Sidney Chambers and The Perils of the Night

A good passage

Why on earth did they want to do it? he wondered. Could it simply be the excitement: the idea that action is life and here was jeopardy at its most distilled? Was it, as he imagined mountaineering to be, the hypnotism of an immense terror drawing them on, the narrowness of the gap between life and death, the fact that one slip or a lapse in concentration could result in fatality?