The agreeable change of finding ourselves together in that curious coign was hardly disturbed by Somervell’s remark, “We’re very near the end of our candle.” We felt we were all very near the end of our journey, for we had dimly made out from the higher level we had just quitted the neat rank of our tents still standing on the shelf below and ready to welcome us. We had only to find the rope which had been fixed on the steep slope below us and we should be at the end of our troubles. But the rope was deeply buried, and we searched in vain, dragging the snow with our picks along the edge of the fall. We were still searching when the last of our candle burnt out. In the end we must do without the rope, and began the abrupt descent tentatively, dubiously, uncertain that we had hit off just the right place. The situation was decidedly disagreeable. Suddenly someone among us hitched up the rope from under the snow. It may be imagined we were not slow to grasp it. The blessed security of feeling the frozen but helpful thing firmly in our hands! We positively made some sort of a noise; unrecognisable, perhaps, it would have been to sober daylight beings who know how to produce the proper effect, but if a dim bat of the night were asked what this noise resembled, he might have indicated that distantly, but without mistake it was like a cheer. A few minutes more and then—then, at 11.30 p.m., and there on the good flat snow as we fumbled at the tent-doors, then and there at last we began to say, “Thank God.”