“What for? It’s five times as hard as the regular track, and precipitous.”
“Not so bad but what we can do it. We can let one another down if we come to one of the wall-like bits too big to jump.”
“But it’s labour for nothing. Only make you more hungry,” added Lennox, with a laugh.
“Never mind; I want to make sure that an enemy could not steal up in the dark and surprise the men in charge of the gun. I’m always thinking that the Boers will steal a march on us and take it some day.”
“You might save yourself the trouble as far as the climbing up is concerned. This is the worst bit; but they could do it, I feel sure, if our sentries were lax. I don’t think they’d get by them, though.”
“Well, let’s have a good look what it is like, now all the crags are lit up.”
They were lit up in a most wonderful way by the sun, which was just about to dip below the horizon, and turned every lightning-shivered mass of tumbled-together rock into a glowing state, making it look as if it was red-hot, while the rifts and cracks which had been formed here and there were lit up so that their generally dark depths could be searched by the eye.
“Do you know what this place looks like?” said Dickenson.
“The roughest spot in the world,” replied Drew as he lowered himself down a perpendicular, precipitous bit which necessitated his hanging by his hands, and then dropping four or five feet.
“No! It’s just as if the giants of old had made a furnace at the top of the kopje, and had been pouring the red-hot clinkers down the side.”