: Cutting a staircase three miles long in the ice of the
shattered ridge.]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I have since learned that this mountain was named Mount Brooks by
Professor Parker, and so withdraw the suggested name.

[2] See frontispiece.

CHAPTER III

THE NORTHEAST RIDGE

Some of the photographs we succeeded in getting will show better than
any words the character of the ridge we had to climb to the upper basin
by. The lowest point of the ridge was that nearest our camp. To reach
its crest at that point, some three hundred feet above the glacier, was
comparatively easy, but when it was reached there stretched ahead of us
miles and miles of ice-blocks heaved in confusion, resting at insecure
angles, poised, some on their points, some on their edges, rising in
this chaotic way some 3,000 feet. Here one would have to hew steps up
and over a pinnacle, there one must descend again and cut around a great
slab. Our wisest course was to seek to reach the crest of the ridge much
further along, beyond as much of this ice chaos as possible. But it was
three days before we could find a way of approach to the crest that did
not take us under overhanging icebergs that threatened continually to
fall upon our heads, as the overhanging hill threatened Christian in the
"Pilgrim's Progress." At last we took straight up a steep gully, half of
it snow slope, the upper half ice-incrusted rock, and hewed steps all
the five hundred feet to the top. Here we were about half a mile beyond
the point at which we first attained the crest, with that half mile of
ice-blocks cut out, but beyond us the prospect loomed just as difficult
and as dangerous. We could cut out no more of the ridge; we had tried
place after place and could reach it safely at no point further along.
The snow slopes broke off with the same sharp cleavage the whole ridge
displayed two thousand five hundred feet above; there was no other
approach.

[Sidenote: The Shattered Ridge]

So our task lay plain and onerous, enormously more dangerous and
laborious than that which our predecessors encountered. We must cut
steps in those ice-blocks, over them, around them, on the sheer sides of
them, under them--whatever seemed to our judgment the best way of
circumventing each individual block. Every ten yards presented a
separate problem. Here was a sharp black rock standing up in a setting
of ice as thin and narrow and steep as the claws that hold the stone in
a finger-ring.