Tyler and Hollis and Short and all the rest of us Americans nearly
worked our jaws loose on the march back to the village, and for
days afterward we kept it up. They told me how they had crossed
the barrier cliffs in five days, working twenty-four hours a day in
three eight-hour shifts with two reliefs to each shift alternating
half-hourly. Two men with electric drills driven from the dynamos
aboard the Toreador drilled two holes four feet apart in the face
of the cliff and in the same horizontal planes. The holes slanted
slightly downward. Into these holes the iron rods brought as
a part of our equipment and for just this purpose were inserted,
extending about a foot beyond the face of the rock, across these
two rods a plank was laid, and then the next shift, mounting to the
new level, bored two more holes five feet above the new platform,
and so on.
During the nights the searchlights from the Toreador were kept
playing upon the cliff at the point where the drills were working,
and at the rate of ten feet an hour the summit was reached upon
the fifth day. Ropes were lowered, blocks lashed to trees at the
top, and crude elevators rigged, so that by the night of the fifth
day the entire party, with the exception of the few men needed to
man the Toreador, were within Caspak with an abundance of arms,
ammunition and equipment.
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