We were standing on a narrow, irregular, all too slanting little ledge, and should doubtless have ignominiously slipped off and broken our rash necks but for the vine. This was a thick-leaved, wide-spreading thing, a little like Amphelopsis.
'It’s not quite vertical here, you see,' said Terry, full of pride and enthusiasm.
'This thing never would hold our direct weight, but I think if we sort of slide down on it, one at a time, sticking in with hands and feet, we’ll reach that next ledge alive.
' 'As we do not wish to get up our rope again—and can’t comfortably stay here—I approve,' said Jeff solemnly. Terry slid down first—said he’d show us how a Christian meets his death. Luck was with us.
We had put on the thickest of those intermediate suits, leaving our tunics behind, and made this scramble quite successfully, though I got a pretty heavy fall just at the end, and was only kept on the second ledge by main force.
The next stage was down a sort of 'chimney'—a long irregular fissure; and so with scratches many and painful and bruises not a few, we finally reached the stream.
It was darker there, but we felt it highly necessary to put as much distance as possible behind us; so we waded, jumped, and clambered down that rocky riverbed, in the flickering black and white moonlight and leaf shadow, till growing daylight forced a halt.
We found a friendly nut-tree, those large, satisfying, soft-shelled nuts we already knew so well, and filled our pockets. I see that I have not remarked that these women had pockets in surprising number and variety.
They were in all their garments, and the middle one in particular was shingled with them. So we stocked up with nuts till we bulged