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Updated: May 15, 2025
The path beyond had vanished. Far below, out of sight over the edge, lay the torrent; unscalable the cliff rose above; and a line of fossil footprints, leading across the face of the precipice in the debris, alone marked where the path had been. Spectres they seemed of their former selves. Crusoe could not have been more horrified than was I.
This rock face could scarcely be described as unscalable, because it was so rough that, although practically vertical, the projections on it were so numerous and pronounced that an active man could climb it without much difficulty, if uninterfered with; but if the summit and flanks happened to be held by even a small force of men armed with rifles, to climb it would at once become an absolute impossibility.
Anciently, according to the traditions of the Queres, it stood upon the crest of the superb Haunted Mesa, three miles away, and some 300 feet higher, but its only approach was one day destroyed by the falling of a cliff, and three unhappy women, who chanced to be the only occupants the remainder of the population being at work in the fields below died of starvation, in view of the homeless hundreds of their people who for many days surrounded the unscalable mesa with upturned, agonized faces.
The valley lay before her, almost a level plain, except for the stream winding through its centre, and all about, unbroken and precipitous, arose the rampart of rocks, which seemed unscalable.
I once saw along the Mediterranean in Italy or France the fastness of a line of nobles, set away up on a lonely hill, glowering, gloomy, and unpeopled, the refuge, mayhap, of the mountain goat, the abiding-place of bats and other creatures of the night. Moorea's fortress conjured up the vision of it, its wondrous ramparts and unscalable precipices strangely the counterpart of the Latin castle.
Presently, in the great silence that reigned, he was aware of the sound of running water to his right; and leaning in that direction, was rewarded by a scene of natural wonder and human pathos strangely intermixed. The stream ran at the bottom of a narrow and winding passage, whose wall-like sides of rock were sometimes for miles together unscalable by man.
If I had been hot and wet below in the thicket I wondered what I grew on the last steps of this ridge. Yet even the toil and the pain held a keen pleasure. I did not analyze my feelings then, but it was good to be there. The rim-rock came out to a point above me, seeming unscalable, all grown over with brush and lichen, and stunted spruce.
Dwarfed mesquite and greasewood appeared among the rocks. Ladd gave the word to tie up horses and go forward on foot. The narrow neck of the pass opened and descended into a valley half a mile wide, perhaps twice that in length. It had apparently unscalable slopes of weathered rock leading up to beetling walls.
From reading he passed to day-dreaming, and day-dreaming drifted into sleep, with his head pillowed on the rocky walls of the cave. How long he had slept he did not know, but he woke with a start of horror. He sprang to his feet, realizing his position instantly. The tide was in far in past the headlands already. Above and beyond him towered the pitiless unscalable rocks.
Then the men, the leagued enemies against this arch conspirator the thousand heroisms of these men who contended without fear against unbeatable odds; the stark, cold bravery that is a thing outside of human experience save in some sublimated essence such as this men who spanned impossible gaps, bore impossible weights, scaled unscalable heights, died incredibly heroic and unutterably tragic deaths, and who did these preposterous things as simply and unquestioningly as a child falling to sleep.
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