“Beg pardon, sir; I could get along there,” said the man.
“Yes, my lad; but I’ll try it first,” said the lieutenant; and he was about to start along the perilous little shelf after a short climb, when Syd suggested that they should have a line thrown to them from the boat.
“Good idea, Belton,” said the lieutenant, who hailed the boat, now lying fifty yards away, and she came in; the rope was thrown to them, made fast about Syd’s chest, and while the lieutenant and the sailor held the slack
ready to pay out, the boy clambered on about twenty feet, and then stepped boldly out upon the narrow shelf in the face of the almost perpendicular rock, crept carefully along to the rift, and entered it to come back and shout all right.
With Syd holding the rope tightly round the edge of the cleft, and the sailor keeping it fast, the lieutenant had no difficulty in getting along; the sailor followed, and they passed along a natural passage to where the rock sloped away sufficiently for them to mount again to a fairsized ledge, from the end of which there was a ridge of broken rock giving foothold for climbers. This they surmounted, Syd going up first like a goat, and holding the rope for his officer, and lowering it in turn for the sailor.
“Why, Belton,” said Mr Dallas, “this place is a natural fortress. All we should have to do would be to make parapets, and mount some guns. It’s a little Gibraltar in its way.”
They went on exploring, or rather climbing from block to block and ledge to ledge, till after some little difficulty the summit was reached, from which the lieutenant signalled with a handkerchief, an acknowledgment being seen from the ship.
The top was a slope of some twenty by thirty yards, and from here as they looked about over the edge a better idea of the capabilities of the place could be formed, and they looked down on what only needed a little of the work of man to make the place impregnable so long as there was no treachery from within.
The great peculiarity of the rock was, that from where they stood they could gaze down into a chasm beyond which rose a mass similar to that on which they stood. In fact, roughly speaking, the stony mount seemed to have been cleft or split in twain, giving it somewhat the aspect of a bishop’s mitre, save that the lower part between the cleft expanded till it reached the sea.