T H E W I N D 173 



of pale blue marked the waves breaking against the blank cliff. 



Once years before in the dazzling white glass-sand quarries 

 of the Ordovician in West Virginia I climbed two hundred 

 feet from the bottom over sheets of loose shale and fragile sand- 

 stone to reach an almost perfect fossil of a crinoid which I had 

 seen through my field glasses and, having secured it, hung help- 

 less for several hours, too frightened by the treacherous char- 

 acter of the rocks to descend, expecting at any moment to be 

 precipitated to the quarry floor; and, once I spent a miserable 

 half hour clambering over steep projections on a narrow ledge 

 high above the Susquehanna River in upper Pennsylvania where 

 I had gone seeking the nest of a Duck Hawk, cautiously hoist- 

 ing myself from stone to stone, scraping the flesh from my 

 knees and fingers as I hugged the cliff wall, and lowering myself 

 between sharp crevasses. On the latter occasion a portion of the 

 ledge had crumbled behind me, shutting off all means of retreat 

 and forcing me to drop from ledge to ledge, some of which 

 were hardly more than eight or nine inches wide, until I reached 

 the valley floor a hundred and fifty feet below. These experi- 

 ences led me to believe that I had some knowledge of the tech- 

 nique of climbing over rock. I had not then seen the crags of 

 Babylon. 



There was no danger of falling any great distance but a drop 

 of a few inches in this amazing place would have meant fright- 

 fully lacerated limbs and mangled flesh. Hundreds of thousands 

 of stone needles and curved knife blades of razor-edge limestone 

 thrust up everywhere. Every crevice and hole was lined with 

 them; deep fissures were barbed with recurved hooks; there was 

 scarcely a spot level enough or large enough to place a foot. 

 Thin sheets of sharp stone covered deep spiked pits and crum- 

 bled at the weight of a body. The thin soles of my tennis shoes 

 afforded no protection. Frequently I had to stop and rest my 

 feet. Sitting was a problem, solved only by perching on top of 



