“Hai-yu,” the friend exclaimed, “you know not what you ask. With my good eyes, and seeing plainly where to cling and step, it would be a hard task to reach that height; for you it would be sure death to attempt the climb.”
“Even so,” the blind one replied, “yet must I try to do it. Death comes in many ways. It stares us in the face at every turn. Wherever we go, whatever we do, it lies in wait for us, like a panther for the deer by a forest trail. I am not afraid; have pity and help me try to reach that nest.”
Í-kai-si cried, and begged him to think no more of such a dangerous thing; the friend told how straight and high the cliff was, how difficult to climb, but they talked in vain. He said that if no one would help him, he would go alone, on until he fell and died. At length, seeing that he was not to be turned from this which he had set his mind upon, the friend consented to be his guide, and they started.
It was but a few steps to the foot of the cliff, where the fallen rocks made a sloping hill; they soon surmounted this, and then the climb [[152]]began. Sometimes they were side by side, the leader guiding the blind one’s hands and feet, and again he was ahead, and reaching down would pull Pi-waṕ-ōk up on a narrow shelf. All the people of the camp stood watching them with wide-staring eyes, and as the two went on, higher and higher, over places where it seemed there was no jutting rock to offer foothold, they held their breath, fearing, expecting, that the next step would be the climbers’ last.
Pi-waṕ-ōk’s courage won. At last, tired and breathless, they came to where the gnarled and stunted tree hung to the cliff’s face by its giant roots. “Hai!” said the guide; “I never thought we would reach it; here we are at last. And now, what next?”
“Help me up into the nest.”
“That I cannot do. There is no room for more than one. The limb would break if both of us were on it.”
“Then,” said Pi-waṕ-ōk, “I will go alone,” and he began to climb out on the trunk, his friend telling him just where to reach for a hold on the spreading branches. Then came the most dangerous feat of all, to climb over the rim of the wide and loose-sticked nest; but [[153]]that too was accomplished, and the tired man lay down in its hollow beside the scared and hissing fledglings. “Go,” he called out to his friend, “go and leave me for a time here alone.”
The young man climbed on up to the summit of the cliff, and walked away to a distant point, where he waited until he should be called.
Pi-waṕ-ōk lay motionless; the young birds ceased their frightened cries, and all was still save for the breeze, which sung through the tree-top with a mournful sound. If the limb on which the nest was built gave way from his added weight, he knew that he would fall upon the rocks far below, a crushed and shapeless mass. It was an uneasy and frightful thought.