﻿FORRESTEB'S EVENINGS AT HOME. 115 



From the head of the gorge we turned off along the other face of the moun- 

 tain ; holding by the shrubs above, while below there was nothing but the 

 tops of the forest for more than nine hundred feet down the slope. 



On rising to the shoulder, a view burst upon us which quite defies my de- 

 scriptive powers. We stood on a little narrow ledge or neck of land, about 

 twenty yards in length. On the side which we mounted, we looked back into 

 the deep wooded gorge we had passed up ; while, on the opposite side of the 

 neck, which was between six and seven feet broad, the precipice went sheer 

 down fifteen hundred feet to the plain. One extremity of the neck was equally 

 precipitous, and the other was bounded by what to rne was the most magnifi- 

 cent sight I ever saw. A narrow, knife-like edge of rock, broken here and 

 there by precipitous faces, ran up in a conical form to about three hundred or 

 three hundred and fifty feet above us ; and on the very pinnacle old " Peter 

 Botte " frowned in all his glory. 



After a short rest we proceeded to work. The ladder had been left by 

 Lloyd and Dawkins last year. It was about twelve feet high, and reacted, 

 as you may perceive, about half way up a face of perpendicular rock. The 

 foot, which was spiked, rested on a ledge, with barely three inches on each 

 side. A grapnel line had been also left last year, but was not used. A ne- 

 gro of Lloyd's clambered from the top of the ladder by the cleft in the face of 

 the rock, not trusting his weight to the old and rotten line. He carried a 

 small cord round his middle ; and it was fearful to see the cool, steady way in 

 which he climbed, where a single loose stone or false hold must have sent him 

 down into the abyss. However, he fearlessly scrambled away, till at length 

 we heard him halloo from, under the neck, " All right." These negroes use 

 their feet exactly like monkeys, grasping with them every projection almost 

 as firmly as with their hands. The line carried up he made fast above, and 

 up it we all four shinned in succession. It was, joking apart, awful work. In 

 several places the ridge ran to an edge, not a foot broad ; and I could, as I 

 held on, half sitting, half kneeling, across the ridge, have kicked my right 

 shoe down to the plain on one side, and my left into the bottom of the ravine 

 on the other. The only thing which surprised me was my own steadiness 

 and freedom from all giddiness. I had been nervous in mounting the ravine, 

 in the morning, but gradually I got so excited and determined to succeed, that 

 I could look down that dizzy height without the smallest sensation of swim- 

 ming in the head. Nevertheless, I held on uncommonly hard, and felt very 

 well satisfied when I was under the neck. And a more extraordinary situa- 

 tion I never was in. The head, which is an enormous mass of rock about 

 thirty-five feet in height, overhangs its base many feet on every side. A 

 ledge of tolerably level rock runs round three sides of the base, about six feet 

 in width, bounded everywhere by the abrupt edge of the precipice, except in 



