The Cliff Climbers

By Captain Mayne Reid ________________________________________________________________________ The book begins with two young brothers and an Indian guide, in a valley in the Himalayas, into which they had ascended with some difficulty in the preceding book - "The Plant Hunters".

Unfortunately they find they cannot get out at the top of the valley, and they cannot go back the way they came. So they are stuck.

They try various ingenious ideas for getting out, each of which appears as though it would work, but in the end does not, usually in a quite entertaining way. Eventually they do think of a way, which I will not divulge here, and they get out, but it had been a long nerve-racking period before their final release.

The copy of the book I worked from looked at first sight as though it had been beautifully printed. But this turned out to be a delusion, for the type-setting had been truly awful. It does seem sad that an author, a well-known one at the time, could take the trouble to write a good book, that he should use a good publisher, and a good illustrator, a good book-binder, only to have the whole thing let down by very poor type-setting. And that goes on down to proof-reading, too, for the publisher should have checked all this as well. NH ________________________________________________________________________

THE CLIFF CLIMBERS A SEQUEL TO "THE PLANT HUNTERS"

BY CAPTAIN MAYNE REID

CHAPTER ONE.

THE HIMALAYAS.

Who has not heard of the Himalayas--those Titanic masses of mountains that interpose themselves between the hot plains of India and the cold table-lands of Thibet--a worthy barrier between the two greatest empires in the world, the Mogul and the Celestial? The veriest tyro in geography can tell you that they are the tallest mountains on the surface of the earth; that their summits--a half-dozen of them at least--surmount the sea-level by more than five miles of perpendicular height; that more than thirty of them rise above twenty thousand feet, and carry upon their tops the eternal snow!

The more skilled geographer, or geognosist, could communicate hundreds of other interesting facts in relation to these majestic mountains; vast volumes might be filled with most attractive details of them--their fauna, their sylva, and their flora. But here, my reader, we have only space to speak of a few of the more salient points, that may enable you to form some idea of the Titanic grandeur of these mighty masses of snow-crowned rock, which, towering aloft, frown or smile, as the case may be, on our grand empire of Ind.

It is the language of writers to call the Himalayas a "chain of mountains." Spanish geographers would call them a "sierra" (saw)--a phrase which they have applied to the Andes of America. Either term is inappropriate, when speaking of the Himalayas: for the vast tract occupied by these mountains--over 200,000 square miles, or three times the size of Great Britain--in shape bears no resemblance to a chain. Its length is only six or seven times greater than its breadth--the former being about a thousand miles, while the latter in many places extends through two degrees of the earth's latitude.

Moreover, from the western termination of the Himalayas, in the country of Cabul, to their eastern declension near the banks of the Burrampooter, there is no continuity that would entitle them to the appellation of a "chain of mountains." Between these two points they are cut transversely--and in many places--by stupendous valleys, that form the channels of great rivers, which, instead of running east and west, as the mountains themselves were supposed to trend, have their courses in the transverse direction--often flowing due north or south.