g,
unclimbable and tremendous as a dream of Dante.

She saw their full position. There was time to get back from where they
stood, but if they went on to the cape of cliff before them there would
be no time to get back, they would have to go on, and the unseen cliffs
beyond that cape might stretch for twenty miles unclimbable as here.

Yet the idea of going back was horrible, heartbreaking.

She saw that Raft was between two moods. Then she said to him.

"If you were alone would you go back or go on?"

"Me?" said Raft. He paused for a moment as if in thought--"Oh, I reckon
I'd go on."

"Then we will go on."

"I was thinkin' of you," said he.

"I know--but I could not bear to go back. If we fail now like that we
will fail altogether. Imagine going all that way back. No, I couldn't.
We must risk it."

"I'm thinking that way," said he.

He picked up the bundle and harpoon and they started, and no sooner had
she taken the first step than Fear laid his hand on her heart and a wild
craving to return seized her so that she could have cried out.

She had once said that she feared an ugly face more than a blow, and the
fear that seized her now was less the fear of death than the fear of the
cliffs and their conspiracy with the murmuring sea that would soon be an
inclosing wall.

She fought it down.

The cliff shoulder was further away than they thought; it took them an
hour to reach it and, when they turned it, there, before them lay cliffs
higher, more monstrous and running in a curve to another shoulder seven
miles away, if a yard. But towards the middle of the curve the cliff
face seemed ridged and broken near the base. Raft shading his eyes,
pointed out this broken surface.

"It looks as if there was foothold there beyond tide mark," said he,
"we've got to go on anyhow--Lord, but you're tired!"

He made her sit down. The sight of that gargantuan sweep of cliff coming
on top of the weariness of the journey had crushed her. To go forward
seemed impossible, to fight against that immensity impossible. She could
have wept but she had neither tears nor energy. The gods seemed to have
built those bastions to shut out all hope and the voice of the returning
sea seemed like a tide turning over her broken thoughts like pebbles.

Raft standing over her like a tower said not a word.

Mixed with the voice of the sea came the voices of the gulls and all
sorts of sea echoes from the cliffs.

Then as she sat she made