About noon we reached the base of the mountain spur toward which our course was bent. It projects into the western border of Agassiz glacier. It is the extension of this cliff underneath the glacier that caused the ice-fall which blocked our way. To go round the end of the cliff with our packs was impracticable, but there seemed a way up the face of the cliff itself, which one could scale by taking advantage of the joints in the rocks. I ascended the snow-slope to the base of the precipice, but found the way upward more difficult than anticipated; and, as the light was very painful to my eyes when not protected by colored glasses, I decided to postpone making the climb until I was in better condition, and in the meantime to see if some other route could not be found. We decided to camp on a small patch of débris near the base of the cliff, and there left our loads. Kerr and Lindsley, taking a rope and alpenstocks, went around the end of the rocky spur and worked their way upward with great difficulty to the top of the cliff immediately above where I had essayed to climb it. A rope was made fast at the top, and our way onward was secured. This place was afterward called _Rope cliff_. The remainder of the afternoon I rested in the tent, with my eyes bound up with tea-leaves, and when evening came found the pain in my head much relieved. Our tent that night was so near the brink of a crevasse that in order to stay the tent one end of the ridge-rope was made fast to a large stone, which was lowered into the gulf to serve as a stake. Above us rose a precipice nearly a thousand feet high, from which stones were constantly falling; but a deep black gulf intervened between the position we had chosen and the base of the cliffs, and into this the stones were precipitated. Not one of the falling fragments reached the edge of the snow slope on which we were camped, but many times during the night we heard the whiz and hum of the rocks as they shot down from the cliffs. {150} The noise made by each fragment in its passage through the air increased rapidly in pitch, thus indicating that they were approaching us; but they always fell short of our camp. The bombardment from above was most active just after the shadows fell on the cliffs, showing that the stones were loosened by the freezing of the water in the interstices of the rock.