the flashlight thing, and twenty-eight more films in his kodak, and
said we might as well get through with the job then as make a
return journey all on purpose. So he took the crowbar, and I
shouldered the rope, and away we went up to the ridge of the cliff,
where we had got such a baking from the sun the day before.

Of course these caves were not easy to come at, or else they
would have been raided years before. Coppinger, who on principle
makes out he knows all about these things, says that in the old
Guanche days they had ladders of goatskin rope which they could
pull up when they were at home, and so keep out undesirable
callers; and as no other plan occurs to me, perhaps he may be
right. Anyway the mouths of the caves were in a more or less level
row thirty feet below the ridge of the cliff, and fifty feet above
the bottom; and Spanish curiosity doesn't go in much where it
cannot walk.

Now laddering such caves from below would have been cumbersome,
but a light knotted rope is easily carried, and though it would
have been hard to climb up this, our plan was to descend on
each cave mouth from above, and then slip down to the foot of
the cliffs, and start again AB INITIO for the next.

Coppinger is plucky enough, and he has a good head on a height,
but there is no getting over the fact that he is portly and
nearer fifty than forty-five. So you can see he must have been
pretty keen. Of course I went first each time, and got into the
cave mouth, and did what I could to help him in; but when you have
to walk down a vertical cliff face fly-fashion, with only a thin
bootlace of a rope for support, it is not much real help the man