Page:My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus (1908).djvu/177

Rh 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 neighbourhood of the col, I looked around for my old route to the "Kanones Loch," but I could not recognise it, and the col itself did not seem familiar to me. The furious wind whistling and howling through the crags did not help to awaken my memory, and it was only when I had climbed round a crag on the Charmoz side of the col that I recovered my bearings and recognised the cleft up which we had to go.

Possibly the knowledge that I was going to try to lead up to it made it look worse than it really was, but for the moment I was startled at its steepness. With the exception of two steps where the rock sets back slightly (to the extent, perhaps, of two feet in all), the whole is absolutely perpendicular. In this estimate I exclude a preliminary section of seven or eight feet, which bulges out and overhangs