Page:My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus.djvu/140

Rh out. I like to feel that our best efforts may be needed, and that even then we may be baffled and beaten. There is, similarly, infinite delight in recalling all the varying chances of a long and hardly fought victory; but the memory of a weary certainty behind two untiring guides, is wholly colourless and soon fades into the indistinguishable past.

Few scrambles have yielded more pleasure to my companions and myself than the ascent of the Brenva Mont Blanc. Owing to a foolish mistake, in which, contrary to the advice of my friends, I persisted, we hurled ourselves at a huge wall of séracs and fought with a vigour and, "under the correction of bragging be it spoken," with a plucky determination, that afforded us then, and will, so long as memory lasts, ever afford us, unmixed delight and pleasure. Recoiling, baffled, we camped on an exposed ledge of rock, and, the next morning, for the third time traversing the far famed knife-edge of ice, we repeated our assault on the séracs, this time at a more vulnerable corner. Victory still hung in the balance, and it was only when Collie had constructed a rickety staircase, by jamming our three axes into the interstices of a perpendicular wall of frozen ice débris, that he scaled the obstacle and we strode in triumph on to the great rolling fields of snow below, but within certain reach of, the Calotte. Such moments are