Page:My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus (1908).djvu/141

Rh But Burgener did not altogether share this view, and at 12.30 p.m. he insisted on our sliding down a doubled rope to the ridge below the summit. All went merrily till we reached the ice couloir. Here Burgener tried to fix one of our wooden wedges; but do what he would, it persisted in evading its duties, wobbling first to one side and then to another, so that the rope slipped over the top. We all had a try, driving it into cracks that struck our fancy, and even endeavouring to prop it up with ingenious arrangements of small stones. Some one then mooted the point whether wedges were not a sort of bending the knee to Baal, and might not be the first step on those paths of ruin where the art of mountaineering becomes lost in that of the steeplejack. Whereupon we unanimously declared that the Charmoz should be desecrated by no fixed wedges, and finding an insecure knob of rock we doubled our rope round it, and Venetz slid down. I followed, and to prevent as far as possible the chance of the rope slipping off the knob, we twisted it round and round, and held the ends fast as Burgener descended.

By 2.20 we rejoined our boots, and ideas of table d'hôte began to replace those of a more poetic type. We rattled down the rocks, and raced across the glacier in a way that, we subsequently learnt, created much astonishment in the minds of sundry friends at the opposite end of M. Couttet's telescope. The further we got the faster we went, for the séracs