The Unthinkable Ascent

The man in black was still there, sailing like lightning toward the Cliffs. He could not have been more than a quarter-mile from them now.

"Faster!" the Sicilian commanded.

"I'm sorry," the Turk answered meekly. "I thought I was going faster."

"Lazy, lazy," spurred the Sicilian.

"I'll never improve," the Turk answered, but his arms began to move faster than before. "I cannot see too well because your feet are locked around my face," he went on, "so could you tell me please if we're halfway yet?"

"A little over, I should think," said the Spaniard from his position around the giant's waist. "You're doing wonderfully, Fezzik."

"Thank you," said the giant.

"And he's closing on the Cliffs," added the Spaniard.

No one had to ask who "he" was.

Six hundred feet now. The arms continued to pull, over and over. Six hundred and twenty feet. Six hundred and fifty. Now faster than ever. Seven hundred.

"He's left his boat behind," the Spaniard said. "He's jumped onto our rope. He's starting up after us."

"I can feel him," Fezzik said. "His body weight on the rope."

"He'll never catch up!" the Sicilian cried. "Inconceivable!"

"You keep using that word!" the Spaniard snapped. "I don't think it means what you think it does."

"How fast is he at climbing?" Fezzik said.

"I'm frightened" was the Spaniard's reply.

The Sicilian gathered his courage again and looked down.

The man in black seemed almost to be flying. Already he had cut their lead a hundred feet. Perhaps more.

"I thought you were supposed to be so strong!" the Sicilian shouted. "I thought you were this great mighty thing and yet he gains."

"I'm carrying three people," Fezzik explained. "He has only himself and—"

"Excuses are the refuge of cowards," the Sicilian interrupted. He looked down again. The man in black had gained another hundred feet. He looked up now. The cliff tops were beginning to come into view. Perhaps a hundred and fifty feet more and they were safe.

Tied hand and foot, sick with fear, Buttercup wasn't sure what she wanted to happen. Except this much she knew: she didn't want to go through anything like it again.

"Fly, Fezzik!" the Sicilian screamed. "A hundred feet to go."

Fezzik flew. He cleared his mind of everything but ropes and arms and fingers, and his arms pulled and his fingers gripped and the rope held taut and—

"He's over halfway," the Spaniard said.

"Halfway to doom is where he is," the Sicilian said. "We're fifty feet from safety, and once we're there and I untie the rope…" He allowed himself to laugh.

Forty feet.

Fezzik pulled.

Twenty.

Ten.

It was over. Fezzik had done it. They had reached the top of the Cliffs, and first the Sicilian jumped off and then the Turk removed the Princess, and as the Spaniard untied himself, he looked back over the Cliffs.

The man in black was no more than three hundred feet away.

"It seems a shame," the Turk said, looking down alongside the Spaniard. "Such a climber deserves better than—" He stopped talking then.

The Sicilian had untied the rope from its knots around an oak. The rope seemed almost alive, the greatest of all water serpents heading at last for home. It whipped across the cliff tops, spiraled into the moonlit Channel.

The Sicilian was roaring now, and he kept at it until the Spaniard said, "He did it."

"Did what?" The humpback came scurrying to the cliff edge.

"Released the rope in time," the Spaniard said. "See?" He pointed down.

The man in black was hanging in space, clinging to the sheer rock face, seven hundred feet above the water.

The Sicilian watched, fascinated. "You know," he said, "since I've made a study of death and dying and am a great expert, it might interest you to know that he will be dead long before he hits the water. The fall will do it, not the crash."

The man in black dangled helpless in space, clinging to the Cliffs with both hands.

"Oh, how rude we're being," the Sicilian said then, turning to Buttercup. "I'm sure you'd like to watch." He went to her and brought her, still tied hand and foot, so that she could watch the final pathetic struggle of the man in black three hundred feet below.

Buttercup closed her eyes, turned away.

"Shouldn't we be going?" the Spaniard asked. "I thought you were telling us how important time was."

"It is, it is," the Sicilian nodded. "But I just can't miss a death like this. If I could stage one of these every week and sell tickets, I could get out of the assassination business entirely. Look at him—do you think his life is passing before his eyes? That's what the books say."

"He has very strong arms," Fezzik commented. "To hold on so long."

"He can't hold on much longer," the Sicilian said. "He has to fall soon."

It was at that moment that the man in black began to climb. Not quickly, of course. And not without great effort. But still, there was no doubt that he was, in spite of the sheerness of the Cliffs, heading in an upward direction.

"Inconceivable!" the Sicilian cried.

The Spaniard whirled on him. "Stop saying that word. It was inconceivable that anyone could follow us, but when we looked behind, there was the man in black. It was inconceivable that anyone could sail as fast as we could sail, and yet he gained on us. Now this too is inconceivable, but look—look—" and the Spaniard pointed down through the night. "See how he rises."

The man in black was, indeed, rising. Somehow, in some almost miraculous way, his fingers were finding holds in the crevices, and he was now perhaps fifteen feet closer to the top, farther from death.

The Sicilian advanced on the Spaniard now, his wild eyes glittering at the insubordination. "I have the keenest mind that has ever been turned to unlawful pursuits," he began, "so when I tell you something, it is not guesswork; it is fact! And the fact is that the man in black is not following us.