cliffs there often projected over their base, so that the fowler had to
be suspended on a rope fastened to the top of the cliff, swinging
himself backwards and forwards like a pendulum until he could reach the
ledge of rock where the birds laid their eggs. Immediately he landed on
it, he had to secure his rope, and then gather the eggs in a hoop net,
and put them in his wallet, and then swing off again, perhaps hundreds
of feet above the sea, to find another similar ledge, so that his
business was practically carried on in the air. On one of these
occasions a fowler had just reached a landing-place on the precipice,
when his rope slipped out of his hand, and swung away from the cliff
into the empty air. If he had hesitated one moment, he would have been
lost for ever, as in all probability he would either have been starved
to death on the ledge of rock on which he was or fallen exhausted into
the sea below. The first returning swing of the rope might bring him a
chance of grasping it, but the second would be too far away. The rope
came back, the desperate man measured the distance with his eye, sprang
forward in the air, grasped the rope, and was saved.

Sometimes the rope became frayed or cut by fouling some sharp edge of
rock above, and, if it broke, the fowler was landed in eternity.
Occasionally two or three men were suspended on the same rope at the
same time. Walter told us of a father and two sons who were on the rope
in this way, the father being the lowest and his two sons being above
him, when the son who was uppermost saw that the rope was being frayed
above him, and was about to break. He called to his brother who was just
below that the rope would no longer hold them all, and asked him to cut
it off below him and let their father go. This he indignantly refused to
do, whereupon his brother, without a moment's hesitation, cut the rope
below himself, and both his father and brother perished.