"Oh, how sore my hands are! That's better."
He was back in safety on the ledge over the hole, and, passing along, he
had soon descended to the one beneath the exit.
"Now then," he said, as he paused for a few minutes before commencing
his descent; "this will be easier."
Somehow he did not feel in any hurry to begin, and he sat down with his
legs hanging over the ledge, to give his nerves time to calm down, for
there was a strong tendency to throb about his pulses, and he was not
sufficiently conversant with the house he lived in, to know that
confinement, worry, want of fresh air, and excessive work during the
past few days had not given him what the doctors call "tone."
So he sat there with his back to the rock, gazing out to sea again, and
then watching the graceful curves made by a gull, which had risen higher
and higher, and came nearer and nearer, till it was on a level with him,
and watching him curiously.
"Wonder whether you think I am going to fall and let you have a pick at
me," said Archy, with a forced laugh; "because I am not going to tumble,
so you can be off."
All the same, though, he shuddered, and he had to exercise a little
force to make his new start downward.
"Best way after all," he said, as he began to descend. "If you go up,
it gets more dangerous every minute, because you have farther to fall.
If you go down, it gets safer, because you have less."
He found the way now comparatively easy, for the rock sloped a little
out, and he had even got down some sixty feet when he had a check.
"I don't know, though," he said, as he put a bleeding knuckle to his
lips. "Don't make much difference, I should think, whether you fall one
hundred feet or five. Bother! I wish I did not keep on thinking about
tumbling."
He forced himself to study the next part of his descent, which was
nearly perpendicular, but well broken up with ledges and cracks which
offered good holding, and terminated a hundred feet below, upon a shelf,
which naturally offered itself as his next resting-place, but beyond
which it was impossible to see.
"Don't matter," he said more cheerfully. "Let's take difficulties a bit
at a time. I'm free, and I can laugh at them now. I could jump into
deep water and swim, if there were no way down from below there."
His spirits rose now, for, though a false step or slip of the foot would
have sent him headlong down to the broad ledge, from which he would in
all probability have bounded into the sea, the climbing was good, and,
panting with the exertion, he got from projection to ledge, now straight
down, now diagonally, and often along first one tiny ledge or cornice
and then another, zig-zagging, till, at about twenty feet from the place
he was making for, a slaty piece of the limestone rock by which he was
holding parted, frost-loosened, from the parent rock, and he went down
with a rush.
But it was only a slide. He alighted on his feet, and, scratched and
startled a bit, stood panting and trying to recover his composure.
"No harm done," he said, as he looked up to where the hole from which he
had escaped was beginning to look quite small. "Might have been worse.
Quite bad enough, though. Shakes one so. Now for a rest, and then down
again."
He stepped to the edge and looked over in the middle, next to the left,
then to the right, and always with the same result. He was now on a
regular sea-birds' sanctuary, for the rock below him was not
perpendicular; but sloped right under, and, try as he would, he could
devise no plan for getting down lower, save by taking a header into the
sea, where the water looked black and deep to his right, while to his
left there was the chasm upon which, twenty feet or so out of the
perpendicular line, was the hole from which he had come.
Heights of sea-cliffs are very deceptive, and slopes which look to the
inexperienced eye only a hundred feet or so to the top, are often more
than double. It was so here, for, in spite of the distance he had come
down, the midshipman found that he must be fully two hundred feet above
the sea.
"Oh, how vexatious!" he cried, as he ground his teeth. "After all that
work, after being so sure, to be out here on this wretched shelf like an
old cormorant, but without any wings."
"I don't care," he said aloud, after again and again convincing himself
that there was no possible means of farther descent. "I won't go back
to prison; I'll sit here and starve first. Not I," he added, after a
few moments' thought; "the cutter will be sure to sail by, and they
could see me if I made signals from just here."
Rather doubtful, as he knew, for he was only at the corner of the chasm
or tiny gulf into which the sea rushed, and the chances were that unless
he had something big and white to wave, he was not likely to get his
signal seen.
For one moment only the recollection of the food he had left behind
tempted him to return.
"I might get it, and bring the basket down," he said. "No, I won't try
it again; it's too dangerous. I don't want another slip. Besides,
there must be a way down farther, if I could find it. Of course! I
knew it!" he cried, as he gazed over once more, farther in toward the
head of the little chasm, which looked as though the rock had been split
from top to bottom.
He rubbed his hands, for some thirty feet below there was certainly a
narrow possible place, and from there perhaps another might be found.
"If one could get down," he said to himself; but it did not look
possible; the rock was out even of the perpendicular, and no sane person
would attempt to drop from the edge so great a distance as that.
At that moment a piece of slaty rock came sliding down from on high, to
fall with a crash and splinter on the rock at his feet.
"Must have loosened that," he said; "good job I didn't get it on my
head. Oh!"
It was a cry of rage as much as of alarm, for there, following his track
exactly, was Ram, who had returned repentant, alone, with his basket, to
miss his prisoner, search, find the opening, and without hesitation to
come down the cliff in pursuit.