path. Aware of the familiar sense of urgency (an injured man might be watching our lights at this moment) we went fast, but it seemed hours before the axe shone silver above the screes.

We turned off the path and started up the mountain. The survivor said that he had left his friend only a few hundred feet above the path. I reflected that it might be better for a small party to go ahead and ascertain the position, so that the people with the stretcher needn't labour unnecessarily up the face in the dark. I waited for Lees to come up and it was agreed that I should go on with one of the Bristol girls - Anne Clark, a medical student - and the survivor, in order to locate the casualty. The others sat down on the stretcher and lit cigarettes.

We pressed on, myself fully expecting to find the man at every step - that is, for the first few hundred feet. But we toiled on and on with the mountain steepening until eventually we seemed very close to the summit, which we saw as a black line against the stars. Once or twice I asked the survivor if he were sure that this was the right gully. He seemed less certain now.

At length I branched out across the face to our left. And so we started to weave backwards and forwards across the flank of Bheinn Fhada in the dark: slipping, recovering our balance, lowering ourselves over the drops, climbing the steps; the others were in vibrams, I was in nails, and the rocks were covered with black ice which didn't show in the light of our torches.

Some time during the night we met another contingent of searchers - from the youth hostel, I believe. Little was said; there was nothing to say. Nothing seemed certain now except that our quarry was in a gully somewhere between the path and the summit.

Occasionally I stopped, revolving the beam of my light, not so much searching as relaxing - feeling the mountain, thinking ...I would not go down until he was found. And we penetrated high up one gully, and turned to start down again across the face, and I looked back, up the side of the gully, out of the line of fall, and saw a body on the snow.

He was dead - and had been dead for some considerable time.

We left him and started down. It would have been dangerous to bring so many inexperienced people up here in the dark. We would come back in the morning. Continue to page 3