ountain.
There was a little ledge. You could look down between your feet quite
straight to the glacier, two thousand feet below. We came to a place
where the wall of the pinnacle seemed possible. Almost ten feet above
us, there was a flaw in the rock which elsewhere was quite
perpendicular. I was the lightest. So my friend planted himself as
firmly as he could on the ledge with his hands flat against the rock
face. There wasn't any handhold, you see, and I climbed out on to his
back and stood upon his shoulders. I saw that the rock sloped back from
the flaw or cleft in quite a practicable way. Only there was a big
boulder resting on the slope within reach, and which we could hardly
avoid touching. It did not look very secure. So I put out my hand and
just touched it--quite, quite gently. But it was so exactly balanced
that the least little vibration overset it, and I saw it begin to move,
very slowly, as if it meant no harm whatever. But it was moving,
nevertheless, toward me. My chest was on a level with the top of the
cleft, so that I had a good view of the boulder. I couldn't do anything
at all. It was much too heavy and big for my arms to stop and I couldn't
move, of course, since I was standing on Jack Lattery's shoulders. There
did not seem very much chance, with nothing below us except two thousand
feet of vacancy. But there was just at my side a little bit of a crack
in the edge of the cleft, and there was just a chance that the rock
might shoot out down that cleft past me. I remember standing and
watching the thing sliding down, not in a rush at all, but very
smoothly, almost in a friendly sort of way, and I wondered how long it
would be before it reached me. Luckily some irregularity in the slope of
rock just twisted it into the crack, and it suddenly shot out into the
air at my side with a whizz. It was so close to me that it cut the cloth
of my sleeve. I had been so fascinated by the gentle movement of the
boulder that I had forgotten altogether to tell Lattery what was
happening; and when it whizzed out over his head, he was so startled
that he nearly lost his balance on the little shelf and we were within
an ace of following our rock down to the glacier. Those were our early
days." And he laughed with a low deep ring of amusement in his voice.

"We were late that day on the mountain," he resumed, "and it was dark
when we got down to a long snow-slope at its foot. It was new ground to
us. We were very tired