ledge beginning to slope upward
as he passed along it to the eastward; but when he had traversed some
fifty yards or so, it suddenly narrowed away to nothing under a
projecting angle of the superimposed sandstone, and in endeavouring to
get a glimpse round this angle, the soft material crumbled in George's
grasp, he lost his hold, staggered, reeled, struggled ineffectually to
recover his balance, and fell. For a single instant he gave himself up
as lost, and suffered in anticipation all the agonies of a frightful
death; but he had not fallen more than six feet, when his outstretched
hand encountered a long, stout, flexible twig, or rather a young tree,
shooting out from an interstice in the rocks. He grasped it with the
iron grip of a drowning man, grasped it with both hands, and, though it
bent double with his weight, it held out bravely, and enabled him to
regain his footing on the face of the precipice. In another moment he
had scrambled once more on to the ledge, where he lay panting,
breathless, with torn and bleeding hands, but safe.

The appalling peril from which he had thus a second time so narrowly
escaped, inflicted a terrible shock on George's nerves, and it was some
time before he could find courage to once more raise his head and look
about him. The reflection, however, that two men, one of them utterly
helpless, were in the same perilous situation as himself--having indeed
been brought directly into it by him--helped him to once more recover
the command of his nerves, and, somewhat ashamed of their unexpected
weakness, he scrambled to his feet and set out to explore in the
opposite direction.

By the time that he had once more reached the point where Tom sat
patiently awaiting him, the dusk was closing down upon the landscape
with all the rapidity peculiar to the tropics, and, shrouded as they
were in the deep shadow of the precipice, it was already difficult for
them to see each other clearly. This meant still another danger added
to those which already confronted them, and George felt that, unless a
way of escape could quickly be found, they would be compelled to remain
where they were all night, a prospect which involved so many horrible
contingencies that he dared not allow his mind to dwell upon it, but,
turning his attention strictly to the matter in hand, hurried away on
his quest to the westward.

In this direction he was more successful, the ledge, at a distance of
some thirty yards, run