‘Well, that’s it, I guess,’ Jeff said. ‘Quite a place, isn’t it?’
I didn’t say anything. I was staring along the threadlike line of the cable, following it in my imagination up the dark face of the cliff, up to the narrow V between the peaks of Solomon’s Judgment. That slender thread was the link bridging the dark gap that separated me from the Kingdom. If I could travel that cable . . . A queer mood of excitement was taking hold of me. I pushed open the door. ‘Let’s have a look in the engine house,’ I said.
‘Sure.’
The door flung to behind me, slammed by the wind. Inside the car we had had the heater going full blast and had been protected from the wind. Outside I found I could hardly stand. The wind tore up the valley. It was not a cold wind, but it had no power to dispel the frozen bite of the air trapped in the circle of the valley head. It was a griping cold that thrust through one’s clothing and ate into one’s guts.
Jeff flung me a duffel coat from the back of the car and then we pushed down through the wind to the engine housing. Though McClellan had only left the place a few hours ago snow was piled up against the pinewood door and we had to scoop it away before we could open it. Inside we were out of the wind, but the cold was bitter. A powdery drift of snow carpeted the floor and the draught of air that whistled in through the horizontal slit window that faced the slide could not dispel the dank smell of the concrete and the less unpleasant smell of oil and combustion fumes.
The interior of the engine housing was about the size of a large room. One wall was taken up entirely by a huge iron wheel round which the driving cable of the hoist ran. This was connected by a shaft to a big diesel engine that stood against the other wall, covered by a tarpaulin lashed down with rope through the eyeholes. Shovel marks showed on the floor where the party which had come up that morning had cleared out the winter’s accumulation of snow. A control panel was fixed to the concrete below the slit and there was an ex-service field telephone on a wooden bracket. Back of the main engine house was a store room and in it I saw the drums of fuel oil that had been brought up from Come Lucky.
I stood there for a moment, absorbing it all, while Jeff peered under the tarpaulin at the engine. I turned slowly, drawn by an irresistible impulse. I went over to the slit and, leaning my arms on the sill, peered up to the snow-lipped top of the cliff face. The moon was just lifting above the left-hand peak of the mountain. I watched the shreds of cloud tearing across the face of it, saw the shadows of the mountain receding, watched till all the whole slide was bathed in the white light of it. The thick thread of the cable was plainly visible now, a shallow loop running from the engine housing in which I stood up to a great concrete pillar that stood on a huge slab of rock that marked the highest point of the slide. From there the cable rose steeply, climbing the black face of the cliff and disappearing into the shadows. My eyes followed the invisible line of it, lifting to the top of the cliff and there, etched against the bright luminosity of the sky, was another pillar, no bigger than a needle, standing like an ancient cromlech on the lip of the cliff.
The thing that had been in my mind ever since I had seen the slender thread of that cable suddenly crystallised and I turned to Jeff. ‘They had that engine going today, didn’t they?’
He nodded, straightening up and facing me, a frown on his friendly, open features. ‘What’s on your mind?’
I hesitated, strangely unwilling to put my idea into words for fear it should be impracticable. ‘You’re a mechanic, aren’t you?’ I said.
‘I run a garage, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Can you start that engine?’
‘Sure, but—’ He stopped and then he stepped forward and caught hold of my arm. ‘Don’t be crazy, Bruce. You can’t go up there on your own. Suppose the thing jammed or the motor broke down?’
The thought had already occurred to me. ‘There must be some sort of safety device,’ I said.
He nodded reluctantly. ‘There’ll be something like that, I guess. If the driving cable were disconnected gravity ought to bring it down.’ He took me outside and we climbed on to the cage. It was a big contraption, bigger than anything I had seen in the Swiss Alps. He flashed the beam of his torch on to the cradle where the two flanged wheels ran on the cable. ‘There you are,’ he said. It was a very simple device. The driving cable was fixed to the cradle by a pinion on a hinged arm. If the motor failed all one had to do was knock the pinion out. The driving cable then fell on to a roller and a braking wheel automatically came into action. It was then possible to let the cage slide down on the brake. ‘See if you can get the motor started,’ I said.
Jeff hesitated, his gaze held by the shadowed void of the cliff face with its sugar-icing of snow at the top. Then he turned with a slight shrug of his shoulders. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But it’ll be cold up there.’
There was a pilot engine for starting the big diesel. It was a petrol engine with battery starter. It started at a touch of the button. Jeff pulled the tarpaulin clear of the diesel, turned on the oil and a moment later the concrete housing shook to the roar of the powerful motor. I went to the car and got another coat and a rug. Jeff met me at the entrance to the housing. ‘Better let me go up,’ he said. ‘Tell me where that recording tape is that Boy wants and I’ll get it.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not a mechanic and I couldn’t run the engine. Besides, I want to see the place.’
He hesitated. ‘I don’t like it,’ he said. ‘These aren’t English mountains. You don’t want to go fooling around with them.’
‘I’ll be all right,’ I said.
He looked at me, frowning slightly. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Better take this.’ He handed me his torch. ‘They’ve rigged a phone up by the look of it. The wire probably runs through the main cable. Ring me from the top.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘If there’s anything wrong with the phone, I’ll bring the cage down at nine o’clock, giving one false start to warn you. If you don’t come down then I’ll run it up again and bring it down every half hour. Okay?’
I nodded and checked my watch with his. Then I climbed on to the wooden platform of the cage. He shouted ‘Good luck’ to me and disappeared into the concrete housing. A moment later the note of the diesel deepened as it took up the slack of the driving cable. I watched the loop of the cable level out and become taut. The cage shook gently and then lifted from its staging. The wheels of the cradle began to turn, creaking slightly. The cage swung gently to and fro. I watched the engine housing slowly grow smaller and then I turned and faced the black rampart of the cliff.
It was an odd journey, alone there, slung in space in the moon-filled night. The rock jumble of the slide fell away steeply below me, a chequer-board of black and white. But ahead all was deep in shadow. A great concrete pillar moved towards me and slid past in the night, a vague shape as the cage ran from moonlight into shadow. For a moment the sound of the cradle wheels changed as they ran on the solid fixing of the cable. Then the whole cradle began to tilt sharply and the rate of progress slowed as it began to climb the vertical cliff face. I could just make it out now, a wall of bare rock criss-crossed with a pattern of white where snow and ice had lodged in crevices and on ledges. Looking back, the moon-white valley seemed miles away. I could barely see the tiny square block of the engine housing. There was no sound except for the creaking of the wheels. The wind whistled up through cracks in the floor timbers. It was bitterly cold. I seemed hung in space, like a balloonist caught in an up-draught of air and slowly rising. I had no sense of vertigo. Only a great sense of loneliness.
It could only have been a few minutes, but it seemed an age that the cage was climbing the bare rock face of the fault. Then we lipped the top and I was in moonlight again and the world around was visible and white. The concrete pylon passed me so close I could have touched it. The cradle toppled down to an almost horizontal position. There was the sound of water in the shadowed bottom of the cleft and I glimpsed the slender veil of a fall wavering as it plunged
the full length of the fault. Ahead of me now I could see the dam, a gigantic concrete wall, unfinished at the top and crumbling away in the centre where the stream ran through. The cage climbed the northern slope of the cleft until I was looking down on to the top of the dam. Then it slowed and moved gently into a wooden staging that finished abruptly at a concrete housing similar to the one at the bottom. The cage stopped with a slight jerk that set the cables swaying.
I climbed stiffly out and looked about me. The dam was below me, looking like some pre-historic rampart built by ancient inhabitants to defend the pass. In places the concrete had crumbled away to spill out the great boulders that formed its core. The unfinished centre section, where the water frothed white over a small fall, gave it the appearance of having been breached in some early raid.
The top of the dam was partially covered by snow, but it was still possible to see the nature of its construction; two outer walls of concrete and the space between filled with rock and sealed with concrete.
My gaze swung to the Kingdom itself. It was a natural bowl in the mountains some five to ten miles long; it was impossible to judge the distance in that queer light. I couldn’t tell the width because a buttress of rock, part of the shoulder of the mountain, blocked my view. The place was completely bare, a white expanse of snow through which ran the black thread of the stream, branching here and there like the spine of a leaf into tributaries that faded rapidly beneath the snow. There was no sign of habitation.
I went into the concrete housing. There was no motor here, of course. It contained nothing but the big iron wheel round which the driving cable ran and some cans of grease. There was a field telephone on a wooden bracket. I lifted the receiver and wound the handle. Faint in my ear came the sound of Jeff’s voice. ‘You all right, Bruce?’
‘Yes, I’m fine.’ It was odd to think of him still down there in the valley with the car outside and the road snaking back to Come Lucky. I seemed to have moved into another world. ‘I can’t see Campbell’s shack from here,’ I told him. ‘It’s probably on the north side of the Kingdom and that’s hidden from me by a buttress of rock. I’ll ring you when I’m ready to come down.’
‘Okay. But don’t be too long. And see you don’t slip or anything.’
‘I’ll be all right,’ I said. ‘It’ll probably take about an hour if I’m to have a look round and get those figures.’
‘Okay.’
I hung up and went outside. I stood there for a moment, gazing beyond the buttress to the Kingdom. It was a crystal bowl surrounded by peaks and it wasn’t difficult to imagine how my grandfather had felt when he had first seen it. Spring would come late here, but when it came it would be splendid, and solitary. The light died out of the whiteness of the plateau until it was no more than a distant glimmer. The moon had blacked out behind a veil of cloud. The mountains closed in on either side, dark, hulking shapes. I glanced back across the lip of the fault towards the valley now deep in shadow. Far away beyond Come Lucky the moon showed white on snowy mountain slopes. I watched as the light sailed up the valley, until the dam and the rock around me was picked out in ghostly brilliance again. The moon sailed clear of the cloud veil. The stars shone in the pallid purple of space and way, way to the west a dark shadow climbed the sky. The clouds were thickening up. I turned and climbed the rock-strewn slope to the buttress.
It didn’t take me long to reach it and from the summit the whole Kingdom lay before me. And there, huddled against the lower slopes of the mountain away to my left was a low range of buildings half-buried in snow. There was nothing of the shack about them and they appeared to be constructed of logs after the fashion of Norwegian saeters. A belt of timber fringed the slopes above them.
It shouldn’t have taken me long to reach them, for it was not more than a mile, but the going was very slippery, the snow frozen into a hard crust and glazed over so that it was like ice. The altitude was also affecting me and I had to stop repeatedly to get my breath. The solitude was frightening. I felt curiously as though I were entering a dead man’s world. Everything was so white and so frozen still.
I was sheltered from the wind by the mountain, but from the slopes above me a whirl of snow came hurtling, curling and curving towards the moon like a scimitar blade. The huddle of buildings seemed crouched low against the onslaught, attempting to hide beneath their mounds of snow. The whirling snow devil swept over them and flung itself on me, a howling rush of wind and ice powder small as ground glass. It stung my face and swept on and all was still again.
I glanced back, panting with the shortness of my breath. The line of my footprints showed faintly in the powdery top layer of snow leading back to the buttress and the dark shadow of the cleft. I could no longer see the valley of Thunder Creek. I was ringed with rock and snow and the dam was again a puny man-made wall against the vast bulk of the southern peak of Solomon’s Judgment.
Behind the crystal white of the peak a heavy cloud obscured the sky like a back-drop of deepest black erected to offset the cold remoteness of the mountain. It was a monster of a cloud, great billows piled up and up into the night. Even as I watched I saw the hard edge of it reach out and clutch at the moon.
The shadow of it raced towards me across the snow. I glanced at the buildings, now less than five hundred yards away. The light was queer, distorted and refracted by the snow. It seemed to me a figure stood there, watching me from the corner of the nearest of the buildings. I thought I saw it move. But then the shadow of the cloud was upon me and I had to adjust the focus of my eyes. And in that second the shadow had passed on and engulfed the buildings and I could see nothing but the snow gleaming white in the moonlight on the further side of the Kingdom. And then the peaks vanished, too, as though blotted out by a giant hand.
All was sudden and impenetrable blackness, and from high up on the peaks above came a dry rustling, a murmur like leaves or the soft escape of steam.
I hesitated, uncertain what to do; whether to go on to the homestead or turn back to the dam. Then all hell broke loose. There was a steady roaring on the mountain slopes above me. The wind came with a drift of powdery snow whipped up from frozen ground and behind the wind came snow, heavy, driving flakes that were cold and clinging, that blinded my eyes and blanketed the whole world that only a moment before had been so bright and clear in the moonlight.
There was no question now of fighting my way back to the top of the hoist. I knew the direction in which the homestead lay and I made for it, head down against the blinding fury of the blizzard and counting my steps so that I should not overshoot it in the impenetrable dark. I switched on the torch Jeff had given me, but it was worse than useless. It converted absolute blackness to a dazzling white world of driven flakes.
I walked straight on with the wind over my left shoulder for seven hundred counted yards and then stopped. I could see nothing. Absolutely nothing. I put the wind on my back and walked two hundred yards, turned right and walked another two hundred; faced into the wind and completed the square, eyes and nostrils almost blocked by the icy, clinging particles of the blizzard. I walked into it for another two hundred paces and again made a square. But I couldn’t see anything and I couldn’t even tell whether I was walking on the flat or not. For all I knew I might have stumbled right over the top of the buildings, half-hidden as they were under drifts. Only if I walked bang up against a wall of the homestead had I any chance of locating it.
I stood still for a moment and considered, knowing that I mustn’t panic, that I must keep calm. Carefully, with the wind as my one fixed point, I searched the ground, patterning it in squares. But I might have been stumbling through an empty plain. I began to doubt whether I had seen any buildings at all. And that figure standing in the snow . . . There wasn’t a soul up in the Kingdom besides myself. If I could have imagined one thing I could have imagined the others. I stopped and wiped the snow from my frozen face. God, it was cold! I glanced at the luminous dial of my watch. Nine-fifteen. Nearly nine hours to go before d
awn began to break. Those buildings had to be real—they had to be!
I started off again and then stopped, trying to remember what square in my pattern I had completed last, trying to get some spark of sense out of my numbed brain. It was then that I saw a faint glow through the snow, an aura of warmth as though a weak sun were trying to rise and penetrate the murk of the blizzard. It was away to my left and I stared at it, wondering whether it was a trick of my imagination or whether it was real. I blinked and rubbed at my snow-encrusted eyes. But the glow remained, a soft radiation that lit the driving snow like the deeper tints of a rainbow. It was unnatural, a queer emanation of colour that warmed the frozen solitude of the Kingdom.
I turned towards it automatically, drawn like a moth to a candle flame in the dark. With every step the colours deepened—orange and red and yellow flamed in the blackness, spreading rosy tints into the flakes of driven snow. And then suddenly the veil of the blizzard seemed to fall back and I saw flames licking skywards and against their lurid light was etched the rough-hewn corner of a log building. A few steps more and I was in the shelter of a group of buildings, low, log-built barns stretching out like two arms from a central ranch-house that had doors and windows. It was one of the barns that was on fire.
The warmth of the flames came licking out of the storm and I ran towards them, drawn by the heat, absorbing it with a feeling of sudden lassitude and wonderful, weary gratefulness. And as the warmth closed round me, melting the snow from my clothes, there was a slow creaking, a cracking of timbers, a movement, a sagging in the heart of the flames. Then with a great roar the roof collapsed. A shower of sparks shot upwards to be caught and extinguished instantly by the storm. The whole centre of the fire seemed to collapse inwards and as it collapsed half-melted snow rolled into the gap from the drift at the back. Steam rose with a roar, a great cloud that was momentarily lit by the glow of the fire. Then the fire was gone. Black darkness closed in and all that was left was a few glowing embers and the soft sizzling of snow melting in contact with red-hot ash.
Campbell's Kingdom Page 13
