Page:My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus (1908).djvu/361

loose rocks, for undercut ice, and all the traps and pitfalls that Madame Nature scatters with such profusion among the "lonely hills"? The chief source of danger is this need for incessant care, the unvarying readiness of ice, snow, and rock to punish relentlessly an instant's forgetfulness, or the most trifling neglect. The first lesson the novice has to learn is to be ever on his guard, and it is one that the oldest climber rarely fully masters. Unfortunately it is one which the beginner must find out for himself, it is a habit that must be acquired, and to which no road, other than constant practice, will ever lead him. It wants long experience to impress upon the mind that the chief danger of extremely difficult climbing is to be found on the easy places by which it is followed; that it lies less in the stress of desperate wrestling with the crags than in the relaxed attention which such work is apt to induce on the return to comparatively easy ground. Nothing is more usual than to hear a man say after some very formidable ascent—it may even be read in the Alpine Journal—that on the way up, certain preliminary rocks appeared distinctly difficult, but on the way down, after the terrible grapple with the cliffs above, these same rocks appeared "ridiculously easy." It is the delusive appearance of safety presented by these "ridiculously easy rocks" that swells the list of Alpine victims. There are few, even of the oldest and most cunning climbers, who