The Cliff Climbers | Page 4

a rude hut built with blocks of stone, and plastered with mud from the bed of the rivulet. Enter it. You will find it empty, cold, untenanted by living thing. No furniture. Stone couches covered with sedge and grass, upon which men may have slept or lain; and two or three blocks of granite upon which they may have sat. That is all. Some pieces of skin hanging around the walls, and the bones of animals strewed over the ground outside, give a clue to the kind of food upon which the inhabitants of the hut may have subsisted. Hunters they must have been. That will be your natural conjecture.
But how did they get into this valley, and how got they out of it? Of course, like yourself, they descended into it, and then ascended out again, by means of a rope-ladder.
That would be the explanation at which you would arrive; and it would be a satisfactory one, but for a circumstance that just now comes under your observation.
Scanning the facade of the cliff, your eye is arrested by a singular appearance. You perceive a serried line, or rather a series of serried lines, running from the base in a vertical direction. On drawing nearer to these curious objects, you discover them to be ladders--the lowest set upon the earth, and reaching to a ledge, upon which the second is rested; this one extending to a second ledge, on which the third ladder finds support; and so on throughout a whole series of six.
At first sight, it would appear to you as if the ci-devant denizens of the hut had made their exodus from the valley by means of these ladders; and such would be the natural conviction, but for a circumstance that forbids belief in this mode of exit: the ladders do not continue to the top of the cliff! A long space, which would require two or three more such ladders to span it, still intervenes between the top of the highest and the brow of the precipice; and this could not have been scaled without additional ladders. Where are they? It is scarcely probable they had been drawn up; and had they fallen back into the valley, they would still be there. There are none upon the ground.
But these conjectures do not require to be continued. A short examination of the cliff suffices to convince you that the design of scaling it by ladders could not have succeeded. The ledge against which rests the top of the highest must have been found too narrow to support another; or rather, the rocks above and projecting over would render it impossible to place a ladder upon this ledge. It is evident that the scheme had been tried and abandoned.
The very character of the attempt proves that they who had made it must have been placed in a desperate situation--imprisoned within that cliff-girt valley, with no means of escaping from it, except such as they themselves might devise.
Moreover, after a complete exploration of the place, you can find no evidence that they ever did escape from their strange prison; and your thoughts can only shape themselves into conjectures, as to who they were that had wandered into this out-of-the-way corner of the world; how they got into, and how out of it; and, finally, whether they ever succeeded in getting out at all. Your conjectures will come to an end, when you have read the history of the Cliff-climbers.
CHAPTER THREE.
THE PLANT-HUNTER AND HIS COMPANIONS.
Karl Linden, a young German student, who had taken part in the revolutionary struggles of 1848, had by the act of banishment sought an asylum in London. Like most refugees, he was without means; but, instead of giving himself up to idle habits, he had sought and obtained employment in one of those magnificent "nurseries" which are to be met with in the suburbs of the world's metropolis. His botanical knowledge soon attracted the attention of his employer, the proprietor of the nursery--one of those enterprising and spirited men who, instead of contenting themselves with merely cultivating the trees and flowering-plants already introduced into our gardens and greenhouses, expend large sums of money in sending emissaries to all parts of the earth, to discover and bring home other rare and beautiful kinds.
These emissaries--botanical collectors, or "plant-hunters," as they may be called--in the pursuit of their calling, have explored, and are still engaged in exploring, the wildest and most remote countries of the globe--such as the deep, dark forests upon the Amazon, the Orinoco, and the Oregon in America; the hot equatorial regions of Africa; the tropical jungles of India; the rich woods of the Oriental islands; and, in short, wherever there is a prospect of discovering and obtaining new floral or sylvan beauties.
The exploration of the Sikhim