The trail climbed a Jacob's ladder of stone steps up the cliff.
Jacob's ladder
idiomA link between the earthly and the heavenly, or by extension a long, steep climb.
Origin
In Genesis 28 Jacob, fleeing his brother, sleeps in the open with a stone for a pillow and dreams of a ladder set on the earth with its top reaching heaven, angels ascending and descending on it. He wakes convinced the place is a gateway between the human and the divine.
The image of a connecting stair between earth and heaven was too vivid not to travel. It named a climbing garden plant, a rope-and-plank ship's ladder, and a children's folding-block toy, in each case borrowing the idea of rungs rising steeply upward.
So Jacob's ladder in English can mean any bridge between the ordinary and the transcendent, or more plainly any long, arduous ascent.
The sailors scrambled up the Jacob's ladder slung over the side of the ship.
From the harbour the town rose in tiers, and the only way up was a Jacob's ladder of worn steps that seemed to climb toward the sky before it ever reached the square at the top.
Genesis after Eden: Noah and the flood, Babel, Sodom, and the patriarchs.
- 01
two by two (idiom)
In pairs, one alongside another.
- 02
Tower of Babel (idiom)
A grand, over-ambitious project that collapses into confusion and a breakdown in communication.
- 03
Sodom and Gomorrah (idiom)
A place or scene of extreme wickedness, vice, and moral ruin.
- 04
a pillar of salt (idiom)
The fate of someone who cannot stop looking back at the past instead of moving forward.
- 05
a coat of many colors (idiom)
A conspicuous mark of favouritism that stirs up envy in others.
- 06
old as Methuselah (idiom)
Extremely old; ancient.