Next morning we strolled up the defile and looked at the mouths of several caves that are now choked up. Two furlongs above its entrance the ravine makes a double curve like a gigantic figure three. The two crescents of beetling Limestone, with their jutting horns, that appear to the astonished beholder underneath like towering pyramids and slim aiguilles, rise to a vertical height of 430 feet, and, being absolutely unassailable, they fill a crag climber's mind with admiration tempered by regret. What enhances their grandeur, while it softens the savage aspect of the sheer and ledgeless precipice, is the bountiful vegetation clinging wherever it can find a hold, dark shrouds of ivy and darker masses of yew standing out against the grey rock in beautiful relief. Would the indomitable scramblers who haunt Lakeland at Easter, we asked ourselves, have forced a way up these tremendous "chimneys" if the Cheddar cliffs had been pitched somewhere in the latitude of Wastdale? We went so far as to reconnoitre one alluring fissure, 200 feet or more in length, but the gap between its base and the first feasible lodgment was insuperable. Not far away a long talus of scree marks the foot of an easy though rather sensational way to the cliff top. Passing it by, we stopped at the mouth of a vertical fissure that opens on to the roadway. It expands slightly inside, and the roof soars higher and higher; then the floor breaks away, and the two men who descended the next 80 feet had to be steadied by the rope. The walls were wet and soft, being incrusted with a sticky calcareous substance. At the bottom of the precipitous slope the magnesium ribbon revealed the enormously lofty walls of a narrow chamber, whose farther extent was blocked up by an accumulation of rocks and débris.