He listened again, waiting for some minutes in the midst of the silence of the great wilderness in which he crouched.
Then “Ahoy!” came up, so clearly that there was no room for doubt, and Aleck’s heart began to beat fast as thought after thought flashed through his brain.
“It must be someone calling,” he felt and when after a few minutes the cry arose again, the thought struck him that it must come from somewhere beneath his feet, from an opening in the wall of the crack and then strike against the opposite wall, from which it was reflected, so that it seemed to come from that side, and from some distance away.
Aleck waited till the cry came across again, and then shouted in answer:
“Hallo there! What is it?”
There was no response. Then after a pause came “Ahoy!” once more.
“Where are you?” shouted Aleck, but there was no reply, and the result was the same when he tried over and over again.
“Whoever it is, he can’t hear me,” thought the lad, and growing excited now as he concluded that some fisherman, or perhaps a strange wanderer, had slipped, fallen, and perhaps broken a limb, he began to set about finding him and affording help.
Coming to the belief more fully that the sound came from beneath him, Aleck lay down upon his chest with his head over the brink of the rocky gash, and, holding on tightly, strained out as far as he could to look down. But he could see nothing, and rose up again to look to his left for the dying out in the solid cliff of the top end of the gorge.
That meaning a difficult climb, he made up his mind, to lower himself down over the edge, and setting his teeth, he began to lower himself over; but a slip at the outset so upset his nerves that he scrambled back, panting as if he had been running a mile.