The silence was the worst of it, the silence and the helplessness.  If he had cried out, if he had struggled, it would have been better.  But to know that he was alive there, with every nerve and perception at its utmost stretch.  Oh! my God!  Oh! my God!

My limbs began to ache, and yet I dared not stir a muscle.  They ached horribly, or so I thought, and beneath this torture, mental and physical, my mind gave.

I remembered things:  remembered how, as a child, I had climbed a tree and reached a place whence I could move neither up nor down, and what I suffered then.  Remembered how once in Egypt a foolhardy friend of mine had ascended the Second Pyramid alone, and become thus crucified upon its shining cap, where he remained for a whole half hour with four hundred feet of space beneath him.  I could see him now stretching his stockinged foot downwards in a vain attempt to reach the next crack, and drawing it back again; could see his tortured face, a white blot upon the red granite.

Then that face vanished and blackness gathered round me, and in the blackness visions:  of the living, resistless avalanche, of the snow-grave into which I had sunk—­oh! years and years ago; of Ayesha demanding Leo’s life at my hands.  Blackness and silence, through which I could only hear the cracking of my muscles.

Suddenly in the blackness a flash, and in the silence a sound.  The flash was the flash of a knife which Leo had drawn.  He was hacking at the cord with it fiercely, fiercely, to make an end.  And the sound was that of the noise he made, a ghastly noise, half shout of defiance and half yell of terror, as at the third stroke it parted.

I saw it part.  The tough hide was half cut through, and its severed portion curled upwards and downwards like the upper and lower lips of an angry dog, whilst that which was unsevered stretched out slowly, slowly, till it grew quite thin.  Then it snapped, so that the rope flew upwards and struck me across the face like the lash of a whip.

Another instant and I heard a crackling, thudding sound.  Leo had struck the ground below.  Leo was dead, a mangled mass of flesh and bone as I had pictured him.  I could not bear it.  My nerve and human dignity came back.  I would not wait until, my strength exhausted, I slid from my perch as a wounded bird falls from a tree.  No, I would follow him at once, of my own act.

I let my arms fall against my sides, and rejoiced in the relief from pain that the movement gave me.  Then balanced upon my heels, I stood upright, took my last look at the sky, muttered my last prayer.  For an instant I remained thus poised.

Shouting, “I come,” I raised my hands above my head and dived as a bather dives, dived into the black gulf beneath.

CHAPTER VI

IN THE GATE

Oh! that rush through space!  Folk falling thus are supposed to lose consciousness, but I can assert that this is not true.  Never were my wits and perceptions more lively than while I travelled from that broken glacier to the ground, and never did a short journey seem to take a longer time.  I saw the white floor, like some living thing, leaping up through empty air to meet me, then—­finis!