In truth, with Jarvo to set light foot where no foot seemed ever before to have been set, with Jarvo to inspect every twig and pebble and to take sharp turns where no turn seemed possible, the ascent, perilous as it was, proved to be no such superhuman feat as from below it had appeared.  But it seemed interminable.  Even when the sea lay far beneath them and the faces of the watchers on the deck of The Aloha were no longer distinguishable, the grim wall continued to stretch upward, melting into the sky’s late blue.

The afterglow laid a fair path along the water, and the warm dusk came swiftly out of the east.  At snail’s pace, now with heads bent to knees, now standing erect to draw themselves up by the arms or to leap a wicked-looking crevice, the four took their way up the black side of the rock.  Birds of the cliffs, disturbed from long rest, wheeled and screamed about them, almost brushing their faces with long, fearless wings.  There was an occasional shelf where, with backs against the wall spotted with crystals of feldspar, they waited to breathe, hardly looking down from the dizzy ledge.  Great slabs of obsidian were piled about them between stretches of calcareous stone, and the soil which was like beds of old lava covered by thin layers of limestone, was everywhere pierced by sharp shoulders of stone lying in savage disarray.  Gradually rock-slides and rock-edges yielded a less insecure footing on the upper reaches, but the chasms widened and water dripping from lateral crevasses made the vague trail slippery and the occasional earth sodden and treacherous.  For a quarter of a mile their way lay over a kind of porous gravel into which their feet sank, and beyond at the summit of a ridge Jarvo halted and threw back to them a summary warning to prepare for “a long leap.”  A sharp angle of rock, jutting out, had been split down the middle by some ancient force—­very likely a Paleozoic butterfly had brushed it with its wing—­and the edges had been worn away in a treacherous slope to the very lip of the crumbling promontory.  From this edge to the edge of the opposite abutment there was a gap of wicked width, and between was a sheer drop into space wherefrom rose the sound of tumbling waters.  When Jarvo had taken the leap, easily and gracefully, alighting on the other side like the greyhound that he resembled, and the others, following, had cleared the edge by as safe a margin as if the abyss were a minor field-day event, St. George and Amory looked back with sudden wonder over the path by which they had come.

“I feel as if I weighed about ninety pounds,” said St. George; “am I fading away or anything?”

Amory stood still.

“I was thinking the same thing,” he said.  “By Jove—­do you suppose—­what if Little Cawthorne hit the other end of the nail, as usual?  Suppose the specific gravity—­suppose there is something—­suppose it doesn’t hold good in this dimension that a body—­by Jove,” said Amory, “wouldn’t that be the deuce?”