Perhaps I’d crawled fifty feet when I came to the end of a plank, and, feeling further ahead and to the right and to the left, I could put my hand on no support save an iron girder at my right side. It was about eight inches wide, and no doubt extended to the edge of the bridge. To the right I thought I saw another plank, but to reach it I must crawl along the narrow, ice-covered beam. I had barely saved myself from disaster on the planking; how I’d fare on the iron, still narrower, I did not know. Ahead, as I became more accustomed to the darkness, I made out the next girder, but it was too far away. I must creep to the plank at my right or go back to Shinburn. Try as I might, I could find no other solution. My predicament can easily be understood, if any one doubts this history, by an attempt on hands and knees, in broad daylight, to crawl fifty feet along a board twelve inches wide, at an elevation of several hundreds of feet, and coming to the end of that narrow path, turn squarely, and, still on the hands and knees, creep along an eight-inch wide ice-covered iron beam. If this journey will not put the nerves to the test, then I’m no judge of human nature and endurance. But the full force of my danger can only be realized, when the course I have outlined has been gone over in such a night as I have described, with its howling winds and blinding snow clouds. A person who can accomplish the task without the trouble I felt must be a practised athlete or a monkey with a ringed tail.