These and many other questions perplexed the travelers, but most of all they sought to know the breadth of the vast gap and to determine if it had, as they hoped, another side, or if it were indeed the edge of an enormous mass split bodily off the earth.
Stern believed he had an answer to this problem on the afternoon of the second day. For many hours he had hung his pendulums over the cliff, noted deflections, taken triangulations, and covered the surface of the smooth stone with X's, Y's, Z's, sines and cosines and abstruse formulae--all scrawled with charcoal, his only means of writing.
At last he finished the final equation, and, with a smile of triumph and relief, got to his feet again.
Back to the girl, who was cooking over an odorous fire of cedar, he made his way, rejoicing.
“I've got it!” he shouted gladly. “Making reasonable allowances for depth, I've got it!”
“Got what?”
“The probable width!”
“Oh!” And she stood gazing at him in admiration, beautiful and strong and graceful. “You mean to say--”
“I'm giving the chasm a hundred miles' depth. That's more than anybody could believe possible--twice as much. On that assumption, my tests show the distance to the other side--and there is another side, by the way!--can't be over--”
“Five hundred miles?”