Half an hour later we got off our ice slope and stepped almost on to the first summit. All our difficulties were over. After ploughing through some soft snow, at about half-past eleven o'clock we were seated on the true top of our peak, the height of which by the barometer turned out to be 19,000 feet.
We had climbed between 6000 and 7000 feet, and Mummery had led the whole way. The last 3000 feet had been very severe, for at first most of the steps had to be laboriously broken, and later we had to win our way by the use of the axe. But Mummery was perfectly fresh and could have gone on for hours, the diminished pressure (fifteen inches of mercury) having apparently no effect on him; neither was Ragobir any the worse for his climb; Lor Khan and I had slight headaches, but otherwise were quite fit for more. As we sat on the top enveloped in mist, Mummery and I debated afresh the old question, How should we feel if we ever ascended to 26,000 feet? Mummery reasoned that it would chiefly depend on our state of training at the time. Had I not been dreadfully ill at 18,000 feet crossing the Mazeno La, whilst here we were all right at 19,000 feet? Had we not ascended our last 3000 feet with hardly a rest and at exactly the same pace as if we had been climbing in the Alps? As it always takes two to argue, I perforce had to try my best as the opposition. At once I discovered that my headache was by no means a negligible quantity, and was therefore an excellent test for abnormal altitudes. Probably also mountain-sickness was a disease which lurked in the higher mountains and was ready at any moment to rush on and seize its prey. Luckily for us the particular bacillus was not just then in the surrounding atmosphere, consequently we had not been inoculated, yet perhaps should we on some future occasion go to 21,000 to 22,000 feet, we might be suddenly overwhelmed. Then I quoted an article I had read somewhere about paralysis and derangement of nerve-centres in the spinal column being the fate of all who insist on energetic action when the barometer stands at thirteen inches. It was no good, Mummery only laughed at me; and at this moment the mist clearing for a short space to the southward, we were soon far more interested with the view of the Thosho and Rupal peaks. The summit we were on fell away on the south directly under our feet in a series of rock precipices. We started on our homeward journey at about one o'clock without catching a single glimpse of Nanga Parbat. The descent of the steep ice slopes of our upward route was far too dangerous to attempt, so we decided on a rock ridge to the westward which we hoped would lead us down on the pass that Hastings had crossed earlier in the day.
Ragobir was sent to the front. He led us down the most precipitous places with tremendous rapidity and immense enjoyment. It was all 'good' according to him, and his cheery face down below made me feel that there could be no difficulty, till I found myself hanging down a slab of rock with but the barest of handholds, or came to a bulging mass of ice overhanging a steep gully, which insisted on protruding into the middle of my stomach, with direful result to my state of equilibrium.
At one place where the ridge was a narrow knife edge, with precipices on both sides, we had a splendid piece of climbing. A sharp descent of about a hundred feet occurred on the arête which seemed at first sight impossible. Ragobir tried first on the right hand, but, owing to the smoothness of the rock slabs and the absence of all handholds, was unable to get down further than twenty feet or so. Whilst I was dangling the Gurkha on the end of the rope, Mummery discovered what he considered to be a possible solution of the difficulty. Ragobir was to climb about twenty-five feet down a small open chimney on the perpendicular south face of the ridge; he then would be on the top of a narrow flake of rock which was laid against the mountain-side in the same manner as those on the traverse of the Aiguille de Grépon. We could easily hold him from above whilst he edged sideways along this narrow way. After a short time he called out that it was all right, and I let down Lor Khan next. When I myself got on to the traverse I was very much impressed, not that it was very difficult, thanks to the splendid handholds, but the face was so perpendicular that without them one could hardly have stood on the narrow top of the slab without falling outwards. A loose stone when thrown out about twenty feet pitched on some snow at least five hundred feet below.
I found Ragobir and Lor Khan on a small niche on the ridge which divided the arête into two and at the top of an incipient ice gully. With considerable difficulty I managed to squeeze on to the small platform of rock and direct operations. Ragobir cut his way down to the next place where he could rest; and, after carefully hitching the rope as safely as I could, Mummery was called on to follow. It was just the kind of place he enjoyed, but it needed some one with iron nerves to descend the somewhat difficult chimney and then edge along the traverse without a steadying-rope from above. After the descent of the ice gully the climbing proved much easier. Rapid progress was made in spite of an uncertainty as to where we were going, for everything was hidden by the afternoon mists. Our route kept slowly bending away to the south-west, and as Hastings's pass lay directly to the west, we hoped that another bend to the north-west would put us straight again.
We could not leave the ridge and traverse to our right, so perforce had to keep on descending, and when at last the mists did rise for a short time, we found our fears amply confirmed. The pass lay about a thousand feet above on our right, and, what was still more exasperating, the shortest route to it necessitated a still further descent of at least five hundred feet, followed by a traverse underneath the overhanging end of a glacier. An extra fifteen hundred feet of climbing up the unstable, interminable, and heart-breaking debris, which is so common on the south faces of the Himalaya, and that, too, late in the afternoon, was trying even to the best of tempers. I used quite unpublishable language, and even the imperturbable Mummery was moved to express his feelings in much more forcible language than was customary. There are occasions when language fails, and even the pen of Rudyard Kipling is unequal to depict the situation literally, though he does his best. There rises before me his description of that scene in the railway works at Jamalpur, where an apprentice is addressing, 'half in expostulation and half in despair, a very much disorganised engine which is sadly in need of repair.' Kipling gives us the gist of his language, but owns that after all the youth put it 'more crisply—very much more crisply.'
We reached the top at last, but even then we had to traverse to the westward half a mile before beginning the descent. Once started we went at racing speed, sometimes getting a long glissade down soft snow, sometimes a run down small stone debris; it was rather hard on poor Lor Khan, who was not shod for this kind of work, and was soon left far behind.
But it was getting late, and we wished to reach the camp before dark. Just as the sun was setting over the far-away hills in the wild, unknown Tangir, and shining through a thin veil of an evening shower, the tents under the Diamirai moraine were sighted; and during the after-dinner smoke opposite a roaring fire of pine logs we went over our day's adventures, and both agreed that we had enjoyed ourselves hugely: and so to bed.