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From now on the landscape changed more and more from day to day: one mountain after another loomed up, one always higher than the other. Their average elevation was 10,000 to 16,000 feet. Their crest-line was always sharp; the peaks were like needles. I have never seen a more beautiful, wild, and imposing landscape.
Paddling, wheezing, resting, oblivious of the shadow-world of the white men, knowing only the reality of Tulagi Mountain cutting its crest-line blackly across the dim radiance of the star-sprinkled sky, the reality of the sea and of the canoe he so feebly urged across it, and the reality of his fading strength and of the death into which he would surely end, the ancient black man slowly made his shoreward way.
We were most anxious to visit the country whence these market-goers came, appearing first upon the crest-line, then against the rough hillside, like a string of industrious white ants crawling down the wall of a house; therefore we engaged a youth with a downy beard and hairy legs and the big grey donkey the most active of his race and set off one morning at half-past nine, prepared to climb into a Top World, like Jack of the Beanstalk, by means of a path which was less smooth "going" than his supernatural ladder.
Standing on the crest-line, shading our eyes with our hands, mountain beyond mountain lay in the distance the Anjeras, the hills of Spain, the Mediterranean, Gibraltar; while in the foreground clustered four villages, brown mud-coloured huts upon the brownish slopes, and only picked out of their surroundings by means of the one little whitewashed spot of a mosque.
The sun was setting when we left the good upper world of silence and the winds; by-and-by the crest-line intervened between ourselves and the strong serene heights they were seen no more; and we came "hand over hand down the Beanstalk" which led to the white city below.
This Rest Camp of ours was near the toe and rather to the left of the centre line; in full view of Achi Baba itself, but screened to some extent from its lower slopes by an insignificant intermediate crest-line about 200 yards to our front. The so-called "trenches" as we found them, bore more resemblance to hastily constructed strings of golf bunkers than to anything else on earth.
Them, too, at length Leith was forced to unleash, and they swept forward on the breaches yelling like a pack of hounds; but on the crest-line they fared at first no better than the regiments they had taunted. Thrice and four times they reached it only to topple back.
The sun sank slowly behind the range and darkness began to fall on the immense plain, but aloft on the topmost edge the pure white of the jagged crest-line glowed for an instant in many-coloured silver, and then the lonely peaks grew dark and dim.
Diamond wanted the coast cleared; and he's cleared it by thunder he has! Swep it up bald as the back o my hand." The mist blew away faint and thin. Through it the bowed crest-line of a cliff loomed up to larboard. "There's the last o the Seven Sisters!" said Reuben. "Birling Gap's just here along." He moved among his men. "Stations, boys. It's here or hereabouts...." "Hush!" whispered Kit.
In other places a fine, exceedingly delicate crest-line would spring up from the high point of some buried obstacle and sweep along in the most graceful curve as far as the eye would carry I particularly remember one of them, and I could discover no earthly reason for the curvature in it.
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