h. And curiously enough
a sensation of committing an intrusion stirred as the silence closed
down about him. A dark wall always seemed to confront him, a wall upon
which he was being precipitated.

The steep of the decline was at times terrific. There were moments of
impact with trees which left him bruised and beaten. There were
moments when projecting roots threatened to hurl him headlong to
invisible depths. Each buffet, each stumble, however, only hardened
his resolve. These things were powerless to deter him.

His descent of the approach to the gorge was a serious test. He felt
thankful at least that his plans called for no reascent of the hill
later. Twice he was precipitated into the bed of a spring "washout,"
and, sore and angry, he was forced to a blind scramble from the moist,
soft bed.

Once he only escaped with his life by a margin the breadth of a hair.
On this occasion he recovered himself with a laugh of something like
real amusement. But death had clutched at him with fierce intent. He
had plunged headlong over the edge of a chasm, hewn in the hillside by
a subsidence of the foundations some hundreds of feet below. Six feet
from the brink his great body had been caught in the arms of a bushy
tangle, which bent and crushed under his great weight in a perilous,
almost hopeless fashion. But he clung to the attenuated branches that
supported him and waited desperately for the further plunge below,
which the yielding roots seemed to make inevitable.

But the waiting saved him. Had he struggled while the bush labored
under the shock, maybe his anticipations would have been fulfilled. As
it was the roots definitely held, and, cautiously, he was able to haul
himself up against the weed-grown wall of the precipice, and finally
obtain a foot and hand hold in its soil. The rest was a matter of
effort and nerve, and at last he clambered back to comparative safety.

So the journey went on with varying fortune, his blind groping and
stumblings alternating with the starlit patches where the woods broke.
But it went on deliberately to the end with an inevitability which
revealed the man.

At last he stood in the open with the frowning walls of the great gorge
far above him, like a giant mouth agape in a desperate yawn. At his
feet lay the river, flowing swiftly on to join the great Mackenzie in
its northward rush to swell the field of polar ice.

Here, in the bowels of the great pit, he was no lo