spot without one cent of wages as a cure for his blooming awkwardness. There was nothing for it but to return to the wharf with the truck. Then, to his dismay, Alaric found that there was no freight left to be taken on board. The pile of household goods had disappeared. As he stood for a moment irresolute, another gruff voice sang out to him to cast off the breast line and get aboard in a hurry if he didn't want to get left. Alaric had no more idea than the man in the moon of what a breast line was; but he knew what to cast off a line meant, and, making a blind guess, fortunately did the right thing. By this time the gang-plank was hauled in, and obeying the order "Jump! you chuckle-head!" he took a flying leap that landed him on all fours on the deck, amid loud guffaws of laughter from those who happened to be near. As he regained his feet, the lad, still mistaken for one of several new hands who had been shipped the evening before, was ordered aft to help haul in the stern line by which the boat was now swinging. He went in the direction indicated, but managed to slip away before reaching the place of the stern line and hide among the very household goods he had helped bring aboard. Here, after lying for a while pondering over the strange fortunes by which every step of his pathway into the world of active life seemed to be beset, he fell asleep. When he awoke it was broad daylight, the sun was shining, and a house seemed tumbling about his ears. It was only the goods among which he had hidden being pulled down by the crew, who were discharging cargo. As the lad scrambled from beneath the very mattress he had brought aboard, and which had now fallen on top of him, he was greeted by an angry roar from the gruff voice of the night before. "Shirking, are ye, you lazy young hound? I'll teach ye!" Picking up a bit of rope and whirling it about his head, the mate sprang towards the lad, who darted away in terror; nor did he stop until he found himself clear of the boat and running up a long wharf, without an idea of where he was or whither he was going. CHAPTER XXIII ALARIC TODD'S DARKEST HOUR "Hello, Rick Dale! Hold on!" was the hail that caused Alaric to halt in his flight from the most recent of the chasings that were becoming so common a feature of his life. It was Bonny who called, and who now came running up to him. "Where have you been all this time?" he asked. "I've waited and watched for you ever since we got in, a good two hours ago, and was getting mighty uneasy for fear you'd fallen overboard or got left at Seattle, or something. You see, I feel in a way responsible for you, seeing that I got you into all this mess." "That's queer," said Alaric, with a faint smile, and sitting down wearily on a huge anchor that lay beside one of the warehouses, "for I've been thinking that all your troubles were owing to me. I'm awfully sorry, though, I kept you waiting, but I suppose I must have been asleep." "You had better luck than I did, then," growled Bonny, seating himself beside his friend, "for I haven't had a wink of sleep since we left Seattle. I was just getting into a doze when a miserable deck-hand swashed a bucket of water over me. Then they found me out, and set me to work cleaning decks and polishing brass. They kept me at it every minute until we got here, and then fired me ashore." "Did they give you any breakfast?" inquired Alaric, with an interest that betrayed the tendency of his thoughts. "Not much, they didn't. Have you had anything to eat?" "Not a bite; and do you know, Bonny, I think I am beginning to realize what starving means." "I know I am, and what being utterly worn out means as well. Do you suppose it's just hunger that makes a fellow feel sick and light-headed and weak as a cat, the way I do now, or is it that he is really in for something serious, like a fever or whooping-cough or one of the things with big names?" "I expect it's hunger, and nothing else," replied Alaric, "for I feel just that way myself, and I've been really ill times enough to know the difference." "Then it must be starvation, and something has got to be done about it," exclaimed Bonny, starting to his feet with a resolute air, "for I don't believe any two fellows are going to be allowed to starve to death in this city of Tacoma. So I'm going to get something for us to eat, even if I have to steal." "Oh no, Bonny, don't steal. We haven't quite come to that," objected Alaric. "Did you say this was Tacoma, though?" "Yes, of course. Didn't you recognize it?" "No, I didn't, for I wasn't given much chance to get acquainted with it last evening, you know. But if this is Tacoma, I've an idea that I believe will bring us some money. So suppose we separate for a while? You can go one way looking for something to eat, and I'll go another in search of that which will mean the same thing. When the whistles blow for noon we'll both come back here and compare notes." "All right," agreed Bonny. "I'll do it, and if I don't bring back something to eat, it will be because the whole city is starving, that's all." So the two set forth in opposite directions, Bonny taking a course that would lead him among the shipping, and Alaric walking up the long easy grade of Pacific Avenue towards the city proper. His pride, which no personal suffering nor discomfort could overthrow, had given way at last before the wretchedness of his friend. "It is I who am the cause of it," he said to himself, "and so I am bound to help him out by the only way I can think of. I hate to do it, for it will be owning up that I am not fit to care for myself or able to fight my own way in the world. I know, too, just how John and the others will laugh at me, but I've got to do something at once, and there doesn't seem to be anything else." The scheme that Alaric so dreaded to undertake, and was yet determined to execute, was the telegraphing to his brother John for funds. Of course John would report the matter to their father, who had probably been already notified of his younger son's disappearance, and our lad would be ordered to return home immediately. Or perhaps John would come to fetch him back, like a runaway child. It would all be dreadfully humiliating, and on his own account he would have undergone much greater trials than those of the present rather than place himself in such a position. But for the sake of the boy who had befriended him and suffered with him, it must be done. The only telegraph-office in the city of which Alaric knew was in the Hotel Tacoma, where he had passed a day on his northward journey, and thither he bent his steps. As he entered its open portal and crossed the spacious hall in which was located the telegraph-station, the well-dressed guests who paced leisurely to and fro or lounged in easy-chairs stared at him curiously. And well they might, for a more tattered, begrimed, unkempt, and generally woe-begone youth had never been seen in that place of luxurious entertainment. Had Alaric encountered a mirror, he would have stared at himself and passed by without recognition; but for the moment his mind was too busy with other thoughts to allow him to consider his appearance. The box-like telegraph-office was occupied by a fashionably attired young woman, who was just then absorbed in an exciting novel. After keeping Alaric waiting for several minutes, or until after she had finished a chapter, she took the despatch he had written, and read it aloud: "_To Mr. John Todd, Amos Todd Bank, San Francisco_: "DEAR JOHN,--Please send me by wire one hundred dollars. Will write and explain why I need it. ALARIC." "Dollar and a half," said the young woman, tersely, and without looking up. Although many telegrams had been forwarded at various times and from distant parts of the world in Alaric Todd's name, he had never before attempted to send one in person. Now, therefore, although somewhat startled by the request for a dollar and a half, he replied, calmly: "Send it collect, please. It will be paid for at the other end." "Can't do it; 'gainst the rules," retorted the young woman, sharply, now glancing at the lad before her, and contemptuously scanning him from head to foot. "But," pleaded poor Alaric, "this is so very important. The money that I ask for is sure to come, and then I will pay for it a dozen times over, if you like. It will certainly be paid for, though, in San Francisco, at the Amos Todd Bank, for my name is Todd--Alaric Todd." "It wouldn't make any difference," remarked the young woman, "if your name were George Washington or John Jacob Astor; you couldn't send a despatch through this office without paying for it. So if you haven't any money you might as well make up your mind not to waste any more of my time." With this she resumed the reading of her novel, while Alaric moved slowly away, stunned and despairing. Now was he indeed cut off from his home, his people, and from all hope of assistance. He hadn't even money enough to pay for a postage-stamp with which to send a letter. As he realized these things, the reaction from his confidence of a few moments before, that his present trouble would be speedily ended, was so great that he grew faint, and mechanically sank into a leather-cushioned chair that stood close at hand. He had hardly done so when an alert porter stepped up, touched him on the shoulder, and pointed significantly to the door. The boy understood, and obeyed the gesture without remonstrance. Thus it came to pass that a son of Amos Todd, the richest man on the Pacific coast, was driven from a hotel of which his father was one of the principal owners, and in spite of the fact that he had just acknowledged his own identity. Once outside, Alaric walked irresolutely, and as though unconscious of what he was doing, for a short distance, and then found himself seated on an iron bench at the edge of a broad asphalted driveway. Here he tried to think, and could not. He closed his eyes and wondered vaguely if he were going to die, or, if not, how much longer he could live without food. It wasn't worth worrying about, though, one way or the other. He had made such a complete failure of life that no one would care if he did die. Of course Bonny might feel badly about it for a little while, but even he would get along much better alone. From such terrible thoughts as these the lad was aroused by the sound of cheery voices; and glancing listlessly in their direction, he saw a well-dressed young fellow, apparently not much older than himself, a little boy in his first suit of tiny knickerbockers, and a big dog. They had just come from the hotel and were playing with a ball. It was Phil Ryder with little Nel-te, an orphan whom he had rescued from the Yukon wilderness, and big Amook, one of his Eskimo sledge dogs that he was carrying back to New London as a curiosity. While Alaric watched them, wondering how it must seem to be as free from both hunger and anxiety as that happy-looking chap evidently was, the ball tossed to Nel-te escaped him and rolled under the iron bench. As the child came running up, the lad recovered it and handed it to him. "Fank you, man," said the little chap, and then ran away. After a while the ball again came in the same direction, and, as the child did not follow it, Alaric picked it up and tossed it to Phil. "Hello!" cried the latter. "It seems mighty good to be catching a baseball again. Give us another, will you?" With this he threw the ball to Alaric, who caught it deftly and flung it back. The ball was one that had been found in a certain canvas dunnage-bag the evening before, and begged by Phil Ryder as a souvenir of his experience as a smuggler. After a few passes back and forth Alaric became so dizzy from weakness that, with a very pale face, he was again forced to sit down. "What's the matter?" asked Phil, anxiously, coming up to the trembling lad. "Not ill, I hope?" "No; I'm not ill. It's only a little faintness." "Do you know," said Phil, as he noted closely the lad's mean dress and hollow cheeks, "that you look to me as though you were hungry. Tell me honestly if you have had any breakfast this morning." "No," replied Alaric, in a low tone. "Or any supper last night?" "No." "Did you have any dinner yesterday?" "I can't exactly remember, but I don't think I did." "Why, man," cried tender-hearted Phil, horror-stricken at this revelation, "you are starving! And I've been keeping you here playing ball! What a heedless brute I am! Never mind; just you wait until I can carry this little chap inside, and don't you stir from that seat until I come back." With this Phil, picking up Nel-te and bidding Amook follow him, hurried away, leaving Alaric still holding the baseball, and filled with a very queer mixture of conflicting emotions. CHAPTER XXIV PHIL RYDER PAYS A DEBT In a very few minutes Phil Ryder hastened back to where Alaric awaited him. "Now you come with me," he said, cheerily, "and we'll end this starvation business in a hurry. I won't take you to the hotel, for those swell waiters are too slow about serving things, and when a fellow is hungry he don't care so much about style as he does about prompt attention to his wants. I know, for I've been there myself. There's a little restaurant just around the corner on the avenue that looks as though it would exactly fill the bill. Here we are." Almost before he realized what was happening Alaric found himself seated before the first regular breakfast-table that he had seen in weeks, while the young stranger facing him, who had so unexpectedly become his host, was ordering a meal that seemed to embrace pretty nearly the whole bill of fare. "Bring the coffee and oatmeal first," he said to the waiter, "and see that there is plenty of cream. If they burn your fingers, so much the better, for you never saw any one in quite so much of a hurry as we are. After that you may rush along the other things as fast as you please." Alaric attempted a feeble protest against the munificence of the order just given, but Phil silenced him with: "Now, my friend, don't you fret; I know what you need and what you can get away with better than you do, for I've experimented considerably with starving during the past year. As for obligation, there isn't any. I am only paying a debt that I've owed for a long time." "I don't remember ever meeting you before," said Alaric, looking up in surprise from a dish of oatmeal and cream that seemed the very best thing he had ever tasted. "No, of course not, and I don't suppose we have ever been within a thousand miles of each other until now; but I have been in your debt, all the same. Just about a year ago I was in Victoria without a cent in my pocket, no friend or even acquaintance that I knew of in the whole city, and so hungry that it didn't seem as though I had ever eaten anything in my life. Just as I was most desperate and things were looking their very blackest, an angel travelling under the name of Serge Belcofsky came along, and spent his last dollar in feeding me. I vowed then that I'd get even with him by feeding some other hungry fellow, and this is the first chance I've run across since. You needn't be afraid, though, that I am spending my last dollar on you, glad as I would be to do so if it were necessary. That it isn't is owing to one of the best fathers in the world, who hasn't had a chance to keep me in funds for so long a time that he is now trying to make up for lost opportunities." "You must be very fond of him," said Alaric, who was now at work on beefsteak and fried potatoes. "Well, rather," replied Phil, earnestly, "though I never knew how much a good father was to a boy until I lost him, and had to fight my way alone through a whole year before I found him again. It's a wonder my hair didn't turn gray with anxiety while I was hunting him up in the interior of Alaska; but it's all over now, and I have him safe at last right here in Tacoma, along with my aunt Ruth and little Nel-te and Jalap----" "Is he the dog?" asked Alaric, beginning an attack on the omelette. "Who?" "Jalap." "Not much he isn't a dog," laughed Phil. "He is one of the dearest of sailormen. He's one of the wisest, too, only he lays all of his wisdom to his old friend Kite Roberson. Besides all that, he is one of the most comical chaps that ever lived, though he doesn't mean to be, and it's better than a circus to see him on snow-shoes driving a sledge team of dogs. I should have brought him over here to cheer you up, only he's off somewhere among the ships this morning. He says he's got the salt-water habit so badly that he can't keep away from them. Are you ready now for the buckwheats? Here are half a dozen hot ones to top off with, and maple-syrup too. Don't they look good, though! I say, waiter, you may as well bring me a plate of those buckwheats. I forgot to have any at breakfast-time." So Phil rattled on, talking of all sorts of things to keep his guest amused, and allow him ample opportunity to attend strictly to the business of eating, without feeling obliged to answer questions or sustain any part of the conversation. And how poor, heart-sick, hungry Alaric was cheered by the thoughtful kindness of this strange lad who had so befriended him in his hour of sorest need! How grateful he was, and how, with each mouthful of food, strength and courage and hope came back to him, until, when the wonderful meal was finished, he was ready once more to face the world with a brave confidence that it should never again get the better of him! He tried to put some of his gratitude into words, but was promptly interrupted by his host, who said: "Nonsense! You've nothing to thank me for. I told you I owed you this breakfast, and besides, though I haven't eaten very much myself, I have certainly enjoyed it as much as any meal of my life. Now we have a few minutes left before I must go, and I want you to tell me something of yourself. What is your name? Where is your home? And how did you happen to get into this fix?" "My name is Rick Dale," began Alaric, who did not feel that he could disclose his real identity under the circumstances, "and my home is in San Francisco; but it is closed now. My mother is dead. I don't know just where my father is, and I was left with some people whom I disliked so much that I just--" Here he hesitated, and Phil, noting his embarrassment, hastened to say: "Never mind the particulars. I had no business to ask such questions, anyway." "Well," continued Alaric, "the result of it all is that I am here looking for work. I had a job, but it didn't pay anything, and I lost it about two weeks ago. Now I am trying to find another." "What kind of a job do you want?" "Anything, so long as it is honest work that will provide food, clothing, and a place to sleep." "In that case," said Phil, thoughtfully, "I don't know but what I can put you in the way of one, though--" "It must be a job for two of us," interposed Alaric, "for I have a friend who is in the same fix as myself." "I only wish I had known that in time to have him breakfast with us," said Phil; "but the job I am thinking of, if it can be had at all, will serve for two of you as well as for one. You see, it is this way. There is a Frenchman over at the hotel whose name is Filbert, and who--" Just here both lads started at the sound of a shrill whistle announcing the hour of noon. "I had no idea it was so late," explained Phil, "and I must run; for we leave here on the one-o'clock train." "I must hurry too, for I promised to meet Bonny at noon," said Alaric. "Who is Bonny?" "The friend I told you of." "Then I want you to give this to him from me, for fear he may not have found any breakfast." So saying, Phil slipped something hard and round into Alaric's hand. "Now good-bye, Rick Dale," he said. "I hope we may meet again sometime. At any rate, be sure to call on Monsieur Filbert at the hotel this afternoon. I guess you can get a job from him; but even if you don't, always remember that, as my friend Jalap Coombs says, 'It's never so dark but what there's a light somewhere.'" Then the lads parted, one filled with the happiness that results from an act of kindness, and the other cheered and encouraged to renewed effort. With grateful and loving glances Alaric watched Phil Ryder until he disappeared in the direction of the hotel, and then hastened to keep his appointment with Bonny. On the road leading to the wharves he passed a tall, lank figure, whose whole appearance was that of a sailor. His shrewd face was weather-beaten and wrinkled, but so kindly and smiling that Alaric could not help but smile from sympathy as they met. He found Bonny impatiently awaiting him, and in such cheerful spirits as to be hardly recognizable for the despondent, half-starved lad of two hours before. "Hello, Rick!" he shouted, as his friend approached. "I know you've had good luck, for I see it in your face." "Indeed I have!" replied Alaric; "and, what's more, I've had the best breakfast I ever ate in my life." "That's what I meant by luck; and I've had the same." "What's more," continued Alaric, "I have brought something that was sent especially to you, for fear you hadn't found anything to eat." Thus saying, he handed over a big bright silver dollar. "Well, if that don't beat the owls!" exclaimed Bonny at sight of the shining coin, "for here is his twin-brother that was handed me to give to you, or rather to the first fellow I met who needed it more than I did." "I must be the one, then," said Alaric, joyously, "for I haven't a cent to my name, and as you now have two dollars, I'm willing to divide with you. But who gave it to you, and how did he happen to?" "The queerest and dearest old chap I ever saw. You know how badly I was feeling when we separated. Well, that was nothing to what came afterwards. I set out to board every ship in port until I should find a cook or steward who would fill me up and let me have something extra to bring to you. On the first half-dozen or so I was treated worse than a dog, and fired ashore almost before I opened my mouth. It made me feel meaner than dirt, and but for thinking of how disappointed you would be if I came back as miserable as I went, I should have given up in despair. I must say, though, that all the fellows who treated me that way were Dagoes, Dutch, or Chinamen. "At length I boarded a Yankee bark that carried an Irish steward, and the minute I said I was hungry he cried out: 'Don't spake a wurrud, lad, for ye couldn't do yer looks justice. Jist be aisy, and come wid me.' "With that he led me to a sort of a cuddy at the forward end of the after deck-house, and set me down to such a spread as I haven't seen since I left Cape Cod. There was cold roast beef, corned beef, potatoes, bread and butter, pie, pickles, coffee, and--well, it would be no use trying to tell all the things that steward gave me to eat, for you just wouldn't believe it. He laid 'em all out, told me to pitch in, and then went off, so, as he said, I'd be free to act according to nature. "I sat there and ate until I hadn't room for as much as a huckleberry. As I was looking at the last piece of squash pie, and thinking what a pity it was that it must be left, I heard a chuckle behind me, and turned around in a hurry. There stood one of the mates and the dear old chap I was just telling you about. "'Why don't you eat it, son?' says the mate. "'Reason enough,' says I, 'because I can't; but if you don't mind, sir, I'd like awfully to take it to my partner in starvation,' meaning you. "'Who is he? And how does he happen to be starved?' says the dear old chap. Then I up and told them the whole story of our experience on the _Fancy_, being chased by the revenue-men, and all, and it tickled 'em most to death. "When I got through, the stranger, who was just down visiting the vessel, slipped a dollar into my hand, and told me to give it to the first chap I met who needed it more than I did. He said he used to know Cap'n Duff, and told me a lot of yarns about him as we walked back here together." "Was his name Jalap Coombs?" asked Alaric. "I expect it must have been, for he had a lot to say about somebody named Kite Roberson, who allus useter call him 'Jal.' Why? Do you know him?" "Yes. That is, I feel as if I did. But, Bonny, I mustn't stop to tell you of my experiences now, for I have made an important business engagement for both of us up-town, and we must attend to it at once." CHAPTER XXV ENGAGED TO INTERPRET FOR THE FRENCH "Where did you get that baseball?" asked Bonny Brooks, referring to one that Alaric was unconsciously tossing from hand to hand as they walked up-town together. At this the latter stopped short and looked at the ball in question, as though now seeing it for the first time. "Do you know," he said, "I have been so excited and taken up with other things that I actually forgot I had this ball in my hands. It belongs to the fellow who gave me that breakfast and your dollar, besides telling me where to look for something to do. Not only that, but I really believe if it hadn't been for this ball he would never have paid any attention to me. You see, we got to passing it; and when I became so dizzy that I had to sit down, he asked me what was the matter. So he found out somehow that I was hungry, though I don't remember telling him, and then insisted on giving me a breakfast." "Who is he? I mean, what is his name?" "I don't know. I never thought to ask him. And he doesn't live here either, but has just come down from Alaska, and was going off in the one-o'clock train. I do know, though, that he is the very finest chap I ever met, and I only hope I'll have a chance some time to pay back his kindness to me by helping some other poor boy." "It is funny," remarked Bonny, meditatively, "that your friend and my friend should both have just come from Alaska." "Isn't it?" replied Alaric; "but then they are travelling together, you know." "I didn't know it, though I ought to have suspected it, for they are the kind who naturally would travel together--the kind, I mean, that give a fellow an idea of how much real goodness there is in the world, after all--a sort of travelling sermon, only one that is acted instead of being preached." "That's just the way I feel about them," agreed Alaric; "but I wish I hadn't been so careless about this ball. It may be one that he values for association's sake, just as I did the one we left in that Siwash camp." "Let me have it a moment," said Bonny, who was looking curiously at the ball. Alaric handed it to him, and he examined it closely. "I do believe it is the very one!" he exclaimed. "Yes, I am sure it is. Don't you remember, Rick, the burned place on your ball that came when Bah-die dropped it into the fire the first time you threw it at him, and how you laughed and called it a sure-enough red-hot ball? Well, here's the place now, and this is certainly the very ball that introduced us to each other in Victoria." "How can it be?" asked Alaric, incredulously. "I don't know, but it surely is." "Well," said Alaric, finally convinced that his comrade was right, "that is the very most unexplainable thing I ever came across, for I don't see how it could possibly have come into his possession." While discussing this strange happening, the lads approached the hotel in which one of them had been made to suffer so keenly a few hours before. He dreaded the very thought of entering it again, but having made up his mind that he must, was about to do so, when his attention was attracted to a curious scene in front of the main entrance. A small, wiry-looking man, evidently a foreigner, was gesticulating, stamping, and shouting to a group of grinning porters and bell-boys who were gathered about him. As our lads drew near they saw that he held a small open book in his hand, from which he was quoting some sentence, while at the same time he was rapidly working himself into a fury. It was a French-English phrase-book, in which, under the head of instructions to servants, the sentence "_Je désire un fiacre_" was rendered "Call me a hansom," and it was this that the excited Frenchman was demanding, greatly to the amusement and mystification of his hearers. "Call me a hansom! Call me a hansom! Call me a hansom!" he repeated over and over, at the top of his voice. "_C'est un fiacre--fiacre--fiacre!_" he shouted. "_Oh, là, là! Mille tonnerres!_ Call me a hansom!" "He must be crazy," said Bonny; "for he certainly isn't handsome, and even if he were, he couldn't expect people to call him so. I wonder why they don't send for the police." Instead of answering him, Alaric stepped up to the laughing group and said, politely, "_Pardon, monsieur. C'est Monsieur Filbert, n'est-ce pas?_" "_Oui, oui. Je suis Filbert!_ Call me a hansom." "He wants a carriage," explained Alaric to the porters, who stared open-mouthed at hearing this young tramp talk to the foreigner in his own "lingo." "_Vous voulez une voiture, n'est-ce pas?_" he added, turning to the stranger. "Oh, my friend!" cried M. Filbert, in his own language, flinging away the perplexing phrase-book as he spoke, and embracing Alaric in his joy at finding himself once more comprehended. "It is as the voice of an angel from heaven to hear again my own language in this place of barbarians!" "Have a care, monsieur," warned Alaric, "how you speak of barbarians. There are many here who can understand perfectly your language." "I care not for them! I do not see them! They have not come to me! You are the first! Can it be that I may engage you to remain and interpret for me this language of distraction?" Here the speaker drew back, and scanned Alaric's forlorn appearance hopefully. "That is what I came to see you about, monsieur," answered Alaric. "I am looking for employment, and shall be happy----" "It is enough!" interrupted the other, vehemently. "You have found it. I engage you now, at once. Come, the carriage is here. Let us enter." "But," objected the lad, "I have a friend whom I cannot leave." "Let him come! Let all your friends come! Bring your whole family if you will, but only stay with me yourself!" cried the Frenchman, impetuously. "I am distracted by my troubles with this terrible language, and but for you I shall go crazy. You are my salvation. So enter the carriage, and your friend. _Après vous, monsieur._ Do you also speak the language of the beautiful France? No? It is a great pity." "Does his royal highness take us for dukes?" questioned the bewildered Bonny, who, not understanding one word of the foregoing conversation, had, of course, no idea why he now found himself rolling along the streets of Tacoma in one of its most luxurious public carriages. "Not exactly," laughed Alaric; "but he takes us for interpreters--that is, he wants to engage us as such." "Oh! Is that it? Well, I'm agreeable. I suppose you told him that I was pretty well up on Chinook? But what language does he talk himself?" "French, of course," replied Alaric, "seeing that he is a Frenchman." "Are you a Frenchman too?" "Certainly not." "Well, I didn't know but what you were, seeing that you talk the same language he does, and just as well, for all that I can make out. Really, Rick Dale, it is growing interesting to find out the things you know and can do." "And the things I still have to learn," laughed Alaric. Having thus satisfied his curiosity, and learned that he was an interpreter, the last position in the world for which he would have applied, Bonny folded his arms, assumed what he considered a proper attitude for the occasion, and entered upon a calm enjoyment of the first regular carriage-ride of his life. Nor did he allow the animated conversation taking place between M. Filbert and Alaric to disturb him in the least, though by it the whole future course of his life was to be changed. Under Alaric's direction the carriage first bore them to the railway-station, where a number of strange-looking boxes and packages, all belonging to M. Filbert, were gathered in one place, and given in charge of a porter, who was instructed to receive and care for any others that might come marked with the same name. Then the carriage was again headed up-town, and driven to shop after shop until it seemed as though the entire resources of the city were to be drawn upon to supply the multitudinous needs of the mysterious Frenchman. Among the things thus purchased and ordered sent down to the station were provisions, cooking utensils, axes, medicines, alcohol, tents, blankets, ammunition, and clothing. "I don't know what's up," reflected Bonny, "and I don't care, so long as Rick says everything is all right; but I should think we were either going to make war on the Siwash or take a trip to the North Pole." Of course Alaric accompanied M. Filbert into each store, where his knowledge of languages was invaluable in conducting the various negotiations; but the Chinook interpreter, as he called himself, finding that his services were not yet in demand, was content to remain luxuriously seated in the carriage. Here he discussed the whole remarkable performance with the driver, who was certain that the Frenchman was either going prospecting for gold, or for a new town-site on which to settle a colony of his countrymen. During the whole afternoon M. Filbert talked incessantly with his new-found interpreter, and Alaric seemed almost as excited as he. At length the former, casting a dubious glance at the lads, asked, with an apologetic manner, if they were well provided with clothing. "Only what you see, monsieur," answered Alaric. "Everything else we have lost." "Ah! is it so? Then must you be provided with the habiliments necessary. If you will kindly give the instructions?" So the carriage was ordered to a shoe-shop and an outfitting establishment, where both lads, to Bonny's further bewilderment, were provided with complete suits of rough but warm and serviceable clothing, including two pairs of walking-boots, one of which was very heavy and had hob-nailed soles. These last purchases were not concluded until after sunset, and with them the business of the day was ended. With many parting injunctions to Alaric, and a polite _bon nuit_ to both lads, M. Filbert was driven back to the hotel, leaving his newly engaged assistants to their own devices for the time being. "Now," said Bonny, "if you haven't forgotten how to talk United States, perhaps you will explain what all this means--what we are engaged to do, what our wages are to be, and where we are bound? Are we to turn gold-hunters or Indian-fighters, or is it something in the exploring line?" "I expect," laughed Alaric, "it is to be more in the climbing line." "Climbing?" "Yes. Do you see that mountain over there?" Here Alaric pointed to the lofty snow-capped peak of Mount Rainier, still rose-tinted with sunlight, and rising in awful grandeur high above all other summits of the Cascade range, nearly fifty miles from where they stood. "Certainly. I can't help seeing it." "Do you think you could climb it?" "Of course I could, if it came in my line of business." "Would you undertake it for thirty dollars a month and all expenses?" "Rick Dale, I'd undertake to climb to the moon on those terms. But you are surely joking. The Frenchman will never pay that just for the fun of seeing us climb." "Yes he will, though, and I have agreed that we shall start with him for the top of that mountain to-morrow morning." CHAPTER XXVI PREPARING FOR AN ASCENT Monsieur Jean Puvis Filbert was a Frenchman of wealth, a distinguished member of the Alpine Club, an enthusiastic mountain-climber, and had for an especial hobby the making of botanical collections from high altitudes. He was now on a leisurely tour around the world, and had recently arrived in Tacoma on one of the Northern Pacific steamships from Japan. This was his first visit to America, and he was filled with enthusiasm by the superb mountain scenery that greeted him on all sides as his ship steamed through the Strait of Juan de Fuca and up the glorious waterways of Puget Sound. He gazed longingly at the snow-crowned Olympics, and went into ecstasies over a distant view of Mount Baker, the most northerly peak of the Cascade range. When grand old Rainier, loftiest of all, appeared on the southeastern horizon, lifting its hoary head more than 14,000 feet above the level of the intervening plain, he became silent with adoration, and determined that his first achievement in America should be to gain that glorious summit. As his knowledge of English was very limited, our mountain-climber began his preparations for this arduous undertaking by engaging an interpreter. The only one whom he could find was a Canadian, who spoke French nearly as badly as he did English, and whom his employer was quickly obliged to discharge for drunkenness and utter incompetence. Then it seemed as though the expedition on which M. Filbert had set his heart must be given up, and he was in despair. At this critical moment Alaric Todd appeared on the scene seeking employment, though never dreaming that it would come to him through his knowledge of French, and was received literally with open arms. Of course he was engaged at once, and was able to secure a situation for Bonny Brooks as well, though the precise nature of the young sailor's duties were not defined. Thus Bonny was allowed to regard himself as also holding the rank of interpreter, whose services would be invaluable in the event of an encounter with Indians, who, for all he knew, might contest every foot of their way up the great mountain. To this young man the climbing of a mountain seemed a very foolish and profitless undertaking, for, as he said, "The only thing we can do when we get up there is to turn around and come down again. But you mustn't think, Rick, that I'm trying to back out. No, siree. Just so long as I am paid to climb I'll climb, even if it comes to shinning up the North Pole and interpreting the Constitution to the polar bears." M. Filbert wished the boys to spend the night with him at the hotel, but Alaric was still so sore over his morning's experience that he begged to be excused. So when they were left to themselves they carried their recently acquired belongings down to the railway-station, and persuaded the agent to allow them to sleep in that corner of the baggage-room devoted to their employer's collection of chattels. Here they put on their new suits, and then, feeling once more intensely respectable, and well content with their own appearance, each invited the other to dine with him. Had they not two whole dollars between them, and was not that enough to make them independent of the world? They procured a bountiful dinner in the restaurant where Alaric had breakfasted, and with it ate up one of their dollars. The place was so associated in their minds with the fine young fellow to whom they owed all their present good fortune that they thought and talked much of him during the meal. Recalling what he had said concerning his father reminded Alaric of his own parent, and caused him to wonder if he were yet aware that his younger son was not travelling around the world with the Sonntaggs as he had planned. "If the dear old dad has heard of my disappearance," reflected the boy, "he must be a good deal worried, for he has no idea of how well I can take care of myself. I believe I would write to him if I only knew his address. He said to send all letters to the bank; but I can't do that, because John, who must have heard from the Sonntaggs by this time, would be certain to recognize the handwriting and open it. I know what, though. I'll write to Cousin Esther, and ask her to tell dad all about me. She is sure to see him on his way home, for he always visits Uncle Dale's when he is in Boston." So after supper, Alaric, who was beginning to have a lively appreciation of the value of money, as well as of fathers, cautiously invested four cents in a sheet of paper, an envelope, and a stamp, all of which he was able to procure from the proprietor of the restaurant. The boy smiled, as he carefully pocketed his one cent of change, to think on what a different scale he would have made a similar purchase less than a month before. Then he would have ordered a box of note-paper, another of envelopes, and a whole sheet of stamps. As for the change, why, there wouldn't have been any, for he would simply have said, "Charge it, please," and it would have been charged to his father's account. When Bonny saw that Alaric was about to write a letter, he decided to write one to his aunt Nancy at the same time. "For," said he, "she probably imagines that I am in China by now, and would never think of sending word to me here in case she got any news of father." So Bonny also invested four cents in stationery; and the restaurant man good-naturedly allowing them to use a table, besides loaning them pens and a bottle of ink, they sat down to compose their respective epistles. When Alaric's letter was finished it read as follows: "DEAR COUSIN ESTHER,--I have taken your advice and run away--that is, I have done what amounts to the same thing, for I just sat still and let the other folks run away. By this time I expect they are in China, while I am here in the very place you said you would be if you were a boy. I wish you were one so you could be here with me now, for I think you would make a first-class boy. I am learning to be one as fast as I can, a real truly boy, I mean, and not a make-believe. I have already learned how to smuggle, and catch a baseball, besides a little batting, and to swim, sail a boat, paddle a canoe, talk some Siwash, and have had a good deal of experience besides. "Now I am an interpreter and engaged in the mountain-climbing business. We start to-morrow. "I have a partner who is a splendid chap, about my age, and named Bonny Brooks. I know you would like him, for he is such a regular boy, and knows just how to do things. "When you see my dear dad, please give him my warmest love, and tell him I think more of him now than I ever did. Please make him understand that it was the Sonntaggs who ran away, and not I. Tell him that when I am through experimenting with my heart, and have become a genuine boy like Bonny, I am coming back to him, to learn how to be a man--that is, I will if I can afford to pay my way to San Francisco. But you have no idea how much money it takes to travel, especially when you have to earn it yourself, and so far I haven't earned any. Still I have not starved--that is, not very often--so far, and am in hopes of having plenty to eat from this time on. Now I must say good-bye because we are going to sleep in the station to-night, and it closes early. "Ever your loving cousin, "RICK." "P.S.--The principal reason I let the Sonntaggs go was because they called me 'Allie.' Please tell this to dad." Bonny's letter was not so long as Alaric's, but it described the situation with equal vagueness. He wrote: "DEAR AUNT NANCY,--I am not in China, as you may suppose, having quit the sea after rising to be first mate. Have also been a smuggler, but am not any more. Am now engaged by the French as interpreter, and so far like the business very well. Have also gone into the climbing trade. We are to do our first mountain to-morrow. Have for a chum one of the cleverest chaps you ever saw. He can talk most any language except Chinook, and is a daisy ball-catcher. His name is Rick Dale, and I am trying hard to be just like him. If you have any news from father, please let me know. You can send a letter in care of Mr. P. Bear, Hotel Tacoma, which is our headquarters. "Ever your loving nephew, "B. BROOKS, Interpreter." Both these letters were sent to Massachusetts, Alaric's being addressed to Boston, and Bonny's to Sandport. After they were posted, and our lads were on their way back to the railway station, they began for the first time to realize how very tired and sleepy they were. They were so utterly weary that as they snuggled down in their corner of the baggage-room, on a bed made of M. Filbert's tents and blankets, Alaric remarked: "This is what I call solid comfort." "Yes," replied Bonny, "we certainly have struck a big streak of luck. Do you remember how we were feeling about this time last night?" "No," answered Alaric, "I can't remember. It's too long ago. Good-night." And in another minute both boys were fast asleep. They had taken "through tickets," as Bonny would have said, and slept so soundly that they hardly stirred until the agent flung open the baggage-room door at six o'clock the following morning, and caused them to spring from their blankets in a hurry by shouting, "All aboard!" A dash of cold water from the hydrant outside drove all traces of sleep from their eyes, and so filled them with its fresh vigor that they raced all the way up-town to the restaurant. Here, although their appetites were keen as ever, they managed to satisfy them with a ninety-cent breakfast, "and left the place with money still in their pockets," as Alaric expressed it. "That's so," responded Bonny. "We've just one cent apiece. Let's toss up to see who will have them both." "No," said Alaric, "for that would be gambling; and I promised my mother long ago at Monte Carlo never to gamble. She said more fortunes were lost and fewer won in that way than by any other." "But one cent isn't a fortune," objected Bonny. "Why not? A man's fortune is all that he has, and if you have but one cent, then that is your fortune." "I guess you are right, Rick Dale," laughed Bonny. "I hate gambling as much as you do; but it never seemed to me before that tossing pennies was gambling. I expect it is, though, so I'll just keep my fortune in my pocket, and not risk it on any such foolishness." As the lads hastened back to the station, where they were to meet their employer, the glorious mountain that was now the goal of their ambition reared its mighty crest, radiant with sunlight, directly before them. So wonderfully clear was the atmosphere that it did not seem ten miles away, and Bonny, shaking a fist at it, cried, cheerfully: "Never you mind, old fellow, we'll soon have you under foot." CHAPTER XXVII BONNY COMMANDS THE SITUATION Our lads had barely time to do up the tents and blankets they had used for bedding into compact bundles before M. Filbert arrived, with his servant François, and a carriage full of packages, including a bundle of iron-shod alpenstocks. He was clad in what appeared to Bonny and the idlers about the station a very curious costume, though to Alaric, who had often seen its like in Switzerland, it did not seem at all out of the way. It consisted of a coat and knee-breeches of dark green velveteen, a waistcoat of scarlet cloth, stout yarn stockings patterned in green and scarlet and folded over at the knees, the heaviest of laced walking-boots with hob-nailed soles, and a soft Tyrolese hat, in which was stuck a jaunty cock's feather. He was full of excited bustle, and the moment he caught sight of Alaric began to shower questions and directions upon him with bewildering rapidity. At length, thanks to Alaric's clear head and Bonny's practical common-sense, confusion was reduced to order, and everything was got on board the train that was to carry the expedition to Yelm Prairie, a station about twenty miles south of Tacoma, from which the real start was to be made. The arrival at Yelm Prairie produced an excitement equal to that of a circus, and our friends had hardly alighted from the train before they were surrounded by a clamorous throng of would-be guides, packers, teamsters, owners of saddle-animals or pack-ponies, and a score of others, who were loud in declaring that without their services the expedition would surely come to grief. In vain did the bewildered Frenchman storm and rave, and stamp his feet and gesticulate. Not one word that he said could be understood by the crowd, who, in their efforts to attract his attention, only shouted the louder and pressed about him more closely. Finally the poor man, turning to Alaric and saying, "Do what you will. Everything I leave to you," clapped his hands to his ears, broke through the uproarious throng, and started on a run for the open prairie. "He leaves everything to us," said Alaric, who was almost as bewildered by the clamor and novelty of the situation as was M. Filbert himself. "Good enough!" cried Bonny. "Now we will be able to do something. I take it that on this cruise you are first mate and I am second. So if you'll just give the word to go ahead, I'll settle the business in a hurry." "I only wish you would," returned Alaric, "for it looks as though we were going to be mobbed." Armed with this authority, Bonny sprang on a packing-case that lifted him well above his surroundings, and shouted: "Fellow-citizens!" Instantly there came a hush of curious expectancy. "I reckon all you men are looking for a job?" "That's about the size of it," answered several voices. "Very well; I'll give you one that'll prove just about the biggest contract ever let out in Yelm Prairie. It is to shut your mouths and keep quiet." Here the speaker was greeted by angry murmurs and cries of "None of yer chaff, young feller!" "What are you giving us?" and the like. Nothing daunted, Bonny continued: "I'm not fooling. I'm in dead earnest. What we are after is quiet, and the prince out there, whom you have scared away with your racket, is so bound to have it that he's willing to pay handsomely for it. He's got the money, too, and don't you forget it. He wants to hire several guides and packers, also a lot of saddle-horses and ponies, but a noisy, loud-talking chap he can't abide, and won't have round. He has left the whole business to my partner here and me to settle, seeing that we are his interpreters, and we are going to do it the way he pays us to do it and wants it done. So, according to the rule we've laid down in all our travellings and mountain-climbings up to date, the man who speaks last will be hired first, and the fellow who makes the most noise won't be given any show at all. Sabe? As an example, we want a team to take our dunnage to the river, and I'm going to give the job to that fellow sitting in the wagon, who hasn't so far spoken a word." "Good reason why! He's deaf and dumb!" shouted a voice. "All the better," replied Bonny, in no wise abashed. "That's the kind we want. There are two more chaps who haven't said anything that I've heard, and I'm going to give them the job of pitching camp for us. I mean those two Siwash at the end of the platform." "They are quiet because they can't speak any English," remonstrated some of those who stood near by. "We don't mind that, though we are French," replied Bonny, cheerfully. "You see, the prince looked out for such things when he engaged us interpreters, and now we are ready to talk to every man in his own language, including Chinook and United States. Now the only other thing I've got to say is that we won't be ready to consider any further business proposals until two o'clock this afternoon, and anybody coming to our camp before that time will lose his chance. After that we shall be glad to see you all, and the fellows that make the least talk will stand the best show of getting a job." The effect of this bold proposition was surprising. Instead of exciting wrath and causing hostile demonstrations, as Alaric feared, its quieting influence was magical. Times were hard in Yelm Prairie, and a well-paid trip up the mountain, or the chance to obtain a dollar a day for the hire of a pony, was not to be despised. So Bonny was allowed to engage the deaf-and-dumb teamster by signs, and the two Indians by a few words of Chinook, without hinderance. All these worked with such intelligence and expedition that within an hour one of the neatest camps ever seen in that section was ready for occupancy beside the white waters of the glacier-fed Nisqually. When M. Filbert, who spied it from afar, came in soon afterwards, with hands and pockets full of floral specimens, he found a comfortably arranged tent and a bountiful camp dinner awaiting him. At sight of these things his peace of mind was fully restored, and he congratulated himself on having secured such skilful interpreters of both his words and wishes as the lads through whom they had been accomplished. Promptly at the hour named by Bonny a motley but orderly throng of men, mules, and ponies presented themselves at the camp, and the whole afternoon was spent in making a selection of animals and testing the skill of packers. Both Alaric and Bonny were inexperienced riders, but neither of them hesitated when invited to mount and try the steeds offered for their use. A moment later Bonny was sprawling on the ground, with his pony gazing at him demurely, while Alaric was flying over the prairie at a speed that quickly carried him out of sight. It was nearly an hour before he returned, dishevelled and flushed with excitement, but triumphant, and with his pony cured of his desire for bolting--at least, for a time. By nightfall the selections and engagements had been made, and the expedition was strengthened by the addition of two white men to act as packers, two Indians who were to serve as guides and hunters, five saddle-ponies, and as many pack-animals. That night our lads slept under canvas for the first time, and as they lay on their blankets discussing the novelty of the situation, Bonny said: "I tell you what, Rick, this mountain-climbing is a more serious business than some folks think. When you first told me what our job was to be I had a sort of an idea that we could get to the top of old Rainier easy enough in one day and come back the next. So I couldn't imagine why Mr. Bear should want to engage us by the month. Now, though, it begins to look as though we were in for something of a cruise." "I should say so," laughed Alaric, who had learned a great deal about mountain-climbing in Switzerland. "It would probably take the best part of a week to go from here straight to the summit and back again. But we shall be gone much longer than that, for we are to make a camp somewhere near the snow-line, and spend a fortnight or so up there collecting flowers and things." "Flowers?" said Bonny, inquiringly. "Yes. M. Filbert is a botanist, you know, and makes a specialty of mountain flora. But I say, Bonny, what makes you call him 'Mr. Bear'?" "Because I thought that was his name. I know you call him 'Phil Bear,' but I never was one to become familiar with a cap'n on short acquaintance." "Ho! ho!" Alaric laughed; "that's a good one. Why, Bonny, Filbert is the surname. F-i-l-b-e-r-t--the same as the nut, you know, only the French pronounce things differently from what we do." "I should say they did if that's a specimen, and I'm glad I'm not expected to talk in any such language. Plain Chinook and every-day North American are good enough for me. I suppose he would say 'Rainy' for Rainier?" "Something very like it. I see you are catching the accent. We'll make a Frenchman of you yet before this trip is ended." "Humph!" ejaculated Bonny. "Not if I know it, you won't." Sunrise of the following morning found the horsemen of the expedition galloping over the brown sward of the park-like prairie towards the forest that for hundreds of miles covers the whole western slope of the Cascade range like a vast green blanket. The road soon entered the timber and began a gradual ascent, winding among the trunks of stately firs and gigantic cedars that often shot upward for more than one hundred feet before a branch broke their column-like regularity. By noon they were at Indian Henry's, twenty miles on their way, and at the end of the wagon-road. That night camp was pitched in the dense timber, and our lads had their first taste of life in the forest. How snugly they were walled in by those close-crowding tree-trunks, and how they revelled in the roaring camp-fire, with its leaping flames, showers of dancing sparks, and perfume of burning cedar! What a delight it was to lie on their blankets just within its circle of light and warmth, listening to its crisp cracklings! Mingled with these was the cheery voice of a tumbling stream that came from the blackness beyond, and the soft murmurings of night winds among the branches far above them. Another day's journey through the same grand forest, only broken by the verdant length of Succotash Valley, and by the rocky beds of many streams, brought them to Longmire's Springs and the log cabins of the hardy settler who had given them his name. At this point, though they had been steadily ascending ever since leaving Yelm Prairie, they were still less than three thousand feet above the sea, and the real work of climbing was not yet begun. After an evening spent in listening to Longmire's thrilling descriptions of the difficulties and dangers awaiting them, Bonny admitted to Alaric that he had never before entertained even a small idea of what a mountain really was. CHAPTER XXVIII ON THE EDGE OF PARADISE VALLEY From the springs a four-mile scramble through the woods and up the rocky beds of ancient waterways brought the party to a place where the Nisqually River must be crossed. Here a single giant tree had been felled so as to span the torrent, and its upper surface roughly hewn to a level. A short distance above the rude bridge rose the frowning front of a glacier. Although its ice was mud-stained and honeycombed by countless rivulets that poured from its upper surface in tiny cascades, it still formed an inspiring spectacle, and one that filled Bonny with wondering admiration, for it was his first glacier. From an arched ice cavern at its base poured the milk-white river, with a hollow roaring, and such force that fair-sized bowlders were swept down its channel as though they were so many sticks of wood. The whole scene was of such fascinating interest that it very nearly brought poor Bonny to grief. He had dismounted, and was preparing to follow M. Filbert and Alaric, who had already led their ponies in safety across the narrow bridge. These animals had crossed so readily that he supposed his would do the same, and, as he stepped out on the great log, was paying far more attention to the glacier than to it. Suddenly he was jerked violently backward, pitched headlong down the bank, and barely saved himself from the icy torrent by clutching at a friendly bush. At the same moment his pony, who had no confidence in mountain bridges, dashed into the roaring stream, was instantly swept from his footing, rolled over and over, and borne struggling away towards what seemed certain destruction. By the good fortune that attends all fools, animals as well as human, he managed to escape both drowning and broken bones, and finally regained his feet on a friendly reef that projected into the river a quarter of a mile below the bridge. There he stood trembling, bruised, and dripping when Bonny and one of the Indians, who had hastened down the bank to discover his fate, found him a few minutes later. From that time forth he was the meekest and most docile pony imaginable, suffering himself not only to be led over the log bridge without remonstrance, but wherever else his young master desired. [Illustration: "BONNY WAS JERKED VIOLENTLY BACKWARD"] From the scene of this incident a hard scramble up a heavily timbered slope, so precipitous that it could only be overcome by a series of zigzags, lifted the expedition a thousand feet above the glacier, and carried them into a park-like meadow so carpeted and fringed with flowers as to throw M. Filbert into an ecstasy of delight. The remainder of that day's ride led through many more of these exquisite, flower-decked mountain meadows separated by belts of timber, and rising one above the other, after the manner of terraces. Largest and most beautiful of them all was Paradise Valley, a broad sweep of flower-painted sward dotted with graceful clumps of alpine firs and hemlocks, and nestled at the base of a mighty frowning cliff. It was bisected by a rippling stream that entered its upper end by a shimmering fall of nearly one thousand feet in height. High above this lovely valley, and close to the line where snow and timber met, M. Filbert called a halt, and ordered the permanent camp to be pitched. Although this point was less than half-way to the top of the mountain, or only 6500 feet above sea-level, the ponies could climb no higher, and, after being unladen, were sent back in charge of the packers into Paradise Valley, where they might fatten on its juicy grasses until needed for the return trip. From here, then, the rugged slope of ice, snow, and rock that stretched indefinitely upward towards the far-away shining summit must be traversed on foot or not at all. But this was not to be done now, nor for days to come, during which the camp just pitched was to be the base of a wide-spread series of explorations. A few straggling hemlocks, so bent by the ice-laden winds that swept down the mountain-side in winter that they looked like decrepit old men, furnished shelter, fuel, and bedding. An ice-cold stream supplied water, the Indian hunters provided fresh meat, bringing in now a mountain-goat or a few brace of ptarmigan, and occasionally fetching up a deer from one of the flowery meadows a few thousand feet below. The supplies of other kinds of food, of warm clothing and bedding, were ample, and so, in spite of its lofty and solitary situation, that mountain-camp seemed to our lads one of the pleasantest and most comfortable places they had ever known. "It beats the sloop away out of sight," remarked Bonny. "Or Skookum John's," said Alaric. "Yes, or being chased and starved." "The best of it all is that up here I seem to amount to something," added Alaric. This was, after all, the true secret of our lads' content; for, in spite of its novelty, the present situation would quickly have grown wearisome had they not been constantly and happily occupied. Every day that the weather would permit they tramped from early morning until dark over snow-fields and glaciers, scaled cliffs, scrambled down into valley-like meadows set like green jewels in the grim mountain-side, threaded their way amid the fantastic forms of stunted forests, toiled slowly up lofty heights, or slid with the speed of toboggans down gleaming slopes. Each day they gained in agility and daring, and each night they returned to that cheery camp with its light, warmth, and abounding comforts, so healthfully tired and so ravenously hungry that it is no wonder they grew to look upon it as a home, and a very pleasant one. Both lads developed specialties in which they became expert. Alaric's was photography, an art that he had acquired in France, and had practised at intervals for more than a year. As soon as M. Filbert discovered this knowledge on the part of his young interpreter, he intrusted him with the camera, and never had the lad devoted himself to anything with such enthusiasm as he now did to the capturing of views. His greatest triumph came through hours of tedious and noiseless creeping over a rough ice-field that finally placed him within twenty yards of a couple of mountain-goats. Although the wind was blowing strongly from them to him, the timid creatures were already alarmed, and were sniffing the air suspiciously when a click of the camera's shutter sent them off like a flash. But the shot had been successful, as was shown by the development of a perfect plate that evening. M. Filbert was jubilant over this feat, which he said had never before been accomplished, and complimented the lad in flattering terms upon the skilful patience that had led to it. Bonny's specialty lay in the collecting of flowers, to which he had devoted himself assiduously ever since learning that they were what the little Frenchman most desired. Keen-eyed, nimble-footed, and tireless, he discovered and secured many a rare specimen that but for him would have been passed unnoticed. Thus the leader of the expedition found reason to value the good qualities of his young assistants more highly with each day, and was already planning to have them accompany him on his entire American tour, during which he proposed to ascend at least a dozen more mountains. Bonny was jubilant over the prospect of such a trip, and was now as eager to learn French, in order to qualify himself for it, as he had formerly been scornful of the language. With all this open-air life and splendid physical exercise, the one-time pale-faced and slender Alaric was broadening and developing beyond belief. His cheeks were now a ruddy brown, his eyes were clear, his muscles hard, and his step as springy as that of a mountain-goat. Above everything else in his own estimation he was learning to swing an axe with precision, and could now chop a log in two almost as neatly as Bonny himself. For all that they were so constantly and agreeably occupied, the boys were possessed of a great and ever-increasing longing to stand on the lofty but still distant summit, with the general aspect of which they had become so familiar during their stay in the timber-line camp. Thus, when one evening M. Filbert decided to make a start towards it on the morrow, they hailed the announcement with joy. One of the Indians was to accompany them as guide, while his fellow was to be left with François to keep camp. The greater part of the following morning was devoted to making preparations for the climb and what was thought might prove a three days' absence from camp: the hobnails of their walking-boots, worn smooth by friction, were replaced by a fresh set; alpenstocks were tested until it was certain that each of those to be taken would bear the weight of the heaviest of the party; provisions were cooked and packs laid out. Each was to carry a canvas-covered blanket sleeping-bag, inside of which would be rolled provisions for three days, a tin plate, and a cup. Each was also provided with a sheath-knife and a supply of matches. Besides these things M. Filbert was to carry a barometer, a thermometer, a compass, and a collecting-case. Alaric was intrusted with the camera and two dozen plates. Bonny's extras were a hatchet and a fifty-foot coil of stout rope; while the Indian was to carry an ice-axe and pack a burden of fire-wood. It was nearly noon when, fortified by a hearty lunch, they left their home-like camp, and, facing resolutely upward, began a tedious climb over the limitless expanse of snow that they struck within the first hundred yards. The sky was overcast, and they had hardly started ere a dense cloud-bank swept down and enveloped them in its chill vapors. An hour later they passed above it, though the clouds still rolled thick below them, and emerged into sunlight. Glad as they were to see this, it was so distressingly bright that they were obliged to protect their eyes from its blinding glare with snow-goggles. Wherever a ledge of rock projected above the snow they found blooming flowers and busy insects. Even butterflies hovered about these spots of verdure, and seemed as much at home amid their arctic surroundings as in the warm valleys far below. The climb of that afternoon was hot, in spite of the snow that crunched beneath their feet, tedious, and only mildly exciting, for all the perils of the ascent were to come on the morrow. Shortly before the sun sank into the sea of cloud that spread in fleecy undulations beneath them, they reached the base of the Cleaver, a gigantic ridge that seemed to bar their further progress. Here, on a small plat of nearly level ground from which they dug away the snow, they made a fire over which to boil water for a pot of tea, ate supper, and prepared to pass the night. They were four thousand feet above timber-line, and two miles higher than the waters of Puget Sound. As soon as supper was over the entire party crawled into their sleeping-bags for protection against the bitter cold of the night, and for a while the two boys, nestling together, talked in low tones. Then Bonny fell asleep; but for nearly an hour Alaric lay awake, listening to the awful silence of that lofty solitude, or startled by the occasional thunderous rush of some plunging bowlder hurled from its bed by the resistless leverage of frost. CHAPTER XXIX MOUNT RAINIER PLACED UNDERFOOT The summit of Mount Rainier has only been gained by way of its southern slope, the much steeper and more dangerous northern face having never been scaled. Even over the comparatively easy slope of the south side but one practicable trail has been discovered, and it leads by way of the Cleaver. This gigantic ridge of rock, like the backbone of some colossal monster, forms a divide between the upper Nisqually and Cowlitz glaciers. Its sides are overlaid with confused masses of bowlders and treacherous gravel, through which appear at intervals sheer cliffs and bare ledges of solid rock. The Cleaver leads to a mighty mass of granite, a mountain in itself, that is fittingly called the Gibraltar of Mount Rainier. It bars a further passage to all save the strongest climbers, and to these it affords the only means of access to the lofty realms beyond. Here is the most perilous part of the ascent, and, with Gibraltar once passed, the summit is almost certain of attainment. It seemed to our weary lads that they had barely fallen asleep when they were wakened by a rude shaking and the voice of their Siwash guide, exclaiming: "Come, come, lazy boy! Wake up! wake up! Mos' _sitkum sun_ (noon). Breakfus! breakfus!" "'Most noon!" growled Bonny, crawling reluctantly from his sleeping-bag, rubbing his eyes, and shivering in the bitter cold. "'Most midnight, more likely." "Alle same, _sitkum sun_ some place; don't he?" queried the Indian; laughing at his own joke. By the time they had swallowed a cup of tepid tea, and lightened their packs by making a hearty meal of cold meat and hard bread, dawn was breaking, and there was light enough to pick their way up the treacherous slope of the Cleaver. As they cautiously advanced, many a bowlder slipped from beneath their feet and bounded with mighty leapings into the depths behind them. Dodging these, sliding in the loose gravels, lifting and pulling each other up rocky faces from one narrow ledge to another, and ever looking upward, they finally gained the summit of the mighty ridge. From here they could gaze down the opposite slope nearly a thousand feet to the gleaming surface of the great Cowlitz glacier, with so much of its ruggedness smoothed away by distance that it looked a river of milk with a line of black drift in its centre, flowing swiftly through a rock-walled cañon and pouring into a sea of cloud. On the far southward horizon could be seen the glistening cone of Mount Hood, kissed by earliest sunbeams, and in the middle distance the volcanic peaks of St. Helens and Adams. Near at hand, pinnacles of the Tatoosh range were breaking through the clouds like rocky islets in a billowy sea. Before them the rugged backbone of the Cleaver, stripped of every particle of its earthy flesh, stretched away in quick ascent to the frowning mass of Gibraltar. The Cleaver carried them half-way up the sombre face of this mighty rock, and from that point a narrow ledge creeping diagonally up the precipice at a steep angle was the trail they must follow. Not only was this rocky pathway steep and narrow, but it shelved away from the wall, and in many places afforded only a treacherous foothold. At any point along its length a slip, a misstep, or an attack of dizziness would mean almost certain destruction. Foot by foot and yard by yard M. Filbert's little party ascended this perilous way, here walking, and trusting to their alpenstocks for support; there crawling on hands and knees. Sometimes one would go cautiously ahead over a place of peculiar danger, with an end of the rope firmly knotted beneath his arms, while his companions, with firm bracings, retained the other part, ready to haul him up if by chance he should plunge over the verge and dangle above the abyss at the end of his slender tether. At the terminus of the ledge they were confronted by a sloping wall of solid ice, in which they must cut steps and grip-holes for feet and hands. As they slowly and painfully worked their way up this precarious ladder, they were continually pelted by pebbles and good-sized stones loosened by the sun from an upper cliff of frozen gravel. At length the toilsome ascent was safely accomplished, and, with a panting shout from Alaric and a hurrah from Bonny, the whole party stood on the summit of that mountain Gibraltar. Here they rested and lunched; then, full of eager impatience, pushed on over the narrow causeway connecting the mighty rock with the vastly mightier snow-cap beyond. This snow, that had looked so faultlessly smooth from below, was found to be drifted and packed into high ridges, over which they slowly toiled, frequently pausing for breath and inhaling the rarefied air with quick gaspings. At length a bottomless crevasse yawned before them, spanned only by a narrow ledge of snow. With an end of the rope knotted beneath his arms, Bonny, being the lightest, essayed to cross it. Before he reached the farther side the treacherous support broke beneath him, and, with a frightened cry, Alaric saw his comrade plunge out of sight in the yawning chasm. He brought up with a heavy jerk at the end of the rope, and they cautiously drew him back to where they stood. As he reappeared above the edge of the opening his face was very pale, but he called out, cheerfully: "It's all right, Rick! Don't fret!" After a long search they discovered another bridge, and it bore them across in safety, one at a time, but all securely roped together. Finally, late in the afternoon, the longed-for summit was attained, and, though nearly toppled over by a furious wind, they stood triumphant on the rocky rim of its ancient crater. This was half a mile in diameter, and filled with snow, but its opposite or northern side was the highest. So to it they made their weary way, following the rocky path afforded by the rim, and barely able to hold their footing against the wind. When they at last attained the point of their ambition, a reading of the barometer showed them to be standing at a height of 14,444 feet above sea-level, and with exulting hearts they realized that, as Bonny expressed it, they had put the highest peak of the Cascade range beneath their feet. The view that greeted them from that lofty outlook was so wonderful and far-reaching that for a while they gazed in awed silence. Mount Baker, two hundred miles away, close to the British line, was clearly visible, as were the notable peaks to the southward, even beyond the distant Columbia and over the Oregon border. "_C'est grand! c'est magnifique! c'est terrible!_" exclaimed M. Filbert, at length breaking the silence. As for Alaric! To have achieved that summit was the greatest triumph of his life; but his heart was too full for utterance, and he could only gaze in speechless delight. The Indian too gazed in silence as, leaning on his ice-axe, he contemplated the outspread empire that but a few years before had belonged solely to the people of his race. Bonny was as deeply impressed as either of his companions, but found it necessary to express his feelings in words. "This must be the top of the world!" he cried; "and I do believe we can see it all. I tell you what it is, Rick Dale, I've learned something about mountains this day, and now I know that they are the grandest things in all creation." At their feet the rock wall dropped so sheer and smooth that no man might climb it, and then came the snow, sweeping steeply downward for miles apparently without a break. Far beyond lay the vast sea of forest, seeming to cover the whole earth with its green mantle. The gleaming glaciers, looking like foaming cascades frozen into rigidity, were swallowed by it and hidden. It rolled in billows over the mighty mountain flanks that radiated from where they stood like the spokes of a colossal wheel, and dipped into the intervening valleys. Nowhere was it broken, save by the few bald peaks that struggled above it and by the thread-like waters of Puget Sound. Even on the west there was no ocean, for the volcanic, snow-crowned Olympics, one of which was smoking, as though in eruption, hid it from view. Our lads could have gazed entranced for hours on the crowding marvels outspread before them had they been warmed and fed and rested and sheltered from the fierce blasts of icy wind that threatened to hurl them from the parapet on which they stood. As it was, night was at hand, they were faint and trembling from weariness, and wellnigh perished with the stinging cold. It was high time to turn from gazing and seek shelter. Inside the crater's rim numerous steam jets issued from fissures in the rocky wall, and these had carved out caverns from the adjacent ice. Here there were roomy chambers, steam-heated and storm-proof, awaiting occupancy, and to one of these M. Filbert led the way. In this place of welcome shelter numbed fingers were thawed to further usefulness by the grateful steam, a small fire was lighted, packs were opened, and in less than an hour a bountiful supper of hot tea, venison frizzled over the coals, toasted hard-bread, and prunes was being enjoyed by as hungry and jubilant a party as ever bivouacked on the summit of Mount Rainier. After supper the Frenchman lighted a cigarette, the Indian puffed, with an air of intense satisfaction, at an ancient pipe, our lads toasted their stockinged feet before the few remaining embers of the fire, and, in various languages, all four discussed the adventures of the day. Although they had much to say, their conversation hour was soon ended by their weariness and by the ever-increasing cold, which even a jet of volcanic steam could not exclude from that chamber of ice. So they speedily slipped into their sleeping-bags, and, lying close together for greater warmth, prepared to spend a night under the very strangest conditions that Alaric and Bonny, at least, had ever encountered. Some hours later the occupants of the ice-cave became conscious of the howlings of a storm that shrieked and roared above their heads with the fury of ten thousand demons; but, knowing that it could not penetrate their retreat, they gave it but slight heed, and quickly dropped again into the sleep of weariness. CHAPTER XXX BLOWN FROM THE RIM OF A CRATER When our lads next awoke they were oppressed with a sense of suffocation and uncomfortable warmth. It was still dark, and M. Filbert was striking a match in order to look at his watch. "Seven o'clock!" he cried, incredulously. "How can it be?" "_Cole snass!_" (snow) exclaimed the Indian, to whom the flare of light had instantly disclosed the cause of both darkness and suffocation. The cave was much smaller than when they entered it, and was also full of steam. Its walls were covered with moisture, and rivulets of water trickled over the floor. "_Cultus snow!_ Heap plenty! Too much! _Mamook ilahie_" (must dig), continued the Indian, springing to his feet, and making an attack on the drifted snow that had completely choked the cavern's mouth. When he had excavated a burrow the length of his body, Bonny took his place, while Alaric and M. Filbert removed the loosened snow to the back of the cave, where they packed it as closely as possible. Although a faint light soon appeared in the tunnel, it was a full hour before it was dug to the surface of the tremendous drift and a rush of cold air was admitted. A glance outside showed that, while no snow was falling at that moment, the day was dark and gloomy, and the mountain was enveloped in clouds that were driven in swirling eddies by fierce gusts of wind. In spite of the threatening weather, M. Filbert declared that they must begin their retreat at once, as they had but one day's supply of food left, while the storm might burst upon them again at any minute and continue indefinitely. So, after a hasty meal of biscuits and cold meat, the little party sallied forth. The Indian, having no longer a burden of fire-wood, relieved Alaric of his camera, and led the way. M. Filbert followed, then came Alaric; while Bonny, with a coil of rope hung over his shoulder, brought up the rear. Oh, how cold it was! and how awful! To be sure, the dangers surrounding them were hidden by impenetrable clouds, but they had already seen them, and knew of their presence. As they started to traverse the rocky crater rim that still rose slightly above the snow, the entire summit was visible; but a few minutes later a furious gust of wind again shrouded it in clouds so dense as to completely hide objects only a few feet away. Just then Alaric tripped on one of his boot-lacings that had become unfastened, and very nearly fell. That was no place for tripping, and such a thing must not happen again. So he paused to secure the loosened lacing, and, as he stooped over it, Bonny cried impatiently from behind: "Hurry up, Rick! the others are already out of sight, and it will never do to lose them in this fog." The necessity for haste only caused the lad's numbed fingers to fumble the more awkwardly, and several precious minutes were thus wasted. With the task completed, Alaric, full of nervous dread, started to run after his vanished companions, slipped on a bit of glare ice at a place where the narrow path slanted down and out, and pitched headlong. Bonny saw his danger, sprang to his assistance, slipped on the same treacherous ice, and in another moment both lads had plunged over the outer verge of the sheer wall. There was a stifled cry, drowned by the roaring blast, and then, without leaving a trace behind them, they were lost to sight in the crowding mists. So complete was their disappearance that when, one minute later, M. Filbert and the Indian passed back over that very place in anxious search of their young companions, they could neither see nor hear aught to tell them of what had happened. Neither Alaric nor Bonny could ever afterwards tell whether they fell twenty feet or two hundred in that terrible, breathless plunge. Almost with the first knowledge of their situation they found themselves struggling in a drift of soft, fresh-fallen snow, and a moment afterwards rolling, bounding, and shooting with frightful velocity down an icy, roof-like slope of interminable length. Breathless, battered, bruised, expecting with each instant to be dashed over some awful brink, as ignorant of their surroundings as though stricken with blindness, the poor lads still tried, with outstretched arms and clutching fingers, to check their wild flight. While they realized in a measure the desperate nature of the situation, its worst features were mercifully concealed from them by the clinging clouds. Had these lifted ever so little, they would have seen that their perilous coast was down a ridge so narrow that the alpenstocks flung from them as they plunged over the rim of the crater had fallen on either side into yawning chasms. At length, after what seemed an eternity of this terrible experience, though in reality it lasted but a few minutes, they were flung into a narrow, snow-filled valley that cut their course at a sharp angle, and found themselves lying within a few feet of each other, dazed and sorely bruised, but apparently with unbroken bones, and certainly still alive. As they slowly gained a sitting posture and gazed curiously at each other, Bonny said, impressively: "Rick Dale, before we go any farther, I want to take back all I ever said about the life of a sailor being exciting, for it isn't a circumstance to that of an interpreter." "Oh, Bonny, it is so good to hear your voice again! Wasn't it awful? And how do you suppose we can ever get back?" "Get back!" cried the other. "Well, if we had wings we might fly back; but there's no other way that I know of. We must be a mile from our starting-point, and even to reach the foot of the place where we dove off we'd have to cut steps in the ice every inch of the way. That would probably take a couple of days, and when we got there we'd have to turn around and come down again, for nothing except a bird could ever scale that wall." "Then what shall we do?" "Keep on as we have begun, I suppose, only a little slower, I hope, until we reach the timber-line, and then try and follow it to camp." "I wonder if we can?" "Of course we can, for we've got to." Painfully the lads gained their feet, and with cautious steps began to explore their surroundings. They walked side by side for a few yards, and then each clutched the other as though to draw him back. They were on the brink of a precipice, over which another step would have carried them. While they hesitated, not knowing which way to turn nor what to do, the clouds below them rolled away, though above and back of them they remained as dense as ever, and a view of what lay before them was unfolded. Rocks, ice, and snow; sheer walls rising on either side of them, and a precipitous slope forming an almost vertical descent of a thousand feet in front. There were but three things to do: Go back the way they had come, which was so wellnigh impossible that they did not give it a second thought; remain where they were, which meant a certain and speedy death; or make their way down that rocky wall. They crept to its brink and looked over, anxiously scanning its every feature and calculating their chances. The first thirty feet were sheer and smooth. Then came a narrow shelf, below which they could see others at irregular intervals. "There is only one way to do it," said Bonny, "and that is by the rope. I will go first, and you must follow." "I'll try," replied Alaric, with a very pale face but a brave voice. So Bonny, with the knowledge of knots that he had learned on shipboard, made a noose that would not slip in one end of their rope, tied half a dozen knots along its length for hand-holds, and fastened its other end about his body. Then he looped the noose over a jutting point of rock, and, slipping cautiously over the brink, allowed himself to slide slowly down. It made Alaric so giddy to watch him that he closed his eyes, nor did he open them until a cheery "All right, Rick!" assured him of his comrade's safety. Now came his turn, and as he hung by that slender cord he was devoutly thankful for the strength that the past few weeks had put into his arms. He too reached the ledge in safety, and then, with great difficulty, on account of the narrowness of their foothold, they managed to slip the noose off its resting-place. Now they _must_ go forward, for there was no longer a chance of going back. In vain, though, did they search that smooth ledge for a point that would hold their noose. There was none, and the next shelf was twenty feet below. "We must climb it, Rick, and this time you must go first. Put the loop under your arms, and I will do my best to hold you if you slip; but don't take any chances, or count too much on me being able to do it." There were little cracks and slight projections. Bonny held the rope reassuringly taut, and at length the feat was accomplished. Then Alaric took in the slack of the rope as Bonny, tied to its other end, made the same perilous descent. So, with strained arms, aching legs, and fingers worn to the quick from clutching the rough granite, they made their slow way from ledge to ledge, gaining courage and coolness as they successfully overcame each difficulty, until they estimated that they had descended fully five hundred feet. Now came another smooth face absolutely without a crevice that they could discover, and the next ledge below was farther away than the length of their dangling rope. There was, however, a projection where they stood, over which they could loop the noose. "We've got to do it," said Bonny, stoutly, "and I only hope the drop at the end isn't so long as it looks." Thus saying, he slipped cautiously over the edge, let himself down to the end of the rope, dropped ten feet, staggered, and seemed about to fall, but saved himself by a violent effort. Alaric followed, and also made the drop, but whirled half round in so doing, and but for Bonny's quick clutch would have gone over the edge. There was now no way of recovering their useful rope; and fortunately, though they sorely needed it at times, they found no other place absolutely impossible without it. By noon, when they paused for rest and a scanty lunch of chocolate and prunes, they were down one thousand feet, and believed the worst of the descent to be accomplished. Now came a rude granite stairway with steps fit for a giant, and then a long slope of loose bowlders, that rocked and rolled from beneath their feet as they sprang from one to another. They crossed the rugged ice of a glacier, whose innumerable crevasses intersected like the wrinkles on an old man's face, and had many hair-breadth escapes from slipping into their deadly depths of frozen blue. Then came a vast snow-field, over which they tramped for miles with weary limbs but light hearts, for the terrors of the mountain were behind them and the timber-line was in sight. Darkness had already overtaken them when they came to a steep, rock-strewn slope, down which they ran with reckless speed. They were near its bottom when a bowlder on which Bonny had just leaped rolled from under him, and he fell heavily on a bed of jagged rocks. As he did not regain his feet, Alaric sprang to his side. The poor lad who had so stoutly braved the countless perils of the day was moaning pitifully, and as his friend bent anxiously over him he said, in a feeble voice: "I'm afraid, old man, that I'm done for at last, for it feels as though every bone in my body was broken." CHAPTER XXXI A DESPERATE SITUATION Of the many trying experiences through which our lads had passed since their introduction to each other in Victoria, none had presented so many hopeless features as the present. They were high up on a mighty mountain, whose terrible wilderness of rock and glacier, precipice and chasm, limitless snow-field and trackless forest, stretched for weary leagues in every direction; beyond hope of human aid; only a mouthful of food between them and starvation; with night so close at hand that near-by objects were already indistinct in its gathering gloom; without shelter; inexperienced in woodcraft; and one of them so seriously injured that he lay moaning on the cruel rocks that had wounded him, apparently incapable of moving. As all these details of the situation flashed into Alaric's mind he became for a moment heart-sick and despairing at its utter hopelessness. He was so exhausted with the exertions of the day, so unnerved by the strain and anxiety of the perilous hours just passed, and so faint for want of nourishment, that it is no wonder his strength was turned into weakness, or that he could discover no ray of hope through the all-pervading gloom. Suddenly and as clearly as though spoken by his side came the words: "Always remember that, as my friend Jalap Coombs says, 'It is never so dark but what there is light somewhere.'" The memory of Phil Ryder's brave face as he uttered that sentence came to our poor lad like a tonic, and instantly he was resolved to find the light that was shining for him somewhere. With such marvellous quickness does the mind act in an emergency that all these thoughts came to Alaric even as he bent anxiously over his injured friend and began examining tenderly into the nature of his hurts. As he lifted the left arm the sufferer uttered a cry of pain, and its hand hung limp. The other limbs were sound, but Bonny said that every breath was like a stab. "One arm broken, and I'm afraid something gone wrong inside," announced Alaric at length; "but it might be ever so much worse," he continued, in as cheerful a tone as he could command. "One of your legs might have been broken, you know, and then we should be in a fix, for I couldn't carry you, and we should have to stay right here. Now, though, I am sure you can walk as far as the timber if you will only try. Of course it will hurt terribly, but you must do it, for there is no other way." Very slowly, and with many a stifled cry of acute pain, Bonny gained his feet. Then, with his right arm about Alaric's neck, and with the latter stoutly supporting him, the injured lad managed to cross the few hundred feet intervening between that place and the longed-for shelter of the stunted hemlocks forming the timber-line. Both Bonny's weakness and the darkness, which was now that of night, prevented their penetrating deep into the timber; but before the sufferer sank to the ground, declaring that he could not take another step, they had gone far enough to escape the icy blast that, sweeping down from the upper snow-fields, had chilled them to the marrow. This alone was a notable achievement, and already Alaric believed he could perceive a glimmer of the light he had set out to find. Now for a fire, and how grateful they were for M. Filbert's forethought that had provided each one of his party with matches! Feeling about for twigs, and whittling a few shavings with his sheath-knife, Alaric quickly started a tiny flame, and with its first cheery glow their situation seemed robbed of half its terrors. An armful of sticks produced a brave crackling blaze that drove the black forest shadows to a respectful distance. With Bonny's hatchet Alaric next lopped off the branches from the lower side of a thick-growing hemlock and wove them among those that were left, so as to form a wind-break. An armful of the same flat boughs, cut from other trees and strewn on the ground, formed a spring bed on which to unfold the sleeping-bags, that by rare good fortune had remained strapped to the lads' shoulders during all their terrible journey from the summit camp of the night before. After making his comrade as comfortable as possible, Alaric hurried away into the darkness. He was gone so long that Bonny, who did not know the reason of his absence, began to grow very uneasy before he returned. When he did reappear, he brought with him a quantity of snow that he had gone back a quarter of a mile up the dark mountain-side to obtain. He wanted water, and not hearing or finding any stream, had bethought himself of snow as a substitute. In each of the packs they had so fortunately brought with them was a handful of tea, for M. Filbert had insisted that all the provisions should be divided among all the packs, as a precaution against just such an emergency as had arisen. Therefore, Alaric now had the materials for a longed-for and much-needed cup of the stimulating beverage. To make it, an amount of the precious leaves equal to a teaspoonful was put into one of their tin cups while snow was melted in the other. As soon as this came to a boil it was poured over the tea leaves in cup number one, which was allowed to stand for two minutes longer in a warm place to "draw." While Bonny slowly sipped this, at the same time munching a handful of hard biscuit, which, broken into small bits, was all the food they had left, Alaric boiled another cup of water for himself. From all this it will be seen that our one-time helpless and dependent "Allie" Todd was rapidly learning not only to care for himself under trying conditions, but for others as well. As soon as Bonny had been thus strengthened and thoroughly warmed, Alaric made a more thorough examination of his injuries than had been possible out in the cold and darkness where the accident occurred. He found that the left arm had sustained a simple fracture, fortunately but little splintered, and also that two ribs on the left side were broken. For these he could do nothing; but he managed to set the broken arm after a fashion, bandage it with handkerchiefs torn into strips, and finally to place it in a case formed of a trough-like section of hemlock-bark, which he hung from Bonny's neck by straps. Then he helped his patient into one of the sleeping-bags, encouraging him all the while with hopeful suggestions of what they would do on the morrow. After thus making his charge as comfortable as circumstances would permit, the lad busied himself for another hour in collecting such a quantity of wood as should insure a good fire until morning. Then, utterly fagged out, he crept into his own bed, and lay down beside his friend. Despite the painful nature of his injuries, Bonny had already fallen asleep, but Alaric lay awake from sheer weariness, and struggled against gloomy thoughts of their future. He knew that the home-like camp in which they had passed two weeks so happily, and which they had hoped to regain by following the timber-line, was on the opposite side of the mountain, many weary miles away. He knew also that between them and it lay a region so rugged as to be wellnigh impassable to the sturdiest of mountaineers, and absolutely so to one in Bonny's condition. It would be a journey of two or more days under the most favorable circumstances; but alone and without food he realized that even he could not accomplish it. Besides, he could not leave Bonny in his present helpless condition. Therefore, all thoughts of obtaining assistance from that direction must be abandoned. Could they continue on down the mountain through the trackless forest that on the upward journey they had occupied two whole days in traversing on horseback, and with a clearly defined trail? Certainly they could not, and to make the attempt would be worse than folly. What, then, could they do? This question was so unanswerable that the perplexed lad gave over struggling with it and fell asleep. He intended to replenish his fire several times during the night; but when he next awoke daylight was already some hours old, the place where the fire had burned was covered with dead ashes, and Bonny lay patiently regarding him with wistful eyes. "I am thirsty, Rick," was all he said, though he had lain for hours wide-awake and parched with fever, but heroically determined that his wearied comrade should sleep until he woke of his own accord. "You poor fellow!" cried Alaric, remorsefully. "Why didn't you wake me long ago?" "I couldn't bear to," replied Bonny; "but now if you will please get me a drink." Only pausing to light a fresh fire, Alaric hastened away to the distant snow-bank, returning as speedily as possible with as much of it as their two tin plates would hold. A handful was given Bonny to cool his parched tongue while the remainder was melting. So small a quantity of water could be procured at a time by this slow process that in a very few minutes Alaric found he must go for more snow. As he went he realized how faint he was for want of food. "I wonder how much longer I shall be able to hold out?" he asked himself. "How many more times can I make this trip before my strength is exhausted?" A mental picture of Bonny begging for water, and he too weak to fetch it, caused his eyes to fill with tears, and a black despair again enfolded him. At this moment the voice of the previous night came again to him: "It is never so dark but what there is light somewhere." "Of course there is," he cried, "and as I found it last night, why shouldn't I to-day?" Even as the lad spoke he caught its first gleam in the form of a rivulet of clear water that rippled merrily down from the snow only a few yards from where he stood. Hastening to this, the lad drank long and deeply. On lifting his head from the delicious water, he could hardly believe his eyes as they rested on a solitary bird, that he knew to be a ptarmigan, crouching beside a bowlder. Hoping against hope, and almost unnerved by anxiety, he flung a stone, and in another minute the bird was his. "Hurrah for breakfast!" he shouted, as he ran back to Bonny with his trophy proudly displayed at arm's-length. Awkward as Alaric was at the business, he had that Heaven-sent bird stripped of its feathers, cleaned, and spitted over a bed of glowing coals within ten minutes of the time he had first spied it, and a little later only its cleanly picked bones remained to tell of its existence. Bonny was disinclined to eat, but he drank two cups of hot tea, that threw him into a perspiration, greatly to Alaric's satisfaction. As he also seemed drowsy, Alaric encouraged him to sleep, while he should go in search of more food and assistance, with one or both of which he promised to return before noon. CHAPTER XXXII HOW A SONG SAVED ALARIC'S LIFE When Alaric made that promise he had no more idea of how it was to be kept than he had of what was to become of Bonny and himself. He only knew that active exertion of some kind was necessary to keep him from utter despair. Besides, it was just possible that he might discover and secure another bird, though not at all probable, as the one on which he had breakfasted was the first that he had encountered since coming to the mountain. By the time he emerged from the timber the morning clouds had rolled away, the sun was shining brightly, and the whole vast sweep of gleaming snow and tumultuous rock, from timber-line to distant summit, lay piled in steep ascent before him. It was a wonderful sight, but as terrible as it was grand, for in all its awful solitude there was no movement, no voice, and no sign of life. Oppressed by the loneliness of his surroundings, and having no reason for choosing one direction rather than another, the lad mechanically turned to the right and began to make his way along a bowlder-strewn slope, where every now and then he came to the bleached skeletons of stunted trees, winter-killed, but still standing, and seeming to stretch imploring arms to their retreating brethren of the forest. He had not gone more than a mile when there came something to him that caused him to halt and glance inquiringly on all sides. At the same time he lifted his head and sniffed the air eagerly, like a hound on the scent of game. He was certain that he had smelled smoke. Yes, there it came again; a whiff so faint as to be almost imperceptible, but the unmistakable odor of burning wood. Facing squarely the breeze that brought it to him, the lad pushed forward, and a few minutes later stood on the verge of a little mountain meadow, sun-warmed and rock-walled on all sides, save the one by which he had approached. Here the slope was so gentle that he started down on a run. He had thus gone but a short distance when he suddenly paused with his eyes fixed on the ground where he was standing. He had been unconsciously following a path, faintly marked and hardly to be distinguished, but nevertheless one that he felt certain had been trodden by human feet. The discovery filled him with excitement, and he bounded forward with redoubled speed. Halfway down the slope, at a point commanding a lovely view of the flower-strewn valley, the trail ended at a crystal spring that bubbled from among the roots of a tall young hemlock. Other trees were grouped near-by, and beneath them stood a rude hut built of poles and boughs, but having a rain-proof roof of thatch. Before it smouldered a log fire, from which rose the thin column of smoke that had directed Alaric's attention to the place. Filled with exultation and wild with joy over his discovery, the lad gazed eagerly about for some sign of the proprietor or occupants of this lonely camp, and at length, seeing no one, he began to shout. Receiving no response, he entered the hut, and was surprised at the absence of even the rude comforts common to such a place. There was a heap of white goat-skins in one corner, and a quantity of meat, either smoked or dried, hung from a rafter overhead. A kettle and a fry-pan lay outside near the fire, an axe was driven into the trunk of one of the trees, and, so far as Alaric could see, there was nothing else. But even these things were enough to indicate that this was a place of at least temporary human abode, and wherever its proprietor might be, he would return to it sooner or later. Then, too, Alaric believed it to be the camp of a white man; for though his knowledge of Indians was limited, it in no way resembled that of Skookum John. "At any rate," he said to himself, "I will try and get Bonny here as quickly as possible, for he will be a thousand times better off in this place than where I left him." So, with a lighter heart than he had known since his comrade's accident, Alaric started back over the trail by which he had come. Bonny was awake and sitting up when he reappeared, and the sufferer's face brightened wonderfully at the great news of at least one other human being, a camp, and an abundance of food so near at hand. "Do you really think I can get there, though?" he asked, anxiously. "Yes," replied Alaric, "I know you can; for, as you said yesterday when we were looking at that precipice, it is something that must be done. We can't stay here without either food or shelter, and we don't dare wait for the owner of that camp to come back and help us move, because he may stay away several days. I know it is going to hurt you awfully to walk, but I know too that you'll do it if you only make up your mind to." "All right, I'll try it; but, Rick, don't you forget that if I ever get down from this mountain alive, never again will I climb another. No, sir. Level ground will be good enough for me after this." As Alaric was doing up the sleeping-bags a familiar-looking baseball rolled from his, and caught Bonny's eye. "If you aren't a queer chap!" he exclaimed. "Whatever made you bring that ball along?" "Because," answered the other, "it means so much to me that I hated to leave it behind, and then I thought perhaps it would be fun to have a game on the very top of the mountain. When we reached there, though, I forgot all about it." "Yes," said Bonny, grimly, "we did have something else to think of. Ough, but that hurts!" This exclamation was called forth by the poor lad's effort to gain his feet, which he found he was unable to do without assistance. Although Alaric carried both packs, and lent Bonny all possible support besides, that one-mile walk proved the most difficult either of the lads had ever undertaken. Brave and stout-hearted as Bonny was, he could not help groaning with every step, and they were obliged to rest so often that the little journey occupied several hours. At its end both lads were utterly exhausted, and Bonny was suffering so intensely that he hardly noticed the place to which he had been brought. The moment he gained the hut he sank down on its pile of goat-skins with closed eyes, and so white a face that he seemed about to faint. When Alaric was there before, he had mended the fire and set on a kettle of water, with a view to just such an emergency as the present. The water was still boiling, and so within three minutes he was able to give his patient a cup of strong tea that greatly revived him. Food was the next thing to be thought of, and Alaric did not hesitate to appropriate one of the strips of goat's flesh that hung overhead. Not being quite sure of the best way to cook this, he cut one portion into small bits, put them into the kettle with a little water, and set the whole on the fire to simmer. Another portion he sliced thin and laid in the fry-pan, which he also set on the fire. Still a third bit he spitted on a long stick and held close to a bed of coals, where it frizzled with such an appetizing odor that he could not wait for it to be cooked before cutting off small bits to sample. They were so good that he went to offer some to Bonny; but finding the latter still lying with closed eyes, thought best not to disturb him. So he sat alone and ate all the frizzled meat, and all that was in the fry-pan, and was still so hungry that he procured another strip of meat from the hut, and began all over again. They had been nearly two hours in the camp before his ravenous appetite was fully satisfied, and by that time the contents of the pot had simmered into a sort of thick broth. At a faint call from Bonny, Alaric carried some of this to him, and had the satisfaction of seeing him swallow a whole cupful. Then, as night was again approaching, he helped his patient into one of the sleeping-bags, which he underlaid with several goat-skins, and sat by him until he fell into a doze. When this happened Alaric went softly outside, and, to dispel the gathering gloom, piled logs on the fire until it was in a bright blaze. Sitting a little to one side, half in light and half in shadow, and having no present occupation, the lad fell into a deep reverie. How was this strange adventure to end? Who owned that camp, and why did he not return to it? What would he think on finding strangers in possession? Had any boy ever stepped from one life into another so entirely different as suddenly and completely as he? One year ago at this time he was in France, surrounded by every luxury that money could procure, carefully guarded from every form of anxiety, and dependent upon others for everything. Now he was thankful for the shelter of a hut, and a meal of half-cooked meat prepared by his own hands. He not only had everything to do for himself, but had another still more helpless dependent upon him for everything. Was he any happier then than now? No. He could honestly say that he preferred his present position, with its health, strength, and glorious self-reliance, to the one he had resigned. Still there had been happy times in that other life. Two years ago, for instance, when his mother and he had travelled leisurely through Germany, halting whenever they chose, and remaining as long as places interested them. Thoughts of his mother recalled the plaintive little German folk-song of which she had been so fond. _Muss i denn._ Yes, that was it, and involuntarily Alaric began to hum the air. Then the words began to fit themselves to it, and before he realized what he was doing he was singing softly: "Muss i denn, muss i denn Zum Städtele 'naus, Städtele 'naus: Und du, mein Schatz, bleibst hier." So engrossed was the lad with his thoughts and with trying to recall the words of the song running in his head that he heard nothing of a soft footstep that for several minutes had been stealthily approaching the fire-lit place where he sat. He knew nothing of the wild eyes that, peering from a haggard face, were fixed upon him with the glare of madness. He had no suspicion of the brown rifle-barrel that was slowly raised until he was covered by its deadly aim. But now he had recalled all the words of his song, and they rang out strong and clear: "Muss i denn, muss i denn Zum Städtele 'naus, Städtele 'naus: Und du--" At that moment there came a great cry behind him: "_Ach, Himmel! Wer ist denn das?_" and the startled lad sprang to his feet in terror. CHAPTER XXXIII LAID UP FOR REPAIRS About the time when Alaric was pleasantly travelling with his mother in Germany, Hans Altman, with Gretchen, his wife, and Eittel, his little daughter, dwelt in a valley of the Harz Mountains. Although Hans was a poor man, he found plenty of work with which to support his family in comfort, but he could never forget that his father had been a burgomeister, and much better off in this world's goods than he. Thinking of this made him discontented and unhappy, until finally he determined to sell what little they had and come to America, or, as he called it, "the land of gold," with the hope of bettering his fortunes. In vain did Gretchen protest that nowhere in the world could they be so happy or so well off as in their own land and among their own people. Even her tears failed to turn him from his purpose. So they came to this country, and at length drifted to the far-away shores of Puget Sound, where they stranded, wellnigh penniless, ignorant of the language and customs of those about them, helpless and forlorn. With the distress of mind caused by this state of affairs, Hans grew melancholy and irritable, and when Eittel died he declared that he himself had killed her. The faithful Gretchen soon followed her little daughter, and with this terrible blow the poor man's mind gave way entirely. He not only fancied himself a murderer, but believed officers of the law to be in pursuit of him, and that if captured he would be hanged. Filled with this idea, he fled on the very night of his wife's death, and having been born among mountains, now instinctively sought in them a place of refuge. He carried an axe with him, and somewhere procured a rifle with a plentiful supply of ammunition. Through the vast forest he made his way far from the haunts of men, ever climbing higher and penetrating more deeply among the friendly mountains, until finally he reached a tiny valley, in which he believed himself safe from pursuit. Here he built a rude hut, and became a hunter of mountain-goats. Their flesh furnished him with food, their skins with bedding and clothing, while from their horns he carved many a rude utensil. In this way he had lived for nearly two months, when our lost and sorely perplexed lads stumbled upon his camp, and found in it a haven of safety. In the peaceful quiet of those mountain solitudes the poor man had become calmly content with his primitive mode of life, and was even happy as he recalled how skilfully he had eluded a fancied pursuit, and how impossible it had now become for those who sought his life to discover his retreat. It was in this frame of mind that, on returning from a long day's hunt with a body of a goat slung across his back, he saw, to his dismay, that his hiding-place had been found, and that his camp was occupied by strangers. Of course they were enemies who were now waiting to kill him. He would fly so fast and so far that they could never follow. No; better than that, he would kill them before they were even aware of his presence. This was a grand idea, and the madman chuckled softly to himself as it came to him. Laying his dead goat on the ground, and whispering to it not to be afraid, for he would soon return, the man crept stealthily forward towards the firelight. At length he spied the form of what he believed to be one of his pursuers, sitting half hid in the shadows and doubtless waiting for him. Ha! ha! How disappointed that enemy would be when he found himself dead! and with a silent chuckle the madman lifted his rifle. At that terrible moment the notes of Alaric's song were borne to him on the still night air, and then came the words: "Muss i denn, muss i denn Und du, mein Schatz, bleibst hier." It was his Gretchen's song, and those were the very words she had sung to him so often in their happy Harz Valley home. The uplifted arm dropped as though palsied, and, like one who hears a voice from the dead, the man uttered a mighty cry of mingled fear and longing; at the same moment he stepped into the full glare of firelight and confronted Alaric, at whom he poured a torrent of questions in German. "Who are you? How came you here? What do you want? Have you seen my Gretchen? Where did you learn to sing '_Muss i denn_'?" "In Germany, of course, where everybody sings it," replied Alaric, answering the last question first, and speaking in the man's own language. "And I didn't think you would mind if we took possession of your camp until your return; for, you see, we are in great trouble." "_Ach_, no! All who are in trouble should come with me; for I, too, have many, many troubles," replied the man, his blue eyes losing their fierce look and filling with tears. "But I never meant to do it. _Gott in Himmel_ knows I never meant to do it." "Of course not," said Alaric, soothingly, anxious to quiet the man's agitation, and suspecting that his mind was not quite right. "Nobody thinks you did." "Yes, they do, the cruel men who would kill me; but you will stay and drive them away if they come, will you not? You will be my friend--you, to whom I can talk with the tongue of the fatherland?" "Certainly I will stay and be your friend, if you will help me care for another friend who lies yonder very ill." "_Ja! ja!_ I will help you if you will stay and talk to me of Gretchen, and sing to me '_Muss i denn_.'" "Very good," agreed Alaric. "It is, then, a contract between us." At the same time he said to himself: "He is a mighty queer-looking chap to have for a friend; but I suppose there are worse, and I guess I can manage him. It's a lucky thing I know a little German, though, for he looked fierce enough to kill me until I began to talk with him." The appearance of the man was certainly calculated to inspire uneasiness, especially when taken in connection with his incoherent words. He was an immense fellow, with shaggy hair and untrimmed beard. On his head was perched a ridiculous little cloth cap, while over his shoulders was flung a cloak of goat-skins, that added greatly to his appearance of size and general shagginess. His lower limbs were covered with leggings of the same hairy material. His ordinary expression was the fierce look of a hunted animal, but now it was softened by the rare pleasure of meeting one who could talk with him in his own language. From that first moment of strange introduction his eagerness to be with Alaric and induce him to talk was pathetic. To him he poured out all his sorrows, together with daily protests that he had never meant to kill his Gretchen and little Eittel. For the sake of this companionship he was willing to do anything that might add to the comfort of his guests. He scoured forest and mountain-side in search of game, and rarely returned empty-handed. He fetched amazing loads of wood on his back, went on long expeditions after berries, set cunningly devised snares for ptarmigan, and found ample recompense for all his labor in lying at full length before the camp-fire at night and talking with Alaric. Bonny he mistrusted as being one who could speak no German, and only bore with him for the sake of his friend. Nor was he greatly liked by the lad, whose injuries compelled a long acceptance of his hospitality. "I know he's good to us, and won't let you do any work that he can help, and all that," Bonny would say; "but somehow I can't trust him nor like him. He'll play us some mean trick yet, see if he don't." "But he saved our lives; for if we hadn't found his camp we should certainly have starved to death." "That's just it! We found his camp. He didn't find us, and never would have. Anyhow, he's as crazy as a loon, and will bear a heap of watching." For all this, Bonny did not allow his anxiety to interfere with a speedy recovery from his injuries, and by the aid of youthful vigor, a splendid constitution, complete rest, plenty of food, and the glorious mountain air, his broken bones knit so rapidly that in one month's time he declared himself to be mended and as good as new. Although Alaric insisted that he should carry his arm in a sling for a while longer, they now began to plan eagerly for a continuance of their journey down the mountain and a return to civilization. By this time they were as heartily sick of goat-meat as they had ever been of fish in Skookum John's camp, tired of the terrible loneliness of their situation, and, more than all, tired of their enforced idleness, with nothing to read and little to do. Alaric had beguiled many long hours with his baseball, which he could now throw with astonishing precision and catch with either hand in almost any position. As this ball, bought in San Francisco, was the sole connecting-link between his present and his former life, it always reminded him of his father, whom he now longed to see, that he might relieve the anxiety he felt certain Amos Todd must be suffering on his account. The boys often talked of M. Filbert, and wondered what had become of him. At first Alaric made an earnest effort to induce Hans Altman to go in search of the Frenchman's camp and notify him of their safety; but the German became so excitedly angry at the mere mention of such a thing that he was forced to relinquish the idea. He would gladly have undertaken the trip himself, but could not leave Bonny. Their strange host became equally angry at any mention of their leaving him, and refused to give any information concerning their present locality or the nearest point at which other human beings might be found. Nor did he ever evince the least curiosity as to where they had come from. It was enough for him that they were there. When the time for them to depart drew so near that the boys could talk of nothing else, Alaric made another effort to gain some information from the German that would guide their movements, but in vain. He only succeeded in arousing the man's suspicions to such an extent that he grew morose, would not leave camp unless Alaric went with him, and watched furtively every movement that the boys made. Bonny realized this, and spoke of it to his comrade. "I believe this Dutchman regards us as his prisoners, and has made up his mind not to allow us to escape him," he said. But Alaric only laughed, and answered that he guessed they would get away easy enough whenever they were ready to go. The two lads slept at one end of the hut with their host at the other, and that very night something happened to confirm Bonny's worst fears and fill him with such horror that he determined never again to sleep within miles of that vicinity. CHAPTER XXXIV CHASED BY A MADMAN Bonny's bed was nearest the side of the hut, while Alaric lay beyond him towards its centre. Morning was breaking when the former awoke from a troubled dream, so filled with a presentiment of impending evil that his forehead was bathed in a cold perspiration. For the space of a minute he lay motionless, striving to reassure himself that his terror was without foundation. All at once he became conscious that some one was talking in a low tone, and, glancing in that direction, saw the form of their host, magnified by the dim light into gigantic proportions, bending over Alaric. The man held an uplifted knife, and was muttering to himself in German; but at Bonny's cry of horror he leaped to his feet and disappeared through the doorway. "What is the matter?" asked Alaric, sleepily, only half awakened by Bonny's cry. "Been having bad dreams?" "Yes, and a worse reality," answered the other, huskily. "Oh, Rick! he was going to kill you, and if I hadn't waked when I did we should both have been dead by this time. He has made up his mind to murder us; I know he has." A minute later Alaric had heard the whole story, and, as excited as Bonny himself, was hurriedly slipping on his coat and boots. They knew not which way to go, nor what to do, but both were eager to escape from the hut into the open, where they might at least have a chance to run in case of an attack. As they emerged from the doorway, casting apprehensive glances in every direction, Alaric's baseball, that had been left in one of his coat-pockets the evening before, slipped through a hole in the lining and fell to the ground. Hardly conscious of what he was doing, the lad stooped to pick it up. At that same instant came the sharp crack of a rifle and the "ping" of a bullet that whistled just above his head. "He is shooting at us!" gasped Bonny. "Come, quick, before he can reload." Without another word the lads dashed into the clump of trees sheltering the camp, and down the slope on which it stood. They would have preferred going the other way, but the rifle-shot had come from that direction, and so they had no choice. Their movements being at first concealed by the timber, there was no sign of pursuit until they gained the open valley and started to cross it. Then came a wild yell from behind, and they knew that their flight was discovered. Breathlessly they sped through the dewy meadow, sadly impeded by its rank growth of grass and flowers, towards a narrow exit through the wall bounding its lower end that Alaric had long ago discovered. Through this a brawling stream made its way, and by means of its foaming channel the boys hoped to effect an escape. As they gained the rocky portal Bonny glanced back and uttered a cry of dismay, for their late host was in plain view, leaping down the slope towards the meadow they had just crossed. He was then bent on overtaking them, and the pursuit had begun in earnest. As there was no pathway besides that offered by the bed of the stream, they were forced to plunge into its icy torrent and follow its tumultuous course over slippery rocks, through occasional still pools whose waters often reached to the waist, and down foaming cascades, with a reckless disregard for life or limb. In this manner they descended several hundred feet, and when from the bottom they looked up over the way they had come they felt that they must surely have been upborne by wings. But there was no time for contemplation, for at that moment a plunging bowlder from above warned them that their pursuer was already in the channel. Now they were in a forest, not of the giant trees they would find at a lower altitude, but one of tall hemlocks and alpine-firs, growing with such density that the panting fugitives could with difficulty force a way between them. They stumbled over prostrate trunks, slipped on beds of damp mosses, were clutched by woody fingers, from whose hold their clothing was torn with many a grievous rent; and, with all their efforts, made such slow progress that they momentarily expected to be overtaken. Nor were their fears groundless, for they had not gone half a mile ere a crashing behind them told that their pursuer was close at hand. As they exchanged a despairing glance, Bonny said: "The only thing we can do is hide, for I can't run any farther." "Where?" asked Alaric. "Here," replied Bonny, diving as he spoke into a bed of ferns. Alaric followed, and as they flattened themselves to the ground, barely concealed by the green tips nodding above their backs, the madman leaped into the space they had just vacated, and stood so close to them that they could have reached out and touched him. His cap had disappeared, his hair streamed over his shoulders like a tawny mane; his clothing was torn, a scratch had streaked his face with blood, and his deep-set eyes shone with the wild light of insanity. He had flung away his rifle, but his right hand clutched a knife, keen and long-bladed. The crouching lads held their breath as he paused for an instant beside them. Then, uttering a snarling cry, he dashed on, and with cautiously lifted heads they watched him out of sight. "Whew!" ejaculated Bonny, "that was a close call. But I say, Rick, this business of running away and being chased seems quite like old times, don't it?" "Yes," answered Alaric, with a shuddering sigh of mingled relief and apprehension, "it certainly does, and this is the worst of all. But what shall we do now?" "I don't know of anything else but to keep right on downhill after going far enough to one side to give his course a wide berth. I'd like awfully to have some breakfast, but I wouldn't go back to that camp for it if it were the only place in the world. I'd about as soon starve as eat another mouthful of goat, anyway. We are sure to come out somewhere, though, if we only stick to a downward course long enough." So the boys bore to the right, and within a few minutes had the satisfaction of noting certain gleamings through the trees that betokened some kind of an opening. Guided by these, they soon came to a ridge of bowlders and gravel, forming one of the lateral moraines of a glacier that lay in glistening whiteness beyond. "We might as well follow along its edge," suggested Bonny; "for all these glaciers seem to run downhill, and, bad as the walking is over mud and rocks, we can make better time here than through the woods." They had not gone more than a mile in this fashion, and, believing that they had successfully eluded their pursuer, were rapidly recovering from their recent fright, when they were startled by a cry like that of a wild beast close at hand. Glancing up, they were nearly paralyzed with terror to see the madman grinning horribly with delight at having discovered them, and about to rush down the steep slope to where they stood. [Illustration: "THEY WERE PARALYZED WITH TERROR TO SEE THE MADMAN GRINNING HORRIBLY"] There was but an instant of hesitation, and then both lads sprang out on the rugged surface of the glacier, and made a dash for its far-away opposite side. It was a dangerous path, slippery, rough beyond description, and beset with yawning crevasses; but they were willing to risk all its perils for a slender chance of escaping the certain death that was speeding towards the place they had just left. If they could only gain the opposite timber, they might possibly hide as before. It was a faint hope, but their only one. So they ran, slipped, stumbled, took flying leaps over the parted white lips of narrow crevasses, and made détours to avoid such as were too wide to be thus spanned. They had no time to look behind, nor any need. The fierce cries of the madman warned them that he was in hot pursuit and ever drawing nearer. At one place the ice rang hollow beneath their feet, and they even fancied that it gave an ominous crack; but they could not pause to speculate as to its condition. That it was behind them was enough. Ere half the distance was passed they were drawing their breath with panting sobs, and Bonny, not yet wholly recovered from his illness, began to lag behind. Noting this, Alaric also slackened his speed; but his comrade gasped: "No, Rick. Don't stop. Save yourself. I'm done for. You can't help me. Good-bye." Thus saying, and too exhausted to run farther, the lad faced about to meet their terrible pursuer, and struggle with him for a delay that might aid the escape of his friend. To his amazement, there was no pursuer, nor in all that white expanse was there a human being to be seen save themselves. At his comrade's despairing words Alaric too had turned, with the determination of sharing his fate; so they now stood side by side breathing heavily, and gazing about them in wondering silence. "What has become of him?" asked Bonny at length, in an awed tone, but little above a whisper. "I don't know," replied Alaric. "He can't have gone back, for there hasn't been time. He can't be in hiding, for there is no place in which he could conceal himself, nor have we passed any crevasse that he could not leap. But if he has slipped into one! Oh, Bonny! it is too awful to think of." "I heard him only a few seconds ago," said Bonny, in the same awed tone, "and his voice sounded so close that with each instant I expected to be in his clutches." "Bonny!" exclaimed Alaric, "do you remember a place that sounded hollow?" "Yes." "We must go back to it, for I believe he has broken through. If it is in our power to help him we must do it; if not, we must know what has happened." They had to retrace their steps but a few yards before coming to a fathomless opening with jagged sides and splintered edges, where the thin ice that had afforded them a safe passage had given way beneath the heavier weight of their pursuer. No sound save that of rushing waters came from the cruel depths, nor was there any sign. The boys lingered irresolutely about the place for a few minutes, and then fled from it as from an impending terror. For the remainder of that day, though no longer in dread of pursuit, they made what speed they might down the mountain-side, following rough river-beds, threading belts of mighty forest, climbing steep slopes, and descending others into narrow valleys. The sun was near his setting, and our lads were so nigh exhausted that they had seated themselves on a moss-covered log to rest, when they were startled by a heavy rending crash that echoed through the listening forest with a roar like distant thunder. The boys looked at each other, and then at what bits of sky they could see through the far-away tree-tops. It was of unclouded blue, and the sun was still shining. "Rick!" cried Bonny, starting to his feet, "I believe it was a falling tree." "Well?" "I mean one that was made to fall by axe and saw." "Oh, Bonny!" was all that Alaric could reply; but in another instant he was leading the way through tall ferns and along the stately forest aisles in the direction from which had come the mighty crash. CHAPTER XXXV A GANG OF FRIENDLY LOGGERS A perfect day of early September was drawing to its close, and the gang of loggers belonging to Camp No. 10 of the Northwest Lumber Company, which operated in the vast timber belt clothing the northern flanks of Mount Rainier, were about to knock off work. From earliest morning the stately forest, sweet-scented with the odors of resin, freshly cut cedar, and crushed ferns, had resounded with their shouts and laughter, the ring of their axes, the steady swish of saws, and the crash of falling trees. To one familiar only with Eastern logging, where summer is a time of idleness, and everything depends on the snows of winter, followed by the high waters of spring, the different methods of these Northwestern woodsmen would be matters of constant surprise. Their work goes on without a pause from year's end to year's end. There is no hauling on sleds, no vast accumulations of logs on the ice of rivers or lakes, no river driving, no mighty jams to be cleared at imminent risk of life and limb--nothing that is customary in the East. Even the mode of cutting down trees is different. The choppers--or "fallers," as they are called in the Northwest--do not work, as do their brethren of Maine or Wisconsin, from the ground, wielding their axes first on one side and then on the other until the tree falls. The girth of the mighty firs and cedars of that country is so great at ordinary chopping height that two men working in that way would not bring down more than two trees in a day, instead of the ten or a dozen required of them. So, by means of what are known as "spring-boards," they gain a height of eight or ten feet, and then begin operations. The ingenious contrivances that enable them to do this are narrow boards of tough vine maple, five or six feet long, and about one foot wide. Each is armed at its inner end with a sharp steel spur affixed to its upper side. This end being thrust into a notch opened in the tree some four feet below where the cut is to be made, the weight of a man on its outer end causes the spur to bite deep into the wood, and to hold the board firmly in place. Having determined the direction in which the tree shall fall, and fixed their spring-boards accordingly, two "fallers" mount them, and chop out a deep under cut on the side that is to lie undermost. They work with double-bitted or two-edged axes, and can so truly guide the fall by means of the under cut that they are willing to set a stake one hundred feet away and guarantee that the descending trunk shall drive it into the ground. With the under cut chopped out to their satisfaction, they remove their spring-boards to the opposite side, and finish the task with a long, two-handled, coarse-toothed saw. As the mighty tree yields up its life and comes to the ground with a grand, far-echoing crash, it is set upon by "buckers" (who saw its great trunk into thirty-foot lengths), barkers, rigging-slingers, hand-skidders, and teamsters, whose splendid horses, aided by tackle of iron blocks and length of wire-rope, drag it out to the "skid-road." This is a cleared and rudely graded track, set with heavy cross-ties, over which the logs may slide, and it is provided with wire cables, whose half-mile lengths are operated by stationary engines. By this means "turns" of five or six of the huge logs, chained one behind the other, are hauled down the winding skid-road through gulch and valley, to a distant railway landing. There they are loaded on a long train of heavy flat cars that departs every night for the mills on Puget Sound. Here the sawed lumber is run aboard waiting ships, and sent in them to all ports on both shores of the Pacific. So wastefully extravagant are the lumbermen of Washington that only the finest trees are cut, and only that portion of the trunk which is free from limbs is made into logs. All the remainder, or nearly half of each tree, is left on the ground where it fell. Here it slowly decays, or, turned into tinder, catches fire from some chance spark and leaps into a sea of flame that sweeps resistlessly through the forest, destroying in one day more timber than has been cut in a year. Thus, while thoughtless and ignorant persons declare the timber supply of the Northwest to be inexhaustible, others, who have carefully studied the subject, do not hesitate to say that within fifty years, at the present rate of reckless destruction, the magnificent forests of Washington will have disappeared forever. Such questions were far from troubling the light-hearted gang of loggers whom we have just discovered in the act of quitting work for the day. If any one of them were to be asked how long he thought the noble forests from which he earned a livelihood would last, he would answer: "Oh, I don't know and don't care. They will last as long as I do, and that's long enough for me." They were laughing and joking, lighting their pipes, picking up tools, and beginning to straggle towards the road that led to camp, when suddenly big Buck Ranlet, the head "faller," who was keener of hearing than any of his mates, called out: "Hush up, fellows, and listen! I thought I heard a yell off there in the timber." In the silence that followed they all heard a cry, faint and distant, but so filled with distress that there was no mistaking its import. "There's surely somebody in trouble!" cried Ranlet. "Lost like as not. Anyway, they are calling to us for help, and we can't go back on 'em. So come on, men. You teamsters stay here with your horses, and give us a yell every now and then, so we can come straight back; for even we don't want to fool round much in these woods after dark. Hello, you out there! Locate yourselves!" "Hello! Help!" came back faintly but clearly. "All right! We're coming! Cheer up!" So the calling and answering was continued for nearly ten minutes, while the rescuing party, full of curiosity and good-will, plunged through the gathering gloom, over logs and rocks, through beds of tall ferns and banks of moss, in which they sank above their ankles, until they came at length to those whom they were seeking--two lads, one standing and calling to them, the other lying silent and motionless, where he had fallen in a dead faint from utter exhaustion. "You see," explained Alaric, apologetically, half sobbing with joy at finding himself once more surrounded by friendly faces, "he has been very ill, and we've had a hard day, with nothing to eat. So he gave out. I should have too, but just then I heard the sound of chopping, and knew the light was shining, and--and--" Here the poor tired lad broke down, sobbing hysterically, and trying to laugh at the same time. "There! there, son!" exclaimed Buck Ranlet, soothingly, but with a suspicious huskiness in his voice. "Brace up, and forget your troubles as quick as you can; for they're all over now, and you sha'n't go hungry much longer. But where did you say you came from?" "The top of the mountain." "Not down the north side?" "Yes." "Great Scott! you are the first ever did it, then. How long have you been on the way?" "I don't know exactly, but something over a month." "The poor chap's mind is wandering," said the big man to one of his companions; "for no one ever came down the north side alive, and no one could spend a whole month doing it, anyway. I've often heard, though, that folks went crazy when they got lost in the woods." The men took turns, two at a time, in carrying Bonny, and Buck Ranlet himself assisted Alaric, until, guided by the shouts of the teamsters, they reached the point from which they had started. By this time Bonny had regained consciousness, and was wondering, in a dazed fashion, what had happened. "Is it all right, Rick?" he asked, as his comrade bent anxiously over him. "Yes, old man, it's all right; and the light I told you of is shining bright and clear at last." "Queer, isn't it, how the poor lad's mind wanders?" remarked Ranlet to one of the men. "He thinks he sees a bright light, while I'll swear no one has so much as struck a match. We must hustle, now, and get 'em to camp. Do you think you feel strong enough to set straddle of a horse, son?" he asked of Alaric. "Yes, indeed," answered the boy, cheerfully. "I feel strong enough for anything now." "Good for you! That's the talk! Give us a foot and let me h'ist you up. Why, lad, you're mighty nigh barefooted! No wonder you didn't find the walking good. Here, Dick, you lead the horse, while I ride Sal-lal and carry the little chap." Thus saying, the big man vaulted to the back of the other horse, and, reaching down, lifted Bonny up in front of him as though he had been a child. Camp was a mile or more away, and as the brawny loggers escorted their unexpected guests to it down the winding skid-road, they eagerly discussed the strange event that had so suddenly broken the monotony of their lives, though, with a kind consideration, they refrained from asking Alaric any more questions just then. "Hurry on, some of you fellows," shouted Ranlet, "and light up my shack, for these chaps are going to bunk in with me to-night. I claim 'em on account of being the first to hear 'em, you know. Start a fire in the square, too, so's the place will look cheerful." No one will ever know how cheerful and home-like and altogether delightful that logging camp did look to our poor lads after their long and terrible experience of the wilderness, for they could never afterwards find words to express what they felt on coming out of the darkness into its glowing firelight and hearty welcome. "Stand back, men, and give us a show!" shouted Ranlet, as they drew up before his own little "shack," built of split cedar boards. "This isn't any funeral; same time it ain't no circus parade, and we want to get in out of the cold." The entire population of the camp, including the cook and his assistants, the blacksmith with his helper, and the stable-boys, as well as the logging gang, were gathered, full of curiosity to witness the strange arrival. Besides these there were Linton, the boss, with his wife, who was the only woman in that section of country. Her pity was instantly aroused for Bonny, and when he had been tenderly placed in Buck Ranlet's own bunk, she insisted on being allowed to feed and care for him. She would gladly have done the same for Alaric, but he protested that he was perfectly well able to feed himself, and was only longing for the chance. "Of course you are, lad!" cried the big "faller," heartily, "and you sha'n't go hungry a minute longer. So just you come on with me and the rest of the gang over to Delmonico's." The place thus designated was a low but spacious building of logs, containing the camp kitchen and mess-room. Ranlet sat at the head of the long table, built of hewn cedar slabs, and laden with smoking dishes. Alaric was given the place of honor at his right hand, and the rest of the rough, hearty crowd ranged themselves on rude benches at either side. The plates and bowls were of tin; the knives, forks, and spoons were iron; but how luxurious it all seemed to the guest of the occasion! How wonderfully good everything tasted, and how the big man beside him heaped his plate with pork and beans, potatoes swimming in gravy, boiled cabbage, fresh bread cut in slices two inches thick, and actually butter to spread on it! After these came a huge pan of crullers and dozens of dried-apple pies. How anxiously the men watched him eat, how often they pushed the tin can of brown sugar towards him to make sure that his bowl of milkless tea should be sufficiently sweetened, and how pleased they were when he passed his plate for a second helping of pie! "You'll do, lad; you'll do!" shouted Buck Ranlet, delighted at this evidence that the camp cookery was appreciated. "You've been brought up right, and taught to know a good thing when you see it. I can tell by the way you eat." After supper Alaric was conducted to a blanket-covered bench near the big fire outside, and allowed to relate the outline of his story to an audience that listened with intense interest, and then he was put to bed beside Bonny, who was already fast asleep. When Buck Ranlet picked up his guest's coat, that had fallen to the floor, and a baseball rolled from one of its pockets, the big logger exclaimed, softly: "Bless the lad! He's a genuine out-and-out boy, after all! To think of his travelling through the mountains with no outfit but a baseball! If that isn't boy all over, then I don't know!" CHAPTER XXXVI IN A NORTHWEST LOGGING CAMP The next day being Sunday, the camp lay abed so late that when Alaric awoke from his long night of dreamless sleep the sun was more than an hour high, and streaming full into the open doorway of Buck Ranlet's shack. For nearly a minute the boy lay motionless, striving to recall what had happened and where he was. Then, as it all came to him, and he realized that he had escaped from the mountain, with its terrors, its cold, and its hunger, and had reached a place of safety, good-will, and plenty, he heaved a deep sigh of content. His sigh was echoed by another close beside him, and then Bonny's voice said: "I'm so glad you are awake, Rick, for I want you to tell me all about it. I've been trying to puzzle it out for myself, but can't be really sure whether I know anything about last night or only dreamed it all. Didn't somebody get us something to eat?" "I should say they did!" rejoined Alaric. "And not only something to eat, but one of the finest suppers I ever sat down to. Don't you remember the baked beans, and the apple-pie, and--Oh no, I forgot; you weren't there; and, by-the-way, how do you feel this morning?" "Fine as a fiddle," replied Bonny, briskly; "and all ready for those baked beans and pie; for somehow I don't seem to remember having anything so good as those." "I don't believe you did," laughed Alaric, springing from the bunk as he spoke; "for I'm afraid they only gave you gruel and soup, or tea and toast." "Then no wonder I'm hungry," said Bonny, indignantly, as he too began to dress, "and no wonder I want beans and things. But, I say, Rick, what a tough-looking specimen you are, anyway!" "I hope I'm not so tough-looking as you," retorted the other, "for you'd scare a scarecrow." Then the two boys scanned each other's appearance with dismay. How could they ever venture outside and among people in the tattered, soiled, and fluttering garments which were their sole possessions in the way of clothing? Even their boots had worn away, until there was little left of them but the uppers. Their hats had been lost during their flight through the forest, their hair was long and unkempt, while their coats and trousers were so rent and torn that the wonder was how they ever held together. As they realized how utterly disreputable they did look, both boys began to laugh; for they were too light-hearted that morning to remain long cast down over trifles like personal appearance. At this sound of merriment Buck Ranlet's good-humored face, covered with lather, appeared in the doorway, and at sight of the ragged lads he too joined in their laughter. "You are tramps, that's a fact!" he cried. "Toughest kind, too; such as I'd never dared take in if I'd seen you by a good light. Never mind, though," he added, consolingly; "looks are mighty easy altered, and after breakfast we'll fix you up in such style that you won't recognize yourselves." Bonny had baked beans and pie that morning as well as Alaric, for the fare at that logger's mess-table, bountiful as it was, never varied. After breakfast the boys found their first chance to take a good look at the camp, which consisted of nearly twenty buildings, set in the form of a square beside the skid-road, in a clearing filled with tall stumps of giant firs and mammoth cedars. The two largest buildings were the combined mess-hall and kitchen and the sleeping-quarters, containing tiers of bunks, one for each man employed. Then came the store, which held a small stock of clothing, boots, tobacco, pipes, knives, and other miscellaneous articles. Close beside it stood Mr. Linton's house, built of squared logs. In its windows both curtains and a few potted plants showed that here dwelt the only woman of the camp. The blacksmith-shop, engine-house, close beside the skid-road, and the stables beyond completed the list of the company's buildings. All the others were little single-room shacks, built in leisure moments by such of the men as preferred having something in the shape of a house to sleeping in the public dormitory. These tiny dwellings were constructed of sweet-smelling cedar boards, split from splendid great logs, absolutely straight-grained and free from knots. Walls, roof, floor, and rude furniture were all made of the same beautiful wood. Some of the shacks had stone chimneys roughly plastered with clay, others boasted small porches, and one or two had both. Buck Ranlet's had the largest porch of any, with the added adornment of climbing vines. This porch also contained seats, and was considered very elegant; but every one knew that the head "faller" was engaged to be married to a girl "back East," and said that was the reason he had built so fine a house. Having little else to amuse them, the men who put up these shacks labored over them with as much pleasure as so many boys with their cubby-houses. Many of the men were anxious to hear a more detailed account of our lads' recent adventures, but Buck Ranlet said: "Call round this afternoon. We've got something else on hand just now." When they returned to his picturesque little dwelling the big man led the way inside, closed the door, and said: "Now, lads, sit down, and let's talk business. What do you propose to do next?" "I don't think we know," responded Alaric. "Do you want to go to Tacoma or Seattle?" "I don't know why we should. We haven't any friends in either place, nor any money to live on while we look for work." "None at all?" "Not one cent. There's a month's wages due us from the Frenchman who hired us to go up the mountain, but I suppose he has left this part of the country long ago." "I suppose he has; and you certainly are playing to such hard luck that I don't see as you can do any better than stay right here. If you are willing to work at whatever offers, I shouldn't wonder if the boss could find something for you to do. At any rate, he might give you a chance to earn a suit of clothes, and feed you while you were doing it." "I think we'd be only too glad to stay here and work," replied Alaric--"wouldn't we, Bonny?" "Yes, I think we would, only I hope we can earn some money. I've worked without wages so long now that it is growing very monotonous." "Well, I'll tell you what," said Ranlet: "You two stay right here while I go over and see the boss." A few minutes later the big man returned with beaming face, and announced that Mr. Linton had consented to take them both on trial, and had promised to find something for them to do in the morning. Moreover, they were to go down to the store at once, pick out the things they needed, and have them charged to their account. All this Buck Ranlet told them; but he did not add that he had been obliged to pledge his own wages for whatever bill they should run up at the store, in case they should fail to work it out. The big-hearted "faller" was willing to do this, for he had taken a great fancy to the lads, and especially to Alaric. "That chap may be poor," he said, "and I reckon he is; but he's honest--so are they both, for that matter; and when a boy is honest, he can't help showing it in his face." These preliminaries being happily settled, he said, "Now let's get right down to business; and the first thing to be done is to let me cut your hair before you buy any hats." The boys agreeing that this was necessary, the operation was performed with neatness and despatch; for the big "faller" was equally expert at cutting hair or trees. Then they went to the store, where Alaric and Bonny selected complete outfits of coarse but serviceable clothing, including hats and boots, to the amount of fifteen dollars each. "Now for a scrub," suggested Ranlet; "and I reckon I need one as much as you do." With this he led his _protégés_ to a quiet pool in the creek just back of camp. When at noon the boys presented themselves at the mess-room door, so magical was the transformation effected by shears, soap and water, and their new clothing, that not a man in the place recognized them, and they had to be reintroduced to the whole jovial crowd, greatly to Buck Ranlet's delight. By a very natural mistake he introduced Alaric, whom he had only heard called "Rick," as Mr. Richard Dale, and the boy did not find an opportunity for correcting the error just then. Later in the day, however, when most of the camp population were gathered in front of Ranlet's shack listening with great interest to the lads' account of their recent experiences, one of them addressed him as "Richard," whereupon he explained that his name was not Richard, but Alaric. "Alaric?" quoth Buck Ranlet; "that's a queer name, and one I never heard before. It's a strong-sounding name too, and one that just fits such a hearty, active young fellow as you. I should pick out an Alaric every time for the kind of a chap to come tumbling down a mountain-side where no one had ever been before. But where did your folks find the name, son?" "I'll tell you," replied Alaric, flushing with pleasure at hearing that said of him for which he had secretly longed ever since he could remember; "but first I want to say that it was Bonny Brooks who showed me how to come down the mountain, and but for him I should certainly have perished up there in the snow." "Hold on!" cried Bonny. "Gentlemen, I assure you that but for Rick Dale I should have had the perishing contract all in my own hands." "I expect you are a well-mated team," laughed Ranlet, "and I am willing to admit that for whatever comes tumbling down a mountain there couldn't be a better name than Bonny Brooks. But now let's have the yarn." So Alaric told them all he could remember of the mighty Visigoth who invaded Italy at the head of his barbarian host, became master of the world by conquering Rome when the Eternal City was at the height of its magnificence, and whose tomb was built in the bed of a river temporarily turned aside for the purpose. The rough audience grouped about him listened to the tale of a long-ago hero with flattering interest, and when it was ended declared it to be a rattling good yarn, at the same time begging for more of the same kind. Alaric's head was crammed with such stories, for he had always delighted in them, and now he was only too glad of an opportunity to repay in some measure the kindly hospitality of the camp. So for an hour or more he related legends of Old World history, and still older mythology, all of which were as new to his hearers as though now told for the first time. Finally he paused, covered with confusion at finding Mr. and Mrs. Linton standing among his auditors, and waiting for a chance to invite him and Bonny to tea. From that time forth Alaric's position as storyteller was established, and there was rarely an evening during his stay in the camp, where books were almost unknown, that he was not called upon to entertain an interested group gathered about its after-supper open-air fire. Mr. Linton questioned the boys closely as to their capacity for work while they were at tea with him, and finally said: "I think I can find places for both of you, if you are willing to work for one dollar a day. You, Brooks, I shall let 'tend store and help me with my accounts until your arm gets stronger, while I think I shall place your friend in charge of one of the hump-durgins." "What is that, sir?" asked Alaric. "What's what?" "A hump-durgin." "Oh! Don't you know? Well, you'll find out to-morrow." CHAPTER XXXVII WHAT IS A HUMP-DURGIN? When the boys returned to Buck Ranlet's shack, which he had insisted they should share with him until they could build one of their own, the first question Alaric asked was in regard to his new employment. "What is a hump-durgin?" "Ho, ho! With all your learning, don't you know what a hump-durgin is? Well, I am surprised, for it's one of the commonest things. Still, if you don't really know, I'll tell you. A genuine hump-durgin is a sort of a cross betwixt a boat and a mule." "A boat and a mule?" repeated Alaric, more perplexed than ever. "That's what I said. You see, it is something like a boat. I might say a steamboat, or perhaps a canal-boat would be more like it, and it is always sailing back and forth. It often rolls and pitches like it was in a heavy sea; but at the same time it lives on dry land and never goes near the water. It also rears and bucks, and jumps from side to side, and tries its best to throw its rider, same as a mule does, and it wouldn't look unlike one if it only had legs, and a tail, and ears, and hair, and a bray." "Humph!" interposed Bonny, who had been an interested listener to this vague description of a hump-durgin. "A log of wood might look like a mule if it had all those things." "Right you are, son! A log of wood might look like a mule, and then again it mightn't. Same time I've often thought that some hump-durgins wasn't much better than logs of wood, after all. Anyway, now that I've described the critter so that you know all about him, you can see why the boss has decided to put our young friend here in charge of one." "I'm sure I can't," said Alaric, more puzzled than ever. "Because of your experience with both mules and boats," laughed the big "faller" teasingly, and that was all the satisfaction the boys could get from him that night. The next morning, bright and early, the occupants of the camp scattered to their respective duties: the loggers trudging up the skid-road and deep into the forest, there to resume their work of converting trees into logs; the loading-gang going in the opposite direction, to the distant railway landing, where they would spend the day loading logs on to flat cars; the engineers with their firemen to their respective engines; the road-gang up to the head of a side gulch where they were constructing a branch skid-road; the blacksmiths to their ringing anvils; Bonny to the store, where he was to take an account of stock; and Alaric, in company with the man whose place he was to fill, after receiving from him half a day's instruction in his new duties, to make the acquaintance of his hump-durgin. They went a short distance down the skid-road to where one of the relay engines was winding in a half-mile length of wire cable over a big steel drum. This cable stretched its shining length up the gulch and out of sight around a bend. Near the engine-house, and at one edge of the skid-road, was a little siding, or dock, protected by a heavy sheer-skid. In it lay what looked like a log canoe, sharp pointed at both ends, and having a flat bottom. "There," said Alaric's guide, "is your hump-durgin." "That thing!" exclaimed the lad, gazing at the canoe-like object curiously. "But I thought a hump-durgin went by steam?" "So it does," laughed the man, "when it goes at all. Just wait a minute, and you'll see." Almost as he spoke there came a sound of bumping and sliding from up the skid-road, and directly afterwards the end of an enormous log came into sight around the bend, drawn by the cable the engine was winding in. As this log rounded the bend and came directly towards them, another was seen to be chained to it, then another, and another, until the "turn" was seen to contain five of the woody monsters. Attached to the rear end of the last log came another hump-durgin, in which a man was seated, and to the after end of which was fastened a second wire cable that stretched away for half a mile to the next engine above. Every log was made fast to the one ahead of it by two short chains, each of which was armed at either end with a heavy steel spur having a sharp point and a flat head. These are called "dogs," and, driven deep into the logs, bind them together. The hump-durgin was also attached to the rear log by a chain and "dog," and one of the principal duties of a hump-durgin man is to see that none of these dogs pulls out. As the "turn" of logs stopped just above the station, the man who had come with them knocked out his hump-durgin dog, while the man with Alaric disconnected the cable that had drawn the logs down to that point, and hooked on the upper end of another that stretched away out of sight down the road. Then he waved to the engineer, who telephoned to the next station down the line, and at the same time to the one above. In another minute the hump-durgin that had just arrived was being pulled back by its cable over the way it had come, and the "turn" of logs was drawn forward by the new cable just attached to them. When the rear end of the last log was passing Alaric's hump-durgin, the man with him hammered its "dog" into the wood, the chain straightened with a jerk, and the novel craft was under way. As it started, both the man and Alaric jumped in, and away they went, bumping and sliding down the skid-road, slewing around corners that were protected by sheer-skids, and dragging behind them a half-mile length of cable attached to the after end of their craft. In this way they were dragged half a mile down the gulch to a second engine station, where a new relay of cable with a third hump-durgin awaited the logs, and from which their own craft, laden with the chains and dogs just brought up from below, was dragged back uphill to the station from which they had started. Every now and then on their downward trip the man jumped from the hump-durgin, and, maul in hand, ran along the whole length of the "turn," giving a tap here and there to the "dogs" to make sure that none of them was working loose. As the cables were only speeded to about four miles an hour, he could readily do this; but after he had thus examined one side he had to wait until the whole turn passed him, and then run ahead to examine the other. Alaric asked why he did not run on the logs themselves, and, by thus examining both sides at the same time, save half his work. "Because I ain't that kind of a fool," replied the man. "There is them as does it; but a chap has to be surer-footed and spryer than I be to ride the logs, 'specially when they're slewing round corners. I reckon, though, from all I hear of you, that you'll be jest one of the kind to try it on; and all I can say is, I hope you'll be let off light when it comes your time to be flung. Some gets killed, and others only comes nigh it." The hump-durgin man at the lower relay station followed the first "turn" of logs to the railway landing, and then went back to the extreme upper end of the skid-road. With the second "turn" Alaric and his instructor did the same thing. The next man above him followed the third "turn" to its destination, while the man farthest up of all travelled the whole length of the road with the fourth "turn," covering its two miles in four different hump-durgins; and at length Alaric had a chance to do the same thing. Thus each hump-durgin driver became familiar with every section of the road, and made six round trips a day. At noon of that first day Alaric's instructor in the art of navigating a hump-durgin bade him "so long," and left him in sole command of the clumsy craft. The man had no sooner gone than his pupil began practising the science of log-riding, and before night he had triumphantly ridden the whole length of the road mounted on the backs of his unwieldy charges. To be sure, he sat down most of the way, and was thrown twice when attempting to walk the length of the "turn" while it was slewing around corners. Fortunately he escaped each time with nothing more serious than a few bruises, and that night he drove a number of hobnails into the soles of his boots. These afforded him so good a hold on the rough bark that he was never again flung, and within a week had become so expert a log-rider that he could keep his feet over the worst "slews" on the road. The hump-durgins brought up many things from the railway landing besides chains and "dogs," for they were the sole conveyances by which supplies of any kind could reach the camp. It often happened that they carried passengers as well, and in this respect running a hump-durgin was, as Alaric said, very much like driving a stage-coach--a thing that he had always longed to do. Bonny was so envious of his comrade's job that on that very first day he made application for the next hump-durgin vacancy, and two weeks later was filled with delight at receiving the coveted appointment. By the time that both our lads became hump-durgin boys they were living in their own shack, which stood just beyond Buck Ranlet's, and which nearly every man in camp had helped them to build. So proud were they of this tiny dwelling that they nearly doubled their bill at the store in procuring bedding and other furnishings for it. Although thus amply provided with rude comforts, or, as Bonny expressed it, "surrounded with all the luxuries of life," Alaric fully realized that it would soon be time to exchange this mode of living for another. He knew that he owed a duty to his father, as well as to the station of life into which he had been born; and, having proved to his own satisfaction that he was equally strong with other boys, and as well able to fight his way through the world, he was more than willing to return to his own home. Now that he felt competent to hold his own, physically as well as mentally, with others of his age, he was filled with a desire to go to college. On talking the matter over with Bonny he found that the latter cherished similar aspirations, the only difference being that the young sailor's longing was for a mechanical rather than a classical education. "Though, of course," said Bonny, with a sigh, "I shall always have to take it out in wishing, for I shall never have money enough to carry me through a school of any kind, or at least not until I am too old to go." At this Alaric only smiled, and bade his comrade keep on hoping, for there was no telling when something might turn up. As he said this he made up his mind that if ever he went to college Bonny should at the same time go to one of the best scientific schools of the country. CHAPTER XXXVIII ALARIC AND BONNY AGAIN TAKE TO FLIGHT For a full month had our hump-durgin boys occupied the little cedar-built shack, which now seemed to them so much a home that it was difficult to realize they had ever known any other. By this time, too, they were exercising a very decided influence upon the character of the camp into whose life they had been so unexpectedly thrown. Light-hearted Bonny, with his cheery face and abounding good-nature, was as full of amusing pranks as a young colt, and from every group that he joined shouts of merriment were certain to arise within a few minutes. Thus Bonny was very popular and always in demand. Nor was Alaric less so, for he could tell so much concerning strange foreign countries and relate so many curious Old World tales, that there was rarely an evening that he was not called upon for something of the kind. He so often said that most of his stories could be found in certain books, related a thousand times better than he could tell them, that in the breasts of many of his hearers he aroused a real longing for books, and a wider knowledge than they could ever acquire without them. At the same time Alaric was not only appreciated for what he knew, but for what he could do. No one in camp could ride a "turn" of logs, swaying, bumping, and sliding down the skid-road, with such perfect confidence and easy grace as he. Only one of them all could outrun him, and none could catch or throw a baseball with the certainty and precision that he exhibited, although ever since Buck Ranlet discovered the ball in his young guest's coat-pocket the camp had practised with it during all odd moments of daylight. So our lads made friends with and knew the personal history of every occupant of the camp save one, and he was its boss. Since the night on which they had taken tea in his house Mr. Linton had hardly spoken to either of them; nor did he ever join with the men in their evening gatherings to listen to Bonny's jokes or Alaric's tales. At first they noticed this, and wondered what reason he had for avoiding them; but they soon learned that it was only his way, and that he never talked with any of the men except on matters of business. Buck Ranlet said it was because he was a deputy United States marshal, and didn't know when he might be called on to arrest any one of them for some offence against the government. With all their present popularity the boys were growing weary of the monotonous life they were leading, of their good-natured but rough and narrow-minded associates, and of the deadly sameness of the food served three times a day in the dingy mess-room. They also dreaded the approaching winter, with its days and weeks of rain, during which the work of getting out logs for the insatiable mills down on the Sound must keep on without a moment of interruption. They listened with dismay to tales of loggers who had not known the feeling of dry clothing for weeks at a time; of "turns" of logs rushing down skid-roads slippery with wet, like roaring avalanches of timber, threatening destruction to everything in their course; and of long, dreary winter evenings when the steady downpour forbade camp-fires and prevented all social out-of-door gatherings. In view of these things, Alaric was determined that the end of another month, or such time as his wages should be paid, should see him on his way to San Francisco and home. He did not anticipate any difficulty in persuading Bonny to go with him, for that young man had already remarked that while hump-durgin riding was fun up to a certain point, he should hate to do it for the remainder of his life. Oh yes, Bonny would go, of course; and Alaric's only fear was that his father might not take a fancy to the lad, or hold the same views regarding his future that he did. Still, that was a matter which would arrange itself somehow, if they could only reach San Francisco, and the "poor rich boy" now began to long as eagerly for the time to come when he might return to his home as he once had for an opportunity to leave it. One day, when matters stood thus, a stranger, past middle age, shabbily dressed, and wearing a peculiarly dilapidated hat, appeared at the railway log-landing, and asked Bonny, whose hump-durgin happened to be there at the time, permission to ride with him to the end of the skid-road. With a sympathetic glance at the man's forlorn appearance, Bonny answered: "Certainly, sir; you may ride with me all day if you like, and I shall be glad of your company." Thanking the lad, the stranger seated himself in the hump-durgin; and after he had been warned to hold on tight and watch out for "slews," the upward journey was begun. At one of the upper relay stations they waited for a descending "turn" of logs to pass them. Here the stranger visited the engine-house, and while he was talking with the engineer they came in sight. Alaric, who happened to be in charge, was at that moment walking easily forward along the backs of the swaying logs, presenting as fine a specimen of youthful agility, strength, and perfect health as one could wish to encounter. He was clad in jean trousers tucked into boot-legs and belted about his waist; a blue flannel shirt, with a black silk kerchief knotted at the throat, and a black slouch hat. "Isn't that extremely dangerous?" asked the stranger, regarding the approaching lad with a curious interest. "Not for him it isn't, though it might be for some; but Dick Dale is so level-headed and sure-footed that there isn't his equal for riding logs in this outfit, nor, I don't believe, in any other," answered the engineer. "What did you say his name was?" asked the stranger, with his gaze still fixed on Alaric. "Dale--Richard Dale," replied the engineer, who had never happened to hear the boy's real name. "Why? Do you think you know him?" "No. I don't know any one of that name; but the lad's resemblance to another whom I used to know is certainly very striking." "Yes. It's funny how often people look alike who have never been within a thousand miles of each other," remarked the engineer, carelessly, as he stepped to the signal-box. In another minute Alaric had passed out of sight, while Bonny and the stranger had resumed their upward journey. That evening Alaric remarked to his chum, "I noticed you had a passenger to-day." "Yes," replied Bonny. "Seedy-looking chap, wasn't he; but one of the nicest old fellows I ever met. Never saw any one take such an interest in everything. I suspected what he was after, though, and finally we got so friendly that I asked him right out if he wasn't looking for work." "Was he?" "Yes. He hesitated at first, and looked at me to see if I was joking, and then owned up that he was hunting for something to do. I felt mighty sorry for him, 'cause I know how it is myself; but I had to tell him there wasn't a living show in this camp just now. He seemed mightily taken with our shack here, and said he once had a house just like it, in which he passed the happiest time of his life, but he was afraid he'd never have another. I invited him to stay with us a few days if he wanted to--just while he was looking for a job, you know--but he said he guessed he'd better go on to some other camp. You'd been willing, wouldn't you?" "Certainly," replied Alaric. "I've already been in hard luck enough to be mighty glad of a chance to help any other fellow who's in the same fix, especially an old man; for they don't have half the show that young fellows do." "I told him you'd feel that way," exclaimed Bonny, triumphantly; "and he said if there were more like us in the world it would be a happier place to live in, but that he guessed he'd manage to scrape along somehow a while longer without becoming a burden to others. I did insist on his taking a hat, though." "A hat?" "Yes. We were down at the store, and he was asking the price of things, and looking around so wistful that I couldn't help getting him a new hat and having it charged; for the one he wore wasn't any good at all. He hated to take it, but I insisted, and finally he said he would if I'd keep his old one and let him redeem it some time. Of course I said I would, just to satisfy him, and here it is." Alaric looked carelessly at the dilapidated hat as he said: "It was a first-class thing to do, Bonny, and I only wish I had been here to give him something at the same time. But, hello! this is a Paris hat, and hasn't been worn very long, either. I wonder how he ever got hold of it? Never mind, though; hang it up for luck, and to remind me to do something for the next poor chap who comes along. By-the-way, I heard to-day that the president of the company was in Tacoma, on his way to make an inspection of all the camps." "Yes," replied Bonny. "They say he is an awful swell, too, and I heard that he was coming in his private car. I only hope he is, and that I can get a chance to look at it, for I have never seen a private car. Have you?" "One or two," answered Alaric, with a smile. At noon of the following day, while a fifteen-minute game of baseball was in progress after dinner, the boss of Camp No. 10 received a note from the president of the company, requesting him to report immediately in person at Tacoma, and bring with him the two hump-durgin boys Dale and Brooks. Mr. Linton, being a man who kept his own business to himself as much as possible, merely called our lads and bade them follow him. Of course this order broke up the game they were playing, and as they hastened after the boss, Bonny, in whose hands the baseball happened to be, thrust it into one of his pockets. Although curious to know why they were thus summoned, the boys learned nothing from Mr. Linton until they reached the railway log-landing, when he told them that they were wanted in Tacoma, and that he was instructed to bring them there at once. From the landing they proceeded by hand-car to Cascade Junction, where they boarded a west-bound passenger train over the Northern Pacific. Even now Mr. Linton was not communicative, and after sitting awhile in silence he went forward into the smoking-car, leaving the boys in the passenger coach next behind it. Now they began to discuss their situation, and the more they considered it the more apprehensive they became that something unpleasant was in store for them. "He's a United States marshal, remember," said Bonny. "Yes," replied Alaric; "I've been thinking of that. Do you suppose it can have anything to do with that smuggling business?" "I'm awfully afraid so," replied Bonny. "Great Scott! Look there!" The train was just leaving Meeker, where a passenger had boarded their car, and was now walking leisurely through it towards the smoker. It was he who had attracted Bonny's attention, and at whom he now pointed a trembling finger. Alaric instantly recognized the man as an officer of the revenue-cutter that had so persistently chased them in the early summer. Without a word, he left his seat and followed the new-comer to the smoking-car, where a single glance through the open door confirmed his worst suspicions. The officer had seated himself beside Mr. Linton, and they were talking with great earnestness. "They are surely after us again," Alaric said, in a whisper, as he regained his seat beside Bonny; "but I don't intend to be captured if I can help it." "Same here," replied Bonny. Thus it happened that when, a little later, the train reached Tacoma, and Mr. Linton returned to look for his lads, they were nowhere to be found. CHAPTER XXXIX BONNY DISCOVERS HIS FRIEND THE TRAMP It was late in the afternoon when the train reached Tacoma, and the logging boss discovered that the lads whom he had been especially instructed to bring with him had disappeared. As he could not imagine any reason why they should do such a thing, he was thoroughly bewildered, and waited about the station for some minutes, expecting them to turn up. He inquired of the train hands and other employés if they had seen anything of such boys as he described, but could gain no information concerning them. The revenue-officer was merely an acquaintance whom he had met by chance on the train, and who now waited a few minutes to see how this affair would turn out. Finally he said: "Well, Linton, I'm sorry I can't help you, but I really must be getting along. I hope, though, you won't have any such trouble with your missing lads as we had in trying to catch two young rascals of smugglers, whom we lost right here in Tacoma last summer. We wanted them as witnesses, and thought we had our hands on them half a dozen times; but they finally gave us the slip, and the case in which they were expected to testify was dismissed for want of evidence. Good-bye." Thus left to his own devices, the boss could think of nothing better than to call upon the police to aid him in recovering the missing boys, and so powerful was the name of the President of the Northwest Lumber Company, which he did not hesitate to use, that within an hour every policeman in Tacoma was provided with their description, and instructed to capture them if possible. In the hope that they would speedily succeed in so doing, Mr. Linton delayed meeting the president, and telegraphed that he could not reach the hotel to which he had been directed to bring the boys before eight o'clock that evening. In the meantime Alaric and Bonny, without an idea of the stir their disappearance had created throughout the city, were snugly ensconced in an empty freight-car that stood within a hundred yards of the railway station. They had dropped from the rear end of their train when it began to slow down, and slipped into the freight-car as a place of temporary concealment while they discussed plans. "We've got to get out of this town in a hurry, that's certain," said Alaric, "and I propose that we make a start for San Francisco. You know, I told you that was my home, and I still have some friends there, who, I believe, will help us. The only thing is that I don't see how we can travel so far without any money." "That's easy enough," replied Bonny, "and I would guarantee to land you there in good shape inside of a week. What worries me, though, is the idea of going off and leaving all the money that is due us here. Just think! there's thirty dollars owing to me as a hump-durgin driver, thirty more as interpreter, and fully as much as that for being a smuggler--nearly one hundred dollars in all. That's a terrible lot of money, Rick Dale, and you know it as well as I do." "Yes," replied Alaric; "if we had it now, we'd be all right. But I'll tell you, Bonny, what I'll do. If you will get me to San Francisco inside of a week, I promise that you shall have one hundred dollars the day we arrive." "I'll do it!" cried Bonny. "I know you are joking, of course, but I'll do it just to see how you'll manage to crawl out of your bargain when we get there. You mustn't expect to travel in a private car, though, with a French cook, and three square meals a day thrown in." "Yes, I do," laughed Alaric, "for I never travelled any other way." "No, I know you haven't, any more'n I have; but, just for a change, I think we'd better try freight-cars, riding on trucks, and perhaps once in a while in a caboose, for this trip, with meals whenever we can catch 'em. We'll get there, though; I promise you that. Hello! I mustn't lose that ball. We may want to have a game on the road." This last remark was called forth by Alaric's baseball which, becoming uncomfortably bulgy in Bonny's pocket as he sat on the car floor, he had taken out, and had been tossing from hand to hand as he talked. At length it slipped from him, rolled across the car, and out of the open door. Bonny sprang after it, tossed it in to Alaric, and was about to clamber back into the car, when, through the gathering gloom, he spied a familiar figure standing in the glare of one of the station lights. "Wait here a few minutes, Rick," he said, "while I go and find out when our train starts." With this he darted up the track, and a moment later advanced, with a smile of recognition and extended hand, towards the stranger whom he had so pitied in the logging camp the day before. The man still wore a shabby suit and the hat Bonny had given him. He started at sight of the lad, and exclaimed: "How came you here so soon? I thought you weren't due until eight o'clock." "How did you know we were coming at all?" asked Bonny, in amazement. "Oh, that's a secret," laughed the other, instantly recovering his self-possession, and assuming his manner of the day before. "We tramps have a way of finding out things, you know." "Yes, I've always heard so," replied Bonny, "and that's one reason why I'm so glad to meet you again. I thought maybe you could help us." "Us?" repeated the stranger. "Who is with you?" "Only my chum, the other hump-durgin driver, you know." "You mean Richard Dale?" "Yes--only his name isn't Richard, but Alaric. I say, though, would you mind stepping over in the shadow, where we won't be interrupted?" "Certainly not," replied the other, with a quiet chuckle. "I expect it will be better, for I'm not anxious to be recognized myself just now." When they had reached what Bonny considered a safe place, he continued: "You see, it's this way. My chum and I did a little business in the smuggling line last summer, and got chased for it by the 'beaks."' "Just like 'em," growled the other. "Yes," said Bonny, wrathfully. "We hadn't really done anything wrong, you know; but they made us skip 'round lively, and came mighty near catching us, too. We gave 'em the slip, though, and thought the whole thing had blown over, till to-day, when they got after us again." "Who did?" "The revenue fellows. You see, the boss up at camp is one of 'em, and we suspicioned something was wrong as soon as he told us we were wanted in Tacoma. We were certain of it when we saw another revenue man, one of the cutter's officers, join him on the train, and so we just gave them the slip again, and have been hiding ever since over in that freight-car." "Indeed!" remarked the stranger, interestedly. "And what do you propose to do next?" "That's what I'm coming to, and what we want you to help us about. You see, my chum's folks live in San Francisco, and I rather think he ran away from 'em, though he hasn't ever said so. Anyhow, he wants to get back there, and as we haven't any money, we've got to beat our way, so I thought maybe you could put us up to the racket, or, at any rate, tell us when the first south-bound freight would pull out. Of course, you understand, we've got to start as quick as we can, for it isn't safe for us to be seen around here." "Of course not," agreed the stranger, with another chuckle; for the whole affair seemed to amuse him greatly. "But what are you going to do for food? You'll be apt to get hungry before long." "I am already," acknowledged Bonny, "and that was another thing I was going to ask you about. I thought maybe you wouldn't mind giving us some pointers from your own experience in picking up your three little square meals a day when you are on the road." At this point the stranger burst into what began like uncontrollable laughter, but which proved to be only a severe fit of coughing. When it was over, he said: "Your name is Bonny Brooks, isn't it?" "Yes; but don't speak so loud." "All right, I won't. But, Bonny Brooks, you were mighty kind to me yesterday--kinder than any one else has been for a long time. By-the-way, did you bring my old hat with you?" "No, of course not." "No matter. I said I would redeem it, and I am going to do so by putting you on to a mighty soft snap. I'm bound to the southward myself, and, as it happens, there is a sort of boarding-car going to pull out of here for somewhere down the line in about half an hour. It is in charge of the cook, and as he and I are on what you might call extra good terms, he is going to let me ride with him as far as he goes. There won't be a soul on board but him and me, unless I can persuade him to let you two boys come along with us. I am pretty sure I can, though, for he is under several obligations to me, and if you'll promise to stay quietly in this freight-car until I come for you, I'll go this minute and see him. What do you say?" "I say you are a trump, and if you'll only work that racket for us, I'll share half the money with you that I'm to get from Rick as soon as we reach San Francisco." "Oh ho! He is to give you money, is he?" "Yes; that is, he has promised me one hundred dollars to make up for the wages I leave behind, if I'll only get him there. Of course that's all his joke, though, for he is just as poor as I am." So Bonny clambered back into the car where he told Rick of the fine arrangement he had just made; while for the next half-hour that shabbily attired stranger was the busiest man in Tacoma, and kept a great many other people busy at the same time. Finally, just as the boys were beginning to think he had forgotten them, he appeared at the door of the freight-car, and said, in a loud whisper: "Come, quick. I think they are after you." As they scrambled out, he started on a run towards a single car that, with an engine attached, stood on a siding in the darkest corner of the railroad yard. Here he hurriedly whispered to the boys to crouch low on its rear platform until it started, when the cook would open the door. Then he disappeared. In another minute the car began to move, and directly afterwards its door was opened. There seemed to be no light in the interior, and, without seeing any one, the boys heard a strange voice, evidently that of a negro, bidding them come in out of the cold. They entered the car, Alaric going first, and were led through a narrow passage into what was evidently a large compartment. They heard their guide retreating through the passage, and were beginning to feel rather uneasy, when suddenly they were surrounded and dazzled by a great flood of electric light. CHAPTER XL A FLOOD OF LIGHT As the brilliant light flooded the place where the boys stood, they were for a minute blinded by its radiance. Bonny was bewildered and frightened, and even Alaric was greatly startled. Gradually, as their eyes grew accustomed to the brightness, they became aware of a single figure standing before them, and regarding them curiously. Alaric looked, rubbed his eyes, and looked again. Then he sprang forward with a great shout. "Dad! you dear old dad! I never was so glad to see any one in my life!" "Rick! you young rascal!" cried Amos Todd. "How could you play your old father such a trick? Never mind, though; you've won your game, and at the same time made me the very happiest and proudest man on the coast this night. Stand there, sir, and let me have a good look at you." With this the proud father held his stalwart son off at arm's-length and gazed at him with loving admiration. "The very neatest trick I ever heard of--the most impudent, and the most successful," he murmured. "But don't you ever be guilty of such a thing again, you young smuggler." "Indeed I won't, dad, for I know I shall never have any reason or desire to repeat it," replied Alaric, promptly, his voice trembling with joyful excitement. "But, dad, you mustn't forget Bonny; for whatever I have gained or learned this past summer I owe to him." "God bless the lad! Indeed I will never forget what he has done both for you and for me," cried Amos Todd, stepping forward and seizing Bonny's hand in a grasp that made him wince. Poor bewildered Bonny, standing amid the glitter of silver and plate-glass, surrounded by furnishings of such luxurious character as he had never imagined could exist in real life, vaguely wondered whether he were under the spell of some beautiful enchantment or merely dreaming. There must be some reality to it all, though, for the stranger in the shabby garments, whom he had befriended only the day before, and still wearing the same hat he had given him, was surely holding his hand and saying very pleasant things. But who could he be? He certainly was not acting like a tramp, or one who was greatly in need of charity. Alaric came to the puzzled lad's relief. "He is my father, Mr. Amos Todd," he cried. "And, Bonny, you will forgive me, won't you, for not telling you before? You see, I was afraid to let even you know that I was the son of a rich man, because I wanted you to like me for myself alone." "You know I do, Rick Dale! You know I do!" exclaimed Bonny, impulsively, finding his voice at last. "But, Rick," he added, almost in a whisper, "are you sure there isn't any mistake about it all? Amos Todd, you know, is President of the Northwest Company, and the richest man on the coast. They do say he's a millionaire." "It's all right, Bonny. I expect he is a millionaire," answered Alaric, joyously. "But we won't lay it up against him, will we? And we'll try not to think any the less of him for it. I didn't know he was President of the Northwest Company, though. Are you, dad?" "I believe I am," laughed Amos Todd. "And I certainly have cause to be grateful that I hold the office, for it was while making my official inspection of the camps yesterday that I ran across you boys. I didn't know you, though, Rick--'pon my word, I didn't. You bore a faint resemblance to my little 'Allie' as you came riding those logs down the skid-road, but I knew you couldn't be he, for I was certain that he was on the other side of the world by this time. And so you shook the Sonntaggs, and let them run away from you. It was wrong, Rick, very wrong, but I don't blame you--not one bit, I don't. I'd have done the same thing myself." "But, dad, how did you come to find me out? I don't understand it at all." "By your own letter to Esther, lad. She forwarded it to me in France; but I had gone when it reached there, and so it was sent to San Francisco. I left Margaret on the other side for the winter, and came back by way of Montreal and the Canadian Pacific, intending to stop here and inspect the lumber camps on my way home. I telegraphed John to send this car and all my mail up here, and they came last night. As soon as I read your letter I felt pretty certain that it was you whom I had seen doing the circus act on those logs. I wasn't quite sure, though, and didn't want to make any mistake, so I just sent word to Linton to fetch you in, that I might take a good look at you." "So it was you who sent for us?" "Certainly. And you thought it was the revenue-officers, and so decided to give 'em the slip, and beat your way home to claim protection of your old dad--eh, you rascal? And Bonny here took me for a fellow-tramp who could put him on to the racket. Ha, ha, ha! Ho, ho, ho! Oh my! I shall die of laughing yet at thinking of it. It was all the hat, though, wasn't it, Bonny? I hated to cut it up, for I only bought it in Paris the other day, and hadn't another with me; but I wanted to inspect the camp without being known, and it was the only disguise I could think of. But, boys, what do you say to supper? If you are as hungry as I am you must be more than ready for it." Indeed, they were ready for supper, and when they sat down to that daintily served meal, in the exquisitely appointed dining-room of President Todd's own private car, Bonny at last understood why Alaric had ordered that strange lot of supplies for the sloop _Fancy_. After supper they returned to the saloon, where Amos Todd lighted a cigar, and listened to the wonderful story of trial and triumph, privation and strange vicissitude, that had transformed his pale-faced weakling into the strong, handsome, self-reliant youth upon whom he now gazed so proudly. When the long story was ended, he asked, quietly: "How much have you earned by your summer's work, son; and what have you to show for it?" "If you mean in money, dad, not one cent; and all I have to show, besides what you've already noticed, is this." Here Alaric held out a dilapidated baseball, at which his father gazed curiously. "With that ball," continued Alaric, "I took my first lesson in being a boy, and it has led me on from one thing to another ever since until, finally, this very evening, it brought me back to you. So, dad, I should say that it stood for my whole summer's work." "I am thankful, Rick, that you haven't earned any money, and that through bitter want of it you have learned its value," said Amos Todd. "I am thankful, too, that there is still one thing for which you have to come to your old dad. More than all am I thankful for what you have gained without his help, or, rather, in spite of him; and had I known last spring what that baseball was to do for you, I would gladly have paid a million of dollars for it." "You may have it now, dad, for one hundred, which is just the amount I owe Bonny." "Done!" cried Amos Todd; and thus he came into possession of the well-worn baseball that, set in a plate of silver and enclosed in a superb frame, soon afterwards hung above his private desk in San Francisco. Here our story properly ends, but we cannot help telling of two or three things that happened soon after the disappearance of our hump-durgin boys from Camp No. 10, and as a direct result of their having lived there. To begin with, Mr. Linton felt himself so insulted by the manner in which President Todd made his inspection that he resigned his position, and, on the recommendation of Alaric, Buck Ranlet was given his place. On the strength of this promotion the big "faller" went East to marry the girl of his choice, and both Alaric and Bonny were present at the wedding. Through the liberality of Amos Todd, the ex-hump-durgin boys were enabled to present the camp with their shack, converted into a neat little library building and filled with carefully selected books, in which the occupants of the camp are greatly pleased to discover many of the tales already told them by Rick Dale. A certain famous and badly used-up hat, carefully removed from the camp, belongs to Bonny Brooks, and adorns a wall in one of a beautiful suite of rooms that he and Alaric occupy together at Harvard. Here Alaric is taking an academic course, while Bonny, whom Amos Todd regards almost as an own son, is sturdily working his way through the mathematical and mechanical labyrinths of a Manual Training School. They went to Cambridge just one year after completing their studies as hump-durgin boys; and while they were still Freshmen, the splendid baseball-player, who, though only just entering his Junior year, was captain of the 'varsity nine, happened to be badly in need of a catcher. "I can tell you of one who can't be beat this side of the Rocky Mountains," suggested his classmate and pitcher, Dave Carncross. "Who is he?" "Rick Todd, a Freshman." "Son of Amos Todd, your San Francisco millionaire?" "Yes." "Then I don't want him. Millionaires' sons are no good." "This one is, though," insisted Carncross; "and I ought to know, for I taught him to catch his first ball. You just come over to Soldiers' Field this afternoon and size him up." The captain needed a first-class man behind the bat so badly that, in spite of his prejudices, he consented to do as his pitcher desired. He was amazed, delighted, and enthusiastic. Never had he seen such an exhibition of ball-catching as was given by that Freshman. Finally he could contain himself no longer, and rushing up to his classmate, he exclaimed: "Carncross, he's a wonder! Introduce me at once." "Rick Todd," said Dave Carncross, "permit me to present you to my friend Phil Ryder, captain of the 'varsity nine." As the two lads grasped each other's hands there came a flash of recognition into each face, and both remembered where they had met each other last. THE END BOOKS BY KIRK MUNROE CAMPMATES. Illustrated. DORYMATES. Illustrated. CANOEMATES. Illustrated. RAFTMATES. Illustrated. WAKULLA. Illustrated. THE FLAMINGO FEATHER. Illustrated. DERRICK STERLING. Illustrated. CHRYSTAL, JACK & CO. Illustrated. THE COPPER PRINCESS. Illustrated. FORWARD, MARCH! Illustrated. THE BLUE DRAGON. Illustrated. FOR THE MIKADO. Illustrated. UNDER THE GREAT BEAR. Illustrated. THE FUR-SEAL'S TOOTH. Illustrated. SNOW-SHOES AND SLEDGES. Illustrated. RICK DALE. Illustrated. THE PAINTED DESERT. Illustrated. 
42758	----	Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Italic text is denoted by _underscores_. The Preface listed as being on page vii is on page ix. TRUE TALES OF MOUNTAIN ADVENTURE [Illustration: MELCHIOR ANDEREGG 1894. _Frontispiece._] TRUE TALES OF MOUNTAIN ADVENTURE FOR NON-CLIMBERS YOUNG AND OLD BY MRS AUBREY LE BLOND (MRS MAIN) NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 1903 (_All rights reserved._) TO MR EDWARD WHYMPER WHOSE SPIRITED WRITINGS AND GRAPHIC PENCIL FIRST AWAKENED AN INTEREST IN MOUNTAINEERING AMONGST THOSE WHO HAD NEVER CLIMBED, I DEDICATE THESE TRUE TALES FROM THE HILLS, THE MATERIAL FOR SOME OF THE MOST STRIKING OF WHICH I OWE TO HIS GENEROSITY. PREFACE There is no manlier sport in the world than mountaineering. It is true that all the sports Englishmen take part in are manly, but mountaineering is different from others, because it is sport purely for the sake of sport. There is no question of beating any one else, as in a race or a game, or of killing an animal or a bird as in hunting or shooting. A mountaineer sets his skill and his strength against the difficulty of getting to the top of a steep peak. Either he conquers the mountain, or it conquers him. If he fails, he keeps on trying till he succeeds. This teaches him perseverance, and proves to him that anything is possible if he is determined to do it. In mountaineering, all the party share the pleasures and the dangers. Every climber has to help the others. Every climber has to rely both on himself and on his companions. Mountaineering makes a person quick in learning how to act in moments of danger. It cultivates his presence of mind, it teaches him to be unselfish and thoughtful for others who may be with him. It takes him amongst the grandest scenery in the world, it shows him the forces of nature let loose in the blinding snow-storm, or the roaring avalanche. It lifts him above all the petty friction of daily life, and takes him where the atmosphere is always pure, and the outlook calm and wide. It brings him health, and leaves him delightful recollections. It gives him friends both amongst his fellow-climbers, and in the faithful guides who season after season accompany him. It is a pursuit which he can commence early in life, and continue till old age, for the choice of expeditions is endless, and ascents of all scales of difficulty and of any length are easily found. That I do not exaggerate the joys and the benefits of mountaineering will be borne out by those extracts from the true tales from the hills of which this book chiefly consists. Some may think I have dwelt at undue length on the catastrophes which have darkened the pages of Alpine history. I do not apologize. If in one single instance any one who reads these pages becomes afterwards a climber, and takes warning from anything I have told him, I am amply justified. It has been difficult in a work like this to know always what to include and what to omit. My guiding principle has been to give preference to descriptions which are either so exciting by reason of the facts narrated, or else so brilliantly and wittily written, that they cannot fail to excite the reader's interest. To these I have added four chapters, those on mountaineering, on glaciers, on avalanches, and on the guides of the Alps, which may help to make climbing more intelligible to those who have never attempted it. My warm thanks are due to Sir Leslie Stephen, Messrs Whymper, Tuckett, Charles Pilkington, and Clinton Dent who have rendered the production of this book possible by allowing me to quote at considerable length from their writings; also to Messrs Longman who have permitted me to make extracts from works of which they hold the copyright, and to Messrs Newnes and Messrs Hutchinson for their kind permission to re-print portions of my articles which have appeared in their publications. I am also under a debt of gratitude to Mr Philip Gosset, who has not only allowed me to reprint his account of the avalanche on the Haut-de-Cry, but has also most kindly placed his wide knowledge of glaciers at my disposal by offering to revise the chapter I have written on that subject in this book. Dr Kennedy, whose beautiful edition of Mr Moore's diary, "The Alps in 1864," recently appeared, has generously given me permission to make any extracts I desire from it. Colonel Arkwright, whose brother perished on Mont Blanc in 1866, has been good enough to allow me to reproduce a most interesting and hitherto unpublished photograph of the relics discovered in 1897. The illustrations, except those connected with the Arkwright accident, and a view of the Matterhorn, by the late Mr W. F. Donkin, are from photographs by me. By them I have tried rather to show how climbers carry out their mountaineering than to illustrate any particular locality. In my own writings I have adopted, in the spelling of names of places, the modern official forms, but, of course, when quoting I have kept to those followed by each writer. If, in the following pages, I have given any pleasure to those who have never scaled a peak, or have perhaps recalled happy days amongst the mountains to a fellow-climber, it will be a very real gratification to me. E. LE BLOND. 67, THE DRIVE, BRIGHTON, _Oct. 30th, 1902_. CONTENTS. CHAP. PAGE PREFACE vii. I. WHAT IS MOUNTAINEERING? 1 II. A FEW WORDS ABOUT GLACIERS 7 III. AVALANCHES 15 IV. THE GUIDES OF THE ALPS 22 V. THE GUIDES OF THE ALPS (Continued) 50 VI. AN AVALANCHE ON THE HAUT-DE-CRY--A RACE FOR LIFE 59 VII. CAUGHT IN AN AVALANCHE ON THE MATTERHORN--THE ICE-AVALANCHE OF THE ALTELS--AN AVALANCHE WHICH ROBBED A LADY OF A GARMENT 72 VIII. LOST IN THE ICE FOR FORTY YEARS 92 IX. THE MOST TERRIBLE OF ALL ALPINE TRAGEDIES 107 X. A WONDERFUL SLIDE DOWN A WALL OF ICE 113 XI. AN ADVENTURE ON THE TRIFT PASS--THE PERILS OF THE MOMING PASS 122 XII. AN EXCITING PASSAGE OF THE COL DE PILATTE 134 XIII. AN ADVENTURE ON THE ALETSCH GLACIER--A LOYAL COMPANION--A BRAVE GUIDE 142 XIV. A WONDERFUL FEAT BY TWO LADIES--A PERILOUS CLIMB 153 XV. A FINE PERFORMANCE WITHOUT GUIDES 170 XVI. THE PIZ SCERSCEN TWICE IN FOUR DAYS--THE FIRST ASCENT BY A WOMAN OF MONT BLANC 194 XVII. THE ASCENT OF A WALL OF ICE 208 XVIII. THE AIGUILLE DU DRU 221 XIX. THE MOST FAMOUS MOUNTAIN IN THE ALPS--THE CONQUEST OF THE MATTERHORN 250 XX. SOME TRAGEDIES ON THE MATTERHORN 268 XXI. THE WHOLE DUTY OF THE CLIMBER--ALPINE DISTRESS SIGNALS 289 GLOSSARY 293 INDEX 295 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Melchior Anderegg, 1894 _Frontispiece_ Climbers Descending the Ortler 2 The Aletsch Glacier from Bel Alp 7 General View of a Glacier 8 A Glacier Table: after a Storm 11 A Crevassed Glacier 13 An Avalanche near Bouveret: a Tunnel through an Avalanche 17 Edouard Cupelin 22 Descending a Rock Peak near Zermatt 31 A Big Crevasse: the Gentle Persuasion of the Rope 37 A Typical Couloir: the Ober Gabelhorn: the Wrong Way to Descend: Very Soft Snow 42 Piz Palü: Hans and Christian Grass 44 Christian Almer, 1894 54 An Avalanche Falling 59 Eiger and Mönch from Lauberhorn 66 Avalanche Falling from the Wetterhorn 79 On Monte Rosa 83 Mr Whymper: Mrs Aubrey Le Blond: Group on a High Peak in Winter 85 Mrs Aubrey Le Blond and Joseph Imboden: Crossing a Snow Couloir 89 Mont Blanc: Nicolas Winhart: a Banker of Geneva: the Relics of the Arkwright Accident 92 Alpine Snow-Fields 108 A Start by Moonlight: Shadows at Sunrise: a Standing Glissade: a Sitting Glissade 136 On a Snow-Covered Glacier 148 Martin Schocher and Schnitzler 150 Exterior of a Climber's Hut: Interior 157 The Meije: Ascending a Snowy Wall 171 Top of Piz Scerscen: Party Descending Piz Bernina: On a Mountain Top: Descent of a Snow-Ridge 194 Hard Work: Setting Out in a Long Skirt 204 A Steep Icy Slope: On the Top of a Pass 216 A Slab of Rock: Negotiating a Steep Passage 225 The Family of Herr Seiler, Zermatt: Going to Zermatt in the Olden Days 250 The Guides' Wall, Zermatt 259 The Zermatt Side of the Matterhorn: Rising Mists 260 A Bitterly Cold Day: The Matterhorn from the Zmutt Side 265 Jost, Porter of Hotel Monte Rosa, Zermatt 268 Hoar Frost in the Alps 274 ERRATA The plate labelled to face page 225, to face page 11. " " " " 5, " 83. TRUE TALES OF MOUNTAIN ADVENTURE CHAPTER I WHAT IS MOUNTAINEERING? Mountaineering is not merely walking up hill. It is the art of getting safely up and down a peak where there is no path, and where steps may have to be cut in the ice; it is the art of selecting the best line of ascent under conditions which vary from day to day. Mountaineering as a science took long to perfect. It is more than a century since the first ascent of a big Alpine peak was accomplished, and the early climbers had but little idea of the dangers which they were likely to meet with. They could not tell when the snow was safe, or when it might slip away in an avalanche. They did not know where stones would be likely to fall on them, or when they were walking over one of those huge cracks in the glacier known as crevasses, and lightly bridged over with winter snow, which might break away when they trod on it. However, they soon learnt that it was safer for two or more people to be together in such places than for a man to go alone, and when crossing glaciers they used the long sticks they carried as a sort of hand-rail, a man holding on to each end, so that if one tumbled into a hole the other could pull him out. Of course this was a very clumsy way of doing things, and before long it occurred to them that a much better plan would be to use a rope, and being all tied to it about 20 feet apart, their hands were left free, and the party could go across a snow-field and venture on bridged-over crevasses in safety. At first both guides and travellers carried long sticks called alpenstocks. If they came to a steep slope of hard snow or ice, they hacked steps up it with small axes which they carried slung on their backs. This was a very inconvenient way of going to work, as it entailed holding the alpenstock in one hand and using the axe with the other. So they thought of a better plan, and had the alpenstock made thicker and shorter, and fastened an axe-head to the top of it. This was gradually improved till it became the ice-axe, as used to-day, and as shown in many of my photographs. This ice-axe is useful for various purposes besides cutting steps. If you dig in the head while crossing a snow-slope, it acts as an anchor, and gives tremendous hold, while to allude to its functions as a tin-opener, a weapon of defence against irate bulls on Alpine pastures, or as a means for rapidly passing through a crowd at a railway station, is but to touch on a very few of its admirable qualities. [Illustration: CLIMBERS DESCENDING A SNOW-CLAD PEAK (THE ORTLER).] When people first climbed they went in droves on the mountains, or I should say rather on the mountain, for during the first half of the nineteenth century Mont Blanc was the object of nearly all the expeditions which set out for the eternal snows. After some years, however, it was found quite unnecessary to have so many guides and porters, and nowadays a party usually numbers four, two travellers and two guides, or three, consisting generally of one traveller and two guides, or occasionally five. Two is a bad number, as should one of them be hurt or taken ill, the other would have to leave him and go for help, though one of the first rules of mountaineering is that a man who is injured or indisposed must never be left alone on a mountain. Again, six is not a good number; it is too many, as the members of the party are sure to get in each other's way, pepper each other with stones, and waste no end of time in wrangling as to when to stop for food, when to proceed, and which way to go up. A good guide will run the concern himself, and turn a deaf ear to all suggestions; but the fact remains that six people had better split up and go on separate ropes. And if they also, in the case of rock peaks, choose different mountains, it is an excellent plan. The best of friends are apt to revile each other when stones, upset from above, come whistling about their ears. The early mountaineers were horribly afraid of places which were at all difficult to climb. Mere danger, however, had no terrors for them, and they calmly encamped on frail snow-bridges, or had lunch in the path of avalanches. After a time the dangerous was understood and avoided, and the difficult grappled with by increased skill, until about the middle of the nineteenth century there arose a class of experts, little, if at all, inferior to the best guides of the present day. The most active and intelligent of the natives of Chamonix, Zermatt, and the Bernese Oberland now learnt to find their way even on mountains new to them. Some were chamois hunters, and accustomed to climb in difficult places. Others, perhaps, had when boys minded the goats, and scrambled after them in all sorts of awkward spots. Others, again, had such a taste for mountaineering that they took to it the very first time they tried it. Of these last my own guide, Joseph Imboden, was one, and later on I will tell you of the extraordinary way in which he began his splendid career. [Illustration: ON A ROCK RIDGE NEAR THE TOP OF MONTE ROSA. The Schallihorn may be seen in the top right-hand corner of the picture.] It is from going with and watching how good guides climb that most people learn to become mountaineers themselves. Nearly all take guides whenever they ascend difficult mountains, but some are so skilful and experienced that they go without, though few are ever good enough to do this quite safely. I am often asked why people climb, and it is a hard question to answer satisfactorily. There is something which makes one long to mountaineer more and more, from the first time one tries it. All climbs are different. All views from mountains are different, and every time one climbs one is uncertain, owing to the weather or the possible state of the peak, if the top can be reached or not. So it is always a struggle between the mountain and the climber, and though perseverance, skill, experience, and pluck must give the victory to the climber in the end, yet the fight may be a long one, and it may be years before a particularly awkward peak allows one to stand on its summit. Perhaps, if you have patience to read what follows, you may better understand what mountaineering is, and why most of those who have once tried it become so fond of it. [Illustration: THE ALETSCH GLACIER FROM BEL ALP. The medial moraine is very conspicuous. This glacier is about a mile in width.] CHAPTER II A FEW WORDS ABOUT GLACIERS Of all the beautiful and interesting things mountain districts have to show, none surpass the glaciers. Now a glacier is simply a river of ice, which never melts away even during the hottest summer. Glaciers form high up on mountains, where there is a great deal of snow in winter, and where it is never very hot even in summer. They are also found in northern lands, such as Greenland, and there, owing to the long cold winter and short summer, they come down to the very level of the sea. A glacier is formed in this way: There is a heavy fall of snow which lies in basins and little valleys high up on the mountain side. The air is too cold for it to melt, and as more falls on the top of it the mass gets pressed down. Now, if you take a lump of snow in your hand and press it, you get an icy snow-ball. If you squeeze anything you make it warmer. The pressing down of the great mass of snow is like the squeezing of the ball in your hand. It makes it warmer, so that the snow first half melts and then gradually becomes ice. You bring about this change in your snow-ball in a moment. Nature, in making a glacier, takes much longer, so that what was snow one year is only partly ice the next--it is known as _nevé_--and it is not until after several seasons that it becomes the pure ice we see in the lower part of a glacier. One would fancy that if a quantity of snow falls every winter and does not all melt, the mountains must grow higher. But though only a little of the snow melts, it disappears in other ways. Some is evaporated into the atmosphere; some falls off in avalanches. Most of it slowly flows down after forming itself into glaciers. For glaciers are always moving. The force of gravity makes them slide down over their rocky beds. They flow so slowly that we cannot see them move, in fact most of them advance only a few inches a day. But if a line of stakes is driven into the ice straight across a glacier, we shall notice in a few weeks that they have moved down. And the most interesting part of it is that they will not have moved evenly, but those nearest the centre will have advanced further than those at the side. In short, a glacier flows like a river, the banks keeping back the ice at the side, as the banks of a river prevent it from running so fast at the edge as in the middle. [Illustration: GENERAL VIEW ON THE LOWER PART OF A LARGE GLACIER. The surface is ice, not snow. The snow-line may be seen further up.] A large glacier is fed by such a gigantic mass of snow that it is in its upper part hundreds of feet thick. Of course when it reaches warmer places it begins to melt. But the quantity of ice composing it is so great that it takes a long time before it disappears, and a big glacier sometimes flows down far below the wild and rocky parts of mountains and reaches the neighbourhood of forests and corn-fields. It is very beautiful at Chamonix to see the white, glittering ice of the Glacier des Bossons flowing in a silent stream through green meadows. The reason that mountaineers have to be careful in crossing glaciers is on account of the holes, cracks, or, to call them by their proper name, crevasses, which are met with on them. Ice, unlike water, is brittle, so it splits up into crevasses whenever the glacier flows over a steep or uneven rocky bed. High up, where snow still lies, these chasms in the ice are often bridged over, and if a person ventures on one of these snow bridges it may break, and he may fall down the crevasse, which may be so deep that no bottom can be found to it. He is then either killed by the fall or frozen to death. If, as I have explained before, several climbers are roped together, they form a long string, like the tail of a kite, and not more than one is likely to break through at a time. As the rope is--or ought to be--kept tightly stretched, he cannot fall far, and is easily pulled out again. The snow melts away off the surface of the glacier further down in summer. It is on this bare, icy stream, scarred all over with little channels full of water running merrily down the melting rough surface, that the ordinary tourist is taken when he visits a glacier during his summer trip to Switzerland. [Illustration: A GLACIER TABLE (page 11).] [Illustration: Taken in Mid-Winter on reaching the Lower Slopes of a Mountain after a terrific Storm of Snow and Wind. The local Swiss snow-shoes were used during part of the ascent.] You will notice in most of the photographs of glaciers black streaks along them, sometimes only near the sides, sometimes also in the centre. These are heaps of stones and earth which have fallen from the mountains bordering the glacier, and have been carried along by the slowly moving ice. The bands in the centre have come there, owing to the meeting higher up of two glaciers, which have joined their side heaps of rubbish, and have henceforward flowed on as one glacier. The bands of piled up stones are called moraines, those at the edge being known as lateral moraines, in the centre as medial moraines, and the stones which drop off the end (or snout) of a glacier, as terminal moraines. Besides these compact bands, we sometimes find here and there a big stone or boulder by itself, which has rolled on to the ice. Often these stones are raised on a pedestal of ice, and then they are called "glacier-tables." They have covered the bit of ice they lie upon, and prevented it from melting, while the glacier all round has gradually sunk. After a time the leg of the table begins to feel the sun strike it also. It melts away on the south side and the stone slips off. A party of climbers, wandering about on a glacier at night or in a fog, and having no compass, can roughly take their bearings by noticing in what position these broken-down glacier-tables lie. Occasionally sand has been washed down over the surface of the ice, and a patch of it has collected in one place. This shields the glacier from the sun, the surrounding ice sinks, and eventually we find cones which are lightly covered with sand, the smooth ice beneath being reached directly we scratch the surface with the point of a stick. It is difficult to realise the enormous size of a large glacier. The Aletsch Glacier, the most extensive in the Alps, would, it has been said, if turned to stone, supply building material for a city the size of London. With regard to the movement of glaciers, the entertaining author of "A Tramp Abroad" mildly chaffs his readers by telling them that he once tried to turn a glacier to account as a means of transport. Accordingly, he took up his position in the middle, where the ice moves quickest, leaving his luggage at the edge, where it goes slowest. Thus he intended to travel by express, leaving his things to follow by goods train! However, after some time, he appeared to make no progress, so he got out a book on glaciers to try and find out the reason for the delay. He was much surprised when he read that a glacier moves at about the same pace as _the hour hand of a watch_! [Illustration: A DISTORTED AND CREVASSED GLACIER. Showing the rough texture of the surface of a Glacier below the Snow-line.] Many thousands of years ago there were glaciers in Scotland and England. We are certain of this, as glaciers scratch and polish the rocks they pass over as does nothing else. Stones are frozen into the ice, and it holds them and uses them as we might hold and use a sharply-pointed instrument, scratching the rock over which the mighty mass is slowly passing. In addition to the scratches, the ice polishes the rock till it is quite smooth, writing upon it in characters never to be effaced the history of past events. Another thing which proves to us that these icy rivers were in many places where there are no glaciers now, is the boulders we find scattered about. These boulders are sometimes of a kind of rock not found anywhere near, and so we know that they must have been carried along on that wonderful natural luggage-train, and dropped off it as it melted. We find big stones in North Wales which must have come on a glacier beginning in Scotland! Glacier-polished rocks are found along the whole of the west coast of Norway, and there are boulders near Geneva, in Switzerland, which have come from the chain of Mount Blanc, 60 miles away. So you see that the glaciers of the Alps are far smaller than they were at one time, and that in many places where formerly there were huge glaciers, there are to-day none. The Ice Age was the time when these great glaciers existed, but the subject of the Ice Age is a difficult and thorny one, which is outside the scope of my information and of this book. CHAPTER III AVALANCHES Many of the most terrible accidents in the Alps have been due to avalanches, and perhaps, as avalanches take place from different causes and have various characteristics, according to whether they are of ice, snow, or _débris_, some account of them may not be out of place. We may briefly classify them as follows:-- 1. Ice avalanches, only met with on or near glaciers. 2. Dust avalanches, composed of very light, powdery snow. 3. Compact avalanches (_Grund_ or ground avalanches, as the Germans call them), consisting of snow, earth, stones, trees, and anything which the avalanche finds in its path. These take place only in winter and spring, while the two other kinds happen on the mountains at any season. An ice avalanche is easily understood when it is borne in mind that a glacier is always moving. When this river of ice comes to the edge of a precipice, or tries to crawl down a very steep cliff, it splits across and forms tottering crags of ice, which lean over more and more till they lose their balance and go crashing down the slope. Some of the ice is crushed to powder by its fall, yet many blocks generally survive, and are occasionally heaped up in such huge masses below that they form another glacier on a small scale. If a party of mountaineers passes under a place overhung by threatening ice, they are in great danger, though at early morning, before the sun has loosened the frozen masses, the peril is less. Sometimes, too, if the distance to be traversed is very short and the going quite easy, it is safe enough to dash quickly across. [Illustration: A TUNNEL 300 FEET LONG THROUGH AN AVALANCHE. Tree trunks, etc., can be seen embedded in it.] [Illustration: AN AVALANCHE NEAR BOUVERET, LAKE OF GENEVA.] Dust avalanches occur when a heavy fall of light, powdery snow takes place on frozen hillsides or ice-slopes, and so long as there is no wind or disturbance, all remains quiet, and inexperienced people would think there was no danger. But in reality dust avalanches are the most to be feared of any, for they fall irregularly in unexpected places, and their power is tremendous. While all seems calm and peaceful, suddenly a puff of wind or the passage of an animal disturbs the delicately-balanced masses, and then woe betide whoever is within reach of this frightful engine of destruction. First, the snow begins to slide gently down, then it gathers pace and volume, and even miles away the thunder of its fall can be heard as it leaps from ledge to ledge. Covered with a cloud of smoking, powdery dust, it is a veritable Niagara of giant height, and as it descends towards the forests, it carries with it whatever it finds in its path. Trees are mown down with as much ease as the tender grass of spring. Houses are lifted from the ground and tossed far away. An avalanche is preceded by a blast even more destructive than the masses of snow which it hurls along. As it advances with ever-increasing rapidity the air in front is more and more compressed as the avalanche rushes on with lightning-like speed behind it. The wind sweeps everything before it, and many are the tales related by those who have survived or witnessed a display of its power. On one occasion more than a hundred houses were overwhelmed by a huge avalanche at Saas (Prättigau, near Davos), and during the search afterwards the rescue party found amidst the ruins a child lying asleep and uninjured in his cradle, which had been blown to some distance from his home, while close by stood a basket containing six eggs, none of which were broken. I have myself seen a row of telegraph posts in an Alpine valley in winter thrown flat on the ground by the air preceding an enormous avalanche, which itself did not come within 300 yards of them. It is a very wonderful thing that persons buried beneath an avalanche can sometimes hear every word spoken by a search party, and yet not a sound that they utter reaches the ears of those outside. A great deal of air is imprisoned between the particles of snow, and so it is possible for those overwhelmed by an avalanche to live inside it for hours. Cases have been known where a man, buried not far below the surface, has been able to melt a hole to the outer air with his breath, and eventually free himself from his icy prison. On 18th January, 1885, enormous avalanches fell in some of the mountainous districts of northern Italy, houses, cattle, crops, and granaries being carried away, and many victims buried beneath the ruins. Some touching episodes of wonderful escapes were related. "For instance, at Riva, in the valley of Susa, a whole family, consisting of an old woman of seventy, her two daughters, her four nieces, and a child four months old, were buried with their house in the snow, exposed apparently to certain death from cold and hunger. But the soldiers of the Compagnie Alpine, hearing of the sad case, worked with all their might and main to save them, and at last they were found and brought out alive, the brave old grandmother insisting that the children should be saved first, and then her daughters, saying that their lives were more precious than her own." The soldiers, who worked with a will above all praise, were obliged in several cases to construct long galleries in the snow in order to reach the villages, which were sometimes buried beneath 40 feet of snow. Compact avalanches, though very terrible on account of their frequently great size, can be more easily guarded against than dust avalanches, because they always fall in well-defined channels. A compact avalanche consists of snow, earth, stones, and trees, and comes down in times of thaw. Many fall in early spring in Alpine valleys, and though it is not unusual for them to come right across high roads, the fatal accidents are comparatively few. The inhabitants know that wherever, high up on the hills, there is a hollow which may serve as a _reservoir_ or collecting-basin for the snow, and below this a funnel or shoot, there an avalanche may be expected. Often they take means to prevent one starting, for an avalanche, whose power is irresistible when once it has begun to move quickly, is very easily kept from mischief if it is not allowed a running start. The best of all ways for preventing avalanches is to plant the gullies with trees, but where this cannot be done, rows of stakes driven into the ground will serve to hold up the snow, and where the hillside is extremely steep, and much damage would be caused if an avalanche fell, stone walls are built one above another to keep the soil and the snow together, very much as we see on precipitous banks overlooking English railways. The driving roads over Alpine passes are in places exposed to avalanches in winter. At the worst spots galleries of stone are built, through which the sleighs can pass in perfect safety, and if an avalanche fell while they were inside it would pass harmlessly over their heads. On the Albula Pass, in Switzerland, as soon as the avalanches come down, tunnels are cut in the snow through them, and are in constant use till early summer. Occasionally houses or churches are built in the very path of an avalanche. A V-shaped wall, called an avalanche-breaker, is put behind, and this cuts the snowy stream in two parts, which passes on harmlessly on either side of the building. Sometimes avalanche-breakers of snow, hardened into ice by throwing water over them, are constructed behind barns which have been put in exposed places. In order that an avalanche may get up speed enough to commence its swift career, the slope the snow rests on where it starts must be at an angle of from 30° to 35° at least. CHAPTER IV THE GUIDES OF THE ALPS: WHAT THEY ARE AND WHAT THEY DO There is no profession drawing its members from the peasant class which requires a combination of so many high and rare qualities as that of a mountain guide. Happily, the dwellers in hill countries seem usually more noble in mind and robust of frame than the inhabitants of plains, and all who know them well must admit that among Alpine guides are to be found men whose intelligence and character would rank high in any class of life. I have usually noticed that the abilities and duties of a guide are little understood by the non-climber, who often imagines that a guide's sole business is to know the way and to carry the various useless articles which the beginner in mountaineering insists on taking with him. [Illustration: EDOUARD CUPELIN OF CHAMONIX. The Guide with whom Mrs Aubrey Le Blond commenced her climbing.] Guiding, if it sometimes does include these duties, is far more than this. The first-class guide must be the general of the little army setting out to invade the higher regions. He need not _know_ the way--in fact, it sometimes happens that he has never before visited the district--but he must be able to _find_ a way, and a safe one, to the summit of the peak for which his party is bound. An inferior guide may know, from habit, the usual way up a mountain, but, should the conditions of ice and snow alter, he is unable to alter with them and vary his route. You may ask: "How does a guide find his way on a mountain new to him?" There are several means open to him. If the peak is well known, as is, say, the Matterhorn, he will have heard from other guides which routes have been followed, and will know that if he desires to take his traveller up the ordinary way he must go past the Schwarz-see Hotel, and on to the ridge which terminates in the Hörnli, making for the hut which he has seen from below through the telescope. Then he remembers that he must cross to the east face, and while doing so he will notice the scratches on the rocks from the nailed boots of previous climbers. Now, mounting directly upward, he will pick out the passages which seem easiest, until, passing the ruined upper hut, he comes out on the ridge and looks down the tremendous precipice which overhangs the Matterhorn Glacier. This ridge, he knows, he simply has to follow until he reaches the foot of a steep face of rock some 50 feet high, down which hangs a chain. He has heard all about this bit of the climb since his boyhood, and he tells his traveller that, once on the top of the rock, all difficulty will be over, and the final slope to the summit will be found a gentle one. So it comes to pass that the party reaches the highest pinnacle of the great mountain without once diverging from the best route. Occasionally the leading guide may take with him as second guide a man from the locality, but most climbers will prefer to keep with them the two guides they are used to. It is not only on mountains that a guide is able to find his way over little known ground. Many years ago Melchior Anderegg came to stay with friends in England, and arrived at London Bridge Station in the midst of a thick London fog. "He was met by Mr Stephen and Mr Hinchliff," writes his biographer in _The Pioneer of the Alps_, "who accompanied him on foot to the rooms of the latter gentleman in Lincoln's Inn Fields. A day or two later the same party found themselves at the same station on their return from Woolwich. 'Now, Melchior,' said Mr Hinchliff, 'you will lead us back home.' Instantly the skilful guide, who had never seen a larger town than Berne, accepted the situation, and found his way straight back without difficulty, pausing for consideration only once, as if to examine the landmarks at the foot of Chancery Lane." Now, let us see how a guide sets about exploring a district where no one has previously ascended the mountains. Of this work I have seen a good deal, since in Arctic Norway my Swiss guides and I have ascended more than twenty hitherto-unclimbed peaks, and were never once unable to reach the summit. Of course, the first thing is to see the mountains, and, to do this, it is wise to ascend something which you are sure, from its appearance, is easy, and then prospect for others, inspecting others again from them, and so on, _ad infinitum_. You cannot always see the whole of a route, and, perhaps, your leading guide will observe: "We can reach that upper glacier by the gully in the rocks." "What gully?" you ask. "The one to the left. There _must_ be one there. Look at the heap of stones at the bottom!" Thus, from the seen to the unseen the guide argues, reading a fact from writing invisible to the untrained eye. Between difficulty and danger, too, he draws a sharp distinction, and attacks with full confidence a steep but firm wall of rock, turning back from the easy-looking slope of snow ready to set forth in an avalanche directly the foot touches it. And how is this proficiency obtained? How does the guide learn his profession? In different ways, but he usually begins young, tending goats on steep grassy slopes requiring balance and nerve to move about over. Later on, having decided that he wishes to be a guide, the boy, at the age of seventeen or eighteen, offers himself for examination on applying for a certificate as porter. The requirements for this first step are not great: a good character, a sound physique, a knowledge of reading and writing, and in most Alpine centres the guild of guides will grant him a license. He can now accompany any guide who will take him, on any expedition that guide considers within the porter's powers. His advancement depends on his capacity. Should he quickly adapt himself to the work, the guides will trust him more and more, taking him on difficult ascents and allowing him occasionally to share the responsibility of leading on an ascent and coming down last when descending. It will readily be seen that the leader must never slip, and must, when those who follow are moving, be able to hold them should anything go wrong with them. The same applies to the even more responsible position of last man coming down. When a porter reaches this stage, he is little inferior to a second guide. He can now enter for his final examination. If he is competent, he has no trouble in passing it, and I fear that if the contrary--as is the case in many of those who apply--he gets through easily enough. At Chamonix the guides' society is controlled by Government. The rules press hardly on the better class of guides there, or would do so if observed; but a first-class guide is practically independent of them, and mountaineers who know the ropes can avoid the regulations. At Zermatt greater liberty is allowed, and, indeed, I believe that everywhere except at Chamonix a guide is free to go with any climber who applies for him. At Chamonix the rule is that the guides are employed in turn, so that the absurd spectacle is possible of a man of real experience carrying a lady's shawl across the Mer de Glace, while a guide, who is little better than a porter, sets out to climb the Aiguille de Dru! However, the exceptions to this rule make a broad way of escape, for a lady alone, a member of an Alpine club, or a climber bent on a particularly difficult ascent, may choose a guide. The pay of a first-class guide is seldom by tariff, for the class of climber who alone would have the opportunity of securing the services of one of the extremely limited number of guides of the first order generally engages him for some weeks at a time. Indeed, such men are usually bespoken a year in advance. The pay offered and expected is 25 fr. a day, including all expeditions, or else 10 fr. a day for rest days, 50 fr. for a peak, 25 fr. for a pass, in both cases the guide to keep himself, while travelling expenses and food on expeditions are to be paid for by the employer. If a season is fine and the party energetic, the former rate of payment may be the cheaper. The second guide generally receives two-thirds as much as the first guide. When a novice is about to choose a guide, the advice of an experienced friend is invaluable, but, failing this, it is worse than useless to rely on inn-keepers, casual travellers, or the _guide-chef_ at the guides' office of the locality. From these you can obtain the names of guides whom they recommend, but before making any definite arrangements, see the men themselves and carefully examine their books of certificates. In these latter lie your security, if you read them intelligently. Bear in mind that their value consists in their being signed by competent mountaineers. For instance, you may find something like the following in a guide's book:-- A. Dumkopf took me up the Matterhorn to-day. He showed wonderful sureness of foot and steadiness of head, and I consider him a first-class guide, and have pleasure in recommending him. (Signed) A. S. SMITH. Now, this is by some one you never heard of, and a very little consideration will show you that A. S. Smith is quite ignorant of climbing, judging by his wording of the certificate. That which follows, taken from the late Christian Almer's _Führerbuch_, is the sort of thing to carry weight:-- Christian Almer has been our guide for three weeks, during which time we made the ascents of the Matterhorn (ascending by the northern and descending by the southern route), Weisshorn (from the Bies Glacier), Dent Blanche, and the Bietschhorn. Every journey that we take under Almer's guidance confirms us in the high opinion we have formed of his qualities as a guide and as a man. To the utmost daring and courage he unites prudence and foresight, seldom found in combination. (Signed) W. A. B. COOLIDGE. Visp, September 22nd, 1871. It is when things go badly that a first-class guide is so conspicuously above an inferior man. In sudden storms or fog you may, if accompanied by the former, be in security, while the latter may get his party into positions of great peril. The former will take you slowly and carefully, sounding, perhaps, at every step, over what appears to you a perfectly easy snow plateau. The latter goes across a similar place unsuspecting of harm and with the rope loose, and, lo and behold, you all find yourselves in a hidden crevasse, and are lucky if you escape with your lives. In the early days of mountaineering guides were frequently drawn from the chamois hunters of a district, a sport requiring, perhaps, rather the quickness and agility of the born climber and gymnast than the qualities of calculation and prudence needed in addition by the guide. [Illustration: A careful party descending a Rock Peak near Zermatt (the Unter Gabelhorn).] The most thoroughly unorthodox beginning to a great career of which I have ever heard was that of Joseph Imboden, of St Nicholas. When a boy his great desire, as he has often told me, was to become a guide. But his father would not consent to it, and apprenticed him to a boot-maker. During the time he toiled at manufacturing and mending shoes he contrived to save 20 fr. He then, at the age of sixteen, ran away from his employer, bought a note-book, and established himself at the Riffel Hotel above Zermatt. On every possible occasion he urged travellers to employ him as guide. "Where is your book, young man?" they invariably enquired. He showed it to them, but the pages were blank, and so no one would take him. "At last," Imboden went on, "my 20 fr. were all but spent, when I managed to persuade a young Englishman to let me take him up Monte Rosa. I told him I knew the mountain well, and I would not charge him high. So we started. I had never set foot on a glacier before or on any mountain, but there was a good track up the snow, and I followed this, and there were other parties on Monte Rosa, so I copied what the guides did, and roped my gentleman as I saw the guides doing theirs. It was a lovely day, and we got on very well, and my gentleman was much pleased, and offered me an engagement to go to Chamonix with him over high passes. "Then I said to myself: 'Lies have been very useful till now, but the time has come to speak the truth, and I will do so.' "So I said to him: 'Herr, until to-day I have never climbed a mountain, but I am strong and active, and I have lived among mountaineers and mountains, and I am sure I can satisfy you if you will take me.' "He was quite ready to do so, and we crossed the Col du Géant and went up Mont Blanc, but could do no more as the weather was bad. Then he wrote a great deal in my book, and since then I have never been in want of a gentleman to guide." Imboden's eldest son, Roman, began still younger. When only thirteen he was employed by a member of the Alpine Club, Mr G. S. Barnes, to carry his lunch on the picnics he made with his friends on the glaciers near Saas-Fée. The party eventually undertook more ambitious expeditions, and one evening, Roman, who was very small for his age, was seen entering his native village at the head of a number of climbers who had crossed the Ried Pass, the little boy proudly carrying the largest knapsack of which he could possess himself, a huge coil of rope, and an ice-axe nearly as big as himself. Thus commenced the career of an afterwards famous Alpine guide. During some fifteen seasons Imboden accompanied me on my climbs, frequently with Roman as second guide. Once the latter went with me to Dauphiné, and, though only twenty-three at the time, took me up the Meije, Ecrins, and other big peaks, his father being detained at home by reason of a bitter feud with the railway company about to run a line through his farm. It is sad to look back to the terrible ending of Roman's career at a period when he was the best young guide in the Alps. How little, in September 1895, as with the Imbodens, father and son, I stood on the summit of the Lyskamm, did any of us think that never again should we be together on a mountain, and that from the very peak on which we were Roman would be precipitated in one awful fall of hundreds of feet, his companions, Dr Guntner and the second guide Ruppen, also losing their lives. I shall never forget the evening the news reached us at Zermatt. Imboden was, as usual, my guide, but Roman was leading guide to Dr Guntner. A month or two previously this gentleman had written to Roman asking if he would climb with him. Roman showed the letter to his father, saying: "I only go with English people, so I shall refuse." "Do not reply in a hurry," was the answer; "wait and see what the Herr is like, he is coming here soon." So Roman waited, saw Dr Guntner, liked him immensely, and engaged himself, not only till the end of the season, but also for a five months' mountaineering expedition in the Himalayas. We had all arrived at Zermatt from Fée a few days before, and while we waited in the valley for good weather, Dr Guntner, Roman Imboden, and Ruppen went to the Monte Rosa Hut to get some exercise next day on one of the easier peaks in the neighbourhood. Dr Guntner much wished to try the Lyskamm. Roman was against it, as the weather and snow were bad. However, in the morning there was a slight improvement, and as Dr Guntner was still most anxious to attempt the Lyskamm and Roman was so attached to him that he wished to oblige him in every way he could, he consented to, at any rate, go and look at it. Another party followed, feeling secure in the wake of such first-rate climbers, and, though the snow was atrocious and the weather grew worse and worse, no one turned back, and the summit was not far distant. The gentleman in the second party did not feel very well, and made a long halt on the lower part of the ridge. Something seems to have aroused his suspicions--some drifting snow above, it was said, but I could never understand this part of the story--and an accident was feared. Abandoning the ascent, partly because of illness, partly on account of the weather, the party went down. At the bottom of the ridge, wishing to see if indeed something had gone wrong, they bore over towards the Italian side of the mountain. Directly the snowy plain at the base of the peak became visible, their worst fears were confirmed, for they perceived three black specks lying close together. Examining them through their glasses, it was but too certain that what they saw were the lifeless bodies of Dr Gunnter, Roman, and Ruppen. Meanwhile, unconscious of the awful tragedy being enacted that day on the mountains, I had sent Imboden down to St Nicholas to see his family, and, after dinner, was sitting writing in the little salon of the Hotel Zermatt when two people entered, remarking to each other, "What a horrible smash on the Lyskamm!" I started to my feet. Something told me it must be Roman's party. Crossing quickly over to the Monte Rosa Hotel, I found a silent crowd gathering in the street. I went into the office. "Who is it?" I asked. "Roman's party," was the answer. "How do you know?" "The other party has telephoned from the Riffel; we wait for them to arrive to hear particulars." The crowd grew larger and larger in the dark without. All waited in cruel suspense. I could not bear to think of Imboden. An hour passed. Then there was a stir among the waiting throng, and I went out among them and waited too. The other party was coming. As the little band filed through the crowd, one question only was whispered. "Is there any hope?" Sadly shaking their heads, the gentleman and his guides passed into Herr Seiler's room, and there we learned all there was to hear. I need not dwell on Imboden's grief. He will never be the same man again, though three more sons are left him; but I must put on record his first words to me when I saw him: "Ruppen has left a young wife and several children, and they are very poor. Will you get up a subscription for them, ma'am, and help them as much as possible?" [Illustration: STOPPED BY A BIG CREVASSE. The party descended a little till a better passage was found by crossing a snow-bridge (page 37).] [Illustration: THE GENTLE PERSUASION OF THE ROPE (page 39).] It was done, and for Roman a tombstone was erected, "By his English friends, as a mark of their appreciation of his sterling qualities as a man and a guide." Roman was twenty-seven at the time of the accident. Neither Imboden nor I cared to face the sad associations of the Alps after the death of Roman, and the next and following years we mountaineered in Norway instead. It will have been noticed that a climber nearly always takes two guides on an expedition. A visitor at Zermatt, or some other climbing centre, was heard to enquire: "Why do people take two guides? Is it in case they lose one?" There are several reasons why a climbing party should not number less than three. In a difficult place, if one slips, his two companions should be able to check his fall immediately, whereas if the party number but two the risk of an accident is much greater. Again, a mishap to one of a party of two is infinitely more serious than had there been three climbing together. A glance at the accompanying photograph of some mountaineers reconnoitring a big crevasse will make my point clear. A first-class guide will use the rope very differently to an inferior man, who allows it to hang about in a tangle, and to catch on every point of projecting rock. A friend of mine, a Senior Wrangler, was extremely anxious to learn how to use a rope properly. So, instead of watching the method of his guide, he purchased a handbook, and learned by heart all the maxims therein contained on the subject. Shortly after these studies of his I was descending a steep face of rock in his company. I was in advance, and had gone down as far as the length of rope between us permitted. A few steps below was a commodious ledge, so I called out: "More rope, please!" My friend hesitated, cleared his throat, and replied: "I am not sure if I ought to move just now, because, in _Badminton_, on page so-and-so, line so-and-so, the writer says----" "Will you please give the lady more rope, sir!" called out Imboden. "He says that if a climber finds himself in a position----" "Will you go on, sir, or must I come down and help you?" exclaimed Imboden from above, and, at last, reluctantly enough, my friend moved on. He is now a distinguished member of the Alpine Club, so there is, perhaps, something to be said in favour of learning mountaineering from precept rather than example! Occasionally a guide's manipulation of the rope includes something more arduous than merely being always ready to stop a slip. If his traveller is tired and the snow slopes are long and wearisome, it may happen that a guide will put the rope over his shoulder and pull his gentleman. A mountaineer of my acquaintance met a couple ascending the Breithorn in this manner. It was a hot day, and the amateur was very weary. Furthermore, he could speak no German. So he entreated his compatriot to intercede for him with the guide, who would insist on taking him up in spite of his groans of fatigue. "Why do you not return when the gentleman wishes it?" queried the stranger. "Sir," replied the guide, "he can go, he must go; he has paid me in advance!" The rope generally used by climbers is made in England, is known as Alpine Club rope, and may be recognised by the bright red thread which runs through the centre of it. A climber should have his own rope, and not trust to any of doubtful quality. Should climbers desire to make ascents in seldom explored parts of the world, such as the Caucasus, the Andes, or the Himalayas, they must take Alpine guides with them, for mountains everywhere have many characteristics in common, and as a good rider will go over a country unknown to him better than a bad horseman to whom it is familiar, so will a skilful guide find perhaps an easy way up a mountain previously unexplored, while the natives of the district declare the undertaking an impossible one. The Canadian Pacific Railway Company have recognised the truth of this, and have secured the services of Swiss guides for climbing in the Rockies. The devotion of a really trustworthy guide to his employer is a fine trait in his character. My guide, Joseph Imboden, has often told me that for years the idea that he might somehow return safe from an expedition during which his traveller was killed, was simply a nightmare to him. Directly the rope was removed his anxiety commenced, and he was just as careful to see that the climber did not slip in an easy place as he had been on the most difficult part of the ascent. It is an unbroken tradition that no St. Nicholas guide ever comes home without his employer; all return safely or all are killed. Alas! the list of killed is a long one from that little Alpine village. In the churchyard, from the most recent grave, covered by the beautiful white marble stone placed there by Roman's English friends, to those recalling accidents a score or more of years ago, there lies the dust of many brave men. But I must not dwell on the gloom of the hills; let me rather recall some of the many occasions when a guide, by his skill, quickness, or resource, has saved his own and his charges' lives. A famous Oberlander, Lauener by name, noted for his great strength, performed on one occasion a marvellous feat. He was ascending a steep ice slope, at the bottom of which was a precipice. He was alone with his "gentleman," and to this fact, usually by no means a desirable one, they both owed their lives. A big boulder seemed to be so deeply imbedded in the ice as to be actually part of the underlying rock. The traveller was just below it, the guide had cut steps alongside, and was above with, most happily, the rope taut. As he gained the level of the boulder he put his foot on it. To his horror it began to move! He took one rapid step back, and with a superhuman effort positively swung his traveller clean out of the steps and dangled him against the slope while the rock, heeling slowly outwards, broke loose from its icy fetters and plunged down the mountain side, right across the very place where the climber had been standing but an instant before. A small man, whose muscles are in perfect condition, and who knows how to turn them to account, can accomplish what would really appear to be almost impossible for any one of his size. Ulrich Almer, eldest son of the famous guide, the late Christian Almer, saved an entire party on one occasion by his own unaided efforts. They were descending the Ober Gabelhorn, a high mountain near Zermatt, and had reached a ridge where there is usually a large cornice. Now, a cornice is an overhanging eave of snow which has been formed by the wind blowing across a ridge. Sometimes cornices reach an enormous size, projecting 50 feet or more from the ridge. In climbing, presence of mind may avail much if a cornice breaks--absence of body is, however, infinitely preferable. Even first-class guides may err in deciding whether a party is or is not at an absolutely safe distance from a cornice. Though not actually on that part of the curling wave of snow which overhangs a precipice, the party may be in danger, for when a cornice breaks away it usually takes with it part of the snow beyond. [Illustration: A typical Couloir is seen streaking the peak from summit to base in the centre of the picture (page 73).] [Illustration: The Cross marks the spot where the accident happened on the cornice of the Ober Gabelhorn in 1880 (page 43).] [Illustration: THE WRONG WAY TO DESCEND.] [Illustration: Very soft Snow which, on a steep slope, would cause an Avalanche (page 60).] By some miscalculation the first people on the rope walked on to the cornice. It broke, and they dropped straight down the precipice below. But at the same moment Ulrich saw and grasped the situation, and, springing right out on the other side, was able to check them in their terrible fall. It was no easy matter for the three men, one of whom had dislocated his shoulder, to regain the ridge, although held all the time by Ulrich. Still it was at length safely accomplished. The two gentlemen were so grateful to their guide that they wished to give him an acceptable present, and after much consideration decided that they could not do better than present him with a cow! In trying to save a party which has fallen off a ridge, either by the breaking of a cornice or by a slip, I am told by first-rate guides that the proper thing to do is to jump straight out into the air on the opposite side. You thus bring a greater strain on the rope, and are more likely to check the pace at which your companions are sliding. I had a very awkward experience myself on one occasion when, owing to the softness of the snow, we started an avalanche, and the last guide, failing to spring over on the other side, we were all carried off our feet. Luckily, we were able, by thrusting our axes through into a lower and harder layer of snow, to arrest our wild career. Piz Palü, in the Engadine, was once nearly the scene of a terrible tragedy through the breaking of a cornice, the party only being saved by the quickness and strength of one of their guides. The climbers consisted of Mrs Wainwright, her brother-in-law Dr B. Wainwright and the famous Pontresina guides Hans and Christian Grass. Bad weather overtook them during their ascent, and while they were passing along the ridge the fog was so thick that Hans Grass, who was leading, got on to the cornice. He was followed by the two travellers, and then with a mighty crack the cornice split asunder and precipitated them down the icy precipice seen to the right. Last on the rope came sturdy old Christian Grass, who grasped the awful situation in an instant, and sprang back. He held, but could, of course, do no more. Now was the critical time for the three hanging against the glassy wall. Both Hans and the lady had dropped their axes. Dr Wainwright alone retained his, and to this the party owed their lives. Of course he, hanging at the top, could do nothing; but after shouting out his intentions to those below, he called on Hans to make ready to catch the axe when it should slip by him. A moment of awful suspense, and the weapon was grasped by the guide, who forthwith hewed a big step out of the ice, and, standing on it, began the toilsome work of constructing a staircase back to the ridge. At last it was done, and when the three lay panting on the snow above, it was seen that by that time one strand only of the rope had remained intact. [Illustration: The dotted line in the top right-hand corner shows the spot on Piz Palü where the Wainwright accident took place, the slope being the one the party fell down.] [Illustration: HANS AND CHRISTIAN GRASS.] The following account of a narrow escape from the result of a cornice breaking has an especially sad interest, for it was found amongst the papers of Lord Francis Douglas after his tragic death on the Matterhorn, and was addressed to the Editor of the _Alpine Journal_. The ascent described was made on 7th July 1865, and the poor young man was killed on the 14th of the same month. The Gabelhorn is a fine peak, 13,365 feet high, in the Zermatt district. Lord Francis Douglas writes:--"We arrived at the summit at 12.30. There we found that some one had been the day before, at least to a point very little below it, where they had built a cairn; but they had not gone to the actual summit, as it was a peak of snow, and there were no marks of footsteps. On this peak we sat down to dine, when, all of a sudden, I felt myself go, and the whole top fell with a crash thousands of feet below, and I with it, as far as the rope allowed (some 12 feet). Here, like a flash of lightning, Taugwald came right by me some 12 feet more; but the other guide, who had only the minute before walked a few feet from the summit to pick up something, did not go down with the mass, and thus held us both. The weight on the rope must have been about 23 stone, and it is wonderful that, falling straight down without anything to break one's fall, it did not break too. Joseph Viennin then pulled us up, and we began the descent to Zermatt." Here, again, one of the guides saved the party from certain destruction. It is in time of emergency that a really first-rate guide is so far ahead of an inferior man. In many cases when fatal results have followed unexpected bad weather or exceptionally difficult conditions of a mountain, bad guiding is to blame, while the cases when able guides have brought down themselves and their employers from very tight places indeed, are far more frequent than have ever been related. A really wonderful example of a party brought safely home after terrible exposure is related in _The Pioneers of the Alps_. The well-known guides, Andreas Maurer and Emile Rey, with an English climber, had tried to reach the summit of the Aiguille du Plan by the steep ice slopes above the Chamonix Valley. "After step-cutting all day, they reached a point when to proceed was impossible, and retreat looked hopeless. To add to their difficulties, bad weather came on, with snow and intense cold. There was nothing to be done but to remain where they were for the night, and, if they survived it, to attempt the descent of the almost precipitous ice-slopes they had with such difficulty ascended. They stood through the long hours of that bitter night, roped together, without daring to move, on a narrow ridge, hacked level with their ice-axes. I know from each member of the party that they looked upon their case as hopeless, but Maurer not only never repined, but affected rather to like the whole thing, and though his own back was frozen hard to the ice-wall against which he leaned, and in spite of driving snow and numbing cold, he opened coat, waistcoat and shirt, and through the long hours of the night he held, pressed against his bare chest, the half-frozen body of the traveller who had urged him to undertake the expedition. "The morning broke, still and clear, and at six o'clock, having thawed their stiffened limbs in the warm sun, they commenced the descent. Probably no finer feat in ice-work has ever been performed than that accomplished by Maurer and Rey on the 10th August 1880. It took them ten hours of continuous work to reach the rocks and safety, and their work was done without a scrap of food, after eighteen hours of incessant toil on the previous day, followed by a night of horrors such as few can realize." Had the bad weather continued, the party could not possibly have descended alive, "and this act of unselfish devotion would have remained unrecorded!" Perhaps the most remarkable instance of endurance took place on the Croda Grande. The party consisted of Mr Oscar Schuster and the Primiero guide, Giuseppe Zecchini. They set out on 17th March 1900, from Gosaldo at 5.10 A.M., the weather becoming unsettled as they went along. After they had been seven hours on the march a storm arose, yet, as they were within three-quarters of an hour of the top of their peak, they did not like to turn back. They duly gained the summit, the storm momentarily increasing in violence, and then they descended on the other side of the mountain till they came to an overhanging rock giving a certain amount of shelter. The guide had torn his gloves to pieces during the ascent, and his fingers were raw and sore from the difficult icy rocks he had climbed. As the cold was intense, they now began to be very painful. The weather grew worse and worse, and the two unfortunate climbers were obliged to remain in a hole scooped out of the snow, not only during the night of the 17th, but also during the whole day and night of the 18th. On the 19th, at 8 A.M., they made a start, not having tasted food for forty-eight hours. Five feet of snow had fallen, and the weather was still unsettled, but go they had to. First they tried to return as they came, but the masses of snow barred the way. They were delayed so long by the terrible state of the mountain that they had to spend another night out, and it was not till 6 P.M. on the 20th, after great danger that they reached Gosaldo. The guide, from whose account in _The Alpine Journal_ I have borrowed, lost three fingers of his right hand and one of the left from frost-bite; the traveller appears to have come off scot free. CHAPTER V THE GUIDES OF THE ALPS--(_continued_). The fathers of modern mountaineering were undoubtedly the two great Oberland guides, Melchior Anderegg and Christian Almer, who commenced their careers more than half a century ago. The former is still with us, the latter passed away some two years ago, accomplishing with ease expeditions of first-rate importance till within a season or two of his death. Melchior began his climbing experiences when filling the humble duties of boots at the Grimsel Inn. He was sent to conduct parties to the glaciers, his master taking the fee, while Melchior's share was the _pourboire_. His aptitude for mountain craft was soon remarked by the travellers whom he accompanied, and in a lucky hour for him--and indeed for all concerned--he was regularly taken into the employ of Mr Walker and his family. At that time Melchior could speak only a little German in addition to his Oberland _patois_, and was quite unaccustomed to intercourse with English people. He was most anxious, however, to say the right thing, and thought he could not do better than copy the travellers, so Mr Walker was somewhat startled on finding himself addressed as "Pa-pa," while his children were greeted respectively as "Lucy" and "Horace." The friendship between Melchior and the surviving members of Mr Walker's family has lasted ever since, and is worthy of all concerned. Melchior was born a guide, as he was born a gentleman, and no one who has had the pleasure of his acquaintance can fail to be impressed by his tact and wonderful sweetness of disposition, which have enabled him to work smoothly and satisfactorily with other guides, who might well have felt some jealousy at his career of unbroken success. Melchior's great rival and friend, Christian Almer, was of a more impetuous disposition, but none the less a man to be respected and liked for his sturdy uprightness and devotion to his employers. The romantic tale of his ascent of the Wetterhorn, which first brought him into notice, has been admirably told by Chief-Justice Wills in his "Wanderings among the High Alps." Mr Wills, as he then was, had set out from Grindelwald to attempt the ascent of the hitherto unclimbed Wetterhorn. He had with him the guides Lauener, Bohren, and Balmat. The former, a giant in strength and height, had determined to mark the ascent in a way there should be no mistaking, so, seeking out the blacksmith, he had a "Flagge," as he termed it, prepared, and with this upon his back, he joined the rest of the party. The "Flagge" was a sheet of iron, 3 feet long and 2 broad, with rings to attach it to a bar of the same metal 10 or 12 feet high, which he carried in his hand. "He pointed first to the 'Flagge,' and then, with an exulting look on high, set up a shout of triumph which made the rocks ring again." The Wetterhorn is so well seen from Grindelwald that it was natural some jealousy should arise as to who should first gain the summit. At this time Christian Almer was a chamois hunter, and his fine climbing abilities had been well trained in that difficult sport. He heard of the expedition, and took his measures accordingly. Meanwhile Mr Wills' party, having bivouacked on the mountain side, had advanced some way upwards towards their goal, and were taking a little rest. As they halted, "we were surprised," writes Mr Wills, "to behold two other figures, creeping along the dangerous ridge of rocks we had just passed. They were at some little distance from us, but we saw they were dressed in the guise of peasants." Lauener exclaimed that they must be chamois hunters, but a moment's reflection showed them that no chamois hunter would come that way, and immediately after they noticed that one of them "carried on his back a young fir-tree, branches, leaves, and all." This young man was Christian Almer, and a fitting beginning it was to a great career. "We had turned aside to take our refreshment," continues Mr Wills, "and while we were so occupied they passed us, and on our setting forth again, we saw them on the snow slopes, a good way ahead, making all the haste they could, and evidently determined to be the first at the summit." The Chamonix guides were furious, declaring that no one at Chamonix would be capable of so mean an action, and threatening an attack if they met them. The Swiss guides also began to see the enormity of the offence. "A great shouting now took place between the two parties, the result of which was that the piratical adventurers promised to wait for us on the rocks above, whither we arrived very soon after them. They turned out to be two chamois hunters, who had heard of our intended ascent, and resolved to be even with us, and plant their tree side by side with our 'Flagge.' They had started very early in the morning, had crept up the precipices above the upper glacier of Grindelwald before it was light, had seen us soon after daybreak, followed on our trail, and hunted us down. Balmat's anger was soon appeased when he found they owned the reasonableness of his desire that they should not steal from us the distinction of being the first to scale that awful peak, and instead of administering the fisticuffs he had talked about, he declared they were '_bons enfants_' after all, and presented them with a cake of chocolate; thus the pipe of peace was smoked, and tranquility reigned between the rival forces." The two parties now moved upwards together, and eventually reached the steep final slope of snow so familiar to all who have been up the Wetterhorn. They could not tell what was above it, but they hoped and thought it might be the top. [Illustration: CHRISTIAN ALMER, 1894.] At last, after cutting a passage through the cornice, which hung over the slope like the crest of a great wave about to break, Mr Wills stepped on to the ridge. His description is too thrilling to be omitted. "The instant before, I had been face to face with a blank wall of ice. One step, and the eye took in a boundless expanse of crag and glacier, peak and precipice, mountain and valley, lake and plain. The whole world seemed to lie at my feet. The next moment, I was almost appalled by the awfulness of our position. The side we had come up was steep; but it was a gentle slope compared with that which now fell away from where I stood. A few yards of glittering ice at our feet, and then nothing between us and the green slopes of Grindelwald, 9000 feet below. Balmat told me afterwards that it was the most awful and startling moment he had known in the course of his long mountain experience. We felt as in the immediate presence of Him who had reared this tremendous pinnacle, and beneath the 'majestical roof' of whose blue heaven we stood poised, as it seemed, half-way beneath the earth and sky." Another notable ascent by Almer of the Wetterhorn was made exactly thirty years later, when, with the youngest of his five sons (whom he was taking up for the first time) and an English climber he repeated as far as possible all the details of his first climb, the lad carrying a young fir-tree, as his father had done, to plant on the summit. Finally, in 1896, Almer celebrated his golden wedding on the top of the mountain he knew so well. He was accompanied by his wife, and the sturdy old couple were guided by their sons. But all guides are not the Melchiors or the Almers of their profession. Sometimes, bent on photography from the easier peaks, I have taken whoever was willing to come and carry the camera, and on one occasion had rather an amusing experience with an indifferent specimen of the Pontresina _Führerverein_. All went well at first, and our large party, mostly of friends who knew nothing of climbing, trudged along quite happily till after our first halt for food. When we started again after breakfast our first adventure occurred. We had one first-class guide with us in the person of Martin Schocker, but were obliged to make up the number required for the gang by pressing several inferior men into our service. One of these was leading the first rope-full (if such an expression may be allowed), and with that wonderful capacity for discovering crevasses where they would be avoided by more skilful men, he walked on to what looked like a firm, level piece of snow, and in a second was gone! The rope ran rapidly out as we flung ourselves into positions of security, and as we had kept our proper distances the check came on us all as on one. We remained as we were, while the second caravan advanced to our assistance. Its leading guide, held by the others, cautiously approached the hole, and seeing that our man was dangling, took measures to haul him up. This was not very easy, as the rope had cut deeply into the soft snow at the edge; but with so large a party there was no real difficulty in effecting a rescue. At last our guide appeared, very red in the face, puffing like a grampus, and minus his hat. As soon as he had regained breath he began to talk very fast indeed. It seemed that the crown of his hat was used by him for purposes similar to those served by the strong rooms and safes of the rich; for in his head-gear he was in the habit of storing family documents of value, and among others packed away there was his marriage certificate! The hat now reposed at the bottom of a profound crevasse, and his lamentations were, in consequence, both loud and prolonged. I don't know what happened when he got home, but for the rest of the day he was a perfect nuisance to us all, explaining by voice and gesture, repeated at every halt, the terrifying experience and incalculable loss he had suffered. Another unlucky result of his dive into the crevasse was its effect upon a lady member of the party, who had been induced, by much persuasion, to venture for the first time on a mountain. So startled was she by his sudden disappearance, that she jibbed determinedly at every crack in the glacier we had to cross, and, as they were many, our progress became slower and slower, and it was very late indeed before we regained the valley. Mr Clinton Dent, writing in _The Alpine Journal_, justly remarks: "Guides of the very first rank are still to be found, though they are rare; yet there are, perhaps, as many of the first rank now as there have ever been. The demand is so prodigiously great now that the second-class guide, or the young fully qualified guide who has made some little reputation for brilliancy, is often employed as leader on work which may easily overtax his powers. There is no more pressing question at the present time in connection with mountaineering, than the proper training of young guides." [Illustration: The dust of an Avalanche falling from the Matterhorn Glacier may be seen to the right.] CHAPTER VI AN AVALANCHE ON THE HAUT-DE-CRY The Haut-de-Cry is not one of the giants of the Alps. It is a peak of modest height but fine appearance, rising abruptly from the valley of the Rhone. In 1864 it had never been climbed in winter, and one of our countrymen, Mr Philip Gosset, set out in February of that year to attempt its ascent. He had with him a friend, Monsieur Boissonnet, the famous guide Bennen, and three men from a village, named Ardon, close by, who were to act as local guides or porters. The party had gained a considerable height on the mountain when it became necessary to cross a couloir or gully filled with snow. It was about 150 feet broad at the top, and 400 or 500 at the bottom. "Bennen did not seem to like the look of the snow very much," writes Mr Gosset in _The Alpine Journal_. "He asked the local guides whether avalanches ever came down this couloir, to which they answered that our position was perfectly safe. We were walking in the following order--Bevard, Nance, Bennen, myself, Boissonnet, and Rebot. Having crossed over about three-quarters of the breadth of the couloir, the two leading men suddenly sank considerably above their waists. Bennen tightened the rope. The snow was too deep to think of getting out of the hole they had made, so they advanced one or two steps, dividing the snow with their bodies. Bennen turned round and told us he was afraid of starting an avalanche; we asked whether it would not be better to return and cross the couloir higher up. To this the three Ardon men opposed themselves; they mistook the proposed precaution for fear, and the two leading men continued their work. "After three or four steps gained in the aforesaid manner, the snow became hard again. Bennen had not moved--he was evidently undecided what he should do. As soon, however, as he saw hard snow again, he advanced, and crossed parallel to, but above, the furrow the Ardon men had made. Strange to say, the snow supported him. While he was passing, I observed that the leader, Bevard, had ten or twelve feet of rope coiled round his shoulder. I of course at once told him to uncoil it, and get on to the arête, from which he was not more than fifteen feet distant. Bennen then told me to follow. I tried his steps, but sank up to my waist in the very first. So I went through the furrows, holding my elbows close to my body, so as not to touch the sides. This furrow was about twelve feet long, and as the snow was good on the other side, we had all come to the false conclusion that the snow was accidentally softer there than elsewhere. Bennen advanced; he had made but a few steps when we heard a deep, cutting sound. The snow-field split in two, about fourteen or fifteen feet above us. The cleft was at first quite narrow, not more than an inch broad. An awful silence ensued; it lasted but a few seconds, and then it was broken by Bennen's voice, 'Wir sind alle verloren.'[1] His words were slow and solemn, and those who knew him felt what they really meant when spoken by such a man as Bennen. They were his last words. I drove my alpenstock into the snow, and brought the weight of my body to bear on it. I then waited. It was an awful moment of suspense. I turned my head towards Bennen to see whether he had done the same thing. To my astonishment I saw him turn round, face the valley, and stretch out both arms. The ground on which we stood began to move slowly, and I felt the utter uselessness of any alpenstock. I soon sank up to my shoulders, and began descending backwards. From this moment I saw nothing of what had happened to the rest of the party. With a good deal of trouble I succeeded in turning round. The speed of the avalanche increased rapidly, and before long I was covered up with snow. I was suffocating, when I suddenly came to the surface again. I was on a wave of the avalanche, and saw it before me as I was carried down. It was the most awful sight I ever saw. The head of the avalanche was already at the spot where we had made our last halt. The head alone was preceded by a thick cloud of snow-dust; the rest of the avalanche was clear. Around me I heard the horrid hissing of the snow, and far before me the thundering of the foremost part of the avalanche. To prevent myself sinking again, I made use of my arms, much in the same way as when swimming in a standing position. At last I noticed that I was moving slower; then I saw the pieces of snow in front of me stop at some yards distant; then the snow straight before me stopped, and I heard on a large scale the same creaking sound that is produced when a heavy cart passes over frozen snow in winter. I felt that I also had stopped, and instantly threw up both arms to protect my head, in case I should again be covered up. I had stopped, but the snow behind me was still in motion; its pressure on my body was so strong that I thought I should be crushed to death. This tremendous pressure lasted but a short time; I was covered up by snow coming from behind me. My first impulse was to try and uncover my head--but this I could not do, the avalanche had frozen by pressure the moment it stopped, and I was frozen in. Whilst trying vainly to move my arms, I suddenly became aware that the hands as far as the wrist had the faculty of motion. The conclusion was easy, they must be above the snow. I set to work as well as I could; it was time for I could not have held out much longer. At last I saw a faint glimmer of light. The crust above my head was getting thinner, but I could not reach it any more with my hands; the idea struck me that I might pierce it with my breath. After several efforts I succeeded in doing so, and felt suddenly a rush of air towards my mouth, I saw the sky again through a little round hole. A dead silence reigned around me; I was so surprised to be still alive, and so persuaded at the first moment that none of my fellow-sufferers had survived, that I did not even think of shouting for them. I then made vain efforts to extricate my arms, but found it impossible; the most I could do was to join the ends of my fingers, but they could not reach the snow any longer. After a few minutes I heard a man shouting; what a relief it was to know that I was not the sole survivor!--to know that perhaps he was not frozen in and could come to my assistance! I answered; the voice approached, but seemed uncertain where to go, and yet it was now quite near. A sudden exclamation of surprise! Rebot had seen my hands. He cleared my head in an instant, and was about to try and cut me out completely, when I saw a foot above the snow, and so near to me that I could touch it with my arms, although they were not quite free yet. I at once tried to move the foot; it was my poor friend's. A pang of agony shot through me as I saw that the foot did not move. Poor Boissonnet had lost sensation, and was perhaps already dead. "Rebot did his best. After some time he wished me to help him, so he freed my arms a little more, so that I could make use of them. I could do but little, for Rebot had torn the axe from my shoulder as soon as he had cleared my head (I generally carry an axe separate from my alpenstock--the blade tied to the belt, and the handle attached to the left shoulder). Before coming to me Rebot had helped Nance out of the snow; he was lying nearly horizontally, and was not much covered over. Nance found Bevard, who was upright in the snow, but covered up to the head. After about twenty minutes, the two last-named guides came up. I was at length taken out; the snow had to be cut with the axe down to my feet before I could be pulled out. A few minutes after 1 P.M. we came to my poor friend's face.... I wished the body to be taken out completely, but nothing could induce the three guides to work any longer, from the moment they saw it was too late to save him. I acknowledge that they were nearly as incapable of doing anything as I was. When I was taken out of the snow the cord had to be cut. We tried the end going towards Bennen, but could not move it; it went nearly straight down, and showed us that there was the grave of the bravest guide the Valais ever had or ever will have." Thus ends one of the most magnificent descriptions of an avalanche which has ever been written. The cause of the accident was a mistaken opinion as to the state of winter snow, which is very different to the snow met with in summer, and of which at that time the best guides had no experience. A RACE FOR LIFE Once upon a time, in the year 1872, a certain famous mountaineer, Mr F. F. Tuckett, had with his party a desperate race for life. The climbers numbered five in all, three travellers and two guides, and had started from the Wengern Alp to ascend the Eiger. Nowadays there is a railway to the Wengern Alp, and so thousands of English people are familiar with the appearance of the magnificent group of mountains--the Eiger, the Mönch, and the Jungfrau--which they have before them as they pass along in the train. Suffice it here to say that the way up the Eiger lies over a glacier, partly fed by another high above it, from which, through a narrow, rocky gully, great masses of ice now and again come dashing down. Unless the fall is a very big one, climbers skirting along the edge of this glacier are safe enough, but on the only occasion I have been up the Eiger, I did not fancy this part of the journey. [Illustration: Eiger. Mönch. FROM THE LAUBERHORN. The Cross marks the Scene of "A Race for Life." The dotted line shows the steep Ice-Wall of the Eigerjoch (page 208).] To return to Mr Tuckett and his friends. They were advancing up the snowy valley below the funnel-shaped opening through which an avalanche occasionally falls. The guide, Ulrich Lauener, was leading, and, remarks Mr Tuckett, "He is a little hard of hearing; and although his sight, which had become very feeble in 1870, is greatly improved, both ear and eye were perhaps less quick to detect any unexpected sound or movement than might otherwise have been the case. Be this as it may, when all of a sudden I heard a sort of crack somewhere up aloft, I believe that, for an instant or two, his was the only head not turned upwards in the direction from which it seemed to proceed, viz., the hanging ice-cliff; but the next moment, when a huge mass of sérac broke away, mingled apparently with a still larger contingent of snow from the slopes above, whose descent may, indeed, have caused, or at least hastened, the disruption of the glacier, every eye was on the look-out, though as yet there was no indication on the part of any one, nor I believe any thought for one or two seconds more, that we were going to be treated to anything beyond a tolerably near view of such an avalanche as it rarely falls to anyone's lot to see. Down came the mighty cataract, filling the couloir to its brim; but it was not until it had traversed a distance of 600 to 800 feet, and on suddenly dashing in a cloud of frozen spray over one of the principal rocky ridges with which, as I have said, the continuity of the snow-slope was broken, appeared as if by magic to triple its width, that the idea of danger to ourselves flashed upon me. I now perceived that its volume was enormously greater than I had at first imagined, and that, with the tremendous momentum it had by this time acquired, it might, instead of descending on the right between us and the rocks of the Klein Eiger, dash completely across the base of the Eiger itself in front of us, attain the foot of the Rothstock ridge, and then, trending round, sweep the whole surface of the glacier, ourselves included, with the besom of destruction. "I instinctively bolted for the rocks of the Rothstock--if haply it might not be too late--yelling rather than shouting to the others, 'Run for your lives!' "Ulrich was the last to take the alarm, though the nearest to the danger, and was thus eight or ten paces behind the rest of us, though he, too, shouted to Whitwell to run for his life directly he became aware of the situation. But by this time we were all straining desperately through the deep, soft snow for dear life, yet with faces turned upwards to watch the swift on-coming of the foe. I remember being struck with the idea that it seemed as though, sure of its prey, it wished to play with us for a while, at one moment letting us imagine that we had gained upon it, and were getting beyond the line of its fire, and the next, with mere wantonness of vindictive power, suddenly rolling out on its right a vast volume of grinding blocks and whirling snow, as though to show that it could out-flank us at any moment it chose. "Nearer and nearer it came, its front like a mighty wave about to break, yet that still 'on the curl hangs poising'; now it has traversed the whole width of the glacier above us, taking a somewhat diagonal direction; and now run, oh, run! if ever you did, for here it comes straight at us, still outflanking us, swift, deadly, and implacable! The next instant we saw no more; a wild confusion of whirling snow and fragments of ice--a frozen cloud--swept over us, entirely concealing us from one another, and still we were untouched--at least I knew that I was--and still we ran. Another half second and the mist had passed, and there lay the body of the monster, whose head was still careering away at lightning speed far below us, motionless, rigid, and harmless. It will naturally be supposed that the race was one which had not admitted of being accurately timed by the performers; but I believe that I am speaking with precision when I say that I do not think the whole thing occupied from first to last more than five or six seconds. How narrow our escape was may be inferred from the fact that the spot where I halted for a moment to look back after it had passed, was found to be just twelve yards from its edge, and I don't think that in all we had had time to put more than thirty yards between us and the point where our wild rush for the rocks first began. Ulrich's momentary lagging all but cost him his life; for in spite of his giant stride and desperate exertions he only just contrived to fling himself forwards as the edge of the frozen torrent dashed past him. This may sound like exaggeration, but he assured me that he felt some fragments strike his legs; and it will perhaps appear less improbable when it is considered that he was certainly several yards in the rear, and when the avalanche came to a standstill, its edge, intersecting and concealing our tracks along a sharply defined line, rose rigid and perpendicular, like a wall of cyclopean masonry, as the old Bible pictures represent the waters of the Red Sea, standing 'upright as an heap' to let the Israelites through. "The avalanche itself consisted of a mixture, in tolerably equal proportions, of blocks of sérac of all shapes and sizes, up to irregular cubes of four or five feet on a size, and snow thoroughly saturated with water--the most dangerous of all descriptions to encounter, as its weight is enormous. We found that it covered the valley for a length of about 3300 feet, and a maximum breadth of 1500, tailing off above and below to 500 or 1000 feet. Had our position on the slope been a few hundred feet higher or lower, or in other words, had we been five minutes earlier or later, we must have been caught beyond all chance of escape." * * * * * There was no rashness which can be blamed in the party finding themselves in the position described. Avalanches, when they fall down the gully, hardly ever come so far as the one met with on this occasion, and they very seldom fall at all in the early morning. The famous guide, Christian Almer, while engaged on another expedition, visited the spot after the avalanche had fallen, and said that it was the mightiest he had ever seen in his life. Mr Tuckett roughly estimated its total weight as about 450,000 tons. FOOTNOTE: [1] "We are all lost." CHAPTER VII CAUGHT IN AN AVALANCHE ON THE MATTERHORN The following exciting account is taken from an article by Herr Lorria, which appeared in _The St Moritz Post_ for 28th January 1888. The injuries received were so terrible that, I believe, Herr Lorria never entirely ceased to feel their effects. The party consisted of two Austrian gentlemen, Herren Lammer and Lorria, without guides, who, in 1887, had made Zermatt their headquarters for some climbs. They had difficulty in deciding which ascent to begin with, especially as the weather had recently been bad, and the peaks were not in first-class condition. Herr Lorria writes: "I fancied the Pointe de Zinal as the object of our tour; but Lammer, who had never been on the Matterhorn, wished to climb this mountain by the western flank--a route which had only once before been attacked, namely by Mr Penhall. We had with us the drawing of Penhall's route, published in _The Alpine Journal_. "After skirting a jutting cliff, we reached the couloir at its narrowest point. It was clear that we had followed the route laid down in _The Alpine Journal_; and although Mr Penhall says that the rocks here are very easy, I cannot at all agree with him. "We could not simply cross over the couloir, for, on the opposite side, the rocks looked horrible: it was only possible to cross it some forty or fifty mètres higher. We climbed down into the couloir: the ice was furrowed by avalanches. We were obliged to cut steps as we mounted upwards in a sloping direction. In a quarter of an hour we were on the other side of the couloir. The impression which the couloir made upon me is best shown by the words which I at the moment addressed to Lammer: 'We are now completely cut off.' We saw clearly that it was only the early hour, before the sun was yet upon the couloir, which protected us from danger. Once more upon the rocks, we kept our course as much as possible parallel to the N.W. arête. We clambered along, first over rocks covered with ice, then over glassy ledges, always sloping downwards. Our progress was slow indeed; the formation of the rock surface was ever becoming more unfavourable, and the covering of ice was a fearful hindrance. "Such difficult rocks I had rarely seen before; the wrinkled ledges of the Dent Blanche were easy compared to them. At 1 P.M., we were standing on a level with the "Grand Tower"; the summit lay close before us, but as far as we could see, the rocks were completely coated with a treacherous layer of ice. Immediately before us was a precipitous ice couloir. All attempts to advance were fruitless, even our crampons were of no avail. Driven back! If this, in all cases, is a heavy blow for the mountain climber, we had here, in addition, the danger which we knew so well, and which was every moment increasing. It was one o'clock in the afternoon; the rays of the sun already struck the western wall of the mountain; stone after stone, loosened from its icy fetters, whistled past us. Back! As fast as possible back! Lammer pulled off his shoes and I stuffed them into the knapsack, holding also our two ice-axes. As I clambered down the first I was often obliged to trust to the rope. The ledges, which had given us trouble in the ascent, were now fearfully difficult. Across a short ice slope, in which we had cut steps in the ascent, Lammer was obliged, as time pressed, to get along without his shoes. The difficulties increased; every moment the danger became greater; and already whole avalanches of stones rattled down. The situation was indeed critical. At last, after immense difficulty, we reached the edge of the couloir at the place we had left it in the ascent. But we could find no spot protected from the stones; they literally came down upon us like hail. Which was the more serious danger, the threatening avalanches in the couloir or the pelting of the stones which swept down from every side? On the far side of the couloir there was safety, as all the stones must in the end reach the couloir, which divides the whole face of the mountain into two parts. It was now five o'clock in the afternoon; the burning rays of the sun came down upon us, and countless stones whirled through the air. We remembered the saying of Dr Güssfeldt, in his magnificent description of the passage of the Col du Lion, that only at midnight is tranquility restored. We resolved, then, to risk the short stretch across the couloir. Lammer pulled on his shoes; I was the first to leave the rocks. The snow which covered the ice was suspiciously soft, but we had no need to cut steps. In the avalanche track before us on the right a mighty avalanche is thundering down; stones leap into the couloir, and give rise to new avalanches. "Suddenly my consciousness is extinguished, and I do not recover it till twenty-one days later. I can, therefore, only tell what Lammer saw. Gently from above an avalanche of snow came sliding down upon us; it carried Lammer away in spite of his efforts, and it projected me with my head against a rock. Lammer was blinded by the powdery snow, and thought that his last hour was come. The thunder of the roaring avalanche was fearful; we were dashed over rocks, laid bare in the avalanche track, and leaped over two immense bergschrunds. At every change of the slope we flew into the air, and then were plunged again into the snow, and often dashed against one another. For a long time it seemed to Lammer as if all were over, countless thoughts went thronging through his brain, until at last the avalanche had expended its force, and we were left lying on the Tiefenmatten Glacier. Our fall was estimated at from 550 to 800 English feet. "I lay unconscious, quite buried in the snow; the rope had gone twice round my neck and bound it fast. Lammer, who quickly recovered consciousness, pulled me out of the snow, cut the rope, and gave me a good shake. I then awoke, but being delirious, I resisted with all my might my friend's endeavours to pull me out of the track of the avalanche. However, he succeeded in getting me on to a stone (I was, of course, unable to walk), and gave me his coat; and having thus done all that was possible for me, he began to creep downwards on hands and knees. He could not stand, having a badly sprained ankle; except for that he escaped with merely a few bruises and scratches. At length Lammer arrived at the Stockje hut, but to his intense disappointment there was nobody there. He did not pause to give vent to his annoyance, however, but continued his way down. Twice he felt nearly unable to proceed, and would have abandoned himself to his fate had not the thought of me kept him up and urged him on. At three o'clock in the morning he reached the Staffel Alp, but none of the people there were willing to venture on the glacier. He now gave up all hope that I could be saved, though he nevertheless sent a messenger to Herr Seiler, who reached Zermatt at about 4.15 A.M. "In half an hour's time a relief party set out from Zermatt. When the party reached the Staffel Alp, Lammer was unconscious, but most fortunately he had written on a piece of paper the information that I was lying at the foot of Penhall's couloir. They found me about half-past eight o'clock. I had taken off all my clothes in my delirium, and had slipped off the rock on which Lammer had left me. One of my feet was broken and both were frozen into the snow, and had to be cut out with an axe. "At 8 P.M. I was brought back to Zermatt, and for twenty days I lay unconscious at the Monte Rosa Hotel hovering between life and death." Herr Lorria pays a warm tribute to the kindness of Seiler and his wife, and the skill of Dr de Courten, who saved his limbs when other doctors wished to amputate them. He ends his graphic account as follows: "The lesson to be learnt from our accident is not 'Always take guides,' but rather 'Never try the Penhall route on the Matterhorn, except after a long series of fine, hot days, for otherwise the western wall of the mountain is the most fearful mouse-trap in the Alps.'" THE ICE AVALANCHE OF THE ALTELS. Those who climbed in the Alps during the summer of 1895 will recollect how wonderfully dry and warm the weather was, denuding the mountains of snow and causing a number of rock-falls, so that many ascents became very dangerous, and, in my own case, after one or two risky encounters with falling stones, we decided to let the rock peaks alone for the rest of that campaign. [Illustration: In the centre of the picture may be seen an Avalanche, which a non-climber might mistake for a Waterfall, dropping down the Rocks of the Wetterhorn.] In _The Alpine Journal_ of August 1897, Mr Charles Slater gives an admirable description of a great ice-avalanche which overwhelmed one of the fertile pastures near the well-known Gemmi route. From this account I make some extracts, which will give an idea of the magnitude of the disaster and its unusual character, as the ice from a falling glacier rarely ever approaches cultivated land and dwellings. The scene of the catastrophe was at Spitalmatten, a pasturage with châlets used in summer by the shepherds, in a basin at the beginning of the valley which extends to the pass. Steep slopes bound it on the east, and above them rises the glacier-capped peak of the Altels. The glacier was well seen from the Gemmi path, and all tourists who passed that way must have noticed and admired it. It is believed that a big crevasse, running right across the glacier, was noticed during the month of August, and the lower part of the glacier seemed to be completely cut off from the upper portion by it. On the evening of 10th September, the Vice-President of the commune of Leuk (to which commune the Alp belonged) arrived at the châlets to settle the accounts of the past summer. Several of the women had already gone down, taking some of the calves with them, and the rest of the inhabitants of the little settlement were to follow next day. The weather was warm but cloudy, with a strong _föhn_ wind.[2] On the morning of 11th September, about 5 A.M., the few people who lived at or near the Schwarenbach Inn heard a roar like an earthquake, and felt a violent blast of wind. A servant, rushing out of the inn, saw "what appeared to be a white mist streaming down the Altel's slope. The huge mass of ice forming the lower end of the glacier had broken away, rushed down the mountain side, leapt from the Tateleu plateau into the valley, and, like an immense wave, had swept over the Alp, up the Uschinen Grat, as if up a 1500 sea-wall, and even sent its ice-foam over this into the distant Uschinen Thal." The only other eye-witness of this appalling catastrophe was a traveller who was walking up the Kanderthal from Frutigen in the early morning. "He saw in the Gemmi direction a fearful whirlwind, with dust and snow-clouds, and experienced later a cold rain falling from a clear sky, the rain being probably due to the melting of the ice-cloud." The scene after the disaster must have been a terrible one. "Winter had apparently come in the midst of summer"; the whole pasture was covered with masses of ice. "The body of the Vice-President was found lying 180 yards away from the hut. Another body had been flung into the branches of an uprooted tree, while a third was found still holding a stocking in one hand, having been killed in the act of dressing." There was no chance of escape for the people, as only a minute or little more elapsed from the time the avalanche started till it reached the settlement. The cows were nearly all killed, "they seem to have been blown like leaves before a storm to enormous distances." A year later, much of the avalanche was still unmelted. The thickness of the slice of glacier which broke away is believed to have been about 25 feet, and it fell through a vertical height of 4700 feet. It moved at about the average rate of two miles a minute. "It is difficult to realise these vast figures, and a few comparisons have been suggested which may help to give some idea of the forces which were called into play. The material which fell would have sufficed to bury the City of London to the depth of six feet, and Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens would have disappeared beneath a layer six-and-a-half feet deep. The enormous energy of the moving mass may be dimly pictured when we think that a weight of ice and stones ten times greater than the tonnage of the whole of England's battle-ships plunged on to the Alp at a speed of nearly 300 miles an hour." An almost exactly similar accident had occurred in 1782. AN AVALANCHE WHICH ROBBED A LADY OF A GARMENT One of the greatest advantages in mountaineering as a sport is the amount of enjoyment it gives even when climbing-days are past. While actually engaged in the ascent of difficult peaks our minds are apt to be entirely engrossed with the problem of getting up and down them, but afterwards we delight in recalling every interesting passage, every glorious view, every successful climb; and perhaps this gives us even more pleasure than the experiences themselves. If we happen to have combined photography with mountaineering we are particularly to be envied, for an hour in the company of one of our old albums will recall with wonderful vividness many an incident which we should have otherwise forgotten. Turning over some prints which long have lain on one side, a wave of recollection brings before me some especially happy days on snowy peaks, and makes me long to bring a breath of Alpine air to the cities, where for so much of the year dwell many of my brother and sister climbers. With the help of the accompanying photographs, which will serve to generally illustrate my remarks, let me relate what befell me during an ascent of the Schallihorn--a peak some twelve thousand and odd feet high, in the neighbourhood of Zermatt. Now, although Zermatt is a very familiar playground for mountaineers, yet even as late as ten years ago one or two virgin peaks and a fair number of new and undesirable routes up others were still to be found. I had had my share of success on the former, and was at the time of which I write looking about for an interesting and moderately safe way, hitherto untrodden, up one of the lesser-known mountains in the district. My guide and my friend of many years, Joseph Imboden, racked his brains for a suitable novelty, and at length suggested that as no one had hitherto attacked the south-east face of the Schallihorn we might as well see if it could be ascended. He added that he was not at all sure if it was possible--a remark I have known him to make on more than one peak in far away Arctic Norway, when the obvious facility of an ascent had robbed it of half its interest. However, in those days I still rose satisfactorily to observations of that sort, and was at once all eagerness to set out. We were fortunate in securing as our second guide Imboden's brilliant son Roman, who happened to be disengaged just then. A further and little dreamed-of honour was in store for us, as on our endeavouring to hire a porter to take our things to the bivouac from the tiny village of Taesch no less a person than the mayor volunteered to accompany us in that capacity. [Illustration: MR WHYMPER. ZERMATT, 1896.] [Illustration: MRS AUBREY LE BLOND ON A MOUNTAIN TOP. _Photographed by her Guide, Joseph Imboden_] [Illustration: A HOT DAY IN MID-WINTER ON THE SUMMIT OF A PEAK 13,000 FEET HIGH.] So we started upwards one hot afternoon, bound for some overhanging rocks, which, we were assured by those who had never visited the spot, we should find. For the regulation routes up the chief peaks the climber can generally count on a hut, where, packed in close proximity to his neighbours, he lies awake till it is time to get up, and sets forth on his ascent benefited only in imagination by his night's repose. Within certain limits the less a man is catered for the more comfortable he is, and the more he has to count on himself the better are the arrangements for his comfort. Thus I have found a well-planned bivouac under a great rock infinitely preferable to a night in a hut, and a summer's campaign in tents amongst unexplored mountains more really luxurious than a season in an over-thronged Alpine hotel. Two or three hours' walking took us far above the trees and into the region of short grass and stony slopes. Eventually we reached a hollow at the very foot of our mountain, and here we began to look about for suitable shelter and a flat surface on which to lay the sleeping-bags. The pictured rocks of inviting appearance were nowhere to be found, and what there were offered very inferior accommodation. But the weather was perfect, and we had an ample supply of wraps, so we contented ourselves with what protection was given by a steep, rocky wall, and turned our attention to the Schallihorn. The proposed route could be well seen. Imboden traced out the way he intended taking for a long distance up the mighty precipice in front of us. There were tracks of avalanches at more than one spot, and signs of falling stones were not infrequent. My guide thought he could avoid all danger by persistently keeping to the projecting ridges, and his idea was to descend by whatever way we went up, as the ordinary route is merely a long, uninteresting grind. We now lit a fire, made soup and coffee, and soon after got into our sleeping-bags. The night passed peacefully, save for the rumble of an occasional avalanche, when great masses of ice broke loose on the glacier hard by. Before dawn we were stirring, and by the weird light of a huge fire were making our preparations for departure. It gradually grew light as our little party moved in single file towards the rocky ramparts which threatened to bar the way to the upper world. As we ascended a stony slope, Imboden remarked, "Why, ma'am, you still have on that long skirt! Let us leave it here; we can pick it up on our return." Now, in order not to be conspicuous when starting for a climbing expedition, I always wore an ordinary walking-skirt over my mountaineering costume. It was of the lightest possible material, so that, if returning by a different route, it could be rolled up and carried in a knapsack. I generally started from the bivouac without it; but the presence on this occasion of the Mayor of Täsch had quite overawed me; hence the unusual elegance of my get-up. Lest I be thought to dwell at undue length on so trifling a matter, I may add that the skirt had adventures that day of so remarkable a nature that the disappearance of Elijah in his chariot can alone be compared to them. The skirt was now duly removed, rolled up and placed under a heavy stone, which we marked with a small cairn, so as to find it the more easily on our return. Shortly after, the real climb began, and, putting on the rope, we commenced the varied series of gymnastics which make life worth living to the mountaineer. We had several particularly unpleasant gullies to cross, up which Imboden glanced hastily and suspiciously, and hurried us over, fearing the fall of stones. At length we came for a little time to easier ground, and as the day was now intensely hot the men took off their waistcoats, leaving them and their watches in a hole in the rock. Above this gentler slope the mountain steepened again, and a ridge in the centre, running directly upwards, alone gave a possible route to the summit. This ridge, at first broad and simple, before long narrowed to a knife-edge. There was always enough to hold; but the rocks were so loose and rotten that we hardly dared to touch them. Spread out over those treacherous rocks, adhering by every finger in our endeavour to distribute our weight, we slowly wormed ourselves upwards. Such situations are always trying. The most brilliant cragsman finds his skill of little avail. Unceasing care and patience alone can help him here. Throwing down the most insecure of the blocks, which fell sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other of the ridge, we gradually advanced. The conversation ran rather in a groove: "Not that one, ma'am, or the big fellow on the top will come down!" "Don't touch the red one or the little white one!" "Now come up to where I am without stepping on any of them!" "Roman! look out! I'm letting this one go!" Then bang! bang! bang! and a disgusting smell as of gunpowder, while a great boulder dashed in leaps towards the glacier below, grinding and smashing itself to atoms before it reached the bottom. [Illustration: JOSEPH IMBODEN. MRS AUBREY LE BLOND. ZERMATT, SEPTEMBER, 1896.] [Illustration: CROSSING A SNOW COULOIR (page 73).] Thus with untiring thoroughness Imboden led his little band higher and higher, till at last the summit came in sight and our muscles and overstrained nerves saw rest ahead. I readily agreed to Imboden's decision that we should go down the ordinary way. After descending for a considerable distance we stopped, and the guides held a short consultation. It seemed that Roman was anxious to try and fetch the waistcoats and watches and my skirt, and his father did not object. Wishing him the best of good-luck, we parted by the rocks and trudged on over the snow towards Zermatt. We moved leisurely, as people who climb for pleasure, with no thought of record-breaking; and as it was late in September it was dusk as we neared the village. Later in the evening I saw Imboden, and asked for news of Roman. He had not arrived, and as time passed we grew uneasy, knowing the speed at which, if alone, he would descend. By 10 P.M. we were really anxious, and great was our relief when a figure with knapsack and ice-axe came swinging up the narrow, cobbled street. It was an exciting tale he had to tell, though it took a good deal of danger to impress Roman with the notion that there was any at all. Soon after leaving us he came to the first gully. Just as he was about to step into it he heard a rumble. Springing back, he squeezed himself under an overhanging piece of rock, while a huge mass of stones and snow dashed down the mountain, some of the fragments passing right over him--though, thanks to his position, none actually touched him. When tranquility was restored he dashed across to the other side, and immediately after a fresh fall commenced, which lasted for a considerable time. At length he approached without injury the spot he was looking for, far down on the lower slopes, where my skirt had been left, and here he felt that all danger was past. But the extraordinarily dry season had thrown out most people's calculations, and at that very moment he was really in the direst peril. As he ran gaily down the slope of earth and stones a tremendous crash brought him to a standstill, and looking back he saw the smoke of a mighty avalanche of ice coming in a huge wave over the cliffs above. He rushed for shelter, which was near at hand, and from beneath the protection of a great rock he saw the avalanche come on and on with the roar of artillery, and he gazed, fascinated, as it swept majestically past his place of refuge. He could see the mound where lay my skirt with its heap of stones. And now a striking sight met his eyes, for before ever the seething mass could touch it the whole heap rose from the ground and was carried far out of the path of the avalanche, borne along by the violence of the wind which preceded it. The late John Addington Symonds has related in one of his charming accounts of winter in the Alps that an old woman, sitting peaceably before her châlet door in the sun, was transported by the wind of an avalanche to the top of a lofty pine-tree, where, quite uninjured, she calmly awaited assistance; but that my skirt should have such an adventure brought very strongly home to me the dangers Roman had passed through that afternoon and the escape we had had ourselves. FOOTNOTE: [2] The exact origin of the _föhn_ wind is still disputed. It is thought to have no connection with the sirocco, a wind which in Europe blows always from the south, bears with it sometimes particles of sand, and is impregnated with damp from its passage over the Mediterranean. The _föhn_ blows from any quarter (though usually from the south), and is a dry, warm wind, which causes the snow to melt rapidly. In German Switzerland it is called the _Schneefresser_, or Snow Devourer, and it has been said that if no _föhn_ visited the Alps, Switzerland would still be in the glacial period. CHAPTER VIII LOST IN THE ICE FOR FORTY YEARS It was in 1786 that the summit of Mont Blanc was reached for the first time. It had been attained on only eleven occasions, and no accidents had happened on it when, in 1820, the catastrophe since known as the Hamel accident, took place. Dr Joseph Hamel was a Russian savant, and Counsellor of State to the Czar. He much desired to ascend Mont Blanc in order that he might make scientific experiments on the top, and in August 1820, he came to Chamonix for the purpose. It is of no use, and of little interest to general readers, if I enter into particulars of the controversy which this expedition excited. Some declared that Dr Hamel urged his guides to proceed against their better judgment. Others say that the whole party--which included two Englishmen and nine guides--were anxious to continue the ascent, and, indeed, saw no reason for doing otherwise. Certain it is, however that in those days no one was a judge of the condition of snow, and able to tell from its consistency if an avalanche were likely or not. [Illustration: MONT BLANC. The black line shows the probable course the bodies took during their 40 years' descent in the ice. _By a local Photographer._] [Illustration: Nicolas Winhart, escaping on this occasion with his life, afterwards perished on the Col des Grands Montets in 1875 (page 99). _By a local Photographer._] [Illustration: A Banker at Geneva, who was a most active searcher for Henry Arkwright's body. He was killed in a duel in 1869. It is interesting to compare the old-fashioned costume with that of the present day climber. _By a local Photographer._] [Illustration: THE RELICS. The rope was found round the body but worn through in two places by the hip bones. The handkerchief, shirt front with studs, prune stones, watch chain, pencil case, cartridge, spike of alpenstock, coins, glove tied with spare bootlace, etc., all belonged to Henry Arkwright.] The party, which at first numbered fourteen, duly reached the rocks of the Grands Mulets, where it was usual to spend the night. The sky clouded over towards evening, and there was a heavy thunderstorm during the night. Next morning the weather was too unsettled for the ascent to be tried, so a couple of guides were sent down to Chamonix for more provisions, and a second night was spent in camp. Early next morning, in beautiful weather, a start was made, one of the members of the party, Monsieur Selligne, who felt ill, and two guides leaving the others and going down to Chamonix. The rest safely reached the Grand Plateau. The snow, hardened by the night's frost, had thus far supported the weight of the climbers and made their task easy. It was, however, far from consolidated beneath the crust, as the warm wind of the previous days had made it thoroughly rotten. All were in excellent spirits during the halt for breakfast on the Grand Plateau, that snowy valley which is spread out below the steeper slopes of the final mass of the mountain. Dr Hamel employed part of his time in writing a couple of notes announcing his arrival on the top of Mont Blanc leaving a blank on each to insert the hour. These notes he intended to despatch by carrier pigeon, the bird being with them, imprisoned in a large kettle. At 10.30 they reached the foot of what is now known as the Ancien Passage. This is a steep snow-slope leading almost directly to the top of Mont Blanc. When the snow is sound, and the ice above does not overhang much, this route is as safe as any other; but a steep slope covered with a layer of rotten snow is always most dangerous. At that time, the Ancien Passage was the only way ever taken up Mont Blanc. They had ascended a considerable distance, the snow being softer and softer as they rose, and they formed a long line one behind the other, not mounting straight up, but making their way rather across the slope. Six guides walked at the head of the troop, and then, after an interval, the two Englishmen and two more guides, Dr Hamel being last. All seemed to be going excellently. Everyone plodded along, and rejoiced to be so near the culminating point of the expedition. No thought of danger disturbed them. Suddenly there was a dull, harsh sound. Immediately the entire surface of the snow began to move. "My God! The avalanche! We are lost!" shrieked the guides. The slope at Dr Hamel's end of the party was not steep,--barely more than 30°--but up above it was more rapid. The leading guides were carried straightway off their feet. Hamel was also swept away by the gathering mass of snow. Using his arms as if swimming, he managed to bring his head to the surface, and as he did so the moving snow slowed down and stopped. In those few moments, some 1200 feet had been descended. At first Dr Hamel thought that he alone had been carried away, but presently he saw his English friends and their guides--no more. "Where are the others?" cried Dr Hamel. Balmat, who a moment before had let his brother pass on to the head of the party, wrung his hands and answered, "The others are in the crevasse!" The crevasse! Strange that all had forgotten it! The avalanche had poured into it, filling it to the brim. "A terrible panic set in. The guides lost all self-control. Some walked about aimlessly, uttering loud cries. Matthieu Balmat sat in sullen silence, rejecting all kind offices with an irritation which made it painful to approach him. Dornford threw himself on the snow in despair, and Henderson, says Hamel, 'was in a condition which made one fear for the consequences.' A few minutes later two other guides extricated themselves, but the remaining three were seen no more. Hamel and Henderson descended into the crevasse, and made every possible attempt to find the lost guides, but without avail; the surviving guides forced them to come out, and sore at heart they returned to Chamonix. "The three guides who were lost were Pierre Carrier, Pierre Balmat, and Auguste Tairraz. They were the three foremost in the line and felt the first effects of the avalanche. Matthieu Balmat, who was fourth in the line, saved himself by his great personal strength and by presence of mind. Julien Dévouassoud was hurled across the crevasse, and Joseph Marie Couttet was dragged out senseless by his companions, 'nearly black from the weight of snow which had fallen upon him.'"[3] Scientific men had already begun to give attention to the movement of glaciers. In addition to this, cases had occurred where the remains of persons lost on glaciers had been recovered years afterwards. A travelling seller of hats, crossing the Tschingel Glacier on his way from the Bernese Oberland to Valais, had fallen into a crevasse. Eventually his body and his stock of merchandise was found at the end of the glacier. Near the Grimsel, the remains of a child were discovered in the ice. An old man remembered that many years before a little boy had disappeared in that locality and must doubtless have been lost in a crevasse. These facts were probably known to Dr Hamel, and he made the remark that perhaps in a thousand years, the bodies of his guides might be found. Forbes, who knew more of the subject, believed that, travelling in the ice, they would reach the end of the glacier in forty years. He was right, for on 15th August 1861, his "bold prediction was verified, and the ice give up its dead." On that day, the guide, Ambrose Simond, who happened to be with some tourists on the lower part of the Glacier des Bossons, discovered some pieces of clothing and human bones. From that time until 1864 the glacier did not cease to render up, piece by piece, the remains and the belongings of the three victims. An accident, very similar to that which befell Dr Hamel's party, took place in 1866. This has for me a very special interest, as I have met the brother of the Englishman who perished, and have examined all the documents, letters, newspaper cuttings, and photographs relating to the catastrophe. The guide, Sylvain Couttet, an old friend of mine, since dead, has given a moving account of the sad event. Sylvain knew Mont Blanc better than any other native of Chamonix, and though when I knew him he had given up guiding, he desired to add one more ascent of the great white peak to his record, for at that time he had been up ninety-nine times. I accordingly invited him to come with my party when we climbed it from the Italian side. He did so--he had never been up that way before--and I well remember how he slipped himself free of the rope after the last rocks, saying, "Ah, you young people, you go on. The old man will follow." Alone he arrived on the top, strode about over its snowy dome as if to say good-bye, and was just as ready for his work as any of us when, in a stiff gale, we descended the ridge of the Bosses. But to return to what is known as the Arkwright accident. In the year 1866, Henry Arkwright, a young man of twenty-nine, aide-de-camp to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, was travelling in Switzerland with his mother and two sisters. Writing from Geneva on 3rd September to a member of his family, he said, "We have ventured to try our luck higher up, as the weather is so warm and settled--as otherwise I should leave Switzerland without seeing a glacier." On what an apparent chance--a run of fine weather--do great issues depend! The party shortly afterwards moved on to Chamonix, where many excursions were made, thanks to the beautiful weather which still continued. It had now become quite the fashion to go up Mont Blanc, so one is not surprised that Henry Arkwright, though no climber, decided to make the attempt. One of his sisters went with him as far as the hut at the Grands Mulets, and they were accompanied by the guide Michael Simond, and the porters Joseph and François Tournier. Another party proposed also to go up. It consisted of two persons only, Sylvain Couttet and an _employé_ of the Hotel Royal named Nicolas Winhart, whom Sylvain had promised to conduct to the top when he had time and opportunity. It was the 12th October when they left Chamonix, and all went well across the crevassed Glacier des Bossons, and they duly reached their night quarters. While the climbers were absent next day, Miss Fanny Arkwright employed herself with writing and finishing a sketch for her brother. Meanwhile the two parties, having set out at an early hour, advanced quickly up the snow-slopes. The days were short, and it was desirable to take the most direct route. For years the Ancien Passage had been abandoned, and the more circuitous way by the Corridor used instead. However, the snow was in good order, and as up to then no accidents had happened through falling ice, this danger was little dreaded, though it is sometimes a very real one in the Ancien Passage. So the guides advised that this should be the way chosen, and both parties directed their steps accordingly. Sylvain Couttet has left a remarkable description of the events which followed, and portions of this I now translate from his own words as they appeared in _The Alpine Journal_. The two parties were together at the beginning of the steep snow-slope. Sylvain's narrative here commences:--"I said to the porter, Joseph Tournier, who had thus far been making the tracks, 'Let us pass on ahead; you have worked long enough. To each of us his share!' It was to this kindly thought for my comrade that, without the slightest doubt, Winhart and I owe our salvation! We had been walking for about ten minutes near some very threatening _séracs_ when a crack was heard above us a little to the right. Without reasoning, I instinctively cried, 'Walk quickly!' and I rushed forwards, while someone behind me exclaimed, 'Not in that direction!' "I heard nothing more; the wind of the avalanche caught me and carried me away in its furious descent. 'Lie down!' I called, and at the same moment I desperately drove my stick into the harder snow beneath, and crouched down on hands and knees, my head bent and turned towards the hurricane. I felt the blocks of ice passing over my back, particles of snow were swept against my face, and I was deafened by a terrible cracking sound like thunder. "It was only after eight or ten minutes that the air began to clear, and then, always clinging to my axe, I perceived Winhart 6 feet below me, with the point of his stick firmly planted in the ice. The rope by which we were tied to each other was intact. I saw nothing beyond Winhart except the remains of the cloud of snow and a chaos of ice-blocks spread over an area of about 600 feet. "I called out at the top of my voice--no answer--I became like a madman, I burst out crying, I began to call out again--always the same silence--the silence of death. "I pulled out my axe, I untied the rope which joined us, and both of us, with what energy remained to us, with our brains on fire and our hearts oppressed with grief, commenced to explore in every direction the enormous mountain of shattered ice-blocks which lay below us. Finally, about 150 feet further down I saw a knapsack--then a man. It was François Tournier, his face terribly mutilated, and his skull smashed in by a piece of ice. The cord had been broken between Tournier and the man next to him. We continued our search in the neighbourhood of his body, but after two hours' work could find nothing more. It was vain to make further efforts! Nothing was visible amongst the masses of _débris_, as big as houses, and we had no tools except my axe and Winhart's stick. We drew the body of poor Tournier after us as far as the Grand Plateau, and with what strength remained to us we descended as fast as we could towards the hut at the Grands Mulets, where a terrible ordeal awaited me--the announcement of the catastrophe to Miss Arkwright. "The poor child was sitting quietly occupied with her sketching. "'Well, Sylvain!' she cried on seeing me, 'All has gone well?' "'Not altogether, Mademoiselle,' I replied, not knowing how to begin. "Mademoiselle looked at me, noticed my bent head and my eyes full of tears--she rose, came towards me--'What is the matter? Tell me all!' "I could only answer, 'Have courage, Mademoiselle.' "She understood me. The brave young girl knelt down and prayed for a few moments, and then got up pale, calm, dry-eyed. 'Now you can tell me everything,' she said, 'I am ready.' * * * * * "She insisted on accompanying me at once to Chamonix, where she, in her turn, would have to break the sad tidings to her mother and sister. "At the foot of the mountain the sister of Mademoiselle met us, happy and smiling. "Do not ask me any more details of that awful day, I have not the strength to tell them to you." * * * * * Thirty-one years passed, when, in 1897, Colonel Arkwright, a brother of Henry Arkwright's, received the following telegram from the Mayor of Chamonix: "Restes Henry Arkwright peri Mont Blanc 1866 retrouvés." Once more the glacier had given up its dead, and during these thirty-one years the body of Henry Arkwright had descended 9000 feet in the ice and had been rendered back to his family at the foot of the glacier. The remains of the Englishman were buried at Chamonix, and perhaps never has so pathetic a service been held there as that which consigned to the earth what was left of him who thirty-one years before had been snatched away in the mighty grip of the avalanche. Many belongings of the lost one's came by degrees to light. A pocket-handkerchief was intact, and on it as well as on his shirt-front, Henry Arkwright's name and that of his regiment written in marking-ink were legible. Though the shirt was torn to pieces, yet two of the studs and the collar-stud were still in the button-holes and uninjured. The gold pencil-case (I have handled it), opened and shut as smoothly as it had ever done, and on the watch-chain there was not a scratch. A pair of gloves were tied together with a boot-lace which his sister remembered taking from her own boot so that he might have a spare one, and coins, a used cartridge, and various other odds and ends, were all recovered from the ice. The remains of the guides had been found and brought down soon after the accident, but that of Henry Arkwright had been buried too deeply to be discovered. In connection with the preservation of bodies in ice the following extract from _The Daily Telegraph_ for 10th May 1902 is of great interest. It is headed: MAMMOTH 8000 YEARS OLD Reuter's representative has had an interview with Mr J. Talbot Clifton, who has lately returned from an expedition in Northern Siberia, undertaken for the purpose of discovering new species of animals. Mr Clifton gives the following account of the Herz mammoth, which he saw on his arrival at Irkutsk. "It is," he said, "about the size of an elephant, which it resembles somewhat in form. It possesses a trunk, has five toes instead of four, and is a heavy beast. It is supposed to have lived about 8000 years ago. Its age was probably not more than twenty-six years--very young for a mammoth. Its flesh was quite complete, except for a few pieces which had been bitten at by wolves or bears. Most of the hair on the body had been scraped away by ice, but its mane and near foreleg were in perfect preservation and covered with long hair. The hair of the mane was from 4 in. to 5 in. long, and of a yellowish brown colour, while its left leg was covered with black hair. In its stomach was found a quantity of undigested food, and on its tongue was the herbage which it had been eating when it died. This was quite green." FOOTNOTE: [3] _The Annals of Mont Blanc_, by C. E. Mathews. CHAPTER IX THE MOST TERRIBLE OF ALL ALPINE TRAGEDIES There is no great mountain in the Alps so easy to ascend as Mont Blanc. There is not one on which there has been such a deplorable loss of life. The very facility with which Mont Blanc can be climbed has tempted hundreds of persons totally unused to and unfitted for mountaineering to go up it, while the tariff for the guides--£4 each--has called into existence a crowd of incapable and inexperienced men who are naturally unable, when the need for it arrives, to face conditions that masters of craft would have avoided by timely retreat. The great danger of Mont Blanc is its enormous size, and to be lost on its slopes in a snow-storm which may continue for days is an experience few have survived. On a rocky mountain there are landmarks which are of the utmost value in time of fog, but when all is snow and the tracks are obliterated as soon as made, can we wonder if the results have been disastrous when a poorly equipped party has encountered bad weather? Of all the sad accidents which have happened on Mont Blanc, none exceeds in pathos that in which Messrs Bean, M'Corkindale, Randall, and eight guides perished. None of these gentlemen had any experience of mountaineering. Stimulated rather than deterred by the account given by two climbers who had just come down from the mountain, and had had a narrow escape owing to bad weather, these three men, with their guides, who were "probably about the worst who were then on the Chamonix roll," set out for the Grands Mulets. The weather was doubtful, nevertheless the next morning they started upwards, leaving their only compass at their night quarters. During the whole of that 6th of September the big telescope at the Châlet of Plan-Praz above Chamonix was fixed on their route, but they could only be seen from time to time, as the mountain was constantly hidden by driving clouds. At last they were observed close to the rocks known as the Petits Mulets not far below the summit. It was then a quarter past two o'clock. There was a terrific wind, and the snow was whirled in clouds. The party could be seen lying down on the ground, to avoid being swept away by the hurricane. [Illustration: These small figures, in a waste of Snow, may help to give some faint idea of the extent of Alpine Snow-fields.] The Chamonix guide, Sylvain Couttet, had gone to the châlet of Pierre-Pointue, where the riding path ends, to await the return of the climbers. On the morning of the 7th, as there was still no sign of them, Sylvain became uneasy, and mounting to an eminence not far off, from which he could see nearly all the route to the Grands Mulets, he carefully searched for tracks with the aid of his telescope. Snow had fallen during the night, yet there was no trace of footsteps. Seriously alarmed, Sylvain hurried back to Pierre-Pointue, sent a man who was there to Chamonix in order that a search party might be held in readiness, and accompanied by the servant of the little inn he went up the Grands Mulets. Sylvain had arranged that if no one was there he would put out a signal and the search party would then ascend without delay. On reaching the hut at the Grands Mulets his worst fears were realised--it was empty. He now quickly regained Chamonix from where fourteen guides were just starting. He remounted with them immediately. By the time they got a little way above Pierre-Pointue, the snow was again falling heavily, it was impossible to go further. Next day the weather was so bad that the party had to descend to Chamonix, and for several days longer the rain in the valley and the snow on the heights continued. On the 15th the weather cleared, and Sylvain went up to Plan-Praz to see if from there any traces of the lost ones could be discovered with the telescope. The first glance showed him five black specks near the Petit Mulets, which could be nothing else but the bodies of some of the victims. On the 16th, with twenty-three other guides, Sylvain spent the night at the Grands Mulets. The 17th, they mounted to the spot they had examined with the telescope, and there they found the bodies of Mr M'Corkindale and two porters. Three hundred feet higher was Mr Bean, with his head leaning on his hand, and by him another porter. These were in a perfectly natural position, whereas the others appeared to have slipped to where they were, as their clothes were torn, and the ropes, knapsacks (still containing food), sticks, and so on, lay by the others above. The five bodies were frozen hard. As complete a search as possible was now made for the remaining six members of the party, but without success. Probably they fell either into a crevasse or down the Italian side of the mountain. It is no wonder that Mr Mathews calls this "the most lamentable catastrophe ever known in the annals of Alpine adventure." But the most pathetic part of the story is to come. During those terrible, hopeless hours Mr Bean had made notes of what was happening, and they tell us all we shall ever know about the disaster: "_Tuesday, 6th September._--I have made the ascent of Mont Blanc with ten persons--eight guides, Mr M'Corkindale, and Mr Randall. We arrived at the summit at half-past two o'clock. Immediately after leaving it I was enveloped in clouds of snow. We passed the night in a grotto excavated out of the snow, affording very uncomfortable shelter, and I was ill all night. _7th September, morning._--Intense cold--much snow, which falls uninterruptedly. Guides restless. _7th September, evening._--We have been on Mont Blanc for two days in a terrible snowstorm; we have lost our way, and are in a hole scooped out of the snow at a height of 15,000 feet. I have no hope of descending. Perhaps this book may be found and forwarded. We have no food. My feet are already frozen, and I am exhausted. I have only strength to write a few words. I die in the faith of Jesus Christ, with affectionate thoughts of my family--my remembrance to all. I trust we may meet in heaven." CHAPTER X A WONDERFUL SLIDE DOWN A WALL OF ICE Twice at least in the Alps climbers have lost their footing at the top of a steep slope, and rolled down it for so long a distance that it seemed impossible they could survive. The two plucky mountaineers who have competed in an involuntary race to the bottom of a frozen hillside are Mr Birkbeck, in his famous slide near Mont Blanc, and Mr Whymper, when he made his startling glissade on the Matterhorn. It was in July 1861 that a party of friends, whose names are well known to all climbers, set out to cross a high glacier pass in the chain of Mont Blanc. The Revs. Leslie Stephen, Charles Hudson, and Messrs Tuckett, Mather, and Birkbeck were the travellers, while in addition to the three magnificent guides, Melchior Anderegg, Perren, and Bennen, there were two local guides from the village of St Gervais. Let me give the account of the accident in Mr Hudson's own words. How sad to think that, only four years later, this capable and brave mountaineer himself perished on the grim north slopes of the Matterhorn! The Col de Miage is reached by a steep slope of ice or frozen snow, and is just a gap in the chain of peaks which runs south-west from Mont Blanc. Col is the word used for a pass in French-speaking districts. "On the morning of the 11th, at 3.30, we left the friendly rock on or near which we had passed the night, and at 7 o'clock we had reached the summit of the Col de Miage. Here we sat down on a smooth, hard plain of snow, and had our second breakfast. Shortly afterwards Birkbeck had occasion to leave us for a few minutes, though his departure was not remarked at the time. When we discovered his absence, Melchior followed his footsteps, and I went after him, and, to our dismay, we saw the tracks led to the edge of the ice-slope, and then suddenly stopped. The conclusion was patent at a glance. I was fastening two ropes together, and Melchior had already bound one end round his chest, with a view to approach or even descend a portion of the slope for a better view, when some of the party descried Birkbeck a long way below us. He had fallen an immense distance. "My first impulse led me to wish that Melchior and I should go down to Birkbeck as fast as possible, and leave the rest to follow with the ropes; but on proposing this plan some of the party objected. For a considerable time Birkbeck shouted to us, not knowing whether we could see his position. His course had been arrested at a considerable distance above the bottom of the slope, by what means we know not; and just below him stretched a snow-covered crevasse, across which he must pass if he went further. We shouted to him to remain where he was, but no distinguishable sounds reached him; and to our dismay we presently saw him gradually moving downwards--then he stopped--again he moved forwards and again--he was on the brink of the crevasse; but we could do nothing for him. At length he slipped down upon the slope of snow which bridged the abyss. I looked anxiously to see if it would support his weight, and, to my relief, a small black speck continued visible. This removed my immediate cause of apprehension, and after a time he moved clear of this frail support down to the point where we afterwards joined him. Bennen was first in the line, and after we had descended some distance he untied himself and went down to Birkbeck. It was 9.30 when we reached him. He told us he was becoming faint and suffering from cold. On hearing this, Melchoir and I determined to delay no longer, and, accordingly, unroped and trotted down to the point where we could descend from the rocks to the slope upon which he was lying. Arrived at the place, I sat on the snow, and let Birkbeck lean against me, while I asked him if he felt any internal injury or if his ribs pained him. His manner of answering gave me strong grounds for hoping that there was little to fear on that score." Mr Hudson gives a graphic description of poor Mr Birkbeck's appearance when he was found on the snow. "His legs, thighs, and the lower part of his body were quite naked, with his trousers down about his feet. By his passage over the snow, the skin was removed from the outside of the legs and thighs, the knees, and the whole of the lower part of the back, and part of the ribs, together with some from the nose and forehead. He had not lost much blood, but he presented a most ghastly spectacle of bloody raw flesh. This, added to his great prostration, and our consciousness of the distance and difficulties which separated him from any bed, rendered the sight most trying. He never lost consciousness. He afterwards described his descent as one of extreme rapidity, too fast to allow of his realising the sentiment of fear, but not sufficiently so to deprive him of thought. Sometimes he descended feet first, sometimes head first, then he went sideways, and once or twice he had the sensation of shooting through the air. "The slope where he first lost his footing was gentle, and he tried to stop himself with his fingers and nails, but the snow was too hard. He had no fear during the descent, owing to the extreme rapidity; but when he came to a halt on the snow, and was ignorant as to whether we saw, or could reach him, he experienced deep anguish of mind in the prospect of a lingering death. Happily, however, the true Christian principles in which he had been brought up, led him to cast himself upon the protection of that merciful Being who alone could help him. His prayers were heard, and immediately answered by the removal of his fears." The account of how the injured man was brought down to the valley is very exciting. Mr Hudson continues:--"The next thing was to get him down as fast as possible, and the sledge suggested itself as the most feasible plan. Only the day before, at Contamines, I had had the boards made for it, and without them the runners (which, tied together, served me as an alpenstock) would have been useless. Two or three attempts were made before I could get the screws to fit the holes in the boards and runners, and poor Melchior, who was watching me, began to show signs of despair. At length the operation was completed, and the sledge was ready. We spread a plaid, coats, and flannel shirts over the boards, then laid Birkbeck at full length on them, and covered him as well as we could. "Now came the 'tug-of-war,' for the snow was much softened by the sun, the slope was steep, and there were several crevasses ahead; added to this, there was difficulty in getting good hold of the sledge, and every five or six steps one of the bearers plunged so deeply in the snow that we were obliged to halt. Birkbeck was all the time shivering so much that the sledge was sensibly shaken, and all the covering we could give him was but of little use. "I was well aware of the great danger Birkbeck was in, owing to the vast amount of skin which was destroyed, and I felt that every quarter of an hour saved was of very great importance; still the frequent delay could not be avoided." So matters continued till the party was clear of the glacier. Then Mr Tuckett went ahead to Chamonix, a ten hours' tramp or so, in search of an English doctor, and on the way left orders for a carriage to be sent as far as there was a driving road, to meet the wounded man, and more men beyond to help in carrying him. The chief part of the transport was done by the three great guides, Melchoir, Bennen, and Perren, and was often over "abrupt slopes of rock, which to an ordinary walker would have appeared difficult, even without anything to carry. We had so secured Birkbeck with ropes and straps, that he could not slip off the sledge, otherwise he would on these occasions at once have parted company with his stretcher, and rolled down the rocks." At last, after incredible toil, they reached the pastures, and at about three o'clock in the afternoon eight hours after the accident, they got to the home of one of the guides, where they were able to make poor Mr Birkbeck more comfortable before undertaking the rest of the journey, warming his feet and wrapping him in blankets. For two hours more the poor fellow had to be carried down, and then they met the carriage, in which he was driven to St Gervais, accompanied by the doctor from Chamonix. Thanks to the skilful treatment and excellent nursing he received, Mr Birkbeck made a good recovery, though, of course, it was weeks before he could leave his bed. Mr Hudson ends his wonderfully interesting narrative with an account of a visit he paid later in the season to the place where the accident happened. He says "The result of our observations is as follows: 'The height of the Col de Miage is 11,095. The height of the point at which Birkbeck finally came to a standstill is 9328 feet; so the distance he fell is, in _perpendicular_ height, 1767 feet." As part of the slope would be at a gentle angle, one may believe that the slip was over something like a mile of surface! Mr Hudson continues:--"During the intervening three weeks, vast changes had taken place in the glacier. The snowy coating had left the couloir in parts, thus exposing ice in the line of Birkbeck's course, as well as a rock mid-way in the slope, against which our poor friend would most likely have struck, had the accident happened later. "This is one of that long chain of providential arrangements, by the combination of which we were enabled to save Birkbeck's life. (1) The recent snow, and favourable state of the glacier, enabled us to take an easier and much quicker route, if not the only one possible for a wounded man. (2) We had a singularly strong party of guides, without which we could not have got him down in time to afford any chance of his recovery. (3) If we had not had real efficient men as travellers in the party we should not have got the telegram sent to Geneva; and a few hours' delay in the arrival of Dr Metcalfe would probably have been fatal. (4) The day was perfectly calm and cloudless; had there been wind or absence of sun, the cold might have been too much for such a shaken system to bear. (5) We had with us the very unusual addition of a sledge, without which it would have been scarcely possible to have carried him down. "One thing there was which greatly lessened the mental trial to those engaged in bringing Birkbeck down to St Gervais, and afterwards in attending upon him, and that was, his perfect calmness and patience--and of these I cannot speak too highly. No doubt it contributed greatly to his recovery." CHAPTER XI AN ADVENTURE ON THE TRIFT PASS Few passes leading out of the Valley of Zermatt are oftener crossed than the Trift. It is not considered a difficult pass, but the rocks on the Zinal side are loose and broken and the risk of falling stones is great at certain hours in the day. The Zinal side of the Trift is in shadow in the early morning, and therefore most climbers will either make so early a start from the Zermatt side that they can be sure of descending the dangerous part before the sun has thawed the icy fetters which hold the stones together during the night, or else they will set out from the Zinal side, and sleep at a little inn on a patch of rocks which jut out from the glacier at the foot of the pass, from which the top of the Trift can be reached long before there is any risk from a cannonade. One of the earliest explorers of this pass, however, Mr Thomas W. Hinchliff, neglected the precaution of a sufficiently early start, and his party very nearly came to grief in consequence. He has given us an excellent description in _Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers_ of what befell after they had got over the great difficulties, as they seemed in those days, of descending the steep wall of rock on the Zinal side. I will now begin to quote from his article: "Being thoroughly tired of the rocks, we resolved as soon as possible to get upon the ice where it swept the base of the precipices. The surface, however, was furrowed by parallel channels of various magnitudes; some several feet in depth, formed originally by the descent of stones and avalanches from the heights; and we found one of these troughlike furrows skirting the base of the rocks we stood upon. One by one we entered, flattering ourselves that the covering of snow would afford us pretty good footing, but this soon failed; the hard blue ice showed on the surface, and we found ourselves rather in a difficulty, for the sides of our furrow were higher here than at the point where we entered it, and so overhanging that it was impossible to get out. "Delay was dangerous, for the _débris_ far below warned us that at any moment a shower of stones might come flying down our channel; a glissade was equally dangerous; for, though we might have shot down safely at an immense speed for some hundreds of feet, we should finally have been dashed into a sea of crevasses. Cachat in front solved the puzzle, and showed us how, by straddling with the feet as far apart as possible, the heel of each foot could find pretty firm hold in a mixture of half snow and half ice, his broad back, like a solid rock, being ready to check any slip of those behind him. "We were soon safe upon a fine open plateau of the _névé_, where we threaded our way among a few snow crevasses requiring caution, and then prepared for a comfortable halt in an apparently safe place. "The provision knapsacks were emptied and used as seats; bottles of red wine were stuck upright in the snow; a goodly leg of cold mutton on its sheet of paper formed the centre, garnished with hard eggs and bread and cheese, round which we ranged ourselves in a circle. High festival was held under the deep blue heavens, and now and then, as we looked up at the wonderful wall of rocks which we had descended, we congratulated ourselves on the victory. M. Seiler's oranges supplied the rare luxury of a dessert, and we were just in the full enjoyment of the delicacy when a booming sound, like the discharge of a gun far over our heads, made us all at once glance upwards to the top of the Trifthorn. Close to its craggy summit hung a cloud of dust, like dirty smoke, and in few seconds another and a larger one burst forth several hundred feet lower. A glance through the telescope showed that a fall of rocks had commenced, and the fragments were leaping down from ledge to ledge in a series of cascades. The uproar became tremendous; thousands of fragments making every variety of noise according to their size, and producing the effect of a fire of musketry and artillery combined, thundered downwards from so great a height that we waited anxiously for some considerable time to see them reach the snow-field below. As nearly as we could estimate the distance, we were 500 yards from the base of the rocks, so we thought that, come what might, we were in a tolerably secure position. At last we saw many of the blocks plunge into the snow after taking their last fearful leap; presently much larger fragments followed; the noise grew fiercer and fiercer, and huge blocks began to fall so near to us that we jumped to our feet, preparing to dodge them to the best of our ability. 'Look out!' cried someone, and we opened out right and left at the approach of a monster, evidently weighing many hundredweights, which was coming right at us like a huge shell fired from a mortar. It fell with a heavy thud not more than 20 feet from us, scattering lumps of snow into the circle." Years afterwards a very sad accident occurred at this spot, a lady being struck and killed by a falling stone. In this case the fatality was unquestionably due to the start having been made at too late an hour. An inn in the Trift Valley makes it easy to reach the pass soon after dawn. THE PERILS OF THE MOMING PASS. In 1864 many peaks remained unsealed, and passes untraversed in the Zermatt district, though now almost every inch of every mountain has felt the foot of man. Yet even now few passes have been made there so difficult and dangerous (if Mr Whymper's route be exactly followed) as that of the Moming, from Zinal to Zermatt. Mr Whymper gives a most graphic and exciting description of what befell his party, which included Mr Moore and the two famous guides Almer and Croz. Having slept at some filthy châlets, the climbers, first passing over easy mountain slopes, gained a level glacier. Beyond this a way towards the unexplored gap in the ridge, which they called the Moming Pass, had to be decided on. The choice lay between difficult and perhaps impassable rocks, and an ice-slope so steep and broken that it appeared likely to turn out impracticable. In fact it was the sort of position that whichever route was chosen the climbers were sure, when once on it, to wish it had been the other. Finally, the ice-slope, over which a line of ice-cliffs hung threateningly, lurching right above the track to be taken, was decided on, and the whole party advanced for the attack. Mr Whymper writes: "Across this ice-slope Croz now proceeded to cut. It was executing a flank movement in the face of an enemy by whom we might be attacked at any moment. The peril was obvious. It was a monstrous folly. It was foolhardiness. A retreat should have been sounded.[4] "'I am not ashamed to confess,' wrote Moore in his Journal, 'that during the whole time we were crossing this slope my heart was in my mouth, and I never felt relieved from such a load of care as when, after, I suppose, a passage of about twenty minutes, we got on to the rocks and were in safety.... I have never heard a positive oath come from Almer's mouth, but the language in which he kept up a running commentary, more to himself than to me, as we went along, was stronger than I should have given him credit for using. His prominent feeling seemed to be one of _indignation_ that we should be in such a position, and self-reproach at being a party to the proceeding; while the emphatic way in which, at intervals, he exclaimed, 'Quick; be quick,' sufficiently betokened his alarm. "It was not necessary to admonish Croz to be quick. He was fully as alive to the risk as any of the others. He told me afterwards that this place was the most dangerous he had ever crossed, and that no consideration whatever would tempt him to cross it again. Manfully did he exert himself to escape from the impending destruction. His head, bent down to his work, never turned to the right or to the left. One, two, three, went his axe, and then he stepped on to the spot he had been cutting. How painfully insecure should we have considered those steps at any other time! But now, we thought only of the rocks in front, and of the hideous _séracs_, lurching over above us, apparently in the act of falling. "We got to the rocks in safety, and if they had been doubly as difficult as they were, we should still have been well content. We sat down and refreshed the inner man, keeping our eyes on the towering pinnacles of ice under which we had passed, but which, now, were almost beneath us. Without a preliminary warning sound, one of the largest--as high as the Monument at London Bridge--fell upon the slope below. The stately mass heeled over as if upon a hinge (holding together until it bent thirty degrees forwards), then it crushed out its base, and, rent into a thousand fragments, plunged vertically down upon the slope that we had crossed! Every atom of our track that was in its course was obliterated; all the new snow was swept away, and a broad sheet of smooth, glassy ice, showed the resistless force with which it had fallen. "It was inexcusable to follow such a perilous path, but it is easy to understand why it was taken. To have retreated from the place where Croz suggested a change of plan, to have descended below the reach of danger, and to have mounted again by the route which Almer suggested, would have been equivalent to abandoning the excursion; for no one would have passed another night in the châlet on the Arpitetta Alp. 'Many' says Thucydides, 'though seeing well the perils ahead, are forced along by fear of dishonour--as the world calls it--so that, vanquished by a mere word, they fall into irremediable calamities.' Such was nearly the case here. No one could say a word in justification of the course which was adopted; all were alive to the danger that was being encountered; yet a grave risk was deliberately--although unwillingly--incurred, in preference to admitting, by withdrawal from an untenable position, that an error of judgment had been committed. "After a laborious trudge over many species of snow, and through many varieties of vapour--from the quality of a Scotch mist to that of a London fog--we at length stood on the depression between the Rothhorn and the Schallhorn.[5] A steep wall of snow was upon the Zinal side of the summit; but what the descent was like on the other side we could not tell, for a billow of snow tossed over its crest by the western winds, suspended o'er Zermatt with motion arrested, resembling an ocean-wave frozen in the act of breaking, cut off the view.[6] "Croz--held hard in by the others, who kept down the Zinal side--opened his shoulders, flogged down the foam, and cut away the cornice to its junction with the summit; then boldly leaped down and called on us to follow him. "It was well for us now that we had such a man as leader. An inferior or less daring guide would have hesitated to enter upon the descent in a dense mist; and Croz himself would have done right to pause had he been less magnificent in _physique_. He acted, rather than said, 'Where snow lies fast, there man can go; where ice exists, a way may be cut; it is a question of power; I have the power--all you have to do is to follow me.' Truly, he did not spare himself, and could he have performed the feats upon the boards of a theatre that he did upon this occasion, he would have brought down the house with thunders of applause. Here is what Moore wrote in _his_ Journal "('The descent bore a strong resemblance to the Col de Pilatte, but was very much steeper and altogether more difficult, which is saying a good deal. Croz was in his element, and selected his way with marvellous sagacity, while Almer had an equally honourable and, perhaps, more responsible post in the rear, which he kept with his usual steadiness.... One particular passage has impressed itself on my mind as one of the most nervous I have ever made. We had to pass along a crest of ice, a mere knife-edge,--on our left a broad crevasse, whose bottom was lost in blue haze, and on our right, at an angle of 70°, or more, a slope falling to a similar gulf below. Croz, as he went along the edge, chipped small notches in the ice, in which we placed our feet, with the toes well turned out, doing all we knew to preserve our balance. While stepping from one of these precarious footholds to another, I staggered for a moment. I had not really lost my footing; but the agonised tone in which Almer, who was behind me, on seeing me waver, exclaimed, "Slip not, sir!" gave us an even livelier impression than we already had of the insecurity of the position.... One huge chasm, whose upper edge was far above the lower one, could neither be leaped nor turned, and threatened to prove an insuperable barrier. But Croz showed himself equal to the emergency. Held up by the rest of the party, he cut a series of holes for the hands and feet down and along the almost perpendicular wall of ice forming the upper side of the _schrund_. Down this slippery staircase we crept, with our faces to the wall, until a point was reached where the width of the chasm was not too great for us to drop across. Before we had done, we got quite accustomed to taking flying leaps over the _schrunds_.... To make a long story short; after a most desperate and exciting struggle, and as bad a piece of ice-work as it is possible to imagine, we emerged on to the upper plateau of the Hohlicht Glacier.')" From here, in spite of many further difficulties necessitating a long _detour_, the party safely descended to Zermatt by the familiar Trift path. FOOTNOTES: [4] The responsibility did not rest with Croz. His part was to advise, but not to direct. [5] The summit of the pass has been marked on Dufour's map, 3793 mètres, or 12,444 feet. [6] These snow-cornices are common on the crests of high mountain ridges, and it is always prudent (just before arriving upon the summit of a mountain or ridge), to _sound_ with the alpenstock, that is to say, drive it in, to discover whether there is one or not. Men have often narrowly escaped losing their lives from neglecting this precaution. These cornices are frequently rolled round in a volute, and sometimes take extravagant forms. CHAPTER XII AN EXCITING PASSAGE OF THE COL DE PILATTE Even now the valleys and mountains of Dauphiné are neglected in comparison with the ranges of Mont Blanc, Monte Rosa, and other famous mountain chains of the Alps. In 1864, when Mr Whymper with his friends Messrs Moore and Walker undertook a summer campaign there, it was practically unexplored from the climbers' point of view. The party was a skilful and experienced one, the guides, Almer and Croz, of the highest class, and the _esprit de corps_ in the little army of invasion most admirable. Thus it is no wonder that peak after peak fell before them, passes were accomplished at the first assault, and no accident or annoyance spoilt the splendid series of expeditions which were so successfully accomplished. Of these I have taken the account of the crossing of the Col de Pilatte, a high glacier pass, for, though it was excelled in difficulty by other climbs, yet it is so wittily described by Mr Whymper in his _Scrambles in the Alps_, and gives so excellent an idea of the sort of work met with on glaciers, and the ease with which a thoroughly competent party tackles it, that it cannot fail to be read with interest. The three Englishmen had been joined by a French friend of theirs, Monsieur Reynaud, and had left their night quarters at Entraigues at 3.30 A.M. on the morning of 27th June. Their course was prodigiously steep. _In less than two miles difference of latitude they rose one mile of absolute height._ The route, however, was not really difficult, and they made good progress. They had reached the foot of the steep part when I take up the narrative in Mr Whymper's own words: "At 9.30 A.M. we commenced the ascent of the couloir leading from the nameless glacier to a point in the ridge, just to the east of Mont Bans.[7] So far the route had been nothing more than a steep grind in an angle where little could be seen, but now views opened out in several directions, and the way began to be interesting. It was more so, perhaps, to us than to our companion M. Reynaud, who had no rest in the last night. He was, moreover, heavily laden. Science was to be regarded--his pockets were stuffed with books; heights and angles were to be observed--his knapsack was filled with instruments; hunger was to be guarded against--his shoulders were ornamented with a huge nimbus of bread, and a leg of mutton swung behind from his knapsack, looking like an overgrown tail. Like a good-hearted fellow he had brought this food thinking we might be in need of it. As it happened, we were well provided for, and, having our own packs to carry, could not relieve him of his superfluous burdens, which, naturally, he did not like to throw away. As the angles steepened, the strain on his strength became more and more apparent. At last he began to groan. At first a most gentle and mellow groan; and as we rose so did his groans, till at last the cliffs were groaning in echo, and we were moved to laughter. [Illustration: START OF A CLIMBING PARTY BY MOONLIGHT.] [Illustration: SHADOWS AT SUNRISE.] [Illustration: A STANDING GLISSADE.] [Illustration: AN EASY DESCENT.] "Croz cut the way with unflagging energy throughout the whole of the ascent, and at 10.45 we stood on the summit of our pass, intending to refresh ourselves with a good halt; but just at that moment a mist, which had been playing about the ridge, swooped down and blotted out the whole of the view on the northern side. Croz was the only one who caught a glimpse of the descent, and it was deemed advisable to push on immediately, while its recollection was fresh in his memory. We are consequently unable to tell anything about the summit of the pass, except that it lies immediately to the east of Mont Bans, and is elevated about 11,300 feet above the level of the sea. It is one of the highest passes in Dauphiné. We called it the Col de Pilatte. "We commenced to descend towards the Glacier de Pilatte by a slope of smooth ice, the face of which, according to the measurement of Mr Moore, had an inclination of 54°! Croz still led, and the others followed at intervals of about 15 feet, all being tied together, and Almer occupying the responsible position of last man: the two guides were therefore about 70 feet apart. They were quite invisible to each other from the mist, and looked spectral even to us. But the strong man could be heard by all hewing out the steps below, while every now and then the voice of the steady man pierced the cloud: 'Slip not, dear sirs; place well your feet; stir not until you are certain.' "For three-quarters of an hour we progressed in this fashion. The axe of Croz all at once stopped. 'What is the matter, Croz?' 'Bergschrund, gentlemen.' 'Can we get over?' 'Upon my word, I don't know; I think we must jump.' The clouds rolled away right and left as he spoke. The effect was dramatic! It was a _coup de théâtre_, preparatory to the 'great sensation leap' which was about to be executed by the entire company. "Some unseen cause, some cliff or obstruction in the rocks underneath, had caused our wall of ice to split into two portions, and the huge fissure which had thus been formed extended, on each hand, as far as could be seen. We, on the slope above, were separated from the slope below by a mighty crevasse. No running up and down to look for an easier place to cross could be done on an ice-slope of 54°; the chasm had to be passed then and there. "A downward jump of 15 or 16 feet, and a forward leap of 7 or 8 feet had to be made at the same time. That is not much, you will say. It was not much. It was not the quantity, but it was the quality of the jump which gave to it its particular flavour. You had to hit a narrow ridge of ice. If that was passed, it seemed as if you might roll down for ever and ever. If it was not attained, you dropped into the crevasse below, which, although partly choked by icicles and snow that had fallen from above, was still gaping in many places, ready to receive an erratic body. "Croz untied Walker in order to get rope enough, and warning us to hold fast, sprang over the chasm. He alighted cleverly on his feet; untied himself and sent up the rope to Walker, who followed his example. It was then my turn, and I advanced to the edge of the ice. The second which followed was what is called a supreme moment. That is to say, I felt supremely ridiculous. The world seemed to revolve at a frightful pace, and my stomach to fly away. The next moment I found myself sprawling in the snow, and then, of course, vowed that it was nothing, and prepared to encourage my friend Reynaud. "He came to the edge and made declarations. I do not believe that he was a whit more reluctant to pass the place than we others, but he was infinitely more demonstrative--in a word, he was French. He wrung his hands, 'Oh! what a _diable_ of a place!' 'It is nothing, Reynaud,' I said, 'it is nothing.' 'Jump,' cried the others, 'jump.' But he turned round, as far as one can do such a thing in an ice-step, and covered his face with his hands, ejaculating, 'Upon my word, it is not possible. No! no! no! it is not possible.' "How he came over I scarcely know. We saw a toe--it seemed to belong to Moore; we saw Reynaud a flying body, coming down as if taking a header into water; with arms and legs all abroad, his leg of mutton flying in the air, his bâton escaped from his grasp; and then we heard a thud as if a bundle of carpets had been pitched out of a window. When set upon his feet he was a sorry spectacle; his head was a great snowball; brandy was trickling out of one side of the knapsack, chartreuse out of the other--we bemoaned its loss, but we roared with laughter. "I cannot close this chapter without paying tribute to the ability with which Croz led us, through a dense mist, down the remainder of the Glacier de Pilatte. As an exhibition of strength and skill, it has seldom been surpassed in the Alps or elsewhere. On this almost unknown and very steep glacier, he was perfectly at home, even in the mists. Never able to see 50 feet ahead, he still went on with the utmost certainty, and without having to retrace a single step; and displayed from first to last consummate knowledge of the materials with which he was dealing. Now he cut steps down one side of a _sérac_, went with a dash at the other side, and hauled us up after him; then cut away along a ridge until a point was gained from which we could jump on to another ridge; then, doubling back, found a snow-bridge, over which he crawled on hands and knees, towed us across by the legs, ridiculing our apprehensions, mimicking our awkwardness, declining all help, bidding us only to follow him. "About 1 P.M. we emerged from the mist and found ourselves just arrived upon the level portion of the glacier, having, as Reynaud properly remarked, come down as quickly as if there had not been any mist at all. Then we attacked the leg of mutton which my friend had so thoughtfully brought with him, and afterwards raced down, with renewed energy, to La Bérarde." FOOTNOTE: [7] The upper part of the southern side of the Col de Pilatte, and the small glaciers spoken of on p. 211, can be seen from the high road leading from Briançon to Mont Dauphin, between the 12th and 13th kilomètre stones (from Briançon). CHAPTER XIII AN ADVENTURE ON THE ALETSCH GLACIER Mr William Longman, a former Vice-President of the Alpine Club, has given us an interesting account in _The Alpine Journal_ of an exciting adventure which happened to his son in August 1862. The party, consisting of Mr Longman, his son, aged fifteen, two friends, two guides, and a porter, set out one lovely morning from the Eggischhorn Hotel for an excursion on the Great Aletsch Glacier. The names of the guides were Fedier and Andreas Weissenflüh. Mr Longman writes:--"We started in high spirits; the glacier was in perfect order; no fresh snow covered the ice; the crevasses were all unhidden; and no one thought it necessary to use the rope. I felt it to be a wise precaution, however, to place my son, a boy of fifteen years of age, under the care of the Eggischhorn porter. It was his second visit to Switzerland, and he could, I am sure, have taken good care of himself, but I felt it was my duty to place him under the care of a guide. I have no wish to throw undeserved blame on the guide; but his carelessness was unquestionably the cause of the accident. He began wrong, and I ought to have interfered. He tied his handkerchief in a knot, and, holding it himself, gave it to my son to hold also in his hand. This was worse than useless, and, in fact, was the cause of danger, for it partly deprived him of that free and active use of his limbs which is essential to safety. It threw him off his guard. Except at a crevasse, it was unnecessary for the boy to have anything to hold by; and, at a crevasse, the handkerchief would have been insufficient. The impression that there was no real danger, and that all that was required was caution in crossing the crevasses, prevented my interfering. So the guide went on, his hand holding the handkerchief behind him, and my son following, his hand also holding the handkerchief. Many a time I complained to the guide that he took my boy over wide parts of the crevasses because he would not trouble himself to diverge from his path, and many a time did I compel him to turn aside to a narrower chasm. At last, I was walking a few yards to his left, and had stepped over a narrow crevasse, when I was startled by an exclamation. I turned round suddenly, and my son was out of sight! I will not harrow up my own feelings, or those of my readers, by attempting to describe the frightful anguish that struck me to the heart; but will only relate, plainly and calmly, all that took place. When my son fell, the crevasse, which I had crossed so easily, became wider, and its two sides were joined by a narrow ridge of ice. It was obviously impossible to ascertain exactly what had taken place; but I am convinced that the guide went on in his usual thoughtless way, with his hand behind him, drawing my son after him, and that, as soon as he placed his foot on the narrow ridge, he slipped and fell. I rushed to the edge of the crevasse and called out to my poor boy. To my inexpressible delight he at once answered me calmly and plainly. As I afterwards ascertained, he was 50 feet from me, and neither could he see us nor we see him. But he was evidently unhurt; he was not frightened, and he was not beyond reach. In an instant Weissenflüh was ready to descend into the crevasse. He buckled on one of my belts,[8] fixed it to the rope, and told us to lower him down. My two friends and I, and the other two guides, held on to the rope, and slowly and gradually, according to Weissenflüh's directions, we paid it out. It was a slow business, but we kept on encouraging my son, and receiving cheery answers from him in return. At last Weissenflüh told us, to our intense joy, that he had reached my son, that he had hold of him, and that we might haul up. Strongly and steadily we held on, drawing both the boy and the guide, as we believed, nearer and nearer, till at length, to our inexpressible horror, we drew up Weissenflüh alone. He had held my son by the collar of his coat. The cloth was wet, his hand was cold, and the coat slipped from his grasp. I was told that when my boy thus again fell he uttered a cry, but either I heard it not or forgot it. The anguish of the moment prevented my noticing it, and, fortunately, we none of us lost our presence of mind, but steadily held on to the rope. Poor Weissenflüh reached the surface exhausted, dispirited, overwhelmed with grief. He threw himself on the glacier in terrible agony. In an instant Fedier was ready to descend, and we began to lower him; but the crevasse was narrow, and Fedier could not squeeze himself through the ice. We had to pull him up again before he had descended many feet. By this time the brave young Weissenflüh had recovered, and was ready again to go down. But we thought it desirable to take the additional precaution of lowering the other rope, with one of the belts securely fixed to it. My son quickly got hold of it, and placed the belt round his body, but he told us his hands were too cold to buckle it. Weissenflüh now again descended, and soon he told us he had fixed the belt. With joyful heart some hauled away at one rope and some at the other, till at length, after my son had been buried in the ice for nearly half an hour, both he and the guide were brought to the surface.... Let a veil rest over the happiness of meeting. My boy's own account of what befell him is, that he first fell sideways on to a ledge in the crevasse, and then vertically, but providentially with his feet downwards, till his progress was arrested by the narrowness of the crevasse. He says he is sure he was stopped by being wedged in, because his feet were hanging loose. His arms were free. He believes the distance he fell, when Weissenflüh dropped him, was about three or four yards, and that he fell to nearly, but not quite, the same place as that to which he fell at first, and that, in his first position, he could not have put the belt on. His fall was evidently a slide for the greater part of the distance; had it been a sheer fall it would have been impossible to escape severe injury." A LOYAL COMPANION The following is taken from _The Times_ of 23rd July 1886. "On Tuesday, 13th July, Herr F. Burckhardt, member of the Basel section of the Swiss Alpine Club, accompanied by the guides Fritz Teutschmann and Johann Jossi, both from Grindelwald, made an attempt to ascend the Jungfrau from the side of the Little Scheideck. After leaving the Guggi cabin the party mounted the glacier of the same name. The usual precautions were of course taken--that is to say, the three men were roped together, Herr Burckhardt in the middle, one of the guides before, the other behind him. When the climbers reached the _séracs_, at a point marked on the Siegfried Karte as being at an elevation of 2700 mètres, an enormous piece of ice broke off from the upper part of the glacier, and came thundering down. Although by good fortune the mass of the avalanche did not sweep across the path of the three men, they were struck by several large blocks of ice, and sent flying. Jossi, who was leading, went head first into a crevasse of unfathomable depth, dragging after him Herr Burckhardt, who, however, contrived to hold on to the edge of the crevasse, but in such a position that he could not budge, and was unable to help either himself or Jossi. Their lives at that moment depended absolutely on the staunchness of Teutschmann, who alone had succeeded in keeping his feet. It was beyond his power to do more; impossible by his own unaided strength to haul up the two men who hung by the rope. If he had given way a single step all three would have been precipitated to the bottom of the crevasse. So there he stood, with feet and ice-axe firmly planted, holding on for dear life, conscious that the end was a mere question of time, and a very short time; his strength was rapidly waning, and then? It would have been easy for the two to escape by sacrificing the third. One slash of Burckhardt's knife would have freed both Teutschmann and himself. But no such dastardly idea occurred to either of them. They were resolved to live or die together. Half an hour passed; they had almost abandoned hope, and Teutschmann's forces were well-nigh spent, when help came just in time to save them. The same morning another party, consisting of two German tourists, and the two guides Peter Schlegel and Rudolph Kaufmann, had started from the Little Scheideck for the Jungfrau, and coming on traces of Burckhardt's party had followed them up, and arrived before it was too late on the scene of the accident. Without wasting a moment Schlegel went down into the crevasse and fastened Jossi to another rope, so that those above were enabled to draw him up and release Burckhardt and Teutschmann. Jossi, although bruised and exhausted, was able to walk to the Scheideck, and all reached Grindelwald in safety." [Illustration: ON A SNOW-COVERED GLACIER. The party is crossing a Snow Bridge, and the rope between the centre and last man is too slack for safety.] When it is remembered how few people make this expedition, the escape of Mr Burckhardt's party is the more wonderful, and would not have been possible unless other climbers had taken the same route that day. This way up the Jungfrau is always somewhat exposed to falling ice, though sometimes it is less dangerous than at other times. As the editor of _The Alpine Journal_ has written, "no amount of experience can avail against falling missiles, and the best skill of the mountaineer is shown in keeping out of their way." A BRAVE GUIDE The brave actions of guides are so many in number that it would be impossible to tell of them all, and many noble deeds have never found their way into print. The following, however, is related of a guide with whom I have made many ascents, and is furthermore referred to in _The Alpine Journal_ as "an act of bravery for which it would be hard to find a parallel in the annals of mountaineering." On 1st September 1898, a party of two German gentlemen with a couple of guides went up Piz Palü, a glacier-clad peak frequently ascended from Pontresina. One of the guides was a Tyrolese, Klimmer by name, the other a native of the Engadine, Schnitzler. They had completed the ascent of the actual peak, and were on their way down, some distance below the Bellavista Saddle. Here there are several large crevasses, and the slope is very steep at this point. I remember passing down it with Schnitzler the previous January, and finding much care needed to cross a big chasm. Schnitzler was leading, then came the two travellers, finally the Tyrolese, who came down last man. Suddenly Schnitzler, who must have stepped on a snow-bridge, and Herr Nasse dropped without a sound into the chasm. Dr Borchardt was dragged some steps after them, but managed to check himself on the very brink of the abyss. Behind was Klimmer, but on so steep a surface that he could give no help beyond standing firm. At last, after some anxious moments, came a call from below, "Pull!" They did their best but in vain. "My God!" cried Schnitzler from below, "I can't get out!" A period of terrible apprehension followed. Herr Nasse was entreated to try and help a little, or to cut himself free from the rope, as he appeared to be suffering greatly. But he was helpless, hanging with the rope pressing his chest till he could hardly breathe, and cried out that he could stand it no longer. Dr Borchardt made a plucky attempt to render assistance, and the desperate endeavour nearly caused him to fall also into the crevasse. [Illustration: Martin Schocher standing, Schnitzler sitting. On the Summit of Crast' Agüzza in Mid-Winter.] [Illustration: A projecting Cornice of Snow, which might fall at any moment. The accident on the Lyskamm, described on page 35, was due to the breaking of a Cornice.] [Illustration: Between Earth and Sky (page 163).] [Illustration: An extremely narrow Snow Ridge, but a much easier one to pass than that described by Mr Moore (page 160)] The position was terrible, and Herr Nasse was at the end of his forces. He called out in a dying voice that he could bear no more--it was the last time he spoke. Of Schnitzler nothing was heard, and the others could not tell if he were still alive. But while this terrible scene was passing, Schnitzler had performed an act of the highest bravery. First he had tried, by using his axe, to climb out of the icy prison where he hung. This he could not do, so steadying himself against the glassy wall, he deliberately cut himself loose from the rope. He dropped to the floor of the crevasse, which, luckily, was not of extraordinary depth, and being uninjured, he set himself to find a way out. He followed the crevasse along its entire length, and discovered a little ledge of ice, with the aid of which, panting and exhausted, he reached the surface. But even with Schnitzler's help it was impossible to raise Herr Nasse out of the chasm. The rope had cut deeply into the snow. He hung underneath an eave of the soft surface and could not be moved. Another willing helper, an Englishman, now came up, and after a time the body--for Herr Nasse had not survived--was lowered to the floor of the crevasse. Every effort was made to restore animation, but with no result, and there was nothing left to do but leave that icy grave and descend to the valley. Herr Nasse had suffered from a weak heart and an attack of pleurisy, and these gave him but a poor chance of withstanding the terrible pressure of the rope. Dr Scriven, from whose spirited translation from the German I have taken my facts, remarks that, "The death of Professor Nasse seems to emphasize a warning, already painfully impressed on us by the loss of Mr Norman Neruda, that there are special dangers awaiting those whose vital organs are not perfectly sound, and who undertake the exertion and fatigue of long and difficult climbs." FOOTNOTE: [8] In the early days of mountaineering it was the custom to pass the rope through a ring or spring-hook attached to a strong leather belt, instead of, as now, attaching it in a loop round the body of each climber. CHAPTER XIV A WONDERFUL FEAT BY TWO LADIES One of the highest and hardest passes in the Alps is the Sesia-Joch, 13,858 feet high, near Monte Rosa. The well-known mountaineer, Mr Ball, writing in 1863, referred to its first passage by Messrs George and Moore, as "amongst the most daring of Alpine exploits," and expressed a doubt whether it would ever be repeated. The party went _up_ the steep Italian side (on the other, or Swiss side, it is quite easy). We can, therefore, judge of the astonishment of the members of the Alpine Club when they learnt that in 1869 "two ladies had not only crossed this most redoubtable of glacier passes, but crossed it from Zermatt to Alagna, thus descending the wall of rock, the ascent of which had until then been looked on as an extraordinary feat for first-rate climbers." The following extract from an Italian paper, aided by the notes communicated by the Misses Pigeon to _The Alpine Journal_, fully explains how this accidental but brilliant feat of mountaineering was happily brought to a successful termination. "On 11th August 1869, Miss Anna and Miss Ellen Pigeon, of London, were at the Riffel Hotel, above Zermatt, with the intention of making the passage of the Lys-Joch on the next day, in order to reach Gressonay. Starting at 3 A.M. on the 12th, accompanied by Jean Martin, guide of Sierre, and by a porter, they arrived at 4 A.M. at the Gorner Glacier, which they crossed rapidly to the great plateau, enclosed between the Zumstein-Spitz, Signal-Kuppe, Parrot-Spitze, and Lyskamm, where they arrived at 10 A.M. At this point, instead of bearing to the right, which is the way to the Lys-Joch, they turned too much towards the left, so that they found themselves on a spot at the extremity of the plateau, from which they saw beneath their feet a vast and profound precipice, terminating at a great depth upon a glacier. The guide had only once, about four years before, crossed the Lys-Joch, and in these desert and extraordinary places, where no permanent vestiges remain of previous passages, he had not remembered the right direction, nor preserved a very clear idea of the localities. At the sight of the tremendous precipice he began to doubt whether he might not have mistaken the way, and, to form a better judgment, he left the ladies on the Col, half-stiffened with cold from the violence of the north wind, ascended to the Parrot-Spitze, and advanced towards the Ludwigshöhe, in order to examine whether along this precipice, which lay inexorably in front, there might be a place where a passage could be effected. But wherever he turned his eyes he saw nothing but broken rocks and couloirs yet more precipitous. "In returning to the Col after his fruitless exploration, almost certain that he had lost his way, he saw among some _débris_ of rock, an empty bottle (which had been placed there by Messrs George and Moore in 1862). This discovery persuaded him that here must be the pass, since some one in passing by the place had there deposited this bottle. He then applied himself to examining with greater attention the rocks below, and thought he saw a possibility of descending by them. He proposed this to the ladies, and they immediately commenced operations. All being tied together, at proper intervals, with a strong rope, they began the perilous descent, sometimes over the naked rock, sometimes over more or less extensive slopes of ice, covered with a light stratum of snow, in which steps had to be cut. It was often necessary to stop, in order to descend one after the other by means of the rope to a point where it might be possible to rest without being held up. The tremendous precipice was all this time under their eyes, seeming only to increase as they descended. This arduous and perilous exertion had continued for more than seven hours when, towards 6 P.M., the party arrived at a point beyond which all egress seemed closed. Slippery and almost perpendicular rocks beneath, right and left, and everywhere; near and around not a space sufficient to stretch one's self upon, the sun about to set, night at hand! What a position for the courageous travellers, and for the poor guide on whom devolved the responsibility of the fatal consequences which appeared inevitable! "Nevertheless, Jean Martin did not lose his courage. Having caused the ladies to rest on the rocks, he ran right and left, climbing as well as he could, in search of a passage. For about half an hour he looked and felt for a way, but in vain. At length it appeared to him that it would be possible to risk a long descent by some rough projections which occurred here and there in the rocks. With indescribable labour, and at imminent peril of rolling as shapeless corpses into the crevasses of the glacier below, the travellers at length set foot upon the ice. It was 8 P.M.; they had commenced the descent at 11 A.M.; they crossed the Sesia Glacier at a running pace, on account of the increasing darkness of the night, which scarcely allowed them to distinguish the crevasses. After half an hour they set foot on _terra firma_ at the moraine above the Alp of Vigne, where they perceived at no great distance a light, towards which they quickly directed their steps. The shepherd, named Dazza Dionigi, received them kindly, and lodged them for the night. Until they arrived at the Alp, both the ladies and the guide believed that they had made the pass of the Lys-Joch, and that they were now upon an Alp of Gressonay. It was, therefore, not without astonishment that they learned from the shepherd that, instead of this, they were at the head of the Val Sesia, and that they had accomplished the descent of the formidable Sesia-Joch." [Illustration: EXTERIOR OF A CLIMBER'S HUT.] [Illustration: INTERIOR OF A CLIMBER'S HUT.] As an accompaniment to the foregoing highly-coloured narrative, the following modest notes, sent to _The Alpine Journal_ by the Misses Pigeon, will be read with interest: "All mountaineers are aware how much the difficulty of a pass is lessened or increased by the state of the weather. In this we were greatly favoured. For some days it had been very cold and wet at the Riffel; and when we crossed the Sesia-Joch we found sufficient snow in descending the ice-slope to give foothold, which decreased the labour of cutting steps--the axe was only brought into requisition whenever we traversed to right or left. Had the weather been very hot we should have been troubled with rolling stones. It was one of those clear, bright mornings so favourable for mountain excursions. Our guide had only once before crossed the Lys-Joch, four years previously, and on a very misty day. We were, therefore, careful to engage a porter who professed to know the way. The latter proved of no use whatever except to carry a knapsack. "We take the blame to ourselves of missing the Lys-Joch; for, on making the discovery of the porter's ignorance, we turned to _Ball's Guide Book_, and repeatedly translated to Martin a passage we found there, warning travellers to avoid keeping too much to the right near the Lyskamm. The result of our interference was that Martin kept too much to the left, and missed the Lys-Joch altogether. "When we perceived the abrupt termination of the actual Col, we all ascended, with the aid of step-cutting, along the slope of the Parrot-Spitze, until we came to a place where a descent seemed feasible. Martin searched for a better passage, but, after all, we took to the ice-slope, at first, for a little way, keeping on the rocks. Finding the slope so very rapid, we doubted whether we could be right in descending it; for we remembered that the descent of the Lys-Joch is described by Mr Ball as _easy_. We therefore retraced our steps up the slope to our former halting-place, thus losing considerable time, for it was now twelve o'clock. Then it was that Martin explored the Parrot-Spitze still further, and returned in three-quarters of an hour fully persuaded that there was no other way. We re-descended the ice-slope, and lower down crossed a couloir, and then more snow-slopes and rocks brought us to a lower series of rocks, where our passage seemed stopped at five o'clock. Here the mists, which had risen since the morning, much impeded our progress, and we halted, hoping they would disperse. Martin again went off on an exploring expedition, whilst the porter was sent in another direction. As both returned from a fruitless search, and sunset was approaching, the uncomfortable suggestion was made that the next search would be for the best sleeping quarters. However, Martin himself investigated the rocks pronounced impracticable by the porter, and by these we descended to the Sesia Glacier without unusual difficulty. When once fairly on the glacier, we crossed it at a running pace, for it was getting dark, and we feared to be benighted on the glacier. It was dark as we scrambled along the moraine on the other side, and over rocks and grassy knolls till the shepherd's light at Vigne gave us a happy indication that a shelter was not far off. The shouts of our guide brought the shepherd with his oil-lamp to meet us, and it was a quarter to nine o'clock P.M. when we entered his hut. After partaking of a frugal meal of bread and milk, we were glad to accept his offer of a hay bed, together with the unexpected luxury of sheets. When relating the story of our arrival to the Abbé Farinetti on the following Sunday at Alagna, the shepherd said that so great was his astonishment at the sudden apparition of travellers from that direction, that he thought it must be a visit of angels. "We consider the Italian account incorrect as to the time we occupied in the descent. We could not have left our halting-place near the summit for the second time before a quarter to one o'clock, and in eight hours we were in this shepherd's hut. "The Italian account exaggerates the difficulty we experienced. The rope was never used 'to hold up the travellers and let them down one by one.' On the contrary, one lady went _last_, preferring to see the awkward porter in front of her rather than behind. At one spot we came to an abrupt wall of rock and there we gladly availed ourselves of our guide's hand. The sensational sentence about 'rolling as shapeless corpses into the crevasses' is absurd, as we were at that juncture rejoicing in the prospect of a happy termination of our dilemma, and of crossing the glacier in full enjoyment of our senses." The editor of _The Alpine Journal_ concludes with the following comments: "It is impossible to pass over without some further remark the behaviour of the guide and porter who shared this adventure. Jean Martin, if he led his party into a scrape, certainly showed no small skill and perseverance in carrying them safely out of it. Porters have as a class, and with some honourable exceptions, long afforded a proof that Swiss peasants are not necessarily born climbers. Their difficulties and blunders have, indeed, served as one of the standing jokes of Alpine literature. But we doubt if any porter has ever exhibited himself in so ignoble a position as the man who, having begun by obtaining an engagement under false pretences, ended by allowing one of his employers, a lady, to descend the Italian side of the Sesia-Joch last on the rope." A PERILOUS CLIMB In the year 1865 but few different routes were known up Mont Blanc. It has now been ascended from every direction and by every conceivable combination of routes, yet I doubt if any at all rivalling the one I intend quoting the account of has ever been accomplished. The route in question is by the Brenva Glacier on the Italian side of the great mountain, and the travellers who undertook to attempt what the guides hardly thought a possible piece of work, consisted of Mr Walker, his son Horace, Mr Mathews, and Mr Moore, the account which I take from _The Alpine Journal_ having been written by the latter. For guides they had two very first-rate men, Melchior Anderegg and his cousin, Jacob Anderegg. I shall omit the first part of the narrative, interesting though it is, and go at once to the point where, not long after sunrise, the mountaineers found themselves. "We had risen very rapidly, and must have been at an elevation of more than 12,000 feet. Our position, therefore, commanded an extensive view in all directions. The guides were in a hurry, so cutting our halt shorter than would have been agreeable, we resumed our way at 7.55, and after a few steps up a slope at an angle of 50°, found ourselves on the crest of the buttress, and looking down upon, and across, the lower part of a glacier tributary to the Brenva, beyond which towered the grand wall of the Mont Maudit. We turned sharp to the left along the ridge, Jacob leading, followed by Mr Walker, Horace, Mathews, Melchior, and myself last. We had anticipated that, assuming the possibility of gaining the ridge on which we were, there would be no serious difficulty in traversing it, and so much as we could see ahead led us to hope that our anticipations would turn out correct. Before us lay a narrow but not steep arête of rock and snow combined, which appeared to terminate some distance in front in a sharp peak. We advanced cautiously, keeping rather below the top of the ridge, speculating with some curiosity on what lay beyond this peak. On reaching it, the apparent peak proved not to be a peak at all, but the extremity of the narrowest and most formidable ice arête I ever saw, which extended almost on a level for an uncomfortably long distance. Looking back by the light of our subsequent success, I have always considered it a providential circumstance that, at this moment, Jacob, and not Melchior was leading the party. In saying this, I shall not for an instant be suspected of any imputation upon Melchior's courage. But in him that virtue is combined to perfection with the equally necessary one of prudence, while he shares the objection which nearly all guides have to taking upon themselves, without discussion, responsibility in positions of doubt. Had he been in front, I believe that, on seeing the nature of the work before us, we should have halted and discussed the propriety of proceeding; and I believe further that, as the result of that discussion, our expedition would have then and there come to an end. Now in Jacob, with courage as faultless as Melchior's, and physical powers even superior, the virtue of prudence is conspicuous chiefly from its absence; and, on coming to this ugly place, it never for an instant occurred to him that we might object to go on, or consider the object in view not worth the risk which must be inevitably run. He therefore went calmly on without so much as turning to see what we thought of it, while I do not suppose that it entered into the head of any one of us spontaneously to suggest a retreat. "On most arêtes, however narrow the actual crest may be, it is generally possible to get a certain amount of support by driving the pole into the slope on either side. But this was not the case here. We were on the top of a wall, the ice on the right falling vertically (I use the word advisedly), and on the left nearly so. On neither side was it possible to obtain the slightest hold with the alpenstock. I believe also that an arête of pure ice is more often encountered in description than in reality, that term being generally applied to hard snow. But here, for once, we had the genuine article, blue ice without a speck of snow on it. The space for walking was, at first, about the breadth of an ordinary wall, in which Jacob cut holes for the feet. Being last in the line I could see little of what was coming until I was close upon it, and was therefore considerably startled on seeing the men in front suddenly abandon the upright position, which in spite of the insecurity of the steps and difficulty of preserving the balance, had been hitherto maintained, and sit down _à cheval_. The ridge had narrowed to a knife edge, and for a few yards it was utterly impossible to advance in any other way. The foremost men soon stood up again, but when I was about to follow their example Melchior insisted emphatically upon my not doing so, but remaining seated. Regular steps could no longer be cut, but Jacob, as he went along, simply sliced off the top of the ridge, making thus a slippery pathway, along which those behind crept, moving one foot carefully after the other. As for me, I worked myself along with my hands in an attitude safer, perhaps, but considerably more uncomfortable, and, as I went, could not keep occasionally speculating, with an odd feeling of amusement, as to what would be the result if any of the party should chance to slip over on either side--what the rest would do--whether throw themselves over on the other side or not--and if so, what would happen then. Fortunately the occasion for the solution of this curious problem did not arise, and at 9.30 we reached the end of the arête, where it emerged in the long slopes of broken _névé_, over which our way was next to lie. As we looked back along our perilous path, it was hard to repress a shudder, and I think the dominant feeling of every man was one of wonder how the passage had been effected without accident. One good result, however, was to banish from Melchior's mind the last traces of doubt as to our ultimate success, his reply to our anxious enquiry whether he thought we should get up, being, 'We must, for we cannot go back.' In thus speaking, he probably said rather more than he meant, but the fact will serve to show that I have not exaggerated the difficulty we had overcome." Mr Moore goes on to describe the considerable trouble the party had in mounting the extremely steep snow-slope on which they were now embarked. The continual step-cutting was heavy work for the guides. At last they were much annoyed to find between them and their goal "a great wall of ice running right across and completely barring the way upwards. Our position was, in fact, rather critical. Immediately over our heads the slope on which we were, terminated in a great mass of broken _séracs_, which might come down with a run at any moment. It seemed improbable that any way out of our difficulties would be found in that quarter. But, where else to look? There was no use in going to the left--to the right we _could_ not go--and back we _would_ not go. After careful scrutiny, Melchior thought it just possible that we might find a passage through those séracs on the higher and more level portion of the glacier to the right of them, and there being obviously no chance of success in any other direction, we turned towards them. The ice here was steeper and harder than it had yet been. In spite of all Melchior's care, the steps were painfully insecure, and we were glad to get a grip with one hand of the rocks alongside of which we passed. The risk, too, of an avalanche was considerable, and it was a relief when we were so close under the séracs that a fall from above could not well hurt us. Melchior had steered with his usual discrimination, and was now attacking the séracs at the only point where they appeared at all practical. Standing over the mouth of a crevasse choked with _débris_, he endeavoured to lift himself on to its upper edge, which was about 15 feet above. But to accomplish this seemed at first a task too great even for his agility, aided as it was by vigorous pushes. At last, by a marvellous exercise of skill and activity, he succeeded, pulled up Mr Walker and Horace, and then cast off the rope to reconnoitre, leaving them to assist Mathews, Jacob and myself in the performance of a similar manoeuvre. We were all three still below, when a yell from Melchior sent a thrill through our veins. 'What is it?' said we to Mr Walker. A shouting communication took place between him and Melchior, and then came the answer, 'He says it is all right.' That moment was worth living for." Mr Moore tells how, over now easy ground, the party rapidly ascended higher and higher. "We reached the summit at 3.10, and found ourselves safe at Chamouni at 10.30. Our day's work had thus extended to nearly 20 hours, of which 17½ hours were actual walking." It is interesting to note that in after years a route was discovered on the opposite, or French side of Mont Blanc, of which the chief difficulty was an extremely narrow--but in this case also steep--ice ridge. This ascent, _via_ the Aiguille de Bionnassay, enjoys, I believe, an even greater reputation than that by the Brenva. It has been accomplished twice by ladies, the first time by Miss Katherine Richardson, whose skill and extraordinary rapidity of pace have given her a record on more than one great peak. Miss Richardson, having done all the hard part of the climb, descended from the Dome de Gouter. The second ascent by a lady was undertaken successfully in 1899, by Mademoiselle Eugénie de Rochat, who has a brilliant list of climbs in the Mont Blanc district to her credit. CHAPTER XV A FINE PERFORMANCE WITHOUT GUIDES The precipitous peak of the Meije, in Dauphiné, had long, like the Matterhorn, been believed inaccessible, and it was only after repeated attempts that at last the summit was reached. The direct route from La Bérarde will always be an extremely difficult climb to anyone who desires to do his fair share of the work; the descent of the great wall of rock is one of the few places I have been down, which took longer on the descent than on the ascent. When the members of the Alpine Club heard that a party of Englishmen had succeeded, _without guides_, in making the expedition, they were much impressed by the feat, and on 17th December 1879, one of the climbers, Mr Charles Pilkington, read a paper before the Club describing his ascent. From it I quote the following. The party included the brothers Pilkington and Mr Gardiner. [Illustration: The Meije is to the left, the Glacier Carré is the snow-patch on it, beneath this is the Great Wall.] [Illustration: ASCENDING A SNOWY WALL (page 216).] "On the 19th July 1878, we reached La Bérarde, where we found Mr Coolidge with the two Almers. Coolidge knew that we had come to try the Meije, and he had very kindly given us all the information he could, not only about it, but about several other peaks and passes in the district. Almer also, after finding out our plans, was good enough not to laugh at us, and gave us one or two useful hints. He told us as well that the difficulty did not so much consist in finding the way as in getting up it. "At two o'clock in the afternoon of 20th July, we left for our bivouac in the Vallon des Etançons, taking another man with us besides our two porters, and at four reached the large square rock called the Hôtel Châteleret, after the ancient name of the valley. We determined to sleep here instead of at Coolidge's refuge a little higher up. The Meije was in full view, and we had our first good look at it since we had read the account of its ascent. "We went hopefully to bed, telling our porters to call us at eleven the same evening, so as to start at midnight; but long before that it was raining hard, and it required all the engineering skill of the party and the india-rubber bag to keep the water out. It cleared up at daybreak. Of course it was far too late to start then; besides that, we had agreed not to make the attempt unless we had every sign of fine weather. "As we had nothing else to do, we started at 8 A.M. on an exploring expedition, taking our spare ropes and some extra provisions, to leave, if possible, at M. Duhamel's cairn, some distance up the mountain, whilst our porters were to improve the refuge and lay in a stock of firewood. The snow was very soft, and we were rather lazy, so it was not until eleven that we reached the upper part of the Brêche Glacier, and were opposite our work. The way lies up the great southern buttress, which forms the eastern boundary of the Brêche Glacier, merging into the general face of the mountain about one-third of the total height from the Glacier des Etançons, and 700 feet below, and a little to the west of the Glacier Carré, from whence the final peak is climbed. The chief difficulty is the ascent from M. Duhamel's cairn, on the top of the buttress to the Glacier Carré. "After a few steps up the snow, we gained the crest of the buttress by a short scramble. The crest is narrow, but very easy, and we went rapidly along, until we came to where a great break in the arête divides the buttress into an upper and a lower part; being no longer able to keep along the crest, we were forced to cross the rocks to our left to the couloir. Not quite liking the look of the snow, Gardiner asked us to hold tight whilst he tried it. Finding it all right he kicked steps up, and at five minutes past one we reached the cairn, having taken one hour and thirty-five minutes from the glacier. The great wall rose straight above us, but the way up, which we had had no difficulty in making out with the telescope from below, was no longer to be seen. Our spirits which had been rising during our ascent from the glacier, sunk once more, and our former uncertainty came back upon us; for it is difficult to imagine anything more hopeless-looking than this face of the Meije. It has been said that, after finding all the most promising ways impossible, this seeming impossibility was tried as a last chance. We looked at it a long time, but at last gave up trying to make out the way as a bad job, determined to climb where we could, if we had luck enough to get so far another day; so, leaving our spare ropes, a bottle of wine, a loaf of bread, and a tin of curried fowl carefully covered with stones, we made the best of our way back, reaching the glacier in one hour and twenty minutes, and our bivouac in an hour and a half more. There we spent the next night and following day, but at last we had to give in to the bad weather, and go sorrowfully down to La Bérarde. It was very disappointing. We had been looking forward to the attempt for more than six months. I had to leave in a few days for England. It was not a mountain for two men to be on alone; what if we had spent all our time and trouble for nothing, and only carried our bed and provisions to the cairn for someone else to use? "On the evening of the 24th we were again at our bivouac; this time there was a cold north wind blowing, and the weather looked more settled than it had yet done since we came into the district. We watched the last glow of the setting sun fade on the crags of the Meije, and then crawled into our now well-known holes. At midnight exactly we were off, and, as we had much to carry, we took our porters with us as far as the bottom of the buttress, where we waited for daylight. At last the Tête du Replat opposite to us caught the reflection of the light, so, leaving a bottle of champagne for our return, as a reward of victory or consolation for defeat, we started at 3.15, unfortunately with an omen, for in bidding good-bye to our porters, we said 'adieu,' instead of 'au revoir, and though we altered the word at once, they left us with grave faces, old Lagier mournfully shaking his head. Gardiner took the lead again, and at 4.45 we once more stood beside the stone-man, finding our _câche_ of provisions all safe. Here we rearranged our luggage. Both the others took heavy loads; Gardiner the knapsack, Lawrence the 200 feet of spare rope and our wine tin, holding three quarts; the sleeping bag only was given to me, as I was told off to lead. "We got under weigh at 5.15, and soon clambered up the remaining part of the buttress, and reached the bottom of the great wall, the Glacier Carré being about 700 feet above us, and some distance to our right. We knew that from here a level traverse had to be made until nearly under the glacier before it was possible to turn upwards. We had seen a ledge running in the right direction; crossing some steep rocks and climbing over a projecting knob (which served us a nasty trick on our descent), we let ourselves gently down on to the ledge, leaving a small piece of red rag to guide us in coming back. The ledge, although 4 or 5 feet broad, was not all that could be wished, for it was more than half-covered with snow, which, as the ledge sloped outwards, was not to be trusted; the melting and refreezing of this had formed ice below, nearly covering the available space, forcing us to walk on the edge. We cut a step here and there. It improved as we went on, and when half-way across the face we were able to turn slightly upwards, and at 6.30 were near the spot where later in the day the icicles from the extreme western end of the Glacier Carré fall. It is not necessary to go right into the line of fire, and in coming back we kept even farther away than on the ascent. "So far the way had been fairly easy to find, but now came the great question of the climb; how to get up the 600 feet of rock wall above us. To our right it rose in one sheer face, the icicles from the Glacier Carré, fringing the top; to our left the rocks, though not so steep, were very smooth, and at the top, especially to the right, near the glacier, they became precipitous. A little above us a bridge ledge led away to the left, slanting upwards towards the lowest and most practicable part of the wall, obviously the way up. Climbing to this ledge, we followed it nearly half-way back across the face, then the holding-places got fewer and more filled with ice, the outward slope more and more until at last its insecure and slippery look warned us off it, and we turned up the steeper but rougher rocks on our right. In doing so I believe we forsook the route followed by all our predecessors, but we were obliged to do so by the glazed state of the rocks. "As the direction in which we were now going was taking us towards the glacier and the steep upper rocks, we soon turned again to our left to avoid them, the only way being up some smooth slabs, with very little hold, the sort of rocks where one's waistcoat gives a great deal of holding power; worming oneself up these we reached a small shelf where we were again in doubt. It was impossible to go straight up; to the left the rocks, though easier, only led to the higher part of the ledge we had forsaken; we spent some minutes examining this way, but again did not like the look of the glazed rocks; so we took the only alternative and went to the right. Keeping slightly upwards, we gained about 50 feet in actual height by difficult climbing. We were now getting on to the steep upper rocks near the glacier, which we had wanted to avoid. "This last piece of the wall will always remain in our minds as the most desperate piece of work we have ever done; the rocks so far had been firm, but now, although far too steep for loose stones to lodge on, were so shattered that we dared not trust them; at the same time we had to be very careful, lest in removing any we should bring others down upon us. "One place I shall never forget. Gardiner was below, on a small ledge, with no hand-hold to speak of, trying to look as if he could stand any pull; my brother on a knob a little higher up, to help me if necessary. I was able to pull myself about 8 feet higher, but the next rock was insecure, and the whole nearly perpendicular. A good many loose stones had been already pulled out; this one would not come. It is hard work tugging at a loose stone with one hand, the other in a crack, and only one foot finding anything to rest on. I looked down, told them how it was, and came down to rest. "For about a minute nothing was said; all our faces turned towards the Glacier Carré, now only about 60 feet above us. We all felt it would have been hard indeed to turn back, yet it was not a pleasant place, and we could not see what was again above. We were on what may be fairly called a precipice. In removing the loose stones, the slightest backhanded jerk, just enough to miss the heads of the men behind, sent them clear into the air; they never touched anything for a long time after leaving the hand, and disappeared with a disagreeable hum on to the Glacier des Etançons, 1800 feet below. We looked and tried on both sides, but it was useless, so we went at it again. After the fourth or fifth attempt I managed to get up about 10 feet, to where there was some sort of hold; then my brother followed, giving me rope enough to get to a firm rock, where I remained till joined by the others. It was almost as bad above, but we crawled carefully up; one place actually overhung--fortunately there was plenty of hold, and we slung ourselves up it! From this point the rocks became rather easier, and at 9.30 we reached a small sloping shelf of rock, about 20 yards to the west of the Glacier Carré and on the top of the great rock wall. Stopping here for a short time to get cool, and to let one of the party down to get the axes, which had been tied to a rope and had caught in a crevice in the rock, we changed leaders, and crossing some shelving rocks, climbed up a gully, or cleft, filled with icicles, and reached the platform of rock at the south-west end of the Glacier Carré at 10.15 A.M. "The platform we had reached can only be called one by comparison; it is rather smooth, and slopes too much to form a safe sleeping-place, but we left our extra luggage there. "At 11.10 we started up the glacier, Gardiner going ahead, kicking steps into the soft, steep snow. "We were much more cheerful now than we had been two hours before. My companions had got rid of their heavy loads, the day was still very fine, and Almer had told us that, could we but reach the glacier, we should have a good chance of success. "Shortly before 1 P.M. we were underneath the well-known overhanging top, the rocks of which, cutting across the face, form a triangular corner. It is the spot where Gaspard lost so much time looking for the way on the first ascent. We knew that the arête had here to be crossed, and the northern face on the other side taken to. "Almost before I got my head over the crest came the anxious question from below, 'Will it go on the other side?' I could not see, however; so when the others came up, Gardiner fixed himself and let us down to the full extent of the rope. The whole northern face, as far as we could see, looked terribly icy; but as there was no other way of regaining the arête higher up without going on to it, we told him to come down after us. "Turning to the right as soon as possible, we had to traverse the steep, smooth face for a short distance. It took a long time, for the rocks were even worse than they had appeared; we often had to clear them of ice for a yard before we could find any hold at all and sometimes only the left hand could be spared for cutting. After about 50 yards of this work we were able to turn upwards, and with great difficulty wriggled up the slippery rocks leading to the arête; rather disgusted to find the north face so difficult--owing, perhaps, to the lateness of the season. "It was our last difficulty, for the arête, though narrow, gives good hand and foot-hold, and we pressed eagerly onwards. In a few minutes it became more level, and there, sure enough, were the three stone-men, only separated from us by some easy rocks and snow, which we went at with a rush, and at 2.25 we stood on the highest point of the Meije. "Knowing that it would be useless for us to try and descend further than the Glacier Carré that day, and as it was pleasanter on the top than there, we went in for a long halt. Untying the rope--for the top is broad enough to be safe--we examined the central cairn, where the tokens are kept. We found a tin box, containing the names of our predecessors; a bottle, hanging by a string, the property of Mr Coolidge; a tri-coloured flag; and a scented pocket-handkerchief belonging to M. Guillemin, still retaining its former fragrance, which it had not 'wasted on the desert air.' We tore a corner off each, leaving a red-and-yellow rag in exchange; put our names in the tin, and an English penny with a hole bored through it. "Then, after repairing the rather dilapidated southern cairn, we sat down to smoke and enjoy the view, which the fact of the mountain standing on the outside of the group, the tremendous depth to which the eye plunges on each side, the expansive panorama of the Dauphiné and neighbouring Alps, and the beautiful distant view of the Pennine chain from Mont Blanc to Monte Rosa, combine to make one of the finest in the Alps. "At four o'clock, after an hour and a half on the top, we started downwards, soon arriving at the spot where it was necessary to leave the arête; however, before doing so, we went along it to where it was cut off, to see if we could let ourselves straight down into the gap, and so avoid the detour by the northern face, but it was impracticable; so, putting the middle of the spare rope round a projecting rock on the arête, we let ourselves down to where we had gone along on the level, pulling the rope down after us; then regaining the gap by the morning's route, we crossed it, and leisurely descended the south-western face to the Glacier Carré, filling our now empty wine tin with water on the way down. We reached the glacier at 6.30. In skirting the base of the Pic du Glacier we found a nice hollow in the snow, which looked a good place to sleep in. Gardiner wanted one of us to stop and build a stone-wall, whilst the others fetched the bag and provisions from the bottom of the glacier. Lawrence was neutral; I was rather against it, having slept on snow before. At last we all went down to the rocky platform where our luggage had been left. We cleared a place for the bag, but it all sloped so much, and the edge of the precipice was so near, that we dared not lie down. We looked for a good rock to tie ourselves to; even that could not be found. Then some one thought we might scrape a hole in the steep snow above us, and get into it. That, of course, was quite out of the question. Nothing therefore remained for us but Gardiner's hollow above--the only level place we had seen above M. Duhamel's cairn large enough for us to lay our bag on. There was no time to be lost; it was getting dark; a sharp frost had already set in: so we at once shouldered our traps and trudged wearily up the glacier once more, wishing now that we had left somebody to build a wall. "On reaching the hollow we put the ropes, axes, hats, and knapsack on the snow as a sort of carpet, placed the bag on the top, then, pulling off our boots for pillows, and putting on the comfortable woollen helmets given to us by Mrs Hartley, got into the bag to have our supper. Fortunately there was not much wind; but it was rather difficult to open the meat tin. We did as well as we could, however, and after supper tried to smoke; but the cold air got into the bag and made that a failure; so we looked at the scene instead. "The moon was half full, and shone upon us as we lay, making everything look very beautiful. We could see the snow just in front of us, and then, far away through the frosty air all the mountains on the other side of the Vallon des Etançons, with the silver-grey peak of the Ecrins behind, its icy ridges standing out sharply against the clear sky; and deep down in the dark valley below was the signal fire of our porters. As this could only be seen by sitting bolt upright, we got tired of looking at it, and the last link connecting us with the lower world being broken, we felt our utter loneliness. "The moon soon going behind a rocky spur of the Pic du Glacier, we lay down and tried to get warm by pulling the string round the neck of the bag as tight as possible and breathing inside; but somehow the outside air got in also. So closing it as well as we could, with only our heads out, we went to sleep, but not for long. The side on which we lay soon got chilled. Now, as the bag was narrow, we all had to face one way on account of our knees; so the one who happened to be the soonest chilled through would give the word, and we all turned together. I suppose we must have changed sides every half-hour through the long night. We got some sleep, however, and felt all right when the first glimmering of dawn came over the mountains on our left. As soon as we could see we had breakfast; but the curried fowl was frozen, and the bread could only be cut with difficulty, as a shivering seized one every minute. We had the greatest trouble in getting our boots on. They were pressed out of shape, and, in spite of having been under our heads, were hard frozen. At last, by burning paper inside, and using them as lantern for our candle, we thawed them enough to get them on, and then spent a quarter of an hour stamping about to thaw ourselves. We rolled the bag up and tied it fast to a projecting rock, hanging the meat tin near as a guide to anyone looking for it. "At 4.30 we set off, very thankful that we had a fine day before us. We soon went down the glacier, and down and across to the shelf of rock where the real descent of the wall was to begin. A few feet below was a jagged tooth of rock which we could not move; so to it we tied one end of the 100 feet of rope, taking care to protect the rope where it pressed on the sharp edges, with pieces of an old handkerchief; the other end we threw over the edge, and by leaning over we could just see the tail of it on some rocks below the bad part,[9] so we knew it was long enough. "After a short discussion we arranged to go down one at a time, as there were places where we expected to throw all our weight on the rope. Gardiner was to go first as he was the heaviest; my brother next, carrying all the traps and the three axes, as he had the strongest pair of hands and arms in the party; whilst I as the lightest, was to bring down the rear. So tying the climbing rope round his waist as an extra help, Gardiner started, whilst we paid it out. He soon disappeared, but we knew how he was getting on, and when he was in the worst places, by the 'Lower,' 'A little lower,' 'Hold,' 'Hold hard,' which came up from below, getting fainter as he got lower. Fifty feet of the rope passed through our hands before he stopped going. 'Can you hold there?' we asked. 'No. Hold me while I rest a little, and then give me 10 feet more if you can.' So after a while we got notice to lower, and down he went again until nearly all our rope was gone; then it slackened. He told us he was fast, and that we could pull up the rope. "Then Lawrence shouldered his burdens, the three axes being tied below him with a short piece of rope. The same thing happened again, only it was more exciting, for every now and then the axes caught and loosened with a jerk, which I felt on the rope I was paying out, although it was tied to him. At first I thought it was a slip, but soon got used to it. Lawrence did not go so far as Gardiner, but stopped to help me at the bottom of the worst piece. "It was now my turn. Tying the other end of the loose rope round me, I crawled cautiously down to where the tight rope was fixed. The others told me afterwards they did not like it. I certainly did not. The upper part was all right; but lower down the rocks were so steep that if I put much weight on the rope it pulled me off them, and gave a tendency to swing over towards the Glacier Carré, which, as only one hand was left for climbing with, was rather difficult to resist. I remember very well sitting on a projecting rock, with nothing below it but air for at least 100 feet. Leaving this, Lawrence half pulled me towards him with the loose rope. A few steps more and I was beside him, and we descended together to Gardiner, cutting off the fixed rope high up, so as to leave as little as possible, and in a few minutes more we all three reached the small shelf of rocks above the smooth slabs by which we had descended the day before. It was the place where we had spent some time trying to avoid the steep bit we had just descended, and which had taken us nearly two hours. "This ledge is about 3 feet broad. We had got down the only place on the mountain that had given us any anxiety. It was warm and pleasant; all the day was before us; so we took more than an hour to lunch and rest. "On starting again we ought to have stuck to our old route and descended by the slabs, as we could easily have done; but after a brief discussion we arranged to take a short cut, by fixing a second rope and letting ourselves straight down the drop on to the lower slanting ledge, at a point a few feet higher than where we had left it on the ascent. "We descended one at a time, as before, and, what with tying and untying, took much longer than we should have done had we gone the other way. On gaining the ledge we turned to our left and soon came across one of our marks; then striking down sooner than our old route would have taken us, we gave a wider berth to the falling ice, and got into the traverse leading to the top of the buttress. Along it we went; but it looked different, had less snow, and when we came near the end a steep rock, with a nasty drop below, blocked the way. It appeared so bad that I said we were wrong. As the others were not sure, we retraced our steps, and by a very difficult descent gained a lower ledge. There was no snow on this, but the melting of the snow above made the rocks we had to take hold of so wet that we often got a stream of water down our arms and necks. "At last, after nearly crossing, it became quite impossible, and we turned back, having gained nothing but a wetting. "Below it was far too steep. Immediately above was the place we had tried just before. We could not make it out; we had been so positive about the place above. "We were just thinking of trying it again more carefully, when Lawrence pointed up at something, and there, sure enough, was the bit of red rag left the day before to show the commencement of the traverse. "We marked where it was, and then crawled back along the ledge on which we were. Scrambling up the steep drop, we made quickly upwards, and, turning towards our flag, found that the only way to it was along the very ledge where we had first tried, and which proved to be the traverse after all. "We were very glad to get into it once more, as for the last three hours we had been on the look-out for falling ice. Some had already shot over our heads, sending showers of splinters on to us, and one piece as big as one's fist had come rather closer than was pleasant. On our left, the Glacier Carré kept up a regular fire of it, the ice following with tremendous noise on to the rocks below. Every time it gave us a start, as we could not always see at once where the fall had taken place; and although the danger was more imaginary than real, it is not pleasant to be constantly on the look-out, and flattening one's self against the rocks to avoid being hit. "We soon crossed the snowy part of the traverse, and were again in front of the rock which had turned us back before. It looked no better; but on going close up we found a small crack near the top, just large enough to get our fingers into, giving excellent hold. By this we swung ourselves up and across the worst part. "We thought we had only two hours more easy descent, and our work would be done. But we made a mistake. "At first we went rapidly down, and were soon cheered by the sight of M. Duhamel's cairn, looking about five minutes off. I was in front at the time, and was just getting on to a short snow-slope by which we had ascended the day before, when, doubting its safety, I asked the others to hold fast whilst I tried it. The moment I put my foot on the snow, all the top went away, slowly at first, then, taking to the left, went down the couloir with a rush. We tried again where the upper layer had gone away, but it was all unsafe; so we had to spend half an hour getting down the rocks, where we had ascended in ten minutes, and it was not until 2.30 that we reached the cairn. "It was 3.30 before we continued the descent. The couloir was not in good order and required care. Gardiner, who was in front, did not get on as well as usual. At last, thinking we might get impatient, he showed us his fingers, which were bleeding in several places, and awfully raw and sore. He had pluckily kept it all to himself until the real difficulties were over; but the snow of the couloir had softened his hands, and these last rocks were weathered granite, and very sharp and cutting; so he had to go very gingerly. "At the bottom of the buttress a surprise awaited us, for as we descended the last 20 feet, the weather-beaten face of old Lagier, our porter, appeared above the rocks. The faithful old fellow said he had traced our descent by the occasional flashing of the wine tin in the sun, and had come alone to meet us, bringing us provisions as he thought we might have run short. He had waited six hours for us, and had iced the bottle of champagne which had been left on the ascent. We opened it and then hurried down to the glacier, taking off the rope at the moraine, and ran all the rest of the way on the snow to our bivouac, like a lot of colts turned loose in a field, feeling it a great relief to get on to something on which we could tumble about as we liked without falling over a precipice." That the Meije is a really difficult mountain may be assumed from the fact that for some years after its first ascent, no party succeeded in getting up and down it on the same day. When every step of the way became well known, of course much quicker times were possible, and when, on 16th September 1892, I went up it with the famous Dauphiné guide, Maximin Gaspard, and Roman Imboden (the latter aged twenty-three, and perhaps the finest rock climber in Switzerland), we had all in our favour. There was neither ice nor snow on the rocks, and no icicles hung from the Glacier Carré, while the weather was still and cloudless. We slept at the bottom of the buttress--just at the spot where Mr Pilkington met his porter--and from here were exactly four hours (including a halt of one hour) reaching the top of the Meije. It is now the fashion to cross the Meije from La Bérarde to La Grave, the descent on the other side being also extremely hard. For a couple of hours after leaving the summit a narrow ridge is traversed with several formidable gaps in it. FOOTNOTE: [9] The remains of this rope hung for years where Mr Pilkington had placed it, and when I ascended the Meije I saw the bleached end of it hanging over as sickening looking a place as I have ever desired to avoid. The ordinary route passes more to the west. CHAPTER XVI THE PIZ SCERSCEN TWICE IN FOUR DAYS--THE FIRST ASCENT OF MONT BLANC BY A WOMAN. It was a mad thing to do. I realised that when thinking of it afterwards; but this is how it happened. I had arranged with a friend, Mr Edmund Garwood, to try a hitherto unattempted route on a mountain not far from Maloja. He was to bring his guide, young Roman Imboden; I was to furnish a second man, Wieland, of St Moritz. [Illustration: WIELAND ON THE HIGHEST POINT OF PIZ SCERSCEN (page 200).] [Illustration: A PARTY ON A MOUNTAIN TOP.] [Illustration: THE OTHER PARTY DESCENDING PIZ BERNINA (page 202).] [Illustration: A PARTY COMMENCING THE DESCENT OF A SNOW RIDGE.] The hour had come to start, the carriage was at the door and the provisions were in it, and Wieland and I were in readiness when, to our surprise, Roman turned up without Mr Garwood. A note which he brought explained that the latter was not well, but hoped I would make the expedition all the same, and take Roman with me. I was unwilling to monopolise a new ascent, though probably only an easy one, so I refused to go till my friend was better, and asked the guides to suggest something else. The weather was lovely and our food ready, and it seemed a pity to waste either. Wieland could not think of a suitable climb, so I turned to Roman, who had only arrived at Pontresina two days before, and asked him his ideas. He very sensibly inquired: "What peaks have you not done yet here, ma'am?" "All but the Scerscen." "Then we go for the--whatever you call it." "Oh, but Roman," I exclaimed, "the Scerscen is very difficult, and there is 3 feet of fresh snow on the mountains, and it is out of the question!" "I don't believe any of these mountains are difficult," said Roman doggedly, with that contempt for all Engadine climbing shown by guides from the other side of Switzerland. "Ask Wieland," I suggested. Wieland smiled at the question, and said he did not at all mind going to look at the Scerscen, but, as to ascending it under the present conditions, of course it was absurd. "Besides," he added, "we are much too late to go to the Marinelli Hut to-day." "Why not do it from the Mortel Hut?" I remarked, on the "in for a penny in for a pound" principle. He smiled again; indeed, I think he laughed, and agreed that, as anyhow we could not go up the Scerscen, we might as well sleep at the Mortel Hut as anywhere else. "Have you ever been up it?" Roman inquired. Wieland answered that he had not. Roman turned to me: "Can you find the mountain? Should you know it if you saw it? Don't let us go up the wrong one, ma'am!" I promised to lead them to the foot of the peak, and Roman repeated his conviction that all Engadine mountains were perfectly easy, and that we should find ourselves on the top of the Scerscen next morning. However, he made no objection to taking an extra rope of 100 feet, and, telling one friend our plan in strictest confidence, we climbed into the carriage. We duly arrived at the Mortel Hut and were early in bed, as Roman wished us to set out at an early hour, or a late one, if I may thus allude to 11 P.M. He was still firmly convinced that to the top of the Scerscen we should go, and wanted every moment in hand, in spite of his recent criticisms of Engadine mountains. There was a very useful moon, and by its light we promised Roman to take him to the foot of the peak, where its rocky sides rise abruptly from the Scerscen Glacier. I must here explain that there are several ways up the Scerscen. I wished to ascend by the rocks on the south side, which, though harder, were safer than the other routes. As for the descent (if we got up!) we intended coming down the way we had ascended, little knowing not only that no one had been down by this route, but also that a party had attempted to get down it and had been driven back. As for finding our way up, some notes in the _Alpine Journal_ were our only guide. The mountain had been previously ascended but a few times altogether, and only, I think, once or twice by the south face. No lady had up till then tried it. We were off punctually at 11 P.M., and by the brilliant light of the moon made good time over the glacier and up the snow slopes leading to the Sella Pass. This we reached in three hours, without a pause, from the hut, and, making no halt there, immediately plunged into the softer snow on the Italian side, and began to skirt the precipices on our left. Even in midsummer, it was still dark at this early hour, and the moon had already set. A great rocky peak rose near us, and Wieland gave it as his opinion that it was the Scerscen. I differed from him, believing our mountain to be some distance farther, so it was mutually agreed that we should halt for food, after which we should have more light to enable us to determine our position. Gradually the warmth of dawn crept over the sky, and soon the beautiful spectacle of an Alpine sunrise was before us, with the wonderful "flush of adoration" on the mountain heads. There was no doubt now where we were; our peak was some way beyond, and the only question was, how to go up it? I repeated to Roman the information I had gleaned from the Journal, and he thanked me, doubtless having his own ideas, which he intended alone to be guided by. Luckily, as we advanced the mountain became visible from base to summit, so that Roman could trace out his way up it as upon a map. We walked up the glacier to the foot of the mighty wall, and soon began to go up it, advancing for some time with fair rapidity, in spite of the fresh snow. After, perhaps, a couple of hours or so, we came to our first real difficulty. This was a tall, red cliff, with a cleft up part of it, and, as there was an evil-looking and nearly perpendicular gully of ice to the right and overhanging rocks to the left, we had either to go straight up or abandon the expedition. The cleft was large and was garnished with a sturdy icicle, or column of ice, some 5 feet or more in diameter. Bidding me wedge myself into a firm place, Roman began to cut footholds up the icicle, and then, when after a few steps the cleft or chimney ended, he turned to his right and wormed himself along the very face of the cliff, holding on by the merest irregularities, which can hardly be termed ledges. After a couple of yards he struck straight up, and wriggling somehow on the surface, rendered horribly slippery by the snow, he at last, after what seemed an age, called on Wieland to follow. What was a _tour de force_ for the first man was comparatively easy for the second, and soon my turn came to try my hand--or rather my feet and knees and any other adhesive portion of my person--on the business. The first part was the worst, for, as the rope came from the side and not above till the traverse was made, I had no help. Eventually I, too, emerged on to the wall, and saw right over me the rope passing through a gap, behind which, excellently placed, were the guides. I helped myself to the utmost of my capacity, but a pull was not unwelcome towards the end, when, exhausted and breathless, I could struggle no more. As I joined the guides they moved to give me space on the ledge, and we spent a well-earned quarter of an hour in rest and refreshment. The worst was now over, but owing to the snow, which covered much of the rock to a depth of about 2 or 3 feet, the remainder of the way was distinctly difficult, and as the mountain was totally unknown to us we never could tell what troubles might be in store. However, having left the foot of the actual peak at 5.40 A.M., we arrived on the top at 10.40 A.M., and as we lifted our heads above the final rocks, hardly daring to believe that we really were on the summit, a distant cheer was borne to our ears from Piz Bernina, and we knew that our arrival had been observed by another party. So formidable did we consider the descent that we only allowed ourselves ten minutes on the top, and then we prepared to go. Could we cross the ridge to Piz Bernina and so avoid the chimney? It had a great reputation, and we feared to embark on the unknown. So at 10.50 A.M. we began the descent, moving one at a time with the utmost caution. Before long the difficulties increased as we reached the steeper part of the mountain. The rocks now streamed with water from the rapidly melting snow, under the rays of an August sun. As I held on, streams ran in at my wristbands, and soon I was soaked through. But the work demanded such close attention that a mere matter of discomfort was nothing. Presently we had to uncoil our spare 100 feet of rope, and now our progress grew slower and slower. After some hours we came to the chimney. No suitable rock could be found to attach the rope to, so Roman sat down and thought the matter out. The difficulty was to get the last man down; for the two first, held from above, the descent was easy. Roman soon hit upon an ingenious idea. Wieland and I were to go down to the bottom of the cleft. Wieland was to unrope me and, leaving me, was to cut steps _across_ the ice-slope to our left till leverage was obtainable for the rope across the boss of rock where Roman stood, and where it would remain in position so long as it was kept taut, with Roman at one end and Wieland slowly paying out from below. The manoeuvre succeeded, and after about two hours' work Wieland had hewn a large platform in the ice and prepared to gradually let out the rope as Roman came down. He descended in grand form, puffing at his pipe and declared the difficulty grossly over-rated, though he did not despise the precaution. At 2.30 A.M. we re-entered the Mortel Hut, somewhat tired, but much pleased with the success of our expedition. Our second ascent of Piz Scerscen is soon told. Four days later Roman casually remarked to me: "It is a pity, ma'am, we have not crossed the Scerscen to the Bernina." "It is," I replied. "Let us start at once and do it." Wieland was consulted, and was only too delighted to go anywhere under Roman's leadership. Our times will give an idea of the changed state of the mountain, for, leaving the Mortel Hut at 12.30 midnight, we were on the top of the Scerscen at 8 A.M. At nine we set off, and taking things leisurely, with halts for food, we passed along the famous arête, and, thanks to Roman's choice of route, met with not one really hard step. At 2.30 P.M. we found ourselves on the top of Piz Bernina, and had a chat with another party, who had arrived not long before. I waited to see them start, and rejoiced that I had kept two plates. Then we, too, set forth, and were in the valley by 7 P.M. THE FIRST ASCENT OF MONT BLANC BY A WOMAN, AND SOME SUBSEQUENT ASCENTS The first woman who reached the summit of Mont Blanc was a native of Chamonix, Maria Paradis by name. Her account of her expedition is so admirably graphic and picturesque that I shall give a translation of it as like the original as I can. Though it was so far back as the year 1809, Maria writes quite in the spirit of modern journalism. She begins:--"I was only a poor servant. One day the guides said to me, 'We are going up there, come with us. Travellers will come and see you afterwards and give you presents.' That decided me, and I set out with them. When I reached the Grand Plateau I could not walk any longer. I felt very ill, and I lay down on the snow. I panted like a chicken in the heat. They held me up by my arms on each side and dragged me along. But at the Rochers-Rouge I could get no further, and I said to them 'Chuck me into a crevasse and go on yourselves.' "'You must go to the top,' answered the guides. They seized hold of me, they dragged me, they pushed me, they carried me, and at last we arrived. Once at the summit, I could see nothing clearly, I could not breathe, I could not speak." Maria was thirty years of age, and made quite a fortune out of her achievement. From that time, tourists returning from Mont Blanc noticed with surprise, as they passed through the pine woods, a feast spread out under the shade of a huge tree. Cream, fruit, etc., were tastefully displayed on the white cloth. A neat-looking peasant woman urged them to partake. "It is Maria of Mont Blanc!" the guides would cry, and the travellers halted to hear the story of her ascent and to refresh themselves. The second woman, and the first lady to climb Mont Blanc, was a Frenchwoman, Mademoiselle d'Angeville. For years she had determined to make the attempt, but it was only in 1838, when she was 44 years of age, that she came to Chamonix with the intention of immediately setting out for the great mountain. She had many difficulties to surmount. The guides feared the responsibility of taking up a woman, many of the Chamonix people thought her mad, and while one was ready to offer a thousand francs to five that she would not reach the top, another was prepared to accept heavy odds that there would be a catastrophe. At last, however, all was ready, and she started. Two other parties offered to join her. She declined with thanks. After half an hour on the glacier she detached herself from the rope and would accept no help. This was far from being out of sheer bravado, it was simply that she desired to inspire confidence in her powers. During the night on the rocks of the Grands Mulets she suffered terribly from cold and could not snatch a moment's sleep. When the party stopped for breakfast at the Grand Plateau, she could eat nothing. At the Corridor, feverishness, and fearful thirst overcame her; she fell to the ground from weakness and drowsiness. After a little rest, however, she was able to go on, but at the Mur de la Cote she felt desperately ill. Violent palpitation seized on her and her limbs felt like lead. With a tremendous effort she moved on. The beatings of her heart became more suffocating, her pulse was too rapid to count, she could not take more than ten steps without stopping. One thing only remained strong in her--the _will_. During these frequent halts she heard the murmuring of talk between the guides, as in a dream. "We shall fail! Look at her, she has fallen asleep! Shall we try and carry her?" while Couttet cried, "If ever I find myself again with a lady on Mont Blanc!" At these words Mademoiselle d'Angeville, with a desperate effort, shook off her torpor and stood up. She clung with desperate energy to the one idea: "If I die," she said to the guides, "promise to carry me up there and bury me on the top!" And the men, stupified with such persistence, answered gravely, "Make your mind easy, mademoiselle, you shall go there, dead or alive!" [Illustration: HARD WORK.] [Illustration: MRS AUBREY LE BLOND SETS OUT IN A LONG SKIRT (page 87).] As she approached the top she felt better, and was able to advance without support, and when she stepped on to the summit, and knew that her great wish was at last accomplished, all sensation of illness vanished as if by enchantment. "And now, mademoiselle, you shall go higher than Mont Blanc!" exclaimed the guides, and joining hands they lifted her above their shoulders. One more ascent by a lady deserves mention here, that of Miss Stratton, on 31st January 1876. She was the first person to reach the summit of Mont Blanc in mid-winter. It is difficult to understand why these early climbers of Mont Blanc, men as well as women, suffered so terribly from mountain sickness, a disease one rarely hears of nowadays in the Alps. The question is too vexed a one for me to discuss it here, but I may say that want of training and unsuitable food bring it on in most cases. "The stagnation of the air in valleys above the snow-line," was believed to produce it, and I cannot help thinking that this does have some effect. The first time I went up Mont Blanc I did not feel well on the Grand Plateau, but was all right when I reached the breezy ridge of the Bosses. The second time, ascending by the route on the Italian side of the peak, where there are no snowy valleys, I did not suffer at all. The third time I felt uncomfortable on the slope leading to the Corridor, but quite myself again above. CHAPTER XVII THE ASCENT OF A WALL OF ICE Of all the writers on Alpine matters none has a more charming style, or has described his adventures in a more modest manner, than Sir Leslie Stephen. Perhaps the most delightful passages in his _Playground of Europe_ are those in which he tells how, in company with the Messrs Mathews, he managed to get up the great wall of ice between the Mönch and the Eiger, known as the Eigerjoch. The Messrs Mathews had with them two Chamonix guides, while Mr Leslie Stephen had engaged the gigantic Oberlander Ulrich Lauener. In those days there was often keen rivalry--and something more--between French and German-speaking guides, and Lauener was apt to be rather an autocrat on the mountains. "As, however, he could not speak a word of French, nor they of German, he was obliged to convey his 'sentiments' in pantomime, which, perhaps, did not soften 'their vigour.' I was accordingly prepared for a few disputes next day. "About four on the morning of 7th August we got off from the inn on the Wengern Alp, notwithstanding a few delays, and steered straight for the foot of the Eiger. In the early morning the rocks around the glacier and the lateral moraines were hard and slippery. Before long, however, we found ourselves well on the ice, near the central axis of the Eiger Glacier, and looking up at the great terrace-shaped ice-masses, separated by deep crevasses, which rose threateningly over our heads, one above another, like the defences of some vast fortification. And here began the first little dispute between Oberland and Chamouni. The Chamouni men proposed a direct assault on the network of crevasses above us. Lauener said that we ought to turn them by crossing to the south-west side, immediately below the Mönch. My friends and their guides forming a majority, and seeming to have little respect for the arguments urged by the minority, we gave in and followed them, with many muttered remarks from Lauener. We soon found ourselves performing a series of manoeuvres like those required for the ascent of the Col du Géant. At times we were lying flat in little gutters on the faces of the _séracs_, worming ourselves along like boa-constrictors. At the next moment we were balancing ourselves on a knife-edge of ice between two crevasses, or plunging into the very bowels of the glacier, with a natural arch of ice meeting above our heads. I need not attempt to describe difficulties and dangers familiar to all ice-travellers. Like other such difficulties, they were exciting, and even rather amusing for a time, but, unfortunately, they seemed inclined to last rather too long. Some of the deep crevasses apparently stretched almost from side to side of the glacier, rending its whole mass into distorted fragments. In attempting to find a way through them, we seemed to be going nearly as far backwards as forwards, and the labyrinth in which we were involved was as hopelessly intricate after a long struggle as it had been at first. Moreover, the sun had long touched the higher snow-fields, and was creeping down to us step by step. As soon as it reached the huge masses amongst which we were painfully toiling, some of them would begin to jump about like hailstones in a shower, and our position would become really dangerous. The Chamouni guides, in fact, declared it to be dangerous already, and warned us not to speak, for fear of bringing some of the nicely-poised ice-masses down on our heads. On my translating this well-meant piece of advice to Lauener, he immediately selected the most dangerous looking pinnacle in sight, and mounting to the top of it sent forth a series of screams, loud enough, I should have thought, to bring down the top of the Mönch. They failed, however, to dislodge any _séracs_, and Lauener, going to the front, called to us to follow him. By this time we were all glad to follow any one who was confident enough to lead. Turning to our right, we crossed the glacier in a direction parallel to the deep crevasses, and therefore unobstructed by any serious obstacles, till we found ourselves immediately beneath the great cliffs of the Mönch. Our prospects changed at once. A great fold in the glacier produces a kind of diagonal pathway, stretching upwards from the point where we stood towards the rocks of the Eiger--not that it was exactly a carriage-road--but along the line which divides two different systems of crevasse, the glacier seemed to have been crushed into smaller fragments, producing, as it were, a kind of incipient macadamisation. The masses, instead of being divided by long regular trenches, were crumbled and jammed together so as to form a road, easy and pleasant enough by comparison with our former difficulties. Pressing rapidly up this rough path, we soon found ourselves in the very heart of the glacier, with a broken wilderness of ice on every side. We were in one of the grandest positions I have ever seen for observing the wonders of the ice-world; but those wonders were not all of an encouraging nature. For, looking up to the snow-fields now close above us, an obstacle appeared which made us think that all our previous labours had been in vain. From side to side of the glacier a vast _chevaux de frise_ of blue ice-pinnacles struck up through the white layers of _névé_ formed by the first plunge of the glacier down its waterfall of ice. Some of them rose in fantastic shapes--huge blocks balanced on narrow footstalks, and only waiting for the first touch of the sun to fall in ruins down the slope below. Others rose like church spires, or like square towers, defended by trenches of unfathomable depths. Once beyond this barrier we should be safe upon the highest plateau of the glacier at the foot of the last snow-slope. But it was obviously necessary to turn them by some judicious strategical movement. One plan was to climb the lower rocks of the Eiger; but, after a moment's hesitation, we fortunately followed Lauener towards the other side of the glacier, where a small gap between the _séracs_ and the lower slopes of the Mönch seemed to be the entrance to a ravine that might lead us upwards. Such it turned out to be. Instead of the rough footing in which we had hitherto been unwillingly restricted, we found ourselves ascending a narrow gorge, with the giant cliffs of the Mönch on our right, and the toppling ice-pinnacles on our left. A beautifully even surface of snow, scarcely marked by a single crevasse, lay beneath our feet. We pressed rapidly up this strange little pathway, as it wound steeply upwards between the rocks and the ice, expecting at every moment to see it thin out, or break off at some impassable crevasse. It was, I presume, formed by the sliding of avalanches from the slopes of the Mönch. At any rate, to our delight, it led us gradually round the barrier of _séracs_, till in a few minutes we found ourselves on the highest plateau of the glacier, the crevasses fairly beaten, and a level plain of snow stretching from our feet to the last snow-slope. "We were now standing on the edge of a small level plateau. One, and only one, gigantic crevasse of really surpassing beauty stretched right across it. This was, we guessed, some 300 feet deep, and its sides passed gradually into the lovely blues and greens of semi-transparent ice, whilst long rows and clusters of huge icicles imitated (as Lauener remarked) the carvings and ecclesiastical furniture of some great cathedral. "To reach our pass, we had the choice either of at once attacking the long steep slopes which led directly to the shoulder of the Mönch, or of first climbing the gentle slope near the Eiger, and then forcing our way along the backbone of the ridge. We resolved to try the last plan first. "Accordingly, after a hasty breakfast at 9.30, we started across our little snow-plain and commenced the ascent. After a short climb of no great difficulty, merely pausing to chip a few steps out of the hard crust of snow, we successively stepped safely on to the top of the ridge. As each of my predecessors did so, I observed that he first looked along the arête, then down the cliffs before him, and then turned with a very blank expression of face to his neighbour. From our feet the bare cliffs sank down, covered with loose rocks, but too steep to hold more than patches of snow, and presenting right dangerous climbing for many hundred feet towards the Grindelwald glaciers. The arête offered a prospect not much better: a long ridge of snow, sharp as the blade of a knife, was playfully alternated with great rocky teeth, striking up through their icy covering, like the edge of a saw. We held a council standing, and considered the following propositions:--First, Lauener coolly proposed, and nobody seconded, a descent of the precipices towards Grindelwald. This proposition produced a subdued shudder from the travellers and a volley of unreportable language from the Chamouni guides. It was liable, amongst other things, to the trifling objection that it would take us just the way we did not want to go. The Chamouni men now proposed that we should follow the arête. This was disposed of by Lauener's objection that it would take at least six hours. We should have had to cut steps down the slope and up again round each of the rocky teeth I have mentioned; and I believe that this calculation of time was very probably correct. Finally, we unanimously resolved upon the only course open to us--to descend once more into our little valley, and thence to cut our way straight up the long slopes to the shoulder of the Mönch. "Considerably disappointed at this unexpected check, we retired to the foot of the slopes, feeling that we had no time to lose, but still hoping that a couple of hours more might see us at the top of the pass. It was just eleven as we crossed a small bergschrund and began the ascent. Lauener led the way to cut the steps, followed by the two other guides, who deepened and polished them up. Just as we started, I remarked a kind of bright tract drawn down the ice in front of us, apparently by the frozen remains of some small rivulet which had been trickling down it. I guessed it would take some fifty steps and half-an-hour's work to reach it. We cut about fifty steps, however, in the first half-hour, and were not a quarter of the way to my mark; and as even when there we should not be half-way to the top, matters began to look serious. The ice was very hard, and it was necessary, as Lauener observed, to cut steps in it as big as soup-tureens, for the result of a slip would in all probability have been that the rest of our lives would have been spent in sliding down a snow-slope, and that that employment would not have lasted long enough to become at all monotonous. Time slipped by, and I gradually became weary of a sound to which at first I always listened with pleasure--the chipping of the axe, and the hiss of the fragments as they skip down the long incline below us. Moreover, the sun was very hot, and reflected with oppressive power from the bright and polished surface of the ice. I could see that a certain flask was circulating with great steadiness amongst the guides, and the work of cutting the steps seemed to be extremely severe. I was counting the 250th step, when we at last reached the little line I had been so long watching, and it even then required a glance back at the long line of steps behind to convince me that we had in fact made any progress. The action of resting one's whole weight on one leg for about a minute, and then slowly transferring it to the other, becomes wearisome when protracted for hours. Still the excitement and interest made the time pass quickly. I was in constant suspense lest Lauener should pronounce for a retreat, which would have been not merely humiliating, but not improbably dangerous, amidst the crumbling _séracs_ in the afternoon sun. I listened with some amusement to the low moanings of little Charlet, who was apparently bewailing his position to Croz, and being heartless chaffed in return. One or two measurements with a clinometer of Mathews' gave inclinations of 51° or 52°, and the slope was perhaps occasionally a little more. [Illustration: A VERY STEEP ICE SLOPE.] [Illustration: HARD SNOW IN THE EARLY MORNING ON THE TOP OF A GLACIER PASS NEARLY 12,000 FEET ABOVE SEA.] "At last, as I was counting the 580th step, we reached a little patch of rock, and felt ourselves once more on solid ground, with no small satisfaction. Not that the ground was specially solid. It was a small crumbling patch of rock, and every stone we dislodged went bounding rapidly down the side of the slope, diminishing in apparent size till it disappeared in the bergschrund, hundreds of feet below. However, each of us managed to find some nook in which he could stow himself away, whilst the Chamouni men took their turn in front, and cut steps straight upwards to the top of the slope. By this means they kept along a kind of rocky rib, of which our patch was the lowest point, and we thus could occasionally get a footstep on rock instead of ice. Once on the top of the slope, we could see no obstacle intervening between us and the point over which our pass must lie. "Meanwhile we meditated on our position. It was already four o'clock. After twelve hours' unceasing labour, we were still a long way on the wrong side of the pass. We were clinging to a ledge in the mighty snow-wall which sank sheer down below us and rose steeply above our heads. Beneath our feet the whole plain of Switzerland lay with a faint purple haze drawn over it like a veil, a few green sparkles just pointing out the Lake of Thun. Nearer, and apparently almost immediately below us, lay the Wengern Alp, and the little inn we had left twelve hours before, whilst we could just see the back of the labyrinth of crevasses where we had wandered so long. Through a telescope I could even distinguish people standing about the inn, who no doubt were contemplating our motions. As we rested, the Chamouni guides had cut a staircase up the slope, and we prepared to follow. It was harder work than before, for the whole slope was now covered with a kind of granular snow, and resembled a huge pile of hailstones. The hailstones poured into every footstep as it was cut, and had to be cleared out with hands and feet before we could get even a slippery foothold. As we crept cautiously up this treacherous staircase, I could not help reflecting on the lively bounds with which the stones and fragments of ice had gone spinning from our last halting place down to the yawning bergschrund below. We succeeded, however, in avoiding their example, and a staircase of about one hundred steps brought us to the top of the ridge, but at a point still at some distance from the pass. It was necessary to turn along the arête towards the Mönch. We were preparing to do this by keeping on the snow-ridge, when Lauener, jumping down about 6 feet on the side opposite to that by which we had ascended, lighted upon a little ledge of rock, and called to us to follow. He assured us that it was granite, and that therefore there was no danger of slipping. It was caused by the sun having melted the snow on the southern side of the ridge, so that it no longer quite covered the inclined plane of rock upon which it rested. It was narrow and treacherous enough in appearance at first; soon, however, it grew broader, and, compared with our ice-climb, afforded capital footing. The precipice beneath us thinned out as the Viescher Glacier rose towards our pass, and at last we found ourselves at the edge of a little mound of snow, through which a few plunging steps brought us, just at six o'clock, to the long-desired shoulder of the Mönch. "I cannot describe the pleasure with which we stepped at last on to the little saddle of snow, and felt that we had won the victory." CHAPTER XVIII THE AIGUILLE DU DRU Few mountains have been the object of such repeated attempts by experienced climbers to reach their summits, as was the rocky pinnacle of the Aiguille du Dru, at Chamonix. While the name of Whymper will always be associated with the Matterhorn, so will that of Clinton Dent be with the Aiguille du Dru, and the accounts given by him in his delightful little work, _Above the Snow Line_, of his sixteen unavailing scrambles on the peak, followed by the stirring description of how at last he got up it, are amongst the romances of mountaineering. I have space for only a few extracts describing Mr Dent's early attempts, which even the non-climber would find very entertaining to read about in the work from which I quote. The Chamonix people, annoyed that foreign guides should monopolise the peak, threw cold water on the idea of ascending it, and were ready, if they got a chance, to deny that it had been ascended. An honourable exception to the attitude adopted by these gentry, was, however, furnished by that splendid guide, Edouard Cupelin, who always asserted that the peak was climbable, and into whose big mind no trace of jealousy was ever known to enter. Very witty are some of the accounts of Mr Dent's earlier starts for the Aiguille du Dru. On one occasion, starting in the small hours of the morning from Chamonix, he reached the Montanvert at 3.30 A.M. "The landlord at once appeared in full costume," he writes; "indeed I observed that during the summer it was impossible to tell from his attire whether he had risen immediately from bed or no. Our friend had cultivated to great perfection the art of half sleeping during his waking hours--that is, during such time as he might be called upon to provide entertainment for man and beast. Now, at the Montanvert, during the tourists' season, this period extended over the whole twenty-four hours. It was necessary, therefore, in order that he might enjoy a proper physiological period of rest, for him to remain in a dozing state--a sort of æstival hybernation--for the whole time, which in fact he did; or else he was by nature a very dull person, and had actually a very restricted stock of ideas. "The sight of a tourist with an ice-axe led by a kind of reflex process to the landlord's unburdening his mind with his usual remarks. Like other natives of the valley he had but two ideas of 'extraordinary' expeditions. 'Monsieur is going to the Jardin?' he remarked. 'No, monsieur isn't.' 'Then, beyond a doubt, monsieur will cross the Col du Géant?' he said, playing his trump card. 'No, monsieur will not.' 'Pardon--where does monsieur expect to go?' 'On the present occasion we go to try the Aiguille du Dru.' The landlord smiled in an aggravating manner. 'Does monsieur think he will get up?' 'Time will show.' 'Ah!' The landlord, who had a chronic cold in the head, searched for his pocket-handkerchief, but not finding it, modified the necessary sniff into one of derision." On this day the party did not get up, nor did they gain the summit a little later when they made another attempt. They then had with them a porter who gave occasion for an excellent bit of character-sketching. "He was," says Mr Dent, "as silent as an oyster, though a strong and skilful climber, and like an oyster when its youth is passed, he was continually on the gape." They mounted higher and higher, and began at last to think that success awaited them. "Old Franz chattered away to himself, as was his wont when matters went well, and on looking back on one occasion I perceived the strange phenomenon of a smile illuminating the porter's features. However, this worthy spoke no words of satisfaction, but pulled ever at his empty pipe. "By dint of wriggling over a smooth sloping stone slab, we had got into a steep rock gully which promised to lead us to a good height. Burgener, assisted by much pushing and prodding from below, and aided on his own part by much snorting and some strong language, had managed to climb on to a great overhanging boulder that cut off the view from the rest of the party below. As he disappeared from sight we watched the paying out of the rope with as much anxiety as a fisherman eyes his vanishing line when the salmon runs. Presently the rope ceased to move, and we waited for a few moments in suspense. We felt that the critical moment of the expedition had arrived, and the fact that our own view was exceedingly limited, made us all the more anxious to hear the verdict. 'How does it look?' we called out. The answer came back in _patois_, a bad sign in such emergencies. For a minute or two an animated conversation was kept up; then we decided to take another opinion, and accordingly hoisted up our second guides. The chatter was redoubled. 'What does it look like?' we shouted again. 'Not possible from where we are,' was the melancholy answer, and in a tone that crushed at once all our previous elation. I could not find words at the moment to express my disappointment; but the porter could, and gallantly he came to the rescue. He opened his mouth for the first time and spoke, and he said very loud indeed that it was 'verdammt.' Precisely: that is just what it was." [Illustration: ON A VERY STEEP, SMOOTH SLAB OF ROCK.] [Illustration: NEGOTIATING STEEP PASSAGES OF ROCK.] It was not till 1878 that Mr Dent was able to return to Chamonix. He had now one fixed determination with regard to the Dru:--either he would get to the top or prove that the ascent was impossible. His first few attempts that season were frustrated by bad weather, and so persistently did the rain continue to fall that for a couple of weeks no high ascents could be thought of. During this time, Mr Maund, who had been with Mr Dent on many of his attempts, was obliged to return to England. "On a mountain such as we knew the Aiguille du Dru to be, it would not have been wise to make any attempt with a party of more than four. No doubt three--that is, an amateur with two guides--would have been better still, but I had, during the enforced inaction through which we had been passing, become so convinced of ultimate success, that I was anxious to find a companion to share it. Fortunately, J. Walker Hartley, a highly skilful and practised mountaineer, was at Chamouni, and it required but little persuasion to induce him to join our party. Seizing an opportunity one August day, when the rain had stopped for a short while, we decided to try once more, or, at any rate, to see what effects the climatic phases through which we had been passing had produced on the Aiguille. With Alexander Burgener and Andreas Maurer still as guides, we ascended once again the slopes by the side of the Charpoua Glacier, and succeeded in discovering a still more eligible site for a bivouac than on our previous attempts. A little before four the next morning we extracted each other from our respective sleeping bags, and made our way rapidly up the glacier. The snow still lay thick everywhere on the rocks, which were fearfully cold, and glazed with thin layers of slippery ice; but our purpose was very serious that day, and we were not to be deterred by anything short of unwarrantable risk. We intended the climb to be merely one of exploration, but were resolved to make it as thorough as possible, and with the best results. From the middle of the slope leading up to the ridge the guides went on alone, while we stayed to inspect and work out bit by bit the best routes over such parts of the mountain as lay within view. In an hour or two Burgener and Maurer came back to us, and the former invited me to go on with him back to the point from which he had just descended. His invitation was couched in gloomy terms, but there was a twinkle at the same time in his eye which it was easy to interpret--_ce n'est que l'oeil qui rit_. We started off, and climbed without the rope up the way which was now so familiar, but which on this occasion, in consequence of the glazed condition of the rocks, was as difficult as it could well be; but for a growing conviction that the upper crags were not so bad as they looked, we should scarcely have persevered. 'Wait a little,' said Burgener, 'I will show you something presently.' We reached at last a great knob of rock close below the ridge, and for a long time sat a little distance apart silently staring at the precipices of the upper peak. I asked Burgener what it might be that he had to show me. He pointed to a little crack some way off, and begged that I would study it, and then fell again to gazing at it very hard himself. Though we scarcely knew it at the time this was the turning point of our year's climbing. Up to that moment I had only felt doubts as to the inaccessibility of the mountain. Now a certain feeling of confident elation began to creep over me. The fact is, that we gradually worked ourselves up into the right mental condition, and the aspect of a mountain varies marvellously according to the beholder's frame of mind. These same crags had been by each of us independently, at one time or another, deliberately pronounced impossible. They were in no better condition that day than usual, in fact, in much worse order than we had often seen them before. Yet, notwithstanding that good judges had ridiculed the idea of finding a way up the precipitous wall, the prospect looked different that day as turn by turn we screwed our determination up to the sticking point. Here and there we could clearly trace short bits of practicable rock ledges along which a man might walk, or over which at any rate he might transport himself, while cracks and irregularities seemed to develop as we looked. Gradually, uniting and communicating passages appeared to form. Faster and faster did our thoughts travel, and at last we rose and turned to each other. The same train of ideas had independently been passing through our minds. Burgener's face flushed, his eyes brightened, and he struck a great blow with his axe as we exclaimed almost together, 'It must, and it shall be done!' "The rest of the day was devoted to bringing down the long ladder, which had previously been deposited close below the summit of the ridge, to a point much lower and nearer to the main peak. This ladder had not hitherto been of the slightest assistance on the rocks, and had, indeed, proved a source of constant anxiety and worry, for it was ever prone to precipitate its lumbering form headlong down the slope. We had, it is true, used it occasionally on the glacier to bridge over the crevasses, and had saved some time thereby. Still, we were loth to discard its aid altogether, and accordingly devoted much time and no little exertion to hauling it about and fixing it in a place of security. It was late in the evening before we had made all our preparations for the next assault and turned to the descent, which proved to be exceedingly difficult on this occasion. The snow had become very soft during the day; the late hour and the melting above caused the stones to fall so freely down the gully that we gave up that line of descent and made our way over the face. Often, in travelling down, we were buried up to the waist in soft snow overlying rock slabs, of which we knew no more than that they were very smooth and inclined at a highly inconvenient angle. It was imperative for one only to move at a time, and the perpetual roping and unroping was most wearisome. In one place it was necessary to pay out 150 feet of rope between one position of comparative security and the one next below it, till the individual who was thus lowered looked like a bait at the end of a deep sea-line. One step and the snow would crunch up in a wholesome manner and yield firm support. The next, and the leg plunged in as far as it could reach, while the submerged climber would, literally, struggle in vain to collect himself. Of course those above, to whom the duty of paying out the rope was entrusted, would seize the occasion to jerk as violently at the cord as a cabman does at his horse's mouth when he has misguided the animal round a corner. Now another step, and a layer of snow not more than a foot deep would slide off with a gentle hiss, exposing bare, black ice beneath, or treacherous loose stones. Nor were our difficulties at an end when we reached the foot of the rocks, for the head of the glacier had fallen away from the main mass of the mountain, even as an ill-constructed bow-window occasionally dissociates itself from the façade of a jerry-built villa, and some very complicated manoeuvring was necessary in order to reach the snow slopes. It was not till late in the evening that we reached Chamouni; but it would have mattered nothing to us even had we been benighted, for we had seen all that we had wanted to see, and I would have staked my existence now on the possibility of ascending the peak. But the moment was not yet at hand, and our fortress held out against surrender to the very last by calling in its old allies, sou'-westerly winds and rainy weather. The whirligig of time had not yet revolved so as to bring us in our revenge. * * * * * "Perhaps the monotonous repetition of failures on the peak influences my recollection of what took place subsequently to the expedition last mentioned. Perhaps (as I sometimes think even now) an intense desire to accomplish our ambition ripened into a realisation of actual occurrences which really were only efforts of imagination. This much I know, that when on 7th September we sat once more round a blazing wood fire at the familiar bivouac gazing pensively at the crackling fuel, it seemed hard to persuade one's self that so much had taken place since our last attempt. Leaning back against the rock and closing the eyes for a moment it seemed but a dream, whose reality could be disproved by an effort of the will, that we had gone to Zermatt in a storm and hurried back again in a drizzle on hearing that some other climbers were intent on our peak; that we had left Chamouni in rain and tried, for the seventeenth time, in a tempest; that matters had seemed so utterly hopeless, seeing that the season was far advanced and the days but short, as to induce me to return to England, leaving minute directions that if the snow should chance to melt and the weather to mend I might be summoned back at once; that after eight-and-forty hours of sojourn in the fogs of my native land an intimation had come by telegraph of glad tidings; that I had posted off straightway by _grande vitesse_ back to Chamouni; that I had arrived there at four in the morning." Once more the party mounted the now familiar slopes above their bivouac, and somehow on this occasion they all felt that something definite would come of the expedition, even if they did not on that occasion actually reach the top. I give the remainder of the account in Mr Dent's own words: "Now, personal considerations had to a great extent to be lost sight of in the desire to make the most of the day, and the result was that Hartley must have had a very bad time of it. Unfortunately, perhaps for him, he was by far the lightest member of the party; accordingly we argued that he was far less likely to break the rickety old ladder than we were. Again, as the lightest weight, he was most conveniently lowered down first over awkward places when they occurred. "In the times which are spoken of as old, and which have also, for some not very definable reason, the prefix good, if you wanted your chimneys swept you did not employ an individual now dignified by the title of a Ramoneur, but you adopted the simpler plan of calling in a master sweep. This person would come attended by a satellite, who wore the outward form of a boy and was gifted with certain special physical attributes. Especially was it necessary that the boy should be of such a size and shape as to fit nicely to the chimney, not so loosely on the one hand as to have any difficulty in ascending by means of his knees and elbows, nor so tightly on the other as to run any peril of being wedged in. The boy was then inserted into the chimney and did all the work, while the master remained below or sat expectant on the roof to encourage, to preside over, and subsequently to profit by, his apprentice's exertions. We adopted much the same principle. Hartley, as the lightest, was cast for the _rôle_ of the _jeune premier_, or boy, while Burgener and I on physical grounds alone filled the part, however unworthily, of the master sweep. As a play not infrequently owes its success to one actor so did our _jeune premier_, sometimes very literally, pull us through on the present occasion. Gallantly indeed did he fulfil his duty. Whether climbing up a ladder slightly out of the perpendicular, leaning against nothing in particular and with overhanging rocks above; whether let down by a rope tied round his waist, so that he dangled like the sign of the 'Golden Fleece' outside a haberdasher's shop, or hauled up smooth slabs of rock with his raiment in an untidy heap around his neck; in each and all of these exercises he was equally at home, and would be let down or would come up smiling. One place gave us great difficulty. An excessively steep wall of rock presented itself and seemed to bar the way to a higher level. A narrow crack ran some little way up the face, but above the rock was slightly overhanging, and the water trickling from some higher point had led to the formation of a huge bunch of gigantic icicles, which hung down from above. It was necessary to get past these, but impossible to cut them away, as they would have fallen on us below. Burgener climbed a little way up the face, planted his back against it, and held on to the ladder in front of him, while I did the same just below: by this means we kept the ladder almost perpendicular, but feared to press the highest rung heavily against the icicles above lest we should break them off. We now invited Hartley to mount up. For the first few steps it was easy enough; but the leverage was more and more against us as he climbed higher, seeing that he could not touch the rock, and the strain on our arms below was very severe. However, he got safely to the top and disappeared from view. The performance was a brilliant one, but, fortunately, had not to be repeated; as on a subsequent occasion, by a deviation of about 15 or 20 feet, we climbed to the same spot in a few minutes with perfect ease and without using any ladder at all. On this occasion, however, we must have spent fully an hour while Hartley performed his feats, which were not unworthy of a Japanese acrobat. Every few feet of the mountain at this part gave us difficulty, and it was curious to notice how, on this the first occasion of travelling over the rock face, we often selected the wrong route in points of detail. We ascended from 20 to 25 feet, then surveyed right and left, up and down, before going any further. The minutes slipped by fast, but I have no doubt now that if we had had time we might have ascended to the final arête on this occasion. We had often to retrace our steps, and whenever we did so found some slightly different line by which time could have been saved. Though the way was always difficult nothing was impossible, and when the word at last was given, owing to the failing light, to descend, we had every reason to be satisfied with the result of the day's exploration. There seemed to be little doubt that we had traversed the most difficult part of the mountain, and, indeed, we found on a later occasion, with one or two notable exceptions, that such was the case. "However, at the time we did not think that, even if it were possible, it would be at all advisable to make our next attempt without a second guide. A telegram had been sent to Kaspar Maurer, instructing him to join us at the bivouac with all possible expedition. The excitement was thus kept up to the very last, for we knew not whether the message might have reached him, and the days of fine weather were precious. "It was late in the evening when we reached again the head of the glacier, and the point where we had left the feeble creature who had started with us as a second guide. On beholding us once more he wept copiously, but whether his tears were those of gratitude for release from the cramped position in which he had spent his entire day, or of joy at seeing us safe again, or whether they were the natural overflow of an imbecile intellect stirred by any emotion whatever, it were hard to say; at any rate he wept, and then fell to a description of some interesting details concerning the proper mode of bringing up infants, and the duties of parents towards their children; the most important of which, in his estimation, was that the father of a family should run no risk whatever on a mountain. Reaching our bivouac, we looked anxiously down over the glacier for any signs of Kaspar Maurer. Two or three parties were seen crawling homewards towards the Montanvert over the ice-fields, but no signs of our guide were visible. As the shades of night, however, were falling, we were able indistinctly to see in the far-off distance a little black dot skipping over the Mer de Glace with great activity. Most eagerly did we watch the apparition, and when finally it headed in our direction, and all doubt was removed as to the personality, we felt that our constant ill-luck was at last on the eve of changing. However, it was not till two days later that we left Chamouni once more for the nineteenth, and, as it proved, for the last time to try the peak. "On 11th September we sat on the rocks a few feet above the camping-place. Never before had we been so confident of success. The next day's climb was no longer to be one of exploration. We were to start as early as the light would permit, and we were to go up and always up, if necessary till the light should fail. Possibly we might have succeeded long before if we had had the same amount of determination to do so that we were possessed with on this occasion. We had made up our minds to succeed, and felt as if all our previous attempts had been but a sort of training for this special occasion. We had gone so far as to instruct our friends below to look out for us on the summit between twelve and two the next day. We had even gone to the length of bringing a stick wherewith to make a flagstaff on the top. Still one, and that a very familiar source of disquietude, harassed us as our eyes turned anxiously to the west. A single huge band of cloud hung heavily right across the sky, and looked like a harbinger of evil, for it was of a livid colour above, and tinged with a deep crimson red below. My companion was despondent at the prospect it suggested, and the guides tapped their teeth with their forefingers when they looked in that direction; but it was suggested by a more sanguine person that its form and very watery look suggested a Band of Hope. An insinuating smell of savoury soup was wafted up gently from below-- 'Stealing and giving odour.' We took courage; then descended to the tent, and took sustenance. "There was no difficulty experienced in making an early start the next day, and the moment the grey light allowed us to see our way we set off. On such occasions, when the mind is strung up to a high pitch of excitement, odd and trivial little details and incidents fix themselves indelibly on the memory. I can recall as distinctly now, as if it had only happened a moment ago, the exact tone of voice in which Burgener, on looking out of the tent, announced that the weather would do. Burgener and Kaspar Maurer were now our guides, for our old enemy with the family ties had been paid off and sent away with a flea in his ear--an almost unnecessary adjunct, as anyone who had slept in the same tent with him could testify. Notwithstanding that Maurer was far from well, and, rather weak, we mounted rapidly at first, for the way was by this time familiar enough, and we all meant business. "Our position now was this. By our exploration on the last occasion we had ascertained that it was possible to ascend to a great height on the main mass of the mountain. From the slope of the rocks, and from the shape of the mountain, we felt sure that the final crest would be easy enough. We had then to find a way still up the face, from the point where we had turned back on our last attempt, to some point on the final ridge of the mountain. The rocks on this part we had never been able to examine very closely, for it is necessary to cross well over to the south-eastern face while ascending from the ridge between the Aiguille du Dru and the Aiguille Verte. A great projecting buttress of rock, some two or three hundred feet in height, cuts off the view of that part of the mountain over which we now hoped to make our way. By turning up straight behind this buttress, we hoped to hit off and reach the final crest just above the point where it merges into the precipitous north-eastern wall visible from the Chapeau. This part of the mountain can only be seen from the very head of the Glacier de la Charpoua just under the mass of the Aiguille Verte. But this point of view is too far off for accurate observations, and the strip of mountain was practically, therefore, a _terra incognita_ to us. "We followed the gully running up from the head of the glacier towards the ridge above mentioned, keeping well to the left. Before long it was necessary to cross the gully on to the main peak. To make the topography clearer a somewhat prosaic and domestic simile may be employed. The Aiguille du Dru and the Aiguille Verte are connected by a long sharp ridge, towards which we were now climbing; and this ridge is let in, as it were, into the south-eastern side of the Aiguille du Dru, much as a comb may be stuck into the middle of a hairbrush, the latter article representing the main peak. Here we employed the ladder which had been placed in the right position the day previously. Right glad were we to see the rickety old structure, which had now spent four years on the mountain, and was much the worse for it. It creaked and groaned dismally under our weight, and ran sharp splinters into us at all points of contact, but yet there was a certain companionship about the old ladder, and we seemed almost to regret that it was not destined to share more in our prospective success. A few steps on and we came to a rough cleft some five-and-twenty feet in depth, which had to be descended. A double rope was fastened to a projecting crag, and we swung ourselves down as if we were barrels of split peas going into a ship's hold; then to the ascent again, and the excitement waxed stronger as we drew nearer to the doubtful part of the mountain. Still, we did not anticipate insuperable obstacles; for I think we were possessed with a determination to succeed, which is a sensation often spoken of as a presentiment of success. A short climb up an easy broken gully, and of a sudden we seemed to be brought to a stand still. A little ledge at our feet curled round a projecting crag on the left. 'What are we to do now?' said Burgener, but with a smile on his face that left no doubt as to the answer. He lay flat down on the ledge and wriggled round the projection, disappearing suddenly from view, as if the rock had swallowed him up. A shout proclaimed that his expectations had not been deceived, and we were bidden to follow; and follow we did, sticking to the flat face of the rock with all our power, and progressing like the skates down the glass sides of an aquarium tank. When the last man joined us we found ourselves all huddled together on a very little ledge indeed, while an overhanging rock above compelled us to assume the anomalous attitude enforced on the occupant of a little-ease dungeon. What next? An eager look up solved part of the doubt. 'There is the way,' said Burgener, leaning back to get a view. 'Oh, indeed,' we answered. No doubt there was a way, and we were glad to hear that it was possible to get up it. The attractions of the route consisted of a narrow flat gully plastered up with ice, exceeding straight and steep, and crowned at the top with a pendulous mass of enormous icicles. The gully resembled a half-open book standing up on end. Enthusiasts in rock-climbing who have ascended the Riffelhorn from the Gorner Glacier side will have met with a similar gully, but, as a rule, free from ice, which, in the present instance, constituted the chief difficulty. The ice, filling up the receding angle from top to bottom, rendered it impossible to find handhold on the rocks, and it was exceedingly difficult to cut steps in such a place, for the slabs of ice were prone to break away entire. However, the guides said they could get up, and asked us to keep out of the way of chance fragments of ice which might fall down as they ascended. So we tucked ourselves away on one side, and they fell to as difficult a business as could well be imagined. The rope was discarded, and slowly they worked up, their backs and elbows against one sloping wall, their feet against the other. But the angle was too wide to give security to this position, the more especially that with shortened axes they were compelled to hack out enough of the ice to reveal the rock below. In such places the ice is but loosely adherent, being raised up from the face much as pie-crust dissociates itself from the fruit beneath under the influence of the oven. Strike lightly with the axe, and a hollow sound is yielded without much impression on the ice; strike hard, and the whole mass breaks away. But the latter method is the right one to adopt, though it necessitates very hard work. No steps are really reliable when cut in ice of this description. "The masses of ice, coming down harder and harder as they ascended without intermission, showed how they were working, and the only consolation we had during a time that we felt to be critical, was that the guides were not likely to expend so much labour unless they thought that some good result would come of it. Suddenly there came a sharp shout and cry; then a crash as a great slab of ice, falling from above, was dashed into pieces at our feet and leaped into the air; then a brief pause, and we knew not what would happen next. Either the gully had been ascended or the guides had been pounded, and failure here might be failure altogether. It is true that Hartley and I had urged the guides to find a way some little distance to the right of the line on which they were now working; but they had reported that, though easy below, the route we had pointed out was impossible above.[10] A faint scratching noise close above us, as of a mouse perambulating behind a wainscot. We look up. It is the end of a rope. We seize it, and our pull from below is answered by a triumphant yell from above as the line is drawn taut. Fastening the end around my waist, I started forth. The gully was a scene of ruin, and I could hardly have believed that two axes in so short a time could have dealt so much destruction. Nowhere were the guides visible, and in another moment there was a curious sense of solitariness as I battled with the obstacles, aided in no small degree by the rope. The top of the gully was blocked up by a great cube of rock, dripping still where the icicles had just been broken off. The situation appeared to me to demand deliberation, though it was not accorded. 'Come on,' said voices from above. 'Up you go,' said a voice from below. I leaned as far back as I could, and felt about for a handhold. There was none. Everything seemed smooth. Then right, then left; still none. So I smiled feebly to myself, and called out, 'Wait a minute.' This was, of course, taken as an invitation to pull vigorously, and, struggling and kicking like a spider irritated by tobacco smoke, I topped the rock, and lent a hand on the rope for Hartley to follow. Then we learnt that a great mass of ice had broken away under Maurer's feet while they were in the gully, and that he must have fallen had not Burgener pinned him to the rock with one hand. From the number of times that this escape was described to us during that day and the next, I am inclined to think that it was rather a near thing. At the time, and often since, I have questioned myself as to whether we could have got up this passage without the rope let down from above. I think either of us could have done it in time with a companion. It was necessary for two to be in the gully at the same time, to assist each other. It was necessary, also, to discard the rope, which in such a place could only be a source of danger. But no amateur should have tried the passage on that occasion without confidence in his own powers, and without absolute knowledge of the limit of his own powers. If the gully had been free from ice it would have been much easier. "'The worst is over now,' said Burgener. I was glad to hear it, but looking upwards, had my doubts. The higher we went the bigger the rocks seemed to be. Still there was a way, and it was not so very unlike what I had, times out of mind, pictured to myself in imagination. Another tough scramble, and we stood on a comparatively extensive ledge. With elation we observed that we had now climbed more than half of the only part of the mountain of the nature of which we were uncertain. A few steps on and Burgener grasped me suddenly by the arm. 'Do you see the great red rock up yonder?' he whispered, hoarse with excitement-- 'in ten minutes we shall be there and on the arête, and then----' Nothing could stop us now; but a feverish anxiety to see what lay beyond, to look on the final slope which we knew must be easy, impelled us on, and we worked harder than ever to overcome the last few obstacles. The ten minutes expanded into something like thirty before we really reached the rock. Of a sudden the mountain seemed to change its form. For hours we had been climbing the hard, dry rocks. Now these appeared suddenly to vanish from under our feet, and once again our eyes fell on snow which lay thick, half hiding, half revealing, the final slope of the ridge. A glance along it showed that we had not misjudged. Even the cautious Maurer admitted that, as far as we could see, all appeared promising. And now, with the prize almost within our grasp, a strange desire to halt and hang back came on. Burgener tapped the rock with his axe, and we seemed somehow to regret that the way in front of us must prove comparatively easy. Our foe had almost yielded, and it appeared something like cruelty to administer the final _coup de grâce_. We could already anticipate the half-sad feeling with which we should reach the top itself. It needed but little to make the feeling give way. Some one cried 'Forward,' and instantly we were all in our places again, and the leader's axe crashed through the layers of snow into the hard blue ice beneath. A dozen steps, and then a short bit of rock scramble; then more steps along the south side of the ridge, followed by more rock, and the ridge beyond, which had been hidden for a minute or two, stretched out before us again as we topped the first eminence. Better and better it looked as we went on. 'See there,' cried Burgener suddenly, 'the actual top!' "There was no possibility of mistaking the two huge stones we had so often looked at from below. They seemed, in the excitement of the moment, misty and blurred for a brief space, but grew clear again as I passed my hand over my eyes, and seemed to swallow something. A few feet below the pinnacles and on the left was one of those strange arches formed by a great transverse boulder, so common near the summits of these aiguilles, and through the hole we could see blue sky. Nothing could lay beyond, and, still better, nothing could be above. On again, while we could scarcely stand still in the great steps the leader set his teeth to hack out. Then there came a short troublesome bit of snow scramble, where the heaped-up cornice had fallen back from the final rock. There we paused for a moment, for the summit was but a few feet from us, and Hartley, who was ahead, courteously allowed me to unrope and go on first. In a few seconds I clutched at the last broken rocks, and hauled myself up on to the sloping summit. There for a moment I stood alone gazing down on Chamouni. The holiday dream of five years was accomplished; the Aiguille du Dru was climbed. Where in the wide world will you find a sport able to yield pleasure like this?" FOOTNOTE: [10] It has transpired since that our judgment happened to be right in this matter, and we might probably have saved an hour or more at this part of the ascent. CHAPTER XIX THE MOST FAMOUS MOUNTAIN IN THE ALPS--THE CONQUEST OF THE MATTERHORN The story of the Matterhorn must always be one of unique attraction. Like a good play, it resumes and concentrates in itself the incidents of a prolonged struggle--the conquest of the Alps. The strange mountain stood forth as a Goliath in front of the Alpine host, and when it found its conqueror there was a general feeling that the subjugation of the High Alps by human effort was decided, a feeling which has been amply justified by events. The contest itself was an eventful one. It was marked by a race between eager rivals, and the final victory was marred by the most terrible of Alpine accidents. [Illustration: MR AND MRS SEILER AND THREE OF THEIR DAUGHTERS. ZERMATT, 1890.] [Illustration: GOING LEISURELY TO ZERMATT WITH A MULE FOR THE LUGGAGE IN THE OLDEN DAYS.] "As a writer, Mr Whymper has proved himself equal to his subject. His serious, emphatic style, his concentration on his object, take hold of his readers and make them follow his campaigns with as much interest as if some great stake depended on the result. No one can fail to remark the contrast between the many unsuccessful attacks which preceded the fall of the Matterhorn, and the frequency with which it is now climbed by amateurs, some of whom it would be courtesy to call indifferent climbers. The moral element has, of course, much to do with this. But allowance must also be made for the fact that the Breil ridge, which looks the easiest, is still the most difficult, and in its unbechained state was far the most difficult. The terrible appearance of the Zermatt and Zmutt ridges long deterred climbers, yet both have now yielded to the first serious attack." These words, taken from a review of Mr Whymper's _Ascent of the Matterhorn_, occur in vol. ix. on page 441 of _The Alpine Journal_. They are as true now as on the day when they appeared, but could the writer have known the future history of the great peak, and the appalling vengeance it called down over and over again on "amateurs" and the guides who, themselves unfit, tempted their ignorant charges to go blindly to their deaths, one feels he would have stood aghast at the contemplation of the tragedies to be enacted on the blood-stained precipices of that hoary peak. THE CONQUEST OF THE MATTERHORN When one remembers all the facilities for climbing which are found at present in every Alpine centre, the experienced guides who may be had, the comfortable huts which obviate the need for a bivouac out of doors, the knowledge of the art of mountaineering which is available if any desire to acquire it, one marvels more and more at the undaunted persistence displayed by the pioneers of present-day mountaineering in their struggle with the immense difficulties which beset them on every side. When, in 1861, Mr Whymper made his first attempt on the Matterhorn, the first problem he had to solve was that of obtaining a skilful guide. Michael Croz of Chamonix believed the ascent to be impossible. Bennen thought the same. Jean Antoine Carrel was dictatorial and unreasonable in his demands, though convinced that the summit could be gained. Peter Taugwalder asked 200 francs whether the top was reached or not. "Almer asked, with more point than politeness, 'Why don't you try to go up a mountain which _can_ be ascended?'" In 1862 Mr Whymper, who had three times during the previous summer tried to get up the mountain, returned to Breuil on the Italian side, and thence made five plucky attempts, sometimes with Carrel, and once alone, to go to the highest point it was possible to reach. On the occasion of his solitary climb, Mr Whymper had set out from Breuil to see if his tent, left on a ledge of the mountain, was still, in spite of recent storms, safely in its place. He found all in good order, and tempted to linger by the lovely weather, time slipped away, and he at last decided to sleep that night in the tent, which contained ample provisions for several days. The next morning Mr Whymper could not resist an attempt to explore the route towards the summit, and eventually he managed to reach a considerable height, much above that attained by any of his predecessors. Exulting in the hope of entire success in the near future, he returned to the tent. "My exultation was a little premature," he writes, and goes on to describe what befell him on the way down. I give the thrilling account of his adventure in his own words:-- "About 5 P.M. I left the tent again, and thought myself as good as at Breuil. The friendly rope and claw had done good service, and had smoothened all the difficulties. I lowered myself through the chimney, however, by making a fixture of the rope, which I then cut off, and left behind, as there was enough and to spare. My axe had proved a great nuisance in coming down, and I left it in the tent. It was not attached to the bâton, but was a separate affair--an old navy boarding-axe. While cutting up the different snow-beds on the ascent, the bâton trailed behind fastened to the rope; and, when climbing, the axe was carried behind, run through the rope tied round my waist, and was sufficiently out of the way; but in descending when coming down face outwards (as is always best where it is possible), the head or the handle of the weapon caught frequently against the rocks, and several times nearly upset me. So, out of laziness if you will, it was left in the tent. I paid dearly for the imprudence. "The Col du Lion was passed, and fifty yards more would have placed me on the 'Great Staircase,' down which one can run. But, on arriving at an angle of the cliffs of the Tête du Lion, while skirting the upper edge of the snow which abuts against them, I found that the heat of the two past days had nearly obliterated the steps which had been cut when coming up. The rocks happened to be impracticable just at this corner, and it was necessary to make the steps afresh. The snow was too hard to beat or tread down, and at the angle it was all but ice; half a dozen steps only were required, and then the ledges could be followed again. So I held to the rock with my right hand, and prodded at the snow with the point of my stick until a good step was made, and then, leaning round the angle, did the same for the other side. So far well, but in attempting to pass the corner (to the present moment I cannot tell how it happened), I slipped and fell. "The slope was steep on which this took place, and was at the top of a gully that led down through two subordinate buttresses towards the Glacier du Lion--which was just seen a thousand feet below. The gully narrowed and narrowed, until there was a mere thread of snow lying between two walls of rock, which came to an abrupt termination at the top of a precipice that intervened between it and the glacier. Imagine a funnel cut in half through its length, placed at an angle of 45° with its point below, and its concave side uppermost, and you will have a fair idea of the place. "The knapsack brought my head down first, and I pitched into some rocks about a dozen feet below; they caught something and tumbled me off the edge, head over heels, into the gully; the bâton was dashed from my hands, and I whirled downwards in a series of bounds, each longer than the last; now over ice, now into rocks; striking my head four or five times, each time with increased force. The last bound sent me spinning through the air, in a leap of 50 or 60 feet, from one side of the gully to the other, and I struck the rocks, luckily, with the whole of my left side. They caught my clothes for a moment, and I fell back on to the snow with motion arrested. My head, fortunately, came the right side up, and a few frantic catches brought me to a halt in the neck of the gully, and on the verge of the precipice. Bâton, hat, and veil skimmed by and disappeared, and the crash of the rocks--which I had started--as they fell on to the glacier, told how narrow had been the escape from utter destruction. As it was, I fell nearly 200 feet in seven or eight bounds. Ten feet more would have taken me in one gigantic leap of 800 feet on to the glacier below. "The situation was sufficiently serious. The rocks could not be let go for a moment, and the blood was spirting out of more than twenty cuts. The most serious ones were in the head, and I vainly tried to close them with one hand, whilst holding on with the other. It was useless; the blood jerked out in blinding jets at each pulsation. At last, in a moment of inspiration, I kicked out a big lump of snow, and stuck it as a plaster on my head. The idea was a happy one, and the flow of blood diminished. Then, scrambling up, I got, not a moment too soon, to a place of safety, and fainted away. The sun was setting when consciousness returned, and it was pitch dark before the Great Staircase was descended; but, by a combination of luck and care, the whole 4900 feet of descent to Breuil was accomplished without a slip, or once missing the way. I slunk past the cabin of the cowherds, who were talking and laughing inside, utterly ashamed of the state to which I had been brought by my imbecility, and entered the inn stealthily, wishing to escape to my room unnoticed. But Favre met me in the passage, demanded 'Who is it?' screamed with fright when he got a light, and aroused the household. Two dozen heads then held solemn council over mine, with more talk than action. The natives were unanimous in recommending that hot wine mixed with salt should be rubbed into the cuts; I protested, but they insisted. It was all the doctoring they received. Whether their rapid healing was to be attributed to that simple remedy or to a good state of health is a question. They closed up remarkably quickly, and in a few days I was able to move again." In 1863 Mr Whymper once more returned to the attack, but still without success. In 1864 he was unable to visit the neighbourhood of the Matterhorn, but in 1865 he made his eighth and last attempt on the Breuil, or Italian side. The time had now come when Mr Whymper became convinced that it was an error to think the Italian side the easier. It certainly looked far less steep than the north, or Zermatt side, but on mountains quality counts for far more than quantity; and though the ledges above Breuil might sometimes be broader than those on the Swiss side, and the general slope of the mountain appear at a distance to be gentler, yet the rock had an unpleasant outward dip, giving sloping, precarious hold for hand or foot, and every now and then there were abrupt walls of rock which it was hardly possible to ascend, and out of the question to descend without fixing ropes or chains. [Illustration: THE GUIDES' WALL, ZERMATT.] Now the Swiss side of the great peak differs greatly from its Italian face. The slope is really less steep, and the ledges, if narrow, slope inward, and are good to step on or grasp. Mr Whymper had noticed that large patches of snow lay on the mountain all the summer, which they could not do if the north face was a precipice. He determined, therefore, to make his next attempt on that side. He had, in 1865, intended to climb with Michel Croz, but some misunderstanding had arisen, and Croz, believing that he was free, had engaged himself to another traveller. His letter, "the last one he wrote to me," says Mr Whymper, is "an interesting souvenir of a brave and upright man." The following is an extract from it: "enfin, Monsieur, je regrette beaucoup d'être engagè avec votre compatriote et de ne pouvoir vous accompagner dans vos conquetes mais dès qu'on a donnè sa parole on doit la tenir et être homme. "Ainsi, prenez patience pour cette campagne et esperons que plus tard nous nous retrouverons. "En attendant recevez les humbles salutations de votre tout devoué. "CROZ MICHEL-AUGUSTE." By an extraordinary series of chances, however, when Mr Whymper reached Zermatt, whom should he see sitting on the guides' wall but Croz! His employer had been taken ill, and had returned home, and the great guide was immediately engaged by the Rev. Charles Hudson for an attempt on the Matterhorn! Mr Whymper had been joined by Lord Francis Douglas and the Taugwalders, father and son, and thus two parties were about to start for the Matterhorn at the same hour next day. This was thought inadvisable, and eventually they joined forces and decided to set out the following morning together. Mr Hudson had a young man travelling with him, by name Mr Hadow, and when Mr Whymper enquired if he were sufficiently experienced to take part in the expedition, Mr Hudson replied in the affirmative, though the fact that Mr Hadow had recently made a very rapid ascent of Mont Blanc really proved nothing. Here was the weakest spot in the whole business, the presence of a youth, untried on difficult peaks, on a climb which might involve work of a most unusual kind. Further, we should now-a-days consider the party both far too large and wrongly constituted, consisting as it did of four amateurs, two good guides, and a porter. On 13th July, 1865, at 5.30 A.M., they started from Zermatt in cloudless weather. They took things leisurely that day, for they only intended going a short distance above the base of the peak, and by 12 o'clock they had found a good position for the tent at about 11,000 feet above sea. The guides went on some way to explore, and on their return about 3 P.M. declared that they had not found a single difficulty, and that success was assured. [Illustration: THE ZERMATT SIDE OF THE MATTERHORN. The route now usually followed has been kindly marked by Sir W. Martin Conway. The first party, on reaching the snow patch near the top, bore somewhat to their right to avoid a nearly vertical wall of rock, where now hangs a chain. _From a Photograph by the late W. F. Donkin._] [Illustration: RISING MISTS.] The following morning, as soon as it was light enough to start, they set out, and without trouble they mounted the formidable-looking north face, and approached the steep bit of rock which it is now customary to ascend straight up by means of a fixed chain. But they were obliged to avoid it by diverging to their right on to the slope overhanging the Zermatt side of the mountain. This involved somewhat difficult climbing, made especially awkward by the thin film of ice which at places overlay the rocks. "It was a place over which any fair mountaineer might pass in safety," writes Mr Whymper, and neither here nor anywhere else on the peak did Mr Hudson require the slightest help. With Mr Hadow, however, the case was different, his inexperience necessitating continual assistance. Before long this solitary difficulty was passed, and, turning a rather awkward corner, the party saw with delight that only 200 feet or so of easy snow separated them from the top! Yet even then it was not certain that they had not been beaten, for a few days before another party, led by Jean Antoine Carrel, had started from Breuil, and might have reached the much-desired summit before them. The slope eased off more and more, and at last Mr Whymper and Croz, casting off the rope, ran a neck and neck race to the top. Hurrah! not a footstep could be seen, and the snow at both ends of the ridge was absolutely untrampled. "Where were the men?" Mr Whymper wondered, and peering over the cliffs of the Italian side he saw them as dots far down. They were 1250 feet below, yet they heard the cries of the successful party on the top, and knew that victory was not for them. Still a measure of success awaited them too, for the next day the bold Carrel, with J. B. Bich, in his turn reached the summit by the far more difficult route on the side of his native valley. Carrel was the one man who had always believed that the Matterhorn could be climbed, and one can well understand Mr Whymper's generous wish that he could have shared in the first ascent. One short hour was spent on the summit. Then began the ever-eventful descent. The climbers commenced to go down the difficult piece in the following order: Croz first, Hadow next, then Mr Hudson, after him Lord Francis Douglas, then old Taugwalder, and lastly Mr Whymper, who gives an account of what happened almost immediately after in the following words: "A few minutes later a sharp-eyed lad ran into the Monte Rosa Hotel to Seiler, saying that he had seen an avalanche falling from the summit of the Matterhorn on to the Matterhorngletscher. The boy was reproved for telling idle stories; he was right, nevertheless, and this was what he saw: "Michel Croz had laid aside his axe, and in order to give Mr Hadow greater security, was absolutely taking hold of his legs, and putting his feet, one by one, into their proper positions.[11] So far as I know, no one was actually descending. I cannot speak with certainty, because the two leading men were partially hidden from my sight by an intervening mass of rock, but it is my belief, from the movements of their shoulders, that Croz, having done as I have said, was in the act of turning round, to go down a step or two himself; at this moment Mr Hadow slipped, fell against him, and knocked him over. I heard one startled exclamation from Croz, then saw him and Mr Hadow flying downwards. In another moment Hudson was dragged from his steps, and Lord Francis Douglas immediately after him.[12] All this was the work of a moment. Immediately we heard Croz's exclamation old Peter and I planted ourselves as firmly as the rocks would permit;[13] the rope was taut between us, and the jerk came on us both as on one man. We held, but the rope broke midway between Taugwalder and Lord Francis Douglas. For a few seconds we saw our unfortunate companions sliding downwards on their backs, and spreading out their hands, endeavouring to save themselves. They passed from our sight uninjured, disappeared one by one, and fell from precipice to precipice on to the Matterhorngletscher below, a distance of nearly 4000 feet in height. From the moment the rope broke it was impossible to help them. So perished our comrades!" [Illustration: A BITTERLY COLD DAY, 13,000 FEET ABOVE SEA.] [Illustration: The Matterhorn from the Zmutt side. The dotted line shows the course which the unfortunate party probably took in their fatal fall.] A more terrible position than that of Mr Whymper and the Taugwalders it is difficult to imagine. The Englishman kept his head, however, though the two guides, absolutely paralysed with terror, lost all control over themselves, and for a long time could not be induced to move. At last old Peter changed his position, and soon the three stood close together. Mr Whymper then examined the broken rope, and found to his horror that it was the weakest of the three ropes, and had only been intended as a reserve to fix to rocks and leave behind. How it came to have been used will always remain a mystery, but that it broke and was not cut there is no doubt. Taugwalder's neighbours at Zermatt persisted in asserting that he severed the rope. "In regard to this infamous charge," writes Mr Whymper, "I say that he _could_ not do so at the moment of the slip, and that the end of the rope in my possession shows that he did not do so beforehand." At 6 P.M., after a terribly trying descent, during any moment of which the Taugwalders, still completely unnerved, might have slipped and carried the whole party to destruction, they arrived on "the ridge descending towards Zermatt, and all peril was over." But it was still a long way to the valley, and an hour after nightfall the climbers were obliged to seek a resting-place, and upon a slab barely large enough to hold the three they spent six miserable hours. At daybreak they started again, and descended rapidly to Zermatt. "Seiler met me at the door. 'What is the matter?' 'The Taugwalders and I have returned.' He did not need more, and burst into tears." At 2 A.M. on Sunday the 16th, Mr Whymper and two other Englishmen, with a number of Chamonix and Oberland guides, set out to discover the bodies. The Zermatt men, threatened with excommunication by their priests if they failed to attend early Mass were unable to accompany them, and to some of them this was a severe trial. By 8.30 they reached the plateau at the top of the glacier, and came within sight of the spot where their companions must be. "As we saw one weather-beaten man after another raise the telescope, turn deadly pale, and pass it on without a word to the next, we knew that all hope was gone." They drew near, and found the bodies of Croz, Hadow and Hudson close together, but of Lord Francis Douglas they could see nothing, though a pair of gloves, a belt and a boot belonging to him were found. The boots of all the victims were off, and lying on the snow close by. This frequently happens when persons have fallen a long distance down rocks. Eventually the remains were brought down to Zermatt, a sad and dangerous task. So ends the story of the conquest of the Matterhorn. Its future history is marred by many a tragedy, of which perhaps none are more pathetic, or were more wholly unnecessary, than what is known as the Borckhardt accident. FOOTNOTES: [11] Not at all an unusual proceeding, even between born mountaineers. I wish to convey the impression that Croz was using all pains, rather than to indicate inability on the part of Mr Hadow. The insertion of the word "absolutely" makes the passage, perhaps, rather ambiguous. I retain it now in order to offer the above explanation. [12] At the moment of the accident Croz, Hadow, and Hudson were close together. Between Hudson and Lord Francis Douglas the rope was all but taut, and the same between all the others who were above. Croz was standing by the side of a rock which afforded good hold, and if he had been aware, or had suspected that anything was about to occur, he might and would have gripped it, and would have prevented any mischief. He was taken totally by surprise. Mr Hadow slipped off his feet on to his back, his feet struck Croz in the small of the back, and knocked him right over, head first. Croz's axe was out of his reach, and without it he managed to get his head uppermost before he disappeared from our sight. If it had been in his hand I have no doubt that he would have stopped himself and Mr Hadow. Mr Hadow, at the moment of the slip, was not occupying a bad position. He could have moved either up or down, and could touch with his hand the rock of which I have spoken. Hudson was not so well placed, but he had liberty of motion. The rope was not taut from him to Hadow, and the two men fell 10 or 12 feet before the jerk came upon him. Lord Francis Douglas was not favourably placed, and could neither move up nor down. Old Peter was firmly planted, and stood just beneath a large rock, which he hugged with both arms. I enter into these details to make it more apparent that the position occupied by the party at the moment of the accident was not by any means excessively trying. We were compelled to pass over the exact spot where the slip occurred, and we found--even with shaken nerves--that _it_ was not a difficult place to pass. I have described the _slope generally_ as difficult, and it is so undoubtedly to most persons, but it must be distinctly understood that Mr Hadow slipped at a comparatively easy part. [13] Or, more correctly, we held on as tightly as possible. There was no time to change our position. CHAPTER XX SOME TRAGEDIES ON THE MATTERHORN By the summer of 1886 it had become common for totally inexperienced persons with incompetent guides (for no first-rate guide would undertake such a task) to make the ascent of the Matterhorn. In fine settled weather they contrived to get safely up and down the mountain. But like all high peaks the Matterhorn is subject to sudden atmospheric changes, and a high wind or falling snow will in an hour or less change the whole character of the work and make the descent one of extreme difficulty even for experienced mountaineers. Practically unused to Alpine climbing, thinly clothed, and accompanied by young guides of third-rate ability, what wonder is it that when caught in a storm, a member of the party, whose expedition is described below, perished? [Illustration: JOST, FOR MANY YEARS PORTER OF THE MONTE ROSA HOTEL, ZERMATT. ] The editor of _The Alpine Journal_ writes: "On the morning of 17th August last four parties of travellers left the lower hut on the mountain and attained the summit. One of them, that of Mr Mercer, reached Zermatt the same night. The three others were much delayed by a sudden storm which came on during the descent. Two Dutch gentlemen, led by Moser and Peter Taugwald, regained the lower hut at an advanced hour of the night; but Monsieur A. de Falkner and his son (with J. P. and Daniel Maquignaz, and Angelo Ferrari, of Pinzolo), and Messrs John Davies and Frederick Charles Borckhardt (with Fridolin Kronig and Peter Aufdemblatten), were forced to spend the night out; the latter party, indeed, spent part of the next day (18th August) out as well, and Mr Borckhardt unfortunately succumbed to the exposure in the afternoon. He was the youngest son of the late vicar of Lydden, and forty-eight years of age. Neither he nor Mr Davies was a member of the Alpine Club." _The Pall Mall Gazette_ published on 24th August the account given by Mr Davies to an interviewer. It is as follows, and the inexperience of the climbers is made clear in every line:- "We left Zermatt about 2 o'clock on Monday afternoon in capital spirits. The weather was lovely, and everything promised a favourable ascent. We had two guides whose names were on the official list, whose references were satisfactory, and who were twice over recommended to us by Herr Seiler, whose advice we sought before we engaged them, and who gave them excellent credentials. We placed ourselves in their hands, as is the rule in such cases, ordered the provisions and wine which they declared to be necessary, and made ready for the ascent. I had lived among hills from my boyhood. I had some experience of mountaineering in the Pyrenees, where I ascended the highest and other peaks. In the Engadine I have also done some climbing; and last week, together with Mr Borckhardt, who was one of my oldest friends, I made the ascent of the Titlis, and made other excursions among the hills. Mr Borckhardt was slightly my senior, but as a walker he was quite equal to me in endurance. When we arrived at Zermatt last Saturday we found that parties were going up the Matterhorn on Monday. We knew that ladies had made the ascent, and youths; and the mountain besides had been climbed by friends of ours whose physical strength, to say the least, was not superior to ours. It was a regular thing to go up the Matterhorn, and we accordingly determined to make the ascent. "We started next morning at half-past two or three. We were the third party to leave the cabin, but, making good speed over the first stage of the ascent, we reached the second when the others were breakfasting there, and then resumed the climb. Mr Mercer, with his party, followed by the Dutch party, started shortly before us. We met them about a quarter-past eight returning from the top. They said that they had been there half an hour, and that there was no view. We passed them, followed by the Italians, and reached the summit about a quarter to nine. The ascent, though toilsome, had not exhausted us in the least. Both Mr Borckhardt and myself were quite fresh, although we had made the summit before the Italians, who started together with us from the second hut. Had the weather remained favourable, we could have made the descent with ease.[14] "Even while we were on the summit I felt hail begin to fall, and before we were five minutes on our way down it was hailing heavily. It was a fine hail, and inches of it fell in a very short time, and the track was obliterated. We pressed steadily downwards, followed by the Italians, nor did it occur to me at that time that there was any danger. We got past the ropes and chains safely, and reached the snowy slope on the shoulder. At this point we were leading. But as the Italians had three guides, and we only two, we changed places, so that their third guide could lead. They climbed down the slope, cutting steps for their feet in the ice. We trod closely after the Italians, but the snow and hail filled up the holes so rapidly, that, in order to make a safe descent, our guides had to recut the steps. This took much time--as much as two hours I should say--and every hour the snow was getting deeper. At last we got down the snow-slope on to the steep rocks below. The Italians were still in front of us, and we all kept on steadily descending. We were still in good spirits, nor did we feel any doubt that we should reach the bottom. Our first alarm was occasioned by the Italians losing their way. They found their progress barred by precipitous rocks, and their guides came back to ours to consult as to the road. Our guides insisted that the path lay down the side of a steep couloir. Their guides demurred; but after going down some ten feet, they cried out that our guides were right, and they went on--we followed. By this time it was getting dark. The hail continued increasing. We began to get alarmed. It seemed impossible to make our way to the cabin that night. We had turned to the right after leaving the couloir, crossed some slippery rocks, and after a short descent turned to the left and came to the edge of the precipice where Mosely fell, where there was some very slight shelter afforded by an overhanging rock, and there we prepared to pass the night, seeing that all further progress was hopeless. We were covered with ice. The night was dark. The air was filled with hail. We were too cold to eat. The Italians were about an hour below us on the mountain side. We could hear their voices and exchanged shouts. Excepting them, we were thousands of feet above any other human being. I found that while Borckhardt had emptied his brandy-flask, mine was full. I gave him half of mine. That lasted us through the night. We did not try the wine till the morning, and then we found that it was frozen solid. "Never have I had a more awful experience than that desolate night on the Matterhorn. We were chilled to the bone, and too exhausted to stand. The wind rose, and each gust drove the hail into our faces, cutting us like a knife. Our guides did everything that man could do to save us. Aufdemblatten did his best to make us believe that there was no danger. 'Only keep yourselves warm; keep moving; and we shall go down all right to-morrow, when the sun rises.' 'It is of no use,' I replied; 'we shall die here!' They chafed our limbs, and did their best to make us stand up; but it was in vain. I felt angry at their interference. Why could they not leave us alone to die? I remember striking wildly but feebly at my guide as he insisted on rubbing me. Every movement gave me such agony, I was racked with pain, especially in my back and loins--pain so intense as to make me cry out. The guides had fastened the rope round the rock to hold on by, while they jumped to keep up the circulation of the blood. They brought us to it, and made us jump twice or thrice. Move we could not; we lay back prostrate on the snow and ice, while the guides varied their jumping by rubbing our limbs and endeavouring to make us move our arms and legs. They were getting feebler and feebler. Borckhardt and I, as soon as we were fully convinced that death was imminent for us, did our best to persuade our guides to leave us where we lay and make their way down the hill. They were married men with families. To save us was impossible; they might at least save themselves. We begged them to consider their wives and children and to go. This was at the beginning of the night. They refused. They would rather die with us, they said; they would remain and do their best. [Illustration: Hoar Frost in the Alps.] [Illustration: Hoar Frost in the Alps.] "Borckhardt and I talked a little as men might do who are at the point of death. He bore without complaining pain that made me cry out from time to time. We both left directions with the guides that we were to be buried at Zermatt. Borckhardt spoke of his friends and his family affairs, facing his death with manly resignation and composure. As the night wore on I became weaker and weaker. I could not even make the effort necessary to flick the snow off my companion's face. By degrees the guides began to lose hope. The cold was so intense, we crouched together for warmth. They lay beside us to try and impart some heat. It was in vain. 'We shall die!' 'We are lost!' 'Yes,' said Aufdemblatten, 'very likely we shall.' He was so weak, poor fellow, he could hardly keep his feet; but still he tried to keep me moving. It was a relief not to be touched. I longed for death, but death would not come. "Towards half-past two on Wednesday morning--so we reckoned, for all our watches had stopped with the cold--the snow ceased, and the air became clear. It had been snowing or hailing without intermission for eighteen hours. It was very dark below, but above all was clear, although the wind still blew. When the sun rose, we saw just a gleam of light. Then a dark cloud came from the hollow below, and our hopes went out. 'Oh, if only the sun would come out!' we said to each other, I do not know how many times. But it did not, and instead of the sun came the snow once more. Towards seven, as near as I can make it, a desperate attempt was made to get us to walk. The guides took Borckhardt, and between them propped him on his feet and made him stagger on a few steps. They failed to keep him moving more than a step or two. The moment they let go he dropped. They repeated the same with me. Neither could I stand. I remember four distinct times they drove us forward, only to see us drop helpless after each step. It was evidently no use. Borckhardt had joined again with me in repeatedly urging the guides to leave us and to save themselves. They had refused, and continued to do all that their failing strength allowed to protect us from the bitter cold. As the morning wore on, my friend, who during the night had been much more composed and tranquil than I, began to grow perceptibly weaker. We were quite resigned to die, and had, in fact, lost all hope. We had been on the mountain from about 3 A.M. on Tuesday to 1 P.M. on Wednesday--thirty-four hours in all. Eighteen of these were spent in a blinding snowstorm, and we had hardly tasted food since we left the summit at nine on the Tuesday morning. At length (about one) we heard shouts far down the mountain. The guides said they probably proceeded from a search party sent out to save us. I again urged the guides to go down by themselves to meet the searchers, and to hurry them up. This they refused to do unless I accompanied them. Borckhardt was at this time too much exhausted to stand upright, and was lying in a helpless condition. The guides, although completely worn out, wished to attempt the descent with me, and they considered that by so doing we should be able to indicate to the searchers the precise spot where my friend lay, and to hasten their efforts to reach him with stimulants. Since early morning the snow had ceased falling. We began the descent, and at first I required much assistance from the guides, but by degrees became better able to move, and the hope of soon procuring help from the approaching party for my poor friend sustained us. After a most laborious descent of about an hour and a half, we reached the first members of the rescue party, and directed them to where Borckhardt lay, requesting them to proceed there with all haste, and, after giving him stimulants, to bring him down to the lower hut in whatever condition they found him. We went on to the hut to await his arrival, meeting on the way Mr King, of the English Alpine Club, with his guides, who were hurrying up with warm clothing. A few hours later we heard the terrible news that the relief party had found him dead." A letter to _The Times_, written by Mr (now Sir Henry Seymour) King comments as follows on this deplorable accident. It is endorsed by all the members of the Alpine Club then at Zermatt. After describing the circumstances of the ascent, the writer continues: "Instead of staying all together, as more experienced guides would have done, and keeping Mr Borckhardt warm and awake until help came, they determined at about 1 P.M. to leave him alone on the mountain. According to their account, the snow had ceased and the sun had begun to shine when they left him. At that moment a relief party was not far off, as the guides must have known. They heard the shouts of the relief party soon after leaving Mr Borckhardt, and there was, as far as I can see, no pressing reason for their departure. They reached the lower hut at about 5 P.M., and at about the same time a rescue party from Zermatt, which had met them descending, reached Mr Borckhardt, and found him dead, stiff, and quite cold, and partly covered with freshly-fallen snow. No doubt he had succumbed to drowsiness soon after he was left. "The moral of this most lamentable event is plain. The Matterhorn is not a mountain to be played with; it is not a peak which men ought to attempt until they have had some experience of climbing. Above all, it is not a peak which should ever be attempted except with thoroughly competent guides. In a snowstorm no member of a party should ever be left behind and alone. He will almost certainly fall into a sleep, from which it is notorious that he will never awake. If he will not walk, he must be carried. If he sits down, he must be made to get up. Guides have to do this not unfrequently. A stronger and more experienced party would undoubtedly have reached Zermatt without misfortune. In fact, one party which was on the mountain on the same day did reach Zermatt in good time." It is fitting that this short, and necessarily incomplete, account of the conquest of the Matterhorn, and events occurring subsequently on it, should conclude with the recital of a magnificent act of heroism performed by Jean-Antoine Carrel, whose name, more than that of any other guide, is associated with the history of the peak. No more striking instance of the devotion of a guide to his employers could be chosen to bring these true tales of the hills to an appropriate end. I take the account from _Scrambles Among the Alps_. "When telegrams came in, at the beginning of September 1890, stating that Jean-Antoine Carrel had died from fatigue on the south side of the Matterhorn, those who knew the man scarcely credited the report. It was not likely that this tough and hardy mountaineer would die from fatigue anywhere, still less that he would succumb upon 'his own mountain.' But it was true. Jean-Antoine perished from the combined effects of cold, hunger, and fatigue, upon his own side of his own mountain, almost within sight of his own home. He started on the 23rd of August from Breuil, with an Italian gentleman and Charles Gorret (brother of the Abbé Gorret), with the intention of crossing the Matterhorn in one day. The weather at the time of their departure was the very best, and it changed in the course of the day to the very worst. They were shut up in the _cabane_ at the foot of the Great Tower during the 24th, with scarcely any food, and on the 25th retreated to Breuil. Although Jean-Antoine (upon whom, as leading guide, the chief labour and responsibility naturally devolved) ultimately succeeded in getting his party safely off the mountain, he himself was so overcome by fatigue, cold, and want of food, that he died on the spot." Jean-Antoine Carrel entered his sixty-second year in January 1901,[15] and was in the field throughout the summer. On 21st August, having just returned from an ascent of Mont Blanc, he was engaged at Courmayeur by Signor Leone Sinigaglia, of Turin, for an ascent of the Matterhorn. He proceeded to the Val Tournanche, and on the 23rd set out with him and Charles Gorret, for the last time, to ascend his own mountain by his own route. A long and clear account of what happened was communicated by Signor Sinigaglia to the Italian Alpine Club, and from this the following relation is condensed: "We started for the Cervin at 2.15 A.M. on the 23rd, in splendid weather, with the intention of descending the same night to the hut at the Hörnli on the Swiss side. We proceeded pretty well, but the glaze of ice on the rocks near the Col du Lion retarded our march somewhat, and when we arrived at the hut at the foot of the Great Tower, prudence counselled the postponement of the ascent until the next day, for the sky was becoming overcast. We decided upon this, and stopped. "Here I ought to mention that both I and Gorret noticed with uneasiness that Carrel showed signs of fatigue upon leaving the Col du Lion. I attributed this to temporary weakness. As soon as we reached the hut he lay down and slept profoundly for two hours, and awoke much restored. In the meantime the weather was rapidly changing. Storm clouds coming from the direction of Mont Blanc hung over the Dent d'Hérens, but we regarded them as transitory, and trusted to the north wind, which was still continuing to blow. Meanwhile, three of the Maquignazs and Edward Bich, whom we found at the hut, returned from looking after the ropes, started downwards for Breuil, at parting wishing us a happy ascent, and holding out hopes of a splendid day for the morrow. "But, after their departure, the weather grew worse very rapidly; the wind changed, and towards evening there broke upon us a most violent hurricane of hail and snow, accompanied by frequent flashes of lightning. The air was so charged with electricity that for two consecutive hours in the night one could see in the hut as in broad daylight. The storm continued to rage all night, and the day and night following, continuously, with incredible violence. The temperature in the hut fell to 3 degrees. "The situation was becoming somewhat alarming, for the provisions were getting low, and we had already begun to use the seats of the hut as firewood. The rocks were in an extremely bad state, and we were afraid that if we stopped longer, and the storm continued, we should be blocked up in the hut for several days. This being the state of affairs, it was decided among the guides that if the wind should abate we should descend on the following morning; and, as the wind did abate somewhat, on the morning of the 25th (the weather, however, still remaining very bad) it was unanimously settled to make a retreat. "At 9 A.M. we left the hut. I will not speak of the difficulties and dangers in descending the _arête_ to the Col du Lion, which we reached at 2.30 P.M. The ropes were half frozen, the rocks were covered with a glaze of ice, and fresh snow hid all points of support. Some spots were really as bad as could be, and I owe much to the prudence and coolness of the two guides that we got over them without mishap. "At the Col du Lion, where we hoped the wind would moderate, a dreadful hurricane recommenced, and in crossing the snowy passages we were nearly _suffocated_ by the wind and snow which attacked us on all sides.[16] Through the loss of a glove, Gorret, half an hour after leaving the hut, had already got a hand frost-bitten. The cold was terrible here. Every moment we had to remove the ice from our eyes, and it was with the utmost difficulty that we could speak so as to understand one another. "Nevertheless, Carrel continued to direct the descent in a most admirable manner, with a coolness, ability, and energy above all praise. I was delighted to see the change, and Gorret assisted him splendidly. This part of the descent presented unexpected difficulties, and at several points great dangers, the more so because the _tourmente_ prevented Carrel from being sure of the right direction, in spite of his consummate knowledge of the Matterhorn. At 11 P.M. (or thereabouts, it was impossible to look at our watches, as all our clothes were half frozen) we were still toiling down the rocks. The guides sometimes asked each other where they were; then we went forward again--to stop, indeed, would have been impossible. Carrel at last, by marvellous instinct, discovered the passage up which we had come, and in a sort of grotto we stopped a minute to take some brandy. "While crossing some snow we saw Carrel slacken his pace, and then fall back two or three times to the ground. Gorret asked him what was the matter, and he said 'nothing,' but he went on with difficulty. Attributing this to fatigue through the excessive toil, Gorret put himself at the head of the caravan, and Carrel, after the change, seemed better, and walked well, though with more circumspection than usual. From this place a short and steep passage takes one down to the pastures, where there is safety. Gorret descended first, and I after him. We were nearly at the bottom when I felt the rope pulled. We stopped, awkwardly placed as we were, and cried out to Carrel several times to come down, but we received no answer. Alarmed, we went up a little way, and heard him say, in a faint voice, 'Come up and fetch me; I have no strength left.' "We went up and found that he was lying with his stomach to the ground, holding on to a rock, in a semi-conscious state, and unable to get up or to move a step. With extreme difficulty we carried him to a safe place, and asked him what was the matter. His only answer was, 'I know no longer where I am.' His hands were getting colder and colder, his speech weaker and more broken, and his body more still. We did all we could for him, putting with great difficulty the rest of the cognac into his mouth. He said something, and appeared to revive, but this did not last long. We tried rubbing him with snow, and shaking him, and calling to him continually, but he could only answer with moans. "We tried to lift him, but it was impossible--he was getting stiff. We stooped down, and asked in his ear if he wished to commend his soul to God. With a last effort he answered 'Yes,' and then fell on his back, dead, upon the snow. "Such was the end of Jean-Antoine Carrel--a man who was possessed with a pure and genuine love of mountains; a man of originality and resource, courage and determination, who delighted in exploration. His special qualities marked him out as a fit person to take part in new enterprises, and I preferred him to all others as a companion and assistant upon my journey amongst the Great Andes of the Equator. Going to a new country, on a new continent, he encountered much that was strange and unforeseen; yet when he turned his face homewards he had the satisfaction of knowing that he left no failures behind him.[17] After parting at Guayaquil in 1880 we did not meet again. In his latter years, I am told, he showed signs of age, and from information which has been communicated to me it is clear that he had arrived at a time when it would have been prudent to retire--if he could have done so. It was not in his nature to spare himself, and he worked to the very last. The manner of his death strikes a chord in hearts he never knew. He recognised to the fullest extent the duties of his position, and in the closing act of his life set a brilliant example of fidelity and devotion. For it cannot be doubted that, enfeebled as he was, he could have saved himself had he given his attention to self-preservation. He took a nobler course; and, accepting his responsibility, devoted his whole soul to the welfare of his comrades, until, utterly exhausted, he fell staggering on the snow. He was already dying. Life was flickering, yet the brave spirit said 'It is _nothing_.' They placed him in the rear to ease his work. He was no longer able even to support himself; he dropped to the ground, and in a few minutes expired."[18] FOOTNOTES: [14] Here the whole contention that the party was a competent one falls to the ground. No one without a reserve of strength and skill to meet possible bad weather should embark on an important ascent. Fair-weather guides and climbers should keep to easy excursions. [15] The exact date of his birth does not seem to be known. He was christened at the Church of St Antoine, Val Tournanche, on 17th January 1829. [16] Signor Peraldo, the innkeeper at Breuil, stated that a relief party was in readiness during the whole of 25th August (the day on which the descent was made), and was prevented from starting by the violence of the tempest. [17] See _Travels amongst the Great Andes of the Equator_, 1892. [18] Signor Sinigaglia wrote a letter to a friend, from which I am permitted to quote: "I don't try to tell you of my intense pain for Carrel's death. He fell after having saved me, and no guide could have done more than he did." Charles Gorret, through his brother the Abbé, wrote to me that he entirely endorsed what had been said by Signor Sinigaglia, and added, "We would have given our own lives to have saved his." Jean-Antoine died at the foot of "the little Staircase." On the 26th of August his body was brought to Breuil, and upon 29th it was interred at Valtournanche. At the beginning of July 1893 an iron cross was placed on the spot where he expired at the expense of Signor Sinigaglia, who went in person, along with Charles Gorret, to superintend its erection. CHAPTER XXI THE WHOLE DUTY OF THE CLIMBER--ALPINE DISTRESS SIGNALS I cannot bring this book to a more fitting end than by quoting the closing words of a famous article in _The Alpine Journal_ by Mr C. E. Mathews entitled "The Alpine Obituary." It was written twenty years ago, but every season it becomes if possible more true. May all who go amongst the mountains lay it to heart! "Mountaineering is extremely dangerous in the case of incapable, of imprudent, of thoughtless men. But I venture to state that of all the accidents in our sad obituary, there is hardly one which need have happened; there is hardly one which could not have been easily prevented by proper caution and proper care. Men get careless and too confident. This does not matter or the other does not matter. The fact is, that everything matters; precautions should be not only ample but excessive. 'The little more, and how much it is, And the little less and what worlds away.' "Mountaineering is not dangerous, provided that the climber knows his business and takes the necessary precautions--all within his own control--to make danger impossible. The prudent climber will recollect what he owes to his family and to his friends. He will also recollect that he owes something to the Alps, and will scorn to bring them into disrepute. He will not go on a glacier without a rope. He will not climb alone, or with a single companion. He will treat a great mountain with the respect it deserves, and not try to rush a dangerous peak with inadequate guiding power. He will turn his back steadfastly upon mist and storm. He will not go where avalanches are in the habit of falling after fresh snow, or wander about beneath an overhanging glacier in the heat of a summer afternoon. Above all, if he loves the mountains for their own sake, for the lessons they can teach and the happiness they can bring, he will do nothing that can discredit his manly pursuit or bring down the ridicule of the undiscerning upon the noblest pastime in the world." ALPINE DISTRESS SIGNALS No book on climbing should be issued without a reminder to its readers that tourists (who may need it even oftener than mountaineers) have a means ready to hand by which help can be signalled for if they are in difficulties. That in many cases a signal might not be seen is no reason for neglecting to learn and use the simple code given below and recommended by the Alpine Club. It has now been adopted by all societies of climbers. The signal is the repetition of a sound, a wave of a flag, or a flash of a lantern _at regular intervals_ at the rate of six signals per minute, followed by a pause of a minute, and then repeated every alternate minute. The reply is the same, except that three and not six signals are made in a minute. The regular minute's interval is essential to the clearness of the code. GLOSSARY AND INDEX GLOSSARY. ALP A summer pasture. ARÊTE The crest of a ridge. Sometimes spoken of as a knife-edge, if very narrow. BERGSCHRUND A crevasse forming between the snow still clinging to the face of a peak, and that which has broken away from it. COL A pass between two peaks. COULOIR A gully filled with snow or stones. GRAT The same as _arête_. JOCH The same as _col_. KAMM The same as _arête_. MORAINE See chapter on glaciers, page 7. MOULIN See chapter on glaciers, page 7. NÉVÉ See chapter on glaciers, page 7. PITZ An Engadine name for a peak. SCHRUND A crevasse. SÉRAC A cube of ice, formed by intersecting crevasses where a glacier is very steep. Called thus after a sort of Chamonix cheese, which it is said to resemble. A Albula Pass, 20 Aletsch glacier, 12, 142 Almer, Christian, 29, 50, 51, 71, 126, 134 Almer, Ulrich, 42 Altels, Ice-avalanche of the, 78 Anderegg, Jacob, 162 Anderegg, Melchior, 24, 50, 113, 162 d'Angeville, Mademoiselle, 204 Ardon, 59 Arkwright, Henry, 98 Aufdemblatten, Peter, 269 Avalanches, different kinds of, 15 B Balmat, 52 Barnes, Mr G. S., 32 Bean, Mr, 108 Bennen, 59, 113, 252 Bich, J. B., 262 Bionnassay, Aiguille de, 169 Birkbeck, Mr, 113 Blanc, Mont, 3, 92, 107, 162, 203 Bohren, 52 Boissonnet, Monsieur, 59 Borchart, Dr, 150 Borckhardt, F. C., 269 Bossons, Glacier des, 9 Breil, 253 Brenva Glacier, Ascent of Mont Blanc by, 162 Burckhardt, Herr F., 147 Burgener, Alexander, 226 C Carré, Glacier, 172 Carrel, J. A., 252, 259, 261, death of, 280 Coolidge, Rev. W. A. B., 30, 171 Couttet, Sylvain, 89, 99, 109 Croda Grande, feat of endurance on, 48 Croz, Michel, 126, 134, 252 D Davies, John, 269 Dent, Clinton, 58, 221 Douglas, Lord Francis, 45, 259 Distress Signals, Alpine, 291 Dru, Aiguille du, 221 E Eigerjoch, 208 F Falkner, Monsieur de, 269 Föhn Wind, Note on the, 80 G Gabelhorn, Ober, 42, 45 Gardiner, Mr, 170 Garwood, Mr Edmund, 194 Glacier tables, 11 Gorret, Charles, 281 Gosaldo, 48 Gosset, Mr Philip, 59 Grass, Hans and Christian, 44 Greenland, Glaciers of, 7 Guntner, Dr, 33 H Hadow, Mr, 260 Hamel, Dr Joseph, 92 Hartley, Mr Walker, 226 Haut-de-Cry, 59 Hinchliff, Mr T. W., 122 Hudson, Rev. C., 113, 269 I Imboden, Joseph, 5, 30, 35, 38, 40, 84 Imboden, Roman, 32, 84, 194 J Jungfrau, 147 K King, Sir H. Seymour, 278 Klimmer, 150 Kronig, F., 269 L Lammer, Herr, 72 Lauener, 41, 52, 66, 208 Longman, W., 142 Lorria, Herr, 72 M M'Corkindale, Mr, 108 Mammoth, 105 Maquignaz, J. P. and D., 269 Martin, Jean, 154 Mather, Mr, 113 Mathews, Mr C. E., 289 Mathews, Messrs, 208 Matterhorn, 23, 72, 250 Maurer, Andreas, 46, 226 Maurer, Kaspar, 239 Meije, 170 Mercer, Mr, 269 Miage, Col de, 114 Moming, Pass, 126 Moore, Mr, 126, 134, 162 Moraines, 10 Moser, 269 N Nasse, Herr, 150 P Palü, Piz, 44, 150 Paradis, Maria, 203 Penhall, Mr, 72 Perren, 113 Pigeon, The Misses, 153 Pilatte, Col de, 134 Pilkington, Messrs, 170 Plan, Aiguille du, 46 R Randall, Mr, 108 Rey, Emile, 46 Reynaud, Monsieur, 135 Richardson, Miss K., 169 Riva, Valley Susa, 18 Rochat, Mademoiselle E. de, 169 S Saas, Prättigau, 17 Schallihorn, 83 Schnitzler, 150 Schuster, Oscar, 48 Scerscen, Piz, 194 Sesia, Joch, 153 Sinigaglia, Leone, 281 Stephen, Sir Leslie, 113, 208 Stratton, Miss, 206 T Taugwald, Peter, 269 Taugwalder, 259 Trift Pass, 112 Tuckett, Mr F. F., 66, 113 W Wainwright, Mrs and Dr, 44 Walker, Mr, 50, 134, 162 Wetterhorn, 51 Wieland, 194 Wills, Chief Justice, 51 Whymper, Mr C., 126, 134, 250 Z Zecchini, G., 48 Printed at The Edinburgh Press 9 & 11 Young Street 
45747	----	generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org) Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 45747-h.htm or 45747-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/45747/45747-h/45747-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/45747/45747-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/climbingonhimala00collrich Transcriber's note: Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). Small capital text has been replaced with all capitals. The carat character (^) indicates that the following character(s) enclosed in curly brackes is/are superscripted (examples: K^{1}, E^{58}). CLIMBING ON THE HIMALAYA AND OTHER MOUNTAIN RANGES * * * * * * _Printed at the Edinburgh University Press_, by T. and A. CONSTABLE, FOR DAVID DOUGLAS. LONDON SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT AND CO., LTD. CAMBRIDGE MACMILLAN AND BOWES. GLASGOW JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS. * * * * * * [Illustration: A Stormy Sunset.] CLIMBING ON THE HIMALAYA AND OTHER MOUNTAIN RANGES by J. NORMAN COLLIE, F.R.S. Member of the Alpine Club Edinburgh David Douglas 1902 All rights reserved PREFACE After a book has been written, delivered to the publisher, and the proofs corrected, the author fondly imagines that little or no more is expected of him. All he has to do is to wait. In due time his child will be introduced to the world, and perhaps an enthusiastic public, by judicious comments on the virtues of the youngster, will make the parent proud of his offspring. Before, however, this much-desired event can take place, custom demands that a preface, or an introduction of the aforesaid youngster to polite society, must be written. Unfortunately also the parent has to compile a list or index of the various items of his progeny's belongings that are of interest; so that nothing be left undone that may be of service to the young fellow, what time he makes his bow before a critical audience. In books on travel, nowadays, it is customary often somewhat to scamp this necessary duty, and, after a few remarks in the preface, on subjects not always of absorbing interest, to conclude with the hope that the reader will be as interested in the description of places he has never seen as the author has been in writing about them. Of course, formerly these matters were better managed. In the 'Epistle Dedicatorie,' the author would at once begin with:--'To the most Noble Earle'--then with many apologies, all in the best English and most perfect taste, he, under the patronage of the aforesaid Noble Earle, would launch his venture on to the wide seas of publicity, or perhaps growing bolder, would put forth his wares with some such phrases as the following:--'And now, oh most ingenuous reader! can you find narrated many adventures, both on the high mountains of the earth, and in far countries but little known to the vulgar. Here are landscapes brought home, and so faithfully wrought, that you must confess, none but the best engravers could work them. Here, too, may'st thou find described diverse parts of thine own native land.' 'Choose that which pleaseth thee best. Not to detain thee longer, farewell; and when thou hast considered thy purchase, may'st thou say, that the price of it was but a charity to thyself, so not ill spent.' J. N. C. 16 CAMPDEN GROVE, LONDON, _24th March 1902_ NOTE Four of the chapters in this book have appeared before in the pages of the Scottish Mountaineering Club _Journal_ (A Chuilionn, Wastdale Head, A Reverie, and the Oromaniacal Quest). They all, however, have been partly rewritten, so the author trusts that he may be excused for offering to the public wares which are not entirely fresh. The Fragment from a Lost MS., and part of the chapter on the Lofoten Islands, were first printed in the _Alpine Journal_. The author also takes this opportunity of thanking Mr. Colin B. Phillip, first, for allowing photogravure reproductions to be made of two of his pictures (The Coolin and the Macgillicuddy's Reeks), and secondly, for the great trouble Mr. Phillip took in producing the three sketches of the Himalayan mountains which are to be found in the text. CONTENTS THE HIMALAYA-- CHAP. PAGE I. General History of Mountaineering in the Himalaya, 1 II. Our Journey out to Nanga Parbat, 25 III. The Rupal Nullah, 38 IV. First Journey to Diamirai Nullah and the Diamirai Pass, 57 V. Second Journey to Diamirai Nullah and Ascent to 21,000 feet, 70 VI. Ascent of the Diamirai Peak, 85 VII. Attempt to ascend Nanga Parbat, 104 VIII. The Indus Valley and Third Journey to Diamirai Nullah, 118 THE CANADIAN ROCKY MOUNTAINS, 135 THE ALPS, 165 THE LOFOTEN ISLANDS, 185 A CHUILIONN, 211 THE MOUNTAINS OF IRELAND, 225 PREHISTORIC CLIMBING NEAR WASTDALE HEAD, 245 A REVERIE, 263 THE OROMANIACAL QUEST, 283 FRAGMENT FROM A LOST MS., 299 NOTES ON THE HIMALAYAN MOUNTAINS, 305 INDEX, 311 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS A STORMY SUNSET, _Frontispiece_ A HIMALAYAN CAMP, To face page 2 A HIMALAYAN NULLAH, " " 38 THE DIAMIRAI PASS FROM THE RED PASS, " " 62 THE MAZENO PEAKS FROM THE RED PASS, " " 74 THE DIAMIRAI PEAK FROM THE RED PASS, " " 88 VIEW OF THE DIAMIRAI PEAK FROM THE RED PASS, " " 90 ON NANGA PARBAT, FROM UPPER CAMP, " " 104 NANGA PARBAT FROM THE DIAMIRAI GLACIER, " " 110 DO. DO. DO., " " 112 VIEW OF DIAMA GLACIER FROM SLOPES OF DIAMIRAI PEAK, " " 116 THE DIAMA PASS FROM THE RAKIOT NULLAH, " " 120 THE CHONGRA PEAKS FROM THE RED PASS, " " 122 THE FRESHFIELD GLACIER, " " 148 A CREVASSE ON MONT BLANC, " " 166 LOFOTEN, " " 186 THE COOLIN, " " 212 THE MACGILLICUDDY'S REEKS, " " 226 LIST OF MAPS MAP OF KASHMIR, To face page 28 MAP OF NANGA PARBAT, " " 40 CANADIAN ROCKY MOUNTAINS. MAP OF THE ICE-FIELDS AND THE MOUNTAINS, " " 144 CHAPTER I GENERAL HISTORY OF MOUNTAINEERING IN THE HIMALAYA 'Let him spend his time no more at home, Which would be great impeachment to his age In having known no travel in his youth.' SHAKESPEARE. At some future date, how many years hence who can tell? all the wild places on the earth will have been explored. The Cape to Cairo railway will have brought the various sources of the Nile within a few days' travel of England; the endless fields of barren ice that surround the poles will have yielded up their secrets; whilst the vast and trackless fastnesses of that stupendous range of mountains which eclipses all others, and which from time immemorial has served as a barrier to roll back the waves of barbaric invasion from the fertile plains of Hindustan--these Himalaya will have been mapped, and the highest points in the world above sea-level will have been visited by man. Most certainly that time will come. Yet the Himalaya, although conquered, will remain, still they will be the greatest range of mountains on earth, but will their magnitude, their beauty, their fascination, and their mystery be the same for those who travel amongst them? I venture to think not: for it is unfortunately true that familiarity breeds contempt. Be that as it may, at the present time an enormous portion of that country of vast peaks has never been trodden by human foot. Immense districts covered with snow and ice are yet virgin and await the arrival of the mountain explorer. His will be the satisfaction of going where others have feared to tread, his the delight of seeing mighty glaciers and superb snow-clad peaks never gazed upon before by human eyes, and his the gratification of having overcome difficulties of no small magnitude. For exploration in the Himalaya must always be surrounded by difficulties and often dangers. That which in winter on a Scotch hill would be a slide of snow, and in the Alps an avalanche, becomes amongst these giant peaks an overwhelming cataclysm shaking the solid bases of the hills, and capable with its breath alone of sweeping down forests. [Illustration: _A Himalayan Camp._] The man who ventures amongst the Himalaya in order that he may gain a thorough knowledge of them must of necessity be a mountaineer as well as a mountain traveller. He must delight not only in finding his way to the summits of the mountains, but also in the beauties of the green valleys below, in the bare hill-sides, and in the vast expanses of glaciers and snow and ice; moreover his curiosity must not be confined to the snows and the rock ridges merely as a means for exercising an abnormal craze for gymnastic performances, or he will show himself to be 'a creature physically specialised, perhaps, but intellectually maimed.' For in order to cope with all the difficulties as they arise, and to guard against all the dangers that lurk amidst the snows and precipices of the great mountains, a high standard, mental as well as physical, will be required of him who sets out to explore the Himalaya: he must have had a long apprenticeship amidst the snow-peaks and possess, too, geographical instincts, common sense, and love of the mountains of no mean order. During these latter years few sports have developed so rapidly as mountaineering; nor is this to be wondered at, for no sport is more in harmony with the personal characteristics of the Englishman. When he sets out to conquer unknown peaks, to spend his leisure time in fighting with the great mountains, it is usually no easy task he places in front of himself; but in return there is no kind of sport that affords keener enjoyments or more lasting memories than those the mountaineer wrests from Nature in his playground amongst the hills. Mountaineering, moreover, is a sport of which we as a nation should be proud, for it is the English who have made it what it is. There are many isolated instances of men of other nationalities who have spent their time in climbing snow-peaks and fighting their way through mountainous countries; but when we inquire into the records of discovery amongst the mountain ranges of the world--in the Alps, the frosty Caucasus, the mighty Himalaya, in the Andes, in New Zealand, in Norway, wherever there are noble snow-clad mountains to climb, wherever there are difficulties to overcome--it is usually Englishmen that have led the way. For the pure love of sport they have fought with Nature and conquered; others have followed after; and the various Alpine Clubs which have been founded during the last twenty years are witnesses of the fact that mountaineering is now one of the pastimes of the world. It has taken its place amongst our national sports, and every year sees a larger number of recruits filling the ranks. In one volume of that splendid collection of books which could have been produced nowhere else but in England--the 'Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes'--we find Mr. C. E. Mathews writing: 'I can understand the delight of a severely contested game of tennis or rackets, or the fascination of a hard-fought cricket-match under fair summer skies. Football justly claims many votaries, and yachting has been extolled on the ground (amongst others) that it gives the maximum of appetite with the minimum of exertion. I can appreciate a straight ride across country on a good horse, and I know how the pulse beats when the University boats shoot under Barnes bridge with their bows dead level, to the music of a roaring crowd; and yet there is no sport like mountaineering.' This was written for a book on mountaineering, but it may be truthfully said, without making distinctions between sports of various kinds, all of which have their votaries, that a sport that demands from those who would excel in its pursuit the utmost efforts, both physical and mental, not for a few hours only, but day after day in sunshine and in storm--a sport whose followers have the whole of the mountain ranges of the world for their playground, where the most magnificent scenery Nature can lavish is spread before them, where success means the keenest of pleasure, and defeat is unattended by feelings of regret; where friendships are made which would have been impossible under other circumstances--for on the mountains the difficulties and the dangers shared in common by all are the surest means for showing a man as he really is--a sport which renews our youth, banishes all sordid cares, ministers to mind and body diseased, invigorating and restoring the whole--surely such a sport can be second to none! But as access to the Alps and other snow ranges becomes easier year by year, the mountaineer, should he wish to test his powers against the unclimbed hills, must perforce go further afield. There are still, however, unclimbed mountains enough and to spare for many years yet to come. In the Himalaya the peaks exceeding 24,000 feet in height, that have been measured, number over fifty,[A] whilst those above 20,000 feet may be counted by the thousand. Every year, officers of the Indian Army and others in search of game wander through the valleys which come down from the great ranges, but up to the present time only a few mountaineering expeditions have been made to this marvellous mountain land. For this there are many reasons. The distance of India from England precludes the busy man from spending his summer vacation there; the natural difficulties of the country, the lack of provisions, the total absence of roads, and lastly, the disturbed political conditions, make any ordinary expedition impossible. Moreover, although the English are supposed to hold the southern slopes of the Himalaya, yet it is a curious fact that almost from the eastern end of this range in Bhutan to the western limit in the Hindu Kush above Chitral we are rigorously excluded. About the eastern portion of the Himalaya in Bhutan, and the mountains surrounding the gorge through which the Bramaputra flows, we know very little, as only some of the higher peaks have been surveyed from a distance. Next in order, to the westward, comes Sikkim, one of the few districts in the Himalaya where Europeans can safely travel under the very shadows of the great peaks. Next comes the native state of Nepaul, stretching for five hundred miles, the borders of which no white man can cross, except those who are sent by the Indian Government as political agents, etc., to the capital, Katmandu. It is evident at once to any one looking at the map of India, that Nepaul and Bhutan hold the keys of the doors through which Chinese trade might come south. The breaks in the main chain in many places allow of trade-routes, and in times gone by even Chinese armies have poured through these passes and successfully invaded Nepaul. The idea of establishing friendly relations between India and this Trans-Himalayan region was one of the many wise and far-reaching political aspirations of Warren Hastings. On it he spent much of his time and thought. His policy was carried out consistently during the time he was Governor-General of India, and commercial intercourse during that period seemed to be well established. Four separate embassies were sent to Bhutan, one of which extended its operations to Tibet. This first British Mission to penetrate beyond the Himalaya was that under Mr. George Bogle in 1774. But on the removal of Warren Hastings from India, these admirable methods of establishing a friendly acquaintance with the powers in Bhutan and Tibet were at once abandoned. It is true that a quarter of a century later, in 1811, Mr. Thomas Manning, a private individual, performed the extraordinary feat of reaching Lhasa, and saw the Dalai Lama, a feat that to this day has not been repeated by an Englishman. But when the guiding hand and head of Warren Hastings no longer ruled India, this commercial policy sank into complete oblivion. From that day to the present little intercourse of any kind seems to have been held between the English Government and those states in that border land between India and China.[B] On the west of Nepaul lie Kumaon, Garhwal, Kulu, and Spiti. Through most of these districts the Englishman can wander, which is also the case with Kashmir to a certain extent. The sources of the rivers that emerge from these Himalayan mountains are almost unknown, except in the case of the Ganges, which rises in the Gangootri peaks in Garhwal. The upper waters of the Indus, the Sutlej, the Bramaputra (or Sanpu), and the numberless rivers emerging from Nepaul and flowing into the Ganges, in almost every case come from beyond the range we call the Himalaya. Their sources lie in that unknown land north of the so-called main chain. Whether there is a loftier and more magnificent range behind is at present doubtful, but reports of higher peaks further north than Devadhunga (Mount Everest) reach us from time to time. The Indian Government occasionally sends out trained natives from the survey department to collect information about these districts where Englishmen are forbidden to go, and it is to their efforts that the various details we find on maps relating to these countries are due. Some day the lower ranges leading up to the great snow-covered mountains will be opened to the English. Sanatoria will be established, tea plantations will appear on the slopes of the Nepaulese hills, as is now the case at Darjeeling, and then only will the exploration of the mountains really begin, for which, at the present day, as far as Tibet and Nepaul are concerned, we have even less facilities than the Schlagintweits and Hooker had forty to fifty years ago. From the mountaineer's point of view, little has been accomplished amongst the Himalaya, and of the thousands of peaks of 20,000 feet and upwards hardly twenty have been climbed. The properly equipped expeditions made to these mountains merely for the sport of mountaineering may be said to be less than half a dozen. Of course the officers in charge of the survey department have done invaluable work, which, however, often had to be carried out by men unacquainted (from a purely climbing point of view) with the higher developments of mountain craft. To this, however, there are exceptions, notably Mr. W. H. Johnson, who worked on the Karakoram range. To omit work done by the earlier travellers, the first prominent piece of mountaineering seems to have been achieved by Captain Gerard in the Spiti district. In the year 1818 he attempted the ascent of Leo Porgyul, but was unsuccessful after reaching a height of 19,400 feet (trigonometrically surveyed). Ten years later he made the first successful ascent of a mountain (unnamed) of 20,400 feet. Speaking of his wanderings in 1817-21, he says: 'I have visited thirty-seven places at different times between 14,000 and 19,400 feet, and thirteen of my camps were upwards of 15,000 feet.' During the years 1848-49-50 Sir Joseph Hooker made his famous journeys into the Himalaya from Darjeeling through Sikkim. Obtaining leave to travel in East Nepaul, he traversed a district that since then has been entirely closed to Europeans. By travelling to the westward of Darjeeling he crossed into Nepaul, explored the Tambur river as far as Wallanchoon, whence he ascended to the head of a snow pass, 16,756 feet, leading over to the valley of the Arun river, which rises far away northward of Kanchenjunga. On the pass he experienced his first attack of mountain sickness, suffering from headache, giddiness, and lassitude. At this point he was probably nearer to Devadhunga[C] (Mount Everest) than any European has ever been, the mountain being only fifty miles away. From the summit of another pass in East Nepaul, the Choonjerma pass, 16,000 feet, he no doubt saw Devadhunga. From here he returned to Sikkim, and travelled to Mon Lepcha, immediately at the south-west of Kanchenjunga. During the next year he visited the passes on the north-east of Kanchenjunga leading into Tibet and ascended three of them, the Kongra Lama pass, 15,745 feet; the Tunkra pass, 16,083 feet; and the Donkia pass, 18,500 feet. From Bhomtso, 18,590 feet, the highest and most northerly point reached by him, a magnificent view to the northward into Tibet was obtained; and Dr. Hooker mentions having seen from this point two immense mountains over one hundred miles distant to the north of Nepaul. It was during his return to Darjeeling that he and Dr. Campbell were made prisoners by the Raja of Sikkim. During the years 1854-58 the two brothers, Adolf and Robert Schlagintweit wandered through a large portion of the Himalaya. They were the first explorers who possessed any real knowledge of snow work, having gained their experience in the Alps. Starting from Nynee Tal they followed the Pindar river to its source, just under the southern slopes of Nanda Devi. Then crossing to the north-east by a pass about 17,700 feet high, they reached Milam on the Gori river, whence they penetrated into Tibet over several passes averaging 18,000 feet. In this district, never since visited by Europeans, they made more than one glacier expedition, finally returning over the main chain, close to Kamet or Ibi Gamin (25,443 feet), on the slopes of which they remained for a fortnight, their highest camp being at 19,326 feet. An unsuccessful attempt was made on the peak, for they were forced to retreat after having reached an altitude of 22,259 feet. Returning over the Mana pass to the valley of the Sarsuti river, they descended to Badrinath. The upper valley of the Indus north of Kashmir was next explored, and Adolf, having crossed the Karakoram pass, was murdered at Kashgar.[D] In the _Journal_ of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal (vol. xxxv.) will be found a paper by the two brothers on the 'Comparative Hypsometrical and Physical Features of High Asia, the Andes, and the Alps,' which deals in a most interesting manner with the respective features of these several mountain ranges. In the years 1860-1865 Mr. W. H. Johnson, whilst engaged on the Kashmir Survey, established a large number of trigonometrical stations at a height of over 20,000 feet. One of his masonry platforms on the top of a peak 21,500 feet high is said to be visible from Leh in Ladâk. The highest point he probably reached was during an expedition made from the district Changchenmo north of the Pangong lake in the year 1864. Travelling northwards he made his way through the mountains to the Yarkand road, and at one point, being unable to proceed, he found it necessary to climb over the mountain range at a height of 22,300 feet, where the darkness overtook him, and he was forced to spend the night at 22,000 feet. In the next year, 1865, on his journey to Khutan he was obliged to wait for permission to enter Turkestan; and being anxious to obtain as much knowledge of the country to the north as possible, he climbed three peaks--E^{57}, 21,757 feet; E^{58}, 21,971 feet; and E^{61}, 23,890 feet (?). The heights of the first two mountains have been accurately determined by a series of trigonometrical observations, but there has probably been some error made in the height of the last, E^{61}. Mr. Johnson was a most enthusiastic mountaineer, and, owing to a suggestion made by him and Mr. Drew to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, efforts were made in 1866 to form a Himalayan Club, but through want of support and sympathy the club was never started. Mountaineering was indeed in those days so little appreciated by the political department of India that this journey of Mr. Johnson's in 1865 was made the excuse for a reprimand, owing to which he left the Service and took employment under the Maharaja of Kashmir. About the same time that Johnson was exploring the district to the north and north-east of Ladák, the officers of the survey, Captain T. G. Montgomerie, H. H. Godwin Austen, and others, were actively at work on the Astor Gilgit and Skardu districts. They pushed glacier exploration much further than had been done before; and it is quite remarkable how much they accomplished when one considers that in those days climbers had only just learned the use of ice-axes and ropes, and the knowledge of ice and snow even in the Alps was very limited. The exploration of the Baltoro glacier, the discovery of the second highest peak in the Himalaya--K^{2}, 28,278 feet--and the peaks Gusherbrum and Masherbrum, by H. H. Godwin Austen, and his ascent of the Punmah glacier to the old Mustagh pass will remain as marvels of mountain exploration. In the next ten or fifteen years but little mountaineering was done in the Himalaya. The Government Survey in Garhwal, Kumaon, and Sikkim was carried on, and more correct maps of the mountain ranges in these parts were issued. On Kamet about 22,000 feet was reached. In Sikkim, Captain Harman, during his work for the survey, made several attempts to climb some of the loftier peaks. He revisited the Donkia pass, and, like Dr. Hooker, saw from it the two enormous peaks far away to the north of Nepaul. In order to measure their height trigonometrically, he remained on the summit of the pass (18,500 feet) all night, but unfortunately was so severely frost-bitten that ultimately he was invalided home. In the year 1883 Mr. W. W. Graham started for India with the Swiss guide Joseph Imboden, on a purely mountaineering expedition; he first went to Sikkim, then attacked the group round Nanda Devi in Garhwal, and later returned to Sikkim and the mountains near Kanchenjunga. This expedition of Graham's remains still the most successful mountaineering effort that has been made amongst the Himalaya. No less than seven times was he above 20,000 feet on the mountains, the three highest ascents being, Kabru (Sikkim), 24,015 feet, A^{21} or Mount Monal (Garhwal), 22,516 feet, and a height of 22,500-22,700 feet on Dunagiri (Garhwal). It is perhaps to be regretted that Graham did not write a book setting forth in detail all his experiences, though a short account of his travels and ascents may be found in vol. xii. of the Alpine Club _Journal_. Arriving at Darjeeling early in 1883, he and Imboden made their way to Jongri just under Kanchenjunga on the south-west, and climbed a peak, Kang La, 20,300 feet. The Guicho La (pass), 16,000 feet, between Kanchenjunga and Pundim, was ascended, but as the end of March was much too early in the year for climbing, they returned to Darjeeling, and Imboden then went back to Europe. It was not till the end of June that Graham was joined by Emil Boss and Ulrich Kauffmann, who came out from Grindelwald. They started from Nynee Tal to attack Nanda Devi, travelling to Rini on the Dhauli river, just to the westward of Nanda Devi. From Rini they proceeded up the Rishiganga, which runs down from the glaciers on the west of Nanda Devi, but they were stopped in the valley by an impassable gorge that had been cut by a glacier descending from the Trisuli peaks. Obliged to retreat, they next attacked Dunagiri, 23,184 feet; after climbing over two peaks, 17,000 and 18,000 feet, they camped at 18,400 feet, and finally got to a point from which they could see the top of A^{22}, 21,001 feet over the top of A^{21}, 22,516 feet, and must therefore have been at least at a height of 22,700 feet. Unfortunately hail, wind, and snow drove Graham and Boss off the peak within 500 feet of the top--Kauffmann had given in some distance lower down--and it was only with difficulty that they were able to return to their camp, which was reached in the dark. The weather then obliged them to return to Rini, from which place they again started for Nanda Devi. This time they went up the north bank of the Rishiganga. After illness, the desertion of their coolies, and all the sufferings produced by cold and wet weather, they reached the glacier in four days, only to find that again they were cut off from it by a perpendicular cliff of 200 feet, down which the glacier torrent poured. Their attempt to cross the stream was also fruitless; so, baffled for the second time, they were forced to return to their camping-ground under Dunagiri at Dunassau, from which place they climbed A^{21}, 22,516 feet, by the western ridge, calling it Mount Monal. They then tried A^{22}, 21,001 feet, but were stopped by difficult rocks after reaching a point about 20,000 feet. By the middle of August Graham was back again in Sikkim and got to Jongri by September 2. With Boss and Kauffmann he explored the west side of Kabru and the glacier which comes down from Kanchenjunga. But the weather was continuously bad; they started to climb Jubonu, but were turned back. Then they crossed the Guicho La to ascend Pundim, but found it impossible; more bad weather kept them idle till the end of the month. They then managed to ascend Jubonu, 21,300 feet. A few days later they went up the glacier which lies on the south-east of Kabru, camping at 18,400 feet; and starting at 4.30 A.M. they succeeded, owing to a favourable state of the mountain, in reaching the summit, 24,015 feet (or rather, the summit being cleft into three gashes, they got into one of these, about 30 feet from the true top). It was not till 10 P.M. that they returned to their camp. The last peak they ascended was one 19,000 feet on the Nepaul side of the Kang La. Thus ended this most remarkable series of ascents, carried out often under the most difficult circumstances. Graham, from his account of his travels, was evidently not a man to talk about all the discomforts and hardships of climbing at these altitudes, and this lack of information about his feelings and sensations above 20,000 feet has been urged against him as a proof that he never got to 24,000 feet at all. But any one who will take the trouble to read his account of the ascent of Kabru, cannot fail to admit that he must have climbed the peak lying on the south-west of Kanchenjunga, viz. Kabru, for there is no other high peak there which he could have ascended from his starting-point except Kanchenjunga itself; moreover, unless he had climbed Kabru, neither he nor Emil Boss could have seen Devadhunga nor the two enormous peaks to the north-west, which they distinctly state must be higher than Devadhunga. Now, if they climbed Kabru, they were at a height of 24,000 feet whether they had a barometer with them or not, for that is the height determined by the Ordnance Survey. The heights reached in all their other completed ascents are vouched for in the same way, for if a mountain has been properly measured by triangulation, its height is known with a greater degree of accuracy than can ever be obtained by taking a barometer to the summit. The next real mountaineering expedition after that of Graham was in 1892, when Sir Martin Conway, together with Major Bruce, and M. Zurbriggen as guide, explored a large part of the Mustagh range. In all they made some sixteen ascents to heights of 16,000 feet and upwards, the highest being Pioneer peak, 22,600 feet. Arriving at Gilgit in May, when much winter snow still lay low down on the mountains, they first explored the Bagrot nullah. Here they ascended several glaciers and surveyed the country. But huge avalanches continually falling entirely stopped any high climbing. They therefore went into the Hunza Nagyr valley as far as Nagyr. In the meantime, as the weather was bad, they investigated first the Samayar and afterwards the Shallihuru glaciers. At the head of the former a pass was climbed, the Daranshi saddle, 17,940 feet, and a peak called the Dasskaram needle, 17,660 feet. They then returned to the Nagyr valley and reached the foot of the great Hispar glacier, 10,320 feet. From here they travelled to the Hispar pass, 17,650 feet, nearly forty miles, thence down the Biafo glacier, another thirty miles. The Hispar pass is therefore the longest snow pass traversed outside the Arctic regions. About half way up the Hispar glacier Bruce left Conway and climbed over the Nushik La, but joined him again later at Askole. From Askole the Baltoro glacier was ascended. Near its head the summit of Crystal peak, 19,400 feet, on the north side of the valley, was reached. From the summit, the Mustagh tower, a rival in height to K^{2}, 28,278 feet, was seen. To quote Conway's description: 'Away to the left, peering over a neighbouring rib like the one we were ascending, rose an astonishing tower. Its base was buried in clouds, and a cloud-banner waved on one side of it, but the bulk was clear, and the right-hand outline was a vertical cliff. We afterwards discovered that it was equally vertical on the other side. This peak rises in the immediate vicinity of the Mustagh pass, and is one of the most extraordinary mountains for form we anywhere beheld.' Two days later they made another climb on a ridge to the east, and parallel to the one previously climbed. From here they first saw K^{2}. Amongst the magnificent circle of peaks that surrounded them at this spot, many of which were over 25,000 feet, one only seemed to offer any chance of being climbed. This was the Golden Throne. It stands at the head of the Baltoro glacier, differing greatly in form and structure from its neighbours; and of all the mountains it seemed most accessible. Amongst, however, the enormous glaciers and snow-fields that eclipse probably those of any other mountains in ordinary latitudes, even to arrive at the beginning of the climbing was a problem of much difficulty. To again quote: 'We struggled round the base of the Golden Throne, up 2000 feet of ice-fall to a plateau where we camped; then we forced a camp on to a second, and again on to a third platform ... we got daily weaker as we ascended ... we finally reached the foot of the ridge which was to lead us, as we supposed, to the top of the Golden Throne. It was an ice-ridge, and not as we hoped of snow, and it did not lead us to the top but to a detached point in the midst of the two main buttresses of the Throne.' This peak they named Pioneer peak, 22,600 feet. After this climb they returned to Kashmir. Major Bruce, who accompanied Sir M. Conway in this expedition, has been climbing in the Himalaya for many years. In 1893, whilst at Chitral with Capt. F. Younghusband, he ascended Ispero Zorn. In July of the same year he made several ascents near Hunza on the Dhaltar peaks--the highest point reached being 18,000 feet. During August of the same year he climbed to 17,000 feet above Phekkar near Nagyr, with Captain B. E. M. Gurdon, and even in December, at Dharmsala, he had some mountaineering. Major Bruce has done some excellent mountaineering in a district that may be said to be his alone, namely in Khaghan, a district south-west of Nanga Parbat and north of Abbottabad. Here, in company with Harkabir Thapa and other Gurkhas, a great deal of climbing has been accomplished, the district having been visited almost every year since 1894. The best piece of climbing in Khaghan was the ascent of the most northern Ragee-Bogee peaks (16,700 feet), by Harkabir Thapa alone. This peak is close to the Shikara pass, though separated by one peak from it. Another district visited by Major Bruce in 1898 was in Ladák east of Kashmir--the Nun Kun range. Several new passes were traversed, and peaks up to 19,500 feet were climbed.[E] There is certainly no mountaineer who has a record of Himalayan climbing to compare with Major Bruce's, ranging as it does from Chitral on the west to Sikkim on the east. In fact, to show how the mountains exercise a magnetic influence on him, in the summer of 1898 he saw, what no one had ever seen before, in the short space of two months, the three highest mountains in the world: Devadhunga, K^2, and Kanchenjunga. In 1898 Dr. and Mrs. Bullock Workman traversed several passes in Ladák, Nubra, and Suru; and in 1899, with M. Zurbriggen as guide, went to Askole and up the Biafo glacier to the Hispar Pass. Then they climbed the Siegfried Horn, 18,600 feet, and Mount Bullock-Workman, 19,450 feet, both near the Skoro La. Afterwards, returning to the Shigar valley, Mount Koser Gunge, 21,000 feet, was ascended. The last mountaineering expedition to the Himalaya was that of Mr. Douglas Freshfield, who, in company with Signor V. Sella, Mr. E. Garwood, and A. Maquignaz as guide, made the tour of Kanchenjunga, crossing the Jonsong La, 21,000 feet. FOOTNOTES: [A] See p. 307. [B] _Narratives of the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet and of the Journey of Thomas Manning to Lhasa._ By Clements R. Markham, C.B., F.R.S. 1876. [C] Tibetan name: Jomo-kang-kar. [D] Cp. _Travels in Ladâk Tartary and Kashmir_, Lieut.-Colonel Torrens, 1862, pp. 350-360, Appendix. [E] _Alpine Journal_, vol. xx. p. 311. CHAPTER II OUR JOURNEY OUT TO NANGA PARBAT 'And go Eastward along the sea, to mount the lands Beyond man's dwelling, and the rising steeps That face the sun untrodden and unnamed.-- Know to earth's verge remote thou then art come, The Scythian tract and wilderness forlorn, Through whose rude rocks and frosty silences No path shall guide thee then, ... There as thou toilest o'er the treacherous snows.' R. BRIDGES. Amongst mountaineers, who has not at some time or another looked at the map of India, wishing at the same time for an opportunity to visit the Himalaya? to see Kanchenjunga, Devadhunga, Nanda Devi, Nanga Parbat, or any of the hundreds of snow-clad mountains, every one of which is higher than the loftiest peaks of other lands? to wander through the valleys filled with tropical vegetation until the higher grounds are reached, where the great glaciers lie like frozen rivers amidst the white mountains, while the green pasturages and pine woods below bask in the sunshine? to travel through the land where all natural things are on a big scale, a land of great rivers and mighty mountains, a land where even the birds and beasts are of larger size, a land that was peopled many centuries ago with civilised races, when Western Europe was in a state of barbarism? But these Himalaya are far away, and often as one may wish some day to start for this marvellous land, yet the propitious day never dawns, and less ambitious journeys are all that the Fates will allow. Although it had seemed most unlikely that I should ever be fortunate enough to visit the Himalaya, yet at last the time arrived when my dream became a reality. I have seen the great mountains of the Hindu Kush and the Karakoram ranges, from Tirach Mir over Chitral to K^{2} at the head of the Baltoro glacier; I have wandered in that waste land, the marvellous gorge of the Indus. I have stopped at Chilas, one of the outposts of civilisation in the wild Shinaki country, where not many years ago no white man could venture. I have passed through the defile at Lechre, where in 1841 a landslip from the northern buttress of Nanga Parbat dammed back the whole Indus for six months, until finally the pent-up masses of water, breaking suddenly through the thousands of feet of debris, burst with irresistible force down through that unknown mountain-land lying below Chilas for many hundreds of miles, till at last the whirling flood, no longer hemmed in by the hills, swept out on to the open plains near Attock, and in one night annihilation was the fate of a whole Sikh army. Also I have seen the northern side of the mighty Nanga Parbat, the greatest mountain face in the whole world, rising without break from the scorching sands of the Bunji plain, first to the cool pine woods and fertile valleys five thousand feet above, next to the glaciers, and further back and higher to the ice-clad avalanche-swept precipices which ring round the topmost snows of Nanga Parbat itself, whose summit towers 26,629 feet above sea-level, and 23,000 feet above the Indus at its base: whilst further to the northward Rakipushi and Haramosh, both 25,000 feet high, seem only to be outlying sentinels of grander and loftier ranges behind. It was in 1894 that the late Mr. A. F. Mummery and Mr. G. Hastings arranged that if they could obtain permission from the Indian Government to visit that part of Kashmir in which Nanga Parbat lies, they would start from England in June 1895, and attempt the ascent. Early in 1895 I made such arrangements (owing to the kindness of Professor Ramsay of London University College) that I was able to join the expedition. We left England on June 20, joining the P. and O. steamer _Caledonia_ at Brindisi. The voyage was delightful till we left Aden--even in the Red Sea the temperature never rising above 90°,--but once in the Indian Ocean we experienced the full force of the monsoon; and it was exceedingly rough from there to Bombay, which we reached on July 5. Two days later we arrived at Rawul Pindi, having had a very hot journey on the railway, a maximum of 103° being experienced between Umballa and Rawul Pindi. At the latter place the foothills of the Himalaya were seen for the first time, rising out of the plains of the Panjab. And that night, amidst a terrific thunderstorm, the breaking of the monsoon on the hills, we slept in dak bungalow just short of Murree. From Rawul Pindi to Baramula, in the vale of Kashmir, an excellent road exists, along which one is able to travel in a tonga. These strongly built two-wheel carriages complete the journey of about one hundred and seventy miles in two or three days. Owing, however, to the monsoon rain, we found the road in many places in a perilous condition. Bridges had been washed away, great boulders many feet thick had rolled down the mountain-side sometimes to find a resting-place in the middle of the road, sometimes to go crashing through it; in one place the whole mountain-side was slowly moving down, road and all, into the Jhelum river below at the bottom of the valley. But on the evening of July 9 we safely reached Baramula. [Illustration: MAP OF KASHMIR J. Bartholomew & Co., Edin^r.] Beyond Baramula it is necessary to take a flat-bottomed boat or punt, called a dunga, traversing the vale of Kashmir by water. This valley of Kashmir, about which so much has been written, is beyond all adequate description. Situated as it is, 6000 feet above sea-level, in an old lake basin amongst the Himalaya, its climate is almost perfect. A land of lakes and waterways, splendid trees and old ruins, vines, grass-lands, flowers, and pine forests watered by cool streams from the snow ranges that encircle it, with a climate during the summer months like that of the south of France--no wonder this valley of Kashmir is beautiful. In length about eighty miles, and twenty-five miles in breadth, it lies surrounded by giant peaks. Haramukh, 16,903 feet, is quite close; to the eastward rise the Nun Kun peaks, 23,447 feet; whilst to the north Nanga Parbat, 26,629 feet high, can be seen from the hill stations. The atmospheric colours in the clear air are for ever changing, and no better description of them can be given than one by Walter R. Lawrence in his classical work on the _Valley of Kashmir_, where as settlement officer he spent several years. He says, 'In the early morning the mountains are often a delicate semi-transparent violet, relieved against a saffron sky and with light vapours clinging round their crests. Then the rising sun deepens shadows and produces sharp outlines and strong passages of purple and indigo in the deep ravines. Later on it is nearly all blue and lavender with white snow peaks and ridges under a vertical sun, and as the afternoon wears on these become richer violet and pale bronze, gradually changing to rose and pink with yellow and orange snow, till the last rays of the sun have gone, leaving the mountains dyed a ruddy crimson, with snows showing a pale creamy green by contrast. Looking downward from the mountains, the valley in the sunshine has the hues of the opal; the pale reds of the Karéwá, the vivid light greens of the young rice, and the darker shades of the groves of trees, relieved by sunlit sheets, gleams of water, and soft blue haze, give a combination of tints reminding one irresistibly of the changing hues of that gem. It is impossible to do justice to the beauty and the grandeur of the mountains of Kashmir, or to enumerate the lovely glades and forests visited by so few.' Nowadays Kashmir is a prosperous country. But before the settlement operations were taken in hand (1887) by Lawrence the country-people were suffering from every kind of abuse and tyranny. Now it is all changed, and under the rule of Maharaja Pratab Singh, who resolved that this settlement should be carried out and gave it his loyal support, the country-folk are contented and prosperous; the fields are properly cultivated, without fear that the harvest will be reaped by some extortionate official; the houses are rebuilt, and the orchards, gardens, and vineyards are well looked after. It was not till my return from the mountains that I had a chance of spending a few days in this fascinating valley. After leaving Baramula our route lay for some time up the Jhelum river, which drains most of the vale of Kashmir; but soon we emerged on the Woolar lake, and in the grey morning light the hills that completely encircle the valley could be partly seen through the long streams of white mist that draped them. The lake was perfectly calm, and reflected on its surface the nearer hills. Soon we came to miles of floating water-lilies in bloom, whilst on the banks quaint mud houses and farms, encircled with poplar, walnut, and chenar trees, were visible; and, beyond, great distances of grass lands and orchards stretched back to the mountains. But we were not across the lake. From the westward a rain-cloud was approaching, and soon the whole face of nature was changed. Small waves arose; then a blast of wind swept down part of the matting which served as an awning to our boat, and in a moment we were in danger of being swamped. The rowers at once began to talk wildly, evidently in great fear of drowning. Several other dungas, which were near and in the same plight as our own, came up, so all the boats were lashed together by ropes. Meanwhile the women and children (for the Kashmiri lives on the dunga with his wife and family) were screaming and throwing rice on the troubled waters, presumably to propitiate the evil beings who were responsible for the perilous state of affairs, and seemingly this offering to the gods was effective, for the angry deity, the storm-cloud, passed on, the wind dropped, and without further adventure we made land at Bandipur on the northern shore of the lake in warm sunshine. Here we found ponies which had been hired for us by Major C. G. Bruce of the 5th Gurkhas. He had travelled all the way from Khaghan to Kashmir in order to engage servants, ponies, etc., and had spent a fortnight out of a month's leave in arranging these matters for us who were strangers to him. Since that time I have seen much more of Bruce, but I shall always remember this kindness. I may also say that during the whole of our expedition the military and political officers, and others whom we met, invariably helped us in every way possible. On July 11 we loaded the ponies with our baggage and started for Nanga Parbat. Our route lay over the Tragbal or Raj Diangan pass, 11,950 feet. On the further side we descended to Kanjalwan in the valley of the Kishnganga river. Up this valley about twelve miles is the village of Gurais, where we were nearly stopped by the tahsildar, a most important village official. We wanted more ponies, which he of course promised, but next morning they were not forthcoming. Messages were useless, and seemingly persuasion also was of no avail, he assuring us that there were no ponies, and telling us every kind of lie with the utmost oriental politeness. Mummery was, however, equal to the occasion. He wrote out a telegram, which of course he never intended to send, the contents of which he had translated to the tahsildar. It was addressed to the British Resident at Srinagar, asking what should be done with a miserable official at Gurais who would give us neither help nor ponies. The effect was magical. In less than ten minutes we had three times as many ponies as we wanted, and that too in a district where everything with four legs was being pressed into the service of the Gilgit commissariat. The tahsildar rode several miles up the valley with us, finally insisting that Mummery should ride his pony, and return it after two or three days when convenient. Just above Gurais we left the valley of the Kishnganga, and turned to the left or north-east up the valley of the Burzil. From this valley two passes lead over the range into the country that drains down the Astor nullah to the Indus: the first is the Kamri, 12,438 feet, the second the Burzil or Dorikoon pass, 13,900 feet, over which the military road to Gilgit has been made. Both these passes ultimately lead to Astor. We chose the Kamri, for we were told that better forage for our ponies could be obtained on the northern slopes. We crossed the pass on July 14, finding still some of the winter snows unmelted on the top. From the summit we had our first view of Nanga Parbat, over forty miles away, but rising in dazzling whiteness far above all the intervening ranges. There is nothing in the Alps that can at all compare with it in grandeur, and although often one is unable to tell whether a mountain is really big, or only appears so, this was not the case with Nanga Parbat as seen from the Kamri. It was huge, immense; and instinctively we took off our hats in order to show that we approached in a proper spirit. Two days later we camped at Rattu, where we found Lieutenant C. G. Stewart encamped with his mountain battery. He showed us the guns (weighing 2 cwt. each) which he had taken over the Shandur pass in deep snow when accompanying Colonel Kelly from Gilgit to the relief of Chitral. During this passage he became snow-blind. The forcing of the Shandur pass was one of the hardest pieces of work in the whole of the relief of Chitral, and the moral effect produced was invaluable. For the Chitralis were under the impression that even troops without guns could not cross the pass. Imagine their consternation when a well-equipped force, together with a mountain battery, was at the head of the Mastuj river leading down to Chitral. After we had been hospitably entertained by Lieutenant Stewart, and duly admired his splendid mule battery, we left the next day, July 16, and finally, in the dark that night, camped at the base of Nanga Parbat. During the day the ponies that we had hired only came as far as a village named Zaipur, where we paid off our men, and sent them and the ponies back to Bandipur. We did not, however, wish to camp at Zaipur, which lay on the south side of the Rupal torrent, but were anxious to cross to Chorit, a village opposite, and then go on to Tashing. How this was to be accomplished was not at first sight very plain. But the villagers were most willing to help, and those of the Chorit village came down on the further bank, in all about fifty to sixty men. Then bridge-building began; tons of stones and brushwood were built out into the raging glacier torrent; next pine trunks were neatly fixed on the cantilever system in these piers on both sides, and when the two edifices jutted far enough out into the stream, several thick pine trunks, about fifty feet long, were toppled across, and prevented from being washed down the stream by our Alpine ropes, which were tied to their smaller ends. Several of these trunks were then placed across between the two piers, and after three hours' hard work the bridge was finished. For this magnificent engineering achievement the headmen of the two villages were presented with two rupees. We did not camp at Tashing, but crossed the glacier immediately above the village, and in a hollow amongst a grove of willows set up our tents. We had taken twenty-seven days from London travelling continuously, but the weather was perfect. We were on the threshold of the unknown, and the untrodden nullahs round Nanga Parbat awaited us. CHAPTER III THE RUPAL NULLAH 'And thus these threatening ranges of dark mountain, which, in nearly all ages of the world, men have looked upon with aversion or with terror, are, in reality, sources of life and happiness far fuller and more beneficent than the bright fruitfulnesses of the plain.'--_Modern Painters._ Our camp in the Rupal nullah was certainly most picturesque, pitched on a slightly sloping bank of grass, strewn with wildflowers and surrounded by a species of willow-tree which, during the hot midday sunshine, afforded most welcome shade. Firewood could be easily obtained in abundance from the dead stems and branches of the thicket, and water from a babbling stream which descended from the lower slopes of Nanga Parbat, almost within a stone's-throw of our tents. Determined after our week's walk from Bandipur to make the most of our delightful camp, we spent the next day, July 17, in blissful laziness, doing hardly anything. We pretended now and again to busy ourselves with the tents and the baggage. A willow branch which hung in front of our tent door would need breaking off, or a rope tightening. But the day was really a holiday, and our most serious occupation was to bask in the warm sunshine and inhale the keen, bracing mountain air fresh from the snow-fields at the head of the Rupal nullah. [Illustration: _A Himalayan Nullah._] The sense of absolute freedom, of perfect contentment with our present lot, blessed gift of the mountains to their true and faithful devotees, was beginning to steal over us. Languidly we talked about the morrow, our only regret arising from our inability to catch a glimpse of that monarch of the mountains, Nanga Parbat, and the ice-fringed precipices which overhang his southern face. The Rupal is the largest nullah close to Nanga Parbat. It runs eastwards from the peaks by the Thosho pass under the whole southern face of Nanga Parbat, till it joins the valley coming down from the Kamri pass, some eight miles below Tashing. The total length is about twenty-five miles in a straight line, but only those who have wandered in these Himalayan nullahs know how that twenty-five miles can be lengthened. The interminable ups and downs, which with endless repetition confront the traveller, now descending on to glaciers by steep moraine walls, now scrambling over loose stones and debris, or crossing from one side of the nullah to the other, all the variations which a mountain path strews with such prodigality in the way, set measurement at defiance, and no man may tell the true length of a nullah twenty-five miles long. The inhabitants are wise; they speak only of a day's journey, and later we easily dropped into their ways, miles being hardly ever mentioned. In fact, to show how deceptive measurement by the map may be, when late in August we left the Diamirai nullah with the whole of our camp baggage to reach the next big nullah, the Rakiot, the traverse over two easy passes just below the snow-line took us no less than three days from early in the morning till late at night, though the distance as the crow flies is only ten miles. Tashing, the village, which lay a few miles below us down the valley, is large and prosperous, the peasants owning many flocks and herds. Chickens, eggs, and milk are plentiful, and situated as it is some distance from the Gilgit road, any surplus stock of provisions is not depleted to the same extent as is the case with hamlets in the Astor valley. Sheep, which are small and not easy to obtain at Astor, may be purchased without difficulty at Tashing. Not many years ago Tashing used to be periodically raided by the Chilas tribesmen, who lived on the western slopes of the Nanga Parbat range. They, like the old border thieves, would swarm over the Mazeno and Thosho passes and lift all the sheep and goats they could find, sometimes even taking the women as well. This, however, is now completely stopped since we 'pacified' Chilas. Mountain robbers of course still harass the land, but they have been driven further to the westward, and now it is the Chilas folk themselves who are the victims. In fact we heard later that at the end of July the tribesmen from Kohistan and Thur (to the south-west of Chilas) were pillaging the country at the head of the Bunar and Barbusar nullahs, where they had killed several shepherds and driven away their flocks. [Illustration: MAP OF NANGA PARBAT J. Bartholomew & Co. Edin^r.] The Rupal nullah above Tashing is fairly fertile, the vegetation stretching up a considerable distance. Pine-trees and small brushwood flourish at the foot of the Rupal or main glacier, whilst for several miles further on the north side of the valley grass and dwarf rhododendron bushes grow. The glaciers from Nanga Parbat sweep across the valley much in the same way as the Brenva glacier sweeps across the Val Véni, cutting off the upper pasturages from the villages below. Of course the highest peak in the neighbourhood is Nanga Parbat itself. But those on the south-west of the Rupal nullah, rising as they do some 7000 to 8000 feet above the floor of the valley, present a most magnificent spectacle. One especially (marked 20,730 feet) which stands alone at the head of the nullah, charms the eye with its beautiful form and exquisite lines of snow and rock. We christened it the Rupal peak, whilst its neighbour further west, almost its equal in size (20,640 feet), we named the Thosho peak. Another summit (20,490 feet) to the eastward might, as it stands at the head of the Chiche nullah, appropriately be termed the Chiche peak, and the glacier which descends from it to the end of the Rupal glacier, the Chiche glacier. A very good idea of the relative size and form of the great main range of Nanga Parbat on the north side of the Rupal nullah may be obtained from the top of the Kamri pass. The ridge to the westward of the true summit of Nanga Parbat, stretching as far as the Mazeno La, does not culminate in any very pronounced peaks. The lowest point, probably 19,000 to 20,000 feet, lies a little over a mile directly west of the top of the mountain. We have called this dip in the ridge the Nanga Parbat pass, and two peaks marked 21,442 feet and 20,893 feet the Mazeno peaks. To the eastward of Nanga Parbat the Rakiot peak, a superb snow-capped mountain, rises to the height of 23,170 feet, and here the main ridge turns considerably more to the north-east, ending in the twin Chongra peaks, 22,360 feet, which overlook Astor and the Chongra valley. Beyond these a sudden and abrupt fall in height of about 3000 feet occurs, and the ridge running more and more in a northerly direction, and never rising above 18,000 feet in height, constitutes the western boundary of the Astor valley. The height of our camp in the Rupal nullah was calculated from observations made with a mercurial barometer. The difference in level between the two cisterns was 531 millimetres, from which observation it was 9900 feet above sea-level.[F] We finally decided that it would be best to obtain a good view of the south face of Nanga Parbat before we made up our minds whether we should remain in the Rupal nullah. Two of us, Mummery and I, agreed to start the next day with the intention of combining business with pleasure; in fact, we had vague ideas about climbing the Chiche peak, 20,490 feet. On July 18 we set out early. Our route lay up the north side of the Rupal nullah through the fields of the small hamlet of Rupal. The morning light, the ripening crops waving in the sunshine, and the fields backed by pine woods, glaciers, and snow-peaks, were very beautiful. Unfortunately, as is usual in this part of the Rupal nullah, we were unable to obtain any view of the great peak of Nanga Parbat, our path taking us directly underneath it. Above the Rupal village the Nanga Parbat glacier sweeps across the valley from underneath the summit of the peak. This glacier, which owes its formation to avalanches perpetually falling down the southern face of the mountain, lies across the Rupal nullah almost at right angles, and forms a huge embankment varying from 500 to 800 feet high. The route up the nullah here turns off to the right, following a hollow which has been formed between the mountain-side and the true left bank of the glacier, and which we found well wooded, with a clear stream running down the centre. In all the larger nullahs the same conditions were conspicuous: usually for several miles up the valley above the end of the glacier a subsidiary valley would exist, between the side moraine of the glacier and the hill-side. These side moraines are often clothed with huge pine-trees, whilst below, birches and willows, dwarf rhododendrons and wild roses, cover the pasturages. A climb of about 200 feet is necessary to take one on to the Nanga Parbat glacier, which at this point is flush with the top of the moraine, and, like so many others in this district, is littered with stones of all sizes. Though much more uneven, it is similar to the lower end of glaciers such as the Zmutt or the Miage. On the west side of the glacier a steep descent must be made down on to the bottom of the Rupal nullah. The floor of the valley here is carpeted with masses of brushwood. As one proceeds up the nullah two more glaciers, similar to the Nanga Parbat glacier, descend at a steep angle from the big peak, but do not stretch quite across the valley, and can be passed by walking round between their ends and the Rupal torrent. Just below the Rupal glacier itself, a well-wooded stretch of pasture-land opens out, studded with pines and other trees. Here it was that we saw, or thought we saw, our first red bear; he was some way off, but the keen-eyed shikari saw the bushes moving, and assured us that the movement was due to a 'Balu,' and as there were traces of these animals in every direction, probably the shikari was right. Having made up our minds to camp just at the end of the Chiche glacier, we tried to effect a crossing over the Rupal torrent which looked quite shallow in several places, but these mountain streams are very deceptive. From a distance of a hundred yards nothing seems more easy than to wade across, but to any one in the swirling torrent the aspect of affairs is very different; ice-cold water with insecure and moving stones below is by no means conducive to a rapid crossing, and our shikari, who first essayed it, made but little advance. Ultimately he edged his way safely back to land, but still on the same side of the stream. Mummery, who was not to be beaten, next made a determined effort, but in his turn had to retreat after having been very nearly swept off his feet. There was, however, an alternative route. By ascending the valley to the end of the Rupal glacier a path would doubtless easily be found on the ice which would take us across to our camping-ground for the night. We were not disappointed, and soon found a spot where our tents could be pitched. The day had been more or less misty, but towards sunset the clouds began partially to roll off the peaks. Then in the gleaming gold of a Himalayan sunset we beheld the southern face of Nanga Parbat. Eagerly we scanned every ridge and glacier, as naturally we preferred to attack the peak if possible from the well-provisioned and hospitable Rupal nullah. Should we be unable to find a feasible route on this side, then it would be necessary to move our base of operations over the range into the wild Chilas country, about which we knew very little, but where we were certain supplies would be difficult to obtain. Knight, who was at Astor in 1891, writes of the Chilas country as follows:-- 'That white horizon so near me was the limit of the British Empire, the slopes beyond descending into the unexplored valleys of the Indus where dwell the Shinaka tribesmen. Had I crossed the ridge with my followers, the first human beings we met would in all probability have cut our heads off.' Our survey of the south of Nanga Parbat was not very encouraging; directly above the Rupal nullah the mountain rose almost sheer for 14,000 to 15,000 feet. Precipice towered above precipice. Hanging glaciers seemed to be perched in all the most inconvenient places, whilst some idea of the average angle of this face may be obtained from the map. The height of the glacier directly under the summit is about 11,000 to 12,000 feet--that is to say, in about two miles or _less_, measured on the map, there is a difference in height of 15,000 feet. In the Alps one can only compare it in acclivity with the Mer de Glace face of the Charmoz and Grépon. On the south face of the Matterhorn or of Mont Blanc a mile measured on the map would probably only make a difference in height of some 5000 and 7000 feet respectively. To come to more familiar instances, the top of the Matterhorn rises 8000 to 9000 feet above Zermatt, but it is distant some six or seven miles; whilst the summit of Mont Blanc, which is 12,000 feet higher than Chamounix, is about eight miles off. One route however seemed to offer some hopes of success. By climbing a very steep rock buttress and then traversing an ice ridge, which looked like a very exaggerated copy of the one on the Brenva route up Mont Blanc, a higher snow-field could be gained, from which the Nanga Parbat pass seemed easy of access. But as the pass was not much over 20,000 feet, at least another 6000 feet would have to be ascended, and the rocky ridge which connected it with the summit would tax the climbers' powers to the utmost. An obvious question also arose as to the possibility of pushing camps with provisions up to 20,000 feet by this route, for we were agreed that our highest camp must at least be somewhere about that altitude. But the evening mists again drifted over the magnificent range opposite and soon hid the upper part of the mountain. They did not finally disappear till long after sunset. In the meantime we contented ourselves with planning our expedition for the morrow by the light of the camp fire. The height of the camp by mercurial barometer was 12,150 feet. Before daylight next day we started up the middle of the Chiche glacier, accompanied by two of our Kashmiri servants. Stones without number covered the ice, and our lanterns only sufficed to show how unpleasant our path on the glacier was likely to prove. Soon the cold grey of the morning revealed the Chiche peak straight in front of us, a dim and colourless shadow. Quickly the dawn rose; we saw the bare precipitous ice slopes on its northern face, scored everywhere by avalanche grooves, and the loneliness of the scene impressed itself upon us. We were entering on a new land, a country without visible trace of man; probably we were the first who had ever ventured into its recesses. No breeze stirred, and the eastern sun slanting across the peaks threw jagged shadows over the snows; soon rising higher in the heavens, it topped the ridges and bathed us in its warm glow. At once the glacier wakened into life, and as the stones on the surface were loosened from the frozen grip of night, those which were insecurely perched would ever and again fall down the slippery ice; then would we hear a grating noise followed by a deep thud or booming splash. These luckless stones had 'left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,' and deep in the cavernous hollows of each crevasse or below the still green water of the glacier pools they rested, till such time as the crushing heel of the relentless ice should grind them slowly to powder. Grand and solemn in the perfect summer's morning was my introduction to the snow world of the mighty Himalaya. The great hills were around me once more. The peaks, ridges, ice-clad gullies, and stupendous precipices encircling me, sent the blood tingling through my veins; I was free to climb where I listed, and the whole of a long July day was before me. To those whose paths lie in more civilised and inhabited regions, this enthusiasm about wild and desolate mountains may seem unwarranted, may, perhaps, even savour of an elevation of fancy, a vain belief of private revelation founded neither on reason nor common sense. They probably will agree with Dr. Johnson, who writes of the Western Highlands of Scotland: 'It will readily occur that this uniformity of barrenness can afford little amusement to the traveller; that it is easy to sit at home and conceive rocks, heaths, and waterfalls, and that these journeys are useless labours which neither impregnate the imagination nor inform the understanding.' The 'saner' portion of humanity, on the whole, are of one mind with the great Doctor, at least if one can judge from their utterances, and the votary of the mountains is often looked upon with pity as one who, being carried away by a kind of frenzy, is hardly responsible for his actions. A sport like mountaineering needs no apology. Moreover, it has been so often and so ably defended by writers with ample knowledge of their subject, that nothing remains for me to say to this 'saner portion,' unless perhaps I might be allowed to quote the following oracular remark: '"But it isn't so, no-how," said Tweedledum. "Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "If it was so it might be; and if it were so it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."' There are, however, those who accuse the mountaineer of worse things than a foolish and misguided enthusiasm about the waste places of the earth. I have often been told that this ardent desire for wild and rugged scenery is an unhealthy mental appetite, the result of the restless and jaded palate of the age, which must be indulged by new sensations, no matter at what cost. Why cannot the mountaineer rest content with the fertile valleys, the grass-clad ranges, and the noble forests with the streams flashing in the sunlight? Why cannot he be satisfied with these simpler and more homely pleasures? To what end is this eagerness for scenes where desolation and naked Nature reign supreme, where avalanches thunder down the mountain-sides, where man has never lived, nay, never could live? To a few the knowledge of the hills is given. They can wander free in the great snow world relying on their mountain craft; and should their imagination not be impregnated nor their understanding informed, then are their journeys indeed useless. For Nature spreads with lavish hand before them some of the grandest sights upon which human eye can gaze. Delicate, white, ethereal peaks like crystallised clouds send point after point into the deep azure blue sky. Driven snow, marvellously moulded in curving lines by the wind, wreathes the long ridges; and in the deep crevasses the light plays flashing backwards and forwards from the shining beryl blue sides: sights such as these delight the soul of the mountaineer and tempt him always onward. The ever-varying clouds, forming, dissolving, and again collecting on the mountains, show, here a delicate spire of rock, undiscernible until the white curling vapour shuts out the black background, there a lesser snow-peak tipped by the sunlight floating slowly across it and rimmed by the white border of the morning mists. But it is needless for the lover of the mountains to describe these sights; the mere stringing together of word-pictures carries little conviction. The sailor who spends his life on the ocean might just as well attempt to awaken enthusiasm for a seafaring life in the minds of inland country-folk, by describing the magnificence of a storm at sea, when the racing waves drive by the ship and the wind shrieks in the rigging, or by telling them of voyages through summer seas when the fresh breezes and the long rolling billows speed the ship on its homeward way through the ever-changing waters. The subject, however, must not be taken too seriously. No doubt the average individual has most excellent reasons for abstaining from climbing hills, whilst the mountaineer is, as a rule, more competent to ascend peaks than to explain their attractions; and to quote from a fragment of a lost MS.,[G] probably by Aristotle: 'Now, concerning the love of mountain climbing and the excess and deficiency thereof, as well as the mean which is also a virtue, let this suffice.' But I have wandered far from the Chiche glacier. Whether it was owing to our tremendous burst of enthusiasm which reacted on our ambition, or to a lack of muscle necessary for a hard day's work, nevertheless it must be recorded that presently our anxiety to climb the Chiche peak gradually dwindled, and after several tentative suggestions we both eagerly agreed that from a smaller summit just as good a view of Nanga Parbat could be obtained as from one 20,490 feet high. We therefore turned our attention to a spur on our right which ran in a northerly direction from the Chiche peak. As the day wore on even this proved too much for us, and after tediously floundering through soft snow, and cutting steps up a small couloir of ice, a strange and fearsome process to our Kashmiris, we sat down to lunch, at a height of 16,000 feet, and basely gave up any ideas of higher altitudes. We were hopelessly out of condition. Below us on our left lay a most enticing rock ridge, where plenty of fun and excitement could be had, and from its precipitous nature in several places, it would evidently take us the rest of the afternoon to get back to our camp. Clouds persistently interfered with the view of Nanga Parbat, but now and again its summit would shine through the drifting vapours, showing precipice above precipice. The eastern face of the Chiche peak, which we saw edgeways, was superb. Nowhere in the Alps is there anything with which one can compare the savage black corrie which nestled right in the heart of the mountain, showing dark, precipitous walls of rock, with here and there a shelf where isolated patches of snow rested. This corrie forms one of the heads of the Chiche nullah, which would be worth visiting for this solitary and savage view alone. As we descended our rock-ridge we had to put on the rope, and soon experienced all the pleasures of the initiated. Our bold and fearless Kashmir servants got more and more alarmed; and the peculiar positions they occasionally thought it necessary to assume made us feel how sweet is the joy of being able to accomplish something that an inexperienced companion regards as impossible. In many places it was only by very great persuasion that they were induced to move. Many were the things they told in Hindustani, which we understood but imperfectly, though we gathered in a general way that no self-respecting Kashmiri would ever attempt to climb down such places, and that even the ibex and markhor would find it an impossibility, a true enough assertion, seeing that many of the small rock faces to be negotiated were practically perpendicular for fifteen or twenty feet. We reached our tents late in the afternoon to find that Hastings had come up from the lower camp. A council of war was then held. Evidently we were not in condition to storm lofty peaks; and in order to get ourselves into proper training, a walk round to the other side of Nanga Parbat was considered necessary. Hastings as arranged had brought up plenty of provisions, thus enabling the party to brave the snows and uninhabited wilds in front of them. Our immediate movements decided upon, we sat round the camp fire, dined, smoked, talked, and finally, when the stars were shining brightly above the precipice-encircled summit of Nanga Parbat opposite, retired into our sleeping-bags for the night. FOOTNOTES: [F] All the heights given, other than those taken from the Ordnance Survey, are deduced from observations made with a novel and portable form of mercurial barometer, which can be coiled up and carried in a small tin box in the pocket. As we were unable to make comparative readings with a second instrument at a known height, the barometrical readings are, in every case, calculated from the pressure at sea-level being assumed to be 30 inches. This makes the heights, as a rule, about 800 feet _lower_ than if 31 inches were taken as the normal sea-level pressure. [G] Cp. page 304. CHAPTER IV FIRST JOURNEY TO DIAMIRAI NULLAH AND THE DIAMIRAI PASS 'Lo! where the pass expands Its stony jaws, the abrupt mountain breaks, And seems, with its accumulated crags, To overhang the world.' SHELLEY. Early the next morning, before the sun had risen, we started for the Mazeno La, which should lead us into the wild and unknown Chilas country. We soon experienced the kind of walking that afterwards we found to be more often than not the rule. Loose stones of every size and description lay piled between the edge of the glacier and the side of the valley, and it was useless to attempt to walk on the glacier itself, for not only was it buried deep with debris, but was crevassed as well. For some distance we followed the northern or left bank, passing by the snout of a small ice-fall that came down from the main range of Nanga Parbat, and then turned to the right up and over an intervening spur, which finally brought us to the level of the glacier that lay immediately under the Mazeno La. Across this our path lay in the burning sun of the morning. Before us, about 1500 feet higher up, was the pass; first the glacier was crossed, and then partly by rocks and partly over soft snow the way led upwards. Within a few hundred feet of the summit (18,000 feet) I experienced a violent attack of mountain sickness, and was hardly able to crawl to the top. This was the only time any of the party suffered at all, and later a slight headache or lassitude was the only symptom that I ever felt, even when at heights up to 20,000 feet. The western face of the pass is much more precipitous than the one we had ascended, but by making use of an easy rock arête we soon got down (2000 feet) to the more level glacier below. The Mazeno La on the western side somewhat resembles the Zinal side of the Triftjoch, but is not quite so difficult. The more active of our coolies, together with servants, were sent on with the instructions to camp on the right-hand side of the glacier as soon as they should come to any bushes out of which a fire could be made, but we were not destined that evening to camp in any comfort. Caught on the glacier by the darkness we were forced to sleep for the night on a small plot of grass on the edge of the side moraine, 13,400 feet, and not till the next morning did we rejoin our coolies about a mile and a half lower down the valley. After we had obtained sufficient to eat we started down beside the glacier, which I have named the Lubar glacier on account of the small shepherds' encampment of that name just below the end of it. On our arrival at Lubar we made our first acquaintance with the Chilas folk, some of whom looked very wild and unkempt, but throughout our expedition we found them to be friendly enough, and never experienced any difficulty with them. Some sour and particularly dirty goats' milk out of huge gourds was their offering to us, and a small sheep, price four rupees, was purchased. Our destination, however, was the Diamirai nullah on the north-west of Nanga Parbat, so we did not stay long, and winding away up the hill-side, leaving the Lubar stream far below us on the left, we first traversed a beautiful wood of birch-trees, and later got out on to the bare hill-side. Only two small ridges separate the Diamirai from the Lubar nullah, but they are only small in comparison with their bigger neighbours; consequently we did not reach the Diamirai nullah that day, but camped on the hill-side by a small stream at 12,500 feet. A magnificent view to the west showed all the country stretched out before us, a country untravelled by any European, whilst skirting the horizon were some splendid snow-peaks that lay near the head of the Swat valley beyond Tangir and Darel. Next day, July 22, before coming to the Diamirai nullah a herd of markhor was seen on the slope not far in front of us, and by midday we camped on the south side of the huge Diamirai glacier that fills up the centre of the nullah, having taken about five hours from our last camp, and having come over some very rough ground. As soon as the baggage was unpacked it was discovered that a pair of steig-eisen had been left at the camp of the night before. One of the goat-herds from Lubar had come with us, and he, being promised a rupee should he bring them back, started at about two o'clock, running up the hill-side like a goat, and by half-past six o'clock was back again with them. Of course, these men having been trained in the hills are very agile, and able to cover long distances, but considering the height there was to climb, and the nature of the ground traversed, his was a fine performance. The camp (12,450 feet) was placed amongst some stunted pine-trees and huge boulders that had rolled down the moraine, the glacier itself being high (200 feet) above the floor of the valley at the side. The view to the westward was much the same as we had seen the night before, only with this difference: it was enclosed now between the two sides of the Diamirai nullah, whilst the glacier fell away down the valley in the foreground, towards the Indus, 10,000 feet below. Beyond, range after range receded to the horizon, the furthest peaks probably being more than one hundred miles distant. There the mountain thieves of Darel, Tangir, and of the country west of Chilas live unmolested. But eastward, at the head of the valley, towered Nanga Parbat, 14,000 feet above us, one mass of ice and snow, with rock ribs protruding here and there, and vast overhanging glaciers ready at any moment to pour down thousands of tons of ice on to the glaciers below. Lit up a brilliant orange by the setting sun, and with the shadows on the lower snows of a pale green, it certainly looked most beautiful, but up its precipitous face a way had to be found, and at first sight it did not look very promising. From our camp we could see the whole face, and Mummery was not long before he pointed out a route by which we hoped later to gain the upper snow-fields just underneath the summit, and thence the topmost pinnacle which glistened in the sunlight. The provisions brought over from the Rupal nullah were only meant to last for a few days, so, after the exploration of the western side of Nanga Parbat, it became necessary to arrange for the return. The servants and coolies were sent back by the route we had come, whilst we made up our minds to cross the ridge on the south side of the valley sufficiently high up to bring us down either on to the Mazeno La, or, if we were fortunate, into the head of the Rupal nullah. I went for a walk about four miles up the glacier, but was unable to find a break in the great wall at the head of the Diamirai nullah. On my return I nearly ran into the arms of a huge red bear; and I must confess that we both were very much frightened. [Illustration: _The Diamirai Pass from the Red Pass._] That night, a little before midnight, we started with lanterns, picking our way first through the small rhododendron bushes by the side of the glacier for about a mile, then turning to the right obliquely up the hill-side with the intention of reaching a rock rib which led up to a gap in the great wall that bounded the Diamirai nullah on the south side. For a long time we stumbled up what seemed an interminable shoot of loose stones, but by the time the early dawn gave sufficient light to enable us to see where we were, a rock arête came into view on our left.[H] Towards this we made our way, finding the climbing was by no means difficult. Occasionally the arête would become too perpendicular for us to follow it, and then we had to cut steps along the top of ice- or snow-slopes that were underneath the rocks on the top of the ridge and chance finding our way back up some gully or subsidiary rib of rocks that might branch out from the main arête. We did not seem to waste much time, but long after the sun had risen and the silent ranges of blue mountains had flushed first with the rosy tints of the rising sun and afterwards glistened with the full blaze of the morning, the pass was still far away above us. These Himalaya are constructed on a totally different scale from either the Alps or any of the ordinary snow mountains. Still, point after point had to be surmounted. Once in the mist that settled down on us about eleven o'clock, we at last thought the summit was reached, and began to descend an arête that led towards the south. Twenty minutes later, when it cleared, great was our vexation to find the pass still a long distance above us on our right, and that we had unconsciously been descending towards the Diamirai nullah. Upwards again we had to climb, finally finding that the ridge led to the top of a peak on the west of the pass and about a thousand feet higher. In order to save the extra fatigue of climbing to the summit and again descending to the pass, Mummery made a bold effort, striking across the face of the mountain. In some places rocks stuck out from the steep face, in others ice slopes had to be crossed, and towards the middle a great circle of soft snow, with steep ice underneath, gave us an anxious time; for should the surface snow have avalanched away, it would not have stopped for certainly several thousand feet. By tying two ropes (eighty and sixty feet long) together, we spread ourselves out as far apart as possible, and very carefully made our way across. It was two in the afternoon before the summit of the pass was reached; its height was 18,050 feet. We have named it the Diamirai pass. Mummery assured us that he had never been over a more sporting pass, and we were delighted with the varied climbing that we had experienced. But our enthusiasm was soon checked; below, on the further side, we could see neither the wished-for Rupal nullah nor the Mazeno La. Easy rocks and snow led down to a small glacier, which, flowing southwards, led into another and larger glacier whose trend was to the west. Evidently the larger glacier was the Lubar. The position we were in gradually began to dawn on us. In fourteen hours we had made, as the crow flies, three miles; of course we had climbed about six thousand feet, but in front of us lay a descent of three thousand feet, and on to the wrong side of the range, therefore at least five miles away round the corner on the left was the Mazeno La, 18,000 feet. We also knew that our camp, and probably our first food, was nearly twenty miles on the other side of the Mazeno, and to make matters worse we had only a few scraps left, a slice of meat, some sticks of chocolate, and about half a dozen biscuits. There was no time to admire the view, also not much view to admire, for the customary midday mists completely hid Nanga Parbat and all the higher peaks. As an heroic effort Mummery suggested that it might save time to climb up from the pass on the south side, over a peak nearly 21,000 feet, in order to drop down on to the Mazeno La; but we soon decided that it was imprudent so late in the day to attempt it, especially as it would most certainly involve spending the night out at some very high altitude. We therefore rapidly descended the easy slopes on the south side of this pass, to which, as I have said, we gave the name of Diamirai. After running down the foot glacier, the Lubar glacier was reached at about half-past five. Here we stopped and rested for about an hour and a half, vainly attempting to get away from a bitterly cold wind that was blowing up from the west. But there was no shelter, so the lesser of two evils was chosen, namely to go on. Slowly we crawled to the foot of the Mazeno La, and about twenty hours after we had started on our expedition, without food, and with only the light of our lanterns, we toiled up the slopes that would bring us at last to the top of our second pass, 18,000 feet above sea-level. I shall never forget how tobacco helped me through that night, as I smoked whilst waiting on the summit, in the freezing air and the bright starlight, for Mummery and Hastings; it almost made me feel that I was enjoying myself; and it stayed the pangs of hunger and soothed away the utter weariness that beset both mind and body. During our wild nocturnal wanderings, first down the Mazeno, and then down the Rupal glacier, where in the dim candle-light and in a semi-conscious condition we slipped, tumbled, and fell, but always with one dominant idea--namely, we must go on!--that pipe continued to help me. What cared I though Hastings growled?--he does not smoke!--or whether poor Mummery groaned aloud as he stepped into icy pools of water. So we stumbled frantically forwards, over the vast wilderness of stones and ice; and I remember, as we groped our way onwards, I must have half fallen asleep, for I could not get out of my mind that there was a hut or a small hotel on the top of the Mazeno La, and that for our sins we had been doomed to wander for ever in this dismal and waste land of cold and darkness, whilst rest and food were foolishly left behind. But daylight came at last, and, after the sun was well up in the sky, we finally made our way off that dreadful glacier. We also had vague hopes that perhaps after all we might be able to get something to eat before we reached our camp, miles away near Tashing. For one of our Kashmiri servants had been told to wait at the foot of the glacier--a week if necessary--till we turned up. We were quite uncertain whether he would follow our instructions, but at seven o'clock Hastings and I found him camped under a huge rock. At once some provisions and a kettleful of hot tea were sent back to Mummery, who was resting some miles up the valley. At half-past ten I left Hastings and Mummery asleep amongst the flowers in the shade under the rock, and set off alone for the lower camp, if possible to hurry up some ponies to fetch them down the valley. Early in the afternoon I met them with two of the Rupal coolies: they had crossed the Nanga Parbat glacier, no easy thing to do, but, the steep face of dried mud and boulders about thirty feet high leading off the glacier, they could not get up. Engineering operations at once became necessary; with my ice-axe I cut large footsteps diagonally upwards across this steep face. But the first pony was afraid. After some talking, one of the men led up a wise-looking, grey pony to the bottom, and, talking to it, showed it the staircase. It then climbed up, feeling each step carefully with its forelegs before venturing on to it. These unshod mountain-horses are certainly extremely clever on such kind of ground. Several years later, when travelling in the Canadian Rocky Mountains with a whole pack of Canadian ponies, a place not one-quarter as difficult entirely stopped the whole outfit, although for making their way through fallen timber and across dangerous streams these Canadian ponies are unequalled. Between five and six that evening I arrived at our Tashing camp and found Bruce there. He had obtained a month's leave, bringing with him two Gurkhas--Ragobir and Goman Singh. Over our dinner we forgot the weary tramping of the last forty hours, celebrating the occasion by drinking all the bottles of Bass's pale ale--a priceless treasure in these parts--that we had brought from Kashmir. Then afterwards, when we turned into our sleeping-bags before the roaring camp-fire, and the twilight slowly passed into the azure night, and overhead the glistening stars were blazing in the clear sky, a worthy ceiling to this mountain land, it was agreed unanimously that it was worth coming many thousand miles to enjoy climbing in the Himalaya, and that those who lived at home ingloriously at their ease knew not the joys that were to be found amidst the ice and snows of the greatest of mountain ranges. Never would they enjoy the keen air that sweeps across the snow-clad heights, never would they wander homeless and supperless over the vile wastes which surround the Mazeno La for the best part of two nights and two days; and, last but not least, never would such joys as the marvellous contentment born of a good dinner, after incipient starvation, nor the delicious rest that comes as the reward after excessive fatigue--never would joys such as these be theirs. FOOTNOTES: [H] See illustration facing page 90. CHAPTER V SECOND JOURNEY TO DIAMIRAI NULLAH AND ASCENT TO 21,000 FEET 'And this, the naked countenance of earth, On which I gaze, even these primæval mountains, Power dwells apart in their tranquillity, Remote, serene, and inaccessible.' SHELLEY. Next day Bruce and I with Ragobir and Goman Singh went for an excursion up the Tashing glacier, in order that the two Gurkhas might have some experience in ice-work and step-cutting. It was great fun, and although I was perfectly unable to understand any of their conversation, Ragobir and Goman Singh were laughing, chattering, and playing the whole time like two children. On July 27 the same party, with the addition of Mummery, started for a ridge which runs south-east towards Tashing from the peak marked 22,360 feet, which we named Chongra peak, as it is at the head of the valley of that name above Astor. We crossed the Tashing glacier, and camped at 15,000 feet by some rocks. Next day was spent in a ridge-wander. Our intention was to climb a rock peak overlooking the Chongra nullah; but laziness was in the air, the day was hot, and the ridge endless. Finally a halt was called somewhat short of the peak that we had intended to climb, and for a long time we basked in the sun, smoked, ate our lunch, and enjoyed the superb view of the precipices of Nanga Parbat on the west and of the Karakoram range far away to the northward. Out of the masses of snow-clad giants in the remote distance to the north-east, one rose obviously higher than all its neighbours; in shape it resembled the view of K^{2} as seen from Turmik.[I] Since then, however, Bruce has told me that the mountain that was seen from Turmik was probably the Mustagh tower. These two peaks would be about one hundred miles away, and in that clear atmosphere should be perfectly visible from our position (about 17,000 feet), for we were high enough to see over the range on the east of the Astor valley. We also saw across the Indus and up the Shigar valleys, and further still the eye was directed straight up the Baltoro with no high peaks or ranges to intercept its view. Very much nearer and more to the north just on the other side of the Astor nullah a really magnificent double-headed peak, the Dichil,[J] sends up a series of perfectly impossible precipices. Its height on the map is 19,490 feet, but I am positive this measurement must be wrong. Much later, whilst returning from the Rakiot nullah to Dashkin, I was at a point 16,000 feet on the ridge just opposite across the Astor valley, and seen from there it apparently towered at least 5000 feet above me. In the Dichil nullah at its foot the valley cannot be more than 10,000 feet, and the view of it from this nullah must far surpass that of Ushba in grandeur. During the day a curious haze hung over some of the precipices at the head of the Tashing glacier just opposite to us, due to perpetual avalanches of stones which were partly falling, partly sliding, down the steep slopes. We returned to camp by a different route. A steep rock ridge led straight down from the peak we were on to the Tashing glacier below. On this ridge we had some delightful climbing, ultimately reaching the upper pasturages lying on the left bank of the glacier. It was a long tramp from there home, but just as it became dark we marched into our camp beneath the grove of willows. The 29th was spent preparing for our start for the Diamirai nullah, for Mummery had quite given up all idea of attempting to climb the thousands of feet of almost perpendicular wall that ran the whole way along the south face of Nanga Parbat. The next day we started with a perfect caravan of coolies. Our intention was to send Goman Singh and our servants, together with all the coolies and baggage, over the Mazeno La by the route we had first taken, whilst we ourselves with Ragobir should try to cross directly from the head of the Rupal nullah to the head of the Diamirai nullah. This time we hoped to have better luck than on our return over the Diamirai pass. But it was with some misgiving that I started, for I alone in my walk a week before up the Diamirai glacier had seen the head of that nullah, and although I did not doubt that we might reach the head of some pass from the southern side, I could not remember any place where it would be possible for us to descend on the northern side, and under any conditions our pass would be at least 20,000 feet, probably more, for the route lay directly over the spur which leads westward from the summit of Nanga Parbat to the Mazeno La. That night we camped about four to five miles short of the Mazeno La at a height of 13,000 feet. In the dark we started next morning up excessively steep and broken moraine by the side of an ice-fall, thence we turned on to the steep glacier, and after some difficulty got on to the upper glacier, which came down from the north-east. After following this for some distance we turned to our left up a wide couloir, and partly on rocks and partly on snow slowly climbed upwards. By three in the afternoon Bruce, who was not in such good condition as we were, and was suffering from suppressed mumps (although neither he nor we knew it at the time), began to feel tired, but under the stimulation produced by some citrate of caffeine lozenges he went on again bravely. At last we came out on to the ridge at the head of the couloir, and climbed some few hundred feet up the arête, which seemed to lead to the very summit of the peak marked 21,442 feet on the map. But the time was five o'clock in the afternoon. The height by mercurial barometer was 20,150 feet. We had climbed over 7000 feet; but beyond feeling very tired, which was natural, we were hardly affected by the rarefied air. Here we stopped for some short time and had our evening meal. Bruce and I came to the conclusion that, as we must certainly spend the night out somewhere, a less exalted position was preferable. We selected a new route, which would take us down to the foot of the Mazeno La, Ragobir coming with us. Mummery and Hastings would not hear of beating a retreat thus early, so they arranged to go on, and should they find the ridge become too difficult further up, they would return and follow us down, but they hoped for a full moon and the possibility of climbing on during the night. [Illustration: _The Mazeno Peaks from the Red Pass._] Bruce and I did not make much progress, for our ridge soon became both narrower and more precipitous; but finally, as the sun was setting, we found a crack running through the arête into which a flat stone had got jammed just large enough for three people to sit on. Here we made up our minds to stop for the night. Roughly we were 19,000 feet, or 1000 feet higher than the Mazeno La, and about two to three miles to the eastward of it. A stone thrown out on either side of our small perch would have fallen many hundreds of feet before hitting anything, so we did not take off the rope, but huddled together as best we could to keep warm. I could write a very long description of the wonderful orange sunset we saw beyond the Mazeno, how the light faded out of the sky, and the stars came out one by one as the sunset disappeared; how we tried in vain to get into positions such that the freezing wind would not penetrate our clothes, how Bruce and Ragobir groaned, and how we suffered--but I will refrain. Let any one who may be curious on the subject of a night out on a rock ridge at 19,000 feet try it; but he must place himself in such a position that, twist and turn as he may, he still encounters the cold, jagged rocks with every part of his body, and though he shelter himself ever so wisely, he must feel the wind steadily blowing beneath his shirt. Late in the night we heard noises on the ridge above us. It was Mummery and Hastings returning. But, although they were within speaking distance of Bruce and myself, and I had lit a lantern to show them where we were, they could not reach us, and finally had to select the least uncomfortable place they could. With leaden feet the night paced tardily on, and brilliant stars and moon that had at first shone from the zenith gradually sank towards the west, but how slowly!-- 'Yon lily-woven cradle of the hours Hath floated half her shining voyage, nor yet Is by the current of the morn opposed.' Would the morning never come, and with it the warm sunshine? Daylight crept up the sky, however, at last, and as soon as they could, Mummery and Hastings joined us. After we left them, they had climbed some considerable distance further, but as the mists did not lift at sundown and the other side of the range was unknown, they perforce had to return, having nearly reached the summit of the mountain and a height of 21,000 feet. It was a long time before we got down on to the Mazeno glacier, but somewhere about ten o'clock we arrived on the flat glacier. Here the party, overcome by the warmth of the sunshine and a great drowsiness, went to sleep on some of the flat slabs of stone that lay scattered on the ice. Personally, nothing would have given me more pleasure than to have followed the example of the rest, but visions of another night out on the Lubar glacier troubled me. Moreover, we had nothing whatever to eat, the night before having seen the last of our provisions. Ragobir and I therefore with weary feet started to cross the Mazeno La. Very slowly we toiled and toiled upwards through the already softened snow; but long before we reached the summit, more than once Ragobir had lain down on the ground exhausted. I found out later that he had eaten nothing whatever the day before. Ultimately we got to the top and rested awhile. Our mission was to get to Lubar, and from there send back up the glacier milk and meat to the remainder of the expedition. It was already midday, and here was I with a Gurkha who could hardly crawl, and the rest of the party perhaps in a worse condition far behind. So after a short rest, I started down from the pass on the west side, soon leaving Ragobir behind. Then I waited for him. Repeating these tactics he was enticed onwards again, until crossing an ice-couloir rendered dangerous through falling stones, I walked out on to the level glacier at the bottom to await him. Very slowly he crawled down, and when in the centre of the couloir, although I screamed to him to hurry, he was nearly hit by a great stone weighing half a hundredweight that had come from two or three thousand feet above. Although it only missed him by a few feet, he never changed his pace; and when at last he reached me, seated on a stone, he dropped full length on the ice, absolutely refusing to move, and groaning. He had eaten nothing for the last forty hours. My position was becoming serious. I could not leave the Gurkha, Lubar was miles away down the glacier, and some of the rest of the party might be in the same condition as Ragobir. I could think of nothing except to smoke my pipe and wait for something to happen. Half an hour passed, then an hour; and then, far up on the summit of the Mazeno La a black dot appeared, and shortly afterwards two more. So I waited, and at last the whole party was reunited. Bruce managed to revive Ragobir, who had had over two hours' rest, and we all set off as fast as we could for the shepherds' huts at Lubar. As the sun was setting we arrived there, very weary, but buoyed up with the expectation of something to eat. I shall never forget the sight that greeted my eyes when Mummery and I, the last of the party, walked into the small enclosure of stones where the goats and sheep were collected. Bruce was seated on the small wall in his shirt-sleeves, superintending the slaughter of one of the sheep. And, horrible to relate, in less than half an hour after we entered Lubar we were all ravenously devouring pieces of sheep's liver only half cooked on the ends of sticks. The dirty, sour goats' milk, too, was delicious, and as far as I can recollect, each of us drank considerably over a gallon that evening, to wash down the fragments of toasted sheep and chappatties that we made from some flour that had providentially remained behind our caravan with a sick coolie. Very soon we got into a somewhat comatose condition, and there was some sort of arrangement made, that should any one wake in the night he should look after the fire. But next morning when I awoke the fire was out and I was covered with hoarfrost. We had all fallen asleep almost in the positions in which we sat in front of the fire. I am afraid I must apologise for this second description of the delights of feeding after a prolonged fast. But few people have any conception of what it feels like to be really starving and worked till one longs to drop down anywhere--even on snow or ice. Hunger, exposure, and exhaustion are hard taskmasters, and the relief brought by rest, comfort, and plenty of food is a pleasure never to be forgotten. It is certainly one of the keenest enjoyments I have ever experienced. Next morning we started for the Diamirai camp, taking with us the coolie and the precious flour. We preferred to strike out a new route, keeping higher up the mountain-side and more to the right. Before long we met some of our Kashmir servants who had come back from the Diamirai to look for us, and, as was their most excellent custom, brought with them as many edibles as they could. These of course were soon finished. We left them to return by the ordinary route to the camp, whilst we followed up the Butesharon glacier in a south-easterly direction, reaching at its head a col about 17,000 feet. From this pass, on that perfectly clear afternoon, an unsurpassed panorama was spread out before us. The Indus valley lay 14,000 feet beneath us. Beyond stretched that almost unknown land below Chilas. A hundred miles away were the snow peaks in the Swat country, marked on the map as 18,563 feet and 19,395 feet high, standing out distinct against the sky, whilst much further still, a little more to the right, rose a vast snow peak nearly flat topped, or at least a ridge of peaks, several thousand feet higher than any others. It was probably Tirach Mir above Chitral, 25,426 feet and 24,343 feet high. From the summit of the Butesharon pass we descended almost straight to the camp, which had been pitched in the old spot, where we had been ten days before. During the next two days, August 3 and 4, we stopped in camp, and on the 5th Bruce left us, going back to Abbottabad _via_ the Mazeno La, the Kamri, and Kashmir. As we heard afterwards, it was anything but a pleasant journey, for, probably owing to the exposure during that night on Nanga Parbat, his complaint had been aggravated, and the glands of his neck and face had become so swollen, that when he was met by a friend on the Kamri he was unrecognisable, and for many months afterwards was unable to wear a collar. The day that Bruce left, Mummery and I with the Gurkhas started to explore the upper end of the Diamirai glacier. We camped at the head of the valley on the last grass on the northern side. Mummery and Ragobir started at midnight for the western face of Nanga Parbat. During the day they managed to reach the top of the second rib of rocks that lie directly under the summit, a height of about 17,000 to 18,000 feet. In the meantime I went to look at the Diama glacier between the Ganalo peak, 21,650 feet, and Nanga Parbat, taking with me Goman Singh and our Kashmir shikari. We climbed up the ridge that comes down from the Ganalo peak to about 17,000 feet, but unfortunately the day was cloudy, so I was unable satisfactorily to see the whole of the Diama valley, and ascertain what chances we should have if we were to attack Nanga Parbat from that side. However, on returning in the afternoon, I met Mummery on the glacier. He was delighted with his exploration, for there was, he said, magnificent climbing, and he had found a place on the top of the second rib of rock where a tent might be pitched. From July 13, the day we left the Kishnganga valley, it had been gloriously fine; but next day, August 7, the weather broke with heavy rain. Of course all our energies now were concentrated on the ascent of Nanga Parbat. Mummery decided that we should push provisions and supplies up the route that he and Ragobir had prospected; and he was confident that once beyond the rock ribs and on the upper snow-fields with some provisions and a silk tent, it would be very hard luck indeed should we be driven back before we reached the summit. During August 8 and 9, Mummery, Ragobir, Lor Khan (a Chilas shikari, who had come up from Gashut in the Bunar valley, and insisted on stopping with us), and I spent the time in carrying a waterproof bag of provisions and some odds and ends up the second rib of rock to a height of 17,150 feet. Here we left it in a safe place on the rocks. We also had considerable quantities of fuel taken up by coolies, to a camp 15,000 feet, at the bottom of the rocks under Nanga Parbat. Mummery was not wrong when he said it was magnificent climbing. The only climbing in the Alps I can compare it to is that on the Chamounix Aiguilles. In many places it was similar to that on the west side of the Aiguille du Plan from the Pèlerin glacier. Between the first and second ribs of rock the glacier was broken up into the wildest confusion, and it was only by passing a somewhat nasty couloir, down which occasional ice avalanches came, that the rocks of the second rib could be reached; thence to the top of the rib was difficult rock climbing over great slabs and towers of rock set at a very steep angle. I was extremely surprised that Lor Khan would go, but he did not seem in the least frightened, and with a little help from the rope climbed splendidly. As we returned that night to our camp the rains descended, and we arrived wet through; the weather was getting worse, and no serious attempt could be made for the present on Nanga Parbat. FOOTNOTES: [I] In Drew's _Jummoo and Kashmir Territories_, p. 370, also _Alpine Club Journal_, vol. xvii. p. 38, there is a sketch showing a mountain supposed to be K^{2}. Drew also has drawn K^{2} in No. 3 Isometric view of the mountains on the north-east of the Indus river. When Drew made these sketches the existence of the Mustagh tower, which rivals K^{2} in height, was unknown; moreover both from Turmik, and also from near Gilgit where the Isometric view No. 3 was taken, the Mustagh tower would be almost exactly in front of K^{2}. [J] There is a drawing of this peak on page 119 of Sir W. M. Conway's _Climbing in the Himalaya_. CHAPTER VI ASCENT OF THE DIAMIRAI PEAK 'Nothing that is mountainous is alien to us; we are addicted to all high places from Gaurisankar to Primrose Hill, wherever man has not forked out Nature. No doubt we find a particular fascination in the greatest and boldest inequalities of the earth's surface and the strange scenery of the ice and snow world; but we are attracted by any inequality, so long as it has not a railroad station or a restaurant on the top of it.' DOUGLAS FRESHFIELD. About this time we were beginning to run short of provisions, though a month earlier we had ordered all sorts of luxuries--jams, Kashmir wine, and so forth--from Srinagar, and had heard that they had been despatched to Bandipur, to be forwarded thence by the Government Commissariat Department. All inquiries were, however, fruitless, but Bruce had promised that should he, on his way down country to Abbottabad, discover their whereabouts he would hurry them on. Eventually he found them reposing at Bandipur, so he at once packed them on ponies and sent them to our camp in the Rupal nullah, knowing how the Commissariat Department had to strain every nerve to get the requisite grain supplies for the troops over the passes to Gilgit before the bad weather set in and blocked the Burzil, and that private baggage and supplies might wait indefinitely till such time as it pleased the Department to find ponies to convey them to their destination. Personally we did not wish to leave the Diamirai nullah, but at the same time it was absolutely necessary that somehow we should replenish our vanishing stock of food. Already two of our Kashmir servants had been sent down into the Bunar district to bring up whatever they were able to collect, but we could not depend on the Chilas nullahs to yield us all we might want. This question of provisioning our camp caused perpetual worry. Unless one has trustworthy servants, every ten days or so one of the party has to start off to the nearest village for supplies. This may take a week or more, and as the period during which the big mountains are in a condition to climb is at the best but very limited, much valuable time will be wasted. Bruce told me that whilst he was with Sir W. M. Conway, in the Karakorams, all the catering was left to Rahim Ali, his servant. If every fortnight during their stay at the head of the Baltoro glacier they had been forced, as we were, personally to forage and seek for dilatory servants, the climbing on Pioneer peak would have progressed but slowly. A piece of advice which cannot be too strongly urged upon those who go to the Himalaya is to get good servants at any cost, not to grudge the time spent, for it will be regained afterwards a hundredfold. The cook or khansammah ought to be the chief servant in the camp. He ought to be responsible for everything: it is his business to provide food, and a good cook who feeds one well, and takes the responsibility of the endless small details of management and supply off one's shoulders is worth five times the wages which are usually given. Accordingly, after some consultation, Hastings generously agreed to sacrifice himself and trudge back to our camp in the Rupal nullah and thence to Astor, not only with the hope of bringing back with him all the luxuries we had weeks before ordered from Srinagar, but also with the intention of procuring sheep, flour, rice, and tea from Astor. At the same time he hoped to shorten to a great extent the journey to the Mazeno by making a new and direct pass over into the Lubar nullah immediately south of our camp. In the meantime Mummery and I were to stay behind in the Diamirai nullah and push provisions up the face of Nanga Parbat as fast as we could. Just south of our camp rose a snow peak, about 19,000 feet, which we have called the Diamirai peak. On July 24, in crossing the pass from the Diamirai over to the Lubar glacier, we had left it on our right. It is not on the main ridge of Nanga Parbat, but on a side spur running to the westward. Camped as we were at its very foot, and looking on it as but a single day's climb, we determined to try to ascend it, whilst we waited for the snow to clear off the rocks on Nanga Parbat. By this time we had learned that the ascent of any peak 20,000 feet high was a laborious undertaking. At first we had talked about the 'twenty thousanders' somewhat contemptuously, and not without reason, for our hopes were fixed on Nanga Parbat, 26,629 feet; surely if a mountain of that height were possible, those whose summits were 7000 feet lower ought to be simplicity itself. In fact, we imagined that, as far as difficulty was concerned, they should stand somewhat in the same proportion to each other as an ascent of Mont Blanc to a climb up the Brévent from Chamounix during the springtime before all the snow has melted. [Illustration: _The Diamirai Peak from the Red Pass._] Unfortunately they were not quite so easy as we should have liked; not only did they involve an ascent from the camp of 7000 to 8000 feet, but also a considerable amount of the climbing under a pressure of about half an atmosphere. Then the interminable ice slopes, which in the Nanga Parbat district are very much more common than in the Alps, meant many hours of step-cutting, and the softened state of the snow directly after the sun had shone on it added considerably to our labour. Besides these drawbacks, which render the ascent of a mountain 20,000 feet high not altogether easy, the utter confusion and wearisome monotony of the stony and rugged hill-sides between the valley and the snow-line must not be forgotten. On August the 11th, we all started early in the morning by lantern light, taking with us Ragobir and Lor Khan (as well as Goman Singh and two coolies who were to accompany Hastings as far as Astor). We first climbed up a small moraine coming steeply down the side of the main valley almost to our camp from the glacier on the north-west side of the Diamirai peak, and in about an hour and a half came to the glacier itself. Here Hastings parted company with us, and, crossing a pass (which he has named Goman Singh pass), to the westward of the Diamirai peak, got safely over down to the Lubar glacier, whence by way of the Mazeno pass he came to our camp in the Rupal nullah. Mummery and I, accompanied by Ragobir and Lor Khan, turning slightly to the left, made for a gully leading higher up to a snow ridge which ran upwards nearly to the summit of the peak. At the foot of the gully we were confronted by a small bergschrund. This we easily turned, and began scrambling up the rocks on our left hand. Gradually the grey dawn melted into a Himalayan sunrise. Far away over the lower ridges we could see-- 'The ever-silent spaces of the east Far folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.' Above there was very little colour, pale greens verging into oranges and yellows, whilst below, in the shadows of the valleys, cold, dark steel blues, clear and deep, were the predominating shades. For a long while we watched the orange sunlight, catching first one part of Nanga Parbat and then another, as slowly the patches widened and spread creeping always down the mountain-side. Away to the north, on the opposite side of the Diamirai nullah, two minor rock peaks on the ridge were tipped with the rays of the morning sun. At the height we had already gained there was visible over the intervening ridge all the country above Gor on the further side of the Indus, while to the south of Gilgit stretched away mile after mile of mountain ranges. But by far the most striking sight was the enormous snow range beyond Gilgit and Yasin, the extreme western end of the Mustagh or Karakoram range. Rakipushi we could not see; it was just cut off by the western spur of the Ganalo peak, but from a point just west of the Kilik pass almost to the mountains above Chitral, snow summit after snow summit rose up into the heavens clear cut and distinct in the wonderfully translucent air. [Illustration: VIEW OF THE DIAMIRAI PEAK FROM THE RED PASS. The dotted lines show our various routes.] [Illustration: VIEW OF THE DIAMIRAI PEAK FROM THE RED PASS.] With this marvellous view nothing interfered, as the average height of the peaks on this mighty barrier which divides English from Russian territory cannot be much less than 23,000 feet, and that of the hills which lay between us and these peaks was not more than 16,000 feet. High above the great snow range on the horizon, a long-drawn cloud floated like a grey bar of silver, but it did not prevent the rays of the rising sun from covering with their golden light the whole of the distant and lonely snow world, as yet untrodden by the foot of man. As usual, a perfect stillness and calm in the morning air seemed to herald a fine day, but already we had learned to mistrust these signs:-- 'Full many a glorious morning have I seene, Flatter the mountaine tops with soveraine eie, * * * * * Anon permit the basest cloudes to ride With ougly rack on his celestiall face.' Few days were there during our stay in the Nanga Parbat region that were clear after 10 A.M., and this morning was no exception. The sun had risen above Nanga Parbat, and we knew well how soon the snow would soften under its powerful rays--half an hour usually sufficing under these conditions to thaw through the frozen outer crust. New snow, too, had fallen in considerable quantities, so we did not want to waste any of the valuable early hours on the lower slopes. Fortunately about this time the morning mists began to gather as usual, and not only prevented the snow from melting, but protected us from the fearful glare which would have been our fate on a perfectly cloudless day. Very narrow and steep was the snow ridge which stretched up the mountain-side above us, but we knew, although we could not see from where we were, that it led almost to the summit. The average angle of the arête was a little over 40 degrees. At first Mummery was easily able to nick out steps with the axe, but soon the crust began to give way here and there, leaving us to struggle often knee-deep. On our right the angle was not very steep, but on the left of the ridge was a most forbidding ice slope. Every now and then we would make rapid progress, finding a thinner coating of snow upon the ice, with but one or two small crevasses to be crossed. Away on our left was an excellent rock ridge, but we could not reach it without cutting across the steep ice-slope. However, our arête, some distance further up, seemed to join the rock ridge, so we pushed on quickly, in the hope that above we should be rewarded by finding easy rocks to climb. Before we reached this point a difficult and steep piece on the arête had to be surmounted. If we could have traversed off to the right it would have been easier, but the snow was in a most unstable condition; small zigzags to the right and then back again on to the ridge were resorted to, and ultimately we succeeded in getting up this somewhat nasty place. Rapid progress was then made, but we found, much to our disappointment, that the rock ridge ended where it joined the arête, and our hopes of an easy rock climb vanished. Finally we arrived just under the first summit of our mountain. Here the same difficulty we had experienced down below again presented itself, but in a worse form. The arête was much steeper, sloping probably at an angle of about 55 to 60 degrees. Mummery tried the same tactics as before, but soon had to confess that he dared not trust the snow any further, for it was thoroughly sodden upon the surface of the ice, and we might bring the whole face off at any moment. On the arête itself the snow, where it had drifted and been frozen, lay curiously deep, so that even at the thinnest point it did not allow of steps being cut in the ice below. Our only chance, therefore, was to try the ice slope on the left of the arête. Mummery led, cutting the steps diagonally across the slope, where a thin coating of snow lay some two or three inches deep over the hard ice underneath. As he moved slowly upwards, I came next on the rope, and, to keep my hands employed, passed the time in cutting the steps deeper into the ice. The position was a sensational one--we were crossing the steepest ice slope of any great size I had ever been on; below us it shot straight down some 2000 feet without a break, till the angle became less in a small snow basin. The next objects that met the eye were the stone slopes far below in the valley, and unconsciously I began to picture to myself the duration and the result of an involuntary glissade on such a mountain-side. Lor Khan, who came behind me on the rope, seemed to be enjoying himself immensely; of course he had never been in such a position before, but these Chilas tribesmen are famous fellows. What Swiss peasant, whilst making his first trial of the big snow peaks and the ice, would have dared to follow in such a place, and that, too, with only skins soaked through by the melting snow wrapped round his feet? Lor Khan never hesitated for a moment; when I turned and pointed downwards he only grinned, and looked as if he were in the habit of walking on ice slopes every day of his life. We were soon all in a line across this ice face, and whilst I was cutting one of Mummery's steps deeper to make it safer for our Chilas shikari, I noticed that the rope was hanging down in a great loop between Lor Khan and myself. At once I cried out to him not to move again till it was absolutely tight between us, and always to keep it so for the future. In the East we found that people were accustomed to obey instantly without asking questions. What the sahib said was law, at least so long as the sahib was there himself to enforce obedience. Consequently as I moved onward the rope soon became taut, and fortunately remained in that condition. Shortly after this Mummery turned upwards and slightly to his right, cutting nearly straight up the face, owing to some bad snow which barred our way. Just as I began the ascent of this staircase I heard a startled exclamation below. Instinctively I struck the pick of my axe deep into the ice, and at the same moment the whole of the weight of the unfortunate Lor Khan came on Ragobir and on me with the full force of a drop of some five to six feet. He had slipped out of one of the steps, and hung with his face to the glistening ice, whilst under him the thin coating of snow peeled off the face of the slope in great and ever-widening masses, gathering in volume as it plunged headlong down the mountain-side, finally to disappear over the cliffs thousands of feet below. For the time being I was fascinated by the descending avalanche, my whole mind being occupied with but this one thought, that if Lor Khan began to struggle and jerk at the rope I should without a doubt be pulled out of my steps. My fears proved groundless. Although Lor Khan had lost his footing he never lost either his head or his axe, and was just able to reach with his hand one of the steps out of which he had fallen. After Mummery had made himself quite firm above me I found myself, with the help of Ragobir, who was last on the rope, just able to haul up our Chilas shikari to a step which he had manfully cut for himself. It was, however, a very unpleasant experience; if the fall had been ten feet instead of six, I should never have been able to have borne the strain, and Lor Khan would have fallen considerably more than that if he had not been opportunely warned that he must keep the rope tight between himself and me. Half an hour later we got off our ice slope and stepped almost on to the first summit. All our difficulties were over. After ploughing through some soft snow, at about half-past eleven o'clock we were seated on the true top of our peak, the height of which by the barometer turned out to be 19,000 feet. We had climbed between 6000 and 7000 feet, and Mummery had led the whole way. The last 3000 feet had been very severe, for at first most of the steps had to be laboriously broken, and later we had to win our way by the use of the axe. But Mummery was perfectly fresh and could have gone on for hours, the diminished pressure (fifteen inches of mercury) having apparently no effect on him; neither was Ragobir any the worse for his climb; Lor Khan and I had slight headaches, but otherwise were quite fit for more. As we sat on the top enveloped in mist, Mummery and I debated afresh the old question, How should we feel if we ever ascended to 26,000 feet? Mummery reasoned that it would chiefly depend on our state of training at the time. Had I not been dreadfully ill at 18,000 feet crossing the Mazeno La, whilst here we were all right at 19,000 feet? Had we not ascended our last 3000 feet with hardly a rest and at exactly the same pace as if we had been climbing in the Alps? As it always takes two to argue, I perforce had to try my best as the opposition. At once I discovered that my headache was by no means a negligible quantity, and was therefore an excellent test for abnormal altitudes. Probably also mountain-sickness was a disease which lurked in the higher mountains and was ready at any moment to rush on and seize its prey. Luckily for us the particular bacillus was not just then in the surrounding atmosphere, consequently we had not been inoculated, yet perhaps should we on some future occasion go to 21,000 to 22,000 feet, we might be suddenly overwhelmed. Then I quoted an article I had read somewhere about paralysis and derangement of nerve-centres in the spinal column being the fate of all who insist on energetic action when the barometer stands at thirteen inches. It was no good, Mummery only laughed at me; and at this moment the mist clearing for a short space to the southward, we were soon far more interested with the view of the Thosho and Rupal peaks. The summit we were on fell away on the south directly under our feet in a series of rock precipices. We started on our homeward journey at about one o'clock without catching a single glimpse of Nanga Parbat. The descent of the steep ice slopes of our upward route was far too dangerous to attempt, so we decided on a rock ridge to the westward which we hoped would lead us down on the pass that Hastings had crossed earlier in the day. Ragobir was sent to the front. He led us down the most precipitous places with tremendous rapidity and immense enjoyment. It was all 'good' according to him, and his cheery face down below made me feel that there could be no difficulty, till I found myself hanging down a slab of rock with but the barest of handholds, or came to a bulging mass of ice overhanging a steep gully, which insisted on protruding into the middle of my stomach, with direful result to my state of equilibrium. At one place where the ridge was a narrow knife edge, with precipices on both sides, we had a splendid piece of climbing. A sharp descent of about a hundred feet occurred on the arête which seemed at first sight impossible. Ragobir tried first on the right hand, but, owing to the smoothness of the rock slabs and the absence of all handholds, was unable to get down further than twenty feet or so. Whilst I was dangling the Gurkha on the end of the rope, Mummery discovered what he considered to be a possible solution of the difficulty. Ragobir was to climb about twenty-five feet down a small open chimney on the perpendicular south face of the ridge; he then would be on the top of a narrow flake of rock which was laid against the mountain-side in the same manner as those on the traverse of the Aiguille de Grépon. We could easily hold him from above whilst he edged sideways along this narrow way. After a short time he called out that it was all right, and I let down Lor Khan next. When I myself got on to the traverse I was very much impressed, not that it was very difficult, thanks to the splendid handholds, but the face was so perpendicular that without them one could hardly have stood on the narrow top of the slab without falling outwards. A loose stone when thrown out about twenty feet pitched on some snow at least five hundred feet below. I found Ragobir and Lor Khan on a small niche on the ridge which divided the arête into two and at the top of an incipient ice gully. With considerable difficulty I managed to squeeze on to the small platform of rock and direct operations. Ragobir cut his way down to the next place where he could rest; and, after carefully hitching the rope as safely as I could, Mummery was called on to follow. It was just the kind of place he enjoyed, but it needed some one with iron nerves to descend the somewhat difficult chimney and then edge along the traverse without a steadying-rope from above. After the descent of the ice gully the climbing proved much easier. Rapid progress was made in spite of an uncertainty as to where we were going, for everything was hidden by the afternoon mists. Our route kept slowly bending away to the south-west, and as Hastings's pass lay directly to the west, we hoped that another bend to the north-west would put us straight again. We could not leave the ridge and traverse to our right, so perforce had to keep on descending, and when at last the mists did rise for a short time, we found our fears amply confirmed. The pass lay about a thousand feet above on our right, and, what was still more exasperating, the shortest route to it necessitated a still further descent of at least five hundred feet, followed by a traverse underneath the overhanging end of a glacier. An extra fifteen hundred feet of climbing up the unstable, interminable, and heart-breaking debris, which is so common on the south faces of the Himalaya, and that, too, late in the afternoon, was trying even to the best of tempers. I used quite unpublishable language, and even the imperturbable Mummery was moved to express his feelings in much more forcible language than was customary. There are occasions when language fails, and even the pen of Rudyard Kipling is unequal to depict the situation literally, though he does his best. There rises before me his description of that scene in the railway works at Jamalpur, where an apprentice is addressing, 'half in expostulation and half in despair, a very much disorganised engine which is sadly in need of repair.' Kipling gives us the gist of his language, but owns that after all the youth put it 'more crisply--very much more crisply.' We reached the top at last, but even then we had to traverse to the westward half a mile before beginning the descent. Once started we went at racing speed, sometimes getting a long glissade down soft snow, sometimes a run down small stone debris; it was rather hard on poor Lor Khan, who was not shod for this kind of work, and was soon left far behind. But it was getting late, and we wished to reach the camp before dark. Just as the sun was setting over the far-away hills in the wild, unknown Tangir, and shining through a thin veil of an evening shower, the tents under the Diamirai moraine were sighted; and during the after-dinner smoke opposite a roaring fire of pine logs we went over our day's adventures, and both agreed that we had enjoyed ourselves hugely: and so to bed. CHAPTER VII ATTEMPT TO ASCEND NANGA PARBAT 'An ancient peak, in that most lonely land, Snow-draped and desolate, where the white-fleec'd clouds Like lagging sheep are wandering all astray, Till the shrill whistling wind, their shepherd rude, Drives them before him at the early dawn To feed upon the barren mountain tops. Far from the stately pines, whose branches woo The vagrant breeze with murmuring melody, Far from the yellow cornlands, far from streams And dewy lawns soft cradled deep below, Naked it stands. The cold wind's goblin prate, Of weird lost legends born in days of old, Echoes all night amongst its pinnacles; Whilst higher more remote a storm-swept dome Mocks the pale moon: there nothing living reigns Save one old spirit of a forgotten God.' FRAGMENT. [Illustration: _On Nanga Parbat from Upper Camp._] A week before this, on the same day that Bruce had left us, our cook and our head shikari, together with some coolies, had been sent to fetch up from the Bunar valley any provisions they could find. We knew that if they had travelled with ordinary speed, five days was ample for the whole journey, and they were therefore two days overdue. Moreover, in our camp provisions for only one day remained. Our position was annoying. Of course, as the weather had turned fine again we wished to carry more necessaries up to the camp at the head of the Diamirai glacier, just under Nanga Parbat; but even where we were at the base camp, it was two days' hard travelling from the nearest village and food. This position of affairs produced a long discussion, and finally we agreed that we ourselves must go down to Bunar after the dilatory servants. It was most provoking, but there was no help for it. Leaving the camp in charge of the goat-herd from the Lubar nullah, and our water-carrier or bhisti, Mummery and I started off with Lor Khan and some servants for Bunar. The further we went the worse the path became, but by skirting upwards along the hill-side, on the left of the valley, we soon left the Diamirai glacier far below us. About this point we met our head shikari, who had come on in front of the remainder of the party from Bunar--at least he said so, but we could get very little accurate information out of him. In fact, as we afterwards discovered, he had stopped at the first village he had come to, and remained there doing nothing, or at least nothing connected with getting us provisions, which work he left to the cook. After enjoying himself for three days in this manner, thinking it was time to return, and collecting what he could, namely some grapes and apples, he came back to us with them as a peace-offering. Whilst he had been away, however, unfortunately for him, our other servants had explained several curious things which we at the time did not understand. These explanations left in our minds no doubt that this wretched Kashmir shikari had not only been robbing us, but also all the coolies as well. We in our ignorance thought that if the coolies were paid with our own hands, the money at least would be safe. In the East this is by no means the case, for the moment we were out of sight, this wily old ruffian would return to the coolies, telling them that they had been overpaid, and that the Sahibs commanded them instantly to give back half of the money. Our coolies were mostly Baltis from the Astor district. These poor Baltis have been a downtrodden race for centuries, harried by their more warlike and courageous neighbours--the Chilasis and the robbers of Gilgit and Hunza. So the shikari has no difficulty in making them yield to his extortion. Mummery for some time listened to his obvious lying, but soon lost his temper. A coolie anxious to go to his home in the Rupal nullah here served our purpose. The shikari was told to return to the Rupal nullah with him, and at the same time we gave him a letter to Hastings. In that letter, which he could not read, we explained the situation, and instructed Hastings to pay the shikari off and send him about his business. The route we were following soon turned away to the left, leaving the Diamirai nullah on the right. It was afterwards that we found out the reason for this. It seems to be impossible to descend or ascend this portion of the Diamirai nullah direct. The valley narrows in below the bottom of the glacier, and finally becomes a deep gorge with cliffs thousands of feet high on either side. Our change in direction soon showed us that we should have to cross the tributary Lubar nullah. This meant that we had to climb down a very steep rocky face of about 3000 feet. At about four in the afternoon we arrived at the bottom, finding an impassable glacier torrent thundering over great boulders and swollen by the melted snows of the morning. Walls of rock barred our way either up or down the stream, but Lor Khan said we were at the ford. In vain we tried to place pine trunks across--they were swept away one by one. It was a fine sight to see Lor Khan, stripped to the waist, struggling in the icy water with the great pine stems, a magnificent specimen of fearlessness, muscle, and activity. Fortunately we had insisted on roping him, for once he was carried off his feet and had to be brought back to land half drowned but laughing. It soon became perfectly evident that we could not cross till early next morning, when the frost on the glaciers above would have frozen up the sources of this turbulent stream. As we were wondering where we could possibly find room to lie down for the night, high above us on the opposite bank a stone came bounding down a precipitous gully. Who had started it? Some goat or other wild animal; or was it our cook returning with provisions? Shouting was useless, for the roar of the torrent drowned every noise. Five minutes passed, then ten, finally a quarter of an hour, but we were not destined to be disappointed; at last, more than five hundred feet up the gully opposite, we saw our cook with all the coolies. After they had descended, a rope was thrown across to them, and we succeeded by its aid in hauling a slippery pine trunk into position behind two large stones. Over this we crossed and camped on a narrow spit of level ground underneath the perpendicular walls of rock: chickens, sugar, eggs, three maunds of flour, and four sheep were amongst the spoils brought up by our cook from Bunar. That evening we ate our meal by the ruddy light of a great camp fire, with the roar of the torrent making it almost impossible to hear our voices, and underneath some gnarled and stunted pines, whose roots were firmly imbedded in the great fissures that ran up the perpendicular rock face. As the question of provisions had been settled for some time, we returned much relieved in our minds to the Diamirai nullah. The next day, August 14th, it again rained hard nearly all day. At 2 A.M. on the 15th we started once more for the upper camp. We took with us Ragobir, Lor Khan, and a Chilasi coolie, whom I had called Richard the Third, from his likeness to the usual portraits of that monarch. More firewood and provisions and a silk tent were taken up to this camp at the head of the glacier. Two rucksacks had already been left high up on the rocks on the 9th. It was now Mummery's intention to take some more odds and ends up to where they were, and if possible push on with about a third of the provisions to about 20,000 feet, and leave them there for the final attempt. This necessitated sleeping on the top of the second rib of rocks. By the time I had arrived at the upper camp underneath Nanga Parbat I began to develop a headache, and, being otherwise ill as well, I had reluctantly to give up any idea of climbing further. Mummery, Ragobir, and Lor Khan went on, whilst I spent most of the morning watching them climb like flies up the almost perpendicular rib of rocks above me. [Illustration: _Nanga Parbat from the Diamirai Glacier._] But I had to get home that night, and also get the coolie home as well. This was no easy matter, for there were some steep ice slopes, with steps cut in them, and crevasses at the bottom, which so frightened poor Richard the Third, that for a long time I could not induce him even to try. In fact, ultimately I had to threaten him violently with my ice-axe. Whether he thought that it was a choice of death by cold steel above, or cold ice below in the crevasse, I don't know, but he chose the latter, and was much surprised to find that he was not going to be sacrificed after all. Then, before we got home it began to rain heavily, the mists came down, everything becoming dull and dreary, the wind sighed sorrowfully up and down the valley, and I was sorry for Mummery on the inhospitable slopes of the great mountain. Mummery spent the night on the top of the second rib of rocks, and next day he climbed about a thousand feet up the third rib, where he left a rucksack with food. The climb was carried out almost entirely in mist; in fact, in the afternoon down at the camp the mist and rain made things thoroughly uncomfortable. I was beginning to get anxious about Mummery, for he did not come back by sunset, and the night promised to be one of drenching rain. But later, in the dark, he marched back into camp, entirely wet through, but far more cheerful than the circumstances warranted, and very pleased with the climbing. His account of the ice world on Nanga Parbat was wonderful. Nowhere in the Caucasus had he seen anything to compare with it. Avalanches had fallen down thousands of feet, set at an angle of over 60 degrees, that would have almost swept away towns. The crevasses were enormous, and the rock-climbing, although difficult, was set at such a steep angle that no time would be lost in making height towards the upper glacier underneath the final peak. If only the weather would clear, Mummery was sure that we could get on to this upper glacier. But the weather sulked and was against us, it rained nearly all the next day, finishing up with a tremendous thunderstorm. In hope that fine weather would now set in, we turned into our tents for the night. About midnight, gusts of cold wind began to moan amongst the stunted pines that surrounded our tents; then, gathering in force, this demon of the mountains howled round our tents, and snow came down in driven sheets. The anger of the spirits that inhabited the mountains had been roused, we were being informed of what awaited us, should we persist in our impious endeavours to penetrate into the sanctuaries above. Many times in the pitch darkness of the night I thought the small Mummery tent I was in would be simply torn in pieces, but towards daylight the hurricane gradually died away, and by nine o'clock the sun came out. The scene, when I emerged from the tent, I shall never forget. Bright sunshine and dazzling white snow--but where were all the groves of rhododendron bushes, from four to five feet high, that yesterday had surrounded our camp? Loaded with the snow, they had been beaten flat, and lay there plastered and stuck tight to the ground, by the ice and snow of the blizzard of the night before. But under the double action of the sun's heat and the rapid evaporation that takes place when the barometer stands only at about sixteen inches, the snow, which was over six inches deep, soon melted, and by the afternoon had all disappeared from around our camp. On the morrow a cloudless sky and a northerly wind changed the whole aspect of affairs. [Illustration: Diama Glacier. Summit (26,629 feet) Nanga Parbat Pass. NANGA PARBAT FROM THE DIAMIRAI GLACIER. A--Upper Camp at the base of Nanga Parbat. B--First rib of rocks. C--Second rib of rocks. D--Sleeping-place on the top of the second rib of rocks. E--Third rib of rocks. F--Mr. A. F. Mummery's highest point (over 20,000 feet). G--The foot of the Diama Glacier. H--The Diamirai Glacier. The dotted line shows route taken.] We had a long consultation, Mummery arguing that we ought to start for Nanga Parbat at once, and make an attempt to reach the summit. His only fear was that Hastings would feel that we were not treating him fairly by starting before he had returned from Astor and could join us in the climb. But the weather had been changeable, and the Chilas coolies with us were predicting that when the next snowstorm came, it would be worse than the last, and the snow would not clear away so quickly. There seemed great probability in their predictions. At any rate, with the cold north wind the good weather would last, but we ought to make use of that good weather at once. So, hoping that Hastings would forgive us, we started on the final attempt to reach the summit of Nanga Parbat. Our position was as follows:--We had plenty of provisions and firewood at the camp at the head of the glacier, a tent and more provisions with some spirits and a boiling tin on the top of the second ridge of rocks, and a last rucksack with more edibles half way up the third rib of rock. On the evening of the 18th, Mummery, Ragobir, and I slept at the camp at the head of the glacier (15,000 feet), but next morning they went on alone, for the coarse food of the previous three weeks had not agreed with me: flour that is largely composed of grindstone is apt to upset one's digestion. Again I sat for a whole morning watching them crawl slowly up that second rib of rock. Once they were hidden from my sight in a huge cloud of snow dust, the fringe of one of those tremendous avalanches that I have only seen in the Himalaya. At last, becoming too small to follow with the eye, they disappeared from my sight. That night I was again back in the base camp. There I found a note from Hastings that had been sent on ahead from the Lubar nullah with the goat-herd and a coolie; and the next day Hastings himself arrived with large quantities of provisions. He had been as far as Astor, and said that without the invaluable help of Goman Singh he would never have got the coolies back over the Mazeno La. Late that night Mummery and Ragobir came into camp. They had passed the second night on the summit of the second rib of rocks. Next morning, starting before daylight, they had pushed on up the final rib towards the upper snow-field. The climbing, Mummery admitted, was excessively difficult, but the higher he went the easier it became. Finally, at a height of over 20,000 feet, for he could see over the Nanga Parbat col on his right, Ragobir turned ill: it was therefore folly to attempt to spend another night on the mountain at that height. Reluctantly he had to return; and his disappointment was great, for, as he said, most of the difficulties had been overcome below the upper snow-field, and he was confident that had he reached these upper snows and been able to spend another night on the mountain, he might have reached the summit on the following day. Thus ended the only attempt Mummery made to reach the summit of Nanga Parbat. I shall always look upon it as one of his finest climbs. Part of it I know from personal experience, and from Mummery's description of the upper half, there must have been some magnificent climbing, surrounded by an ice world such as can be seen nowhere except on peaks with at least 15,000 feet of snow on them. But it was on too large a scale for ordinary mortals, and the difficulties began just above the camp, at the head of the glacier, 12,000 feet below the summit of the mountain. Although the last 6000 feet of the mountain does not look as if it would present much difficulty or danger, yet above 20,000 feet one would necessarily make height very slowly, and much step-cutting would be almost impossible at that height. The following two days were spent in discussing what we should do next; for Mummery had very sorrowfully come to the conclusion that his route up Nanga Parbat from the Diamirai glacier must be abandoned. Ultimately it was agreed that, owing to all the recent snowfalls, a purely snow route was the only one that would give any chance of success. Our last chance lay in finding such a route; in the Rakiot nullah, there perhaps Nanga Parbat might be less precipitous. So thither we determined to go. When Mummery and Ragobir had come down from the mountain, they did not bring with them the rucksacks from the top of the second rib of rocks. These were too valuable to leave behind. Mummery, disliking the interminable scrambling over loose stones which he would have to endure should he come with the coolies, suggested that the two Gurkhas should be sent early on the 23rd up the glacier to fetch the rucksacks down to the camp at the head of the Diamirai glacier. Here later in the day Mummery should join them, and from this point he could go up the Diama glacier which lay between Nanga Parbat and the Ganalo peak, 21,650 feet high. A snow pass (Diama pass) would then separate them from the Rakiot nullah. He left us on the 23rd, and took with him Lor Khan, and Rosamir, our head coolie, to carry some extra provisions up to the higher camp. That evening they were joined by Ragobir and Goman Singh, who had successfully brought down the rucksacks. [Illustration: VIEW OF DIAMA GLACIER FROM SLOPES OF DIAMIRAI PEAK. The arrow shows the route taken by Mr. A. F. MUMMERY on 24th August. Diama Pass. Nanga Parbat.] Next morning, the 24th August, Lor Khan and Rosamir, having seen them start off up the Diama valley to the east, returned down the Diamirai valley and joined us later. Mummery, Ragobir, and Goman Singh were never seen again. CHAPTER VIII THE INDUS VALLEY AND THIRD JOURNEY TO DIAMIRAI NULLAH 'For some ... Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before, And one by one crept silently to rest.' _Rubáiyát of_ OMAR KHAYY�M. Our route with the coolies was to skirt along the lower slopes of Nanga Parbat as near the snow line as possible. This would lead us first into the Ganalo nullah, and thence to the Rakiot nullah. There we had arranged to meet Mummery by the side of the glacier. Having crossed the Diamirai glacier, we went straight up the opposite side of the valley for a pass on the ridge south-east of a pointed rock peak at the head of the Gonar nullah. This peak we have named the Gonar peak, and the pass the Red pass (about 16,000 feet). From this pass a superb view of the head of the Diamirai nullah was obtained, whilst to the south and south-west a beautifully shaped snow mountain, beyond the Lubar glacier, probably the Thosho peak, shone in the sunlight over the Goman Singh pass. To the east we saw for the first time the great Chongra peaks on the north-east of Nanga Parbat. On the north side of our pass snow slopes stretched down some hundreds of feet to a small glacier. Some of the coolies tried an impromptu glissade here, and seemed rather pleased at the result; but it was a dangerous experiment, for various rocks and stones awaited their arrival at the bottom. At last in the dark after much trouble we managed to get down far enough to collect wood for our camp fires, and put up our tent by the side of a small stream. Next day it was found necessary to climb up again at least 1000 feet before descending about 2500 feet on to the snout of the Ganalo glacier. This we crossed on the ice. On the far bank most luxuriant vegetation covered the hill-side, and for a long time we climbed rapidly upwards through woods of pines, birches, and other trees till the rhododendrons were reached late in the afternoon. Still we pushed on, hoping to get over into the Rakiot nullah, for perhaps Mummery would be there awaiting tents and food. But the coolies were dead beat; therefore, when we were still more than 1000 feet below the col, we were forced to camp beyond the limit of the brushwood in an open grass valley. Next day we went over the pass, about 16,500 feet, into the Rakiot nullah. From the summit a splendid view of the Rakiot glacier and the northern side of Nanga Parbat could be seen. Never have I seen a glacier that presented such a sea of stormy ruin; the waste of frozen billows stretched ever upwards towards the ice-slopes that guarded the topmost towers of the great mountain. Thunder and rain welcomed us, and amidst dripping trees and cold mist our camp was pitched on the true left bank of the glacier. From the top of the last pass we had come over we could see the great face down which Mummery and the Gurkhas would have had to come had they reached the Diama pass. It seemed to us quite hopeless. I spent about half an hour looking through a powerful telescope for any traces of steps cut down the only ridge that looked at all feasible. I could see none. Hastings and I were therefore of the opinion that Mummery had turned back. This he had told us he intended to do should he find the pass either dangerous or very difficult, for, as he pointed out, he was not going to risk anything on an ordinary pass. Moreover, he had expressly taken sufficient food with him, leaving it at the upper camp, so that should he have to return and follow our footsteps he would have enough to last him for three days. In the Rakiot nullah we could find no traces of him. Lor Khan and Rosamir were at once sent back into the Ganalo nullah to meet Mummery with extra food, Hastings and I in the meantime exploring some distance up the valley. The day was more or less wet, with the mists lying low down on the mountains. It cleared, however, in the evening. The next two days were also wet and disagreeable. We were beginning to get anxious, and when on the 29th Lor Khan and the coolie returned, having seen nothing of Mummery, something had to be done. [Illustration: _The Diama Pass from the Rakiot Nullah._] We imagined that when the pass had proved to be too difficult, Mummery had turned back to the high camp where the food had been left. From there he would follow our route, but as the weather had been wretched, with mist lying over all the hills, perhaps he had missed his way. Or perhaps he might have sprained an ankle and be still in the Diamirai nullah. It was therefore agreed that Hastings should return towards the Diamirai nullah, and as my time was nearly at an end, if I wished to get back to England by the end of September, I should make my way to Astor as quickly as I could. Once there, I could wait a few days, and Hastings promised that as soon as possible he would send a coolie down to the nearest spot on the Gilgit-Chilas road, where there was a telegraph-station, and telegraph the news to me at Astor. Thus we parted company, Hastings returning along our old route to the Diamirai, whilst I with a coolie and the cook set off for Astor. About a mile down the valley we were met by some of the wild folk from Gor, a village on the opposite side of the Indus. These inhabitants of Gor have a somewhat evil reputation. Not many years before, an officer out shooting in one of their nullahs was nearly murdered. They did succeed in killing his shikari who was with him, but he himself escaped owing to the lucky appearance of some soldiers from Gilgit who were going down the valley of the Indus towards Chilas. Bruce also had some experience of these turbulent tribesmen when stopping at Darang, on the banks of the Indus below Gor; for whilst partridge-shooting in the hill-sides the beaters had to be armed with rifles, and played the double _rôle_ of protecting Bruce and driving the game. The Gor shepherds that I met were, I believe, the only ones on the south side of the Indus. Owing to the rich pasturage in the Rakiot nullah, they kept sheep and goats there. I must say they treated me very well, and two of them accompanied me for a couple of days, carrying the rucksacks and showing us the way. [Illustration: _The Chongra Peaks from the Red Pass._] The first night we slept in an old and disused shepherd's encampment high up, just at the limits of the pines. Next day we had to descend by most precipitous slopes to the bottom of the Buldar nullah. Our second night was spent high up on the eastern slopes of the nullah and short of the pass which was called the Liskom pass by the natives. On the next day we crossed this pass (about 16,000 feet). The view of the Chongra peaks from here is most striking, backed as it is by the great upper snow-field of the Rakiot glacier and Nanga Parbat behind. Just across the Astor valley to the east rises the Dichil peak, a terrific, double-headed rock pinnacle that is certainly over 20,000 feet high. These obliging Gor shepherds had accompanied us thus far, but no amount of persuasion could induce them to go one step further. At last, becoming frightened, they put the bags down on the snow and fled down the hill-side back to the Buldar nullah, and I was unable to give them anything for all their kindness. That afternoon, 1st September, I reached Dashkin on the Gilgit road, and was back again in civilised country. From there I made my way to Astor. It was on the 5th of September that I received a telegram from Hastings. He had returned to the Diamirai nullah without finding Mummery. The camp there was just as we had left it. Next day, 1st September, he made his way up the glacier to the high camp under Nanga Parbat with Rosamir and Lor Khan; there he found the extra provisions and some other things exactly as they had been placed by Mummery on the morning of the 24th There was only one conclusion to draw--Mummery, Ragobir, and Goman Singh had been killed somewhere up the glacier that lies between the Ganalo peak and Nanga Parbat. For there was absolutely no way out, except the way they had gone in. The Diama pass over to the Rakiot nullah we knew to be impossible on the eastern face, on the south lay Nanga Parbat, whilst on the north was the Ganalo peak, 21,500 feet high. If, therefore, they never returned for the provisions, some catastrophe must have overtaken them during their attempt to climb over the pass. From what I have seen of the valley, an avalanche falling from the north face of Nanga Parbat seems the most probable explanation; but in that vast ice world the hidden dangers are so many that any suggestion must necessarily be the merest guessing, and what happened we shall never know. For Hastings to attempt to explore this glacier alone would have been a most hazardous and hopeless task. He had no one with him on whom he could rely, and the area to be explored was also far too large. His only alternative therefore was to go at once with the greatest speed possible to the nearest post where he knew an Englishman was, namely at Chilas. This he did, but it was not till the 5th of September that he reached Jiliper on the Indus and was able to telegraph to me at Astor. In the meantime the villagers in the Bunar nullah had been ordered by the officer in command at Chilas to explore all the valleys round the Diamirai, and on the receipt of the telegram at Astor, Captain Stewart, the head political officer of the Gilgit district, sent word to the people in the Rupal nullah to do the same as far as the Mazeno La. I felt, however, that there was no help and no hope. Out of that valley up which Mummery had gone there was but one way: that was the one by which he had entered it; he had not returned, the provisions were untouched. It was a dreadful ending to our expedition. The mountains amongst which we had spent so many pleasant days together no longer were the same. The sunshine and the beauty were gone; savage, cruel, and inhospitable the black pinnacles of the ridges and the overhanging glaciers of cold ice filled my mind with only one thought. I could not stop at Astor. Moreover, by descending the valley I should at least meet Hastings sooner, for he was returning by forced marches to join me at Astor. On the 6th September we met at Doian. Beyond what he had already told me in his telegram there was nothing. Together we returned to Astor to arrange our future movements. There we agreed that it was necessary to return to the Diamirai nullah at once, and together explore the upper part of the valley beyond the high camp. Provisions and ponies were hastily got, and after having arranged with Captain Stewart for as much help as possible, we started for the Diamirai by way of the Indus valley and the Bunar nullah. The first day's march down the Astor valley brought us to Doian. There we were hospitably received by the officers of the Pioneer regiment, who, earlier in the year under Colonel Kelly, had marched over the Shandur pass to the relief of Chitral. Below Doian the road descends rapidly by zigzags towards the Astor stream: soon all vegetation is left behind, and one enters a parched and barren land. The valley is hemmed in by precipitous cliffs on both sides, and the road in many places has been hewn and blasted out of the solid rock. Bones of horses strew the wayside, and occasionally a vulture will sail by. The heat becomes oppressive, and the glare from the hill-sides down which no water runs suggests a mountainous country in the Sahara. Before this road was built, the old path led over the summit of the Hatu Pir, and the traveller now misses a marvellous view of Haramosh, Rakipushi, and the Indus valley by plunging down into this bare, desolate nullah, shut in on all sides by precipitous hills. The small post of Ramghat, or Shaitan Nara, where this road finally emerges from the Astor nullah into the great valley of the Indus, is merely a post for guarding the suspension-bridge across the Astor stream. Here are stationed some Kashmir troops, and here it is that the roads to Chilas and Gilgit separate. The Chilas road follows down the Indus on the left bank, through a country which probably has no equal in the world. How this astounding valley was formed it is difficult to say; but the valley is there, and a wilder, grander, more desolate, and more colossal rift cannot occur elsewhere on the earth's surface. 'Is this the scene Where the old Earthquake-dæmon taught her young Ruin?' From the summit of Nanga Parbat to the waters of the Indus below is in depth nearly 24,000 feet. On the opposite side, the naked hill-sides rising in precipice after precipice are entirely barren of all vegetation. Waterworn into innumerable gullies and rock towers, they present a melancholy and arid appearance; and, although their summits are 12,000 feet above the Indus, they do not form a north side to this gorge in any way comparable with that on the south. The floor of the valley is filled with the debris of countless Himalayan deluges, yet the Indus looks like a small and dirty stream. To appreciate in any way the gigantic scale of the whole is quite impossible. What is the depth of that stealthily flowing flood and the measure of its waters, who can say? For it is more than six hundred miles from its source, and its tributaries sometimes are almost as big as itself. From the borders of Swat and Chitral, from the Darkot pass, from the Kilik beyond Hunza, and from the Hispar pass, the waters collect to form the Gilgit river, one only of the many tributaries of the Indus. This tract of the Mustagh range is nearly two hundred miles long by eighty broad. The Shigar river drains the waters from the Mustagh range and K^{2}, perhaps the greatest accumulation of ice and snow that exists outside the arctic regions. The Nubra and Shayok rivers collect their waters from a yet larger area. But still east of all these tributaries, the Indus itself rises three hundred miles away in those unknown lands of Tibet behind the Himalaya and near the source of that mysterious river of eastern India, the Bramaputra. Yet all these collected waters are penned into this apparently slow flowing and narrow river, as with silent but stealthy haste it twists and turns through the gigantic chasm at the base of Nanga Parbat. Once, not many years ago, in December 1840, into the upper end of this gorge the side of the Hatu Pir fell, forming a dam probably over 1000 feet high.[K] A lake was formed behind it for miles. The water rose to the level of Bunji fort, 300 feet above the river below, and up the Gilgit valley this lake, newly formed, reached nearly to Gilgit itself. For six months the waters were held back till, topping the vast accumulation, they burst the dam, 'and rushed in dark tumult thundering.' The lake is said to have emptied in one day. A small remnant of the barrier can still be seen near Lechre on the Chilas road. The heat in this valley is so great after eleven o'clock in the day, that it is impossible to travel, and makes it necessary to seek what shade there may be till the sun has sunk low in the sky. The naked rocks glisten and tremble in the heat, the staring colours of the parched hill-sides, and the intense glare of the sun in this desert land, are in curious contrast to the shady valleys that lie thousands of feet up, hidden away in the recesses of the great mountain. But it is after the evening shadows have one by one lengthened, after the last glow of the hot orange sunset has at last faded out of the sky, and from out the darkness the rising moon lights up this deserted landscape with mysterious shadows and perplexing distances, that the whole scene becomes totally beyond description. The intricacy of form shown by the silent mountains seem to be some magnificent and great imagination from the mind of a Turner. The white moonlight, and the grotesque black shadows and leering pinnacles piercing the starlit sky, can only belong to a land dreamt of by a Gustave Doré as a fitting illustration to the Wandering Jew, and only be described by Shelley:-- 'At midnight The moon arose: and lo! the ethereal cliffs Of Caucasus, whose icy summits shone Among the stars like sunlight, and around Whose caverned base the whirlpools and the waves Bursting and eddying irresistibly Rage and resound for ever.' But without doubt the dominant sensation in this strange land is that of fear and abhorrence; and what makes it all the more appalling is that this thing before one is there in all its nakedness; it has no reserve, there is nothing hidden. Its rugged insolence, its brutal savagery, and its utter disregard of all the puny efforts of man, crushes out of the mind any idea that this spot belongs to an ordinary world. Whether in the day or the night it is the same. During the stifling hours of noon the valley sleeps in the scorching sunlight, but there, always there, is that monstrous flood below, slowly, ceaselessly moving. Occasionally the waters will send up an angry and deep-tongued murmur, when some huge eddy, rising to the surface, breaks, and belches out the waters that have come from the lowest depths. At night in the stillness and the heat, as one lies unable to sleep, imagination runs riot; from out the inky shadows that seam the hill-sides in the pale moonlight, dragons and great creeping monsters seemingly appear crawling slowly down to drink at the ebon flood beneath. And imagination easily in restless dreams becomes reality, thus adding tenfold to the already accumulated horrors. But at last in the darkness-- 'Before the phantom of false morning dies'-- suddenly a breath of cold air, as from heaven, descends like a splash of cool water. It has wandered down from the upper snows. Then a few moments later comes another; and, tired out, real sleep claims one at last. Later, when one awakes, the morning sun has risen, sending his light slanting across the hill-sides with a promise that before he sets we may be delivered from the bottom of this singular abyss. No description, however, can possibly give an adequate idea of the immensity, the loneliness, and the feeling of the insignificance of human affairs that is produced by this valley of the Indus below Rhamghat. It was not till the 13th that we reached Bunar Post, a small station for troops at the bottom of the Bunar nullah. Here we were met by Captain de Vismes, who was in command of the Chilas district. He had most kindly come from Chilas to help us with coolies up the Bunar nullah, and from there to the Diamirai nullah. From Bunar Post to our destination it took no less than three days' hard travelling; for as I have already pointed out, it is not possible to go straight up the valley. If we had been able to travel direct, it meant an ascent of some 9000 feet, but by the only possible route that existed, nearly double that height had to be climbed before we finally, on the 16th, found ourselves once more in the Diamirai nullah. What a change, however, met our gaze! The great masses of wild rose-trees that had welcomed us on our first visit were bare even of leaves. The willow groves now lifted gaunt, leafless branches into the chill air, and sighed mournfully when the cold wind shook them, and the rhododendrons were powdered with snow. Winter had set in, as the Chilas herdsmen had warned us it would, only a month before; and the contrast was all the more marked when compared with the temperature of nearly 100° in the shade, which existed a few miles away by the Indus. Hastings and I soon saw that any attempt at exploration amongst the higher glaciers was out of the question. We went up the glacier as far as half-way to the old upper camp where the provisions had been found untouched, but even there it was wading through snow nearly a foot deep; ultimately we climbed through heavy powdery snow, perhaps 500 feet up the south side of the valley, to obtain a last look at the valley in which Mummery, Ragobir, and Goman Singh had perished. The avalanches were thundering down the face of Nanga Parbat, filling the air with their dust; and if nothing else had made it impossible to penetrate into the fastnesses of this cold, cheerless, and snow-covered mountain-land, they at least spoke with no uncertain voice, and bade us be gone. Slowly we descended, and for the last time looked on the great mountain and the white snows where in some unknown spot our friends lay buried. But although Mummery is no longer with us, though to those who knew him the loss is irreparable, though he never can lead and cheer us on up the 'gaunt, bare slabs, the square, precipitous steps in the ridge, and the bulging ice of the gully,' yet his memory will remain--he will not be forgotten. The pitiless mountains have claimed him--and--amongst the snow-laden glaciers of the mighty hills he rests. 'The curves of the wind-moulded cornice, the delicate undulations of the fissured snow,' cover him, whilst the 'grim precipices, the great brown rocks bending down into immeasurable space,' and the snow-peaks he loved so well, keep watch, and guard over the spot where he lies. FOOTNOTES: [K] See note, p. 305. THE CANADIAN ROCKY MOUNTAINS 'A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke, Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go: * * * * * They saw the gleaming river seaward flow From the inner land: far off, three mountain-tops, Three silent pinnacles of aged snow, Stood sunset-flushed.' _The Lotus-Eaters._ Far away in the west of North America, west of the Great Lakes, west of Lake Winnipeg, west of the endless prairie, lies a 'Great Lone Land': a land almost bare of inhabitants, a land deserted, if we except a few prospectors, trappers, and wandering Indians who spend their time amongst the mountain fastnesses, either hunting wild animals or searching for gold and minerals. Looking at a map of North America, one sees how a vast range of mountains stretches from far south in the United States to Alaska, more than two thousand miles away. This backbone of a continent in reality is made up of a series of ranges, running parallel with one another. In Canada there are, roughly, only two: the Rocky Mountains to the east, and the Cascade range to the west, forming the shore of the Pacific Ocean. In breadth about five hundred miles, in length over fifteen hundred, if one includes the continuation of the Cascade range into Alaska, where are situated the highest mountains in North America: Mount St. Elias, 18,090 feet, Mount Logan, 19,539 feet, and Mount M'Kinley (at the head waters of the Shushitna river), 20,874 feet. Much of this country still has 'unexplored' printed large across it, and until a few years ago, when a trans-continental railway connected the Atlantic with the Pacific Ocean, parts of the western portion of the Dominion of Canada, stretching as it does for thousands of miles, covered with dense forests, watered by unnumbered rivers, was as difficult of access as Siberia. The magnitude of the Dominion, even at the present day, is hard to realise. It can only be appreciated by those who have travelled through its mighty woods, over its vast lakes and prairies, and explored the fastnesses of those lonely canyons of the West. Halifax, in Nova Scotia, is nearer to Bristol than to Vancouver on the Pacific coast, and Klondike is further north of Vancouver than Iceland is of London. Since, however, the Canadian-Pacific Railway has bridged the continent, these mountain solitudes of the Far West are much more accessible to the ordinary traveller, and the wild, secluded valleys of the Canadian Rocky Mountains are becoming more frequented by sportsmen and mountaineers. It does not need a prophet to foretell their future. A land where the dark green valleys are filled with primeval forest, where the pine, spruce, and fir, poplars, white maple, and cedar, vie with each other in adding colour to the landscape and beauty to the innumerable rivers, lakes, and streams: a land where endless snow-clad mountains send up their summits into the clear air from great glaciers below, where ridges of crags, pinnacles of rock, and broken mountain-side, catch sometimes the glow of the early dawn or the sunset, or at others bask in the glare of the midday heat, changing their colour perpetually from grey to crimson, from gold to purple, whilst below always lie the mysterious dark pine woods, filled with scents of the trees, and the noise of the wind as it sighs amongst the upper branches: such a land can only be employed by man for one purpose, it must become a playground where the tired people can make holiday. It must become the Switzerland of North America, and, like Switzerland, no doubt, some day will be completely overrun; at present, however, the valleys are unspoilt; wild, beautiful, untouched and unscarred by the hand of man. Fortunately the Canadian Rocky Mountains never can be the centre of any great manufacturing district; and as they are in extent vastly greater than the Alps, for a very long time to come they will remain the hunting ground for those who care to spend their spare time in breathing pure air, and in living amidst splendid scenery. At the present time the exploration of these mountains is going rapidly forward, at least in those portions near where the Canadian-Pacific Railway passes through them; and the mountaineer of to-day is offered great opportunities. For should he climb to the summit of any peak, even near the railway, high enough to give an extensive view, by far the greater number of the mountains and peaks that can be seen stretching in every direction, as far as the eye can see to the horizon, are as yet untrodden by human feet. The approach also to this splendid range is exceptionally fine. From the east, as the traveller leaves Winnipeg and enters on the prairie, till he reaches the foot of the mountains at Morley, nearly nine hundred miles away, the broad endless spread of the open country is seen. On many this apparently desolate, never-ending expanse of rolling grassland produces a sensation of weariness. But it is like the open sea in its size, and, like the ocean, has a charm that ordinary country does not possess. Its very immensity gives a mystery to it: sometimes the air is clear as crystal, and the white clouds on the horizon seem to be touching some far-distant fold of the landscape; at others the plain dances in the heat, and great mirage lakes can be seen covering the middle distances; again, thunderstorms pass along the sky, whose piled masses of cumuli clouds send down ribbons of fire, often causing fires that sweep for miles over the open grassland. At early dawn and sunset, however, are produced the great scenic effects of the prairie, and to look down the sky from the zenith to the setting sun, a great red ball just disappearing below the horizon, and count the colours that light up the islands, bays, promontories, and continents of that marvellous cloudland, makes one forget that one is in a railway train, or has anything to do with everyday life; it is like actually seeing for the first time some fairyland that one has read of in one's childhood. Afterwards, when the full moon comes out, the distances seem almost greater, and one can lie comfortably in bed and gaze at the landscape sliding swiftly by, comparing the ease and rapidity of modern travel, which does hundreds of miles in one night, with that of the pioneers who first traversed these endless plains a century or more ago. Near a station called Gleichen, the Rocky Mountains can be seen more than one hundred miles away, but it is not till one approaches them that it is recognised how abruptly they rise out of the prairie, like a long wall, with apparently not an opening; and, even when a few miles away, they seem an impenetrable barrier. The railway, however, follows the bank of the Bow river, which from its size must at least come down a moderate-sized valley, and just above where the Kananaskis, a side river, is crossed, a sudden bend of the line takes one through the gateway of the hills and the Bow valley is entered, which is then followed westward up to the Great Divide, or watershed, sixty miles away. The approach to the Rocky Mountains from the Pacific coast is through country of a totally different nature. From Vancouver to the Great Divide is five hundred miles; along the whole of this distance the railway line is surrounded by the most splendid mountain scenery. At first the line runs up the great and broad valley of the Fraser river, which when seen in the light of a fine September afternoon is magnificent. For it is shut in on all sides by high mountains (one, Mount Baker, being 14,000 feet), and filled with such timber as only grows on the Pacific coast, all of it the natural forest, vast Douglas firs of giant girth, cedars, poplars, and maples, with their autumn-colouring of crimson, green, and gold, adding beauty to this lovely valley; whilst winding backwards and forwards across it, flows the vast flood of the Fraser. Certainly it is one of the finest large valleys I have ever seen. Then further up is the world-famous Fraser canyon, not so beautiful as the greater valley below, but grand and terrible in its own way. There are fiercer and bigger rivers and gorges in the Himalaya. Here it is that for over twenty miles the railway track has been hewn in many places out of the solid wall of the canyon, whilst below rush the pent-up waters of the great river, sometimes slowly moving onwards with only the occasional eddy coming up to the surface to show the depth of water, again rushing with wildest tumult between narrow walls of black rock, tossing up the spray, and foaming along, afraid that unless it hastened madly through its rock-girt channel the almost overhanging walls, hundreds of feet high, would fall in and prevent it ever getting down to the open sea. Leaving the valley of the Fraser, the railway follows the desolate gorge of the Thompson river, and after passing through a series of minor mountains, comes down to the valley of the Columbia river, which here is running almost due south. If it had been possible to have built the line up the Columbia valley to the Rocky Mountains, no doubt that route would have been followed, but the railway has been taken over the Selkirk range instead. It is whilst crossing the Selkirks that by far the most wonderful part of this mountain line is to be seen. From the Columbia to the summit there is a rise of 2800 feet, and the descent on the other side to the Columbia river again is 1775 feet in less than twenty miles. Here are to be seen the miles of snow-sheds through which the train has to go, whilst towering into the sky are all the white snow-peaks of the Selkirks, and the glaciers that almost come down to the railway itself. From the Columbia to the Great Divide another ascent has to be made, this time of 2800 feet, and the last 1250 feet of this is done in the short distance of ten miles. It is not in any way exaggerating to say that these five hundred miles of line give by far the most extensive and varied wild mountain scenery that can be obtained from any railway train in the world. The Fraser valley, and canyon, the Selkirk Mountains, and the scenery of the Rocky Mountains, before the Great Divide is reached, are each one of them wonderfully beautiful, and each one of them possesses so much individuality of its own, that to forget the impressions they make would be impossible. The Great Divide is at the watershed, or on the top of the Kicking Horse pass. One of the most curious features of the Canadian Rocky Mountains is the lowness of the passes, also their number. The average height of the mountains is between 10,000 and 11,000 feet, yet none of these passes are much over 6000 feet, so that the simplest way to describe the range is to take the various masses of mountains that lie between the passes. Twenty miles south of the Kicking Horse pass lies first the Vermilion pass (5265 feet), next comes the Simpson pass (6884 feet), thirteen miles further south, thus giving three groups of mountains which can be named as follows:-- (1) _The Temple group_ (or Bow range); and _the Goodsir group_ (or Ottertail range). This group is south of the Kicking Horse pass and north of the Vermilion pass. (2) _The Ball group_, which lies south of the Vermilion pass and north of the Simpson pass. (3) _The Assiniboine group_, which lies south of the Simpson pass. North of the Kicking Horse pass the peaks and glaciers of the Rocky Mountains have been more carefully explored and for a greater distance than on the south side of the railway. It will be sufficient, however, only to mention the passes through the mountains which are to be found in that tract of country (120 miles long), lying south of the Athabasca pass, and north of the Kicking Horse pass. The first pass across the Rocky Mountains is the Howse pass, 4800 feet, and thirty miles north of the railway; thirty miles further north is the Thompson pass, 6800 feet; next comes Fortress Lake pass, thirty-five miles distant, and only 4300 feet high; and lastly, twenty-five miles further, still to the north, the Athabasca pass, 5700 feet. Thus if we omit the mountains north of the Athabasca pass, there are four more groups. Taking them in order, they are:-- (4) _The Balfour group_ (or Wapta range), lying between the Kicking Horse pass and the Howse pass. (5) _The Forbes group_, lying between the Howse pass and the Thompson pass. (6) _The Columbia group_, lying between the Thompson pass and the Fortress Lake pass. (7) _The Mount Hooker group_, lying between the Fortress Lake pass and the Athabasca pass. [Illustration: CANADIAN ROCKY MOUNTAINS Showing the Ice Fields and the Mountains _Heights when marked? only approximate_ J. Bartholomew & Co., Edin^r.] In the Temple-Goodsir group, which is situated just to the south of the Canadian Pacific Railway, are a very large number of rock- and snow-peaks; in fact, probably more varied rock climbing can be found here than in any of the other groups of mountains. Mounts Temple, Lefroy, Victoria, Stephen, Cathedral, Vaux, and the Chancellor have all been ascended, but Goodsir, Hungabee, and Deltaform, all of them first-class peaks, yet wait for the first party to set foot on their summits. Besides the numerous good mountain climbs that can be found in this district, many most charming lakes and pine-clad valleys lie hidden away in the narrow valleys. It would be hard to find in any mountain-land a more perfect picture than that afforded by Lake Louise, a clear, deep lake, surrounded by pine woods and snow-clad peaks whose reflection in the water seems almost more natural than the reality in the distance. The O'Hara lakes and Paradise valley also possess the wild grandeur and rich fertility that is one of the chief attractions of the Rocky Mountains of Canada. Of the Mount Ball group nothing need be said, Mount Ball being the only peak in it which reaches 11,000 feet. As seen from the summit of Mount Lefroy, Mount Ball is a long, somewhat flat-topped mountain covered with ice and snow. Perhaps, however, on the southern side it may be more precipitous and rocky. In the Assiniboine group there seems only one important mountain, Mount Assiniboine itself. But what is wanting in quantity is certainly atoned for by the excessive grandeur and beauty of Mount Assiniboine. For long called the Canadian Matterhorn (11,830 feet), it towers a head and shoulders above its fellows, the highest peak south of the line. For several years it withstood many determined attempts made to scale its sharp, pyramid-shaped summit; but in August of 1901 the Rev. J. Outram, with two Swiss guides, was fortunate enough at last to conquer this difficult mountain. The chief feature of the Balfour group is the great expanse of upper snow-fields on the Wapta névé. The highest peak, Mount Balfour, 10,873 feet, was ascended in 1898 by Messrs. Charles S. Thompson, C. L. Noyes, and C. M. Weed. Once on this central reservoir of ice none of the peaks are difficult to climb. The Bow river, which has its source at the north-eastern corner of this Wapta snow-field, flows down the Bow valley, which skirts for more than twenty-five miles the eastern slopes of the Balfour group. This Bow valley is an excellent example of the numberless valleys that are to be found amongst the Rocky mountains, flat-bottomed and filled with pine woods and marshes or muskegs. Two beautiful lakes, the Upper and Lower Bow lakes, filled with trout, give good sport to the fisherman; but to fish successfully a raft must be built, for there are no boats as yet on the lakes. The Upper Bow lake is particularly beautiful, for in many places on its shores are great expanses of open grassland, covered here and there with clumps of dwarf rhododendron bushes, or, it may be, studded with thickets of pine and other trees, whilst on the opposite shore the mountains rise sheer for several thousand feet, and more than one glacier hangs poised high up on the cliffs, above the clear blue water beneath. The next group further north, the Forbes group, has not been visited as yet by many mountaineering parties. But it contains possibly the highest peak in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, Mount Forbes, which is certainly considerably over 13,000 feet, and may be as much as 14,000 feet high. The Bush peak and Mount Freshfield also must be about 12,500 to 13,000 feet, and Mount Lyell is not much less, perhaps 12,000 feet. Many ice-fields lie underneath these high peaks: the Freshfield, Bush, and Lyell snow-fields being the most important. In this group as yet none of the peaks have been ascended, and up to the present only on the Freshfield glacier has any one set foot. This is largely due to the difficulty of getting to the foot of the peaks and the time necessary to expend on such an expedition. To get to the bottom of Mount Forbes from Laggan, the nearest spot on the Canadian-Pacific railway, would take about nine days, and, should the Saskatchewan be in full flood, it might take four or five days more. The Columbia group, which is still further north, was only discovered in 1898 by Messrs. Stutfield, Woolley, and myself. It is by far the biggest accumulation of glaciers that we have yet seen, covering an area of at least one hundred square miles; moreover, from a geographical point of view, it claims additional interest, for it is the source of the two great rivers, the Athabasca, the Saskatchewan, and formerly probably of the Columbia as well. The mountains also that rise out of these untrodden snow-fields are amongst the highest peaks in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, with the one exception of Mount Forbes. At present it is impossible to say with certainty whether Mount Columbia or Mount Forbes is the higher. Personally I should like to give the preference to Mount Columbia. Another peak situated near the centre of this group, the Dome, 11,650 feet, on whose summit we stood in 1898, is the only mountain in North America the snows of which when melted feed rivers that flow into the three oceans--the Atlantic, the Arctic, and the Pacific. North of Mount Columbia another peak was discovered, Mount Alberta, over 13,000 feet. This mountain, unlike Mount Columbia, is a rock-peak and flat-topped. Its summit is ringed round with tremendous precipices, and its north-western face must be particularly grand, for it rises straight from the valley of the Athabasca for nearly 8000 feet. [Illustration: _The Freshfield Glacier._] The outlets from the great Columbian ice-field are very numerous; and many large glaciers flow into the valleys to feed the head waters of the Saskatchewan, the Athabasca, and the tributaries of the Columbia. Of the mountains in the next group further north practically nothing is known. Only three parties in modern times have even penetrated into the valleys of this land south of the Athabasca pass--Professor Coleman (1893), during his search for Mounts Hooker and Brown; and Wilcox (1896) and E. Habel (1901). It is improbable that there are any peaks as high as 13,000 feet, but many covered with ice, snow, and glaciers were seen from the summits of the Dome and Diadem peak in 1898, when we were on the Columbian ice-fields. That this mountain-land remains unexplored is not to be wondered at, for the country is so far away, and so difficult to get at, from any human habitation that it takes weeks of hard work battling with the rivers and forests before even the valleys are reached which lie at the bottom of these ranges of snow-and glacier-covered mountains. When one has got accustomed to it, however, travelling in these vast mountain solitudes becomes by no means either irksome or unpleasant. But before one is capable of understanding all the woodcraft and knowledge requisite for successfully guiding a party through the endless forested valleys, the apparent monotony is apt to weary the traveller; afterwards, however, when a thousand and one things in the woods or on the mountain-side are for the first time seen and understood, then the environment no longer dominates one. For instance, a peculiar notch or 'blaze' on an occasional tree means that some prospector or Indian has been there before, or perhaps a newly overturned stone amongst the moss tells how a bear has recently been searching for food; or, again, some half-obliterated mark by the side of a stream means cariboo, or, if higher up, goat or the wild sheep. Then, often by the kind of tree one can roughly guess how high one is, for certain poplars, for instance the balsam poplar, I have never seen higher than 5000 feet. Of course amongst the Canadian Rockies it is necessary on every expedition to take men and horses. The men are to look after the horses and the camp, and to cut the trail. The horses carry the food or 'grub-pile,' the tents, etc. At first one is quite unaccustomed to the leisurely method of progression, and quite unacquainted with many mysterious things that afterwards appear obvious. Now that I look back on my first day with ponies in the Rockies I blush for my incompetence and ignorance. To begin with, we were late in starting--our men, with most of the ponies and heavy baggage, had gone up the Bow valley, leaving us three ponies for the remainder of the luggage. At the very start, if it had not been for the help of an obliging man at Laggan railway station, I do not think we should ever have satisfactorily tied on all the odd packages. To pack an Indian pony, and finish all off neatly with a good tight diamond hitch, is an accomplishment not possessed by every one. After three summers' experience I really now can tie it: at least I know I could, but it is a wonderful hitch; and although you think that you have got it all right, when you begin to pull the rope tight, somehow it all comes undone and one must start again from the beginning. The ponies having been packed, we started, but soon lost our way amongst the most dreadful tangle of fallen timber; the men had 'blazed' the way, but we were new at the work, and so soon got out of the trail. After getting the ponies with great difficulty through some miles of this timber, we gradually worked ourselves free, getting into more open ground, but it was out of Scylla into Charybdis, for now it was a question of how to get through endless swamps or muskegs that filled up the floor of the valley. Here the blazes of course stopped, and soon we missed the tracks of the other horses and got hopelessly lost, floundering about in every direction trying to find a way through. Several times the luckless ponies, dead tired and overladen, had sunk up to their bellies, but with terrified snorts and plunges had just managed to get out again. At last the sun went down, then daylight disappeared, and finally the moon came out, and we were still in that swamp. Ultimately we tried to make for the forest at the side of the valley, but one of the horses got so deep into a hole that only with difficulty we managed to prevent him vanishing altogether. He was at last rescued with an Alpine rope; and we also were rescued from a night out in a swamp by our headman, Peyto, who had come down the valley to look for us. The horses had to be left for the night, but we, wading through everything, got safely into camp at about midnight. These Indian ponies are wonderfully clever in thick timber or in the streams and rivers that have every now and then to be crossed. One old grey that I rode for two different trips was a most wise old animal, rather stiff in the knees, but wonderfully sure-footed, and never once did he even brush my leg against a tree trunk even in the thickest timber. He was also a very gentlemanly old animal, never frightened (unless he got into a muskeg), never in a hurry, very fond of going to sleep, also of having his own way, and his way was usually the right one. To those who wish to spend all their time, during a short holiday, climbing peaks, the Canadian Rocky Mountains cannot be recommended without some explanation. Firstly, they are a very long way off; and secondly, many of the finest groups, lying, as they do, perhaps fifty or a hundred miles from the railway, necessitate days of travel with ponies, provisions, etc., before even their base is reached. Still undoubtedly the pleasure of the leisurely advance through the charming valleys and dense pinewoods is to 'Those who love the haunts of Nature, Love the shadow of the forest, Love the winds among the branches, And the rain-shower and the snowstorm, And the rushing of great rivers' of quite an equal importance to the joys of a first ascent. The absolutely free life that one experiences in camp never palls, let the weather be good or bad; as one jumps out of one's sleeping-bag into the fresh morning air, one is always ready for the day's work. Perhaps it is a glorious morning. The men have gone off to find the ponies, which, if they have strayed far afield during the night, can be found by listening for the tinkle of the bell always tied to the neck of the bell-mare. Then after a breakfast of porridge, bacon, and whatever else there may be, the horses are packed--an operation which is hard work, and takes perhaps the best part of two hours when there are over a dozen horses to load. Each pack has to be finally tied on with the diamond hitch, otherwise in a very short time the pack would work loose, and, if once lost bit by bit in the dense undergrowth of the forest, would never be recovered. Then comes the start, and the cavalcade files off into the virgin forest, led by the headman, whose business it is to pick out a trail amidst the dense undergrowth and the fallen trees along which the pack train can go. Soon the sound of the axe is heard, and the single file of ponies comes to a standstill whilst some fallen tree which bars the way is cut through. Sometimes the path leads along the bank of a swiftly flowing, muddy white river, swollen by the melting snows of the glaciers, which every now and then are seen through more open parts of the forest, glaciers that glimmer and shine high up amongst the peaks that wall in the valley below. It is in places such as this that the greatest danger to the horses and baggage is experienced. The banks of the river may be rotten, or a horse more self-willed than the others may suddenly plunge into the water, and often it is next to impossible to prevent others following; so that in one moment of time perhaps half the outfit may be sweeping down stream to perdition, and the expedition ruined by being left provisionless. Fortunately, although I have often seen our horses helplessly drifting down rivers that at first sight seemed hopeless to get out of, owing to the undercut banks, depth of water, and strength of current, yet somehow or other these plucky little ponies always have managed to scramble out again. The silent forests, through which one sometimes has to march for days together, are not so dense, and the trees are not so large on the eastern side of the Divide as on the western, that is to say, in the valleys leading to the Columbia river. In the valley of the Columbia itself, down which we travelled in 1900 from Donald to the Bush river, for several days we hardly saw the sky. The vast forest far surpassed in size anything we had seen on the other side of the range--huge pines, cotton-wood trees, firs, and spruces reaching to a height of 150 feet or more. The undergrowth too was very dense--cedar, white maple, and alder (near the streams), were found; whilst the fallen trunks of dead trees, sometimes six or eight feet in diameter, lay scattered with others of lesser size in every kind of position. Some in their fall had been arrested by others, and were waiting for the first gale to bring them crashing to the ground; whilst at the will of every breeze that wandered through the upper branches of the higher trees, these half-fallen monarchs of the forest would break the heavy stillness of the air by their complaints and groans against their more sturdy brethren for thus preventing them lying at peace upon the moss-covered ground below. Others that had lain perhaps scores of years in the wet underbush had decayed and rotted, leaving rich masses of decomposing vegetation, from which trees had sprung that in their turn also must fall and suffer the same change. There is a marvellous fascination about these quiet shady fastnesses of the western valleys. As one wanders day after day through this underworld, cut off from the glaring sun of noonday and the blue sky, hardly a sound breaks the stillness, whilst all around the ruin of ancient woods lies piled with a lavishness most absolute--that of Nature's self, the tangled wreck of a lifetime, the luxuriant growth of centuries. It is in these western valleys that the rainfall is far greater than on the other side of the range, hence the forests are thicker and the muskegs and streams more dangerous. Only in the western valleys also is found that pest of British Columbia forests, the Devil's Club--a plant with large, broad leaves and a stem covered with spikes. Amongst the moist undergrowth it grows to a height of from five to six feet, trailing its stems in every direction and emitting a dank, unwholesome smell. Woe betide any one who with bare hand should roughly seize one of those stems, for the spikes enter the flesh, and, breaking off, produce poisoned wounds which fester. But whilst cutting trail it is impossible to prevent the long, twisted roots flying up occasionally, leaving their detestable thorns in all parts of one's body. Sometimes instead of these virgin forests the trail--and this is especially true when one is near a pass at 6000 feet or 7000 feet--passes along wide expanses of meadow, with small rhododendron bushes and clumps of pines every here and there. Masses of flowers can be seen in every direction, many kinds of anemone, large yellow daisies, and many others. Near the watershed of a pass beautiful lakes of pure blue water are often found, and in a quiet summer afternoon the long slanting shadows and the reflection of pines, peaks, and glaciers lie still in the clear water. The contrast of colours often is almost dazzling. One instance in particular I shall never forget: it was in a valley thirty miles north of the line called Bear Creek, near two lakes where some years before a fire had burnt out several square miles of forest. The gaunt, shining black stems of the trees formed a curious but fitting background--shining like black satin--for the mass of brilliant golden yellow daisies that were in full bloom amongst the stones at their feet. There was no green of grass, in fact no other colour except that of the sky. This blaze of golden orange against satin black tree trunks, with a sapphire sky beyond, formed a contrast of colours but rarely seen in a landscape. These burnt forests are one of the worst obstacles for delaying a party with horses. For a few years the ground is cleared excellently; but soon an undergrowth of pines springs up, then for many years the burnt dead trunks, which never seem to rot after having been charred by the fire, and the new thick undergrowth, make often a mile a day with a pack team good work. Often even without burnt timber to delay one, the progression up an unknown valley is very tedious. In 1900, whilst exploring the Bush valley on the western side of the mountains, our first view of the valley held out hopes to us that we should soon get to the head waters and the snow peaks fifteen miles away. Stretched out at our feet, as we looked down from a neighbouring hill, lay the valley, wide and level. There were no canyons or defiles that might necessitate lengthy détours up precipitous hill-sides. The valley was open and flat. It is true we saw some muskegs at the sides, but along the level bottom stretched shingle flats, with streams all tangled together, looking like a skein of ravelled grey wool thrown down between the dull green hills, whilst the main river, winding first toward one hillside and then towards the other, sometimes branching, again reuniting, formed a veritable puzzle of interlacing channels, islands of pebbles, stretches of swamps, and small lakes all hopelessly intermingled. The first ten miles up that valley took us ten days' incessant work. Our way was alternately through immense timber, dense thickets of willows, through swamps, streams, small lakes, along insecure river banks, climbing up the hill-sides, jumping logs, cutting through fallen trees and undergrowth so thick one could hardly see a yard ahead, splashing, fighting, and worrying ahead; we had an experience of almost everything that could delay us, and whether the woods, the streams, or the muskegs were worst, it was impossible to say. So the days go by, and often real mountaineering is a luxury which has to be left till the last. But we were the pioneers; now the trails are partly made, and the way to get at the peaks is known, therefore the expenditure of time in arriving at any particular spot can be calculated with much greater certainty. But with this gain in time-saving comes also the lost pleasure of the uncertainty of an unknown land; now the country is being mapped and all the peaks are being named. However, it will be many a long year before much real change can be made in the valleys that lie thirty or more miles from the line; also the snow peaks, the marvellously clear atmosphere, the woods, lakes, and scenery will remain the same. After a long day through these valleys of the Canadian Rocky Mountains one will be just as able to pitch one's tent and enjoy over the camp fire the stories of the hour, to eat one's dinner with the mountaineer's appetite, to smoke by the light of the smouldering logs, and to go to sleep safely, surrounded by these mysterious and dark forests. I always think that the supreme moments of a mountaineer's existence are, more often, not whilst battling with the great mountains, but afterwards, when the struggle is done and the whole story is gone over again quietly by a camp fire. Violent action no doubt appeals to many people, but the delightful sense of content that wraps one round after a long and successful day on the mountains, after the victory has been won, is a very pleasant sensation. One such evening I remember in the Bush valley when no victory had crowned our efforts. We were returning, in fact, from an attempt to reach Mount Columbia which had proved an undoubted failure; still somehow I felt that although beaten, we had been honourably beaten, we had struggled hard, but two things had failed us--time and provisions--and we were retracing our steps towards civilisation. The camp that evening had been pitched on the banks of the Bush river. In the foreground, water and shingle stretched in desolate fashion westward to where ridges of dark pine woods sloped down from dusky peaks above, sending out point after point to strengthen the forms of the middle distance; whilst beyond, far away across the Columbia, the Selkirk mountains raised their snow peaks into the calm, clear sky, a mysterious land unexplored and unknown. Through a rift in the clouds in the far west shone the setting sun, tinging the dull grey clouds overhead and the stealthily flowing river below with its many-coloured fires. A faint evening breeze softly moved the upper foliage, a couple of inquisitive chipmunks were chattering near at hand, and a small stream could be heard whispering amongst the thickets near the banks of the river. The great gnarled trunks of pine and fir, festooned with moss, fungi, and grey lichen, the dead, drooping branches, and the half fallen, decaying trunks propped up in dreary, melancholy array, caught for a moment the sunset's ruddy glow, whilst the mysterious shadows of the dense forest darkened by contrast. It was one of those evenings 'When, upon a tranced summer night, Those green robed senators of mighty woods, Tall oaks, branch charmed to the earnest stars, Dream, and so dream all night without a stir, Save from one gradual solitary gust, Which comes upon the silence, and dies off, As if the ebbing air had but one wave.' Such evenings compensate one for many a wet, dreary day spent amongst the mountains. Nature suddenly offers them to the traveller without any toil on his part. He has only to sit watching, surrounded by the dark forest, the stretch of waters, and the ever-changing glory of the setting sun; then, unmindful of the worry of yesterday, or the uncertainties of to-morrow, amidst the great stillness, he feels with absolute conviction one thing and one thing only--that it is good to be alive and free. Civilised life no doubt teaches us much, but when one has once tasted the freedom of the wilds, a different knowledge comes. The battling with storm, rain, cold, and sometimes hunger, and the doubt of what any day may bring forth, these at least teach that life--that mere existence--is beyond all price. THE ALPS 'Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them.'--_Ecclesiastes._ Many years ago I remember quoting once some paragraphs which seemed at the time to portray so exactly the attitude of certain people towards the Alps, that they were instantly plucked from their seclusion, for the purpose of enforcing some rather flippant and idle remarks of my own. These flippant efforts of mine, I may add, were not intended to be taken seriously. The paragraphs, however, were written in 1868, and can be found in the _Alpine Journal_.[L] I now presume to use them once more. 'So far as the Alps are concerned, we can now, I fear, expect nothing free altogether from the taint of staleness. For us the familiar hunting grounds exist no longer as they once existed.' Again: 'Those waters of oblivion which have overwhelmed the Jungfraus and Finsteraarhorns of our youth.' And, 'It only remains for us to dally awhile with the best recollections of the now degraded mountains.' As I have said, when I first quoted these sentences I did not believe one word of them. It is true that then I was younger and more enthusiastic; moreover, the Alps were new to me, and I was still able to appreciate to the full the beauties of that region of streams, glaciers, and snow peaks: then the sun still shone, then the morning and the evening, arrayed in their coat of many colours, called either to action or bid a cheerful good-night, and even then the fleeting clouds, flung abroad like 'banners on the outer wall,' would often make me stop and watch, till the mists dissolved into thin air left the high battlements of the mighty mountains once more clear against the blue sky. Yes! although I quoted these paragraphs, yet at that period, to me it was impious to question the sway of the monarchs of the earth. Degraded mountains, taint of staleness, waters of oblivion, Jungfraus overwhelmed, a truly depressing picture! but when one comes to examine into the real truth of the matter, the fact remains that the mountains are still there, and really after all in much the same condition as they were fifty years ago. Of course one must admit that many parts of Switzerland below the snow line and some infinitesimal bits higher up possibly have been degraded, but not by a natural process. This degradation is the work of the animal, Man; and it is difficult to say why he alone of all the inhabitants of this world, wherever he sets himself down, should always besmirch and befoul the face of Nature. Some literary and inquiring spirit should write a monograph on the subject. [Illustration: _A Crevasse on Mont Blanc._] What sight is more depressing than the gaunt, soot-begrimed trees that struggle for a pitiful existence around our centres of so-called civilisation? Where can a more squalid picture be either seen or imagined than a back slum in one of our manufacturing towns where the teeming millions are born, bred, and die? The inhabitants of a London back street never see this earth as Nature made it, beyond perhaps occasionally a green field. They know nothing of the great face of the world. What do mountains, streams, pinewoods, and lakes ruffled by the wind, mean to them? they only have seen the lower Thames and its mud banks. Expanses of heather moorland where the birds, the breezes, and the many summer scents wander to and fro: probably their nearest approach to these is Hampstead heath and oranges! The nations of the East can teach Western civilisation several things, and the people of the Staffordshire Black Country would not lose were they to copy some of the methods of living in Japan. Now the worst of all this is that as the nations expand and communication becomes easier, the several, as yet unspoilt, corners of the world, where man has not yet 'forked out' Nature, are in grave danger of being swept bodily into civilisation's net. Unfortunately the majority of mankind is hopelessly lacking in imagination, they are incapable of accommodating themselves to their environment, trying always instead to force their surroundings to fit their own small ideas. Brighton becomes more civilised in direct ratio as it becomes more like London; and Switzerland--that is to say, where many unimaginative tourists go, and nowadays they go to most places from Lucerne to the tops of the highest mountains--is thus degraded. It becomes a herding place during August for the nations, each brings his own special atmosphere, his family, his newspaper, and himself. The money pours in, the state becomes civilised, and the hotels flourish. If Zermatt possessed first-class beer halls, a golf course, and plenty of motor cars, a very large number of the German, English, and French tourists would gladly amuse themselves each with his particular native pastime, and would never bother themselves about whether Monte Rosa was covered with ice and snow, or was merely a mud heap, or whether glaciers, Matterhorns, Dent Blanches were or were not. It would be foolish to deny that the interest of mankind in man must necessarily be stronger than the mere abstract pleasure obtained from the contemplation of wild and beautiful scenery. So it follows that when a vast concourse gathers, such as is seen during the season at Zermatt, mankind naturally dominates the environment, and the study of man, not of scenery, prevails. This must be so. Take, for instance, any of our best novelists: of course they deal with people, not things. When Clive Newcome and J. J. (artists too, if you please) crossed the Alps, does Thackeray give us a long account of the scenery? Certainly not: the whole matter is disposed of at once, and in a sentence they are whisked from Baden to Rome. On the other hand, the descriptions of the beauties of Nature by Sir Walter Scott or by Wordsworth, who reads them now except with an occasional yawn? Far more interesting, and properly so too, are narratives of real, live people, their thoughts, their hopes, their disappointments. _Soldiers Three_ appeals to every one; but should one begin to talk about the merits of Claude and Turner as painters of hills, and even quote some of Ruskin's very finest passages about Alps and Archangels, your neighbour at _table d'hôte_ will either think that you are a great bore, or, perhaps, an extremely clever person; but will be far more interested, when the old lady opposite begins to tell how Mr. Jones was caught that very afternoon proposing to Miss Robinson, and how the Bishop of X. is really coming to stop at the hotel for a few days. All this is meant to show that by far the greater number of the hordes that invade Switzerland every year does not in reality take any interest at all, or at best a very feeble one, in the only really national dish that Switzerland has to offer. They neither care for it, nor do they understand it. Naturally, therefore, the majority with their outside influence, with their own objects, ends, and atmosphere, entirely swamps the small remainder who appreciate the natural beauties of the land, and who fifty years ago practically held undivided possession. In those days the tourists, and they were few in the land, did not in the least mind suffering certain minor hardships owing to the absence of hotels: it was nothing compared with the pleasure that they obtained from the free life and the scenery; also, should they be mountaineers and scale some of the till then unvisited summits, on their descent into the valleys they were looked upon with wonder by the simple village folk and the herders of cattle of the small hamlets; these inhabitants would crowd round, when with arm extended and finger pointing to the distant peak of snow they described how yesterday, at such a time, they and their friend the chamois hunter of the district were on its summit. This sort of thing has most certainly gone, gone for ever. In this respect the Alps are as dead as Queen Anne--they have been overwhelmed in the waters of oblivion. The self-sufficient modern traveller now holds undivided sway in the chief central places of the Alps; and were it possible for him to impress his puny individuality on the great crags and the snow-fields of the mountains, to interfere with the colours of the sunset or the dawn, or to compel the clouds, then perhaps we might agree with the bitter cry of Ruskin, who, speaking of the artistic creative faculty of the present day, says that we 'live in an age of base conceit and baser servility--an age whose intellect is chiefly formed by pillage, and occupied in desecration; one day mimicking, the next destroying, the works of all noble persons who made its intellectual or art life possible to it: an age without honest confidence enough in itself to carve a cherry-stone with an original fancy, but with insolence enough to abolish the solar system, if it were allowed to meddle with it.' Fortunately they cannot meddle with the mountains and the snow-fields. Still, as in those bygone days, man there is a mere speck. The peaks are as high and the snows as deep. Above, the glories of the sunset and the sunrise are the same, amidst the ice, the snow, and the black rocks; there the taint, and the adverse influence of this invasion of civilisation, is unfelt, although it may have overwhelmed the valleys below. The Jungfrau and the Finsteraarhorn still are as untouched and unspoiled, as far from vulgarisation as in the days when they were first conquered. It is only when we descend from the mountains, and at the huts once more enter into contact with this other world, that the change begins to be felt, or when we have returned to our hotel, donned our dress clothes, and are seated before a bad imitation of a dinner, that we finally recognise that the waters of the great modern sea of vulgarity and mediocrity have engulfed us. Forty years ago Switzerland, or at least the finest part of Switzerland, belonged to the tourist or traveller, call him which you will, who really cared for the healthy, out-of-door existence and the scenery; and to the mountaineer, who, as a rule, appreciated both the natural grandeur of the Alps, and at the same time the pleasure of spending his holidays high up amidst the ice and snow. At that time we find in the _Alpine Journal_ (a record of mountain adventure) endless papers on the climbing and the exploration of the Alps. But if we examine the pages of the _Alpine Journal_ of to-day, a distinct scarcity of papers on the Alps is at once apparent. In the year 1900, out of fourteen articles only five dealt with the Alps, for there nowadays exploration and new climbs are almost impossible. Moreover, records of mere mountain adventure without any description of an ascent of some unconquered peak have become too common. Therefore it is not remarkable that the mountaineer is driven further afield, preferring to win laurels amidst new ranges. But still the Alps are both broad and wide, and after all it is only along certain lines that the great civilised mob disports itself. It is true that all the mountains have been ascended, but surely that only destroys a minor attraction; moreover, fortunately almost anywhere on the Italian side of the watershed one is free from that lamentable state of affairs that obtains at such places as Chamonix, Grindelwald, and Zermatt; and should the mountaineer possess a tent and a sleeping-bag he can always camp out, thus being entirely free. There are places on the south side of Mont Blanc, in the Rutor or in the Grand Paradiso district, in the Valpelline, and in many others, where delightful camps can be made and where one would hardly ever see a stranger for weeks together. There the mountaineer can live practically undisturbed in his own hunting ground of peaks, passes, and glaciers. Amongst the most pleasant recollections I have of the Alps are those connected with our camps. We always had sleeping-bags, and I may say that during all the years I spent climbing with Mummery only twice have I slept in a hut with him. There are few more pleasurable sensations than to be comfortable and warm under the lee of some great boulder, watching the stars as they slowly move westward; or to sit by a camp fire after the sun has set, and to recall all the enjoyment of the climb just finished; a feeling of most profound contentment with everything in the world steals over the party; the conversation becomes more and more disjointed as first one and then another turns over and sleeps. When I look back and think of all the various places where Mummery, Hastings, Slingsby, and I have slept out in the open, far away from the haunts of men, and remember how we enjoyed ourselves, I for one would go back year after year to the Alps if those times could be brought back again. In those days the glass of time, when shaken, ran in golden sands. Now all that is left of them is the memory. It was in those days long ago, that I remember, how on one perfect evening at the beginning of August, we camped high up by the side of the Brenva glacier, having been well prepared for struggling with the tremendous southern face of Mont Blanc by the delightful dinners of M. Bertolini. The sun went down behind the Pétéret ridge--a ridge which always seems to me to be unsurpassed in the Alps--and we hoped that in another twenty-four hours we should be on the other side of the great mountain. But one of the great charms of mountaineering is its uncertainty, and instead of twenty-four it was forty-eight hours before we arrived at the Grands-Mulets. It would be distinctly perverting the truth to say that, at the time, we enjoyed the whole of our expedition, but often have I during winter evenings recalled that climb. I cannot now reproduce the unpleasant sensations, but the satisfaction and recollection of success becomes more pleasing as lapse of years adds enchantment to the memory of that fierce battle with Mont Blanc. I shall never forget how, hour after hour, Mummery, following a wrong direction of E. Rey's (who, as it turned out afterwards, had never been up Mont Blanc by this Brenva route), persistently kept towards the left; how at last the hard blue ice became so steep that it was almost impossible to cut steps in it; and how the ice also had a sticky feel when touched with the fingers, for we were in the shadow of the mountain. Unfortunately we were 1500 feet from the summit; and as the daylight was only good for a few more hours, we had reluctantly to turn and make our way down that icy staircase. At one place where Hastings had thrown a portion of his breakfast into a small crevasse, we carefully recovered the discarded provisions, coming at last, just before darkness enveloped everything, to a small rock jutting out of that almost vertical face. The Brenva glacier was thousands of feet below us. One of the penalties of guideless climbing is that when prolonged step-cutting has to be undertaken, no amateur can compete with a first-class guide. Naturally, therefore, nights out on the mountains are often the price paid. Our penance on this particular expedition was to sit on that rock all night. The cold was intense, and it was not till the sun had risen next day that we were capable of moving. Once started, the blood began again to circulate, and keeping this time more to the right, a passage was forced with very great difficulty indeed through the almost overhanging edge of the great snow cap of Mont Blanc. In more than one place we had to use the axes forced home to their heads as a staircase for the first man. It was a magnificent climb, in fact the finest I have ever had. That ice world on the south side of Mont Blanc is on a larger scale than anything I know of outside the Himalaya. On the afternoon of the third day out from Courmayeur I arrived on the summit by crawling up on my hands and knees. But although the ascent had taken so long, the descent was accomplished much more expeditiously. In two hours we reached the Grands-Mulets. There, being supplied with omelette after omelette, I basely refused to roam any further; but Hastings and Mummery, unsatisfied, rushed down the remainder of the mountain, to lose themselves in the pine woods below in the darkness, reaching Couttet's and luxury late that night. If I was to recount all the splendid expeditions that we were taken by Mummery--how we sometimes failed, but much more often succeeded--this chapter could be made into a dozen; and yet, in spite of all these ascents, my knowledge of the Alps is extremely limited. Curiously, however, I have found that sometimes those who most loudly complain of the Alps being played out are quite unacquainted with, or at least have never attempted, most of those ascents which it was my good fortune to make with Mummery. Certainly they were mostly made in the Mont Blanc range, a part which does not seem to commend itself so much to mountaineers of the present day as the eastern portion of the Alps. Yet where can be found anywhere else, in the whole range, rock pinnacles that are finer than the Aiguille Noire de Pétéret. Few people know that its west face is a sheer precipice of several thousand feet. In 1899 I was camping for a couple of days with Major Bruce and Harkabir Thapa, just opposite to it on the ridge between the Brouillard and Fresnay glaciers. It was then I watched a slab of rock fall from about twenty feet below the summit. It was a mass weighing perhaps fifty or a hundred tons. For over 1000 feet it touched nothing, then striking on a ledge it burst into a thousand fragments with a noise like thunder, and hardly one of the fragments touched rock again, but descended straight to the snows of the Fresnay glacier beneath. We were investigating the south-west corner of Mont Blanc, intending if possible to make the ascent by the continuation of the Brouillard ridge. With this prospect in view, we ascended the Brouillard glacier to near the top of the Aiguille l'Innominata, but went no further. The Brouillard is a glacier that to try and descend on a hot summer afternoon would be foolish, to say the least of it. For, set at a very high angle, and broken up in the wildest fashion, although presenting a magnificent spectacle, it does not lend itself to safe mountaineering. Harkabir was much disappointed that we refused to go on, for he thought he could see his way up the rock escarpment at the head of the glacier, and, were that possible, probably no more difficulty would be met with from there to the summit. But in spite of the climber of the party being confident we could proceed, I as conductor insisted on turning back, being only a 'mere mountaineer.' One thing at least I was certain of: Bertolini lived at Courmayeur, not Chamonix, and forty-year old Barolo, together with countless other delicacies, was to be obtained from him alone. To return, however, from the excellences of the cuisine at Bertolini's to those of the range of Mont Blanc, should the jaded climber of 'degraded' mountains want more rock peaks, the ascent of the lesser Dru, in my opinion, can be repeated profitably. Not even amongst the Dolomites can one get the sensation of dizzy height and appalling depth to the same extent as on this mountain; moreover, there is a most sporting though small glacier to cross before one begins the rock ascent. Then the Charmoz and the Grépon are not to be despised. For a most varied climb, requiring every kind of mountain craft, the traverse of the Aiguille du Plan is to be recommended, from the Glacier des Pèlerins over the summit, down the Glacier du Plan, and back by the Glacier du Géant. Again, without doubt, the finest snow and ice climb in the Alps, surrounded the whole time by superb scenery, is from the Montanvert to the hut behind the Aiguille du Midi, thence over Mont Blanc du Tacul and the Mont Maudit to the summit of Mont Blanc, and down to the Grands-Mulets. Of course, I know that to recommend any one to climb Mont Blanc will certainly be regarded as a bold suggestion by those who have noticed a taint of staleness in the great mountains. For of all the peaks that have been overwhelmed by the waters of oblivion, surely Mont Blanc outrivals both the Jungfraus and the Finsteraarhorns of the happy childhood of the Alps. Personally, however, I am a staunch adherent of the 'ancient monarch of the mountains.' But as Leslie Stephen says, the 'coarse flattery of the guide-books has done much to surround him with vulgarising associations.' Surely, though, Mont Blanc is far too magnificent, far too splendid to be much affected by such associations, and as if to shake them off every now and then, after he has been patted on the back by those of every nationality who swarm over his sides, he arises in his anger, hangs out his danger signal above his summit, and sweeps his glaciers and snows clear of the invading crowd. The Föhn wind and the angry clouds envelop him, his snow-fields glare with a ghastly dead white colour, and whirlwinds of clouds, snow, and gloom descend. But the storm passes, and once more he emerges clean and glistening in all his beauty. But at Chamonix the Föhn wind of vulgarity seems to blow perpetually, enveloping always the great mountain in pale and dim eclipse, and obscuring the romance, the charm, and all honest appreciation of the old monarch. Fortunately one can easily run away, leaving this depressing atmosphere behind, and can bask once more in the sunshine, and camp amidst the unspoiled valleys near the snows. Why there are not more mountaineers who take small tents to the Alps is always to me a mystery. For long ago most of the huts have become abominations, whilst the free life that is afforded by camp life adds a very great charm to mountain expeditions. Having tried it so often in the Himalaya, in Skye, in Norway, in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, and Switzerland, perhaps I may be biassed, but even if I never again had a chance of climbing a first-class peak in the Alps, I would return there to live the lazy, delightful, disreputable life in a tent, near the ice and the snows and the pine woods, to smell the camp fire, lie on my back all day amidst the grass and the flowers, listening to the wind, and looking at the sky and the great silent peaks. On the other hand, the idea of spending a month at Swiss hotels, arising in the darkness to wander forth in a bad temper, chilled to the bone, in order merely to finish off the remaining peaks of some district, so that I might say I had been up them all, and therefore never be bothered to return again--rather than perpetrate such a hideous waste of time I would go to some secluded spot on the western coast of these islands where the waves were for ever rolling in with that long, lazy, monotonous sweep that is only seen on the shores of the Atlantic, and there I would lie day after day on my back on the sands watching the ever-changing colours of the sea. These things, however, can be done in their proper season, but until there are restaurants all over Mont Blanc, and railways up most of the peaks, illuminations of the Matterhorn every night by means of electricity and coloured fires, and all the avalanches are timed to be let loose only twice a day, namely at a morning and an afternoon performance--until that time arrives mountaineering in the Alps will still be worth while indulging in occasionally. Till then there will be plenty of space for the enthusiast who likes to wander amidst the snow-and ice-covered mountains. The ledges of rock high up, with the grey lichen on them, will still afford a resting-place from which the long glaciers far down below can be seen as they descend to the green-hued woods and the hazy valleys filled with sunshine. The overhanging cornices high above, for ever on the point of breaking off, will still hang poised in unstable equilibrium. The storms will sweep as frequently as of old across that mountain land, hiding for a brief space all in gloom; the lightning flashes, the roar of the thunder, the driving snow, and the keen biting wind will hunt the too presumptuous climber back to lower altitudes, as they have done often before; and afterwards the sun will again shine, dissolving the clouds, drying the lower slopes, and showing how the old mountains have once more put on a clean garment, which in magnificence, in glittering splendour, is as unmatched or unequalled as the deep, glowing colour of that 'solitary handmaid of eternity,' the open ocean, or the glories of the heavens at dawn or at sunset. Those who have learned to understand the language of the hills can appreciate the many-voiced calls of the mountains, and, I am sure, are not in the least afraid that, for the present, the Alps will be wholly ruined or degraded. For my own part, they will always possess an attraction which I care neither to analyse nor to destroy. I shall go back there just as the swallow at the end of summer goes south; and if by an unfortunate combination of circumstances anything should happen to prevent me ever returning from that world of snow, my ghost, could it walk, would then at any rate be surrounded by nothing common nor unclean, which might perhaps not be so should it be compelled to wander amongst the tombstones of a London cemetery. FOOTNOTES: [L] Vol. iv. p. 185. THE LOFOTEN ISLANDS 'Near the outer lands of the silent mist, The waves moan wearilie; Yet hidden there lie the Isles of the Blest, The lonely Isles of the Sea.' _Olav's Quest._ Many years ago I remember the first time I read that marvellous description of the Maelström by Edgar Allan Poe, where he tells how a fisherman from the Lofoten Islands, driven by a hurricane, was caught in the Maelström's grip, and descended 'into the mouth of that terrific funnel, whose interior, as far as the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water, speeding dizzily round and round with a swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice--half-shriek, half-roar--such as not even the mighty cataract of Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to Heaven'; and I remember how I used to picture to myself precipitous, polished cliffs of terrific height and grandeur encircling a writhing pool of dusky waters; above, the rocks glowing red and golden in the light of a stormy sunset; below, stray flakes of foam ever and again flashing back the fiery glories of the angry sky, as they glided with a stealthy, increasing haste for ever nearer and nearer and yet nearer to the awful abyss of the devouring whirlpool. This, like so many tales of one's youth, although told by that consummate artist Poe, must be relegated to the realms of fiction. But his description of one of the Lofoten Islands--of the 'sheer, unobstructed precipices of black, shining rock,' against which the ocean surf howled and shrieked, and of the endless array of gloomy mountains, 'outstretched like ramparts of the world, hideously craggy and barren'--is far nearer the truth; for in it is much that is characteristic of the outer islands. But after all he has only portrayed the Lofoten Islands when enveloped in storm. Of course, when the south-west gales sweep on to the rock-bound coast of Röst and Moskenesö, even Poe himself could hardly do justice to the scene, for the battle between the great waves coming in from the open ocean and the tremendous tides that surge past the outer islands must be magnificent. Truly the picture would have to be of 'An iron coast and angry waves, You seemed to hear them rise and fall And roar rock-thwarted under bellowing caves, Beneath the windy wall.' [Illustration: Lofoten.] But these mere rude phases of Nature's moods do not for ever encircle Lofoten in flying surf and with winds that shriek and howl. In the summer months, at least, the sun shines, and often one may look in vain over the untroubled water, rippled by the warm west wind, for the dreaded Maelström, whose thunderous voice and angry whirlpool for the moment is stilled; whilst in its stead a gentle murmur rises from the clear water which possesses just sufficient motion for the waves to lazily rise and fall against the bare rocky shore, and yet is calm enough for the reflection of the white clouds and craggy hill-sides to repose sleepily on its surface. From their geographical position these islands should have a very different climate from that which they possess; and perhaps it may be due partly to this cause that the mountains are so craggy and barren. For the rainfall during several months is excessive, and is quite capable of washing away any superincumbent earth from the sides of the numerous needle-shaped peaks that are to be found on most of the Lofoten Islands; moreover, in the valleys the whole country has been worn down to the bone in prehistoric times by enormous glaciers, and to-day the abnormal summer rainfall and the frosts of the long Arctic nights are continuing the work of denudation. Although the Lofoten Islands are south of the North Cape, yet one does not at once appreciate how far north they lie. From London they are more than twelve hundred miles; and they are one hundred miles nearer the North Pole than the northernmost part of Iceland. Moreover, most of Siberia, Bering Straits, and Klondike are all further south than the Lofoten Islands. If it were not for that warm current which, starting from the Gulf of Mexico, after thousands of miles sweeps past this northern coast of Norway, these islands would during the whole year be covered with ice and snow, and be surrounded by a frozen ocean. The influence of the Gulf Stream on the temperature of the northern coast of Norway is well illustrated by the fact that every winter the sea round the Lofoten Islands, and even further north at Hammerfest and the North Cape, is always open; yet in Southern Norway, six hundred miles to the southward, the Kristiania Fjord, which the Gulf Stream does not touch, is during the winter months covered with ice. The exact reverse in climate is experienced in Newfoundland, the shores of which are washed by the Labrador current, coming from the frozen north out of Baffin Bay. In the straits of Belle Isle, which are in the same latitude as London, and which separate Newfoundland from Labrador, may be seen snow-drifts on the seashore even in July, whilst the bare uplands behind are covered with far-stretching fields of snow. The icebergs, too, which drift south on this Labrador current, are sometimes found in such low latitudes that if on the map the latitude were followed due east it would be found to pass through Cairo, and not many miles north of Lahore in India. The approach to the Lofoten Islands from the south after one has passed the Arctic Circle is particularly grand and beautiful. The mountains, owing to excessive prehistoric glaciation, possess forms at once curious and peculiar, giving an individuality to the view which is lacking further south on the Norwegian coast. Lofoten, however, is not seen till the great West Fjord is reached; then far away across thirty miles of blue waters, which slowly pulsate with the long waves of the open sea, appears a wonderful land of sharp-pointed peaks that with a deep sapphire colour outshines the deeper purple of the restless sea. The west coast of Scotland can give similar views. Rum, Skye, and the Hebrides, as seen from the mainland at Arisaig or Loch Maree, in some respects resemble these islands, but the Lofoten mountains are far wilder and far more fantastic in shape, and the number of peaks infinitely greater than in the western islands of Scotland. Ages ago the West Fjord must have held an enormous glacier, although it is improbable that the great ice-sheet which then covered the country ever was thick enough to submerge the loftier summits of the Lofoten Islands, the highest of which now stand 4000 feet above sea-level; yet this ice-sheet must have been thousands of feet thick, for from any mountain-top it is easy to see how whole masses of solid rock appear to have been cut away, leaving valleys whose cross-section is a perfect half-circle. To those who are sceptical of what ice will do, a visit to the mainland opposite the Lofoten Islands would prove very instructive. Even the most gigantic of Himalayan glaciers are feeble in comparison with an Arctic ice-sheet such as that on Greenland or on the Antarctic continent. On Nanga Parbat I have seen a vast glacier turned to one side by its own moraine. Near Elvegaard on the Ofoten Fjord there exist valleys whose sides for miles are perpendicular walls of rock sometimes a couple of thousand feet high, and which undoubtedly have been excavated and then polished by the power of the ice. For many years I had been anxious to see the Lofoten Islands, for I had heard rumours that they were more beautiful than Skye and the Coolin. But it was not till 1901 that I was able to go there. It was in good company that I went; Woolley, Hastings, and Priestman, all of whom had been there before in 1897, were the other members of the party. They were able to advise where to go, how to best overcome the difficulties of provisioning our camp, and, what was still better, were all able to speak Norsk fluently. We landed from the steamer at Svolvaer, a curious harbour amongst a maze of ice-polished rocks. Svolvaer is the point where all the large steamers call, although on a rough day as the vessel approaches the harbour it looks as if there was not even a passage for a rowing-boat anywhere along the rock-bound shore. The small town of Svolvaer is built on a series of rocky islands, consequently the only convenient way of getting from one part of the town to another is by boat, and of course there is no such thing as a road in the town. The finest mountains in the Lofoten Islands congregate round the Raftsund, a narrow waterway which separates the islands of Hindö and �st Vaagö; but further down the islands are other isolated peaks whose pointed spires of rock look almost inaccessible. Vaage Kallen is one, whilst several in Moskenesö also would give excellent climbing. As far as I could see, these mountains to the south-west are without glaciers, which is not the case of those round the Raftsund. The highest peak in Lofoten, Mösadlen by name, had been climbed, but the next three highest, Higraf Tind, 3780 feet; Gjeitgaljar, 3560 feet; and Rulten, 3490 feet, had as yet summits untrodden by the foot of man. Moreover, of all the lesser mountains only about half a dozen had been ascended. Here, then, should the climbing be good, was a mountaineer's paradise. On August 2, with the help of two men and a couple of boats, Woolley, Hastings, Priestman, and I conveyed our camp-baggage from Svolvaer to a spot marked Austavindnes near the head of the �stnes Fjord. A Norwegian porter, E. Hogrenning, who had been with Hastings before on the mountains for more than one season, also came and helped to pull the heavily laden boats through the waves of the fjord. It was a pleasing sight to me as I sat idle in the stern of the boat in which were the two local fishermen, to watch Hastings and Priestman in their shirt-sleeves pulling the second boat, and trying their best to show that Englishmen were just as capable of rowing as Norwegians. In this they were successful, for we soon parted company, Hastings' boat finally disappearing on the opposite side of the fjord. In time, however, they came back again to us, but what they had been doing was not quite clear--Hastings had probably been trying to borrow something from a house on the shore, a pole or a cooking-stove, or some nails or a spade. All these things and many more were ultimately collected by Hastings, and before we left our camp a fortnight later there were few houses on the �stnes Fjord that had not contributed something towards our wants. Hastings' tent in the meantime had assumed the appearance of a really first-class gipsy encampment. The place where we had decided to camp was finally reached, and all our provisions, tents, and baggage landed on the beach. One of the boats we kept, and our two fishermen, bidding us farewell, returned to Svolvaer. The views from our camp, although rather restricted, were occasionally most beautiful, when during the long summer nights the peaks at the head of the �stnes Fjord to the north-west were a dark purple against the evening sky. Opposite to us was the peak Gjeitgaljar, a veritable little Dru in appearance, and in front of it a ridge of pinnacles that looked hopelessly inaccessible. Every few moments some change in light and shade or in colour would shift over the landscape. As soon as we had got our camp into order, Woolley and I determined to start the attack on the mountains at once. As far as we knew, all the peaks on the east side of the fjord were unclimbed. We were not joined by Hastings and Priestman, they having to return to Svolvaer for some more baggage. Straight behind our camp the hill-side rose sheer; up these precipitous slabs of glacier-worn rock we made our way, using the small ledges on which grew grass and moss. So steep was the mountain-side that when a spot was reached fully a thousand feet above our camp, it looked as if we could almost have thrown a stone on to the white tents below by the water's edge. After that we came to more easy travelling, still, however, over glaciated rocks, finally reaching a small glacier. All along the head of the glacier were precipitous rocks, rising here and there to peaks forming the watershed of the island. At the head and towards the right lay a snow col, filling a deep gap in the rock wall in front of us. Towards this we made our way. The ascent of the ridge from this col to the left was by no means easy climbing, and we soon found that ridge-climbing in the Lofoten, even though there was no ice on the rocks, was often difficult and sometimes impossible. Eventually, by a series of traverses on the south-east side and by climbing up some cracks, we succeeded in reaching our first summit. Here a cairn was built, and I photographed an exceedingly tame ptarmigan in the foreground against an excessively savage-looking peak in the background named Rulten. We were at a height of about 3000 feet. Rulten, from where we were, looked hopelessly inaccessible; but Higraf Tind, the second highest peak in Lofoten, when examined through a glass, promised not only a fine climb, but also success. One of the great charms of climbing in Lofoten is that to hurry is unnecessary, for it is daylight through all the twenty-four hours: a night out on the mountains in darkness is impossible. Moreover, owing to the comparative smallness of the mountains more than one first ascent may be made in a morning or an afternoon. As Woolley and I saw several more summits on our ridge (the Langstrandtinder) towards the north-east, we started off for them after we had fully exhausted the view, and smoked as many pipes as were necessary to produce a sensation of rest. In fact, to me one of the chief reasons for moving on to the next peak was that again I might have the excuse for being lazy, again look at the sky, the far-off mountains, and the endless expanse of the sea beyond. The climbing along the ridge was easy, and two more summits were ascended; a small cairn was left on each of their tops. Further progress along the ridge was, however, impossible, for a deep gap of about five hundred feet cut us off from the next peak. We therefore descended on the north side of the mountain to a steep snow slope, which led down for several hundreds of feet to the glacier below. Thence following our route of the morning we descended the steep rock face above our camp, and got home in time for dinner. During the next two days we paid a part of our penalty for being on the shores of the Gulf Stream. Clouds hid the mountains, and rain and dull weather kept us at sea-level. But magnificent weather followed on August 7, and we were all impatient to start for the virgin peak, Higraf Tind, 3780 feet, the second highest mountain in Lofoten. In order to get to the base of the mountain we rowed in our boat across the small arm of the �stnes Fjord, by whose shores we were camped, and beached our boat at Liland. Thence making our way through the thickets of dwarf birch up the lower stretches of the small valley of Lilandsdal, we arrived at the foot of the great precipice which constitutes the upper part of the mountain. Rimming the head of the valley was the rocky ridge which connects Higraf Tind with Gjeitgaljar. To follow this ridge to the summit of our mountain would have necessitated climbing over various pinnacles and notches, and as we were very sceptical as to whether we should be able to surmount these difficulties, we turned to our left along a small ledge which appeared to run in and out of the gullies that seamed this southern face of Higraf Tind. On more than one occasion we found ourselves in places where great care was necessary, and our spirits rose and fell as we either found a narrow ledge which would safely lead us into one of the many rock gullies and out again on the far side, or were forced back to try higher up or lower down on the face of the mountain. Eventually we emerged on the arête which led up to the topmost peak. The summit of the mountain consisted of huge monoliths of what I should call granite (it may, however, be gabbro), similar in appearance to those on the top of the Charmoz, and also similar to the Charmoz in being very narrow with tremendous precipices on each side. A short distance below the top a small promontory on the ridge afforded a splendid point from which a photograph could be taken. Woolley was sent on so that he might be photographed, proudly planting his ice-axe on the topmost pinnacle. In due time he appeared clear cut against the sky; but immediately afterwards from his gesticulations I could see that something was wrong. The reason was obvious when after a few moments I joined him. Twenty feet away was another summit a few feet higher, and between the two a gulf was fixed. Below us the rock fell sheer for over thirty feet with never a crack in it, whilst on the opposite side of the chasm the great blocks overhung, so that even had we descended hand over hand on the rope into the gap, direct ascent on the other side was hopeless. But remembering our tactics lower down we tried further back for a traverse, and soon found that by climbing down a crack between two huge blocks on the eastern side we could get round into the gap. So far so good, but how to surmount the difficulties on the further side! An attempt to traverse on the western side was seen to be hopeless, but an obliging ledge on the other face ran round a corner. Where would it lead to? Cautiously we edged along it, passing under the summit of the mountain. Another crack between great slabs was found; up this we clambered, and once at its top all difficulty disappeared. We had conquered Higraf Tind, and all that remained for us to do was to crown the vanquished mountain with a cairn. Then we returned to the lower summit, where the cameras and baggage had been left. After toil came repose. The afternoon was perfect, only a few clouds floated in the clear sky. Far away to the south-west could be seen the outer Lofoten Islands, a mass of tangled mountain forms, in colour every conceivable shade of atmospheric blue and purple, whilst beyond lay the calm glittering ocean, and far, far away the last and loneliest of the Lofoten, the island of Röst. Nearer and beneath us were numberless peaks, the majority of them unclimbed; of them, next in height to Higraf Tind were Gjeitgaljar and Rulten. In the distance across the Raftsund in the island of Hindö we could see Mösadlen and its two attendant pinnacles of rock. These pinnacles, from their appearance, should be excessively difficult to climb. At our feet lay the Blaaskovl glacier with the Troldfjordvatn beyond, a solitary iceberg floating on its waters, and further the Trold Fjord and glimpses of the Raftsund. All these combined to give an effect of space and depth to the view far in excess of what one would expect from mountains not 4000 feet above their base. We lingered for a long time on the summit; but in a land where, at that time of year, night never comes, what need was there to hurry? The extraordinary atmospheric colours, the ever-changing forms of the clouds, and the slowly slanting rays of the sun, flashing first on one peak and then on another, produced a wonderful picture. Also it was the first time that I had been able to master the complicated geography of the district, and the peaks Store Trold Tind, Svartsund Tind, Isvand Tind, and others that my friends had climbed when they were last camped by the Raftsund, were pointed out to me. No icy wind shrilled across the mountains, darkness would not visit this land for many days yet; to hasten would have been as foolish as it was unnecessary. After our victory over Higraf Tind came the deluge; for three nights and days the heavens were opened and the rains descended. Had it not been for strenuous efforts on our part in trench digging, our camp would have been bodily washed into the fjord. On one morning an aluminium pan out in the open served as an amateur rain-gauge; in three hours about three inches of water were registered, proving that Lofoten can easily compete with our Atlantic coast as regards rainfall. On the return of fine weather we determined to attack Rulten. In our boat we rowed to his base, landing in a small bay named Flaeskvik. The lower slopes of the mountain were very steep, and the usual climbing from ledge to ledge and up gullies had to be resorted to. After a toilsome climb, for the day was moist and warm, we finally emerged on to the true south-west arête, having discovered on our way up a most remarkable window in one of the ridges. The difficulties now began, for the ridge at once steepened; moreover, in slimness it almost resembled the Grépon. I tried to climb straight up the ridge, but perpendicular slabs, with only small cracks in them, barred the way. To be entirely outside the mountain, when in a peculiarly difficult place, is by no means pleasant. The imagination is far less troubled with ideas of what might happen should one fall, when the extreme steepness is partially hidden from one's view in the privacy of a rock chimney. Baffled in my attempt to make a direct ascent, I looked to the left for some convenient traverse. There was none; vertical slabs, many hundreds of feet high, entirely stopped the way. To the right hand a ledge was found which led for a short distance along the side of the mountain, but smooth rocks, bending over into space, brought my investigations there also to an abrupt conclusion. It might have been possible from the end of this traverse to climb upwards on to the ridge, but later we saw, on our return journey, that should we have surmounted this difficulty, further along the sky-line more than one gap would almost certainly have prevented our reaching the top. The point where we stopped was below 3000 feet, therefore there was at least 800 feet more of the mountain to climb. Rulten is undeniably a difficult peak; at present I have seen no likely way up it, but no doubt by a systematic attack, by trying first one side and then another, a weak spot would be discovered. During the day we had seen the �stnes Fjord dotted over with thousands of boats, and as we descended on to the beach, we found many of the fisherfolk on shore drying their herring-nets on the rocks, for it was the herring fishery that had brought them into the fjord. These nets are often as much as 800 feet long by 100 to 130 feet deep, and a really fortunate haul will bring in often many hundreds of pounds worth of fish; enough, in fact, to fill more than one small steamer. It is, of course, in the early spring, from January to April, that the great cod fishery is carried on, for it is then that the cod migrate to the coast. The fish are caught with hooks and lines, and it is the cod fishery which forms the chief trade of the Lofoten Islands. There are two usual methods of preparing the fish for the market, either by drying (Törfisk) or salting (Klipfisk). The former is the old-fashioned method, and is carried out by drying the cod on wooden scaffolds, after they have been cleaned and the heads removed. And an ancient rule forbade fish being hung up after April 12th, or taken down before June 12th. By far the greater portion of the cod, however, are exported as Klipfisk, Spain being the chief customer, taking about three-fifths of the whole amount exported. Of the remainder of the cod, the liver produces cod-liver oil, the roe is exported to France for sardine bait, and the heads and other parts are turned into manure. The next day was gloriously fine, so we stretched our Alpine ropes to their fullest extent, between the birch trees, and hung everything in the camp on them to dry. Then we bathed in the clear water of the fjord, taking headers into the deep water from the smoothly polished rocks on the shore. Ever since we had pitched our tents by the side of the fjord, Gjeitgaljar Tind had waited patiently. Day by day we had seen the mists play hide-and-seek behind his jagged pinnacles of rock; now we thought the time had arrived for us to attack this formidable looking aiguille. In appearance by far the most difficult peak we had seen, it turned out the most easy to climb; in fact, there was no difficulty experienced anywhere on the ascent. Our route lay up a deep gully partly filled with snow, on the left of the peak, which led us on to a small snow-field behind the summit. On the way up this gully a splendid view of the pinnacle ridge, in front of the top of the mountain, was obtained. A more formidable series of rock towers I have never seen. From the snow-field to the highest point is easy climbing. The top consists of some flat slabs of rock, but the eastern edge is most sensational, and is best investigated by lying on one's stomach before looking over, for it drops sheer for many hundreds of feet. A small stone let fall from the outstretched hand is almost out of sight before it hits the vertical side of the mountain. A more ideal summit for a cairn could hardly be imagined; moreover, there were plenty of loose stones, so Hogrenning was set to build one worthy of the mountain. He produced one seven feet high, and big enough to proclaim to all interested the fact that somebody at least had scaled that impossible looking rock pinnacle Gjeitgaljar. On the next day we broke up our camp, putting on board the steamer _Röst_ all our baggage; but it was not till late on the day following that we arrived back again at Svolvaer, for the _Röst_ had to call at all the small hamlets on the outer islands, almost as far down as the end of Moskenesö. We stopped just short of the historic Maelström, but had we gone further the Maelström would not have been seen, for we voyaged through summer seas. Hastings now left us in order to go to the Lyngen peninsula, whilst Woolley, Priestman, and I went to Digermulen on the Raftsund. From there, that most extraordinary fjord, the Trold Fjord was visited, and we also walked up to the Troldfjordvatn. This mountain tarn, hidden away amongst the mountains and flanked with dark and forbidding precipices, has a beauty all its own, and in some respects reminds one of Loch Coruisk. At its head is a small glacier, whose snout, occasionally breaking off, produces icebergs. The precipices along its shore fall sheer into its dark waters, and the surrounding peaks are wild and savage, but its sides lack the wonderful soft-coloured clothing of the heather, and the rocks are not of such rich hues as the gabbro of Skye. Perhaps I may be wrong, yet it seemed to me that the mountains themselves are not so graceful, neither are the long curving lines so fine as those that can be seen amongst the Coolin from the shores of Coruisk. From Digermulen we attempted the ascent of another of the unclimbed peaks of �st Vaagö. It is an unnamed peak north of Rörhop Vand. But the weather was bad, and clouds prevented us ever seeing the summit of our peak. We had, however, a most delightful climb, first up a small glacier, marked Dijerna on the map, thence up some steep rocks to the ridge, which joined our mountain with the Troldtinder. Following this ridge, we ultimately got into a gap, but beyond this we could see no possible way; traversing for a short distance on the western face only showed us that there was little likelihood of our ever getting back again on to the arête, so reluctantly we returned, and got back to Digermulen in the rain. The weather then went from bad to worse. So we boarded the steamer _Röst_ once more, and went for a trip in mist, rain, and storm round Langö, one of the outer islands of Vesteraalen. All that we saw were the grey seas, the clouds lying low on the mountains, and most extraordinary places bristling with rocks, into which our captain took the small _Röst_, tossed to and fro by the great rolling waves of the Arctic ocean. The voyage in fine weather must be superb. On our return to Svolvaer, Woolley and I travelled south with Priestman, as far as Trondhjem, and from there went home to England. It is a very curious fact that so few mountaineers go to Lofoten. As far back as 1867 the Rev. St. John Tyrwhitt read a paper before the Alpine Club, in which he says, 'An exploration of the Loffodens would be a work worthy of the Club in every sense of the words.' Again, in 1869, Professor Bonney, who visited these islands with E. Walton, speaks 'strongly of the wonderful grandeur and beauty of some parts of the Lofotens,' and then the next paper in the _Alpine Club Journal_ is that of Priestman in 1898 nearly thirty years later. It is true that the peaks are only 4000 feet high, and therefore cannot compete with those of 14,000 feet; also, they possess no large glaciers, neither are the valleys filled with pine forests, and the foregrounds, as a rule, are desolate and the rocks without much colour: but the rock climbing is as good as any one could wish to get, the rock resembling in many respects that of the Chamonix Aiguilles. Moreover, and herein lies the strong charm of this mountain-land, it is a land of exquisite atmospheric effects. For those who care to climb where great expanses of sky and clouds arch slowly down to the far-off horizon, and where lonely islands are set in open spaces of blue water, these remote Lofoten mountain fastnesses beyond the Arctic Circle are difficult to equal. The low circling sun making it for ever afternoon, flooding sky and mountain-land in warm, luminous colour, which deepens the distances, and adds perspective to ridge after ridge of serrated and barren peaks, all these purely æsthetic qualifications are possessed in a high degree by the Lofoten Islands. Also for those who are willing to spend a lazy, delightful summer holiday in camp by the side of the many-voiced sea, far from busy crowds and the worries of civilisation, there are few spots more peaceful, more fascinating, or more beautiful than these Lofoten Islands, where the wondrous summer skies slowly change their exquisitely rich colouring of long-drawn-out evening for the more delicate tints of the early dawn, and where the restless waves of the great Arctic Ocean are for ever washing against the precipitous sides of the bare, rock-girt mountains. A CHUILIONN 'But in the prime of the summer-time Give me the Isle of Skye.' A. NICOLSON. Once upon a time, as the story-books say, Dr. Samuel Johnson was bold enough to forsake his beloved Fleet Street, and, at the age of sixty-four, journey northwards in company with Boswell to the Hebrides, the Ultima Thule of those days. He finally arrived in the Island of Skye, 'without any memorable accident,' about the beginning of September 1773, where he experienced all the severities of ordinary Skye weather--much rain and many gales--and this state of things continuing throughout the month, the Doctor found some difficulty in getting back again to the mainland. He writes, 'Having been detained by storms many days in Skie, we left, as we thought with a fair wind; but a violent gust which Bos had a great mind to call a tempest, forced us into Col, an obscure island.' The wild and beautiful scenery of the Island of Skye does not seem to have made any impression on Johnson, and he leaves with no regret, merely admitting, that he has 'many pictures in his mind which he could not have had without his journey,' and that these pictures 'will serve later for pleasing topics of conversation.' What these pictures were he does not say, but they probably had little to do with what we now call the beauties of the Highlands; for he mentions that he found little entertainment in the wildernesses of the Hebrides, the universal barrenness oppressed him, and he points out that 'in those countries you are not to suppose that you shall find villages or enclosures. The traveller wanders through a naked desert, gratified sometimes but rarely with sight of cows, and now and then finds heaps of loose stones and turf in a cavity between the rocks, where a being, born with all those powers which education expands, and all those sensations which culture refines, is condemned to shelter itself from the wind and the rain.' Also, that 'a walk upon ploughed fields in England is a dance upon carpets, compared to the toilsome drudgery of wandering in Skie.' But it is not surprising that Johnson at the age of sixty-four looked upon hilly country with aversion--the mountains interfered with his convenience. He only mentions the hills in Skye once. 'Here are mountains that I should once have climbed,' he writes to his friend Mrs. Thale; 'but to climb steeps is now very laborious, and to descend them dangerous.' No doubt at the Doctor's age he was right; still we feel somewhat disappointed that during his stay at Talisker, he was apparently unconscious of the Coolin, and we receive but small consolation from his elegant epistolary communications, when they tell us instead, that he was gratified sometimes but rarely with sight of cows, and that Mr. Boswell was affected almost to tears by the illustrious ruins at Iona. [Illustration: The Coolin.] All this shows us, how the attitude of people towards the wilds of the Highlands has become completely changed in one century, for Johnson was not in any way peculiar in his ideas. Look where we will in the literature of that time, we find the same sentiments. Pennant, who visited Skye the year before Dr. Johnson, describes the Coolin as 'a savage series of rude mountains,' whilst Blaven, 'affects him with astonishment.' Thirty years later the only natural objects in the island that interested Forsyth, at least so far as one can judge from what he writes in _The Beauties of Scotland_, were 'an obelisk of uncommon magnitude' in the parish of Snizort, (probably the Storr Rock,) and a waterfall and sea cave near Portree. But a new school was growing up, and Sir Walter Scott was one of the first to insist, that a visit to the Highlands would reveal objects more interesting than cows, waterfalls, and sea caves. People were beginning to find in the torrents, mountains, lochs, and pine woods, beauties they had not seen before. No longer were the hills chaotic masses of rock, ready at any moment to fall and overwhelm the valleys, nor were the moors and glens expanses of uniform barrenness or gloomy mountain fastnesses. Robson, at the beginning of last century (1815), writing of one of the most remote and wild regions of the Highlands, namely the head of Glen Tilt, says: 'Of all the romantic scenes which are presented to those who explore the recesses of the Grampians, none will be found to possess a more picturesque combination of wild and characteristic beauty than this'; and in the preface to his accurate and delightful volume on the scenery of the Grampian mountains, he writes: 'With the man of taste few districts in this kingdom have equal claim to admiration.' Robson was not a Scotchman, but a London artist; yet one has only to look at his sketches, and read the letterpress of his book to see how well he appreciated mountain form, and how he understood, in no uncertain manner, that which now delights us nearly a century later in the Highlands. His water-colour picture of Loch Coruisk[M] is an honest attempt to accurately reproduce the wonderful colour and savage beauty of the grandest of all Scotch lochs, and one is only sorry that he has introduced into the foreground a fully dressed Highlander--a legacy, no doubt, of that old feeling that made Dr. Johnson crave for cows, and that even now survives at the present time in the pretty sketches of Scotch hills, where the foreground is animated by Highland cattle. Since Robson's time, many people have been to the Highlands and to Skye and the Coolin. Turner visited them, and the impression produced may be seen from his drawing of Loch Coriskin. This drawing is described by Ruskin in _Modern Painters_ as 'a perfect expression of the Inferior Mountains,' yet any one who had really seen the Coolin would hardly be justified in asserting that Turner's drawing (Fig. 69, vol. iv., _Modern Painters_) was the perfect expression of the hills round Sgurr Dubh, even though it may be the perfect expression of an inferior mountain. Fortunately the Coolin are never inferior mountains, unless we measure them by the number of feet they rise above the sea. 'Comparative bulk and height,' says the late Sheriff Nicolson, 'are of course important elements in mountain grandeur, but outline and features are, as with human beings, even more important.' Clachlet at Easter, covered with snow and seen across the moor of Rannoch at a distance of a few miles, towers up into the heavens just as grandly as a peak five times its altitude does in the Himalaya, when that peak is seen from a point thirty miles away. It is the atmosphere that adds both dignity and charm to these Scotch hills, making them appear far bigger than they would in the clearer air of the larger mountain ranges, and giving them all the softened colour and perspective so necessary to emphasise the real beauty of true mountains. Their form also helps them in no small degree. The long-flowing lines of the lower slopes gradually rising from the moorland below, and the beautifully carved corries that nestle into their sides, all tend to strengthen and serve as a fit substructure for their more wild and broken summits. At their feet lie no valleys with dirty-white glacier streams tearing down between mud banks, and never a proper pool in them; their sides are not disfigured with monotonous pine forests of a uniform light green colour, but the heather and the grey rocks, lichen-covered, mingle together on their slopes, lighting up with every flash of sunshine, or deepening into every shade of brown and purple gloom, as the storm clouds sweep over their summits; whilst, below, brown trout streams wander between wild birches and Scotch firs, staying here in some dark pool hidden away under the rocks covered with ferns and heather, flashing out again there into the sunshine over the pebbles, and across the low-lying moor. Those who have seen the Coolin from the moors above Talisker in the twilight, or who have watched them on a summer's evening from Kyle Akin, apparently clothed in deep purple velvet broidered with gold, and rising out of the 'wandering fields of barren foam,' whilst 'The charmed sunset linger'd low adown In the red west'; or lazily spent a whole day on the sand beaches of Arisaig point, gazing, towards Rum and Skye lying light blue on the horizon, and across a sea brilliant in colour as the Mediterranean amongst the Ionian islands; or lingered at the head of Loch Coruisk till the last pale light has faded out of the heavens behind Sgurr Alasdair, and only the murmur of the streams breaks the stillness of the night air--those who have thus seen the Coolin will know that they are beautiful. But the fascination that these mountains exercise over those that know them well is manifold; there are more pleasures that the Coolin can offer than those of being merely very beautiful. For the mountaineer who wanders in the heart of this marvellous mountain land there are rock climbs without end. He can spend hour after hour exploring the corries, or threading the intricacies of the narrow rock edges that form so large a part of the sky-line. From the summits he can watch the mists sweeping up from below, and hurrying over the bealachs in tumbled masses of vapour, or he can dreamily follow the white sails of the boats, far out to sea, as they slowly make for the outer islands; then clambering down the precipitous faces he can repose in some sheltered nook and listen to the sound of a burn, perhaps a thousand feet below, echoed across from the sheer walls of rock on the other side of the corrie; there is always something new to interest him--it may be a gully that requires the utmost of his skill as a mountaineer, or it may be a view of hill, moor, and loch backed by the Atlantic and the far-off isles of the western sea. Nowhere in the British Islands are there any rock climbs to be compared with those in Skye, measure them by what standard you will--length, variety, or difficulty. Should any one doubt this, let him some fine morning walk up from the head of Coruisk to the rocky slabs at the foot of Sgurr a'Ghreadaidh. There he will see the bare grey rocks rising out from the heather not 500 feet above the level of the loch, and there walls, ridges, and towers of weather-worn gabbro stretch with hardly a break to the summit of the mountain, 2800 feet above him. Measured on the map, it is but half a mile, but that half mile will tax his muscles; he must climb up gullies that the mountain torrents have worn out of the precipices, and over slabs of rock sloping down into space at an angle that makes handhold necessary as well as foothold; he must creep out round edges on to the faces of perpendicular cliffs, only to find that after all the perpendicular cliff itself must be scaled before he can win back again to the ridge that is to lead him to the topmost peak. There are many such climbs in the Coolin. The pinnacles of Sgurr nan Gillean, the four tops of Sgurr a'Mhadaidh, and the ridge from Sgurr Dearg to Sgurr Dubh, are well known, but the face climbs have been neglected. The face of Sgurr a'Mhadaidh from Tairneilear, the face of Sgurr Alasdair from Coire Labain, are both excellent examples of what these mountains can offer to any one who wants a first-rate scramble on perfect rock. Sgurr a'Coir' an Lochain on the northern face gives a climb as good as one could anywhere wish to get, yet it is only a preliminary one to those on the giants Sgurr Alasdair and Sgurr Dearg that lie behind. But splendid though the climbing on the Coolin may be, it is only one of the attractions, possibly a minor attraction, to these hills, and there are many other mountain ranges where rock-climbing can be found. It is the individuality of the Coolin that makes the lover of the hills come back again and again to Skye, and this is true also of other mountain districts on the mainland of Scotland. To those who can appreciate the beauty of true hill form, the ever-changing colour and wonderful power and character of the sea-girt islands of the west, the lonely grandeur of Rannoch moor, the spacious wooded valley of the Spey at Aviemore, backed by the Cairngorm mountains, wild Glen Affric prodigal of gnarled pines abounding in strange curves of strength, or the savage gloom of Glencoe--all these scenes tell the same tale, and proclaim in no doubtful manner, that the Scotch mountain land in its own way is able to offer some of the most beautiful mountain scenery in the world. The Highlands of Scotland contain mountain form of the very finest and most subtle kind--form not so much architectural, of which Ruskin writes, 'These great cathedrals of the earth, with their gates of rock, pavements of clouds, choirs of streams and stone, altars of snow, and vaults of purple traversed by the continual stars,' but form where the savage grandeur, the strength, and the vastness of the mountains is subordinate to simpler, yet in a way more complicated, structures. Scotch mountains have something finer to give than architectural form. In their modelling may be seen the same beauties that in perfection exist in Greek statuary. The curving lines of the human figure are more subtle than those of any cathedral ever built. The Aiguilles round Mont Blanc are architectural in the highest degree, but the mighty summit rising up far above them into the blue sky, draped in wonderful and sweeping lines of snow and ice, marvellously strong, yet full of moderation, is far more mysterious, far more beautiful, than all the serrated ridges and peaks that cluster round its base. It is in the gentleness of ascent in many of the Highland hills, in the restraint and repose of the slopes 'full of slumber,' that we can trace all the finer and more delicate human lines; and it is due to the strength of these lines that the bigger mountains seem to rise without an effort from the moors and smaller hills that surround them. To many people the Cairngorm range is composed of shapeless, flat-topped mountains devoid almost of any character. They do not rise like the Matterhorn in savage grandeur, yet the sculptured sides of Braeriach, seen from Sgoran Dubh Mhor, are in reality far more full of rich and intricate mountain sculpture, than the whole face of the Matterhorn as seen from the Riffel Alp. The individuality of the Coolin is not seen in their summits, which are often almost ugly, but in the colour of the rocks, the atmospheric effects, the relative largeness and harmony of the details compared with the actual size of the mountains, and most of all in the mountain mystery that wraps them round: not the mystery of clearness such as is seen in the Alps and Himalaya, where range after range recedes into the infinite distance, till the white snow peaks cannot be distinguished from the clouds, but in the secret beauty born of the mists, the rain, and the sunshine, in a quiet and untroubled land, no longer vexed by the more rude and violent manifestations of the active powers of Nature. Once there was a time when these peaks were the centre of a great cataclysm; they are the shattered remains of a vast volcano that ages since poured its lavas in mighty flood far and wide over the land; since then the glaciers in prehistoric times have polished and worn down the corries and the valley floors, leaving scars and wounds everywhere as a testimony of this power; but the fire age and the ice age are past; now the still, clear waters of Coruisk ripple in the breeze, by the lochside lie the fallen masses of the hills, and the shattered debris left by the glaciers of bygone days; these harbour the dwarf hazel, the purple heather, and the wildflowers, whilst corrie, glen, and mountain-side bask in the summer sunlight. But when the wild Atlantic storms sweep across the mountains; when the streams gather in volume, and the bare rock faces are streaked with the foam of a thousand waterfalls; when the wind shrieks amongst the rock pinnacles, and sky, loch, and hillside all are one dull grey, the Coolin can be savage and dreary indeed. Perhaps, though, the clouds towards evening may break; then the torn masses of vapour tearing in mad hunt along the ridges will be lit up by the rays of the sun slowly descending into the western sea, 'robing the gloom with a vesture of divers colours, of which the threads are purple and scarlet, and the embroideries flame'; and as the light flashes from the black rocks, and the shadows deepen in the corries, the superb beauty, the melancholy, the mystery of these mountains of the Isle of Mist will be revealed. But the golden glory of the sunset will melt from off the mountains, the light that silvered the great slabs will slowly fail; from out the corries darkness heralding the black night will creep with stealthy tread, hiding all in gloom; then, last of all, beyond the darkly luminous, jagged, and fantastic outline of the Coolin the glittering stars will flash from the clear sky, no wind will stir the great quiet, and only the far-off sound, born of the rhythmic murmur of the sea-waves beating on the rock-bound shore of lonely Scavaig, remains as a memory of the storm. 'In conclusion, let us sum up the lessons that the mountains of the British Isles can teach us. They can give healthy exercise, and cultivate in us the power of appreciating the beauties and grandeur of nature.... Amongst them we may learn the proper uses of our legs.... We may learn to climb difficult rocks, to avoid dislodging loose stones, and to guard against those dangers that are peculiar to grassy mountains.... We can cultivate perseverance, courage, the quiet, uncomplaining endurance of hardships, and last, but not least important, those habits of constant care and prudence without which mountaineering ceases to be one of the finest sports in the world, and may degenerate into a gambling transaction with the forces of nature, with human life for the stake.' CHARLES PILKINGTON. Turning over the pages one day of the index of the _Alpine Club Journal_, I looked for information on the mountains of Ireland. Greece, Greenland, Patagonia, the Peepsa fly, and mountain midgets were all mentioned, but Ireland and its many ranges of hills I sought for in vain. This obviously was a most monstrous injustice, and it almost seemed, at first sight, as if a tour of exploration into this apparently unknown land might be undertaken for the purpose of climbing the numerous and neglected heights. Years ago, however, I had visited several parts of Ireland, the Mourne mountains, the north of Antrim, and a great part of Donegal, and I knew that there were cairns at least on the summits of most of the mountains; presumably, therefore, they had been visited by man before my arrival. Still it is strange that Ireland, with so many groups of hills, and some of them so wonderfully beautiful, should not attract more notice in the mountaineering world. Why should not an Irish club, like the Climbers' Club, the Cairngorm Club, or the Scottish Mountaineering Club, be formed? Mr. H. C. Hart, in his introduction to Ireland in _Climbing in the British Isles_, has very ably given both the possibilities and the limits of Irish climbing, and I cannot do better than quote his words: 'But there are ample opportunities for acquiring the art of mountain craft, the instinct which enables the pedestrian to guide himself alone from crest to crest, from ridge to ridge, with the least labour. He will learn how to plan out his course from the base of cliff or gully, marking each foot and hand grip with calm attention; and knowing when to cease to attempt impossibilities, he will learn to trust in himself, and acquire that most necessary of all climbers' acquirements, a philosophic, contemplative calm in the presence of danger or difficult dilemmas. If the beginner is desirous of rock practice, or the practised hand requires to test his condition or improve his form, there is many a rocky coast where the muscles and nerves and stamina can be trained to perfection. Kerry and Donegal are competent to form a skilled mountaineer out of any capable aspirant. Ice and snow craft is an accomplishment which must of course be learnt elsewhere.' [Illustration: _The Macgillicuddy's Reeks._] All this being true, it seems incomprehensible that Ireland should not be looked upon more favourably as a possible mountaineering country. I am afraid nowadays, however, that unless a considerable amount of rock gymnastics can be made part of a climb, the modern mountaineer is not satisfied. Merely beautiful scenery is insufficient to lure him to the mountains. Still, as Mr. Hart says, Kerry and Donegal are good training-grounds for the novice. This I can vouch for; the cliffs of Slieve League, 1972 feet, form one of the finest sea cliffs in the British Isles, and much of the best scenery amongst the Macgillicuddy's Reeks can only be obtained by those who are willing to do some rock scrambling. Now the modern mountaineer, owing to this specialisation in rock climbing, is apt to lose much that the earlier mountain climbers enjoyed; whilst, in days gone by, the wanderer amongst the mountains also missed much by being unable to deal with difficult rocks. On the other hand, the expert of to-day gains in both directions, but he must beware of spending all his time in mere gymnastics or the pure athletics of mountaineering. One of Ireland's most famous literary men, the Rev. J. P. Mahaffy, more than a quarter of a century ago in _Social Life in Greece_, points out the dangers of immoderate specialisation in bodily exercise, and how alien it was to Greek education. 'The theoretical educators,' he says, 'knew quite well what most of us do not, that field sports are vastly superior to pure athletics in their effects upon the mind.' Again: 'The Greeks knew what we ignore, that such sports as require excessive bodily training and care are low and debasing in comparison to those which demand only the ordinary strength and quickness, daring and decision in danger, resource and ingenuity in difficulties.' In these days the old Greek virtue of moderation is hard to follow. But perhaps in the sport of mountaineering it is more easily observed than in many others, for he who wanders amongst the hills is not driven forward by strenuous competition, no crowd applauds the success of some daring feat, and as a rule these immoderate efforts can be avoided. The extent of wild mountainous country in Ireland where the mountaineer can enjoy his sport is much greater than is generally supposed; the Kerry mountains occupy a larger area than the Snowdon group in North Wales; then there are the Wicklow mountains, the Mourne mountains, the Donegal Highlands, the Galtee More group, and the mountainous country of Connemara and Mayo, which last is about forty miles long by thirty miles wide. Over all these scattered groups the mountaineer can wander at his will; he will be stopped by no one. Moreover, this west coast of Ireland has more to offer than mountains. Should the visitor not be extraordinarily enthusiastic and wish to walk over the hills every day in the week, from Kerry to Donegal there are always plenty of rivers and lakes where salmon and trout can be caught; the scenery, too, is often of the finest description, wonderfully wild sea lochs to explore, with a magnificent rock-bound coast, on whose shores the restless Atlantic breaks, also numberless lonely islands far out in the sea. To those who care for beautiful soft atmospheric lights, for great stretches of heather lands, of sky, or of clouds, for a clean sea with often miles of yellow sands or splendid cliffs, all these can be found on Ireland's Atlantic coast, and they surely are a sufficient enticement to bring far more visitors to this beautiful country than are to be found there at the present time. It is now many years since I was stopping at Carrick in Donegal bay. Not many miles west of Carrick is Slieve League. Although it is not quite 2000 feet high, yet it needs a good climber to ascend this hill from the seashore at its feet. I do not know what the average angle may be, but on one summer afternoon it took me a very long time to accomplish the ascent. Of course there is a great deal of heather and grass set at the steepest angle on which they will grow; but a climber ought to be able to be as safe on such a mountain-side as he is on hard rock or on snow or ice, and unless experience is obtained, he will remain a novice in this particular kind of climbing. There was more than one place on the way up Slieve League from the seashore that needed considerable care, and I well remember those 'nasty ravines, iron-floored and steep-edged,' that Mr. Hart mentions in his description of the place. Another unique experience, not however a mountaineering one, that I had whilst stopping at Carrick, was in the sea caves in the cliffs just west of Slieve League. It is only in the finest weather that a boat can venture near them, for even after several days of east wind off the land the Atlantic swell is still big enough, unless great care is taken, to break a rowing boat to pieces on the rocks. The cliffs where the cave is situated come down sheer into the dark water below; the entrance is a great doorway with a somewhat slanting roof, into which the full force of the waves from the open ocean can play; and as the boat rises and falls on the water, the danger of hidden rocks underneath the surface adds a certain amount of anxiety to the other feelings that possess one, as the daylight begins to fade away in the mysterious recesses of the cavern. For about three hundred yards this tunnel is straight; by looking back the opening can be seen growing smaller and smaller and more distant. At length a great dome-shaped chamber is reached, from which branch out other caves in various directions. Here the dim light of candles, the washing of the water on the rocks, the thunderous booming of the surge in unknown passages far away in the bowels of the mountain, where, every sound being greatly magnified and echoed backwards and forwards, all these produce most weird and awe-inspiring sensations. The mystery and the sense of remoteness from the world, the uncanny feeling that a thousand feet of solid rock lies between one and the sunshine, also add to the effect. But when besides these things, we had been listening to dreadful tales from our boatmen, of mermaids, of sea pigs light green in colour with pink spots and human heads, that at night would come 'wondering' round the boat, and finally of a 'great big beast, a serpent,' as large as the steeple of a church, which was supposed not only to feed on human beings when opportunity offered, but what was worse, was said to inhabit the inner recesses of the very cave in which we were, it is unnecessary to say how easy it was to be frightened at anything. The only unblocked waterway where a boat could pass on out of this domed hall was to the right, and up this we were preparing to go in search of seal, when some exceptionally large waves, tortured in some narrow passages, sent a terrific boom with multitudinous echoes reverberating through the caverns; at the same time a most curious phenomenon, half sound, half vibration of the air occurred. It seemed as though the whole body of the air in the cave pulsated, producing a swishing sound with periods of about one second, which gradually became fainter and fainter till it died away. Probably the cave had been converted into a gigantic organ pipe, and the note was one so low down in the scale that the vibrations were about one per second. Unfortunately I suggested that it was the 'great big beast, the serpent,' and that finished the expedition. Our boatmen were at once terrified, shouting to each other, pushing and half rowing the boat in a frenzy of fear. Amidst the bellowing noises of the various caverns leading out of the central hall, and the angry hisses of 'the beast, the serpent,' we departed most hurriedly for the outer air. Slieve League, however, if the Ordnance Survey maps are to be trusted, is not the finest cliff in Ireland. On the western coast of Achill Island are the cliffs of Croaghaun, 2192 feet high. But my friend, Colin Phillip, who was there in the summer of 1901, made a somewhat startling discovery. A piece of land to the west of Croaghaun, more than _a square quarter of a mile_, has been left out altogether from the map. Where this land should be a bay is marked; perhaps, however, his own words will describe better how the discovery was made. 'The seaward face of Croaghaun is usually spoken of as an almost perpendicular cliff of over 2000 feet. This is not true. It is a fine, rocky, more or less buttressed mountain face, dropping to the sea at an angle of perhaps 50 degrees in places. But its general inclination would not be so much. There appears to be a curious error in the Ordnance Survey map with regard to the sea front of this hill. Expecting to find a grand view of this giant amongst the cliffs of Ireland, I made for a point marked on the map as a headland, projecting well out to sea on the west side of Croaghaun, from which a complete survey of the face should have been obtained. I was astonished to find, instead of a broad bay, with the great cliff of the mountain descending into it, a narrow inlet, like a 'geo' in Shetland, on the other side of which, almost completely blocking the view, was the south-west buttress of Croaghaun, and certainly not steeper than 40 degrees.' The whole bay, therefore, as marked on the Ordnance map, is now occupied by the lower part of the mountain; consequently, instead of a sheer cliff, this western side of the mountain is no more than an easy slope which may be traversed in many places. Another piece of information of Phillip's which may be novel, is that perhaps Sir Walter Scott was right when he called the hills in Skye the Cuchullin hills. During a discussion on the Skye hills with Mr. Seaton F. Milligan (past vice-president of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland), whom Phillip met on the west coast of Ireland, Mr. Milligan said that the hills had been named after the Irish hero Cuchulain; and the reason he gave was the following:-- In those early days the sons of the kings of Ireland were often sent to Skye to learn the art of war. At the end of their first year, a test of their progress was whether they were able to walk across what was called 'the bridge of the cliffs'; this bridge is supposed to have been part of the ridge of the Coolin. The bridge is thus described in the legend:-- 'Wonderful was the sight the bridge afforded, when any one would leap upon it, for it narrowed until it became as narrow as the hair of one's head, the second time it shortened till it became short as an inch, and the third time it grew slippery until it was as slippery as an eel of the river, and the fourth time it rose up on high against you as the mast of a ship.' That this description agrees with the ridges of Sgurr nan Gillean (the peak of the young men) no one can deny, and the story goes on to say how Cuchulain at once performs the feat at the first trial, so astonishing the onlookers that the bridge was named after him. In opposition, however, to this, we have the weighty statement of the late Alexander Nicolson, who says,[N] 'They are known to the natives of Skye and always have been as "A Chuilionn." There was an Ossianic hero of the name Cuchulain, said to have been brought up at Dun-Sgàthaich, an ancient fort near Ord in Skye, but the natives never called the great mountain range by his name. In this view I am supported by our greatest Celtic archæologist, Dr. Skene.' But to return to Ireland: besides the cliffs on Achill, all along the north coast of Mayo are excessively wild and grand precipices often of hard quartzite rock, and this part of the west coast is perhaps the finest and most picturesque in all Ireland. East and south of Achill lie a series of detached mountains and ranges of mountains, all of which are more or less interesting as they command wide views of sea, valley, and moorland. South of the Killary lies perhaps the most beautiful of all the mountainous districts in Ireland, the district of Connemara. In fact, it is not exaggeration to say that there are few finer groups of hills in Britain than the twelve Bens of Connemara, and this is the more remarkable when one considers that they are only 2395 feet high. To again quote Phillip: 'The views from some of the summits are enchanting, in particular from the easily got at summit W.S.W. of Leenane. From this point the Killary can be traced from the ocean to its head. The valley of the Erriff river carries the eye over the plains of Mayo northwards to the far away hills in Sligo. To the eastward the Formnamore mountains, with glimpses through their gaps of Loughs Maske and Corrib, beyond which the plains extend through Mayo, Galway, to Clare. Then Maam Turk blocks the view, which opens again, however, to the south, with wild moorland and the whole of the twelve Bens. Through the gaps of these mountains the Atlantic is seen in more than one direction, fringed by rocky headlands and white sandy bays, carrying the eye back again to the westward and the solemn Killary, beyond which, lying almost hidden amongst the hills, is the beautiful valley of Delphi and glimpses of the Dhu Lough.' I have left the Kerry hills till the last, because they are the most important and the highest in Ireland. The Connemara hills are perhaps, on the whole, more beautiful, but the hills of Kerry possess a grandeur and such characteristic form, that one at once thinks of them as mountains and not hills. This is not surprising, for they easily surpass the English hills in height, Carran Tuohill, 3414 feet, Been Keragh, 3314 feet, Caher, 3200 feet, and Brandon, 3127 feet, being the highest. Moreover their bases are in some cases (Brandon, for instance) on the seashore. The chief points of this group, which in some respects differentiate them from the other ranges of mountains in the British Isles, are the numberless wild mountain tarns that lie hidden in their corries, the masses of vegetation that clothe even the rock precipices, and the curious capping of peat that is to be found on some of the hill-tops. In some instances, after climbing up hundreds of feet of rock from the corrie below, one finds that the last twenty feet of the mountain is up a steep slope of peat, occasionally almost corniced by the overhanging fringe of heather. Then, too, the luxuriant growth of the trees in some of the valleys, especially those near Killarney and at the head of Caragh lake, is wonderful, and it is almost needless to say that the upper part of the Lake of Killarney itself, beneath the Macgillicuddy's Reeks, is unrivalled in the British Isles for rich beauty. There are larger lakes surrounded by far wilder scenery in Scotland, for instance in Glen Affric, or lakes like Loch Katrine that lie between wonderful forested shores and beneath shapely mountains, or Rydal Water or parts of Derwentwater in the Lake District; but the upper lake at Killarney, as an example of winding stretches of clear waters, with rocky shores clothed in oaks, firs, hollies, and other trees, the foliage stretching upwards to the heather-covered mountains behind, this particular part of the Kerry mountain land certainly in its own way stands alone; it has no competitor. The warm moist Atlantic climate has had almost the effect of a hothouse on the flora of these sheltered valleys, whilst above, on the summits of the mountains the first snow and storms of the winter and early spring produce a rugged wildness that is only to be found in the British Islands on mountains over 3000 feet high. Carran Tuohill, the highest of the Macgillicuddy's Reeks, also the highest mountain in Ireland, lies some distance away from Killarney. Its eastern and northern faces are especially grand. At its foot can be found more than one mountain tarn; Lough Gouragh, at the head of the Hag's Glen, being very fine, for the greatest mountain precipice in Ireland rises from its shores almost to the summit of Carran Tuohill, about 2300 feet above. On the other side of the mountain, another tarn, Coomloughra, is of a more ordinary type, even although it is encircled by the three highest peaks in Ireland. Notwithstanding that the face of Caher, which overlooks Coomloughra, is precipitous for more than 1000 feet, yet there is no very good climbing to be obtained on it, for the rocks are treacherous; also, they run diagonally up and across the face of the mountain. The views from all these mountains that surround Coomloughra are very fine. That from Been Keragh perhaps is the best for the surrounding peaks; for, looking across the Hag's Glen at the black precipices of Carran Tuohill and at the savage ridge which connects it with Been Keragh, one wonders that such wild and desolate scenery can exist so near to the rich and luxuriant vegetation of the valleys only a few miles away. From Carran Tuohill it is towards the west and south-west that the finest outlook is obtained. Across the valley in which Coomloughra lies are the cliffs of Caher; Dursey Island is seen in the distance at the mouth of the Kenmare river; the small but shapely Skellig rocks jut out of the open sea far away in the west; and Brandon, one of the most beautiful of mountains, stands alone and solitary on the shores of the wild Atlantic beyond the blue waters and the yellow sands of Dingle bay. Heather moorland, desolate loughs, and peat mosses extend for miles, and the great dome of the sky, perhaps flecked with soft clouds, bends down to the far off horizon of the outer ocean. To the west of the Macgillicuddy's Reeks, in a part of the country but little visited, is Lough Coomacullen, one of the most wonderfully beautiful mountain tarns I have ever seen. Hidden away amongst the hills, and difficult of access, it has attracted but little attention, yet with its glacier-worn sides of bare rock that descend in many places sheer into the black waters below, and the circle of cliffs which surround the upper part of the lough, one might almost imagine one was in Norway, except that the deep velvet brown of the heather, the few well-grown hollies clinging to the broken rock walls, and the rich colours of the mosses, lichens, and ferns that find nourishment on the ledges and faces of the precipices, at once show that one is on the Atlantic coast and in a softer and warmer clime. Five hundred feet below this small tarn lies the larger lake, Coomasaharn; it too has a shore line much wilder and more rugged than the majority of British lakes. Great boulders and masses of glacier-worn rocks surround it, whilst at its head the precipices extend almost to the summit of Coomacarrea (2542 feet). In some places these precipices give good rock scrambling, but it is rather surprising, after a couple of hours' climbing on good hard rock, to find that the top of the mountain is a flat peat moor which in some places almost overhangs the wild corrie below. This capping of peat on several of even the wilder mountains seems to be characteristic of many of the summits on the west coast of Ireland. The highest summits of the Reeks, however, are quite free from peat. There are, of course, many other mountainous districts besides those I have already mentioned. The Mourne mountains, where the mountaineer may, if he chooses, collect topaz and beryls of a most exquisite blue, the Wicklow, Tipperary, or Waterford groups, all possess wild mountain scenery, and many rare plants can be found there. But after all, undoubtedly it is the picturesque side of the mountain land that makes to the wanderer in Ireland the most forcible appeal of all. It is the atmospheric softness, and the rich vegetation, which, on the west of Ireland, covers the valleys, glens, and the mountain-sides, it is the colour of the deep and lovely tarns, of the expanses of heather, and of the distances, and lastly, it is the rugged, rock-bound coast, a coast of many bays, of desolate islands, of solitary sea stacks, of cliffs, of sandy beaches, and wonderful sea caves, a coast that has for ages withstood the attacks of the mighty waves of the storm-driven Atlantic; these are the beauties of which this Irish mountain land can boast, which after all are of more worth than the attractions of many inaccessible pinnacles and many ranges of ugly but excessively steep and high mountains. FOOTNOTES: [M] It used to be in the Loan Collection at the South Kensington Museum. [N] _The Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal_, vol. ii. p. 99. PREHISTORIC CLIMBING NEAR WASTDALE HEAD 'Though sluggards deem it but a foolish chase, And marvel men should quit their easy chair, The toilsome way, and long, long league to trace, Oh, there is sweetness in the mountain air And life, that bloated Ease can never hope to share.' _Childe Harold._ To the mountaineer who makes his way from Seascale or from Drigg to Wastdale Head, the Cumberland hills with their long, rolling outlines, their flanks concealed by superincumbent soil and vegetation, do not seem to promise well as far as rock climbing is concerned. Only here and there do the ridges break into rocky precipices; nowhere is seen the rugged grandeur of the Highlands of Scotland; such valleys as Glencoe with its rock-built walls, or the splintered summits of the Coolin, or of An Teallach, do not exist. Yet the rock-climber who stops at the inn at the head of Wastdale may spend weeks before he has exhausted the district. He will be lucky indeed, and a first-rate climber to boot, if he has done the best of the climbs without further aid than that afforded by what the mountaineer calls the 'moral' support of the rope. Once upon a time a celebrated climber of Alpine repute came to Wastdale for the first, alas! also for the last time. 'Climbing in the Caucasus,' Mummery said, 'was easy and safe; in the Alps too it was usually easy and safe, though sometimes difficult; but climbing as practised at Wastdale Head was both difficult and dangerous.' The great delight of the climber in the Cumberland hills is in gullies or 'ghylls,' and no wonder, for there are endless gullies both great and small, the climbs in which vary with the state of the weather, and may be easy or difficult, wet or dry, or dirty, according to circumstances. Then again, the climber must have a perfect contempt for streams, and especially waterfalls, for the ascent of a perpendicular 'pitch' through a delightfully cold and invigorating shower bath will be one of his earliest experiences. But there are plenty of other climbs besides those in ghylls. Hidden away in the recesses of the hills are sharp and jagged pinnacles of hard porphyritic rock, precipices smooth, flawless, and sometimes overhanging, whose firm grey bastions have withstood the storms of ages; whilst only at their feet, where lie the remnants which have yielded, flake by flake, from the massive buttresses above, does the ruin proclaim that the hand of time carves the rocks on the mountain-side as well as the valleys below. This was written several years ago, before all the rock problems, and also before all their variations, had been worked out. When first I visited Wastdale Head it was at Christmas time. I knew there was a pinnacle of rock on Great Gable, also that another rock climb could be obtained on the Pillar mountain--that was all. Mr. Jones had never visited Wastdale, and his work was unwritten. The entries in the climbers' book at the inn were only just begun. W. P. Haskett Smith, J. W. Robinson, C. Slingsby, and G. Hastings were the pioneers of those days; they first really drew the attention of mountaineers to the fact that rock climbing of every degree of difficulty could be indulged in amongst the hills that surrounded the head of Wastdale. It is true that for many years previously members of the Alpine Club had been in the habit of spending some time every year in the district, but they had gone there more for the ice and the snow and for the enjoyment of the mountain scenery than for indulgence in extraordinary performances in the ghylls and on the rock faces. May we not call theirs the Golden Age? whilst that sterner time which followed, full of fierce fighting, of victory and of defeat, was the Age of Iron. It was my good fortune to be associated with those who were responsible for this second period, and many a long day have I spent on the mountains in their company. In those days at Easter time there was usually a great gathering of the mountaineering clans in the inn at Wastdale Head. They came from all points of the compass, and swooped down on Wastdale, bringing with them every sort of mountain appliance. Into the inn they would rush, soon to emerge again clothed in wonderful suits of clothes, carrying cameras, ropes, ice-axes, and luncheons; and they used to remind me of an instructive toy machine presented to a friend of mine in the days of his early youth--'morality made easy' he afterwards called it, when he had arrived at man's estate and was able to grasp the true inwardness of the ingenious apparatus. Its object was to inculcate at an early age the virtue of moderation, and it represented a public house. You slowly turned a handle, making a procession of respectably dressed citizens, with eager, smiling faces, enter the front door, over which was written in large letters:-- 'They quietly enter the doorway within For an hour's indulgence in riot and sin.' Another turn of the handle, which should now be done rapidly and with shaking hand, and at once the scene changed. From out the back door dishevelled and staggering figures emerged, with no resemblance whatever to the former ones. Above was another couplet:-- 'Then rushing out wildly, their senses departed, On Ruin's dark pathway the victims are started!' Alas! those delightful toys of one's youth, where have they all gone? The toys of the present day are feeble, and lack that educational value which those of thirty years ago never failed to possess. How can we compare them? It is _The Bad Boys Book of Beasts_ to Dr. Watts's _Poems_. The first of the two couplets mentioned above, in the case of the mountaineer, however, needs emendation; perhaps 'quiet lunchin'' at the end of the second line would be more appropriate. But I have wandered from my subject. The inn at the head of Wastdale lies in the very centre of the hills, and from it two or three hours at the most will take the climber to his work. On the south are the gullies of the Screes; the great gully opposite Wastdale Hall will occupy an ordinary party at least three hours. The first three or four hundred feet are by no means easy, and are thoroughly typical of ghyll climbing. On the south-east of Wastdale is Scawfell, with its splendid precipices where there are three first-rate ghyll climbs, Moss ghyll, Steep ghyll, and Deep ghyll. At the top of the last is Scawfell pinnacle, a delightful short climb if taken from the top of Scawfell; but if ascended from the foot of the precipice, _via_ Steep ghyll, and then by the arête which lies between Steep ghyll and Deep ghyll, it will give several hours of really good rock work. Next to Scawfell are the Pikes and Great End. On both of these interesting scrambles can be found. To the eastward, almost above the inn, the slopes of Great Gable stretch up towards the Napes rocks, where can be found the Napes Needle and several rock ridges. Further away, on the north, lies the Pillar mountain, with its great buttress of rock jutting out into Ennerdale. Up the Pillar Rock there are at least half a dozen different routes, and none of them can be called perfectly easy. But these are by no means all the climbs that can be found near Wastdale Head. There are gullies on the Langdale Pikes and on Pavey Arc, and another on Dow Crag near Coniston. My first climb was on the Napes Needle. Since then I have been up it many times, but it always remains as interesting as ever. I must confess that the first time I tried it, it was too difficult for me, and I was very glad of a helping hand from the first man up, for we were climbing without a rope and had no nails in our boots, our proper mountaineering equipment having been delayed at Drigg station; and as we afterwards learned, we had shocked Dan Tyson of the inn by going to the hills in what he considered were our Sunday clothes. But the Pillar Rock is the most famous crag near Wastdale. It lies on the far side of the Pillar mountain, and is not a great distance below the summit. It consists of a mass of rock standing far out from the side of the mountain, its precipices overhanging the head of Ennerdale. The end nearest the Pillar mountain is cut off from the hill-side by a great gash, whilst the other end plunges down almost perpendicularly for about eight hundred feet. The great Ennerdale climb is up this Ennerdale face. At the bottom a broad grassy band, 'The Great Doupe,' runs across the foot of the precipice. It is from here that the climb must be begun, but every way up this face finally converges towards one spot, called the 'Split-Block.' Above is a vertical rock face, whilst below, four hundred feet straight down, is the grassy band. For nine years all attacks on the Ennerdale face of the Pillar Rock ended here. Only in 1891 was it conquered. Two of the party were lowered down into a savage-looking gully, from which they ascended to a spot some thirty feet higher than the Split-Block, and by lowering a rope were able to pull up the last man direct, who could not descend alone into the gully. This sounds as if the last man had a comparatively easy climb. But as the ascent is literally made through the air, unless an extra rope is sent down to help him with a noose at the end which can be used as a stirrup, he will arrive up above in a somewhat congested state. Moreover, he must insist that the two ropes be worked by reasonable people, otherwise he will be unfortunate enough to probably complete his ascent in an inverted position, and be apt to lose faith in the use of the Alpine rope. It has already been pointed out that above the Split-Block is a vertical precipice. Across this face about twenty-five feet above the Split-Block there is another way up, which does away with the necessity of descending into the Savage gully. It was first climbed by G. Solly. But it is a most dangerous climb, for the leader must traverse across this perpendicular face hanging on by his hands alone, and--here is where the danger comes in--should he be unable to finish the climb, and the worst piece which needs the expenditure of most energy is at the very end, the leader is quite unable to return: there he hangs till he can hold on no longer, then he drops! I myself have seen this happen. The subsequent escape, not only of the leader but of the rest of the party, was the most marvellous piece of luck I have ever seen on the mountains, and even now makes me shudder when I think of it. Collier has also varied this climb by getting up directly from the end of the ledge beyond the Split-Block; but, after all, the original manner employed by the first party in 1891 still remains the most satisfactory method for overcoming the difficulty at this spot on the Pillar climb. Above this, a gully leads to within two or three hundred feet of the top, which can be reached by an interesting rock climb of no great difficulty. This ascent of the Pillar Rock is certainly a remarkably fine one. It is full of variety, and nearly the whole of it is on bare rock; moreover, owing to the great steepness during the greater part of the climb, it produces an exhilarating feeling of being perched in mid-air most of the time. I should think nowadays it cannot be difficult to find, but when we first tried it, a few scratches here and there on the rock were our only guides. Of the ghyll climbs, the one on the Screes already mentioned is well worth trying. It was first climbed by Hastings, Robinson, and myself; and I could not have been in better company. Robinson is _the_ great authority on the hills of the Lake district; there is not a rock on a mountain-side that he does not know. In sunshine or mist, in daylight or at midnight, he will guide one safely over passes or down precipitous mountain-sides. Every tree and every stone is a landmark to him. It was on a perfect winter's morning, many years ago now, that we started for the great gully in the Screes. Not a breath of air stirred; hoar frost covered the ground; the trees were a mass of silver, glittering in the morning sun. If from the road by Wastdale Hall the rock face opposite be examined, it does not seem to be much broken, but as one approaches the gullies deepen, and in reality are great gashes penetrating far into the hillside. The bottom of the gully is reached by ascending a mass of loose stones which stretch almost down to the lake-side. In the gully there is no great difficulty at first, but after a short time it branches off into two, and it is the left-hand branch which has to be followed. The stream was frozen, forming a beautiful cascade of ice, and we were forced on to the buttress that divides the two gullies. Hastings was sent on to prospect, whilst I had to back him up as far as possible. With considerable trouble he managed to traverse back to the left into the main gully, using infinitesimal knobs of rock for foot and hand hold. We then followed, to find ourselves in a narrow cleft cut far into the side of the hill. Perpendicular walls rose on both sides for several hundred feet; above us stretched cascade after cascade of solid ice, always at a very steep angle and sometimes perpendicular. Up these we cut our way with our axes, sometimes being helped by making the steps close to the walls, and using any small inequalities on the rock face to steady us in our steps. At last we came to the final pitch. Far above us at the top, the stream coming over a hanging ledge on the right had frozen into masses of insecure icicles, some twenty or more feet long, and thus prevented us from getting up on that side. However, at the left-hand corner, at the top of the pitch, a rock was wedged, overhanging the gully, but leaving underneath a cave of considerable size. We managed to get as far up as the cave; there we placed Robinson, in a position of great importance and responsibility, for he had to hitch himself to a jammed boulder at the back, and hold both Hastings and me steady on the other end of the rope. I placed myself in the most secure position I could: my right foot occupied a capacious hole cut in the bottom of the icicles, whilst my left was far away on the other side of the gully, on a small but obliging shelf in the rock face. In this interesting attitude, like the Colossus of Rhodes, I spanned the gulf, and was anchored to the boulder as well as to Robinson. Next, Hastings, with considerable agility, climbed on to my shoulders; from that exalted position he could reach the edge of the overhanging stone, underneath which Robinson was shivering, and, after great exertions, was able finally to pull himself up on to the top. Then Robinson and I followed on the rope. No doubt when the gully is dry, with neither ice nor water in it, the climb would be much modified. Above this pitch the climbing is easy as the gully opens out, and the route to the top may be varied according to taste; some ways are difficult and some are easy. There is one more climb, the recollection of which always gives me pleasure; indeed it was one of the most delightful I ever had in this splendid land of rock scrambles. On the great precipice of Scawfell, Moss ghyll is the most easterly of the three gullies which look towards the Pikes. When we attacked it, this ghyll had not been climbed, although several parties had been up a considerable distance. The highest point attained was just underneath a huge overhanging block of rock, weighing hundreds of tons, which formed the roof of a great cave. Robinson, Hastings, and I were anxious to see whether it was not possible in some way to circumvent this objectionable block. We had already carefully prospected the upper part of the ghyll from above, finding that there was no difficulty once this obstacle was passed. We therefore next attacked the ghyll from the bottom, hoping that we should be able to discover a way where others had failed. Starting from below we chose the easiest route up the rock face on the right hand of the ghyll. Here the climbing chiefly consisted in getting from one ledge to another, up slabs of rock. We soon, however, got into the gully itself, where we found a perpendicular wall, up which we had to climb, before reaching a ledge, which the first party of exploration had called the 'Tennis Court' on account of its large size when compared with those lower down. If it were to grow vigorously, perhaps in its manhood it might become just large enough to run about on, but when we first made its acquaintance it must have been in its early childhood. From here we traversed back into the ghyll and got underneath the great overhanging block. We found that below the great slab which formed the roof another smaller one spanned the ghyll, forming the top of a great door to the cave behind. Under this we passed, and clambered up on to the top of it. Over our heads the great rock roof stretched some distance over the ghyll. Our only chance was to traverse straight out to the right, over the side of the ghyll, till one was no longer overshadowed by the roof above, and then, if possible, climb up the face of rock, and traverse back again above the obstacle into the ghyll once more. This was easier to plan than to carry out; absolutely no handhold could be found, but only one little projecting ledge jutting out about a quarter of an inch and about a couple of inches long to stand on; moreover, a lip of rock overhung this little ledge, making it impossible to grip it satisfactorily with one's foot. Beyond this there were six or eight feet of the nearly perpendicular rock wall to traverse. I was asked to try it. So, being highly pleased at being intrusted with such delicate operations, I with great deliberation stretched out my foot and tried to grip the little edge with the side nails of my boot. Just as I was going to put my whole weight on to this right foot, the nails, unable to hold on such a minute surface, gave way, and if Hastings had not instantly with a mighty pull jerked me back, I should have been swinging on the rope in mid-air. But we were determined not to be beaten. Hastings's ice-axe was next brought into requisition, and what followed I have no doubt will be severely criticised by more orthodox mountaineers than myself: as it was my suggestion I must take the blame. _I hacked a step in the rock!_[O] It was very hard work, but that upper lip to the step had to go, and Hastings's ice-axe, being an extraordinary one, performed its work admirably, and without damage to anything else than the rock. I then was able to get a much firmer foothold, and getting across this 'bad step,' clambered up the rock till I reached a spot where a capital hitch could be got over a jutting pin of rock, and the rest of the party followed. We then climbed out of the ghyll on the left up some slabs of rock. A few days later, Moss ghyll was again climbed by a party led by J. Collier. They did not follow our track to the left after the overhanging rock had been passed, but climbed straight up, using a crack which looks almost impossible from below, thus adding an extra piece of splendid climbing to this expedition. That Collier did not follow our route was, I believe, entirely due to Robinson, who, being so excessively delighted with having at last conquered Moss ghyll, wrote a long account of it in the climbing book at the inn, and being in this particular instance far more capable of successfully climbing Moss ghyll than describing how it was done, produced a tale where the points of the compass got, so to speak, 'snarked.' But to return to our climb: just as it was getting dark we emerged on to the top of Scawfell. The sun-god had plunged once more into the baths of ocean, leaving behind him the golden splendour of a perfect evening. In the far distance lay the sea, with banks of sullen mist brooding over it; nearer, like a purple curtain, stretched the low hills by the coast; whilst far away in the south, towering into the sunset glow, out of a level surface of sea mists rose the peaks of Snowdon and the two Carnedds in Wales. Towards the east, range after range of mountain crests encompassed the horizon as far as the eye could see, from the Yorkshire moors, with their strong, massive outline crowned by Ingleboro and Whernside, to Skiddaw and the Scotch hills beyond the sands of the Solway. Delicate pearl-grey shadows creep in amongst the wealth of interlacing mountain forms in the clear air, deepening towards the far east into the darkness of approaching night. No sound breaks the stillness, all around are piled the tumbled fragments of the hills, hoary with the memories of forgotten years. The present fades away, and is lost in the vast ocean of time; a lifetime seems a mere shadow in the presence of these changeless hills. Slowly this inscrutable pageant passes, but blacker grow the evening shadows; naught remains but the mists of the coming night, and darkness soon will fall upon this lonely mountain-land. 'A land of old, upheaven from the abyss By fire, to sink into the abyss again; Where fragments of forgotten peoples dwelt, And the long mountains ended in a coast Of ever-shifting sand, and far away The phantom circle of a moaning sea.' FOOTNOTES: [O] During climbing in ice and snow one is allowed, in fact, one is expected, to cut steps. But it is held to be entirely contrary to the laws which govern the great sport of mountaineering to make similar holes in rock. This is remarkable, though nevertheless true. A REVERIE '... Restless thoughts, that, like a deadly swarm Of hornets arm'd, no sooner found alone, But rush upon me thronging, and present Times past.' MILTON. On winter evenings, when out of doors the fogs and dirt of London reign supreme, it is the wisest course to sit at home in one's arm-chair, warmed by the blaze of a comfortable fire, and with some favourite book for a companion, to watch the smoke curl upwards from one's pipe. But after a time the book falls on to one's knees, and all sorts and conditions of pictures float lazily through the tobacco mists. I have been told that effects are due to causes. Perhaps these undisciplined wanderings of my brain may be only the inevitable result of a good dinner; perhaps the quiet content that I feel may be caused only by a spirit of contradiction--a knowledge that the arm-chair and the desultory visions of my brain should be ruthlessly put aside, to give place to exact, well-regulated thoughts concentrated on necessary labour. Be it what it may, I will not work to-night. A nebulous peace of mind has claimed and absorbed me which it would be impious to dispel. I shall let my memory lift the curtain behind which lies the past. The thousand and one small duties of the present, mostly absurd trivialities, the insignificance of which is only equalled by their persistence, can be neglected for once, and shall be as dust in the balance, without weight to disturb the equipoise of my mind. Letters from people I do not know, requesting information on subjects that do not concern me--letters which, as far as I can see, merely stamp the writers as belonging to that class of human animal incapable of thinking for itself--these shall remain unanswered. Why should such shallow creatures be allowed to worry the more robust portion of the universe by their energetic yet irritating display of letter-writing? why have I to spend much ink and thought in answering them? Truly this is a weary world! Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards. Worries and bothers are for ever at one's elbow. But here I am thus early inveighing against the petty annoyances of the present instead of enjoying those reminiscences of former years that, viewed through the mists of time, have their pleasures enhanced and their pains discounted; when I can allow my memory a free field from which it may pick the fairest flowers that have blossomed in those bygone years. Ah! a quotation comes wandering by: when it is at home it may be found in an 'Ode to the Terrestrial Globe,' by an unhappy wretch:-- 'It's true my prospects all look blue-- But don't let that unsettle you! Never you mind. Roll on!' (_It rolls on._) And as it rolls on down the distances of my mind, it leaves me, being in a very contrary frame of mind, somewhat comforted. Moreover, it opens up new channels for thought, and those exquisite lines on golf that occur somewhere in _Paradise Lost_ are of course at once suggested, but I am too lazy to find the context:-- 'So eagerly with horrid voice the Fiend Cries "Fore!" as he o'er the far bunker drives The errant ball; it with the setting sun Dropp'd from the zenith like a falling star, Alas! untruly urged, it lies in Hell.' Then I muse over all the golf-courses that I have played on or seen, from St. Andrews to an improvised one above Astor amongst the stately pines on the Himalayan mountains, when the snow peaks and the glaciers, glistening in the marvellous sunshine, play hide-and-seek with the white fleecy clouds that drift over their summits. Those wonderful mountains! what magnificent outlines, what grandeur, what mystery, what!... Stop! can I be growing sentimental? It must have been the dinner that has produced this particular physiological sensation. However, the sensation is passing, and my thoughts have flown back naturally to the subject of dinners. Yes, many dinners--what a subject!--glorious, unapproachable, exhaustless dinners! I could write pages, volumes, in praise of dinners; but not for the vulgar, not for the uninitiated--that surely were sacrilege. Dinners that with subtle and insinuating address came and went, leaving behind them fascinating and precious memories, even though 'good digestion did not wait on appetite.' Dinners, too, eaten under the stars. Yes, now I think of it, that _was_ a dinner! when four of us ate a whole sheep, after two weary days and nights spent starving on the icy slopes of Nanga Parbat. Mountaineering, truly thou art a marvellous and goodly provoker of hunger! Those mortals who may be in search of sensations--big, boisterous, blustering sensations not to be denied--should sacrifice often on thy altars, O Goddess of the Hills! In the mountains, however, these sensations, these inspired ecstasies of mind and body, may be pushed sometimes rather far; then the recoil comes, and with it contrast, which however is often agreeable. But these memories of unpleasant Alpine half-hours grow faint as one sits in a satisfying arm-chair--they are easily discounted in a process of mental dissipation, by which one cheats oneself; and finally, it is easy to believe that there is no sport like mountaineering. Of course this conclusion is fallacious--conclusions sometimes are. Again my thoughts are interrupted. Outside in the cold, the rain, and the darkness some poor wretch is making night hideous by attempting to sing-- 'There is a 'appy land, for for awye.' Most true! most philosophical! The Islands of the Blest usually are some distance away. We have been told by the poet that neither are they to be attained by omnibuses, nor to be approached by 'A ram-you-damn-you liner with a brace of bucking screws.' Therefore why disturb the darkness, O most miserable one, by dismal reiteration of a well-known fact? But still the song moans out its Cockney dialect, false notes, and falser sentiment; and the singer, drenched to the skin, possibly starving, with probably only one desire, and that for drink, goes his way. I hear the melancholy music die into the distance. Of a truth his sensations cannot be pleasant; but with these few coppers changed into the equivalent of alcohol perhaps he also may 'Life's leaden metal into gold transmute,' and cheat himself into the belief that life is worth living. That last sentence, now I come to read it over again, seems perhaps a trifle cynical; _seems_, certainly, but are we not told that things often 'are not what they seem'? I have heard the late poet laureate accused (and by a Scotchwoman, too!) of writing slang. 'Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly towards the west.' My thoughts, too, are 'sloping' in a westerly direction. I am on a personally-conducted tour--my brain is in command, and I am the spectator. If only I can forget that those letters have to be answered, and if no other miserable wretch comes to sing touching refrains outside in the rain, my brain and I shall thoroughly enjoy each other's company; whilst the firelight sheds its dim radiance over glimpses of the metamorphised past and the indeterminable future, till all is so blended together that I cannot tell whether these things have been or are to be. I see long stretches of Rannoch moor as Stevenson saw it, 'where the mists rise and die away, and showed us that country lying as waste as the sea; only the moorfowl and the peewees crying upon it, and far over to the east a herd of deer moving like dots. Much of it is red with heather; much of the rest broken up with bogs and hags and peaty pools; some had been burnt black in a heath fire; and in another place there are quite a forest of dead firs, standing like skeletons.' Northward over the moor ponderous Ben Alder lifts his bleak and barren top in massive strength above lonely Loch Ericht, whilst beyond the loch, Schehallion's slender summit, deep blue in the evening sky, tells of that fierce day when the body of the dead Graham lay on the hillside and the sun went down on a lost cause. Southward are the peaks of the Black Mount and the peaceful hills that feed the upper waters of Glen Lyon; then Buchaille Etive and all those wild, rocky mountains further west, dominating wild Glencoe, stir the memory with the story of how Campbell of Glen Lyon betrayed and murdered the whole of the M'Ians with treachery as black as the cliffs of the Aonach Dubh and as cruel as the winter winds that sweep mercilessly across the corries and pinnacles of Bidean nam Bian, the peak of the storms. Or in imagination I follow Alan Breck with Davie Balfour as they flee by the sea-loch that separates Appin from Mamore up and across to the great moor, toiling and resting, but ever onward, till amongst the labyrinth of glens in the heart of the forest of Ben Alder they found Cluny Macpherson. Yes, Rannoch moor is wild and desolate; and could the grey blocks of stone or the bare slabs of granite that lie amongst the brown heather speak, surely there would be many more tales of bygone adventures to listen to and wonder over. From Rannoch my mind wanders across the stretches of blue water, past stormy Ardnamurchan to the island of Mull. I am on the summit of Ben More; below lies a ridge smothered in snow and ice. I am trying all I can with words of sweet persuasion to entice my companion, Colin Phillip, down what is obviously the shortest route to the next peak, A Chioch. But he says it is impossible, he will not trust himself on that slope of snow and ice. Now my thoughts fly to the shores of Loch Earn. I am listening to one, a geologist, who expounds to me the marvels of the prehistoric glacier; he also, with words of sweet persuasion, is trying to make me believe that Loch Morar was excavated by a glacier. Those wonderful geological truths, how simple, how all-sufficient they are to explain to the uninitiated the why and wherefore of the ancient mountains; but put not your trust in them; they suffer by the process of evolution, and are changed. Without doubt, in those days Phillip believed that I was totally ignorant of mountaineering; whilst now, perhaps, that geologist thinks that I am equally ignorant of the truth. Whether it is the truth about Loch Morar that I mean, or about that geologist's statement, or about my own, I really don't know. In imagination I am hurried on; I see myself, footsore and weary, wandering through Ardgour and Moidart, or across from Invercannich through Affric's wild glens down to Shiel House, by the western sea; now I am glissading down Beinn Alligin, or hacking my way through a cornice, apparently hundreds of feet high, on Aonach Mor, my companion Travers meanwhile slowly freezing on the brink of an _absolutely_ perpendicular ice slope, the daylight waning, and our retreat cut off. Then comes a glimpse of the platform at Kingshouse station. I am addressing winged words to Colin Phillip, and he is engaged in a contentious refutation of my argument. The subject is not at all interesting--only the comparative usefulness of painting and photography as a means for reproducing mountain form; but the result is most disgraceful, for presently we are seen sitting at different ends of the platform waiting for the train, and thinking--well, it doesn't matter what we thought. Was it yesterday, or when, that all these things happened? Still it cannot be so very long ago that Phillip climbed Sgurr Alasdair, the finest peak of the Coolin in Skye. Would that on that occasion, just below the summit, I had possessed a camera, for then could I have shown Phillip that photography at least was capable of very faithfully reproducing his manly and superior form, as he was seen approaching the cairn, even though it might be useless in giving us the true proportions of inferior mountains. Neither do I think that I should be overstepping the bounds of prudence should I assert that Colin Phillip has a marked dislike for stone walls. I have hopes, however, that some day a happy combination of the despised camera--the stone wall and Phillip--may yield interesting results. Little did Phillip think, that evening at Kingshouse, that a time would come when the maligned camera would turn--turn its eye on Phillip and on that stone wall--and wink with malicious pleasure. But in spite of winged words, weary feet, and endless eggs and bacon, these were fine times--from Sutherland to the Galloway Highlands, from Mull to the mountains on Deeside, Colin Phillip and I have wandered in fair weather and in foul. We have waxed enthusiastic over the Cairngorm mountains. We have watched the last light of day fade far away over the Atlantic behind the islands of the west; and although we may have disagreed in many things, yet we have always acknowledged that for wild beauty, for colour, for atmospheric effects and lonely grandeur, we know of no country that is equal to the Highlands of Scotland. But a younger century has arrived, and 'The old order changeth, yielding place to new.' Somewhere have I seen some remarks about the Coolin, where no mention is made of the mountains as being capable of stirring the imagination or gratifying the mind; no, the subject was 'the ridiculously easy nature of the climbing in Skye,' 'the gabbro of the Coolin being too good,' and so on, the New Mountaineer merely looking upon these peaks and ribs of splintered rock as a useful spot where gymnastic feats might be performed, and even compares the Coolin unfavourably with the decomposing granite slabs at the head of Glen Sannox. Truly the glory of the mountains is departing. The progressive, democratical[P] finger of the 'New Mountaineer' is laid with equal irreverence and mockery on Sgurr nan Gillean and Cir Mhor, and this spirit of irresponsible criticism 'fulfils itself in many ways.' It is not the first time that the Coolin have been 'slandered.' Have they not been called 'inferior mountains'? (_Modern Painters_). Now the climbers 'run' over the Pinnacle Ridge of Sgurr nan Gillean, and no doubt the next generation (if they have wise fathers) will be induced to take their maternal grandmothers up the inaccessible summit of Sgurr Dearg. One by one the recollections of all our most cherished climbs will be punctured, flat and unprofitable as a collapsed bicycle tire; they will rotate over the rough roads of bygone memories, whilst that progressive democratical finger will guide the new nickel-plated, pneumatic-cushioned, electrically-driven modern mountaineer on his fascinating career. But to return. I am still sitting in my comfortable arm-chair, and looking at my own fingers to see whether they possess a progressive democratical appearance. Before me passes the vision of a mountain, a beautiful, many-headed mountain, hidden away from democratical enemies of mountaineering, and without the line of vulgarity. Carefully enclosed on its western face lies a corrie named Coire Mhic Fhearchair. I see a party wandering up its glacier-worn entrance. At its head the mist lies low down, but not low enough to hide the precipices that encircle the lochan in its centre. On the right, snow-filled gullies sweep with graceful curves from a dome-shaped peak. But it is the rock escarpment at the back of the corrie that fascinates their gaze. As the mists begin to clear one by one, they suggest climbs on its face, for there are 1250 feet of bare rock in front of them, broken up into three distinct buttresses with two splendid gullies dividing them. At last they choose the right-hand gully, and, having roped themselves, proceed to cut steps up the steep snow that has drifted into it and obliterated any perpendicular pitches there may be. I am sorry that there are no perpendicular pitches--it is most unfortunate; for I should like to see that party performing all these daring feats so well known to, and beloved by, the professional rock climber, 'How things began to look rather blue.' 'How for a minute or two one of the party remained spread-eagled on the face of a cliff almost despairing of getting up, the desired crack being a good two feet out of reach, till, with a supreme effort, he was propelled from below by a sudden and powerful jerk, his outstretched fingers seize the desired crack.' Nor can I describe how 'the heavy man of the party, his finger tips playing upon the face of the cliff with the delicacy of touch of a professional pianist, his every movement suggestive of the bounding lightness of the airy thistle-down,' followed. No, I am sorry I have no such wildly exciting adventures to relate, nor such poetical fancies wherewith to eke out a plain story. I see that party merely climbing up that gully, in a most uninteresting yet simple manner, by cutting steps. They come to where it ends against a perpendicular and overhanging cliff at least a couple of hundred feet high. Only 200 feet, but higher they cannot go, for none of the party are sufficiently muscular to propel the leader with a jerk upwards that paltry 200 feet. Therefore they climb out to their left, along a narrow and somewhat broken ledge, on to the middle buttress, where a place is found large enough for them all to sit down. They gaze upwards at the last 300 feet that separate them from the summit, but it is steep, very steep, 'A.P.'[Q] Also, it is late in the afternoon; so they comfort themselves by building a cairn, and eating all these delicious things that are so good on a mountain-side--meat sandwiches which have remained from lunch, and taste so full of mustard and so delightfully dry; old, old prunes encrusted with all kinds of additional nutriment from the bottom of some one's pocket; a much-worn stick of chocolate, or perhaps an acidulated drop--on such fare does the hardy mountaineer feed. I see them once more in the gully, but they descend more rapidly than they climbed up it, for the more daring of the party glissade down the lower part, and so home. On the morrow, however, I see three of the party again setting forth for that precipice. This time, instead of approaching it from the north-west by the Allt Toll a'Ghiubhais, they hire a machine, and drive as far as the foot of Sgurr Bàn on the southern side; then mounting to the peak just to the west of Sgurr Bàn by a well-made deer path, they soon arrive at the summit of the middle buttress, overlooking Coire Mhic Fhearchair. They climb out to the very end of the nose and look down, straight below, and only 300 feet away is the little cairn built on the preceding afternoon, but, as I have remarked before, that 300 feet is very steep. A photograph taken from the most southerly of the three buttresses, so as to get the middle buttress in profile, shows the angle of the last 200 feet to be about 85 degrees, not quite but very nearly 'A.P.' However, they think that they may as well see how far they can descend. The rocks on the left-hand (southern) side of the buttress are obligingly broken up, so that by a series of small climbs the party are enabled to get from one small platform to the next, always edging towards the outside of the buttress. At last they all congregate together. A perpendicular slab, which has partly come away from the front of the crags, bars their way to the right, and, below, a quite perpendicular drop of about 200 feet on to the ledge quietly but firmly impresses on them the fact that that way is not for them. But always in mountaineering, just as things become quite hopeless and 'blue,' then it is the duty of the person who describes the adventure to appeal to the feelings of the public (who, presumably, are unacquainted with that particular climb). It is his duty to picture these unfortunate individuals, fearful that their retreat is cut off, yet unable to proceed; how, having dangled on the ends of ropes, swinging backwards and forwards in the breeze, they return to the ledge baffled; or having climbed on each other's shoulders, they find 'the desired crack two good feet out of reach,' and there is not always one in the party powerful enough to 'propel' the leader 'from below by a sudden and powerful jerk, so that he can with outstretched fingers clutch that desired crack.' But still, with a little imagination, we can see these things. A good imagination is necessary, I may say very necessary, to the enthusiastic climber; much pleasure is otherwise lost. The party I see, evidently has none of this precious imagination. They are obviously wasting their opportunities most shamefully on that rock face. I see one of them climb out on to the face just under the great loose slab, and disappear round the corner; then the rest follow, and find themselves on the topmost of a series of ledges, and about 200 feet above the small cairn below. I will not describe that traverse, but will merely mention that the party seem quite pleased with it. Then they begin the descent. First they get down a narrow slit between a slab and the buttress, and with a drop of about 10 feet get into the next ledge. Next they have to climb down another slab, bulging over into space, or a perpendicular gully gives them an interesting piece of climbing. About 120 feet from the bottom they build a small cairn, and then, without much further difficulty, they finally find themselves where they had ended their climb on the afternoon of the day before. They do not, however, descend to the bottom of the gully, but about half-way down, traversing out to the left, they make for the ridge connecting Sail Mhòr with the rest of the mountain. It is now evening, and I ought, if orthodox, here 'to burst out in sentences which swell to paragraphs, and in paragraphs which spread over pages; to plunge into ecstasies about infinite abysses and overpowering splendours, to compare mountains to archangels, lying down in eternal winding-sheets of snow, and to convert them into allegories about man's highest destinies and aspirations. This is good when it is well done. Yet most humble writers will feel that if they try to imitate Mr. Ruskin's eloquence, they will pay the penalty of becoming ridiculous. It is not every one who can with impunity compare Alps to archangels.'[R] Yet there is always something about sunsets which is horribly fascinating--from a literary point of view; it is so easy to become suddenly enthusiastic and describe how 'The sun-god once more plunges into the baths of ocean.' The sea too is always useful at such moments. 'Banks of sullen mist, brooding like a purple curtain,' etc., sounds well; and one must not forget 'the shadows of approaching night,'--they form a fitting background for the gloomy and introspective spirit which ought to seize upon one at this particular psychological moment. 'The tumbled fragments of the hills, hoary with memories of forgotten years,' come next, with a vague suggestion of solitude, which should be further emphasised by allusions to 'the present fading away, and being lost in the vast ocean of time, a lifetime being merely a shadow in the presence of these changeless hills.' Then, to end up, mass the whole together, and call it an 'inscrutable pageant'; pile on the shadows, which must grow blacker and blacker, till 'naught remains but the mists of the coming night and darkness'; and if you have an appropriate quotation, put it in! FOOTNOTES: [P] 'They are still within the line of vulgarity, and are _democratical_ enemies of truth,'--Browne's _Vulg. Errours_. [Q] _Absolutely_ perpendicular. [R] _The Playground of Europe._--Leslie Stephen. THE OROMANIACAL QUEST _To all ingeniously elaborate students in the most divine mysteries of the oromaniacal quest: an account in which is set forth the eminent secrets of the adepts; whereunto is added a perfect and full discoverie of the way to attaine to the Philosopher's heavenly chaos._ 'Whose noble practise doth them teach To vaile their secrets wyth mystie speach.' _The Hunting of the Greene Lyon._ After that the three most respectable Travellers and Searchers after vast protuberances of the earth, in the land of the Caledones, had with haste, joyousness, and precision arrived at those parts, where with observation, snow-covered mountains together with rocks and ice in abundance, and also many other things may be perceived which commend themselves to true worshippers of that most mystagorical and delectable pursuit--the oromaniacal Quest into the secret and hidden Mysteries of sublime Mountains--they at once determined to so haste, walk, run, climb, and otherwise betake themselves to the uppermost parts of the hills, that by continual patience a new entrance towards the topmost pinnacle should be discovered, which should in all respects yield that quintessential pleasure they believed could be extracted from such pursuit of the enigmatical Process. There be, however, many who deny that the Quintessence of the true enjoyment can so be attained. These indeed do maintain that it resides in that subtill art, the striking of a ball violently with a stick, but this also is a mystery; therefore I will not launch my little skiff further into the wide ocean of the dispute, neither will I argue with such fellows, for do they not offend philosophically, and therefore should be admonished to the end that they meddle not with the Quest of the true Brethren? Thou askest, Why? I say thou hast not tasted of these things! Hast thou not tarried with those that are below, or, ascending, hast thou not proceeded upwards by help of mules, jackasses, and other auxiliaries, or even in these swift, luxurious and delectable vehicles drawn by the demon of water ten times heated in the furnace? I bid thee search that treasure-house of clouds, fountains, fogs, and steep places on thine own ten toes, and peradventure thou shalt find that which is above resembleth not that which is beneath, neither are the high places of the earth like unto the groves and hedgerows, or the places where people do most congregate, in towns, villages, courts, gardens, to the end that they may hold discourse, spagyrising, philosophising, lanternising, whereby is the engendering of fools a most mystical matter furthered--also the concocting of many poculations; truly these fellows are vulgar tosspots, they attaine not the first Matter, nor the whole operation of the Work; neither do they approach to the enchanted Treasure-House sought for by that worthy Quintessencer and most respectable Traveller, Master Beroalde of fragrant and delectable memory.[S] Also are these fellows most injurious to well-deserving Philosophers, for they comprehend not the writings, and through 'misunderstanding of the possibilities of Nature do commit foul mistakes in their operations, and therefore reap a ridiculous harvest.' Our Record is writ neither for simple, vulgar, and pitiful sophisters, nor for such owls, bats, and night-birds, who, blinded by the full light of the Quest lye hidden in gloomy nooks, crannies, and holes below. But return we to our purpose. When our three travellers had arrived at that place in the northland, hight Castrum Guillelmi, they tarried there awhile seeking diligently if perchance even in that place the great Mysterie, the quintessential Pleasure of devout Philosophers, could by searching be attained. 'Good,' said they; 'Now are we near the Fulfilment, the Entrance into Secret Places, the Consummation, the Marriage of the Impossible with the Real, the Knowledge of this Mastery.' So it came to pass that on the day following, early and with great joyousness, did they start forth by the straight road. Nor did they issue forth unprepared, for they bore with them the proper, peculiar, fit, exact, and lawful insignia of the brotherhood, a mystic thread, coiled even as the sable serpent, likewise staves curiously shapen did they take in their hands, for 'peradventure,' said they, 'the way may be steep and full of toil, the dangers many; behold go we not forth in a savage land, where liveth the white dragon and eke basilisks, spoken of by the ingenious J. J. Scheuchzerus, doctor of medicine, what time he did wander in the far country of the Helvetii? Good, now come we to it! for saith not Aristotle in his _Physicks_, "_Ab actionibus procedit speculatio_," "Now are all things propitious, let us seek the Delphinian oracle"; Phoebus like unto the fiery Dragon shines bravely, conquering the hydropical vapours and transforming them into subtill aerial sublimations; soon shall we come to the high places where abideth the great water the Lochan Meal an't Suidhe. It shall we leave on the dexter hand, for the path lieth not there but onwards, straight without twist or turn along the valley at the feet of the red Mountains, whose hue is multiplied, transmuted, and purified even unto seven times seven, a wonder to the sight, and tincted by the ruddy colour of Sol the golden, what time he goeth down at eventide, slavering the deep waters of the western sea so that they be all of a gore bloud.' But let not these things turn us from the true Quest, the hidden Mysteries, which in the opinion of the vulgar rude are by many deemed nought but delusions. For over against and opposite across the valley, abideth the Immensity of greatness, the majestic Silence, the prodigious Dampness, the Depth, in shape like a great Dome, whereof the base is in the Flouds and the Waters, whence issueth forth delectable springs welling up for ever, continually ascending yet ever flowing downwards; here perchance shall we find the Mysterie of the heavenly Chaos, and the great Abyss, the way to attaine to Happiness, even the quintessential mystagorical Delight and oromaniacal Quest, so highly extolled yet so deeply concealed by the true Philosophers. Thus did they fare onward toward the midst of the valley placed between the red Hill and the great Mountain. Then behold before them rose hugeous rocks and bulky stones standing on end facing to the north where the ice and snow tarry from one winter even unto the following; for in those places the sun shines not, neither are found the comfortable, soft, juicy, and foeculent breezes of the South; there the brood of the black Crow and the white smoak or vapour, and comprehensive congelations of the Mistus Scotorum are produced. So were the Brethren sore amazed, but as yet could not see even the first matter of the Work. 'See,' said one, 'the way leadeth upward where the Spirit arising like unto a volatisation, a separation or sublimation or wind, has much bewhited the mighty petrolific ridge full of points towers and pinnacles. There the pursuit may be pursued, there the volatisation which is an ascension may be compleatly demonstrated, and the operation of the great Work may be begun. First must we fashion in the snow and ice great stairs of steps, by aid of which, through prolongation, extension, reduplication, and multiplication shall we be brought on to the Ridge even at the beginning.' So did they enter upon the Work in this lowest period of obscurity, multiplying the steps in a certain mystic manner which had been revealed to them; and it came to pass that they attained at last on to the Ridge, whereon might be perceived far above, towers, pinnacles, points, and other pleasant places, suitable and useful for the furtherance of the Quest. First did they traverse a narrow edge of snow fashioned by the wind. Then said one, 'Follow me, but look not either to the right or to the left, for there lyeth the Abyss.' So they followed him, with the mystic thread fastened to their girdles. They saw how that, far above, the heavens were separated from the white snow, which was curled and twisted, also falling, overhanging, and extended, so that they could perceive no way whereby they might pass through. But above and beyond lay the summit of the great Mountain, where clouds are concocted in the natural furnace; there also may be seen in the proper season, 'The whole operation of the Sons of Wisdom, the great Procession and the Generation of Storms, the Marriage of the Stars and the Seven Circulations of the Elements.' So did they fare onwards; and by inspection were they aware how others had travelled on the same way, for on the stones and rocks were certain petrographical scratchings and curious markings deeply graven and very evident. But presently came they to a great Rock, a majestic Tower. Here were they perforce compelled to depart to the right hand, placing themselves in steep and perilous positions on slopes of ice, which downwards seemed to end in empty air, even in the great void. Then were the Three exceeding joyful, for is it not written in the secret books of the Brethren, Many operations must they perform amidst the great mountains and the snowy ice, especially and creditably, ere they be so transmuted, mystagorified and metagrabolised, that they may be numbered with the True, the Pious, the Elect, even amongst those who are considered worthy of the most mystical and allegorical symbol, A.C., by many variously interpreted. For some hold that it signifies, 'Adepti Cragorum,' whilst others 'Angelorum Confederatio,' for these latter maintain that the Quest can only be rightly pursued, or satisfactorily continued, by the aid of wings; but in this matter they are deceived, and argue foolishly after the wisdom of the flesh. Still all things have an end at last--good Wine, Pinnacles, Spires, cabalistic Emblems, and oromaniacal Wanderings, even the green sauce of the Philosophers and the pythagoric Mustard of the Great Master himself, spoken of by Alcofribas Nasier in his merrie work. So did the Three find the perilous passage across the headlong steep of that ruinous place finish. Then did they pass onward to the Labyrinth, the rocky chaos, and greatly did they marvel at the exceeding steepness thereof; so that only by great perseverance, turning now to the left and now to the right, were they able to break themselves free from the bonds and entanglements, and climb sagaciously upwards to the summit of the great Tower. Whereon did they find a heaped up accumulation of stones curiously erected, a cabalistic Pyramid, set there doubtless by a former seeker in the Work, to the end that true searchers might not despair, but continue the matter of the Work with fresh hope and industry. But when they had gazed for a short space, they perceived how that the Consummation, the great Fulfilment, was nigh at hand. Behind and far below, imprinted in the snow, were the steps by which they had mounted upwards, winding now this way, now that, looking like scarce seen veins in whitest marble. But before them lay the narrow Way, the Ridge, the Cleft, and the White Slope, leading even unto the utmost Height, the sovereign Summit of the mightie Mountain. Thither therefore did their footsteps trend. First did they pass along the narrow Way, treading with exceeding care and exactness, for there was but foothold for one alone; the path being no broader than a man's hand. Next did they descend into the Cleft, which thing is also emblematical and symbolical of the precious secret of all Philosophies, for without this key can no one unlock the Hermetic Garden, the Arcanum of the Alchemists, spoken of by Paracelsus in his _Archidoxis_. Now before them stretched the white Slope, which lay beneath the topmost summit, and steeper became the path, going upwards with a great steepness; now whilst the three Travellers did toil and seek, endeavouring to meet the perils of the way, yet almost despairing, lo! from out the clouds a thread descended and a voice was heard afar off: 'Fear not, now have ye attained to the Consummation, enter into the mystagorical, quintessential, and delectable Pleasure-House of devout Oromaniacs!' Thus therefore do the true Philosophers distinguish that which is superior from that which is inferior, for it is a thing deeply concealed by the envious, let therefore the same be thy subject to work upon, thy first Basis, for the white must first come out of the red, and black following with multiplicative virtue rise above according to the nature of all things. Hear then the meaning of the four Degrees. Thy first Degree maketh to sweat but gently. In the second much travail followeth, whereby thy sweat increaseth, whilst _tertius excedit et cum tolerantia laedit_, for our way ascendeth speedilie where the black rocks fall and rise continually. Congelation and Circulation cometh next, when in the fourth Degree the blackness wears away, which, believe me, is a gallant sight. 'Then shalt thou see thy Matter appear, shining, sparkling, and white even like to a most glorious heaven-born Mercury the subject of wonders. Then if thou art fortunate shall the fumes cease and our congelation will glitter incomparably and wonderfully, and thickening more and more it will sprout like the tender frost in a most amiable lustre. Now thou needest no further instruction, only this let me tell you, understand this well, and you will not be amazed any longer with the distinction of our Operations. For all is but a successive action and passion of him who seeks for the Work. Which carrying him up and down like a wheel, returns thither whence it proceeded, and then beginneth again and turns so long till it finds its rest. So he thus attains a _plusquam_ perfection through the marvellous co-operation of Art and Nature.'[T] 'Who knoweth not this in knowledge is blind, He may forth wander as mist in the wind, Wotting never with profit where to light, Because he understands not our words aright.' Therefore, with what joy, think you, did the Three progress onward after the long and troublous ascent? After _scrambling_, _slipping, gathering,_ _pulling, talking,_ _pushing, stepping,_ _lifting, grumbling,_ _gasping, anathematising,_ _looking, scraping,_ _hoping, hacking,_ _despairing, bumping,_ _climbing, jogging,_ _holding on, overturning,_ _falling off, hunting,_ _trying, straddling,_ _puffing, and at last_ _loosing, attaining,_ for know ye that by these methods alone are the most divine Mysteries of the Quest reached. So at last they came even unto the very topmost Point, and were aware how that Priests from the heavenly Temple, which is placed on the top of that Mountain, had come forth to guide them, without further difficulty, across a level plain of white snow to the gates of the Temple itself. But the perils of the way were not ended. At the threshold were there many steps leading down and underground to the Temple's innermost recesses, through a domed vault or doorway built of the plastered snow. Now were these steps both slippery and very treacherous, having been fashioned in a truly sopho-spagyric manner, likewise did they seem reduplicated and multiplied even by the Pythagorical Tetrad. Moreover, above the portal were there magical characters engraven, even after the same fashion as those seen by the wise Pantagruel what time he sought the Oracle of the Bottle in the land of Lanterns. But beyond the portal a very thick mistie and cimmerian darkness, an eclipsation, apprehended them, and the Three did stumble now this way and now that, so did they greatly fear even at this very end of their Quest, that beasts and creeping things of monstrous shape awaited them, dangers far worse than those on the steep places of the Mountain. 'Art thou here?' said one. 'Prithee guide my steps!' quoth another. 'Alas, we are undone!' cried a third. 'Zoons, why are ye afraid?' answered a voice; 'when ye have passed the three-square Corner and the Darkness ye are safe in the Sanctum Sanctorum even of the Elect, in the Philosopher's heavenly Chaos, where may ye understand all Mysteries. But first answer ye me, whence come ye?' 'From without and below.' 'And how?' 'By the seven-fold stairs nigh unto the great Abyss where liveth the brood of the black Crow, and the engendering of the Mistus Scotorum proceedeth perpetually.' 'Good, but how did ye proceed?' 'Thence came we by the rocky Labyrinth, and by the perilous Passage to the great Tower, and the mystic Pyramid, which is set on the further side of the narrow Way and the Cleft, emblematic of hidden things; thence by the white Slope to the topmost Summit. So have we sought the divine mysteries of this great Quest with much toil, so may we attaine to the Philosopher's heavenly Chaos.' Then said the voice, 'Enter into the abode of Knowledge, through the open Entrance to the shut Palace of the King,[U] into the outer chamber of the most sophistical Retreat of the Sons of Wisdom, where are perpetually and endlessly produced many reasonable meteorological prognostications; also divinations, concentrations, observations, and conglomerations are recorded in divers registers, all of them most deducible, for are they not stored with great care in sundry leathern bags for the delectation of wise men? Thou hast been led as it were by the hand through many a desert and waste spot, now lift up your eyes and behold where you are; welcome into the garden of the Philosophers, which is walled about with a very high wall.' So were they shown by the dwellers in the Temple many and marvellous wonders. In the centre stood a furnace for all transmutations and agitations by heat; whilst on shelves did they see great store of divers bottles, pans, boxes, and bags, wherein could be found succulent sauces and philosophical essences, to the end that the delectable concoctions of the pious might be completed. Likewise great numbers of books. In some could be found treatises of the true science, also devices, hieroglyphic interpretations and perspicuous renderings of great wisdom, in others histories of joyous diversions. Also were there 'curious and ingenious engines for all sorts of motions, where were represented and imitated all articulate sounds and letters, and conveyed in trunks and strange lines and distances. Also helps for the sight representing things afar off in the heavens and remote places, as near, and making feigned distances.'[V] Likewise mathematical instruments, exquisitely made, for the discovering of small and minute bodies in the air. 'Also divices for natural divination of tempests, great inundations, temperatures of the yeare and diverse other things.'[W] Also were they shown many and marvellous things pertaining to the harmony of the heavenly spheres. Then did they drink the mixed draught, the comfortable potation, joyously, philosophically, and with discernment, for at last had they attained to the divine Secrets of the Philosophers, even unto the mystagorical Delight, the great Fulfilment of the Spagyrick Quest of devout Oromaniacs. FOOTNOTES: [S] The Spagyric Quest of Beroaldus Cosmopolita. [T] _The First Gate._ By the Chanon of Bridlington. [U] Introitus apertus ad occlusum Regis palatium. [V] _The New Atlantis._ F. Bacon. [W] _Ibid._ FRAGMENT FROM A LOST MS., PROBABLY BY ARISTOTLE, ENTITLED, [Greek: peri athlêtikês, k.t.l.]; OR A TREATISE CONCERNING THE SPORTS AND PASTIMES OF THE ATHENIAN YOUTH WITH REGARD TO THEIR ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE. We come now to investigate the position of the mountaineer, or climber of hills. Now, we may rightly call him the true mountaineer or climber of hills, who possesses the true love of mountain climbing, which, being a mean between two extremes, may be fitly termed a virtue. First, indeed, it is right to call the love of mountain climbing an active virtue, and not one of contemplation, for to no one is the ascent of a hill possible by contemplation alone; still, the virtue of a mountain climber is for a truth not wholly active, but is partly contemplative, as we shall show further on. Moreover, the love of hill climbing, like fortitude or other virtues, has its defects, its mean, and its excess. Now, as we have said, virtue being a mean of which the extremes are the excess or the deficiency, he who is defective in this matter is one who either has not this love of climbing, or is indifferent in the matter; this man, indeed, is pitied by the hill climber, and indeed may be called the 'irrational man.' Now by the 'irrational man' we do not mean him who is unreasonable without qualification, but rather the man who is possessed of unreason from the point of view of the mountaineer, and truly amongst 'irrational men' are to be found the fathers of families, many learned men and others. Moreover, the 'irrational man' prefers rather to ascend hills by means of the telescope, or in a railway train, and if interrogated on the subject, expresses great scorn for those who rise at midnight, or in the early hours of the morning, for the purpose of imperilling their lives on the end of a rope. Again, he goes not to places where there are no hostels, alleging that he likes to be comfortable and enjoy himself. The scarcity of inns, however, in mountainous countries is a matter which, in these times, has in some few instances been remedied, for we are credibly informed that on the topmost summit of the lofty Mount Snowdon, in the Principality of Wales, an hostel exists, where the 'irrational man' may find gratification for his baser appetites, and perhaps may also at the same time experience, in a limited manner, that happiness which in its full degree is experienced by the true lover of hill climbing, whom we may call the 'mountaineer.'[X] Further, the 'irrational man' is inclined often to treat the adventures of the 'mountaineer' as travellers' tales, but in this respect he is unable rightly to distinguish between the true climber of hills and the 'pseudo-mountaineer' who haunts the smoking-rooms of certain hostels. This man climbs, but in imagination only. He will relate how he has ascended certain high and difficult, nay, even inaccessible peaks, and will brand the names of many hills on staves, that when he returns to his native land he may win much reverence. But although the 'pseudo-mountaineer' pretends to greater things than he has accomplished, and is, therefore, a depraved person, on the whole, perhaps, he appears more a vain than a bad man, for it is not for the sake of money that he would have the unwary traveller and the people of his nation believe his stories, but for the sake of honour and glory, which in itself is praiseworthy. Now both the 'pseudo-mountaineer' and the 'irrational man' err by way of defect, being indifferent to the true joys of mountaineering. But the 'mountaineer' is he who has this virtue in the right measure. He delights not in climbing this hill or that, but in climbing itself. He loves to wander in mountainous lands; ascents of great mountains, clad in frozen snow, to him are not unprofitable. Mountain-huts ill-ventilated, nights spent under rocks, amidst snow, wind, mist, or rain, these things will he endure. Moreover, to help him, will he even pay much money to the more hardy inhabitants of the hills, who are able to guide him with skill and safety through the inhospitable fastnesses, which he loves to explore. Thus much knowledge will he gain, making observations on the heights of hills, the efficacy of meat lozenges, the movement of glaciers by day, and the _pulex irritans_ by night. He is a searcher after sensations. But when, owing to misfortune, he finds that his desire for climbing is in inverse ratio to his opportunity for so doing, then will he spend his leisure hours in adorning his maps with red lines, or he will write papers, yea, even books, describing his former exploits, so that perchance other 'mountaineers' may receive benefit therefrom. But, as we have already said, the love of mountain climbing, like fortitude and other virtues, has its mean and its defect; as to the mean, we have seen that it is the virtue of the 'mountaineer,' whilst the defect constitutes the habit of the 'pseudo mountaineer' and the 'irrational man.' But the extreme is found in the man who has the desire to climb hills out of all reason, therefore we call him the 'oromaniac,' or he who is incontinent in the matter. He it is who ascends hills on the wrong side, and cares not to travel in the line of least resistance; also should he hear that a pinnacle of rock is inaccessible, he is at once seized with a great desire to climb that pinnacle. For he climbs not mountains for the exercise, or the love of climbing itself, but for the mere base desire to beat all records or to outdo an enemy, or that he may see his name blazoned in the local papers. And not unfrequently do accidents befall such an one, and he hurts himself grievously; hence come those accidents which we may call indefinite, for of this kind of accident there is often no definite cause, for the cause of it is casual, and that is indefinite. Thus such an one may have fallen. Now if it was not his intention so to do, and he either slipped or was otherwise moved in a direction suddenly downwards, it happened accidentally. The accident, therefore was generated, and is, but not so far as itself is, but as something else is. Moreover, in this kind of accident, as we have already stated, it often happens that the 'oromaniac' suffers many woes; breaking sometimes a limb, or, if still more unfortunate, his neck, or he suffers mutilation[Y] in respect to his garments. Again, accidents may be called that which is inherent to something, and of which something may be truly asserted; as for instance, if any one going up one mountain in a mist should, after much fatigue, find himself at the summit of another, the ascent would be an accident to him who climbs the mountain. Nor, if any one climbs one mountain, does he for the most part climb another. Accident is after another manner denominated, that which essentially belongs--'The inseparable,' for instance, the mountains themselves. Hence, indeed, it happens that accidents of this kind are perpetual, which is not the case with any others. Now concerning the love of mountain climbing, and the excess and deficiency thereof, as well as the mean which is also a virtue, and concerning also accidents both separable and inseparable of mountain climbing, let this suffice. FOOTNOTES: [X] The great Lexicographer defines the word as 'an inhabitant of the mountains, a savage, a freebooter, a rustick.' Can the word be here used in this sense? [Y] Of the mutilated we have spoken elsewhere. 'A man is mutilated when some part is taken away, and this not any part indifferently, but which, when wholly taken away, cannot again be generated. Hence, men that are bald are not mutilated.'--_Metaphysics_, Book v. chap. xxvii. NOTES ON THE HIMALAYAN MOUNTAINS The great flood of the Indus in 1841 seems to have been one of the most tremendous cataclysms recorded as having occurred on the continent of India. The exact reason of it was for many years unknown. Major Cunningham suggested that it was due to the bursting of an ice-dammed lake on the Shayok river. Major Becher seems, however, to have been the first who expressed a belief that it was caused by a landslip blocking the Indus near Gor. In a letter (_Journ. Asiat. Soc. Bengal_, vol. xxviii. p. 219) he writes that a mountain called Ultoo Kunn, near Gor, owing to an earthquake, subsided into the valley of the main Indus. Drew, in his book on Kashmir (p. 415), gives the following description: 'The flood of 1841 was in this wise. It occurred, as near as I can make out, in the beginning of June of that year. At Atak, a place twelve or fifteen miles below where the latitude-parallel of 34° crosses the Indus, the river had been observed during several months, indeed from December of the previous year onwards, to be unusually low; in the spring it had risen a little from the snow melting, but only a little, so that at the end of May (when in ordinary years the volume has greatly increased) it was still extraordinarily low. This in itself should have been enough to warn the people who dwelt by its banks, but so little was it thought of that a portion of the Sikh army was encamped on the low plain of Chach which bordered the river. One day in the beginning of June, at two in the afternoon, the waters were seen by those who were there encamped to be coming upon them, down the various channels, and to be swelling out of these to overspread the plain in a dark, muddy mass, which swept everything before it. The camp was completely overwhelmed; five hundred soldiers at once perished; only those who were within near reach of the hill-sides could hope for safety. Neither trees nor houses could avail to keep those surprised in the plain out of the power of the flood, for trees and houses themselves were swept away; every trace of cultivation was effaced; and the tents, the baggage, and the artillery, all were involved in the ruin. The result was graphically described by a native eye-witness, whose words were, "As a woman with a wet towel sweeps away a legion of ants, so the river blotted out the army of the Raja."' Drew was probably the first to actually visit the place where the block occurred. And a villager from Gor pointed out to him the exact spot where the debris of the landslip blocked the river. These floods seem to be of somewhat frequent occurrence. In 1844 one came from the Tshkoman valley above Gilgit. In 1858 another did great damage at Naushahra. The Indus at Attock (Atak) on 10th August was very low. In the early morning it rose ten feet in two hours, and five hours later it had risen no less that fifty feet, and continued rising till it stood no less than ninety feet higher than in the morning. It is probable that this flood came from the Hunza valley. Smaller floods in the narrow Himalayan valleys are of frequent occurrence. For instance at Tashing, in 1850, a large lake was formed in the Rupal nullah by the snout of the Tashing glacier crossing the valley till it was jammed against the rock wall on the opposite side, thus blocking the Rupal torrent. Probably this will again happen, for when we were there in 1895 the Tashing glacier had once more blocked the valley to the depth of at least 200 feet, the Rupal stream finding its way underneath the ice; should this passage become in any way stopped, a huge lake must at once form behind the glacier. The extreme narrowness, and often the great depth, of many of these Himalayan valleys will always be favourable to the production of these floods. Should a landslip occur, or should a glacier, such as the Tashing glacier, block the valley, a flood must be the inevitable result. On the Indus there are many places where a dam might easily be formed. In the bend underneath Haramosh, at Lechre under Nanga Parbat, or further down below Chilas in that unknown country where the Indus begins to flow in a southerly direction. For there on the map the Indus is made to flow between two peaks, _not three miles apart_: one is marked 16,942 feet, and the other 15,250 feet, thus making the depth of this ravine over 12,000 feet. LIST OF SOME OF THE MOUNTAINS IN THE HIMALAYA THAT ARE OVER 24,000 FEET IN HEIGHT The following list of mountains that are more than 24,000 feet has been taken from various maps. It gives most of the peaks that have been trigonometrically measured, but probably there are at least as many more in those great mountain ranges, the Hindu Kush, the Mustagh, the Kuen Lun, and the Himalaya, that are over 24,000 feet high. The next highest peak in the world outside Asia is Aconcagua, 23,393 feet high. Feet. Devadhunga, Gaurisanka, or Mt. Everest, in Nepaul, 29,002 K^{2} in the Mustagh range, 28,278 Kanchenjunga (1), north peak in Sikkim, 28,156 Kanchenjunga (2), south peak, 27,815 5 Makalu, S.E. of Devadhunga, 27,799 Dhaolagiri (1), in Nepaul, 26,826 Unnamed peak N.W. of Katmandu, 26,680 Nanga Parbat, or Diama, in Kashmir, 26,629 Unnamed peak N. of Pokra Nepaul 26,522 10 K^{1} in the Mustagh range, 26,483 Hidden peak in the Mustagh range, 26,470 Gusherbrum (1), in the Mustagh range, 26,360 Gosai Than, N.E. of Katmandu, 26,305 Gusherbrum (2), 26,103 15 Unnamed, N. of Pokra Nepaul, 26,069 Gusherbrum (3), 26,016 Unnamed peak, N.W. Katmandu, 25,818 Unnamed peak, N.W. Katmandu, 25,729 Masherbrum (1), in the Mustagh range, 25,676 20 Nanda Devi (1), in Kumaon, 25,661 Masherbrum (2), 25,660 Nanga Parbat or Diama (2), 25,586 Rakipushi, in Kashmir, 25,550 Unnamed, N. of Hispar glacier, Mustagh range, 25,503 25 Unnamed, N. of Hispar glacier, 25,493 Dhaolagiri (2), 25,456 Ibi Gamin, or Kamet, in Kumaon, 25,443 K^{10}, in the Mustagh range, 25,415 Boiohagurdaonas (1), N.W. of Hunza, 25,370 30 Jannu, in Sikkim, 25,304 K^{11} in the Mustagh range, 25,210 Nubra peak (1), N. of Leh, Mustagh range, 25,183 K^{6} in the Mustagh range, Chogolisa peak, 25,119 Bride peak, Baltoro glacier, Mustagh range, 25,110 35 Dhaolagiri (3), 25,095 Boiohagurdaonas (2), 25,050 Unnamed, N. of Pokra Nepaul, 24,780 Nubra Peak (2), 24,698 Tirach Mir (1), N. of Chitral Hindu Kush, 24,611 40 Unnamed, near Rakipushi, Kashmir, 24,470 Muz Tagh Ata, Pamirs, 24,400 Nanda Devi (2) (Nanda Kot), 24,379 K^{12} in the Mustagh range, 24,352 Tirich Mir (2), 24,343 45 Unnamed, N. of Katmandu Nepaul, 24,313 Haramosh, near Gilgit Kashmir, 24,270 Boiohagurdaonas (3), 24,044 Unnamed, S. of Devadhunga, Nepaul, 24,020 Kabru, in Sikkim, 24,015 50 Chumaliri, in Bhutan, 24,000 Aling Gangri, in Tibet, 24,000 K^{9} in the Mustagh range, 24,000 LITERATURE DEALING WITH THE HIMALAYA Bogle, G., Account of Tibet. Philosophical Transactions, No. 67, part 2, and Annual Register, 1778. Turner, Capt. S., Account of an Embassy to the Court of the Teshoo Lama, in Tibet, 1 vol., 1806. Webb and Raper, Journey to explore the sources of the Ganges. Asiatic Researches, vol. x. Colebrooke, H., On the height of the Himala Mountains. Asiatic Researches, vol. xi. Moorcroft, W., Journey to the Lake Mánasarówara. Asiatic Researches, vol. xii. Kirkpatrick, Col. W., An Account of the Kingdom of Nepaul, 1 vol., 1811. Hamilton, Francis, M.D., An Account of the Kingdom of Nepal, 1 vol., 1819. Fraser, J. B., Tour through part of the Snowy Range of the Himalya Mountains, 1 vol., 1820. Hodgson, B. H., Essays on Nepál and Tibet, etc., 2 vols., 1874; also no less than 170 papers to various periodicals, chiefly the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Cp. Report on the Mineralogical Survey of the Himala Mountains. J. A. S. B. xi., part 1, p. x. Vigne, G. T., Travels in Cashmir, Ladak, etc., 2 vols., 1835. Thomson, T., M.D., Western Himalaya and Tibet, 1 vol., 1852. Moorcroft, W. and G. Trebeck, Travels in the Himalayan Provinces, etc., 2 vols., 1841. Gerard, Capt. A., Account of Koonawur, in the Himalaya, 1 vol., 1841. Gerard and Lloyd, Tours in the Himalaya, 2 vols., 1840. Cunningham, Sir A., Ladák, Physical, Statistical, and Historical, 1 vol., 1854. Strachey, R., Physical Geography of Kumaon and Gurhwal and the adjoining parts of Tibet. R. G. S. Journal, xxi., p. 57. Strachey, Capt. H., Physical Geography of Western Tibet. R. G. S. Journal, xxiii., p. 2, published separately, 1 vol., 1854; also Journey to Lake Mánasarówar, 1 vol., 1848. 'Mountaineer' (Wilson), A Summer Ramble in the Himalayas and Cashmere, 1 vol., 1860. Hooker, Sir J. D., Himalayan Journals, 2 vols., 1854. Saunders, Trelawny W., Sketch of the Mountains and River Basins of India, in two maps, with explanatory memoirs. Geographical Department, India Office, 1870. Gordon, Lieut.-Col. T. E., The Roof of the World, 1 vol., 1876. Wilson, Andrew, The Abode of Snow, 1 vol., 1875. Indian Alps and How we Crossed Them. By a Lady Pioneer, 1 vol., 1876. Markham, Clements R., A Memoir on the Indian Surveys, 1 vol., 1871; 2nd ed., 1878. Montgomerie, Major T. G., Reports on the Trans-Himalayan Explorations, 1865-1867, 1869, and 1871 (Indian Survey). Shaw, R., Visits to High Tartary, Yârkand, and Kâshgar, 1 vol., 1871. Torrens, Lieut.-Col. H. D., Travels in Ladak, Tartary, and Kashmir, 1 vol., 1862. Bellew, Dr. H. W., Kashmir and Kashgar, 1 vol., 1875. Drew, F., Jummoo and Kashmir Territories, 1 vol., 1875. Bogle, G., and T. Manning, Narratives of their Journeys to Tibet and Lhasa, edited by Clements R. Markham, 1 vol., 1876. Godwin-Austen, Col. H. H., Royal Geographical Society Journal, vol. xxxiv., p. 19. Knight, Capt., Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Tibet, 1 vol., 1863. Schlagintweit, H. and B., The Last Journeys and Death of Adolph Schlagintweit, 1854. Conway, Sir W. M., Climbing in the Karakoram Himalayas, 1 vol., 1894. Knight, E. F., Where Three Empires Meet, 1 vol., 1893. MacCormick, A. D., An Artist in the Himalayas, 1 vol., 1895. Waddell, L. A., Among the Himalayas, 1 vol., 1899. Younghusband, F. E., The Heart of a Continent, 1 vol., 1896. Boeck, K., Indische Gletcherfahrten, 1900. Deasy, H. H. P., In Tibet and Chinese Turkestan, 1 vol., 1901. Durand, A., Making of a Frontier, 1 vol., 1900. Holdich, Col. Sir T. H., Indian Borderland, 1 vol., 1901. Bose, P. N., Glaciers of Kabru, 1 vol., 1901. Workman, Mrs. F. B. and Dr. W. H., In the Ice-World of Himalaya, 1 vol., 1900. INDEX A A^{21}. See Mount Monal. A^{22}, 17, 18. Achill Island, cliffs of, 233. A Chuilionn, 211. See Coolin Hills. Alberta, Mount, 149. Alps, The, mountaineering in, 165 _et seq._ Assiniboine group of mountains, 143, 145. Astor, 43, 123, 126. Astor valley, road down, 126. Athabasca pass, 144. Avalanche of stones, 72. B Bagrot nullah explored, 20. Baker, Mount, 140. Balfour group of mountains, 144, 146. Ball group of mountains, 143, 145. Baltoro glacier ascended, 15, 21, 22. ---- ---- survey of the, 15. Bandipur, 32. Baramula, 28. Bear, red, 45, 62. Been Keragh, 237, 240. Ben Eighe, climb on, 274 _et seq._ Ben Nevis, ascent of Tower Ridge of, 288 _et seq._; observatory on summit of, 296. Biafo glacier, 21, 24. Blanc, Mont, ascent of, by Brenva route, 175. Bogle, G., Mission to Tibet, 8. Boss, Emil, 17. Bow range, 143. Brandon, 237, 240. Brown, Mount, 149. Bruce, Major C. G., 20, 21, 23; ascents near Chitral, 23; do. near Hunza, 23; do. near Nagyr, 23; do. of Ragee-Bogee peaks, 23; meets us at Tashing, 68; returns to Abbottabad, 81; climbing in the Alps by, 178. Buldar nullah, 123. Bullock-Workman, Mount, ascent of, 24. ---- Dr. and Mrs., climbing in Ladak and Suru by, 24. Butesharon glacier, 80; pass, 81. Bunar Post, 132. Burzil or Dorikoon pass, 34. Bush peak, 147. C Caher, 237, 240. Camping, 154, 182. Canada, size of, 136. Carran Tuohill, 237, 239. Chiche peak, 42; glacier, ascent of, 49. Chilas, 26; road to, 127. ---- tribesmen, raids by, 40. Chongra peaks, 43, 119, 123. Choonjerma pass, 11. Chorit, 36. Collier, J., 253, 259. Columbia group of mountains, 144, 148. ---- Mount, 148. ---- river, 141. Connemara, the twelve Bens of, 236. Conway, Sir W. Martin, mountain exploration by, 20, 21, 23. Coolin Hills, appearance and description of, 217 _et seq._, 234. Coomacarrea, 241. Coomacullen, Lough, 241. Croaghann, 233. Crystal peak ascended, 21. D Daranshi Saddle climbed, 21. Dashkin, 123. Dasskaram needle ascended, 21. Devadhunga, 9, 11, 12, 20, 24. Dhaltar peaks, ascent of, 23. Diama glacier, 116; pass, 116, 120. Diamirai glacier explored, 62, 82. ---- nullah, 59; camp in, 61; return to, 81; storm in, 111; upper camp in, 83, 109, 113; leave, 116; last visit to, 133. ---- pass crossed, 64. ---- peak, 88; view from slopes of, 91; summit of, 97; south-west arête of, 100. Dichil peak, 72, 123. Divide, Great, 140, 142. Doian, 126. Dome peak, 148. Donegal, 227. Donkia pass, 12, 16. Drew, 14. Dunagiri, 16; attempted ascent of, 17. E Elias, Mount St., 136. Everest. See Devadhunga. F Forbes Group of Mountains, 144, 147. Forsyth, 213. Fortress Lake pass, 144. Fraser river, 140; canyon, 141. Freshfield, D., Tour of Kanchenjunga, 24. ---- Mount, 147. G Ganalo nullah crossed, 118; glacier, 119; camp in, 119. ---- peak, 82, 116, 124. Garhwal, 9. Garwood, E., 24. Gerard, Captain, ascents by, 11. Gjeitgaljar, 192; ascent of, 204. Glaciers, effect of, 190. Godwin, Austen H. H., survey of mountains by, 15. Golden Throne, 22. Goman Singh, 69; takes servants, etc., over Mazeno La, 73, 117, 124. ---- ---- pass, 89, 118. Gonar peak, 118. Goodsir group of mountains, 143, 145. Gor, inhabitants of, 122. Graham, W. W., ascents by, 16. Guicho La, 17, 19. Gurais, 34. Gurdon, Capt. B. E. M., ascent near Nagyr, 23. Gusherbrum, 15. H Haramosh, 127. Haramukh, 29. Harkabir Thapa, 23, 178. Harman, Capt., visits Donkia pass, 16. Hart, H. C., 226, 230. Haskett-Smith, W. P., 247. Hastings, G., 27; arrives at Chiche glacier camp, 56; returns to Rupal nullah and Astor, 87; crosses Mazeno La, 90; returns to Diamirai nullah to search for Mummery, 122, 125, 175, 191, 247, 256. ---- Warren, frontier policy, 8. Hatu Pir, view from, 127, 129. Higraf Tind, 192; ascent of, 197. Himalaya, peaks over 24,000 feet, 6, 307. ---- exclusion from, 7. ---- Mountaineering Club, 14. Hindu Kush range, 26. Hispar pass crossed, 21, 24. Hooker, Sir Joseph, Sikkim Journeys, 11. ---- group of mountains, 144. ---- Mount, 149. Howse pass, 144. I Ibi-Gamin. See Kamet. Imboden, Joseph, 16. Indus valley, 127; heat in, 130. J Johnson, Dr., 50, 211; description of Skye by, 212. ---- W. H., ascents by, 13. Jonsong La crossed, 24. Jubonu, 18; ascent of, 19. K K^{2}, 15, 21, 22; seen from slopes of Nanga Parbat, 71. Kabru, 16, 18; ascent of, 19; objections to claimed ascent of, 19. Kamet, attempted ascents of, 13, 16. Kamri pass crossed, 34. Kanchenjunga, 12, 16, 17, 18, 24. Kang La, ascent of peak near, 19. Karakoram range. See Mustagh range. ---- pass, 13. Kashmir, journey from Rawul Pindi to, 28; valley of, 29. Kauffmann, Ulrich, 17. Kerry Hills, 237 _et seq._ Khaghan, 23. Kicking Horse pass, 143. Kishnganga valley, description of, 33. Kongra-Lama pass, 12. Koser Gunge, ascent of, 24. Kulu, 9. Kumaon, 9. L Langstrandtinder, ascent of, 195. Laurence, W. R., description of valley of Kashmir, 30. Lechre, landslip blocks Indus at 26, 129. Leo Porgyul, 11. Liskom pass, 123. Lofoten Islands, 185; fish trade of, 203; rain in the, 201; visits to the, 207; climate of, 187; scenery of, 189. Logan, Mount, 136. Lor Khan, 83, 89; accident to, 96; 109. Louise lake, 145. Lubar nullah, camp in, 79. ---- glacier, 59. ---- torrent, 107. Lyell, Mount, 147. M Macgillicuddy's Reeks. See Kerry Hills, 237. Maelström, description of, 185. Manning, T., Mission to Tibet, 8. Markhor, 60. Masherbrum, 15. Mazeno La, 42; cross the, 57; cross second time, 66; cross third time, 77; Bruce crosses the, 81; Hastings crosses, 90. ---- peaks, 42. M'Kinley, Mount, 136. Monal, Mount, 16; ascent of, 17, 18. Montgomerie, Capt. T. G., survey of mountains by, 15. Mösadlen, 192. Moss ghyll, climb up, 256. Mountains, description of Himalayan, 50; Canadian Rocky, 143. Lofoten 191; Scotch, 220; Irish, 226. Mummery, A. F., 27; explores western face of Nanga Parbat, 82; ascends Diamirai peak, 97; starts for Bunar, 105; takes provisions up rocks of Nanga Parbat, 83, 109; spends night on rocks of Nanga Parbat, 110, 114; starts for ascent of Nanga Parbat, 113; starts for Diama pass, 116; probable fate of, 124; climbing in Alps, 174; climbing near Wastdale Head, 246. Murree, 28. Mustagh range, view of, 91, 128. ---- pass, 22. ---- tower, description of, 21. N Nanda Devi, 12, 16, 17, 18. Nanga Parbat, 26; view of from Kamri pass, 34; glacier, 45; south face, view of, 47; western face, view of, 61; Mummery explores western face, 82; provisions left on, 83; climbing on, 83; avalanches on, 83, 111, 114, 124, 133; attempted ascent of, 114; northern face of, 120. Nepaul, enormous peaks north of, 12, 16. Nicholson, A., derivation of the name of the Coolin, 235. Night out at 19,000 ft., 75. Nun Kun peaks, 24, 29. Nushik La crossed, 21. O Ottertail Range, 143. P Pennant, 213. Phillip, Colin B., 233, 270, 273. Pillar rock, climbing on, 251. Pioneer peak, 20, 23. Prairie, description of, 138. Priestman, H., 191. Pundim, 17, 19. Punmah glacier, 15. R Ragee-Bogee Peaks ascended, 23. Ragobir Thapa, 69, 82, 89, 113, 117, 124. Rakiot nullah, 116; arrive in, 120; explore, 121. Rakiot glacier, 120. ---- peak, 42. Rakipushi, 127. Ramghat, 127. Rattu, 35. Red pass, 118. Robinson, J. W., 247, 255, 260. Robson, description of Grampians by, 214. Rocky Mountains, Canadian, 135; future of, 137; approach to, 138, 140; travelling in, 150; dense forests on west side of, 156. Rosamir, head coolie, 116. Rulten, 192; attempted ascent of, 201. Rupal nullah, arrival in, 38; description of, 41; journey up, 44. ---- peak, 42; glacier, 42. S Samayar Glacier, 21. Schlagintweit, Adolf and Robert, exploration of Himalaya, 12. Screes, climb up the great gully of the, 254. Selkirk mountains, 142. Sella, Signor V., 24. Sgurr a'Ghreadaidh, climb on, 219. Shallihuru glacier, 21. Shandur pass, 35. Sheep, price of, 59. Shikara pass, 23. Shikari, robbed by, 106. Sickness, mountain, 11, 58, 98. Siegfried Horn, ascent of, 24. Simpson pass, 143. Slieve League, climbing on, 230; sea caves near, 231. Slingsby, C., 247. Solly, G., 252. Spiti, 9. Stewart, Capt., 125. ---- Lieut. C. G., Chitral Relief Expedition, 35. Swat country, peaks in, 60, 81. T Tashing, 36, 40. ---- river crossed, 36. ---- glacier ascended, 70; descended, 72. Temple group mountains, 143, 145. Thompson pass, 144. Thosho pass, 39; peak, 42. Tirich Mir, 26; seen from slopes of Nanga Parbat, 81. Tragbal or Raj Diangan pass, 33. Travers, M. W., 271. Trisuli peaks, 17. Trold Fjord, 199, 205. Troldfjordvatn, 199, 205. Tunkra pass, 12. V Vaage Kallen, 192. Vermilion pass, 143. W Wapta Range, 144, 146. Wastdale Head, climbing near, 245 _et seq._ Wicklow Mountains, 229, 242. Woolar lake, description of, 31; storm on, 32. Woolley, H., 191. Y Younghusband, Captain F., climb with Major Bruce, 23. Z Zaipur, 36. Zurbriggen, M., 20, 24. Edinburgh: Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE Now Ready. _In One Volume, Royal 8vo, with Illustrations, price 36s. net._ * * * * * THE ALPS IN 1864 A PRIVATE JOURNAL BY A. W. MOORE EDITED BY ALEX. B. W. KENNEDY, LL.D., F.R.S. MEMBER OF THE ALPINE CLUB Moore's privately printed Journal of 1864 has long been one of the rarest and most coveted books of Alpine adventure. The Author was a climber of marvellous energy, and climbed, for the pure pleasure of climbing, in days when the Alps were not 'hung in chains,' and when virgin peaks and passes still remained in comparative plenty. Few of his contemporaries had so wide a knowledge of the mountains as he had, and few were able to make so many first ascents; while few, it may be said without offence, spoke and wrote of their doings in so simple, genial, and unaffected a fashion. 'The writer succeeds in bringing the actual conditions of the climb home to the reader in a manner calculated at times almost to take his breath away. He makes one believe that it would be possible to go and repeat the exact route merely from his description. As we follow him over the ice-wall and along the _arêtes_ of the Ecrins, through the hurricanes on the Dom, across the awful barrier of the Moming Pass, and up the hanging glaciers of the Brenva, we feel as if we were ourselves standing amid the snows and rocks of the Alpine giants as we sit in our arm-chair waiting till the return of a summer holiday sends us once again to the happy hunting ground.'--_Spectator._ 'The work will prove not only a monument to the memory of a man of rare culture, of great public capacity, and of unusual mountaineering experience, but also a notable addition to permanent Alpine literature.'--_Birmingham Post._ 'The keynote of the whole book is its frank, hearty, straightforward naturalness. It breathes the very air of the mountains, and is instinct in every page with the spirit of the true mountaineer.'--_Birmingham Gazette._ 'Contains a better collection of Alpine plates than we have ever before seen brought together in a book. The volume would be worth buying for the plates alone.'--_Times._ 'One of the most vivid and fascinating books of Alpine travel which has ever been written.'--_Alpine Journal._ 'Moore's book will be classed with the very best in its department of literature with the works of Mummery and Mr. Whymper and Mr. Leslie Stephen.'--_Glasgow Herald._ 'Mr. Moore was an ardent and successful mountain climber,' with a remarkable topographical faculty and a retentive and accurate memory. He wrote in an easy style with much descriptive power and quiet humour.'--_Standard._ * * * * * _In Preparation, One Volume, with Illustrations_ A Book on Climbing in Norway _with chapters on the physical features, etc., of the country_. BY WM. CECIL SLINGSBY. * * * * * EDINBURGH: DAVID DOUGLAS, 10 CASTLE STREET. * * * * * Transcriber's note: Obvious misspellings and omissions were corrected. Errors in punctuation and inconsistent hyphenation were not corrected unless otherwise noted. The illustrations have been moved so that they do not break up paragraphs and so that they are next to the text they illustrate.