At regular intervals he encountered uprights: between these he had to
depend upon his sense of direction and equilibrium to guide him safely
across those narrow walks of steel made slippery by rain.
But, thanks to forethought, his footwork was faultless: he wore shoes old,
well-broken, very soft, flexible, and silent.
The building was in the shape of a squat E, with two courts facing south.
On this seventh level the first court was bridged by a single girder, the
middle of which was Lanyard's immediate objective. Since it lacked uprights
he took it cautiously on hands and knees until approximately equidistant
from both ends, when he straddled it, took the cable from his shoulders,
uncoiled a length and made it fast round the girder with a clove hitch:
giddy work, in that darkness, on that greasy span, fashioning by simple
sense of touch the knot upon which his life was to depend, half of the time
prone upon the girder and fishing blindly beneath it for the rope's end,
with nothing but a seventy--foot drop between him and eternity, not even
another girder to break a fall.
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