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Updated: May 14, 2025
A few words of instruction made an efficient rodwoman of Genevieve, so that they soon reached the foot of the ridge up which her husband had led Ashton the previous day. Here he established a bench-mark, and turned along the base of the escarpment to the mouth of Dry Fork Gully, where he checked the line of levels that had been run up the bed of the creek.
Our bench-mark there on the dike is more than two hundred feet above that spike we drove into your porch post." "Is that all you've found out today?" "All for today," said Blake. "I could have left this line of levels until later, but I thought I might as well get through with them."
Blake established a bench-mark at the foot of the acclivity, and came forward beside Ashton to peer up the Titanic chute between the dizzy precipices. From where they stood to the head of the gulch was fully four thousand feet. "What do you think of it?" asked the engineer. "I think this is where your line ends," answered Ashton, and he rolled a cigarette.
But here such silence and such darkness reign that we have nothing to hope for. There exists, so to speak, no bench-mark, no means of communication between the world of insects and our own; and we are perhaps less far from grasping and fathoming what takes place in Saturn or Jupiter than what is enacted in the ant-hill or the hive.
At sunrise the next morning Blake screwed his level on its tripod and set up the instrument about a hundred yards away from the ranch house. Ashton held the level rod for him on a spike driven into the foot of the nearest post of the front porch. Blake called the spike a bench-mark.
Ashton complied, though with evident ill will. He had wakened in good spirits, but was fast returning to his sullenness of the previous day. He took his time in going from the bench-mark to the first turning point. Blake moved up past him with inspiring briskness, but the younger man kept to his leisurely saunter. In rounding the corner of the hill twice as much time was consumed as was necessary.
Blake was outstretched on her back, fast asleep, and Isobel was playing with the baby under the adjoining tree, when at last the surveyors came up on the other side of the creek and ended their day's run with the establishment of a bench-mark on the top of the dike above the pool. Blake seemed as fresh as in the morning.
Beginning from his bench-mark at the foot of the mountain, Blake carried the level line slantingly up the ridge side. The work was slow and tedious, since the telescope of the level could never be on a horizontal line either higher or lower respectively than the top and bottom of the thirteen-foot rod.
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