Page:My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus (1908).djvu/153

 CHAPTER VI.

THE GRÉPON.

An inaccessible peak—The most difficult climb in the Alps—An easy day for a lady.

HILST on the summit of Charmoz in 1880, the Grépon had struck me as rivalling the Géant itself in the wild grandeur of its cliffs. The ridge from that point looked wholly impassable; great towers, rising a hundred feet or more in single obelisks of unbroken granite, seeming to bar all possibility of progress. We had previously examined the cliffs of the Nantillon face with a telescope, and seen that they were nearly, if not quite, perpendicular, and of that peculiarly objectionable formation known to the German guides as "abgeschnitten." Feeling none the less certain that there must be a way somewhere, we were led by the process of exclusion to infer that it would be found on the Mer de Glace face. We decided, in consequence, to deliver our first assault from that side.

On the way up the Verte from the Charpoua