e swung the top over, and found that it
rested satisfactorily against the opposite bank. Almer crept up it,
and made the top firmer by driving his ax into the snow underneath the
highest step. The rest of us followed, carefully roped, and with the
caution to rest our knees on the sides of the ladder, as several of the
steps were extremely weak--a remark which was equally applicable to one,
at least, of the sides. We crept up the rickety old machine, however,
looking down between our legs into the blue depths of the crevasse, and
at 8.15 the whole party found itself satisfactorily perched on the edge
of the nearly level snow plateau, looking up at the long slopes of
broken neve that led to the col....

When the man behind was also engaged in hauling himself up by the rope
attached to your waist, when the two portions of the rope formed an
acute angle, when your footing was confined to the insecure grip of one
toe on a slippery bit of ice, and when a great hummock of hard serac was
pressing against the pit of your stomach and reducing you to a
position of neutral equilibrium, the result was a feeling of qualified
acquiescence in Michel or Almer's lively suggestion of "Vorwaerts!
vorwaerts!"

Somehow or other we did ascend. The excitement made the time seem short;
and after what seemed to me to be half an hour, which was in fact nearly
two hours, we had crept, crawled, climbed and wormed our way through
various obstacles, till we found ourselves brought up by a huge
overhanging wall of blue ice. This wall was no doubt the upper side of
a crevasse, the lower part of which had been filled by snow-drift. Its
face was honeycombed by the usual hemispherical chippings, which somehow
always reminds me of the fretted walls of the Alhambra; and it was
actually hollowed out so that its upper edge overhung our heads at a
height of some twenty or thirty feet; the long fringe of icicles which
adorned it had made a slippery pathway of ice at two or three feet
distance from the foot of the wall by the freezing water which dripped
from them; and along this we crept, in hopes that none of the icicles
would come down bodily.

The wall seemed to thin out and become much lower toward our left, and
we moved cautiously toward its lowest point. The edge upon which we
walked was itself very narrow, and ran down at a steep angle to the
top of a lower icefall which repeated the form of the upper. It almost
thinned out at the point where the uppe