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He swayed and staggered over the rough declivity to the road. It required a superhuman effort to heave the pack into the stage. The strap with which he had hitched the horses had turned into iron. At last it was untied. He clambered up to the enormous height of the driver's seat, unwrapped the reins from the whipstock, and the team started forward.
A quarter of an hour after the two savants were descending the declivity of the Rocky Mountains; and two days after, at the same time as their friends of the Gun Club, they arrived at San Francisco, having killed five horses on the road. Elphinstone, the brothers Blomsberry, and Bilsby rushed toward them on their arrival. "What shall we do?" they exclaimed.
Some part of the road was very narrow and wound round the mountain we were going to. At one of the angles, or turns, the purser, who was one of the party, had got his mule too near the precipice, and in a few seconds was rolling down the declivity, the mule first and he afterwards.
He knew his comrade too well, and could picture him clinging by hand and heel as he crawled along the brink of the declivity with the lake below, and gasped from relief when once more a dim whitened object lurched up out of the snow. "Got them all," said Alton cheerfully. "That last one was just on the edge, and it took some thinking before I could get at it.
Either he must dismount and lead down the abrupt declivity and up the opposite bank, or, keeping along the bluff, follow the windings of the ravine. One wrong step had led with him to another. There is a fatality about such things that besets the truest of men and bedevils the best intentions.
When we were midway down the glen, the ruins of the ancient Chartreuse suddenly burst upon the view! At this moment all the terrors of the declivity, and the momentary expectation of meeting some of the wolves with which the forest abounds, vanished from my mind before the feelings of delight which the enchanting scene called forth.
But in other parts of the island, where the declivity of the surface favours the transportation of gravel by the currents of water, there is less of the gravel to be found in the soil, and more of the fragments of stone not formed into gravel.
During the Russian retreat through the Mazur lake district, in East Prussia, a Russian battery was surrounded on three sides by the enemy's quick firers. The infantry was on the other side of the lake, and the Russian ammunition was exhausted. In order to avoid capture, the commander ordered the battery to gallop over the declivity into the lake.
Thus, for example, there are fissures at the foot of the eastern declivity of the Sierra Nevada in the state of that name, from which boiling water and steam escape, forming siliceous incrustations on the sides of the fissures. In one case, where the fissure is partially filled up with silica inclosing iron and copper pyrites, gold has also been found in the vein-stone.
As they had yet to "quarter" the declivity several times before they could reach the summit, they were more careful about approaching the line of descent; and whenever they drew near it, they put their ponies and mules to as good a speed as they could take out of them.
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