e
hung there suspended by a single strand, but still being lowered rapidly
from above. His eyes were now fixed intently upon the unbroken strand,
and he distinctly saw it stretching and straightening out under his
weight, but, as it seemed to him, with inconceivable slowness. Then--to
such a preternatural state of acuteness had his senses been wrought by
the imminence and certainty of ghastly disaster--he saw the last strand
slowly parting, not yarn by yarn but fibre by fibre, until, after what
seemed to be a veritable eternity of suspense, the last fibre snapped,
he heard a loud twang, and found himself floating--as it seemed to him--
very gently downward, so gently, indeed, that, as he was swung round,
facing the rocky wall, he was able to note clearly and distinctly every
inequality, every projection, every crack, every indentation in the face
of the rock; nay, he even felt that, were it worth while to do so, he
would have had time enough to make sketches of every one of them as they
drifted slowly upward. The next thing of which he was conscious was a
loud swishing sound which rose even above the deafening brawl of water
among rocks, that he now remembered with surprise had been thundering in
his ears for--how many months--or years, was it? Then he became aware
that he was somehow among leaves and branches; and again memory
reproduced the scene upon which he had looked when, standing upon the
cliff edge at a point from which he could command a view of the whole
depth of the gorge, he had idly noted that, at the very bottom of it, a
few inconsiderable shrubs or small trees, nourished by eternal showers
of spray, grew here and there from interstices of the rock, and he
realised that he had fallen into the heart of one of them. He contrived
to grasp a fairly stout branch with each hand, and was much astonished
when they bent and snapped like twigs as his body ploughed through the
thick growth; but he knew that the force of his fall had been broken,
and, for the first time since he had made the discovery of the severed
strand, the hope came that, after all, he might emerge from this
adventure with his life. Then he alighted--on his feet--on a great,
moss-grown boulder, felt his legs double up and collapse under him, sank
into a huddled heap upon the wet, slippery moss, shot off into the
leaping, foaming water, and knew no more.

CHAPTER FOUR.

MAMA CACHAMA.

When young Escombe regained his senses it was nig