It was certainly no spot to linger in.  We looked down into a trough of driving mist, which sometimes swirled aside and showed a knuckle of black rock far below.  We ate some chocolate, while Wake shouted in my ear that now we had less step-cutting.  He did his best to cheer me, but he could not hide his anxiety.  Our faces were frosted over like a wedding-cake and the sting of the wind was like a whiplash on our eyelids.

The first part was easy, down a slope of firm snow where steps were not needed.  Then came ice again, and we had to cut into it below the fresh surface snow.  This was so laborious that Wake took to the rocks on the right side of the couloir, where there was some shelter from the main force of the blast.  I found it easier, for I knew something about rocks, but it was difficult enough with every handhold and foothold glazed.  Presently we were driven back again to the ice, and painfully cut our way through a throat of the ravine where the sides narrowed.  There the wind was terrible, for the narrows made a kind of funnel, and we descended, plastered against the wall, and scarcely able to breathe, while the tornado plucked at our bodies as if it would whisk us like wisps of grass into the abyss.

After that the gorge widened and we had an easier slope, till suddenly we found ourselves perched on a great tongue of rock round which the snow blew like the froth in a whirlpool.  As we stopped for breath, Wake shouted in my ear that this was the Black Stone.

‘The what?’ I yelled.

’The Schwarzstein.  The Swiss call the pass the Schwarzsteinthor.  You can see it from Grunewald.’

I suppose every man has a tinge of superstition in him.  To hear that name in that ferocious place gave me a sudden access of confidence.  I seemed to see all my doings as part of a great predestined plan.  Surely it was not for nothing that the word which had been the key of my first adventure in the long tussle should appear in this last phase.  I felt new strength in my legs and more vigour in my lungs.  ’A good omen,’ I shouted.  ‘Wake, old man, we’re going to win out.’

‘The worst is still to come,’ he said.

He was right.  To get down that tongue of rock to the lower snows of the couloir was a job that fairly brought us to the end of our tether.  I can feel yet the sour, bleak smell of wet rock and ice and the hard nerve pain that racked my forehead.  The Kaffirs used to say that there were devils in the high berg, and this place was assuredly given over to the powers of the air who had no thought of human life.  I seemed to be in the world which had endured from the eternity before man was dreamed of.  There was no mercy in it, and the elements were pitting their immortal strength against two pigmies who had profaned their sanctuary.  I yearned for warmth, for the glow of a fire, for a tree or blade of grass or anything which meant the sheltered homeliness of mortality.  I knew then what the Greeks meant by panic, for I was scared by the apathy of nature.  But the terror gave me a kind of comfort, too.  Ivery and his doings seemed less formidable.  Let me but get out of this cold hell and I could meet him with a new confidence.