With the lamp dry and warm the tiny flint wheel sparked at the first attempt and the white tongue of flame shot out in a friendly fashion that brought the ghost of a smile to Abington’s lips. Even then he waited long enough to refill the lamp with water before rising to begin the hazardous climb—which, after all, might net him nothing, unless it were a broken bone or two if he lost his footing and fell again.
Abington’s work had given him the sureness of a mountain goat. He took off his necktie, tied it like a bandeau around his head, hooked the lamp securely in its fabric and began to climb, resolutely pushing far from him the thought of failure.
How far he went, he did not know. All he was certain of was the impossibility of going back. There were times when he hung by a slender foothold and risked his neck while he rested his hands. There were other times when he was almost ready to give it up, almost but never wholly beaten.
“By Jove, this is a high mountain!” he gasped once when, having found a fairly comfortable perch on a knob of rock the size of a barrel, he very gingerly removed the lamp from his forehead and took a more comprehensive survey of his immediate surroundings and the wall above him. “I’ll swear I’ve climbed ten miles!” This was a very unscientific assertion to make. He capped it at once by another. “Bet I’ve passed a dozen lateral fissures on the way up.”
Having relieved the tension somewhat by that remark, he slowly turned himself about and illumined with white light an arched opening in the wall that half faced him around the curve of the cavern. “I’ll be damned!” breathed John Abington but what he really meant was: “Thank God!”
The six feet of sheer wall which stood between his perch and the mouth of the passageway balked him for a time, until he saw that the rock immediately above the opening broke smoothly for several feet, even with the face of the wall. The rock floor of the tunnel extended outward over the black abyss from which he had just climbed; it was like a pursed lip thrust out from an open mouth, he thought.
Upon that narrow platform he fixed his gaze, shrewdly measuring the width of the extension. He would have to climb above the opening and drop down to the out-thrust lip, trusting to good fortune to keep his balance and not pitch headlong into the cavern.
For a long moment he stood face to face with this fresh ordeal, the lamplight sliding back and forth, halting to contemplate a feasible niche for his feet, stealing upward to find some splinter or seam where the fingers could clutch.
Foot by foot he planned it, while he gathered his last reserve of strength for this supreme effort. Once he started, there could be no going back. He must work above the smooth stretch, where, at some time in the past, a huge fragment of wall had fallen away, and then edge sidewise until he was directly over the lip of the tunnel.