And now we came to a stretch of our journey beside which the worst that had gone before was mere pastime. Strive as I may, I cannot get clear in my mind the events of the next few days. I wouldn't even be sure how many days we travelled, for it is all a blurry nightmare to me, with nothing remaining distinct but a ghastly memory of constantly increasing cold and misery and exhaustion. What few facts rise up vaguely out of the confusion I have tried to re-assemble and set down in order, but I will stake nothing on them. It may be we didn't travel far as distance would be measured on the flat. There was no flat in that country to measure the distance on. All was sheer cliff or tremendous wall-sided ravine. The greater part of the time we seemed to be crawling along a mere thread of projecting ledge and looking down into awful abysses of rock and snow; and most perilous of all were the rare places where our route looked to be easier. We halted before one such, which I should have said was a moderately passable snow-paved surface of rock, but after some hesitation Philipson shook his head and turned aside. We climbed a rugged scarp to the left, from which we could overlook the way we should have taken, and coming at length to a ledge broad enough to stand the five of us, Philipson stopped, picked up a fragment of rock, and heaved it over the cliff side. The stone clattered hoarsely down, then disappeared in the fluid powdery snow, which closed silently in over it so that you wouldn't have known the surface had been disturbed. 'It is well that I did not let you go on,' muttered Philipson. 'That means deep snow--an enormous drift in a ravine. Not one of us would have come out of it alive.' He led on, picking a way with extreme care and, as it seemed to me, a perfectly uncanny instinct for safety, but at the best our advance was no more than a laborious crawl. Though the snow had evaporated off the more exposed faces of the mountain, the treacherous, swallowing drifts were everywhere, and there was a fantastic suggestion about it all of crossing a flooded country by shallows. Time and again we halted while Philipson, mistrusting even his own intuition, hurled great stones into the crevasses to estimate whether they were "fordable" or not.