“That’s famous,” cried Garratt Skinner, looking once more at his watch.  He did not say that they had lost yet another hour upon the face of the buttress.  It was now half past nine in the morning.  “We are twelve thousand feet up, Wallie,” and he swung to his left, and led the party up the ridge of the buttress.

As they went along this ridge, Wallie Hine’s courage rose.  It was narrow but not steep, nor was it ice.  It was either rock or snow in which steps could be kicked.  He stepped out with a greater confidence.  If this were all, the Brenva climb was a fraud, he exclaimed to himself in the vanity of his heart.  Ahead of them a tall black tower stood up, hiding what lay beyond, and up toward this tower Garratt Skinner led quickly.  He no longer spoke to his companions, he went forward, assured and inspiring assurance; he reached the tower, passed it and began to cut steps.  His ax rang as it fell.  It was ice into which he was cutting.

This was the first warning which Walter Hine received.  But he paid no heed to it.  He was intent upon setting his feet in the steps; he found the rope awkward to handle and keep tight, his attention was absorbed in observing his proper distance.  Moreover, in front of him the stalwart figure of Garratt Skinner blocked his vision.  He went forward.  The snow on which he walked became hard ice, and instead of sloping upward ran ahead almost in a horizontal line.  Suddenly, however, it narrowed; Hine became conscious of appalling depths on either side of him; it narrowed with extraordinary rapidity; half a dozen paces behind him he had been walking on a broad smooth path; now he walked on the width of the top of a garden wall.  His knees began to shake; he halted; he reached out vainly into emptiness for some support on which his shaking hands might clutch.  And then in front of him he saw Garratt Skinner sit down and bestride the wall.  Over Garratt Skinner’s head, he now saw the path by which he needs must go.  He was on the famous ice-ridge; and nothing so formidable, so terrifying, had even entered into his dreams during his sleep upon the rocks where he had bivouacked.  It thinned to a mere sharp edge, a line without breadth of cold blue ice, and it stretched away through the air for a great distance until it melted suddenly into the face of the mountain.  On the left hand an almost vertical slope of ice dropped to depths which Hine did not dare to fathom with his eyes; on the right there was no slope at all; a wall of crumbling snow descended from the edge straight as a weighted line.  On neither side could the point of the ax be driven in to preserve the balance.  Walter Hine uttered a whimpering cry: 

“I shall fall!  I shall fall!”

Garratt Skinner, astride of the ridge, looked over his shoulder.

“Sit down,” he cried, sharply.  But Walter Hine dared not.  He stood, all his courage gone, tottering on the narrow top of the wall, afraid to stoop, lest his knees should fail him altogether and his feet slip from beneath him.  To bend down until his hands could rest upon the ice, and meanwhile to keep his feet—­no, he could not do it.  He stood trembling, his face distorted with fear, and his body swaying a little from side to side.  Garratt Skinner called sharply to Pierre Delouvain.