“All right—straight up,” said the doctor. He looked for a firm projection of rock, and took a turn with the rope, while Mills picked up the slack and tested it.
The Ranger studied the wall in front of him, and made a try. Anchored by the doctor from below, he got up ten feet, but at that point he could not find a single handhold higher up which would bear his weight. After a long try, he descended to the ledge again.
“No use, we’ve got to go around to the right, and climb that big gully,” Mills said. “If this wall stumps us, we’d find a dozen worse ones before we got to the top.”
To get to the gully to the east of them, they had to go along the ledge on which they stood. It was wider to the east than six inches, which was its width in the other direction, the direction the goats took at this point, but it wasn’t any too wide for comfort, and in places the precipice above actually overhung it, and seemed to be crushing you down. In one place they had to crawl on their hands and knees under this overhang. In another place they came to what the doctor called “a real transverse”—that is, a very narrow shelf leading them around a projection from the ledge they were on to another one, with a sheer drop below it.
This transverse ledge was about fifteen feet long before it widened. It may have been eighteen inches wide, but to Tom it looked about six. It was level enough, and firm, but it was cut out of the side of an absolute precipice, and the sheer drop, before you hit any ledge or slope below, to break your fall, was at least a hundred feet.
“Dizzy?” the doctor asked Tom, noting the expression that had come over the scout’s face.
“No,” said Tom. “But I feel as if I would be if I looked down.”
The doctor eyed him sharply. “I guess you’re all right,” he said. “Remember, you’ll be anchored fast, and look hard at your footing, focus on that, and don’t see off at all. All ready, Mills.”
The Ranger walked out on the ledge quite calmly, a little sideways, so he could lean back toward the cliff, and tested each step to see that the ledge was firm and his spikes were gripping. Then the doctor went, even more coolly than Mills. Tom swallowed a lump in his throat, called himself a “poor mut,” and when he had the signal, followed the others. He kept his eyes on the ledge, as the doctor told him, though there was a horribly fascinating and indescribable temptation to peep from the corners of them down over the edge. He could feel the doctor taking up the slack of the rope as he came, so that with each step his fall would be shorter if he fell. Then, suddenly, he was over! He had been cold before he started, with a chill in his back as the wind evaporated the perspiration. Now he was suddenly hot again, and the sweat came out on his forehead.
The doctor was smiling at him.