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Bonatti decided to abandon the ascent. At 10:30 a.m., the three men started down—their task made all the trickier because the surface of the rock was covered with fresh ice. Finally, at 6 p.m. they reached the base of the vertical wall and collapsed, exhausted, on a narrow ledge—the first horizontal surface they had seen in five days. They had not eaten or drunk in 72 hours, and when they staggered back into Zermatt after seven days on the Matterhorn, they discovered that newspapers had already given them up for dead. Dead? Next day Bonatti went skiing for exercise, and two days later he was back on the mountain, attacking the north wall again—this time by himself. Said Bonatti: "I'm on a war footing now."