Some of the people in the hotel were getting up at 3.30 to go to Tiger Hill to see the sun rise on Everest.  Boggley, the lazy one, wouldn’t hear of going, and when I awoke in the grey dawning stiff with cold, in spite of a fire and heaps of blankets and rugs, I felt thankful that I hadn’t a strenuous brother.  If it had been John, I dare not think where he would have made me accompany him to in his efforts to get as near as possible to his beloved mountains.  Never shall I forget the first time he took me to Switzerland to climb.  I had never climbed before—­unless you call scrambling on the hills at home climbing—­and I was all eagerness to try till John gave me Whymper’s book on Zermatt to amuse me in the train, and I read of the first ascent of the Matterhorn and its tragic sequel.  It had the effect of reducing me to a state of abject terror.  All through that journey, from Paris to Lausanne, from Lausanne to Visp, from Visp to Zermatt, horror of the Matterhorn hung over me like a pall.  I even found something sinister in little Zermatt when we got there—­Zermatt that now I love so, with the rushing, icy river, the cheerful smell of wood smoke, the goats that in the early morning wake one with the tinkle-tinkle of the bells through the street, and the quiet-eyed guides that sit on the wall in the twilight and smoke the pipe of peace.

After dinner, that first night, we walked through the village and along the winding path that leads up to the Schwarzsee, and gazed at the mighty peak, so wild, so savage in the pale purple light that follows the sunset glow—­gazed at it in silence, John wrapped in adoration, I thinking of the men who had gone up this road to their death.

“Yes,” said John, as we turned back, “some very scared men have come down this road.”

If he had known what an exceedingly scared girl was at his side he wouldn’t, I think, have chosen that moment to turn into the little graveyard that surrounds the village chapel, to look at the graves of the victims—­the graves of Croz the guide, of Hudson, and the boy Hadow.  The text on one stone caught my eye—­“Be ye therefore also ready...” It was too much; I fled back to the hotel, locked the door of my room, shuttered the windows so that I should not see the vestige of a mountain—­and wept.

It is odd to think how I hated it all that night, how to myself I maligned all climbers, calling them in my haste foolhardy—­senseless—­imbecile, when I had only to go up my first easy mountain to become as keen as the worst—­or the best.

Sometimes in those mountaineering excursions with John to Zermatt, to Chamonix, to Grindelwald, I have found it in my heart to envy the unaspiring people who spend long days pottering about on level ground.  But looking back it isn’t the quiet, lazy days one likes to think about.  No—­rather it is the mornings when one rose at 2 a.m. and, thrusting aching feet into nailed boots, tiptoed noisily into the deserted dining-room to be supplied with coffee and rolls by a pitifully sleepy waiter.