Did you ever stand in Broadway below the Woolworth Tower, and look up?
Imagine that tipped over a little from the perpendicular, and four times as high, and you"ll have an idea of what Tom looked at.
"Well, now, this is worth coming for!" the doctor cried, cheerfully, as he took off his coil of rope, and made it ready. "Mills, will you take number one place for a way? I"ll be number two and anchor, of course.
Tom can dangle off below, like a tail to the kite. How"ll you like that, Tom?"
Tom"s face must have shown what he was feeling, for the doctor suddenly changed tone.
"Come, come," he said. "It"s not bad--only long. A Swiss guide wouldn"t even consider this dangerous. All you have to remember is to test all your hand- and foot-holds before you put your weight on them, and watch for falling stones. This shale pile means the rock may crumble easily in places. Come on--be a scout!"
"I"m game!" Tom answered, biting his lip. "I guess I won"t be stumped by an old goat!"
Mills laughed. "Wait till you see a goat perform," he said, as he made fast one end of the rope around his waist. As he adjusted it, he added, "This is a better rope than I ever used. Where"d you get it?"
"Switzerland," the doctor answered. "I have several I"ve brought over from time to time. You can"t get soft, flexible, braided rope here in this country. We don"t go in for mountain climbing enough to make it."
Tom was now fastened on the lower end of the rope, and the doctor in the middle, and the ascent began.
"You watch me use the rope," the doctor said to Tom. "It will show you how to do it, if you ever have to be second man on a climb--and it will keep you from looking down, also!"
Spider was almost as anxious to learn how to use the rope properly as he was to get up the cliff. He had hoped to climb, when he came to the Park, but he never dreamed he would be climbing with a real Alpine rope, manipulated by a man who had been up the Matterhorn, and with the leader of the party an old goat hunter.
For the benefit of the boys who are reading this book, I want to tell just how Dr. Kent used the rope. No boy, or man, either, should ever try to climb a cliff without a rope, and without proper shoes, with plenty of strong, sharp spikes. The rope must be strong enough to hold the weight of three or four men, at the very least, and it must be soft and pliable. If you cannot get such a soft rope, boil an ordinary one in a wash-boiler till it loses its stiffness. But, even when you have the rope, you must not use it on a cliff until you have learned the proper methods, preferably under the guidance of some man who has climbed in England or the Alps or the Rockies.
Now in rope climbing up rocks, the leader has the hardest job because he has to find the way up, and to climb without any rope to help him. But the second man has what is perhaps the most important job, for he is the anchor; it is on him that the life of the leader may depend, as well as the life of the man below.
Suppose three men are fastened on the rope almost fifty feet apart, as Tom, Mills and Dr. Kent were, for the average rope is about a hundred feet long. The first man starts climbing, and when he gets up nearly to the full play of his fifty feet of rope, he finds some ledge where he can rest, or some firm projection where he can throw his end of the rope over, take a half hitch, and thus make a firm line for the second man to climb with. The second man comes up to him, and the leader starts up again. But now he is starting well up from the ground, and if he got any higher and should fall, it would be bad, so the second man, before the leader starts up, takes a half turn around the firm projection with his end of the stretch of rope between himself and number one, or, if it is very steep and dangerous, perhaps giving the leader a play of only fifteen or twenty feet. Then if the leader should slip and fall, instead of dragging off the second man with him, he would fall only the distance between himself and the point where the rope was secured to the rock. If the rope was strong, it would bring him up short, dangling against the cliff, and would not yank the second man off with him. Of course, after three climbers are well up the face of a cliff, if the leader should fall without the rope being anch.o.r.ed between him and number two, he would drag all three men off with him, probably to death. That is why number two position is so important in rope climbing.
And Tom was not long in realizing this. He saw Mills go up easily to a shelf forty feet above, and both the doctor and he scrambled up after him, without needing the rope at all. The next stage was not difficult, either, though the Ranger, as soon as he was well above the shale pile, began to test his hand-holds and foot-holds with the utmost care, keeping in the faintly discernible goat track whenever he could. But when they were up a hundred and seventy-five feet or more, all three of them on a ledge about three feet wide, they found themselves directly against a perpendicular wall at least twenty-five feet high.
Mills was studying the situation. "Coming down, the goats jump it from that shelf above," he said. "You can see their tracks here where they land. But they can"t climb it going up. They swing off to the left, by this ledge--and look at it!"
Tom and the doctor looked. To the left the ledge shrank to a cornice actually not over six inches wide.
"Do you mean to tell me the goats walk around on that?" the doctor demanded.
"Sure," said Mills. "It probably leads to an easy way around to the shelf over our heads, but we can"t make it--at least, I don"t want to try, unless I have to."
Tom looked at the six inch ledge, and the hundred and seventy-five foot drop below it, and said, "Amen!"
"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. Anch.o.r.ed 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 anch.o.r.ed 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.
"That"s your real initiation in rock climbing," he said. "You"re going good. Keep it up!"
The new ledge brought them to the big gully (the one you see, filled with snow, in the picture). It still had some snow in places when the party reached it, but for the most part it was clear, though there was a tiny trickle of water at the bottom. It was a great, rough, jagged trough scooped out of the cliff by ages of running snow water, and inclined at an angle not very far off the perpendicular.
"Not quite a real chimney," the doctor said briefly. "It"s too big and open, and you can"t stretch from side to side. Looks as if we"d have to watch out for stones, too."
"You will," said Mills.
Even as he spoke, they heard a noise above them, and the Ranger yelled, "Jump for shelter!"
All three sprang to one side of the gully, below a projecting shelf of rock, and past them, thundering down the chute, went a stone as big as a bucket, just loosened by melting snow above.
Tom watched it go past, and began to think the last place on the rope was not the softest berth he could imagine.
The doctor now turned to him. "You see what you"ve got to look out for, Tom," he said. "For each fresh climb, we"ll pick a place where there is shelter for the man waiting below. But you"ve still got to be on the watch, and dodge quick. This is going to be a regular climb!"
It was! For the next three hours Tom did the liveliest and the hardest work he had ever put in. He had no chance to get dizzy looking down, for he never even dared to look down. He looked up, never knowing when the next stone or even shower of stones would descend upon him, and prepared every second to spring to right or left to dodge them. They climbed by sending Mills out from under a protecting ledge and letting him shin up his fifty feet. Then the doctor would follow, and when he was up with Mills, Tom would emerge from under the shelter, and join them. Then they would repeat the process. But even with Mills and the doctor standing still above him, Tom had to look out for rocks. They were always coming down, loosened by the melting snow above, as well as by the feet of the climbers.
And it was hard work, too. Not only was the gully tremendously steep, but it was rough, in places wet and slippery, and finally half full of snow. When they reached the snow, their worst troubles came, for they had no ice axes to make steps, and without steps they could not climb on the snow, it was so steep. They had to work up the side of the gully, by whatever toe holds they could find. The gully was steeper than a flight of very steep stairs--in places, indeed, it was almost perpendicular,--and Tom"s breath began to come hard and his legs tremble with weariness. But Mills kept plugging upward, and the towering, upright pinnacles of the summit began to loom nearer and nearer.
Finally Mills, without warning, turned out of the gully, close to its top, and swung out on a wide ledge right under the final two or three hundred feet of the climb. On this ledge, which didn"t show from below, was a regular little garden of moss campion and Alpine wild flowers.
"Goat food," said Mills, shortly. He had hardly spoken a word since the first bad place, and the doctor had been equally silent They sat down to rest on this wide ledge, and looked off at last upon the great prospect below them, with the lake, like a little green mirror now, far beneath.
"Wonderful!" the doctor exclaimed. "A magnificent balcony seat we have in this amphitheatre, and no ushers to bother us. Mills, you"re a good climber--you don"t talk."
Mills smiled. "Never knew a safe mountain man who did talk on a cliff or a glacier," said he.
"No, you can"t watch your footing and gabble at the same time. Bah! how I hate a talker on a climb!"
"A man came out here once in a big party," said the Ranger. "I took "em up Cleveland. When we hit the real climb, he fetched out a sign from his pack, and hung it on his back. It read, "I"m not very sociable when I"m climbing.""
The doctor and Tom laughed, and the former added, "There"s a wise man!"
The ledge on which they sat, which was like a little secret garden hung up here two thousand feet above the lake, was covered with goat tracks, and Mills pointed out several little caves, too, under overhanging rocks, where, he said, the kids were probably born. Above them, the last three hundred feet of the cliff went up perfectly straight, and Tom didn"t see how they were going to get any farther.