Page:My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus (1908).djvu/222

216 to inspect our intended line of ascent, we bore to the right on to the open glacier, and then sat down to wait for sufficient light to see whether the unknown couloir was likely to give us passage. The great circle of cliffs rising for nearly four thousand feet above the glacier looked in the dim light of dawn extremely forbidding. Indeed there are few glaciers in the Alps walled in by so mighty and precipitous a rampart. After sitting in a filled-up crevasse for ten minutes, we found the breeze so excessively cold that without more ado we picked up our sacks and moved on towards the base of the couloir. The glacier soon steepened, but the thin layer of snow still lying on the ice sufficed to give us footing, and was so well frozen that the thinnest and most absurdly fragile bridges could be utilised for our progress. Higher up, however, this thin coating of snow ceased. Slingsby, with the cunning of an old climber, kept away to the left, where, under the shelter of the great buttress, streaks of snow were still intact. The rest of the party boldly marched up the glacier and were soon reduced to using the axe. Patience and hard work at length brought us to some rocks on the right of the entrance to the couloir, where Slingsby was waiting for us. Working to the right over glacier-polished and ice-glazed slabs, we reached an awkward, outward-shelving, ice-encumbered ledge, over which a tiny stream from the cliffs above was trickling.