ON THE MARCH
“We’re coming back to-morrow,” said Titty, “and you know you wouldn’t like it on the top of a mountain.”
But the ship’s parrot said nothing and there was a look in its eye that was worse than a lot of things it might have said.
“We can’t possibly take him with us,” said Susan.
For one dreadful moment the able-seaman began to think that perhaps she ought to stay behind to look after both Peter Duck and Polly, but she thought better of it.
“It’s much darker than this in a tropical forest,” she said, “even at midday. So you’d better be sensible.” She gave the parrot three lumps of sugar which she had been keeping for him till the last minute and then hurried out of the cave into the sunlight. She slung her knapsack on her back, stuffed her pocket with some of the small pine-cones left over, and was ready to start.
Susan blew out the lantern and followed her. She arranged the big tufts of heather at the mouth of the cave so that no one who did not know of it would guess it was there. On the rocky ground there were no footmarks leading to and from the cave as there would have been in soft turf, and John and Roger had already seen that the bits of broken stick that might have betrayed it had been cleared away. When the four explorers climbed the northern side of Swallowdale and looked back into the empty valley, there was really nothing but the charred stones of the fireplace and the paler patches where the tents had been to show that it had been a camp.
CHAPTER XXIII
OVERLAND TO THE AMAZON
CAPTAIN JOHN once more looked carefully through the Amazons’ message. “‘Due north’ is what they say, but really it’s north-north-west till we get to that rock.” He looked at the compass. “North-north-west is what I made it last night, but we’ll just have one more look from the watch-tower.”
From the top of the watch-tower everybody turned the telescope towards Rio and Holly Howe, but to-day there seemed to be no one about. Then they looked the other way at the peak of Kanchenjunga towering into the morning sunlight. It was hard to believe that they were going to the top of it.
“North-north-west it is,” said John, taking the bearing of the jagged rock past which the Amazons had come when they made their attempt to surprise the camp.
“But we needn’t go straight across the heather,” said Susan.
“Not if we can find a sheep-track,” said the captain.
There seemed to be two or three going in the right direction. John chose a likely one, and in a few minutes the expedition had left the watch-tower and was fairly on its way, walking in Indian file along a narrow sheep-track in the heather, John first, then Roger, then Titty, and Susan last of all.
This order was not kept for very long.
“Don’t waste pine-cones,” said the able-seaman. “It’s silly when we’re still close to our own watch-tower. We shall want all we’ve got when we’re in really unknown country beyond the other rock.”
But Roger’s pockets were bursting with pine-cones, and every dozen yards or so he stopped and put two pine-cones in the middle of the sheep-track, one crosswise and one pointing along the track. Then, of course, he had to stop to see that Titty and Susan did not tread on them by mistake. Again and again the mate found herself brought up short by Roger crouching in the track to make his patteran and by Titty who, though she urged him not to waste pine-cones, stood on guard all the same to see that the mate walked over them without moving them. So the mate let the able-seaman and the boy have the track to themselves while she walked in front of them immediately after the captain.
Long before they came to the jagged rock Roger’s pockets were empty and he wanted to get a new supply out of his knapsack. This Titty would not allow.
“You see now,” she said, “if you go on putting them down like that there won’t be enough to last and then we shall have no patterans just when we want them most, in the most difficult part of the trail.”
Empty pockets brought the boy to reason and it was agreed that only one pine-cone should be laid at a time, because they knew, anyhow, which way they were going, and that they should be laid a long way apart.
“We don’t want a regular string of them,” said Titty. “We want to be able to find one every now and then so as to be sure that we are in the right way.”
At the jagged rock they caught up the others and looked back.
“We needn’t have used a single one so far,” said Titty. “You can see the watch-tower from here. Where we shall want the patterans is where we can’t be sure of the way without them.”
Now, however, unknown country opened before them.
From the rock at which they had first aimed, they moved as nearly as possible due north. The captain kept looking at his compass, choosing a rock or a clump of bracken or heather that bore due north, walking straight to it, and then choosing another in the same way.
They were on a wide ridge of rolling moorland, so that often they could see not more than two or three hundred yards ahead of them and sometimes even less. Sometimes, though, when they were on the top of one of the waves that seemed to cross the moor they could see how the ridge sloped towards the right where, far away, they could see the green tops of larches and pines. Somewhere below those woods must be the lake. Sometimes they could see where the moor began to drop on the other side of the ridge, where also there were the tops of trees showing beyond the heather. Once they caught a glimpse of water on that side very far away, but even with the telescope could see no boats upon it.
“Perhaps it hasn’t yet been discovered,” said Titty.
“That’s where the swans were going,” said John.
Not all the moorland was covered with heather. There were wide stretches of tall green bracken, and short-cropped grass burnt brown by the sun. Grey rocks rose up out of the grass and heather alike. It was as if an old ragged counterpane of deep purple, patched with scraps of faded green and rusty brown, had been thrown over the earth’s skeleton and the bones were showing through the threadbare places. Peewits circled overhead, swooping down towards them, and tumbling and swinging up and away again, shrieking at them as if to say they had no business to be there. Twice a curlew with his long, curved, thin beak stretched before him, screamed shrilly as he passed overhead from one valley to another. Grouse rose suddenly out of the heather, with a loud whirring of wings and a shout of “Go back! Go back! Go back!”
“No, we won’t,” said Roger.
“They wouldn’t tell us to go back if they knew what we were going to do,” said Titty. “They think it has something to do with them. That’s why they shout at us.”
Always before them, away to the west of their course, though not much, on the port bow as they would have said if they had been afloat in Swallow, rose the great mass of the hill they had agreed to call Kanchenjunga. It changed its shape a little as they moved northwards. It looked less of a solitary peak, and they could see a deep gully running up into it just above the woods that covered its lower slopes.
By the time the first halt was called all the pine-cones from Roger’s knapsack had been used up and Titty’s knapsack was not as full as it had been. They had long ago lost sight of the watch-tower. To east of them they could see nothing but the rolling waves of heather. To the west there was less heather and the moorland seemed to come suddenly to an end. Before them the ground seemed to be still rising, though they knew it must sooner or later drop into the valley of the Amazon River. Nor could the end of the ridge be very far away. Going due north over the moor they were steering a straighter course than if they had been sailing to the Amazon from Wild Cat Island, when there was always Rio Bay to allow for and the islands, to say nothing of the wind. The line of their march over the moorland was as straight as a crow’s flight, thanks to the captain’s careful use of his compass.
He had explained this to Roger.
“It’s easier for crows,” said Roger. “Crows keep their wings still and go on and on without stopping, but if we keep our l
egs still for a minute nothing happens. We just stick.”
“This is a good place for sticking,” said the mate. “There’s a flat rock for a table. And we must be much more than halfway. Off with your knapsacks. Apples all round.”
“Yes,” said the captain. “It’s no good getting there with any of us tired. We don’t know what we may have to do when we come to the river.”
Knapsacks were dumped on the flat rock. Apples were taken out and a moment later only the peewits circling overhead could have known that the explorers were there. All four of them were lying flat on their backs on the dry turf beside the rock (the mate had felt it carefully and said it was not damp) eating their apples and shading their eyes while they blinked up between their fingers into the blue sky.
When they set off again, another half-hour’s walking brought them to the edge of the high ground. They looked down into the valley of the Amazon. A spur of the ridge along which they had come reached forward and hid the place where the river flowed out into the lake, but they could see the flash of water here and there in the green meadows far below them, and away to the right, under the foot of a wooded ridge, they could see a long ribbon of pale reeds that widened suddenly on either side of a little glittering tarn.
“That must be the lagoon,” said John. “Beckfoot must be just round the corner of those woods.”
Though they could not see where the river ran out into the lake, they could see the lake itself, the wide sheet of the northern end of it where they had never been, the Arctic of their maps, and the big hills above it.
“I wonder if any of these hills are as high as Kanchenjunga,” said John.
“They haven’t got a peak like his,” said Titty.
“More hummocky,” said John, who felt already towards Kanchenjunga much what he felt towards Swallow and Swallowdale and Wild Cat Island.
Looking the other way towards Kanchenjunga himself, they could see the valley of the Amazon wound round beneath the high ground on which they were standing, so that the mountain was on the farther side of it. Below them woods dropped steeply down towards the meadows in the bottom.
“Let’s aim straight for the lagoon,” said Roger. “We know the Amazons live just the other side of it.”
“Duffer,” said John. “Coming down that way we could be seen for miles while we were getting across the fields. Besides, if that was the best way they’d have said so.”
“Perhaps nobody would be looking,” said Roger.
“The natives have probably got sentinels posted all round,” said Titty, “and anyhow we’ve got to get the canoe.”
Captain John once more opened the message that had been hidden in Nancy Blackett’s arrow. He read it all through to himself and then looked down into the valley towards the woods that covered the slopes between the moorland and the meadows.
“Four firs in what used to be a wood,” he said aloud.
Titty had the telescope and handed it to him.
“Over there,” she said, “it looks as if it might have been a wood some time or other.” She pointed a little to the left where close below the open moor there were short stumpy bushes and patches of rock and bracken and fern, with a few solitary oaks and ashes.
“There are the firs,” shouted John. “Come on. I thought there were only two, but that was because they’re all in a straight line. Come on.”
Titty had only three pine-cones left. She gave them, one at a time, to Roger, and the ship’s boy laid them carefully on the ground in clear open spaces, where they could easily be seen.
“The trees’ll show us how to find them,” said Titty. “We can’t miss them with the four trees being in a line.”
When the last patteran had been put in its place the able-seaman and the boy galloped downhill after the captain and the mate, their knapsacks bumping on their backs.
They went a little slower through a broad belt of heather, and after that were picking their way among stumpy little bushes, fresh saplings, fern and moss-covered rocks, and huge old tree stumps still left in the ground.
“Don’t go so fast,” panted Roger.
John and Susan were already far ahead of them.
But the captain stopped when he came to the four big fir trees that they had seen from the moor. He pulled out the message again.
“These are the trees all right,” he was saying as Roger and Titty came galumphing down. “‘Follow the way they point,’ it says, and they point down the hill. ‘Keep to the stone wall.’ … There it is. They’re pointing to it.”
It was a tumble-down old wall, built, like all the walls of these parts, of rough stones with no mortar. There were big gaps in it made by the sheep, who always pull down walls sooner or later, but even where no more was left of it than a lot of loose stones lying on the ground where they had fallen, anybody could see that it had at one time been a stone wall running straight up the fell from the valley below.
“Come on,” said John, “but go quietly. There’s the road somewhere in front of us.”
They followed the old wall down from the partly cleared ground into thick bushy forest like the woods round Horseshoe Cove.
“That’s why they chose this way,” said John. “Nobody could see us here. Hullo! Listen! Halt!”
There was the sound of a motor horn only a little way ahead of them. The explorers stiffened like startled hares. The sound died away, and at a signal from John they crept on, pushing their way through the hazel bushes, with the remains of the old wall close on their right.
“Steady, Mister Mate!” whispered John. “I’ll see if the coast is clear.”
“Steady, Able-seaman!” whispered Susan, stopping short.
“Steady, Ship’s Boy!” whispered Titty.
“Steady, Roger!” said the ship’s boy to himself.
“Sh!” said Titty.
John had seen, close in front of him, a different wall. It was in much better repair than the old wall, and higher, and he guessed at once that the road must lie on the other side of it. At a place where a big copper beech spread its branches over the wall John climbed carefully up and lay at full length along the top, covered by the dark coppery leaves. He lifted a thin spray of leaves so that he could see out. There was nothing on the road. On the other side of the road there was another wall. Beyond it there were grass meadows not long since cut. But the meadows ended only a few yards farther to the left, where another wood began.
“That’s the thing to do,” said John to himself. “We’ll cross the road and get into that wood and keep in it along the edge of the fields until we come to the river. Two fields away, they said it was.”
He whistled softly, and a moment later a hand touched his foot. The mate was there.
“Get the others,” he whispered. “We’ve got to cross the road.”
He heard the crack of a twig, no more, and then “All right,” said rather firmly by Roger. His foot was touched again. Another twig cracked. The mate and the crew were just below the wall, ready for orders.
At that moment they heard the quick clumpety clump of horses’ feet and the rattle of heavy wheels, and clear above all that noise the loud and cheerful whistling of a tune.
Whispering seemed useless.
“What is it?” said the mate.
Three horses, trotting heavily along with the two pairs of great wheels on which the big logs are carried from the woods, and Mary Swainson’s woodman sitting on the shafts at one side and whistling like the very loudest of all blackbirds, made such a noise that it was quite safe to talk. There was no great log being carried, and the road just here was a little downhill, and the three huge horses, one before the other, were trotting like overgrown colts, with the heavy, red-painted wheels clattering and rattling behind them. They passed in a towering wave of noise, and a moment or two later were out of sight round the next bend in the road, though for some time the explorers could hear their hoofs and wheels, and sometimes the shriller notes of the woodman’s whistling.
“I
saw them,” said Roger, “through the hole in the wall. Meant for rabbits, I should think. You can see quite well. It’s Mary Swainson’s woodman.”
“I thought it must be when I heard the whistling,” said Titty. “Of course, this must be the same road we cross, going down to Horseshoe Cove. Mary Swainson said they come round by Beckfoot with the big trees from the next valley. I wish I’d seen them too. Was it the same three horses?”
“Shut up, you two, for a minute,” said Susan. “John says, be quiet and listen. We’ve got to slip across the road.”
There was a soft thud as John dropped on the grass at the other side of the wall. Susan climbed up where John had been. John was already across the road and looking for a good place at which to cross the other wall. He found a stone jutting out and was up in a moment.
“This is the place,” he called softly. “Easy climbing. Come one at a time. Send the boy first.”
“Good-bye,” said Roger to Susan, when he had climbed up beside her among the beech leaves.
“We’re coming too,” said Titty.
But Roger was scampering across the road. He was already at the foot of the other wall when the horn of a motor sounded beyond the bend.
“Quick!” said John, and reached down to help him. There was a tremendous scrabbling at the wall. Moss flew in all directions, but somehow or other, with John pulling and Roger climbing, he came to the top and rolled over and dropped into the wood on the other side. A motor car, full of natives, shot past down the deserted, empty road.
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