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And those shrill cries now belling through the mountain heights ought to draw everyone of their species within miles. "There it is!" Thorvald, pulling himself to his feet by a rock handhold, gazed westward, his gaunt face eager. Shann, expecting no less than a cruising Throg ship, searched for cover on their perch.
Here, too, came the youth who wanted to cut his name above Washington's, and who found, to his horror, when half-way up, that he must keep on, for he had left no resting-places for his feet at safe and reachable distances who, therefore, climbed on and on, cutting handhold and foothold in the limestone until he reached the top, in a fainting state, his knife-blade worn to a stump.
Frequently he would feel that his transgressions had cut him off from Christ, and left him "neither foot-hold nor handhold among all the props and stays in the precious word of life;" but presently he would find some gracious assurance he knew not how sustaining him.
Presently he found he could not break through the crust with his foot. Clinging hard to his handhold, he lowered himself to feel for a softer spot. His toe went in a little way; he ventured to trust to the slight support; but as he did so the treacherous snow broke beneath him. For a few tense moments his numbed fingers held him to the slope.
This was so laborious that Wake took to the rocks on the right side of the couloir, where there was some shelter from the main force of the blast. I found it easier, for I knew something about rocks, but it was difficult enough with every handhold and foothold glazed. Presently we were driven back again to the ice, and painfully cut our way through a throat of the ravine where the sides narrowed.
It was clear that the current could not be stemmed by pole or paddle; the canoe must be towed or carried. When Mackenzie tried to get foothold or handhold on the shore, huge boulders and land-slides of loose earth slithered down, threatening to smash canoe and canoemen. Mackenzie got out a tow-line eighty feet long. This he tied to the port thwart of the canoe.
He knew now that this beast would never again lift its head. The test of her had been last night in the streets. "Love," he said, lowering the bow. "Love," said Cutty, shifting his chrysoprase. There was no fool like an old fool. It did not serve to recall Molly in all her glory, to reach hither and yon for a handhold to pull him out of this morass. Molly had become an invisible ghost.
In fact, if you want to know the ear marks of a handy man's "story," look out for the smart gentlemen in veiled references without any facts which can be transfixed by either a pin or a handspike. When you find the innuendo without the handhold of fact, lick your lips if you are keen on carrion; for I promise that you have come on a morsel.
Whenever I was slow in finding a handhold or foothold, there would come a stentorian instruction to Saunders to feel to the right or the left, or higher up or lower down. And I remember that I found it a great comfort to know that it was not I who was so slow, but that fellow Saunders.
And, acting on the instant, he began swinging himself down from tree to bush, from shrub to tuft of grass, clinging wherever handhold or foothold offered, digging his stout boots into every cleft and cranny of the precipice. The height could not have been less than a hundred and fifty feet.
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