The lad was lithe, agile, sure-footed as a chamois, and he climbed up to the platform in front of the sculptures with little trouble. Equipping himself with some ropes and pegs and a hammer, he gazed up at his objective. The rock jutted outwards over the sheer precipice; it seemed impossible for anything but a fly to crawl over its face. For a little while the keen eyes of the lad sought for handholds and footholds; then he squeezed himself into a crevice at the side of the big rock and began to worm his way upward. Rawlinson gazed on while the lad mounted a foot at a time. Often the climber stopped while his fingers sought another hold, then he progressed a little higher. But at last even he came to a stop; he was unable to go on. Reaching above his head, he drove one of the wooden pegs deep down into the soil covering the rock. Attaching a rope to it, he tested it, pulling this way and that, to make sure that the peg held firmly. The onlookers watched with bated breath as the lad attached himself to the end of the rope, as he tried to swing himself across to the other side of the rock, clinging with hands and feet to the rocky surface, with death yawning for him below. Failure met his gallant attempt. Once more he tried, swinging over the rock face, with only a rope between himself and Eternity. Ten, fifteen, twenty feet he traversed, to find that further progress was impossible. Quickly reaching out, he drove another peg deep down into the soil above his head, as quickly attached a rope. The fixing of a seat to the ends of the two ropes to form a cradle was not very difficult, and sitting in this cradle the lad was able to go all over the rock, taking impressions of the inscription under Rawlinson’s direction on sheets of damp paper. In ten days the task was finished, and Rawlinson possessed the first complete copy of the cuneiform inscriptions at Behistun ever held in the hands of man. The supreme task of deciphering these inscriptions occupied Rawlinson on and off for many years. As already mentioned, the first draft of his book on the inscriptions was finished before he left Kermanshah; and when he came to the consulate at Baghdad he threw himself heart and soul into making a complete revision of his draft to embody his later studies and knowledge. Often in the intense heat he worked in a summer-house at the bottom of the garden, a pet lion lying at his feet, and a water-wheel from the river Tigris pouring water over the roof of the summer-house to keep it cool. There was the Greek script to assist Young and Champollion to decipher the hieroglyphics of the Rosetta Stone, but there was no known writing at all in the inscriptions at Behistun. There were three inscriptions carved on the rock face, Persian, Babylonian and Median cuneiform. The clue to them was lost. No living race wrote in such a manner, and not a single man knew how to read the curious wedge-shaped writing of the ancients.