071- Action -Joseph Kearns

Suspense, which is usually heard at this hour on Thursday nights, is taking its customary summer holiday. Suspense returns to the air six weeks from tonight on Thursday, September 1st. We're hanging by your fingertips on the sheer face of an icy cliff.

Suspended a thousand feet above instant death, with your strength running out, and with no chance for escape. We offer you escape, designed to free you from the four walls of today for a half hour of high adventure.

Tonight we escape to the cold loneliness of a glacier high in the Swiss Alps, and to a man who learned much about death, as C.E. Maudigue tells it in his famous story, action. High in the Swiss Alps, well above 12,000 feet, a man plings with desperation to the frozen glass wall of the shally-ock glacier,

Hands and feet jammed in the shallow steps, chopped in the iron hard ice. A cold wind drives a spray of dusty sleet along the overhanging wall, and the sun has fallen away among the cranks to the west.

Darkness lies one hour ahead. The man has climbed with painful care a thousand feet up the glacious face from the broken moraine at the foot, and has moved now on hold the underside of a great bulge in the ice, a part of the wall which breaks out beyond the perpendicular.

And the man is forced to hang from slots cut by his axe, such as a sloth hangs from a tree branch. Twelve more feet lie between him and the brow of the overhang, six more steps to be chopped out with the axe, and a thousand feet of void space waits beneath him.