HANGING ON FOR BARE LIFE.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 116, 5 July 1873, Page 9

HANGING ON FOR BARE LIFE.

While steadily occupied in fighting my way downwards through a steep ravine, cloven, far below, by a vicious little torrent from a lofty it happened I know not, for all forms of earth and grassy slope were obliterated at a few yards by the descending showers —I suddenly found that I had left the right track and was descending too sharply. At the same time I saw, or thought I saw, that by crossing the face of a cliff for a few yards I should regain the ordinary route. A huge buttress of black rock descended with exceeding steepness from the ridge above me to the bed of the stream below. For the most part it was too precipitous to allow me to venture upon it; but halfway down some horizontal fissures had provided ledges which imitated a rude and broken pathway. Beneath and above were giddy cliffs but, I resolved, without much hesitation, to attempt the passage. The first step or|wo was easy ; then came a long stride in which I had to throw out one hand by way of grappling-iron to a jutting rock above. The rock was reeking with the moisture, and as I threw my weight upon it my hand slipped, and before I had time to look round I was slithering downwards without a single point of support. Below me, as I well knew at a depth of some two hundred feet, was the torrent. One plunge through the air upon its rugged stones, and I should be a heap of mangled flesh and bones. Instinctively I flung abroad my arms and legs in search of strong supports ; and in another moment I was brought up with a jerk. My hands now rested on the narrow ledge where my feet had been a moment before, and one foot was propped by some insecure support whose nature I could not precisely determine.

During the fall —it can hardly have lasted for a second—l had space for only one thought; it was that which had more than once occurred to me in somewhat similar situations, and might be summed up in the same ejaculation— ‘ At last !’ Expanded to greater length, it was the one startled reflection that the experience which I had so often gone through in imagination was now at length to be known to me in the bitter reality. It was the single flash of emotion which —as one may guess—passes through the brain of the criminal when the drop falls or the signal is given to the firing party. I had often made my way along dangerous ridges bounded by cliffs of gigantic height; I had clung to steep walls of ice and passed shiveringly across profound crevasses ; a partial slip in such places had given me some faint foretaste of the sensation produced by an accident, and the single thought—if it may be called a thought—that occurred to me was this electric shock of colorless expectation. I call it even of conscious horror. Another half second, and all thought would have been summarily stopped, as it was when I felt that I was no longer falling; the next wave of emotion was compounded of vehement excitement and a sort of instinctive sense that everything might depend on my retaining presence of mind. Desperately choking back the surging emotion that seemed to shake my limbs, I sought for some means of escape. By slowly moving my left hand I managed to grasp a stem of rhododendron which grew upon the ledge of rock, and felt tolerably firm; next, I tried to feel for some support with the toe of my left boot ; the rock, however, against which it rested, was not hard, but exquisitely polished, by the ancient glacier which had forced its way down the gorge. A geologist would have been delighted with this admirable specimen of the planing powers of nature, I felt, I must confess, rather more inclined to curse geology and glaciers. Not a projecting ledge corner, or cranny could I discover ; I might as well have been hanging against a pane of glass. With my right foot, however, I succeeded in obtaining a more satisfactory lodgment ; had it not been for that, I could only have supported myself so long as my arms would hold out, and I have read somewhere that the strongest man cannot hold on his arms alone for more than five minutes. I am unluckily very weak in the arms, and was therefore quite unable to perform the gymnastic feat of raising myseif till I could place a knee upon the ledge where my hands were straining. Here, then, I was, in an apparently hopeless predicament. I might cling to the rocks like a bat till exhaustion compelled me to let go; on a very liberal allowance, that might last for some twenty minutes, or say half an hour. There was, of course, a remote chance that some traveller or tourist might pass through the glen ; but the ordinary path lay some hundred yards above my head, on the other side of a rocky pinnacle, and a hundred yards was, for all practical purposes, the same thing as a hundred miles. The ceaseless roar of the swollen torrent would drown my voice as effectually as a battery of artillery ; but, for a moment or two, I considered the propriety of shouting for help. The problem was whether I should diminish my strength more by the effort of shouting than the additional chance of attract-

ing attention was worth. If the effort shortened my lasting powers by five minutes, it would so far diminish the time during which succor could be brought to any purpose. I had not the necessary data for calculation, and was not exactly in a frame of mind adapted for cool comparison of figures; but a spasm of despair kept me silent. Help in any form seemed too unlikely to be worth taking into account; the one thing left was to live as long as I could, though to say the truth, five minutes’ life on such a rock was a very questionable advantage. The vague instinct of selfpreservation, however, survived its reason; all that I could really hope was that by husbanding my strength, as carefully as possible, I might protract existence till about the time when the dinner-bell would be ringing for my friends—a quarter of an hour away. Well, I would protract it —indeed, at times a thought almost emerged as consciousness that I might make it agreeable as might be under the circumstances; but that, I need not say, was a thought which, however sensible, had too much of mockery in it to be explicitly adopted. In dumb obstinacy I clung firmly as might be to the rocks, and did my best to postpone the inevitable crash. Yet I fdlt that it was rapidly approaching, and felt it at times almost with a sense of relief.

It was becoming tempting to throw up the cards and have done with it. Even the short sharp pang of the crash on the rocks below seemed preferable to draining the salt dregs of misery. And yet, stupidly or sensibly, my mind fixed itself on at least holding out against time, and discharging what seemed to be a kind of duty. All other motives were rapidly fading from me, and one theory of the universe seemed to be about as uninteresting as another. The play should be played out and as well as it could be done. Yet, before the end, I gave one more frantic glance at the position, and suddenly, to my utter astonishment, a new possibility revealed itself. Could I grasp a certain projection which I now observed for the first time. I might still have a chance of escape. But to gain it, it was necessary to relax, my hold with the right hand and make a slight spring upwards. If the plan had occurred to me at the first moment it might not have been difficult. But my strength had ebbed so far that success was exceedingly doubtful. Still it was the one chance, and at worst would hasten the crisis. I gathered myself up, crouching as low as I dared, and then springing from the right foot, and aiding the spriug with my left hand, I threw out my right at the little jutting point. The tips of my fingers just reached their aim, but only touched without anchoring themselves. As I.fell back my foot missed its former support, and my whole weight came heavily on the feeble left hand. The clutch was instantaneously torn apart, and I was falling through the air. The old flash of surprise crossed my mind, tempered by something like a sense of relief. All was over ! The mountains sprang upward with a bound. But before the fall had well begun, before the air had begun to whistle past me, my movement was arrested. With a shock of surprise I found myself lying on a broad bed of deep moss as comfortably as in my bed at home. As my bewildered senses righted themselves I understood it all. The facts were simple and ratherprovoking. Before attempting the passage across the rock-face, I had just noticed, though, in my hurry, I had not imprinted the fact on my mind, that beneath my narrow ledge there was a broader one, some ten feet lower down. The sudden alarm produced by the slip, while reviving so much else, had expunged this one practically useful memory completely and instantaneously. But now, as it came back to me, I easily convinced myself not only that I had never been in danger, and thus that all my agony had been thrown away, but that I had never done anything rash. It was rather humiliating, but decidedly consoling, and in some sense comforting to self-esteem. As I slowly picked myself up, I looked at my watch. It followed from a comparison of times, that I had not been stretched on the rock for more than five minutes. Besides the obvious reflection that in such moments one lives fast, it also followed that I might still be in time for dinner. I got on my legs, trembled at first, but soon found that they could carry me as fast as usual down the well-known path. I was in time to join my friends at the ‘ table d’hote,’ joined in the usual facetiousness about the soup, and spent the evening—for the clouds were now rolling away—in discussing the best mode of assulting our old friend the Teufelshorn.—From ‘ A Bad Five Minutes in the Alps, in Frazer’s Magazine.’