By the light of a match that we kept flaming for a sufficient time in an improvised tent of coats, he examined the pocket compass he carried, and was confident that ten minutes’ good going would carry us down to the grassy shoulder below the White Napes. On we went steadily downwards, and I wondered whether, if we took to running when the boulders were passed, we might get down in time to start dinner at the usual hour. Happy thoughts in this connection kept me from attending particularly to our route and its details, but when we got to a thicker mist I looked about for a landmark. Nothing could be recognised. The ground sloped rapidly down on the right; the left seemed to rise most oddly to a sort of ridge. But the strange thing was that there seemed to be another mountain fronting us. K. was at a complete loss, and took out his compass again. We erected the tent once more, and all crowded over the instrument to determine our fate. Alas, we had been travelling towards the north! K. had mistaken the two poles of the magnet. The mountain mass looming ahead was the Green Gable, and we were within a few feet of the Wind Gap. Our dinner was at least two hours further away than ever, and we were still hungry. There was nothing to be done but walk round the mountain by way of the Styhead tarn and pass. We had no lantern, and it would have been a legbreaking business to attempt to skirt the Ennerdale face and strike off the Moses’ Sledgate in the dark. The snow was soft all the way down Aaron Slack. I have often come down in daylight since and wondered what we could have found to tumble over that night; we were always slipping through snow pitfalls into water, or tripping over boulders and on to our heads in snowdrifts. Now and again we would find ourselves sitting side by side in the stream, the leader’s tumbling having been too sudden to permit of any warning to the others. Such occasions we generally seized on as suitable opportunities for halting, only to be ended by sleepy realization that the water was both damp and cold. And all the time the inexperienced classic was enjoying his dinner and his phrase-making in princely luxury and comfort at the inn.