Slowly, slowly up, foot by foot, yard by yard, until one-third of the
distance was climbed. The suspense and strain were immeasurable. But he
struggled on and on, and at last reached a sort of flying pinnacle of
rock, like a hook for the shields of the gods.

Here he ventured to look below, expecting to see Carterette, but there
was only the white sand, and no sound save the long wash of the gulf. He
drew a horn of arrack from his pocket and drank. He had two hundred feet
more to climb, and the next hundred would be the great ordeal.

He started again. This was travail indeed. His rough fingers, his toes,
hard as horn almost, began bleeding. Once or twice he swung quite clear
of the wall, hanging by his fingers to catch a surer foothold to right or
left, and just getting it sometimes by an inch or less. The tension was
terrible. His head seemed to swell and fill with blood: on the top it
throbbed till it was ready to burst. His neck was aching horribly with
constant looking up, the skin of his knees was gone, his ankles bruised.
But he must keep on till he got to the top, or until he fell.

He was fighting on now in a kind of dream, quite apart from all usual
feelings of this world. The earth itself seemed far away, and he was
toiling among vastnesses, himself a giant with colossal frame and huge,
sprawling limbs. It was like a gruesome vision of the night, when the
body is an elusive, stupendous mass that falls into space after a
confused struggle with immensities. It was all mechanical, vague, almost
numb, this effort to overcome a mountain. Yet it was precise and hugely
expert too; for though there was a strange mist on the brain, the body
felt its way with a singular certainty, as might some molluscan dweller
of the sea, sensitive like a plant, intuitive like an animal. Yet at
times it seemed that this vast body overcoming the mountain must let go