A pair of blue eyes
sensation that Knight was in bodily danger. But attempt to help him she
must. She ventured upon the treacherous incline, propped herself with
the closed telescope, and gave him her hand before he saw her
movements.
“O Elfride! why did you?” said he. “I am afraid you have only
endangered yourself.”
And as if to prove his statement, in making an endeavour by her
assistance they both slipped lower, and then he was again stayed. His
foot was propped by a bracket of quartz rock, balanced on the verge of
the precipice. Fixed by this, he steadied her, her head being about a
foot below the beginning of the slope. Elfride had dropped the glass;
it rolled to the edge and vanished over it into a nether sky.
“Hold tightly to me,” he said.
She flung her arms round his neck with such a firm grasp that whilst he
remained it was impossible for her to fall.
“Don’t be flurried,” Knight continued. “So long as we stay above this
block we are perfectly safe. Wait a moment whilst I consider what we
had better do.”
He turned his eyes to the dizzy depths beneath them, and surveyed the
position of affairs.
Two glances told him a tale with ghastly distinctness. It was that,
unless they performed their feat of getting up the slope with the
precision of machines, they were over the edge and whirling in mid-air.
For this purpose it was necessary that he should recover the breath and
strength which his previous efforts had cost him. So he still waited,
and looked in the face of the enemy.
The crest of this terrible natural facade passed among the neighbouring
inhabitants as being seven hundred feet above the water it overhung. It
had been proved by actual measurement to be not a foot less than six
hundred and fifty.
That is to say, it is nearly three times the height of Flamborough,
half as high again as the South Foreland, a hundred feet higher than
Beachy Head—the loftiest promontory on the east or south side of this
island—twice the height of St. Aldhelm’s, thrice as high as the Lizard,
and just double the height of St. Bee’s. One sea-bord point on the
western coast is known to surpass it in altitude, but only by a few
feet. This is Great Orme’s Head, in Caernarvonshire.
And it must be remembered that the cliff exhibits an intensifying
feature which some of those are without—sheer perpendicularity from the
half-tide level.
Yet this remarkable rampart forms no headland: it rather walls in an
inlet—the promontory on each side being much lower. Thus, far from
being salient, its horizontal section is concave. The sea, rolling
direct from the shores of North America, has in fact eaten a chasm into
the middle of a hill, and the giant, embayed and unobtrusive, stands in
the rear of pigmy supporters. Not least singularly, neither hill,
chasm, nor precipice has a name. On this account I will call the
precipice the Cliff without a Name.*
* See Preface
What gave an added terror to its height was its blackness. And upon
this dark face the beating of ten thousand west winds had formed a kind
of bloom, which had a visual effect not unlike that of a Hambro’ grape.
Moreover it seemed to float off into the atmosphere, and inspire terror
through the lungs.
“This piece of quartz, supporting my feet, is on the very nose of the
cliff,” said Knight, breaking the silence after his rigid stoical
meditation. “Now what you are to do is this. Clamber up my body till
your feet are on my shoulders: when you are there you will, I think, be
able to climb on to level ground.”
“What will you do?”
“Wait whilst you run for assistance.”
“I ought to have done that in the first place, ought I not?”
“I was in the act of slipping, and should have reached no stand-point
without your weight, in all probability. But don’t let us talk. Be
brave, Elfride, and climb.”
She prepared to ascend, saying, “This is the moment I anticipated when
on the tower. I thought it would come!”
“This is not a time for superstition,” said Knight. “Dismiss all that.”
“I will,” she said humbly.
“Now put your foot into my hand: next the other. That’s good—well done.
Hold to my shoulder.”
She placed her feet upon the stirrup he made of his hand, and was high
enough to get a view of the natural surface of the hill over the bank.
“Can you now climb on to level ground?”
“I am afraid not. I will try.”
“What can you see?”
“The sloping common.”
“What upon it?”
“Purple heather and some grass.”
“Nothing more—no man or human being of any kind?”
“Nobody.”
“Now try to get higher in this way. You see that tuft of sea-pink above
you. Get that well into your hand, but don’t trust to it entirely. Then
step upon my shoulder, and I think you will reach the top.”
With trembling limbs she did exactly as he told her. The preternatural
quiet and solemnity of his manner overspread upon herself, and gave her
a courage not her own. She made a spring from the top of his shoulder,
and was up.
Then she turned to look at him.
By an ill fate, the force downwards of her bound, added to his own
weight, had been too much for the block of quartz upon which his feet
depended. It was, indeed, originally an igneous protrusion into the
enormous masses of black strata, which had since been worn away from
the sides of the alien fragment by centuries of frost and rain, and now
left it without much support.
It moved. Knight seized a tuft of sea-pink with each hand.
The quartz rock which had been his salvation was worse than useless
now. It rolled over, out of sight, and away into the same nether sky
that had engulfed the telescope.
One of the tufts by which he held came out at the root, and Knight
began to follow the quartz. It was a terrible moment. Elfride uttered a
low wild wail of agony, bowed her head, and covered her face with her
hands.
Between the turf-covered slope and the gigantic perpendicular rock
intervened a weather-worn series of jagged edges, forming a face yet
steeper than the former slope. As he slowly slid inch by inch upon
these, Knight made a last desperate dash at the lowest tuft of
vegetation—the last outlying knot of starved herbage ere the rock
appeared in all its bareness. It arrested his further descent. Knight
was now literally suspended by his arms; but the incline of the brow
being what engineers would call about a quarter in one, it was
sufficient to relieve his arms of a portion of his weight, but was very
far from offering an adequately flat face to support him.
In spite of this dreadful tension of body and mind, Knight found time
for a moment of thankfulness. Elfride was safe.
She lay on her side above him—her fingers clasped. Seeing him again
steady, she jumped upon her feet.
“Now, if I can only save you by running for help!” she cried. “Oh, I
would have died instead! Why did you try so hard to deliver me?” And
she turned away wildly to run for assistance.
“Elfride, how long will it take you to run to Endelstow and back?”
“Three-quarters of an hour.”
“That won’t do; my hands will not hold out ten minutes. And is there
nobody nearer?”
“No; unless a chance passer may happen to be.”
“He would have nothing with him that could save me. Is there a pole or
stick of any kind on the common?”
She gazed around. The common was bare of everything but heather and
grass.
A minute—perhaps more time—was passed in mute thought by both. On a
sudden the blank and helpless agony left her face. She vanished over
the bank from his sight.
Knight felt himself in the presence of a personalized loneliness.
Chapter XXII
“A woman’s way.”
Haggard cliffs, of every ugly altitude, are as common as sea-fowl along
the line of coast between Exmoor and Land’s End; but this outflanked
and encompassed specimen was the ugliest of them all. Their summits are
not safe places for scientific experiment on the principles of
air-currents, as Knight had now found, to his dismay.
He still clutched the face of the escarpment—not with the frenzied hold
of despair, but with a dogged determination to make the most of his
every jot of endurance, and so give the longest possible scope to
Elfride’s intentions, whatever they might be.
He reclined hand in hand with the world in its infancy. Not a blade,
not an insect, which spoke of the present, was between him and the
past. The inveterate antagonism of these black precipices to all
strugglers for life is in no way more forcibly suggested than by the
paucity of tufts of grass, lichens, or confervae on their outermost
ledges.
Knight pondered on the meaning of Elfride’s hasty disappearance, but
could not avoid an instinctive conclusion that there existed but a
doubtful hope for him. As far as he could judge, his sole chance of
deliverance lay in the possibility of a rope or pole being brought; and
this possibility was remote indeed. The soil upon these high downs was
left so untended that they were unenclosed for miles, except by a
casual bank or dry wall, and were rarely visited but for the purpose of
collecting or counting the flock which found a scanty means of
subsistence thereon.
At first, when death appeared improbable, because it had never visited
him before, Knight could think of no future, nor of anything connected
with his past. He could only look sternly at Nature’s treacherous
attempt to put an end to him, and strive to thwart her.
From the fact that the cliff formed the inner face of the segment of a
huge cylinder, having the sky for a top and the sea for a bottom, which
enclosed the cove to the extent of more than a semicircle, he could see
the vertical face curving round on each side of him. He looked far down
the facade, and realized more thoroughly how it threatened him.
Grimness was in every feature, and to its very bowels the inimical
shape was desolation.
By one of those familiar conjunctions of things wherewith the inanimate
world baits the mind of man when he pauses in moments of suspense,
opposite Knight’s eyes was an imbedded fossil, standing forth in low
relief from the rock. It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and
turned to stone, were even now regarding him. It was one of the early
crustaceans called Trilobites. Separated by millions of years in their
lives, Knight and this underling seemed to have met in their death. It
was the single instance within reach of his vision of anything that had
ever been alive and had had a body to save, as he himself had now.
The creature represented but a low type of animal existence, for never
in their vernal years had the plains indicated by those numberless
slaty layers been traversed by an intelligence worthy of the name.
Zoophytes, mollusca, shell-fish, were the highest developments of those
ancient dates. The immense lapses of time each formation represented
had known nothing of the dignity of man. They were grand times, but
they were mean times too, and mean were their relics. He was to be with
the small in his death.
Knight was a geologist; and such is the supremacy of habit over
occasion, as a pioneer of the thoughts of men, that at this dreadful
juncture his mind found time to take in, by a momentary sweep, the
varied scenes that had had their day between this creature’s epoch and
his own. There is no place like a cleft landscape for bringing home
such imaginings as these.
Time closed up like a fan before him. He saw himself at one extremity
of the years, face to face with the beginning and all the intermediate
centuries simultaneously. Fierce men, clothed in the hides of beasts,
and carrying, for defence and attack, huge clubs and pointed spears,
rose from the rock, like the phantoms before the doomed Macbeth. They
lived in hollows, woods, and mud huts—perhaps in caves of the
neighbouring rocks. Behind them stood an earlier band. No man was