Still we went forward and upward, scrambling over, under, round,
between. At one point, when Harry was a few yards in front of me,
he suddenly disappeared from sight as though swallowed by the
mountain.
Rushing forward, I saw him scrambling to his feet at the bottom
of a chasm some ten feet below. Luckily he had escaped serious
injury, and climbed up on the other side, while I leaped
across--a distance of about six feet.
"They could never have brought her through this," he declared,
rubbing a bruised knee.
"Do you want to go back?" I asked.
But he said that would be useless, and I agreed with him. So we
struggled onward, painfully and laboriously. The sharp corners of
the rocks cut our feet and hands, and I had an ugly bruise on my
left shoulder, besides many lesser ones. Harry's injured knee
caused him to limp and thus further retarded our progress.
At times the passage broadened out until the wall on either side
was barely visible, only to narrow down again till it was
scarcely more than a crevice between the giant boulders. The
variation of the incline was no less, being at times very nearly
level, and at others mounting upward at an angle whose ascent was
all but impossible.
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