Page:My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus.djvu/129

104 hold of any sort. It was just possible to jam one's back against one wall and one's knees against the other, but progress under these conditions was not to be thought of. After a few minutes had been allowed to convince a possibly sceptical Herr that the knapsack and the ice-axe were not the only impedimenta in the party, the persuasive influence of the rope brought me to more broken ground, and a scramble landed me in the sunshine.

The men were ruefully gazing at their torn and bleeding elbows, for it appears they had only succeeded in attaching themselves to the gully by clasping their hands in front of them, and then drawing them in towards their chests, thus wedging their elbows against the opposing walls. They were both very thoroughly "blown," so we halted and circulated a certain flask. Then I lay down on the warm rocks and wondered how long my internal organs would take to get back into those more normal positions from which the pressure of the rope had dislodged them.

A quarter of an hour later we were once more en route. Above, a long series of broken cliffs, seamed by a fairly continuous line of vertical cracks, assured our progress as far as the ridge. How I crawled up great slabs hanging on to impossible corners—how at critical moments the knapsack hooked on to sharp splinters of rock, or the ice-axe jammed into cracks, whilst the