The brown crags seemed to look at me with a kind of friendly recognition, and, with a surer and firmer feeling than I possessed on ascending, I swung myself from crag to crag and from ledge to ledge with a velocity which surprised myself. I reached the summit of the Kamm, and saw the party which I had passed an hour and a half before, emerging from one of the hollows of the mountain; they had escaped from the edge which now lay between them and me. The thought of the possible loss of my axe at the summit was here forcibly revived, for without it I dared not take a single step. My first care was to anchor it firmly in the snow, so as to enable it to bear at times nearly the whole weight of my body. In some places, however, the anchor had but a loose hold; the "cornice" to which I have already referred became granular, and the handle of the axe went through it up to the head, still, however, remaining loose. Some amount of trust had thus to be withdrawn from the staff and placed in the limbs. A curious mixture of carelessness and anxiety sometimes fills the mind on such occasions. I often caught myself humming a verse of a frivolous song, but this was mechanical, and the substratum of a man's feelings under such circumstances is real earnestness. The precipice to my left was a continual preacher of caution, and the slope to my right was hardly less impressive. I looked down the former but rarely, and sometimes descended for a considerable time without looking beyond my own footsteps. The power of a thought was illustrated on one of these occasions. I had descended with extreme slowness and caution for some time, when looking over the edge of the cornice I saw a row of pointed rocks at some distance below me. These I felt must receive me if I slipped over, and I thought how before reaching them I might so break my fall as to arrive at them unkilled. This thought enabled me to double my speed, and as long as the spiky barrier ran parallel to my track I held my staff in one hand, and contented myself with a slight pressure upon it.