Page:Canadian Alpine Journal I, 2.djvu/33

Rh Soon we were on one of the frozen faces of the pyramid, a slope of 45°, rounding off abruptly to where, far below, we had passed early in the morning. We made a horizontal traverse of this, negotiated two crevasses, and then began to climb the steep face of iced snow leading to an arête above, which would take us to the summit. Every step had to be cut, and the higher we climbed the steeper it grew. Then someone murmured, for the slope became nearly vertical and a merciless wind was whistling across it. Close above, however, was rock, so we worked to this haven. Decidedly unnerved we reached it at last, and clambering up its steep face, gazed over the saw-like edge. What we saw there sickened the bravest of us. We were on the edge of a thin toppling precipice of rotten lava, overhanging a horrible green glacier a thousand feet below, with empty space beneath it again. A cry was raised to return, but our guides were firmer now, and we had to go on. The arête was about a hundred yards long, all cracked and crumbling, with its north face, on which we were, a mass of loose slabs of lava, coated with snow and ice. Under this was a bank of snow too steep to use, with two yawning crevasses stretching across it. To the south was the paralyzing "overhang." It took an hour and a half to make that course. Every piece of dislodged rock went either silently flying into dizzy space on one side, or whirring down the other to vanish with an almost human howl in the hungry throat of one of those crevasses.

In a kind of trance we at last crawled up a ridge of soft clean snow, and found ourselves standing on a flat, bare rock, with only the four winds about us and the heavens above us. One of our young guides planted a Union Jack; and we realized that a virgin peak was conquered—Garibaldi.

The view from that point ten thousand feet above the sea must be left to the imagination of those who have been in like places. A cairn was built, and then