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This dread was there, an intense agony at first, but beyond it arose the more important thought of what would become of her if he failed to attain the bottom of that cliff alive. Yet this was the very thing which steadied him, and brought back his courage.
We were vaguely conscious now and then that a river far below us clamoured for our bones; on one side we had a precipice, on the other a sheer face of towering cliff. Gorges, glorious gorges! a plethora of gorges. No sooner were we out of one, and drawing breath in a valley of golden sunshine and silver river, but we were back in another majestic cañon.
Then with a glance towards the cliff he started the working chant "Ayee-ho, Ayee-ho!" The two gangs twenty men to each windlass took it up with one voice, and to the deep intoned chant the chains tautened, shuddered for a moment, and began to lift. "Ayee-ho!" Silently, irresistibly, the chain drew the rock from its bed.
I had watched the rocks as they went down the cliff and it seemed nearly every one of them bounced off the same limb. I commented on the accuracy of his eye. "Aw! I wasn't throwing at that sapling, but at that leaf." He straightened up and threw more carefully; and the leaf floated down to the waters of the York spring.
Glass, as Avicen saith, is among stones as a fool among men, for it taketh all manner of colour and painting. Glass was first found beside Ptolomeida in the cliff beside the river that is called Vellus, that springeth out of the foot of Mount Carmel, at which shipmen arrived.
The boys looked at her in admiration. "I admit there is something queer in his offering to increase the prize money," spoke Jerry, after a pause. "He must be very desperate." "And why this sudden rush?" inquired Ned. "This afternoon he was in no such hurry. Something must have occurred in the meanwhile I wonder if it was the man on the cliff "
The ground now got very bad, and presently we came to a stone shoot which extended high up above us, while ending in a cliff a little below. This we crossed carefully, one man going at a time. Each step set the whole slide in motion and brought stones bounding down from above. The best way was to take it at a rush.
Many a time that day as the racing horses obeying the experienced hand of the driver swept around a sharp turn in the road she had looked down a sheer cliff that had made her flesh quiver so that it had been hard not to draw back and cry out.
After an hour of sharpish work among slaty shelves and threatening crags, we got into one of those troughlike hollows hung on each side with precipices, which look as if the earth had sunk for the sake of letting the water through. On our left hand, cliff towered over cliff to the grand height of Pen y Cader, the steepest and most formidable aspect of the mountain.
But what boots in this age of earnest activity more than a trivial reference to the selfish splendor of a superstitious past? To-day is to-day, and the nails on the coffin-lid of the last Hanoverian would scarcely be of silver, so many hungry mouths are to be fed. Geoffrey Ripon on the morning following his reflections was sauntering along the gravel path which bordered the cliff.
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