My father was always too busy and absent-minded to worry much about us children; my mother did worry. Yet she allowed us to go off immediately after breakfast into the hills and did not complain much when we came back long after supper-time. Though she had a terror of heights herself she never restrained us from climbing about in dangerous places; so we never got hurt. I had a bad head for heights and trained myself deliberately and painfully to overcome it. We used to go climbing in the turrets and towers of Harlech Castle. I have worked hard on myself in defining and dispersing terrors. The simple fear of heights was the most obvious to overcome. There was a quarry-face in the garden of our Harlech house. It provided one or two easy climbs, but gradually I invented more and more difficult ones for myself. After each new success I had to lie down, shaking with nervousness, in the safe meadow grass at the top. Once I lost my foothold on a ledge and should have been killed; but it seemed as though I improvised a foothold in the air and kicked myself up to safety from it. When I examined the place afterwards it was almost as if the Devil had given me what he had offered Christ in the Temptation, the freedom to cast myself down from the rock and be restored to safety by the angels. Yet such events are not uncommon in mountain climbing. George Mallory, for instance, did an inexplicable climb on Snowdon once. He had left his pipe on a ledge half-way down one of the precipices and scrambled back by a short cut to retrieve it, then up again by the same way. No one saw just how he did the climb, but when they came to examine it the next day for official record, they found that it was an impossible overhang nearly all the way. The rule of the Climbers’ Club was that climbs should not be called after their inventors, but after natural features. An exception was made in this case; the climb was recorded something like this: ‘_Mallory’s Pipe_, a variation on Route 2; see adjoining map. This climb is totally impossible. It has been performed once, in failing light, by Mr. G. H. L. Mallory.’ VI