A Dangerous Cliff 347 
re) 
moment some furious rain-squalls were passing and the drifting 
clouds and vapour half-obscured the view of the rocky valley and 
winding stream which lay far away, 800 or more feet below us, and 
made the descent look doubly formidable. The lowering party 
were perched amid the rocks 30 ft. above me and I was in a 
life-line at the extreme edge, but such was the nature of the cliff 
that I could see nothing immediately below me and I remained 
crouched down, anxiously feeling the rope as it passed through 
my hands and waiting for the signal whistle from below. The 
wind whistled and roared around the edge of the cliff and it seemed 
impossible to hear anything. Very soon to my great relief, | heard 
the whistle, ‘* Haul up,” and soon we had our climber back safe 
among us. 
One of those untoward affairs now occurred which illustrate 
the wide difference between rope-work among cliffs well-known 
to the climbers and the reverse. I called attention to this when 
discussing climbing in general in an earlier part of this book. 
My comrade having been hauled up to the lowering party, I was 
in the act of following him up, when a great mass of seemingly 
solid rock upon which I put my weight suddenly came away in my 
hand and bounding past me down the slope, disappeared over the 
cliff at the point where we had both been climbing and we heard it 
crashing and splintering as it struck the rocks hundreds of feet below. 
So much for working among disintegrated limestone rocks! Nor 
is it to be wondered at. The excessive rain-fall in this region 
during the winter months, the dense clouds which so constantly 
enshroud the mountain tops, the snow and hard frosts of every 
successive winter and the powerful rays of the Andalucian summer 
sun, all combine to break up the hardest formations. Some of the 
huge talus of sharply broken stone which are met with at com- 
paratively low altitudes in this region bear eloquent testimony to 
the irresistible forces of Nature. 
