"REMEMBER," SAYS Hamish MacInnes, 70, reminiscing about the 1950s, "at this time the ice ax was still considered a cutting implement, not a tool for direct adhesion. One had to be completely ambidextrous. Hang on by one hand and cut with the other. You got into the habit of being much further out than climbers are today."

MacInnes leans forward, the great blade of his nose protruding from a sallow, stern face. "It was strenuous and bloody dangerous."

Getch and I have cornered MacInnes in the pub of the Ballachulish Hotel in the bleak feudal valley of Glencoe, Scotland. It is still pouring outside, great swaths of black liquid. The relentlessness of the rain seems almost malevolent. Already I am beginning to believe that every Scot with any sense left this soggy land the minute Australia was discovered. There is good reason why those who stayed drink.

But Hamish MacInnes, with a thin white beard yet still big-shouldered, reminding you of the force he once was, has ordered orange juice. MacInnes is a climbing legend, one of the few who put up new routes over several decades and somehow survived the bad gear and worse weather. He estimates he has lost 40 friends to the mountains. He, along with Graeme Nicol and the lyric mountain churl Tom Patey (who died in 1970 falling off a sea stack called The Maiden), did the first ascent of Ben Nevis's Zero Gully, then one of the hardest ice climbs in the world, in 1957.

"I climbed a lot with Patey," MacInnes says. "He was always rather amusing. One day he came down to see me with a couple of those hand cultivators that the ladies use in the garden. He figured you could strap these claws to your hands." MacInnes allows himself a thin-lipped grin.

"Unfortunately these claws needed some means of forcing them into the ice. Patey wasn't much of an engineer."

But MacInnes was. He had been designing mountaineering equipment since the late 1940s. His own homemade incline-picked ice hammer had been nicknamed The Message by fellow mountaineers. The mythic Message, like the sword in the stone, had an all-metal shaft, an innovation MacInnes believes was his greatest contribution to climbing.

"It was quite common to find broken axes in rescues," he continues. "Three people died while attempting Zero Gully because of wood-shafted axes. They were using the axes in a traditional boot-ax belay, and when one of them fell, the rope snapped the ax heads right off. We found the wood stumps still stuck in the snow."

MacInnes designed his all-metal ice ax in 1948, began mass production in 1960, and by the mid-1970s had perfected his notorious, prehistoric-looking "Terrordactyl" ice hammer.

"The inclined pick and the metal shaft, those are what really started the ice-climbing revolution," MacInnes says.

I try to get him to talk more about the glory days, but he is disinclined to do so.

"You know who you should talk to? That Yank. Yvon Chouinard."

When we step from the Ballachulish, it's still raining. Big black pellets. "Ach, this bloody rain," MacInnes groans. "You never really get used to it."