The loose snow was shovelled away and the steps dug in the hard snow beneath, and the creepers upon our feet gave good grip in it. Thus, slowly, step by step, we descended the ridge and in an hour and a half had reached the cleavage, the most critical place in the whole descent. With the least possible motion of the feet, setting them exactly in the shovelled steps, we crept like cats across this slope, thrusting the points of our axes into the holes that had been made in the ice-wall above, moving all together, the rope always taut, no one speaking a word. When once Karstens was anchored on the further ice he stood and gathered up the rope as first one and then another passed safely to him and anchored himself beside him, until at last we were all across. Then, stooping to pass the overhanging ice-cliff that here also disputed the pack upon one's back, we went down to the long, long stretch of jagged pinnacles and bergs, and our intricate staircase in the masonry of them. Shovelling was necessary all the way down, but the steps were there, needing only to be uncovered. Passing our ridge camp, passing the danger of the great gable, down the rocks by which we reached the ridge and down the slopes to the glacier floor we went, reaching our old camp at 9.30 P. M., six and a quarter hours from the Parker Pass, twelve hours from the eighteen-thousand-foot camp in the Grand Basin, our hearts full of thankfulness that the terrible ridge was behind us. Until we reached the glacier floor the weather had been clear; almost immediately thereafter the old familiar cloud smother began to pour down from above and we saw the heights no more. [Sidenote: The Glacier Camp] The camp was in pretty bad shape. The snow that had fallen upon it had melted and frozen to ice, in the sun's rays and the night frosts, and weighed the tent down to the ground. But an hour's work made it habitable again, and we gleefully piled the stove with the last of our wood and used the last spoonfuls of a can of baking-powder to make a batch of biscuits, the first bread we had eaten in two weeks.