Page:My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus.djvu/176

Rh of difficulties; not only was the slab impassable by reason of the accumulated ice, but it was not even there! A state of affairs recalling to our minds the celebrated legal pleas entered relatively to the cracked jar—" We never had it. It was cracked when we had it. We returned it whole!" Pasteur, however, by an interesting deductive argument, reached an equally gloomy conclusion. "It was," said he, "extremely unlikely that I should have the luck to get up the Grépon at all this year; now, having been up once, it is absurd to suppose I shall get up a second time." He suggested we should tell the porters to halt at the foot of the couloir till we got to the col, and, if we found that we could not storm the Grépon ridge, we would shout to the guides and they could then deposit the baggage and return as fast as they liked. This suggestion was duly accepted by the party. Indeed, a telescopic examination of the peak had not enabled me to trace my old route—for the excellent reason, as I subsequently discovered, that it is not visible from this point of view. This, and the wide prevalence of a rumour that a great crag really had fallen from this part of the mountain, led me to fear that it might be all too true, and that the peak was closed for ever from this side. We started up the couloir, with chastened feelings and hopes little higher than the Charmoz traverse backwards. On reaching the