At last we reached the shores of the frozen tarn and turned wearily up to the right. The path was in a shocking state, and on arriving at the cairn at the top of the pass we found a continuous glaze of ice along our route. So, at any rate, it seemed to be that night--my first experience of crossing the Styhead in the dark. It was nothing less than actual hand-and-foot work in many an awkward corner. Subsequent opportunities of climbing down the path in the dark have often been given me, but that first night was the worst. How we managed to avoid broken limbs has ever been a mystery. We would suddenly slip over on the ice, and slide furiously down the path and into some obstruction below. We had tried to smoke, but pipes were too dangerous to hold between the teeth during these unpremeditated rushes. But time ends all things. By ten o’clock we were anointed with Vaseline and massaged with Elliman, with the prospect of substantial fare to follow. The classic slippered into the dining-room to report himself. He had waited on Gable cairn till half-past three, and then had returned by the way he had come. Our lunch he had left under a stone, and as a guide to our finding it had stamped the snow down and drawn with his finger several arrows or asterisks or other marks of reference in the snow. It was very clever, but the fresh fall thwarted his ingenuity only too effectually. The Oblique Chimney rapidly became popular, and has since been visited by many climbers. But it can never be regarded as an easy ascent. Some time during the summer following I looked down it to see how a descent might be managed. The loose stones at the top were most uncomfortably unstable, and the clamber down towards the entrance of the upper cave required great care, without being exactly perilous. A friend was with me who counselled waiting till we should find ourselves up there again with a rope, and ultimately his advice prevailed. Some eighteen months later, in January, 1895, a large party of Wastdale Christmas revellers made for the Oblique Chimney top. The crags were approached from the scree below, a few feet to the north of the entrance to the Central Gully. We took to a little chimney at once, and then up a grassy slope to another chimney that brought us to steep grass and scree with frequent outcrops of rock. Thence we made up towards the entrance to the Oblique Chimney then visible, and before reaching it clambered up an incipient gully on the left wall that bounds the scree just there. It led over the sharp crest of the buttress that supports the bottle-shaped pinnacle, and thence we had a steep but fairly easy descent of ten or twelve feet to a ledge that led round to the other side. The rocks were dry and very free from snow, so that each member of our party found himself able to pull up easily from ledge to ledge in the little gully till the notch between the pinnacle and the main wall was reached.