water in the dark, about a mile above Lochinver, and sighting the hospitable lights of the hotel by 9 P.M.

Just before entering the village, we stumbled against two men in the dark. It was Andrew Kerr, with a friend. We told him of our climb. It put him into a state of the greatest excitement. Consternation, incredulity, delight, poured out of him by turns, merging finally in a mixed state of indignation and enthusiasm, which suggested how much the S.M.C. has still to do in the way of familiarising the Highland mind to the idea of climbing for its own sake. To Andrew Kerr, it was not merely that the climb was useless and foolhardy; there was to him something half uncanny in our venturing up places which had not been climbed before. Nature had set her bounds, which man was not to pass. I was reminded much of what our dear friend Veitch used to say of the feeling of awe and more than human mystery with which the folk looked up the dark glens and hills of the Border country; the same spirit that was in the remark made to a young lady in my own glen, after the frightful gale of 17th November 1893, "Ah, my lamb, there was a rude forester at wark last nicht!" So now Andrew Kerr: “I never thought any living man would go up the Grey Castle. No man ever went that way before. There is a story that one man went down that way with a gun: but I do not believe it. He would go down, certainly; but he would never walk away from the bottom. But take my advice, and give it up; you would not like to lose your life at the bottom of a rock. I could see it was not the first time you had been on a hill; but take my advice, and give it up. Any way, they will never believe here that you was up that way!"

With this comforting assurance, and many a warm shake of the hand, he said "Good-night." Next day he came to see us off, and renewed his adjurations to us to give up climbing, again and again; and as a memento of the day, he presented me with a beautiful long hazel stick of his own making, to replace the old friend lost over the side of the "Grey Castle."

LOCHNAGAR BY THE CLIFFS.

BY WILLIAM TOUGH.

LOCHNAGAR has, for various reasons, long held a high place in popular favour among the mountains of Scotland. Some of these reasons there are, such as the ease of the ordinary routes of ascent and the example of Royalty, which, while doubtless appealing strongly to the bulk of visitors, do not at all influence the true mountain worshipper. But the principal reason is one which affects all classes; drawing upwards with varying power of fascination both the professed lover of high places and the tyro to whom the cult of the mountaineer is as one of the divine mysteries. For even among the lower orders—if I may use the expression without any reference to distinctions in the social scale-it will be acknowledged that the compelling attraction of Lochnagar is that magnificent crescent of cliffs which encircles the head of the great corrie and towers above the waters of the small dark loch, stern and sheer to the level of the summit plateau. One does not need to be a mountaineer to appreciate the grandeur of this range of precipices. Indeed, if the feeling of reverent awe is to be taken into account in analysing the emotions excited by such a scene, it is questionable whether the ordinary sensitive man or woman has not a distinct advantage over the trained mountaineer—especially if the latter be of the cliff-climbing variety on the hunt for a "first ascent."

Strangely enough no serious attempt to test the accessibility of the Lochnagar cliffs seems to have been made previous to the time of our visit, if we except the gully climb attempted by Messrs Gibson and Douglas, and described by the latter in the second volume of our Journal.* Their local reputation perhaps had something to do with this. "Why don't you climb the cliffs of Lochnagar ?" I was asked in Aberdeen the day before this very ascent. "They would try your mettle and give you something to talk about-if you succeeded." The irony of the remark was obvious, and the smile that accom* Vol. II., p. 246.

panied it that of the man who has made his point. But I kept my own counsel. My reputation for sanity had already suffered during a previous visit for suggesting the feasibility of such an undertaking, and I had no wish again to bring upon me the fate of the irreverent innovator.

It was a forenoon early in August when Brown and I dismounted at the gate of the small farmhouse of Inschnabobart. We had cycled up from Ballater without meeting with any of those exciting incidents which only prove their value in the period of reminiscence and description. The day, our only one, was well enough suited to our purpose. The higher summits, it is true, were all invisible, and as we topped the ridge we saw the black brows of the great frowning cliffs swathed in bands of fleecy mist. But below all was clear, and the work we had taken in hand lay plain before us.

A pretty exhaustive survey of the cliffs both from above and below had been made by my companion some weeks before, with the result that much time was probably saved on the present occasion. It had seemed to him that the most feasible line of attack was to be found on the precipice forming the central buttress of the N.W. division of the corrie. Here the cliffs attain about their greatest range in altitude and while presenting a tempting appearance of accessibility give promise of quite that degree of sensationalism which renders rock-climbing one of the most fascinating pastimes in the world.

The position of our climb is easily found in the ordinary photographs of Lochnagar corrie, as the buttress stands in the very centre of the picture, its base descending well down towards the loch in the form of a gigantic V. And now having made our selection we spent no time in wider investigation, but resolved to risk our solitary day on this one hazard.

With vivid recollections of the corries of Skye, and fresh from the boulder-strewn slopes at the head of Corrie Beach in Glencoe, we found the walk over the screes of Lochnagar gentle and easy to a degree. Passing above the lower range of rocks which continue the wall of separation between the two divisions of the corrie almost down

to the water's edge, we quickly reached the beginning of our climb and at once put on the rope.

: The part of the precipice we had chosen is, as we now saw, divided by two shallow water-worn gullies into three vertical sections of very unequal width. The principal of these, that most to the west, shows a very decided ridge on its extreme right running straight to the top. Our selected route lay up this ridge. But a very short examination

A, Gully attempted in March 1893. B, Black Spout.
The dotted line shows the route described.

showed us that any attempt to reach it by a perpendicular climb from the base of the cliff was out of the question. The most clearly indicated, possibly the only available, line of ascent at first, and for a considerable distance, lies up the face of the left-hand division of the buttress slightly to the left of the more easterly of the above-mentioned gullies.

For the first hundred feet or so we made excellent progress, although from the smoothness of the rocks and

the downward dip of the stratification the whole of this first part of the climb was distinctly more difficult than its appearance from below had led us to expect. The rock was nowhere shattered or weathered so as to give a firm footing. There were none of those slight projections round which a cast of the rope gives such a sense of security. Every fissure capable of holding the most infinitesimal quantity of soil had been taken advantage of to form a strip of green, so that, altogether, we had an exceedingly favourable opportunity of testing the various merits of the frictional method.

After crossing the first gully and establishing our position well up on the central section, we at length seemed to see our way stretching clearly before us. The plan we now adopted was to climb straight up and cross gully No. 2 at a point where the cliff retreats more sharply backwards, and a series of slight ledges appear to offer a comparatively easy route to the crest of the main ridge. The idea was good, but it wanted carrying out, and this, as we shortly found, was a task rather beyond our powers. For a short distance indeed Fortune seemed to bestow on our efforts her most propitious smile; then, having lured us on sufficiently far to suit her malevolent purpose, she abandoned us in a manner which I can now describe as utterly heartless, though another adjective would perhaps more clearly express my feelings at the time. It was a series of great slabs, steep, smooth, and fitted so closely together as to defy both finger-tip and toe, that barred our way. Even the trustworthy footing I always confidently look to find on Brown's head in cases of more than ordinary emergency failed me here. The support he would have had here was altogether too "moral" in its nature to enable him to bear the double strain, and nothing was left for us but to descend. I need hardly say that the process of "climbing down" loses none of its usual humiliating characteristics when the physical is added to the figurative significance of the act.

As is always the case on very steep rocks the descent cost us both more time and trouble than the ascent. But it was managed at last, and then we crossed the gully easily enough. The place where we did so was somewhat lower than the