In passing from one of the ledges to another there was
a vertical wall of rock. One of the Tahitians, a fine active man,
placed the trunk of a tree against this, climbed up it, and then by
the aid of crevices reached the summit. He fixed the ropes to a
projecting point, and lowered them for our dog and luggage, and
then we clambered up ourselves. Beneath the ledge on which the dead
tree was placed, the precipice must have been five or six hundred
feet deep; and if the abyss had not been partly concealed by the
overhanging ferns and lilies my head would have turned giddy, and
nothing should have induced me to have attempted it. We continued
to ascend, sometimes along ledges, and sometimes along knife-edged
ridges, having on each hand profound ravines. In the Cordillera I
have seen mountains on a far grander scale, but for abruptness
nothing at all comparable with this. In the evening we reached a
flat little spot on the banks of the same stream which we had
continued to follow, and which descends in a chain of waterfalls:
here we bivouacked for the night. On each side of the ravine there
were great beds of the mountain-banana, covered with ripe fruit.
Many of these plants were from twenty to twenty-five feet high, and
from three to four in circumference.
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