by John Buchan
I examined my left hand, which was in a horrid mess. The top of my thumb was blown off, and the two top joints of my middle and third fingers were smashed to pulp. I felt no pain in them, though they were dripping blood, but I had a queer numbness in my left shoulder. I managed to bind the hand up in a handkerchief, where it made a gory bundle. Then I tried to collect my wits.
Medina was coming up the chimney after me. He knew I had no rifle. He was, as I had heard, an expert cragsman, and he was the younger man by at least ten years. My first thought was to make for the upper part of the Pinnacle Ridge, and try to hide or to elude him somehow till the darkness. But he could follow me in the transparent Northern night, and I must soon weaken from loss of blood. I could not hope to put sufficient distance between us for safety, and he had his deadly rifle. Somewhere in the night or in the dawning he would get me. No, I must stay and fight it out.
Could I hold the chimney? I had no weapon but stones, but I might be able to prevent a man ascending by those intricate rocks. In the chimney at any rate there was cover, and he could not use his rifle… But would he try the chimney? Why should he not go round by the lower slopes of the Pinnacle Ridge and come on me from above?
It was the dread of his bullets that decided me. My one passionate longing was for cover. I might get him in a place where his rifle was useless and I had a chance to use my greater muscular strength. I did not care what happened to me provided I got my hands on him. Behind all my fear and confusion and pain there was now a cold fury of rage.
So I slipped back into the chimney and descended it to where it turned slightly to the left past a nose of rock. Here I had cover, and could peer down into the darkening deeps of the great couloir.
A purple haze filled the corrie, and the Machray tops were like dull amethysts. The sky was a cloudy blue sprinkled with stars, and mingled with the last flush of sunset was the first tide of the afterglow… At first all was quiet in the gully. I heard the faint trickle of stones which are always falling in such a place, and once the croak of a hungry raven… Was my enemy there? Did he know of the easier route up the Pinnacle Ridge? Would he not assume that if I could climb the cleft he could follow, and would he feel any dread of a man with no gún and a shattered hand?
Then from far below came a sound I recognized – iron hobnails on rock. I began to collect loose stones and made a little pile of such ammunition beside me… I realized that Medina had begun the ascent of the lower pitches. Every breach in the stillness was perfectly clear – the steady scraping in the chimney, the fall of a fragment of rock as he surmounted the lower chockstone, the scraping again as he was forced out on to the containing wall. The light must have been poor, but the road was plain. Of course I saw nothing of him, for a bulge prevented me, but my ears told me the story. Then there was silence. I realized that he had come to the place where the chimney forked.
I had my stones ready, for I hoped to get him when he was driven out on the face at the overhang, the spot where I had been when he fired.
The sound began again, and I waited in a desperate choking calm. In a minute or two would come the crisis. I remember that the afterglow was on the Machray tops and made a pale light in the corrie below. In the cleft there was a still a kind of dim twilight. Any moment I expected to see a dark thing in movement fifty feet below, which would be Medina’s head.
But it did not come. The noise of scraped rock still continued, but it seemed to draw no nearer. Then I realized that I had misjudged the situation. Medina had taken the right-hand fork. He was bound to, unless he had made, like me, an earlier reconnaissance. My route in the half-light must have looked starkly impossible.
The odds were now on my side. No man in the fast-gathering darkness could hope to climb the cliff face and rejoin that chimney after its interruption. He would go on till he stuck – and then it would not be too easy to get back. I reascended my own cleft, for I had a notion that I might traverse across the space between the two forks, and find a vantage point for a view.
Very slowly and painfully, for my left arm was beginning to burn like fire and my left shoulder and neck to feel strangely paralysed, I wriggled across the steep face till I found a sort of gendarme of rock, beyond which the cliff fell smoothly to the lip of the other fork. The great gully below was now a pit of darkness, but the afterglow still lingered on this upper section and I saw clearly where Medina’s chimney lay, where it narrowed and where it ran out. I fixed myself so as to prevent myself falling, for I feared I was becoming light-headed. Then I remembered Angus’s rope, got it unrolled, took a coil round my waist, and made a hitch over the gendarme.
There was a smothered cry from below, and suddenly came the ring of metal on stone, and then a clatter of something falling. I knew what it meant. Medina’s rifle had gone the way of mine and lay now among the boulders at the chimney foot. At last we stood on equal terms, and, befogged as my mind was, I saw that nothing now could stand between us and a settlement.
It seemed to me that I saw something moving in the half-light. If it was Medina, he had left the chimney and was trying the face. That way I knew there was no hope. He would be forced back, and surely would soon realize the folly of it and descend. Now that his rifle had gone my hatred had ebbed. I seemed only to be watching a fellow-mountaineer in a quandary.
He could not have been forty feet from me, for I heard his quick breathing. He was striving hard for holds, and the rock must have been rotten, for there was a continuous dropping of fragments, and once a considerable boulder hurtled down the couloir.
‘Go back, man,’ I cried instinctively. ‘Back to the chimney. You can’t get further that way.’
I suppose he heard me, for he made a more violent effort, and I thought I could see him sprawl at a foothold which he missed, and then swing out on his hands. He was evidently weakening, for I heard a sob of weariness. If he could not regain the chimney, there was three hundred feet of a fall to the boulders at the foot.
‘Medina,’ I yelled, ‘I’ve a rope. I’m going to send it down to you. Get your arm in the loop.’
I made a noose at the end with my teeth and my right hand working with a maniac’s fury.
‘I’ll fling it straight out,’ I cried. ‘Catch it when it falls to you.’
My cast was good enough, but he let it pass, and the rope dangled down into the abyss.
‘Oh, damn it, man,’ I roared, ‘you can trust me. We’ll have it out when I get you safe. You’ll break your neck if you hang there.’
Again I threw, and suddenly the rope tightened. He believed my word, and I think that was the greatest compliment ever paid me in all my days.
‘Now you’re held,’ I cried. ‘I’ve got a belay here. Try and climb back into the chimney.’
He understood and began to move. But his arms and legs must have been numb with fatigue, for suddenly that happened which I feared. There was a wild slipping and plunging, and then he swung out limply, missing the chimney, right on to the smooth wall of the cliff.
There was nothing for it but to haul him back. I knew Angus’s ropes too well to have any confidence in them, and I had only the one good hand. The rope ran through a groove of stone which I had covered with my coat, and I hoped to work it even with a single arm by moving slowly upwards.
‘I’ll pull you up,’ I yelled, ‘but for God’s sake give me some help. Don’t hang on the rope more than you need.’
My loop was a large one and I think he had got both arms through it. He was a monstrous weight, limp and dead as a sack, for though I could feel him scraping and kicking at the cliff face, the rock was too smooth for fissures. I held the rope with my feet planted against boulders, and wrought till my muscles cracked. Inch by inch I was drawing him in, till I realized the danger.
The rope was grating on the sharp brink beyond the chimney and might at any moment be cut by a knife-edge.
‘Medina’ – my voice must have been like a wild animal’s scream – ‘this is too dangerous. I’m going to le
t you down a bit so that you can traverse. There’s a sort of ledge down there. For Heaven’s sake go canny with this rope.’
I slipped the belay from the gendarme, and hideously difficult it was. Then I moved farther down to a little platform nearer the chimney. This gave me about six extra yards.
‘Now,’ I cried, when I had let him slip down, ‘a little to your left. Do you feel the ledge?’
He had found some sort of foothold, and for a moment there was a relaxation of the strain. The rope swayed to my right towards the chimney. I began to see a glimmer of hope.
‘Cheer up,’ I cried. ‘Once in the chimney you’re safe. Sing out when you reach it.’
The answer out of the darkness was a sob. I think giddiness must have overtaken him, or that atrophy of muscle which is the peril of rock-climbing. Suddenly the rope scorched my fingers and a shock came on my middle which dragged me to the very edge of the abyss.
I still believe that I could have saved him if I had had the use of both my hands, for I could have guided the rope away from that fatal knife-edge. I knew it was hopeless, but I put every ounce of strength and will into the effort to swing it with its burden into the chimney. He gave me no help, for I think – I hope – that he was unconscious. Next second the strands had parted, and I fell back with a sound in my ears which I pray God I may never hear again – the sound of a body rebounding dully from crag to crag, and then a long soft rumbling of screes like a snowslip.
I managed to crawl the few yards to the anchorage of the gendarme before my senses departed. There in the morning Mary and Angus found me.
THE ISLAND OF SHEEP
TO
J.N.S.B.
who knows the Norlands and the
ways of the wild geese
CONTENTS
PART I: FOSSE
1. Lost Gods
2. Hanham Flats
3. The Tablet of Jade
4. Haraldsen
5. Haraldsen’s Son
6. Sundry Doings at Fosse
7. Lord Clanroyden Intervenes
PART II: LAVERLAW
8. Sanctuary
9. Lochinvar
10. The Dog Samr
11. We Shift our Base
PART III: THE ISLAND OF SHEEP
12. Hulda’s Folk
13. Marine Biology
14. The Ways of the Pink-Foot
15. Transformation by Fire
16. The Riddle of the Tablet
PART I
FOSSE
CHAPTER ONE
Lost Gods
I have never believed, as some people, in omens and forewarnings, for the dramatic things in my life have generally come upon me as suddenly as a tropical thunder-storm. But I have observed that in a queer way I have been sometimes prepared for them by my mind drifting into an unexpected mood. I would remember something I had not thought of for years, or start without reason an unusual line of thought. That was what happened to me on an October evening when I got into the train at Victoria.
That afternoon I had done what for me was a rare thing, and attended a debate in the House of Commons. Lamancha was to make a full-dress speech, and Lamancha on such an occasion is worth hearing. But it was not my friend’s eloquence that filled my mind or his deadly handling of interruptions, but a reply which the Colonial Secretary gave to a question before the debate began. A name can sometimes be like a scent or a tune, a key to long-buried memories. When old Melbury spoke the word ‘Lombard’, my thoughts were set racing down dim alleys of the past. He quoted a memorandum written years ago and incorporated in the report of a certain Commission; ‘A very able memorandum,’ he called it, ‘by a certain Mr Lombard,’ which contained the point he wished to make. Able! I should think it was. And the writer! To be described as ‘a certain Mr Lombard’ showed how completely the man I once knew had dropped out of the world’s ken.
I did not do justice to Lamancha’s speech, for I thought of Lombard all through it. I thought of him in my taxi going to the station, and, when I had found my compartment, his face came between me and the pages of my evening paper. I had not thought much about him for years, but now Melbury’s chance quotation had started a set of pictures which flitted like a film series before my eyes. I saw Lombard as I had last seen him, dressed a little differently from today, a little fuller in the face than we lean kine who have survived the War, with eyes not blurred from motoring, and voice not high-pitched like ours to override the din of our environment. I saw his smile, the odd quick lift of his chin – and I realized that I was growing old and had left some wonderful things behind me.
The compartment filled up with City men going home to their comfortable southern suburbs. They all had evening papers, and some had morning papers to finish. Most of them appeared to make this journey regularly, for they knew each other, and exchanged market gossip or commented on public affairs. A friendly confidential party; and I sat in my corner looking out of the window at another landscape than what some poet has called ‘smoky dwarf houses’, and seeing a young man’s face which was very different from theirs.
Lombard had come out to East Africa as secretary to a Government Commission, a Commission which he very soon manipulated as he pleased. I met him there when I was sent up on a prospecting job. He was very young then, not more than twenty-five, and he was in his first years at the Bar. He had been at one of the lesser public schools and at Cambridge, had been a good scholar, and was as full as he could hold of books. I remembered our first meeting in a cold camp on the Uasin Gishu plateau, when he quoted and translated a Greek line about the bitter little wind before dawn. But he never paraded his learning, for his desire was to be in complete harmony with his surroundings, and to look very much the pioneer. Those were the old days in East Africa, before the ‘Happy Valley’ and the remittance man and settlers who wanted self-government, and people’s hopes were high. He was full of the heroes of the past, like Roddy Owen and Vandeleur and the Portals, and, except that he was a poor horseman, he had something in common with them. With his light figure and bleached fair hair and brown skin he looked the very model of the adventurous Englishman. I thought that there might be a touch of the Jew in his ancestry – something high-coloured and foreign at any rate, for he was more expansive and quickly fired than the rest of us. But on the whole he was as English as a Hampshire water-meadow…
The compartment was blue with pipe-smoke. My companions were talking about rock-gardens. The man in the corner opposite me was apparently an authority on the subject, and he had much to say about different firms of nursery gardeners. He was blond, plump and baldish, and had a pleasant voice whose tones woke a recollection which I could not fix. I thought that I had probably seen him at some company meeting…
My mind went back to Lombard. I remembered how we had sat on a rock one evening looking over the trough of Equatoria, and, as the sun crimsoned the distant olive-green forests, he had told me his ambitions. In those days the afterglow of Cecil Rhodes’s spell still lay on Africa, and men could dream dreams. Lombard’s were majestic. ‘I have got my inspiration,’ he told me. His old hankerings after legal or literary or political success at home had gone. He had found a new and masterful purpose.
It was a very young man’s talk. I was about his own age, but I had knocked about a bit and saw its crudity. Yet it most deeply impressed me. There were fire and poetry in it, and there was also a pleasant shrewdness. He had had his ‘call’ and was hastening to answer it. Henceforth his life was to be dedicated to one end, the building up of a British Equatoria, with the highlands of the East and South as the white men’s base. It was to be both white man’s and black man’s country, a new kingdom of Prester John. It was to link up South Africa with Egypt and the Sudan, and thereby complete Rhodes’s plan. It was to be a magnet to attract our youth and a settlement ground for our surplus population. It was to carry with it a spiritual renaissance for England. ‘When I think,’ he cried, ‘of the stuffy life at home! We must bring air into it, and instead of
a blind alley give ’em open country…’
The talk in the compartment was now of golf. Matches were being fixed up for the following Sunday. My vis-à-vis had evidently some repute as a golfer, and was describing how he had managed to lower his handicap. Golf ‘shop’ is to me the most dismal thing on earth, and I shut my ears to it. ‘So I took my mashie, you know, my little mashie’ – the words seemed to have all the stuffiness of which Lombard had complained. Here in perfection was the smug suburban life from which he had revolted. My thoughts went back to that hilltop 3,000 miles and thirty years away…
All of us at that time had talked a little grandiloquently, but with Lombard it was less a rhapsody than a passionate confession of faith. He was not quite certain about the next step in his own career. He had been offered a post on the staff of the Governor of X—, which might be a good jumping-off ground. There was the business side, too. He had the chance of going into the firm of Y—, which was about to spend large sums on African development. Money was important, he said, and cited Rhodes and Beit. He had not made up his mind, but ways and means did not greatly trouble him. His goal was so clear that he would find a road to it.
I do not think that I have ever had a stronger impression of a consuming purpose. Here was one who would never be content to settle among the fatted calves of the world. He might fail, but he would fail superbly.
‘Some day,’ I said, ‘there will be a new British Dominion, and it will be called Lombardy. You have the right sort of name for Empire-making.’
I spoke quite seriously, and he took it seriously.
‘Yes, I have thought of that,’ he said, ‘but it would have to be Lombardia.’
That was not the last time I saw him, for a year later he came down to Rhodesia, again on Government business, and we went through a rather odd experience together. But it was that hour in the African twilight that stuck in my memory. Here was a man dedicated to a crusade, ready to bend every power of mind and body to a high ambition, and to sacrifice all the softer things of life. I had felt myself in the presence of a young knight-errant, gravely entering upon his vows of service…
