Out of the Depths: A Romance of Reclamation

by Robert Ames Bennet

“Get busy, then! I shall do my work!” snarled Ashton.

Blake pointed to one of the three bundles that he had tied together. “There’s half the grub, the tripod and the rod. I can manage the rest. I’ve dropped a measurement to the foot of the first incline.”

He swung one of the other bundles on his back, under the level. The third, which was made up of railroad spikes and picket-pins, he sent rolling down the steep slope, tied to one end of the rope. He had driven a spike into a crevice of the rock. Hooking the other end of the rope over its head with an open loop, he grasped the line and started to walk down the gorge bottom. As he descended he dragged the loose lengths of rope after him.

Ashton stood rigid, staring at the spike and loop. If the loop should slip or the spike pull out, he need only climb back out of the ravine––to her. But Blake’s work was not the kind to slip or pull out. The watcher looked at the powerful figure backing rapidly down that roof-like pitch. One of the toes of the level tripod under the taut loop would easily pry the rope off the spike-head. He turned his pack around to get at the tripod––and paused to look upwards at the 295 three tiny faces peering down over the brink of the cliff.

He slung the pack over his shoulder and grasped the rope to follow his leader, who had come to the narrow shelf from which another measurement must be taken. He made the descent no less rapidly and easily than had the engineer. He was naturally agile, and now he was too full of his purpose to have any thought of vertigo. Yet quickly as he followed, when he reached the shelf he found that Blake had already lowered the bundle of spikes over the cliff below and was reënforcing with a spike a picket-pin that he had driven deep into a crevice.

“Drop over the chain at that point,” curtly ordered the engineer. “Think you can climb back up this slope without the rope?”

“Yes,” answered Ashton, still more curtly.

Blake lifted the line and sent up it a wave that carried to the upper end and flipped the loop from the spike-head. He jerked the freed end down to him and knotted it securely to the picket-pin, while Ashton was making the third vertical measurement. He then lowered everything except the level in loops of the line, and wrapped a strip of canvas around the line where it bent over the sharp edge of the cliff.

Ashton laconically reported the measurement. Blake noted it in his book, and promptly swung himself 296 out over the edge of the cliff. Again his assistant looked at the fastening of the rope; again he looked upwards at the three tiny down-peering faces; and again he followed his leader. The sun was glaring directly down into the gorge. Later they would descend into the shadows where no eye could perceive from above the loosening of the rope.

Blake cut off the line at the foot of the cliff and left it dangling. They would require it for their ascent. Another Titan step took fifty feet more of the rope.