“But I must do something,” he thought. “I can’t go on backwards like this.”
He waited a little while to let his breath come and go more easily, and while he lay there resting upon his chest he thought. He reasoned with himself in a kind of argument and appeal to his common-sense.
“This natural shelf,” he said, “is about a foot wide, and if it were only just above the ground I should feel not the slightest nervousness, but be ready to stand up and run along it, instead of creeping back like a worm. Suppose it does go down hundreds of feet, what then? There is just as much room, and it only wants pluck. If I couldn’t run along it I might walk steadily. I will.”
But he did not begin. The horror of that great unknown depth was too hard to master; but he raised himself slowly on all fours to see if he could not turn himself round so as to crawl the rest of the way head first instead of feet.
It seemed very simple, but at the first trial his rifle caught tightly, and he was attacked by a sensation as of something thrusting at him hard, so that he closed his eyes and remained for some seconds with his head projecting over the edge of the shelf before he shuffled himself back into his former position, and then lay panting till the breathlessness that had attacked him passed away, leaving a sensation of anger against himself for his want of firmness.
“Oh, it’s cowardly,” he muttered fiercely. “I can’t go on backwards, and I must and will do it. But how?”
He thought more calmly at last, and it seemed plain enough. All he had to do, it seemed, was to take fast hold of some projection in the rock, so as to steady himself, and then—
No, that wouldn’t do.
“I see,” he panted the next minute. “Turn over on my back. But is there room?”
This required a good deal of anxious thought, for failure meant plunging down at once into the depths below.