, cupped her mouth to her hands and called,
"Rapids!"

I pulled myself up to the edge of the drop and stood looking down into
the narrow gully. Here the narrow track we had been following was
crossed and obscured by the deep, roaring rapids of a mountain stream.

Less than twenty feet across, it tumbled in an icy flood, almost a
waterfall, pitching over the lip of a crag above us. It had sliced a
ravine five feet deep in the mountainside, and came roaring down with a
rushing noise that made my head vibrate. It looked formidable; anyone
stepping into it would be knocked off his feet in seconds, and swept a
thousand feet down the mountainside by the force of the current.

Rafe scrambled gingerly over the gullied lip of the channel it had cut,
and bent carefully to scoop up water in his palm and drink. "Phew, it's
colder than Zandru's ninth hell. Must come straight down from a
glacier!"

It did. I remembered the trail and remembered the spot. Kendricks joined
me at the water's edge, and asked, "How do we get across?"

"I'm not sure," I said, studying the racing white torrent. Overhead,
about twenty feet from where we clustered on the slope, the thick
branches of enormous trees overhung the rapids, their long roots
partially bared, gnarled and twisted by recurrent floods; and between
these trees swayed one of the queer swing-bridges of the trailmen,
hanging only about ten feet above the water.

Even I had never learned to navigate one of these swing-bridges without
assistance; human arms are no longer suited to brachiation. I might have
managed it once; but at present, except as a desperate final expedient,
it was out of the question. Rafe or Lerrys, who were lightly built and
acrobatic, could probably do it as a simple stunt on the level, in a
field; on a steep and rocky mountainside, where a fall might mean being
dashed a thousand feet down the torrent, I doubted it. The trailmen's
bridge was out ... but what other choice was there?

I beckoned to Kendricks, he being the man I was the most inclined to
trust with my life at the moment, and said, "It looks uncrossable, but I
think two men could get across, if they were steady on their feet. The
others can hold us on ropes, in case we do get knocked down. If we can
get to the opposite bank, we can stretch a fixed rope from that snub of
rock--" I pointed, "and the others can cross with that. The first men
over will be the only ones to run any risk. Want to try?"

I l