“Oh, you’ll find a few holds, if I remember right, places where you can get a sort of apology for a rest,” his uncle said, casually.
“Say, are you joshing me or not? Did somebody really climb up here?”
For answer his uncle stepped into the chimney with him.
“This is the way,” he said.
He braced his back against one side of the crack by pressing hard with his hands against the other side. Then he raised both his feet free of the ground, while he held himself wedged by sheer muscle, and set his feet against the wall a little way up. Then he pressed so hard with his legs that they wedged him in, and raised his hands, hunching up his shoulders a few inches at the same time. Again bracing with his arms and shoulders, he got his feet up a few more inches. Then his hands and shoulders again. Progressing in this way, almost crawling, in fact, he was before long so far up in the chimney that Bennie could walk under him. Then, almost as slowly as he went up, he came down.
“You see, it can be done,” he said. “I don’t say it isn’t hard work. But you wanted exercise.”
“Give me the rope!” said Bennie, shortly.
“What’s the idea of the rope?” asked Lester.
“So the rest of you can get up,” Bennie answered.
He tied the rope under his arms, while his uncle held the coil, to play it out. Then he tried his shoes on the wall to see if the nails held, and found they would hold in the lava, where they slipped on granite or other hard rock, and began to work his way up. He worked in silence. Spider and Lester shouted joshing advice at him, advising him to use his teeth, to sit down a while where he was and take a rest, and anything else they could think of, but he was wasting no breath on replies. In fact, he needed all the breath, all the strength and all the attention he had to keep on going. A dozen times he thought he would have to give it up. Once he thought his strength was going to fail him and he would fall. That was when he was about twenty feet from the bottom. But each time he grit his teeth and either seemed to get a kind of second wind, or else found just the faintest hint of a foothold, or a handhold, so he could relieve for a moment the awful tension on his arms and back.