Ellis braced himself firmly at the highest corner of the recess, and manipulated the rope with special care. I started working up between the two buttresses in a manner that recalled to us both the well-known picture of the Funffingerspitze chimney in Sanger-Davies’ book. When some twelve feet above him, it seemed safe to quit the left-hand side altogether, and a stride effected the change of style. But the return was now almost impossible, and in the anxious five minutes that followed I had time to repent the sudden resolve. The top of the wall was within reach, but it was fringed with loose grass tufts that scarcely seemed secure enough to offer purchase in the upward heave that I wanted to give myself. However, the time spent in hesitation was sheer waste, for at the end the pull-up was perfectly safe and easy, and a little wriggling over rock and steep grass brought me to a long terrace, that naturally suggested a halt for the second man’s advance. In good time his head appeared above the grass tufts that formed the limit of my foreground, and a few seconds later he was sitting at my side and speculating as to the length of the difficult piece. The whole climb so far had been veritably one single pitch; we had had no interval of comparative ease, and were now eager to find some temporary freedom.
That we found in perambulating our terrace. It was about a yard wide and fifty feet long, and gave evidence that our gully as such had practically terminated. We found it rather awkward clambering up the wall some thirty feet to another similar terrace. This stretched horizontally from the large ravine that now disclosed itself on our right, and across the face of the mountain towards the Great Gully. The former, we could see, involved some pretty climbing a hundred feet below us. At our level it was merely a scree-walk finishing at the highest part of Doe Crag.
Our route lay up the rocks above the terrace. Two narrow clefts offered choice. We took the one to the right, about fifteen feet long and sufficiently tough to make us remember the place. Then followed easy hand-and-foot work till we could distinguish the branch exit of the Great Gully. Down this we carefully picked our way, and then returned to gather up our belongings and make tracks for distant Wastdale. The round had taken three hours.