Part 29 (1/2)
Did you ever stand in Broadway below the Woolworth Tower, and look up?
Imagine that tipped over a little from the perpendicular, and four times as high, and you'll have an idea of what Tom looked at.
”Well, now, this is worth coming for!” the doctor cried, cheerfully, as he took off his coil of rope, and made it ready. ”Mills, will you take number one place for a way? I'll be number two and anchor, of course.
Tom can dangle off below, like a tail to the kite. How'll you like that, Tom?”
Tom's face must have shown what he was feeling, for the doctor suddenly changed tone.
”Come, come,” he said. ”It's not bad--only long. A Swiss guide wouldn't even consider this dangerous. All you have to remember is to test all your hand- and foot-holds before you put your weight on them, and watch for falling stones. This shale pile means the rock may crumble easily in places. Come on--be a scout!”
”I'm game!” Tom answered, biting his lip. ”I guess I won't be stumped by an old goat!”
Mills laughed. ”Wait till you see a goat perform,” he said, as he made fast one end of the rope around his waist. As he adjusted it, he added, ”This is a better rope than I ever used. Where'd you get it?”
”Switzerland,” the doctor answered. ”I have several I've brought over from time to time. You can't get soft, flexible, braided rope here in this country. We don't go in for mountain climbing enough to make it.”
Tom was now fastened on the lower end of the rope, and the doctor in the middle, and the ascent began.
”You watch me use the rope,” the doctor said to Tom. ”It will show you how to do it, if you ever have to be second man on a climb--and it will keep you from looking down, also!”
Spider was almost as anxious to learn how to use the rope properly as he was to get up the cliff. He had hoped to climb, when he came to the Park, but he never dreamed he would be climbing with a real Alpine rope, manipulated by a man who had been up the Matterhorn, and with the leader of the party an old goat hunter.
For the benefit of the boys who are reading this book, I want to tell just how Dr. Kent used the rope. No boy, or man, either, should ever try to climb a cliff without a rope, and without proper shoes, with plenty of strong, sharp spikes. The rope must be strong enough to hold the weight of three or four men, at the very least, and it must be soft and pliable. If you cannot get such a soft rope, boil an ordinary one in a wash-boiler till it loses its stiffness. But, even when you have the rope, you must not use it on a cliff until you have learned the proper methods, preferably under the guidance of some man who has climbed in England or the Alps or the Rockies.
Now in rope climbing up rocks, the leader has the hardest job because he has to find the way up, and to climb without any rope to help him. But the second man has what is perhaps the most important job, for he is the anchor; it is on him that the life of the leader may depend, as well as the life of the man below.
Suppose three men are fastened on the rope almost fifty feet apart, as Tom, Mills and Dr. Kent were, for the average rope is about a hundred feet long. The first man starts climbing, and when he gets up nearly to the full play of his fifty feet of rope, he finds some ledge where he can rest, or some firm projection where he can throw his end of the rope over, take a half hitch, and thus make a firm line for the second man to climb with. The second man comes up to him, and the leader starts up again. But now he is starting well up from the ground, and if he got any higher and should fall, it would be bad, so the second man, before the leader starts up, takes a half turn around the firm projection with his end of the stretch of rope between himself and number one, or, if it is very steep and dangerous, perhaps giving the leader a play of only fifteen or twenty feet. Then if the leader should slip and fall, instead of dragging off the second man with him, he would fall only the distance between himself and the point where the rope was secured to the rock. If the rope was strong, it would bring him up short, dangling against the cliff, and would not yank the second man off with him. Of course, after three climbers are well up the face of a cliff, if the leader should fall without the rope being anch.o.r.ed between him and number two, he would drag all three men off with him, probably to death. That is why number two position is so important in rope climbing.
And Tom was not long in realizing this. He saw Mills go up easily to a shelf forty feet above, and both the doctor and he scrambled up after him, without needing the rope at all. The next stage was not difficult, either, though the Ranger, as soon as he was well above the shale pile, began to test his hand-holds and foot-holds with the utmost care, keeping in the faintly discernible goat track whenever he could. But when they were up a hundred and seventy-five feet or more, all three of them on a ledge about three feet wide, they found themselves directly against a perpendicular wall at least twenty-five feet high.
Mills was studying the situation. ”Coming down, the goats jump it from that shelf above,” he said. ”You can see their tracks here where they land. But they can't climb it going up. They swing off to the left, by this ledge--and look at it!”
Tom and the doctor looked. To the left the ledge shrank to a cornice actually not over six inches wide.
”Do you mean to tell me the goats walk around on that?” the doctor demanded.
”Sure,” said Mills. ”It probably leads to an easy way around to the shelf over our heads, but we can't make it--at least, I don't want to try, unless I have to.”
Tom looked at the six inch ledge, and the hundred and seventy-five foot drop below it, and said, ”Amen!”
”All right--straight up,” said the doctor. He looked for a firm projection of rock, and took a turn with the rope, while Mills picked up the slack and tested it.
The Ranger studied the wall in front of him, and made a try. Anch.o.r.ed by the doctor from below, he got up ten feet, but at that point he could not find a single handhold higher up which would bear his weight. After a long try, he descended to the ledge again.
”No use, we've got to go around to the right, and climb that big gully,”
Mills said. ”If this wall stumps us, we'd find a dozen worse ones before we got to the top.”
To get to the gully to the east of them, they had to go along the ledge on which they stood. It was wider to the east than six inches, which was its width in the other direction, the direction the goats took at this point, but it wasn't any too wide for comfort, and in places the precipice above actually overhung it, and seemed to be crus.h.i.+ng you down. In one place they had to crawl on their hands and knees under this overhang. In another place they came to what the doctor called ”a real transverse”--that is, a very narrow shelf leading them around a projection from the ledge they were on to another one, with a sheer drop below it.
This transverse ledge was about fifteen feet long before it widened. It may have been eighteen inches wide, but to Tom it looked about six. It was level enough, and firm, but it was cut out of the side of an absolute precipice, and the sheer drop, before you hit any ledge or slope below, to break your fall, was at least a hundred feet.