for on some of them you could get two thousand feet of good rock.
We got our glasses on the face of Sgurr Alasdair, and he sketched
out for me various ways of getting to its grim summit. The Coolin
and the Dolomites for him, for he had grown tired of the Chamonix
aiguilles. I remember he described with tremendous gusto the joys
of early dawn in Tyrol, when you ascended through acres of flowery
meadows to a tooth of clean white limestone against a clean blue
sky. He spoke, too, of the little wild hills in the Bavarian
Wettersteingebirge, and of a guide he had picked up there and
trained to the job.

'They called him Sebastian Buchwieser. He was the jolliest boy
you ever saw, and as clever on crags as a chamois. He is probably
dead by now, dead in a filthy jaeger battalion. That's you and your
accursed war.'

'Well, we've got to get busy and end it in the right way,' I said.
'And you've got to help, my lad.'

He was a good draughtsman, and with his assistance I drew a
rough map of the crevice where we had roosted for the night,
giving its bearings carefully in relation to the burn and the sea.
Then I wrote down all the details about Gresson and the Portuguese
Jew, and described the latter in minute detail. I described, too,
most precisely the cache where it had been arranged that the
messages should be placed. That finished my stock of paper, and I
left the record of the oddments overheard of the conversation for a
later time. I put the thing in an old leather cigarette-case I possessed,
and handed it to Wake.
'You've got to go straight off to the Kyle and not waste any