To return to ourselves. We steadily progressed down the cold and snowy face, with rope kept taut and paid out slowly as, one by one, we moved lower. I need not follow our climb, which was without incident, and while it was still daylight, we reached the snow ridge, on the stones just below, which in ascending it is usual to pause for breakfast. We were particularly anxious to be off the stony rocks below and to gain the little glacier and pass over the moraine before dark, but this we could not manage, so in spite of our lantern we wandered about on those odious rocks for hours before we found the gully by which alone it is possible to get off them. Our various attempts entailed the descent of slippery chimneys leading to the top of black precipices, with nothing to be done but scramble up again, merely to embark in other chimneys with precisely similar consequences. I got so sick of the whole thing that I would gladly have dozed under a rock and awaited daylight. The guides, however, stuck to the business, and after a positive nightmare of gullies they at last hit off the right and only one. I have seldom felt greater satisfaction than when I stepped off those detestable rocks on to the snow, shimmering beneath our feet in the starlight. We had now only to cross the glacier and make our way down an exceedingly steep but well-defined foot-path over the sharply-crested moraine. Once we had left this behind us we had nothing more than grass-slopes between us and the Trift Inn. As soon as we reached this final stage in our day's work, we selected the most comfortable-looking hollow, and hanging the lantern to an axe stuck upright in the ground, we prepared, at a somewhat unorthodox hour and within only thirty minutes of the hotel, to enjoy a well-earned meal.
In a most interesting account of a mountain adventure which, by the courtesy of the writer, Sir H. Seymour King, I am enabled to reprint from _The Alpine Journal_, we are once more reminded that a party of thoroughly competent and robust mountaineers can come without evil after-effects out of a night of great hardship which would have undoubtedly proved fatal to ill-equipped and inexperienced amateurs and guides, such as those accompanying Mr Burckhardt, who perished from exposure on the Matterhorn.[8]