It is not to be wondered at if the girls’ hearts quailed at the sight. They were standing on a sloping terrace, of no great depth, which ended abruptly at the foot of a towering cliff. A little to the right ran the line of the cleft, but so forbidding was its appearance, and so apparently unscalable its broken ledges, that the same thought occurred to each—what if they had but left a narrow, sheltered prison for a wider and more exposed one?
Maseden, however, allowed no time for reflection. He and Sturgess had already dragged the foremast after them, and were shouldering it in the direction of the first hump of rock which seemed to offer a way into the cleft. Any other route was absolutely impossible.
After one last glance at the reef which had slain a gallant ship and so many lives, they quitted the ledge which had proved their salvation. It was then five o’clock in the morning. At four o’clock that afternoon they flung themselves, utterly spent, on a carpet of thick moss which coated the landward slope of the most westerly point of Hanover Island.
Their hands and knees were torn and bleeding, their fingernails broken, their bones aching and their eyes bloodshot. But they had triumphed, though many a time it had seemed that if Providence meant to be kind, an avalanche of loose stones or a slip on treacherous shale would have hurled them to speedy death on the rocks beneath.
On five separate occasions they had found themselves strung out on a narrow ledge which merged to nothingness in the sheer wall of a precipice. Five times had they to go back and essay a different path, often beginning again fifty or even a hundred feet below the point they had reached. They were obliged to drag or carry the heavy topmast every inch of the way, because, without its aid, either as a bridge or a ladder, they could never have surmounted a tithe of the obstacles encountered.
In those eleven awful hours they had climbed not two, but five hundred feet, a distance which, on the level, a good runner would traverse in about twenty seconds, whereas it took them an average of a minute to climb one foot.
The marvel was that the women could have done it at all, even with the help which both men gave unstintedly. During the last weary hours no one uttered an unnecessary word. Each of the four was determined to go on, not for his or her own sake, but for the sake of the others. They were roped together. If one fell, it meant disaster to all. So, with splendid grit, each resolved not to fall so long as hand would hold or foot lodge on the tiniest projection.
But, with final success, came utter collapse. Even Maseden, far stronger physically than Sturgess, fell like a log. True, he had borne far more than his share of the day’s toil. No matter what his inmost thoughts, he had never, to outward seeming, lost heart. It was he who always found the new line, he who earliest decided to turn back and try again.
It was he, too, who called now for renewed exertion after some minutes of complete and blissful repose.