Funnelling my mouth with my hands, I called to Veneda, but received no answer. What could be the matter? Could the bump against the wall have stunned him? As I wondered, to my consternation I heard footsteps approaching round the corner. It was the sentry again. Now we were in a pretty fix! To let go the rope would be to allow Veneda to drop thirty feet down on to the ground on the other side; yet, on the other hand, I knew it would be fatal to permit the sentry to discover us in this invidious position. I ransacked my brains for a way out of the difficulty. The sweat streamed over my face; it was like some horrible nightmare from which, strive how I would, I could not awake. And every moment the steps were coming closer.
So far as I could see there was only one thing to be done; feeble reed though he was to lean upon, I must trust to the fidelity of the Malay driver. Signing to him to hang on to the rope, as if his very life depended on it, I left him, and crept towards the corner. It was my idea to jump upon the sentry as he came round it, hoping to being able to silence him before he could give the alarm.
What I went through during the thirty seconds or so in which I lay crouched behind the buttress of that wall no man will ever understand. The steps came nearer and nearer—I pulled myself together in preparation for the spring. It seemed as if the beating of my heart must be plainly audible yards away.
Then suddenly a dark figure appeared before me, and I leapt upon it.
So swift was my onslaught that the man had not time to guard himself before my left arm was round his waist and my right hand tightening on his throat. My left leg I crooked round his right, with the intention of throwing him. He was a plucky fellow, and did his best against me. But his surprise was no match for my despair. As we swayed backwards and forwards his rifle fell from his grasp, striking the wall with an awful clatter. When I heard that I gave myself up for lost.
Exerting all my strength, I lifted him clear off the ground (a feat I could never have accomplished in cold blood), and dashed him from me against the buttress edge. His head struck it with a ghastly thud; he slipped, fell, and lay upon the ground a huddled up mass of groaning humanity. Ascertaining that he was powerless, I turned and ran in the direction of the rope, to which I was relieved beyond all measure to find the Malay still clinging.
What to do now was a puzzle. I reflected there were only two ways out of it—I must either be content to abandon the enterprise altogether, and to leave Veneda to his fate, or, as he could not come down to me, go up to him. But whatever I intended to do must be accomplished quickly, for it might be the sentry's duty to report himself as he went by the guardhouse every round, and in that case his nonappearance would be the signal for search, and we should be irretrievably lost.
With this thought in my mind I clutched the rope and began to swarm up it, trusting to Providence that whatever was keeping it at the top would hold it until I could get there.
Even now, when I think about the climb to the top of that prison wall, I feel a shudder pass over me. It was interminable. I seemed to be doomed to climb thousands of feet of rope, and never to get any farther. But at last it was accomplished, and I was hauling myself along the broken cheval de frise, to where a black mass lay blocked between it and the stones. Needless to say, that mass was Veneda, and unconscious. He had tied the rope round his waist before starting, and its sudden drop from the iron-work on to the coping must have inflicted on him a terrible wrench; in swinging round, his head had struck the wall with sufficient force to stun him.
One glimpse was enough to show me that it was impossible for him to help himself, so drawing the rope up, I made it fast round the stanchions of the iron, and pulling his body over to the other side, lowered it as gently as I could, under the circumstances, to the ground. It was a dangerous undertaking, for, as I have said, he was a heavy man, and I had only the narrow top of the wall on which to take a purchase with my feet.