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.