Читать книгу In Lakeland Dells and Fells онлайн

55 страница из 69

In this cleft the scene was wild in the extreme. Snow lay thick, and outside its shelter the gale boomed and moaned among the great crags above. The scene was bleak and wintry; the faces of the rock which were too abrupt for the snow to lie on were crusted with ice. From the top of the first reach of the Lord’s Rake Messrs. Robinson and Gibbs struck off along the grassy ledge which gives easy access to Deep Ghyll. Here a sudden gust of wind loosened a stone high on the crags above, and they cowered under a rock as, with a crash and a bound through the air, it whizzed past into the dark recess immediately below.

The snow now became thicker, having been drifted into this wild ghyll by the wind, and on the steep bits near the top it was frozen sufficiently for them to kick their toes into the almost perpendicular slope, and go up it ladder fashion, holding on as best they could to insure safety. As the pair emerged on to the plateau on the top of Scawfell at 6.10 a.m. the mists began to roll away, and the first streaks of dawn were viable in the east. Across the Mickledore, a fearful, rock-split chasm, lay Scawfell Pike, to reach which involved a descent to Broad Stand and a scramble along the ice-coated ledges. Mr. Robinson says of this portion of their experience: ‘We were not prepared to find the climb in a more dangerous state than it was last year in midwinter, but such it was; and the alpenstocks we had provided ourselves with were without the usual spike in the end with which to roughen the ice to make a foothold. I took off the rucksack which held our lunch, and, with an arm through one strap while my friend held on to the other, kicked off the ice from ledge to ledge.’ Truly a risky mode of progression, when a single slip would have had irretrievable consequences.