long-dead inhabitants. He was standing in an enclosure, he thought happily, in which watchful men had stood before America was on anybody’s map, before the Magna Carta, before Galileo and da Vinci and Michelangelo, before the Gutenberg Bible, before He wasn’t alone. As his eyes adapted to the dimness, he realized that the place was still occupied. Christ, no wonder it smelled like a zoo. Two sleeping, leathery brown bats hung peacefully by their feet from the uneven roof, and an owl he’d incompletely awakened grumbled and muttered and ruffled its feathers, and then sank its head into its chest to go back to sleep. More unsettling, less than two feet from his eyes, a now-wide-awake, nesting peregrine falcon rose menacingly onto its powerful yellow legs and hissed at him, its beak agape. Beneath it lay three rust-colored eggs.
Now, a peregrine falcon isn’t much bigger than a crow, but it is a natural predator, it has a bad temper, and being confined in a small space with it is not recommended by bird books. It has the viciously hooked beak, the talons, and the ferocious yellow eyes of an eagle, and Gideon had read somewhere that when attacking its prey – or the presumed enemies of its young – it is believed to be the fastest animal in the world.
He didn’t give it a chance to prove it. In a flash he had regrasped the margin of the arched doorway and heaved himself around to the outside, tottering momentarily but frighteningly on the edge of the cliff, his heart pounding away, as a wind gust snatched at him. The sooner he Before his mind could grasp what was happening, he was sliding down the face of the cliff, scrabbling desperately at the rough surface for a handhold that wasn’t there.
My God, he thought dully, I’m dead. Julie -
Whump! “Ow! Oogh!” The breath was knocked out of him with a whoosh, and for a few seconds it took all his concentration to get his lungs going. Once that was accomplished, his mind started working again.
Why was he still alive? He opened his eyes.
He was sitting – literally sitting – in a tree, the lone Aleppo pine he’d seen from above, in which he was wedged remarkably solidly into a crotch between the trunk, the thick, blessedly sturdy trunk, and two not-quite-so- sturdy branches. Looking down, his eyes were caught by the twigs and stones he’d broken loose, tumbling and falling away from him, down the gray cliffside, bouncing off the wall, down, and down…
He stopped looking down.
What had happened was already becoming fuzzy. Had a gust of wind thrown him off balance? Had he been pushed? He tried to reconstruct the moment, the feeling just before his fall. Had there been a thrust ? Had he felt hands on his hip? Had some windborne object struck him? Had there been a sound? Had he – He shook his head. No good. It had happened only seconds ago, but already the memory, if it was there at all, was dissolving, like the wisps of last night’s dream.
As the helpless, mindless panic of his fall subsided and his breathing became more regular, he took stock of his situation. The trunk seemed solid enough. It hadn’t seemed to give much when he landed on it, and he was relieved to see a set of thick roots twining into whatever earth they could find between heavy slabs of rock. The two branches supporting him were less conducive to serenity. They had given, all right, almost bouncing him back into space, and they were still quivering from the shock of it When he shifted his weight to a less painful position, he felt them bend under him, and one of them gave out an ominous, thin, snapping sound.
He stopped shifting his weight.
Still, he wasn’t dead after all; that was the critical thing. He breathed out a sigh. As long as he didn’t move, he was safe.
By now his wits had returned to the extent that the thought made him laugh. Safe, as long as he sat in, or rather on, a dwarf tree sticking out of the side of the Rock of Gibraltar, a thousand feet in the air, with nothing at all between him and the stony beach at the bottom, and twenty feet of nearly vertical cliff face between him and safety of a more permanent sort at the top.
He tried calling out, but gave it up after his second “Hello… is anybody there?” (He felt too ridiculous to sit there in his tree yelling, “Help!”) Whatever he yelled, he realized no one was going to answer anyway. If someone had actually pushed him, whoever had done it had probably already fled, and if not, he wasn’t about to come to his aid. To reach anyone else, his voice would have to carry up and over the top of the ridge and down the long stone stairwell to the trail. And even if his voice did carry, which it wouldn’t – not in this wind – who was there to hear him? If there was anybody out on the trail in this weather, Gideon certainly hadn’t seen him.
All right then, it was up to him to get himself out of there. Time for a plan. Julie, in her park-ranger mode, said that the best plan, the best thing you could do if you were lost or in trouble, as long as you weren’t in danger of imminent death, was to stay put. People would come and find you, especially if they had some idea of where you’d been going. And in this case, Julie knew he’d been headed for the watchtower, and Rowley knew exactly where it was. So how long would it be before they came looking? Well, at least another forty minutes: half an hour before they started worrying about him, and ten minutes to get here. After that, it would be another twenty minutes, because they’d have to go back to the cable terminal building and return with some rope. So, at a minimum, an hour, all told. Could he last that long?
Not a chance. Oh, the tree felt solid enough, even with that crack he’d heard, but the fact was, he didn’t trust himself not to fall out of the damn thing. Balance had never been his strong suit. He’d fallen into more than one stream from more than one log bridge that his companions had crossed without a problem. And that had been from heights of three or four feet, not with a thousand feet of empty space under him and fierce, spiteful gusts of wind whacking away at him. Some people were said to be seized by a near-irresistible urge to jump when they found themselves looking down from a height like this. Not him. All he had was an irresistible certainty that he’d fall out of the damn tree if he sat there long enough.
No, it was time to go.
He looked at the wall of solid rock that loomed above him. Well, not exactly what you’d call solid rock, really. Mostly, it was composed of what appeared to be a compacted, gravelly clay of some kind, with outcroppings of limestone pushing through it here and there. The Aleppo had improbably grown from one such outcropping, winding its roots through and around the limestone to reach the clay beneath. About fifteen feet above him – only five feet below the top of the Rock – was another such outcrop. If he could manage to pull himself up onto that and then stand up on it – not a happy thought, but he could do it – he’d be home free; he could reach the top from there and pull himself up. The problem was getting to the outcropping in the first place. He could shinny the two feet from where he was to the base of the tree and get up on this outcropping. From there, given his height, he’d easily be able to reach up another eight feet.
Which left seven to be accounted for. Taking extreme care not to look down again, he hitched himself along the trunk an inch at a time, then leaned forward to test the clay near the outcropping to see if it was soft enough to dig footholds in, yet firm enough to hold his weight. Firm enough was definitely not the problem. The stuff was more like breccia than clay: a conglomerate of little pieces of rock in a coarse matrix that seemed to be some kind of hard sandstone. When he dug at it with his fingers – holding grimly on to a root with his other hand and wrapping his legs around the trunk as tightly as they would go – all he did was tear a fingernail. And now for the first time he noticed that he’d torn a couple of other nails on the way down, and scraped his knuckles as well. He’d hurt his back too, he realized, although it didn’t feel like anything serious – just an abrasion or two and maybe a strained muscle, and a little bruising; nothing too bad… he hoped.
But that was something to worry about later. For now, he had to get back up, and the thing to do was obvious. If there was nothing that would serve as hand- and footholds, he would have to carve out his own. Fortunately for him, the tools were right there. The roots of the Aleppo, in their unremitting search for sustenance, had split and fractured the rock, leaving a couple of football-sized chunks lodged in their coils. Tugging the smaller chunk out (no easy task for Gideon, considering his nervous-making perch) he found that it would indeed do the job; by repeatedly pounding its broken edge against the sandstone, he was able to dig out a small cavity.
But it was far too heavy to be a useful tool, a good twelve or fifteen pounds; it took two hands to keep it going for more than a short time, and he most definitely didn’t have two free hands. He was worried about his endurance too. What he needed was a smaller rock, but a quick probing of the outcrop showed that there was nothing that would do. The one other chunk that he could pull out was about the same size as the first one. All right, then, using both of them, he’d make his own. He’d spent a good many hours one summer teaching himself the craft of prehistoric stone-knapping, and although the art of fine-edge pressure-flaking had been beyond him (he’d spent more time applying Band-Aids than turning out arrowheads), he’d done pretty well with the less complex skills involved in percussion-flaking, which, at its most basic level, consisted of using a hammer stone to chip away at the edges of a core stone or “blank” to create a crude hand ax or chopper.
