Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 9.djvu/429

 157I-] THE RIDOLFI CONSPIRACY. 415 intersected, and daylight was dangerously near when they reached the foot of the rock. As dawn ap- proached however the moist air from the Clyde condensed upon the crags and wrapped the castle in vapour. The watch was weakest where the rock was highest, and there, exactly under Wallace's Tower at the north-east corne"r where the road from the town first touches the cliff, they made preparations to ascend. 1 For the first forty feet there was a sheer precipice. The cliff then split, making a kind of funnel, at the top of which stood a stunted ash tree, and above that a steep grassy slope of a hundred and twenty feet rising to the foot of the wall. Crawford and the guide went up first. The ladder brought them within ten or twenty feet of the tree, 2 and 'from thence they scrambled up the rock in the darkness with extreme difficulty, dragging a rope behind them which they succeeded in lashing to the stem. With this assistance the rest rapidly followed. The mist which concealed them from the guard hap- The spot can be identified with I down, and blocked the way for those certainty by the ash tree not that the tree now growing there can be supposed to have stood three hun- dred years, or thirty, but the crack in the rock where it is rooted is the only spot in the whole circuit, of the place where a tree could take hold. 2 Among other romantic stories which gathered round Crawford's exploit, it was said that the first man who ascended was seized with a fit when half way up the ladder. He could neither go forward nor come below. After a moment's thought, Crawford lashed him hand and foot to the staves so that he could not fall, turned the ladder over and so enabled the rest to pass over him. Crawford himself, in the account which he wrote for John Knox, says nothing of this ; and I fear it can scarcely be reconciled with his own modest but clear declaration that he was himself the first to go up. See BANNATYNE'S Journal, p. 123.