rd, and that his life now depended upon the holding together of
the two remaining strands!

Harry could see that those two remaining strands were stretched by his
hanging weight to the utmost limit of their resistance, and he watched
them with dull anxiety, as one in a dream, every moment expecting to see
the yarns of which they were composed part one by one under the strain.
And the worst of it was that that strain was not a steady one, otherwise
there might be some hope that the strands would withstand it long enough
to permit him to reach the bottom of the _quebrada_; but at frequent
intervals there occurred a couple of jerks--one as a clip passed round
the bar, and another as it slid over the cliff edge--and, of course, at
every recurrence of the jerk the strain was momentarily increased to an
enormous extent. And presently that which he feared happened, a more
than usually severe jerk occurred, and one of the yarns in the remaining
strands parted. Escombe dully wondered how far he still was from the
bottom--a fearful distance, he believed--for he seemed to be cruelly
close to the overhanging edge of the cliff, although he had been hanging
suspended for a length of time that seemed to him more like hours than
minutes. He did not dare to look down, for he had the feeling that if
he removed his gaze from those straining and quivering strands for a
single instant they would snap, and he would go plunging downward to
destruction. Then, as he watched, another yarn parted, and another. A
catastrophe was now inevitable, and the lad began to speculate
curiously, and from a singularly impersonal point of view, what the
sensation would be like when the last yarn had snapped. He had read
somewhere that the sensation of falling from a great height was
distinctly pleasurable; but what about the other, upon reaching the
bottom? A quaint story came into his mind about an Irishman who was
said to have fallen off the roof of a house, and who, upon being picked
up, was asked whether he had been hurt by his fall, to which the man
replied: "No, the fall didn't hurt me a bit, it was stoppin' so quick
that did all the mischief!" The humour of the story was not very
brilliant, yet somehow it seemed to Escombe at that moment to be
ineffably amusing, and he laughed aloud at the quaintness of the
conceit. And, as he did so, the remaining yarns of the second strand
parted with a little jerk that thrilled him through and through, and h