Page:My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus (1908).djvu/148

142 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 worth living for, but they are sought in vain, if a guide who can "lie in bed and picture every step of the way up" is of the party. Mountaineering, as Mr. Leslie Stephen has pointed out, is "a sport—as strictly as cricket, or rowing, or knurr and spell," and it necessarily follows that its enjoyment depends on the struggle for the victory. To start on an ordinary expedition with guides, is, from the sporting point of view, as interesting—or the reverse—as a "walk over" race.

There is, doubtless, another side to the