IT'S RAINING IN Edinburgh, the city's Gothic spire to Robert Louis Stevenson shrouded in clouds. Getch and I search along slippery cobblestone streets, find Jimmy Marshall's home on a small lane, and knock.

"Come in, come in!"

We are escorted up narrow stairs to a spacious, book-lined living room. Our host offers tea. Marshall, 71, is a spry, slender man with the gayest of eyes. He radiates an ineluctable lightness of being. He has been an architect his whole life. Getch and I pepper him with questions about all the famous routes he put up, but he is loath to dwell on his accomplishments. Instead he relates anecdotes of the "tremendous ice climbers" of Scotland who came before him.

Norman Collie, who in 1894 made the first winter ascent of Tower Ridge on Ben Nevis.

John MacKenzie, Collie's partner for 50 years, who would strip off his boots and climb in his woolen socks to gain more friction—a technique Marshall admits to having resorted to himself.

Harold Raeburn, who did the first ascent of Green Gully on Ben Nevis in 1909, a feat that would not be repeated for 31 years.

Bill Murray, who wrote the first draft of his classic history, Mountaineering in Scotland, on toilet paper as a prisoner of war in Bavaria during the Second World War, only to have it discovered and confiscated by the Gestapo. And then wrote the whole thing again, from memory, in a prison camp in Czechoslovakia.

"Murray inspired a lot of young people to take up ice climbing," Marshall tells us, his eyes gleaming. "I was walking the Highlands a lot in the forties. We were climbing in snow and ice just as a natural sort of thing. That's what you did. It's so damned attractive in the hills in winter, you know. Winter's a classic time. It's absolutely wonderful.

"It's really all about linking with nature. Coming close to rocks and hills and exposing yourself to wilderness and wild weather and all the rest of it. It gives you a tremendous sense of belonging, of being part of it. The poetry of it." Marshall pauses and looks out the window longingly, as if he could see the Highlands. "It's quite overwhelming."

Getch tells Marshall of our trembling ascent of The Chute and how weevily and variable the ice seemed to be.

"That's the great joy of winter climbing, isn't it?" he says. "I mean, there's really no such thing as a first ascent!"

We ask about the climbing techniques Marshall employed to climb bad ice with one bad tool.

"We had this terrible labor of hacking away at the ice," Marshall replies with a rueful snicker. "A hell of a job it was. And then the knack of going over a final end of a pitch, you were just walking in wee scrapes in the thinner surfaces. It was quite hairy."

Marshall suddenly springs from his chair as if he were half a century younger, disappears from the room for a moment, and returns with his wood-shafted ice ax—a beautiful antique with the tiny teeth on the straight pick almost worn away and the edges of the adze completely rounded off from chopping hundreds of thousands of holds.

He stands in the living room and gives us a demonstration, nimbly dancing up aninvisible wall of ice. Raising the ax above his head to chop handholds, two precise blows for each one, spreading his legs, leaning delicately from one side to the other, stepping up, throwing the ice ax to his other hand, and chopping another set of tiny holds.

"The real skill was being able to balance and cut steps. Can you imagine it!"

His movements are so graceful, Getch and I are speechless.

"With the stick-and-pick techniques of modern tools, you're not actually in balance. You don't need to be because you're just always supported by your tools and your crampons."

"It seems desperate," I say.

"We didn't think it was particularly risky," Marshall responds, still deftly scaling his imaginary wall.

"Did you ever fall?" I ask.

He stops, lowers his ax, and drops his lively eyes to the two boys on his couch.

"I have never fallen. That really was virtually death."