doing - lowering himself to a seventy-degree pitch with no support. Sweat was running stingingly into his eyes; he tried to wipe it off on the moss that was pressed against his face. He swore.
His left foot found an iron paw. He pushed on it; it felt solid. He put more of his weight on it. Still solid. He looked to his right, twisting his neck, to locate the dormer. Three feet away. Could he put his weight on the iron support and still reach out for the dormer eave and—?
The iron support broke. Not slowly, not crumblingly like the other one, but like a snapped twig, and he slid off the central part of the roof. He was still twisted towards the dormer and he made a grab at it, actually touched the broken slate, but the slide was accelerating, and he tried to get on his back, not knowing why - what good would it do? - but down he went, fingers scrabbling at the slates, nails breaking, like a nightmare, the worst of nightmares realized: he was going over the edge and into the abyss.
The iron paws had been put up in lines at right angles to the eaves, so that one jutted up eight feet below the broken one. His foot caught it, slid over, and would have gone on except for his turn-up, which snagged and held - good British woollens. The paw sagged, bent, but held. He felt it, felt his direction change from a downward plunge to a swing as the turn-up became the centre of a circle on which his weight spun, throwing him down and to his right, closer to the dormer. He dug with his hands, his arms; he tried to force his chest into the slates; his injured arm felt a jolt like electricity as it took all his weight. His hands, swinging around, struck the side of the dormer and he slowed and stopped, his hands spread against the wood as if he were a suction-toed frog, held for as long as his trousers and his arms could hold out; and then there was nothing for it but to look down, terrified, down the steep slope to the vertical drop-off. Just short of the edge, another iron support jutted up, closer to the line of the dormer than his right foot, which had got within inches of the edge. He thought he could have hung there longer except for the pain that was burning up his injured arm and into his shoulder, now spreading over the top of his left arm towards his clavicle.
He moved the foot over and caught the iron paw. And then hung there. Listening to the imp.
He could see the dormer’s corner now; it rose in line with the building’s external wall, about eighteen inches from the edge of the roof. He was still two feet above the corner, his right foot six inches below it. He had either to move his left foot so as to put all his weight on the one support, or move his hands down the dormer wall until he could grasp something, perhaps a window ledge, to pull himself up.
The fingers of his right hand inched down the wall, palm flat against it. At the bottom, an irregular brick gave a kind of fingerhold. Then he inched his left foot off its support and moved his left leg over towards his right, finding it impossible to put both feet on the paw because he couldn’t get his left leg under his right, and then he was lying partly on his left side. Bending his legs, he let himself down the dormer and felt around the corner, up, then a few inches across the face, and at last to the sill of the open window.
He found a handhold in the windowsill, a blessed, blissful handhold, and he pulled his weight to the corner and then up, and then he could pull his right foot up and put the left foot briefly on the paw, and then he was sitting in the open window with his feet on the slates, his toes six inches from the edge of the roof.
Then he was going to be sick, and the imp was tempting him to be sick over the edge, and he scrambled through the window, his knees on the floor inside and his belly on the windowsill, and he bent forward, ready to vomit, his chin where his toes had been,