Bother! I wish I did not keep on thinking about tumbling." He forced himself to study the next part of his descent, which was nearly perpendicular, but well broken up with ledges and cracks which offered good holding, and terminated a hundred feet below, upon a shelf, which naturally offered itself as his next resting-place, but beyond which it was impossible to see.
"Don't matter," he said more cheerfully.

"Let's take difficulties a bit at a time.

I'm free, and I can laugh at them now.

I could jump into deep water and swim, if there were no way down from below there." His spirits rose now, for, though a false step or slip of the foot would have sent him headlong down to the broad ledge, from which he would in all probability have bounded into the sea, the climbing was good, and, panting with the exertion, he got from projection to ledge, now straight down, now diagonally, and often along first one tiny ledge or cornice and then another, zig-zagging, till, at about twenty feet from the place he was making for, a slaty piece of the limestone rock by which he was holding parted, frost-loosened, from the parent rock, and he went down with a rush.
But it was only a slide.

He alighted on his feet, and, scratched and startled a bit, stood panting and trying to recover his composure.
"No harm done," he said, as he looked up to where the hole from which he had escaped was beginning to look quite small.