are not random affairs. The sweep search is a line of men placed out at intervals over a given area. They will be in radio contact with others sweeps in progress on a different part of the mountain. All will be in radio contact with their base. When the area becomes difficult, such as a field of very large boulders under any one of which an exhausted man might have crawled for shelter, the line contracts; over easy ground, such as a bare hillside of grass, it will spread out. At the end of a sweep they return on a parallel line.

When climbers fall on cliffs it is seldom difficult to locate them: they are on a ledge or at the bottom. If they can't be seen from a distance it is most probable that they are in a gully. (The bright clothes that most climbers wear nowadays have more than sartorial value.) Searches involving a fall on a cliff are seldom extensive. The big, frustrating searches are those in wide and untracked country: walking country as opposed to climbers' cliffs.

Walkers cover greater distances than climbers, their routes are more subject to a change of plan, and - worst of all - walking country is some of the most difficult to search. The most innocuous-looking burn - on a map a fine blue line across widely-spaced contours - may be, after rain, a torrent in a miniature gorge. If the little cliffs are well wooded, even a sweep search may miss the most important corner in mist.

A man vanished in country like this in 1951. The incident was unusual in that he was not a hiker, but a local resident, factor to an estate on Loch Arkaig, west of the Great Glen. He was young, twenty-seven, and had not been long in the are. He had poor eyesight and wore spectacles.

On February 2nd he left Glendessary at the head of the loch with two other men to inspect fences on the way to Kingie Lodge. The lodge was three or four miles distant to the north, across a watershed which reached 1,500 feet (see page 172).

The others left the factor about 12.30 p.m. at a point on the hill roughly two-thirds of the way to the lodge. They had arranged to meet later at Caonich on the northern shore of Loch Arkaig. Before he left them the factor had complained of the cold and taken a drink from his flask. He was wearing no coat.

He didn't turn up at the rendezvous on Loch Arkaig and that night it snowed heavily. The following morning a search party went across to Kingie Continue to page 13