Page:My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus.djvu/407

350 days of mountaineering, two guides, dismissed after crossing a pass, have been in the habit of returning home by themselves. So far as I have been able to learn, no single crevasse accident has ever happened to them. When it is remembered that such extensive and fissured fields of névé, as those traversed by the routes over the Col du Géant, the Mönch Joch, the Weiss Thor, the Col d'Hérens and the Brèche de la Meije, are amongst those which have been habitually crossed by two guides alone, it would appear that the danger to such parties is almost or quite non-existent. It is, indeed, obvious that if such parties were exposed to the danger alleged, it would be little short of criminal to take two men across an ice pass and dismiss them under conditions which practically involve their climbing two on a rope. To permit guides to run risks, which their employer is warned on no account to face, would be, to say the least of it, contrary to the traditions of Englishmen at large and the Alpine Club in particular.

The difficulty of reconciling practice and teaching on this point leads me to suppose that, possibly, these denunciations are levelled, not against parties of two mountaineers, but against parties of one mountaineer and one duffer. Politeness, that arch-corrupter of truth, has, perchance, led our teachers to say "a party should never consist of less than three, of whom