I looked through these Scottish pages again the other day, the first time for quite a while - Scotland feels a distant memory now I`m here in Switzerland. Grainy though these scanned slides are, they are from an exciting time in my outdoor life. On every excursion I tingled with fresh excitement at the wonder of it all. But rows 5 and 6 tell the downside of that thrill-seeking. The stretcher you see here contains the dying body of a French father-of-two, his bloodied torso wrapped in my spare down jacket. But keeping him warm merely delayed the inevitable. He had tripped, unroped, on the approach to Point Five Gully and had cartwheeled down the slope, propelled in sommersault fashion by the front points of his crampons catching on the hard ice beneath him. Given a bit of luck, he could have survived relatively unscathed. I once watched a climber fall seemingly more severely than this on Mount Assiniboine in Canada in 1988. He stood up, let out a yell of relief and continued on down. But that luck was denied this Frenchman on Ben Nevis in 1992. He banged his face on a rock on the way down and that one single strike of fate was decisive. A few months later the jacket arrived back by parcel post. Despite her obvious grief, his wife, bless her, had taken the trouble to have it dry-cleaned. I don`t know what more to write.