Juss was their leader in the ice-fall, guiding them now along high knife-edges that fell away on either hand to unsounded depths, now within the very lips of those chasms, along the bases of the ice-towers. These, five times a man’s height, some square, some pinnacled, some shattered or piled with the ruins of their kind, leaned above the path, as ready to fall and overwhelm the climbers and dash their bones for ever down to those blue-green secret places of frost and silence where the chips of ice chinked hollow as Juss pressed onward, cutting his steps with Mivarsh’s axe. At length the slope eased and they walked out on the unbroken surface of the glacier, and passing by a snow-bridge over the great rift betwixt the glacier and the mountain side came two hours before noon to the foot of the rock-rib that they had scanned from Ailinon. Now was Brandoch Daha to lead them. They climbed face to the rock, slowly and without rest, for sound and firm as the rocks were the holds were small and few and the cliffs steep. Here and there a chimney gave them passage upward, but the climb was mainly by cracks and open faces of rock, a trial of main strength and endurance such as few might sustain for a short while only: but this wall was three thousand feet in height. By noon they gained the crest, and there rested on the rocks too weary to speak, looking across the avalanche-swept face of Koshtra Pivrarcha to the corniced parapet that ended against the western precipices of Koshtra Belorn. For some way the ridge of the buttress was broad and level. Then it narrowed suddenly to the width of a horse’s back, and sprang skyward two thousand feet and more. Brandoch Daha went forward and climbed a few feet up the cliff. It bulged out above him, smooth and holdless. He tried it once and again, then came down saying, “Nought without wings.” Then he went to the left. Here hanging glaciers overlooked the face from on high, and while he gazed an avalanche of ice-blocks roared down it. Then he went to the right, and here the rocks sloped outward, and the sloping ledges were piled with rubbish and the rocks rotten and slippery with snow and ice. So having gone a little way he returned, and, “O Juss,” he said, “wilt take it right forth, and that must be by flying, for hold there is none: or wilt go east and dodge the avalanche: or west, where all is rotten and slither and a slip were our destruction?”