higher peaks
like wild music which the spirits might have made. As for the path
itself, it was oftentimes but a ledge against the wall of some sheer
height; and none, I think, but seamen could have followed it, surely.
Even I remembered where I was, and feared to look down sometimes; but
danger bridges many a perilous road, and what with the silence and the
fresh breezes and the thought that we might live through the night,
after all, I believe I could have hugged the wild old man who led us
upward so unflinchingly.

I say that he went on unflinchingly, and surely no goat could have
climbed quicker than he did. Now standing over an abyss which made you
silly to look down into; now pulling himself up by bush or branch; at
other times scrambling over loose shale as though he had neither hands
nor knees to cut, he might well have scared the coolest who had met him
without warning on such a road. As for the four men he had saved from
the devils in the thickets below, I don't believe there was one of them
who didn't trust him from the first. The sea is a sure school for
knowing men and their humours. If this old Frenchman chose to put a
petticoat about his legs, and to wear a lion's mane down his back, we
liked him all the better for that. What we had seen of the young girls'
behaviour towards him made up for that which we did not know about him.
He must have had a tender place somewhere in his heart, or three young
women wouldn't fondle him like a dog. Like a ship out of the night had
he crossed our path; and his port must be our port, since we knew no
other. That's why, I say, we followed him over the dangerous road like
children follow a master. He was leading us to some good haven--I had
no doubt of it. The thing that remained to tell was, had we the
strength and the breath to reach it?

You may imagine that it was no light thing to run such a race as we had
run, and to be asked to climb a mountain on the top of it. For my part,
I was so dead tired that every step up the hillside was like a knife in
my side; and as for Peter Bligh, I wonder he didn't go rolling down to
the rocks, so hard did he breathe and so heavy he was. But men will do
wonders to save their necks, and that is how it is that we went up and
still up, through the black ravine, to the blue peaks above. Aye, a
fearsome place we had come to now, with terrible gorges, and wild
shapes of rocks, like dead men's faces leering out of the darkness. The
wind how