d with a tangle of seaweed. It was of a softer
stone than the hard stuff in the hills and somebody had scraped off
half the seaweed and a slice of the side. 'That wasn't done yesterday
morning, for I had my bath here.'

Wake got up and examined the place. He nosed about in the crannies of
the rocks lining the inlet, and got into the water again to explore
better. When he joined me he was smiling. 'I apologize for my
scepticism,' he said. 'There's been some petrol-driven craft here in
the night. I can smell it, for I've a nose like a retriever. I daresay
you're on the right track. Anyhow, though you seem to know a bit about
German, you could scarcely invent immortal poetry.'

We took our belongings to a green crook of the burn, and made a very
good breakfast. Wake had nothing in his pack but plasmon biscuits and
raisins, for that, he said, was his mountaineering provender, but he
was not averse to sampling my tinned stuff. He was a different-sized
fellow out in the hills from the anaemic intellectual of Biggleswick.
He had forgotten his beastly self-consciousness, and spoke of his hobby
with a serious passion. It seemed he had scrambled about everywhere in
Europe, from the Caucasus to the Pyrenees. I could see he must be good
at the job, for he didn't brag of his exploits. It was the mountains
that he loved, not wriggling his body up hard places. The Coolin, he
said, were his favourites, for on some of them you could get two
thousand feet of good rock. We got our glasses on the face of Sgurr
Alasdair, and he sketched out for me various ways of getting to its
grim summit. The Coolin and the Dolomites for him, for he had grown
tired of the Chamonix aiguilles. I remember he described with
tremendous gusto the joys of early dawn in Tyrol, when you ascended
through acres of flowery meadows to a tooth of clean white limestone
against a clean blue sky. He spoke, too, of the little wild hills in
the Bavarian Wettersteingebirge, and of a guide he had picked up there
and trained to the job.

'They called him Sebastian Buchwieser. He was the jolliest boy you ever
saw, and as clever on crags as a chamois. He is probably dead by now,
dead in a filthy jaeger battalion. That's you and your accursed war.'

'Well, we've got to get busy and end it in the right way,' I said. 'And
you've got to help, my lad.'

He was a good draughtsman, and with his assistance I drew a rough map
of the crevice where we had roosted for the night, giving