We started up the opening in the hills, and the prospect was fairer than we had seen yet. It was not a gorge, but wide enough to be almost like a narrow ascending valley, and its sides were not perpendicular, but sloping and bearing many stunted oaks and pines, and shrubbery, as did the bottom. Over the bottom were distributed boulders of all sizes, and some of them appeared certainly not to have come from the mountainsides adjoining, so different were they in appearance from the rock of the sloping walls. Such a thing I had often seen, however, and I thought little of it. Hardly had we entered the gap than we began testing the rocks with our heavy hammers, battering away at them until the moss and incrustations of any kind were knocked away and the nature of the rocks made clear to us. Our hammers, which I have not yet described, were most excellent for this. They were of much weight and of the hardest kind of stones of proper size that we could find in our region. These stones, half as large as a man’s head, we had grooved around, after much labour in the chipping, and, fitting in the grooves and holding firmly, had laid withes of the toughest willow, which were twisted into handles of the length we wanted. So we made hammers which would crush the common rock most easily. Never were better hammers than these of the hard, unbreaking porphyry and greenstone, though these were not the names we called them, if, indeed, we gave them names at all. It was sufficient that they served our purpose well. So we hammered our way up the slope, but found nothing to reward us. At midday we rested for a time and ate, and then took up our testing again, not far from each other, with Hammer, as it chanced, a little in the lead. We had not gone half a furlong when there came from him the longest, loudest and most ear-splitting yell I had ever heard. I was with him in a moment.