“Let’s wait a minute first,” said Bob cautiously.
It was good advice, and we did wait I suppose quite a minute, but to us it seemed more than five, and considering now that it was quite safe, I jumped up and we went back to the ridge, looking eagerly towards the place where the stone hung over the Gap, but it was hidden from us by the great blocks we had run round, or else probably we might have seen what we smelt—the thin blue stream of smoke that curled up from beneath the great block.
As it was, our noses and not our eyes saved us, for I being in front, and just about to pass on to the open edge of the Gap, stopped suddenly and said:
“I can smell burning. Can’t you?”
“I can smell the tinder,” said Bob. “Go on and—”
He did not finish his speech, for the earth shook beneath our feet, and we saw a flash and a great puff of smoke, and quite a hurricane of bits of slate and stone and earth came flying by our ears, turning us into statues for the moment. Then I bounded forward, followed by my companions, to stand beneath a broad canopy of smoke that floated inland, and just in time to see the great stone go rumbling and bounding down the precipitous place like a pebble, gathering force moment by moment, till it seemed to glance from a stone and make one tremendous leap of quite a couple of hundred feet right into a clump of rugged masses of rock half-way down the precipice, and these it scattered and drove before it in one great avalanche of débris down and down and down till the bottom was reached, and what had increased into quite a little landslip settled into its new home with a sullen roar.