St. George threw one swift glance upward and looked down, shudderingly.  Beetling above them in the great starlight hung the gigantic pile, wall upon wall of rock hewn with such secret foothold that it was a miracle how any living thing could catch 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 find much more to say.