ously.

The line was knotted at intervals of eighteen inches; and to the
inexpert it may seem as if it should have been even easy to descend. The
trouble was, this devil of a piece of rope appeared to be inspired, not
with life alone, but with a personal malignity against myself. It turned
to the one side, paused for a moment, and then spun me like a
toasting-jack to the other; slipped like an eel from the clasp of my
feet; kept me all the time in the most outrageous fury of exertion; and
dashed me at intervals against the face of the rock. I had no eyes to
see with; and I doubt if there was anything to see but darkness. I must
occasionally have caught a gasp of breath, but it was quite unconscious.
And the whole forces of my mind were so consumed with losing hold and
getting it again, that I could scarce have told whether I was going up
or coming down.

Of a sudden I knocked against the cliff with such a thump as almost
bereft me of my sense; and, as reason twinkled back, I was amazed to
find that I was in a state of rest, that the face of the precipice here
inclined outwards at an angle which relieved me almost wholly of the
burthen of my own weight, and that one of my feet was safely planted on
a ledge. I drew one of the sweetest breaths in my experience, hugged
myself against the rope, and closed my eyes in a kind of ecstasy of
relief. It occurred to me next to see how far I was advanced on my
unlucky journey, a point on which I had not a shadow of a guess. I
looked up: there was nothing above me but the blackness of the night and
the fog. I craned timidly forward and looked down. There, upon a floor
of darkness, I beheld a certain pattern of hazy lights, some of them
aligned as in thoroughfares, others standing apart as in solitary
houses; and before I could well realise it, or had in the least
estimated my distance, a wave of nausea and vertigo warned me to lie
back and close my eyes. In this situation I had really but the one wish,
and that was: something else to think of! Strange to say, I got it; a
veil was torn from my mind, and I saw what a fool I was--what fools we
had all been--and that I had no business to be thus dangling between
earth and heaven by my arms. The only thing to have done was to have
attached me to a rope and lowered me, and I had never the wit to see it
till that moment!

I filled my lungs, got a good hold on my rope, and once more launched
myself on the descent. As it chanced, the worst