Explore "Out of the Depths" by Robert Ames Bennet on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
At sunrise the next morning Blake screwed his level on its tripod and set up the instrument about a hundred yards away from the ranch house. Ashton held the level rod for him on a spike driven into the foot of the nearest post of the front porch. Blake called the spike a bench-mark. For convenience of determining the relative heights of the points along his lines of levels, he designated this first "bench" in his fieldbook as "elevation 1,000."
From the porch he ran the line of level "readings" up the slope to the top of the divide between Plum Creek and Dry Fork and from there towards the waterhole on Dry Fork. At noon Isobel and Mrs. Blake drove out to them in the buckboard, bringing a hot meal in an improvised fireless-cooker.