KERN KNOTTS CRACK.--One fine morning in April I started off for Keswick, grieved to leave Wastdale and feeling strong after a fortnight’s scrambling. Surely if the crack could be done at all now would be the time, with weather and physical fitness corresponding. Our party was small; two men were coming with me to look at Kern Knotts, and subsequently to exploit the Oblique Chimney, the where-abouts of which had puzzled them the previous day. It was a bargain between us that they should help me in the crack and I should lead up the Oblique Chimney afterwards. The advantage was thus all my own, and their brotherly kindness drew me to them. It was in the preceding winter that Hill had let me down from the top of the crack for a distance of fifty feet to a small loose platform of rock, and I had with extreme effort managed to return without tugging the rope. Since that time there had been opportunity to reflect and decide that if I could get up to the platform from below and then help another to the same level, we could jointly manage the ascent of the crack without further aid. If the platform could not hold two, it would be a case of ascending the worst part of the crack, the splayed-out portion some twelve feet high, without assistance. On reaching the spot things looked cheerful enough. The rocks were dry, and I found that imagination had somewhat magnified my early impressions of the wall. But the reality is bad enough. The wall is one side of a buttress about one hundred feet in height, and marvellously smooth to look at. It is out down from top to bottom by a clean-edged slit passing right through the buttress and forming on the other side, as I have already explained, the now familiar Kern Knotts Chimney. At a height of thirty feet or so from the foot is the little platform, the niche at the back of which looks as though carved out for the reception of a piece of statuary. The portion of the crack that leads up this first part has a slightly different outlook; it is more open, and is provided with holds of a shaky description. Getting a companion to hold himself in this, I mounted his shoulder and felt about with the hands. There was nothing at all that seemed firm. So I called for the axe, and, remembering certain tactics in an awful rock climb in Northern Italy some years before, I rammed the axe longitudinally into the crack and endeavoured to use it as a hold. The plan is sometimes effective; it is not sufficiently often adopted _in extremis_; but on this occasion it would not act; the loose stones in the cleft were simply levered out of place, and I had to pass the axe down again. Then ensued a few moments’ fatiguing suspension from one arm with but poor foothold to ease the strain. It was no go this time; I had to let myself down and rest awhile. Next we sat on a boulder opposite the wall, and stared at it silently for a space. Surely that must be a foothold ten feet up on the edge of the crack. If, while I mounted his