divided his men into parties of
two, scattering them along the Summit, with orders to be vigilant, and
to support each other. It was well known that a man could not enter from
without unless by the gate, or aided by ladders, or some other
mechanical invention. The time necessary to provide the last would bring
broad daylight, and enable the colonists to march such a force to the
menaced point, as would be pretty certain to prove sufficient to resist
the assailants. The gate itself was commanded by a carronade, and was
watched by a guard.

Great was the disappointment of Waally when he ascertained, by personal
examination, that the Summit could not be scaled, even by the most
active of his party, without recourse to assistance, by means of
artificial contrivances. He had the sagacity to collect all his men
immediately beneath the natural walls, where they were alone safe from
the fire of the guns, but where they were also useless. A large pile of
iron, an article so coveted, was in plain sight, beneath a shed, but he
did not dare to send a single hand to touch it, since it would have
brought the adventurer under fire. A variety of other articles, almost
as tempting, though not perhaps of the same intrinsic value, lay also in
sight, but were tabooed by the magic of powder and balls. Eleven hundred
warriors, as was afterwards ascertained, landed on the Reef that
eventful morning, and assembled under the walls of the crater. A hundred
more remained in the canoes, which lay about a league off, in the
western passage, or to leeward, awaiting the result of the enterprise.

The first effort made by Waally was to throw a force upward, by rearing
one man on another's shoulders. This scheme succeeded in part, but the
fellow who first showed his head above the perpendicular part of the
cliff, received a bullet in his brains. The musket was fired by the
hands of Socrates. This one discharge brought down the whole fabric,
several of those who fell sustaining serious injuries, in the way of
broken bones. The completely isolated position of the crater, which
stood, as it might be, aloof from all surrounding objects, added
materially to its strength in a military sense, and Waally was puzzled
how to overcome difficulties that might have embarrassed a more
civilized soldier. For the first time in his life, that warrior had
encountered a sort of fortress, which could be entered only by regular
approaches, unless it might be carried by a