Ragobir was sent to the front. He led us down the most precipitous places with tremendous rapidity and immense enjoyment. It was all 'good' according to him, and his cheery face down below made me feel that there could be no difficulty, till I found myself hanging down a slab of rock with but the barest of handholds, or came to a bulging mass of ice overhanging a steep gully, which insisted on protruding into the middle of my stomach, with direful result to my state of equilibrium. At one place where the ridge was a narrow knife edge, with precipices on both sides, we had a splendid piece of climbing. A sharp descent of about a hundred feet occurred on the arête which seemed at first sight impossible. Ragobir tried first on the right hand, but, owing to the smoothness of the rock slabs and the absence of all handholds, was unable to get down further than twenty feet or so. Whilst I was dangling the Gurkha on the end of the rope, Mummery discovered what he considered to be a possible solution of the difficulty. Ragobir was to climb about twenty-five feet down a small open chimney on the perpendicular south face of the ridge; he then would be on the top of a narrow flake of rock which was laid against the mountain-side in the same manner as those on the traverse of the Aiguille de Grépon. We could easily hold him from above whilst he edged sideways along this narrow way. After a short time he called out that it was all right, and I let down Lor Khan next. When I myself got on to the traverse I was very much impressed, not that it was very difficult, thanks to the splendid handholds, but the face was so perpendicular that without them one could hardly have stood on the narrow top of the slab without falling outwards. A loose stone when thrown out about twenty feet pitched on some snow at least five hundred feet below. I found Ragobir and Lor Khan on a small niche on the ridge which divided the arête into two and at the top of an incipient ice gully. With considerable difficulty I managed to squeeze on to the small platform of rock and direct operations. Ragobir cut his way down to the next place where he could rest; and, after carefully hitching the rope as safely as I could, Mummery was called on to follow. It was just the kind of place he enjoyed, but it needed some one with iron nerves to descend the somewhat difficult chimney and then edge along the traverse without a steadying-rope from above. After the descent of the ice gully the climbing proved much easier. Rapid progress was made in spite of an uncertainty as to where we were going, for everything was hidden by the afternoon mists. Our route kept slowly bending away to the south-west, and as Hastings's pass lay directly to the west, we hoped that another bend to the north-west would put us straight again.