"How do you feel?" said Alec.
A TERRIBLE FALL FROM THE CLIFFS.
To which I replied by asking him a question,
"Whatever is the matter, Alec, am I hurt?" at which he laughed and said, "I ought to know better than he could tell me; perhaps I would inform him what I was doing there, and why, for more than half an hour since he found me I had been insensible?"
Then I remembered slipping carelessly over the edge of the path at a part that was not at all dangerous, and bumping myself against a granite rock, but beyond that I remembered nothing whatever.
Alec had missed me for nearly three hours, so calling to "Begum," he strolled along to see what I was doing. It was our invariable custom to tell each other where we were going, and what we were going to do, whenever we separated for a time; but on this occasion I had purposely omitted this precaution. The dog had found me on the lower pathway doubled up, or as Alec put it, "Standing on my head in a very undignified position, with my back against a granite boulder."
I could not rise, in fact could scarcely move, so battered and bruised was I in my fall of about fifty yards. Of course this was not a perpendicular fall, or I should never have penned these lines; but as the slope was one that a man could not walk up without using his hands, it is a wonder to me to this day that I was not killed on the spot. Evidently I had broken my swift fall by clutching at some furze bushes, for my right hand was dreadfully lacerated, and full of furze needles, and my shoulder so stiff that my arm seemed paralyzed; besides which, I found I was spitting blood, which frightened me very much, as I was afraid of some internal injury.
The cart was fetched, and Alec assisted me on it; but oh dear me! I thought the jolting would have shaken me literally to pieces, so I sang out "Halt! Wo!" and told Alec I could go no farther, and then I fainted away.