was to carry him manually.

Both Lees and Robertson were big men, about six feet tall, and fourteen stone in weight; the others had considerable difficulty in hoisting the casualty on to Lee's back. Once Robertson was trussed there and supported in a cradle of rope, the guide was helped to stand up. He tottered to the edge and looked down.

This was when Robertson started to struggle in delirium and Lees thought of the breaking strain of nylon, of twenty-eight stone supported by fine rope, of the men for whose training he had been responsible, and who were now responsible for his own life and that if the other. But the dominant thought was speed and the other man's life - and they started over the edge and down the vertical wall.

While they were being lowered, the rest of the team and the Army were bringing the stretcher down the side of the cliff. So there were other at the foot of the wall when Lees arrives in the amphitheatre, waiting to relieve him of his load.

The long evacuation route to the road-head in Cwm Eigiau was gruelling. All the men had been working for hours on the mountain, and now they were faced with a carry across bogs where there were no tracks that were all bog. And when they reached the road there was no sign of the ambulance. Increasingly aware of the need for speed (it was about 1.0 a.m. now) they continued down the road on foot. After a mile and half they met the ambulance. It has been misdirected.

Hugh Robertson recovered despite his fractured skull and the twelve hours which elapsed between the fall and his admittance to hospital. Lees was awarded the George Medal for his part in the rescue; this, he maintained, he could not have earned without the team; what he rated as a personal achievement was the tragsitz which Robertson obtained from Austria at his suggestion. But what did more for the morale or the standard of the team than either medal or tragsitz was the fact that they had got two men down alive. For all the horror and futility of those other rescues when they came down with nothing but a shattered shell on the stretcher, this made it worth while. Living men and women they regarded with possessive pride as their own achievement and their own special reward.

The character of a rescue will change immediately the casualty is found. If he is alive, the sense of urgency which has marked the operation so far is intensified. But if he is dead, the life goes out of the team: they become sullen and exhibit a peculiar resentfulness of which they seem to be unaware. And the greater the number of such casualties, the more intense the reaction of the rescuers. We are all difficult to some extent after contact with death, but after the multiple tragedies, there is a feeling almost of shame in the team. This is not surprising; even in one's own smouldering anger (as the long cortéges wind down the mountain) there is a shadow of guilt.

Some years after the High Robertson accident, a party of schoolboys were camped in Nantgwynant, and one day five of these, with a master, started at 1.30 p.m. to climb Snowdon via Crib Goch and Crib y Ddisgl, intending to descend to their camp by the Watkin Path.

They were given a thorough briefing at the foot of Crib Goch, then they started up into cloud - but before they reached the summit the two parties had lost contact with each other. They were roped in two parties of three, with the master leading the first party. One of the objects of the expedition was to teach them rope management. Continue to page 7