atch and cling to
its forbidding surface. Only lifelong practice of the men, who from
childhood had been required to make the ascent and whose fathers and
fathers' fathers before them had done the same, could have accounted
for that catlike ability to cling to the trail where was no trail.
The sensation of the long swinging upward movement was unutterably
alien to anything in life or in dreams, and the sheer height above
and the momently-deepening chasm below were presences contending for
possession.

Strange fragrance stole from gum and bark of the decreasing
vegetation. Dislodged stones rolled bounding from rock to rock into
the abyss. To right and left the way went. There was not even the
friendly beacon of the summit to beckon them. It seemed to St.
George that their whole safety lay in motion, that a moment's
cessation from the advance would hurl them all down the sides of the
declivity. Since the ascent began he had not ceased to look down;
and now as they rose free of the tree-tops that clothed the base of
the mountain he could see across the plain, and beyond the bounding
embankment of the island to the dark waste of the sea. Somewhere out
there _The Aloha_ was rocking. Somewhere, away to the northwest, the
lights of New York harbour shone. _Did_ they, St. George wondered
vaguely; and, when he went back, how would they look to him? It
seemed to him in some indeterminate fashion that when he saw them
again there would be new lines and sides of beauty which he had
never suspected, and as if all the world would be changed, included
in this new world that he had found.

Half-way up the ascent a resting-place was contrived for the
carriers. The projection upon which the baskets were lowered was
hardly three feet in width. Its edge dropped into darkness. Within
reach, leaves rustled from the summit of a tree rooted somewhere in
the chasm. The blackness below was vast and to be measured only by
the memory of that upward course. Gemmed by its lighted hamlets the
fair plain of the island lay, with Med and Melita glowing like lamps
to the huge dusk.

"St. George," said Amory soberly, "if it's all true--if these people
do understand what the world doesn't know anything about--"

"Yes," said St. George.

"It makes a man feel--"

"Yes," said St. George, "it does."

This, they afterward remembered, was all that they said on the
ascent. One wonders if two, being met among the "strengthless tribes
of the dead," would