In the next five minutes the Loon made a complete circle of “Baldy’s Bench.” All its faces resembled the southern exposure.
“Do you think a sheep could climb that hill?” asked Lord Pelton.
“You can’t tell,” said Frank. “Those flat cliffs are often pushed out enough to give a footing—for a sheep at least. ‘Grizzly’ says he has seen sheep scramble up sixty degree inclines. And sixty degrees to us looks like a perpendicular wall.”
“There’s one anyway,” yelled Phil again when the Loon had almost completed its circuit. As he pointed to what seemed an absolutely unscalable point several hundred feet above them, all clearly made out the dark brown, almost black, shape of a statue-like mountain sheep. With head lowered, its horns curved outward and backward and its long wool reaching far down over its short legs, it suggested a musk ox.
“If that ram can get there,” shouted Frank, “he can go all the way. Let’s get up higher. There may be a place on the top where they do their loafin’. If we don’t see anything better, we’ll come back and try for this boy.”
“Lift her,” shouted Frank. “Let’s get a look at the top of the hill.”
With a suddenness that almost threw Lord Pelton off the seat which he had not left for an hour and a half—for it was now eight thirty o’clock—Phil tilted the movable wings of the Loon upward and, like a train on a sudden grade, the propellers slowed up as they pushed the enlarged plane surfaces against the air. When the monoplane at last reached the top of the “Bench” it had passed around to the western side. The peak seemed to end in a rocky ridge.
“Over the top,” Frank suggested as Phil dropped his planes and the accelerated propellers shot the airship ahead once more. “Anyway,” he said without much spirit, “we’re six thousand feet in the air. I reckon the ‘Bench’ is about fifteen hundred feet above the valley. We—”
He did not finish. Just then the monoplane passed over the western edge of the summit and the ridge was seen to be only a wall extending around the western and northern sides of the top. A long whistle came from Phil, and Frank thrust his body out of the side window in an excited effort to see everything at once.
There was a half circle of descending, broken rock something like a ruined amphitheater; a wide stretch of still sloping but comparatively smooth surface, covered in places with peculiar heaps and mounds and, on the eastern and part of the southern sides, a clean and abrupt ending of the summit in sheer precipices. In the center of this cliff-like margin a break occurred as if some Cyclopean ax had been sunk sideways in the rock to form an opening leading to the lower heights.