The White Mountains (The Tripods)

by Christopher, John

  “Perhaps not in the mountains.”

  He nodded. “And there are mountains in the south. Where one could hide, if no more. Is that where you go? Is it possible that I can come?”

  I looked at Henry, but it scarcely needed confirmation. Someone whom we already knew to be resourceful, who knew the country and the language. It was almost too good to be true.

  “Can you come as you are?” I asked him. “Going back would be risky.”

  “I am ready now.” He put a hand out, first to me and then to Henry. “My name—I am Zhan-pole.”

  He looked odd and solemn standing there, tall and thin, with that strange metal-and-glass thing on his face. Henry laughed.

  “More like Beanpole!”

  He stared at Henry inquiringly for a moment. Then he laughed, too.

  We tramped through the night, covering ten or twelve miles before, with the summer dawn edging over the horizon, we broke off, to rest and eat. While we rested, Beanpole told us the reason for the men rushing out from the tavern to catch us the previous night: some of the local boys had been damaging the boats on the hard, and the sailors thought we were the culprits. A stroke of bad luck, though it had turned out well. He told us something about himself also. His parents had died when he was a baby; and his uncle and aunt owned the tavern. They seemed to have looked after him all right, but in a distant way, with not much affection or, at any rate, not much shown. I got the impression that they may even have been a little scared of him. This is not as silly as it sounds because there was one thing that stood out about him: he had quite a tremendous brain.

  His speaking English, for instance: he had found an old book, giving instructions in the language, and taught himself. And the contraption on his face. His eyesight was poor, and he had worked it out that, since mariners’ telescopes helped sailors to see at a distance, a glass in front of each eye might enable him to see more clearly. He had messed about with lenses until he found some that did. There were other things he had tried, with less success, but you could see how they might have worked. He had noticed that hot air rises, and had filled a pig’s bladder with steam from a kettle and seen it go up to the ceiling. So he had tried making a big balloon out of oilskin and fixing it to a platform with a brazier under the opening, hoping it would rise into the sky; but nothing happened. Another idea that had not worked out had been for putting springs on the ends of stilts—he had broken a leg the previous year trying that one out.

  Lately he had been more and more uneasy about the prospect of being Capped, rightly guessing that it would put an end to his inventing things. I realized that it was not just Jack, and myself, and Henry, who had doubts about Capping. Probably everyone, or almost everyone, felt like that, but because adults were all on the side of the Tripods dared not say so. Beanpole said his balloon idea had come from this: a thought of himself drifting through the sky to strange lands, perhaps somewhere finding one where there were no Tripods. He had been interested in us because he had guessed we came from north of the sea, and there were stories that the Tripods were fewer there.

  We came to a crossroads not long after restarting our journey, and I was once more made aware of our luck in finding him. I would have taken the road south, but he chose west.

  “Because of the …” What he said sounded like “Shmand-Fair.” “I do not know your name for it.”

  “What is it?” Henry asked.

  “It is too hard to explain, I think. You will see.”

  The Shmand-Fair started inside a town, but we skirted it and reached a small hill, topped with ruins, on the southern edge. Looking down we could see a track, on which were two parallel straight lines, gleaming in the sunshine, which ran from the town and disappeared in the far distance. The town end had an open space, where half a dozen objects looking like great boxes on wheels were linked together. As we watched, a dozen horses were harnessed in pairs and yoked to the nearest of the boxes. A man was mounted on the lead pair, and another on the second pair from the box. At a signal, the horses strained forward and the boxes began to move, slowly and then faster. When they were going quite fast, the eight horses in front broke free, and galloped obliquely away. The remaining four continued pulling the boxes on and past our vantage point. There were five boxes altogether. The two in front had openings in their sides, and we could see people sitting in them; the rest were closed.

  Beanpole explained that twelve horses were needed to start the wheels rolling along the lines, but once they were moving four were enough. The Shmand-Fair took goods and people south for a long way—more than a hundred miles, it was said. It would save us a lot of walking. I agreed, but asked how we were going to get aboard, since the horses had been going at full tilt when it passed us. He had an answer for that, too. Although the ground on which the lines were laid looked level, there were parts with slopes up or down. On the down slopes, the horseman could brake the wheels of the boxes. In the case of up gradients, the horses had to pull against the drag, which sometimes reduced them almost to walking pace before they reached the top.

  We followed the now empty lines away from the town. They were of iron, their tops polished to brightness by the wheels, and were fastened on massive planks, whose surface showed in places through a covering of earth. It was a clever means of travel, but Beanpole was not satisfied with it.

  “Steam,” he said, musing. “It rises. Also, it pushes. You have seen the lid pushed up from the saucepan? If one made a lot of steam—like a very big kettle—and pushed the carriages from behind? But, no. That is impossible.”

  We laughed, agreeing. Henry said,“It would be like lifting yourself by pulling on the laces of your shoes.”

  Beanpole shook his head. “There is a way, I am sure.”

  • • •

  Finding the best place for getting on the Shmand-Fair proved easier than I had expected. The gradient was scarcely noticeable, but the crest of the rise was marked by a wooden post, with arms on either side pointing down. There were bushes nearby, which provided cover. We had a wait of half an hour before the next one came in sight, but that was going the wrong way. (I wondered about there being only the one set of tracks, and found later that there were places where the tracks were doubled, so that two could pass.) Eventually, the right one appeared; we saw the horses drop from gallop to canter, and at last to a straining, heaving walk. When the carriages with people had passed, we darted out, and swung aboard the one at the end. Beanpole led the way, clambering up the side and on to the flat top. No sooner had Henry and I followed suit than the Shmand-Fair ground to a halt.

  I thought perhaps our extra weight had stopped it, but Beanpole shook his head. He whispered back:

  “They have reached the top. The horses rest, and are given water. Then they go on.”

  And after a five-minute break, they did, quickly gathering speed. There was a bar along the top to hold, and the motion was not unpleasant—better than traveling in a carriage on an ordinary road where one hit boulders and potholes all the time. Henry and I looked out at the landscape, as it flashed past. Beanpole stared at the sky. I suspected he was still pondering his idea of using steam instead of horses. It was a pity, I thought, that with so many ideas in his head he could not learn to tell the difference between sensible and ridiculous ones.

  From time to time there were halts in villages, and people got on and off and goods were loaded and unloaded. We lay flat, and kept silent, hoping no one would come up on top. Once a large millstone was unloaded, with a lot of panting and cursing, from directly beneath us, and I recalled what difficulty my father had found in getting a new millstone up to Wherton. There was a raised bank, not far from the village, which ran straight for miles, and it occurred to me that Shmand-Fair could be built along that. Or perhaps had been built, long ago, before the Tripods? The thought, like so many others recently, was startling.

  Twice we saw Tripods in the distance. It struck me that, being more numerous in this country, they must do a great deal of damage to
crops. Not only crops, Beanpole said. Animals were often killed by the great metal feet; and people, too, if they were not quick enough to get out of the way. This, like everything else, was taken for granted. But no longer by us; having started asking questions, each doubt set loose a score of others.

  Toward evening, during a halt to refresh the horses, we saw a town in the distance. It looked bigger than the town from which the Shmand-Fair had started, and Beanpole thought it might be the place where it ended. It seemed a good opportunity to take our leave, and we did so when the horses began to move again to the cries of the horseman. We slipped off as the Shmand-Fair gathered speed, and watched the carriages roll away. We had been traveling almost continuously southeast, a distance of anything from fifty to a hundred miles. Less than a hundred, though, or we ought to have seen what was shown as a landmark on the map: the ruins of one of the great-cities of the ancients. The thing to do, we agreed, was head south.

  We traveled on while the light held. It was warm still, but clouds had come up. We looked for shelter before darkness halted us, but could find nothing, and settled at last for a dry ditch. Fortunately, it did not rain during the night. In the morning, clouds still threatened, but no more than that, and we had a snack of bread and cheese and continued on our way. We went up a rise, beside a wood, which would offer cover if there were a risk of being seen. Henry reached the top first, and stood there, stock still and staring ahead. I quickened my step, anxious to see what he was gazing at. When I reached him, I, too, stopped in wonder.

  It was the ruins of the great-city which lay ahead of us, a mile or two distant. I had never seen anything remotely like it before. It stretched for miles, rising in hills and valleys. The forest had invaded it—there was the tossing green of trees everywhere—but everywhere also were the gray and white and yellow bones of buildings. The trees followed lines among them, like veins in some monstrous creature.

  We stood in silence, until Beanpole murmured, “My people built that.”

  Henry said, “How many lived there, do you think? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? A million?”

  I said, “We shall have to go a long way around. I can see no end.”

  “Around?” Beanpole asked. “But why? Why not through?”

  I remembered Jack, and his story of the huge ship in the harbor of the great-city south of Winchester. It had not occurred to either of us that he might have done more than gaze from a distance; no one ever approached the great-cities. But that was the way of thinking that came from the Tripods, and the Caps. Beanpole’s suggestion was frightening, and then exciting. Henry said, in a low voice, “Do you think we could get through?”

  “We can try,” Beanpole said. “If it is too difficult, we can return.”

  The nature of the veins became clear as we approached. The trees followed the old streets, sprouting out of the black stone of which they had been built, and thrusting their tops up above the canyons formed by the buildings on either side. We walked in their dark cool shade, at first in silence. I did not know about the others, but I needed all the courage I could summon up. Birds sang above our heads, emphasizing the quietness and gloom of the depths through which we made our way. Only gradually did we start taking an interest in our surroundings, and talking—at the beginning in whispers and then more naturally.

  There were strange things to be seen. Signs of death, of course—the white gleam of bone that had once borne flesh. We had expected that. But one of the first skeletons we saw was slumped inside a rusted oblong, humped in the middle, which rested on metal wheels, rimmed with a hard black substance. There were other similar contraptions, and Beanpole stopped by one and peered inside. He said, “Places for men to sit. And wheels. So, a carriage of some nature.”

  Henry said, “It can’t be. There’s nowhere to harness the horse. Unless the shafts rusted away.”

  “No,” Beanpole said. “They are all the same. Look.”

  I said, “Perhaps they were huts, for people to rest in when they were tired of walking.”

  “With wheels?” Beanpole asked. “No. They were carriages without horses. I am sure.”

  “Pushed by one of your big kettles, maybe!” Henry said.

  Beanpole stared at it. He said, quite seriously, “Perhaps you are right.”

  Some of the buildings had fallen down, from age and weathering, and in places many—whole rows sometimes—had been flattened, crushed, it seemed, by a hammer from the sky. But a great number were more or less intact, and eventually we ventured inside one. It had been a shop, plainly, but of enormous size. There were tins everywhere, some still piled on shelves, but most of them scattered on the floor. I picked one up. It had paper around it, with a faded picture of plums. Other tins had pictures, too—fruit, vegetables, bowls of soup. They had held food. It was reasonable enough: with so many people living together, and no land to till, food would have had to be brought to them in containers, just as my mother bottled things in summer for winter use. The tins had rusted, in some places right through, showing a dried-up indistinguishable mess inside.

  There were thousands of shops, and we looked in many of them. Their contents amazed us. Great bolts of mildewed cloth, still showing weird colors and patterns; row on row of crumbling cardboard boxes, full of rotting leather shoes; musical instruments, a few familiar but most incredibly weird; figures of women, made from a strange hard substance, clothed in the tattered remnants of dresses. And a place full of bottles, which Beanpole told us was wine. He broke the top off one, and we tasted it but pulled faces at the sourness: it had gone bad long ago. We picked up some things and took them with us: a knife, a small axe with an edge that was rusted but could be sharpened, a kind of flask made of translucent blue material, very light in weight, which would carry water better than the flasks Henry and I had got from Captain Curtis, candles … things like that.

  But the shop that filled me with awe was quite small. It was tucked away between two much bigger ones, and as well as the usual broken glass it had a barrier of warped and rusted metal in front of it. When I looked in, it was like Aladdin’s cave. There were gold rings, set with diamonds and other stones, brooches, necklaces, bangles. And perhaps a score of Watches!

  I picked one out. It was gold, too, and had a heavy gold bracelet, which expanded when I put my fingers inside and stretched them; so that it would be made large enough to go over your hand and would then lie snug on your wrist. Or on a thicker wrist than mine. It was loose when I put it on, so I pushed it higher up my arm. It would not go, of course, but it was a Watch. The other two were exploring on the other side of the street. I thought of calling them, and then decided against it.

  It was not just that I did not want them to have a Watch like mine, though that was part of it. There was also the memory of my struggle with Henry over my father’s Watch, when Jack had helped me to get it off him. And this, I think, was sparked by something less definite, a feeling of discontent. My dislike for Henry had been thrust into the background by the difficulties and dangers which we encountered together and shared. When Beanpole joined us, I had talked to him more, and he had responded: Henry, to some extent, had been left out of things. I had realized this and, I am afraid, been complacent about it.

  Today, though, particularly since we had come into the great-city, I had become aware of a change. It was nothing clearcut; just that Henry talked more to Beanpole, that Beanpole directed more of his own remarks to Henry—that there had been a shift, in fact, from it being a matter of Beanpole and myself, with Henry a little bit out of things, to a situation in which I was, to some extent, the excluded one. So it had happened that I had found this shop, with the jewels and the Watches, having left them discussing a strange machine they had found which had four rows of small white buttons with letters on, in front. I looked at the Watch again. No, I was not going to call them.

  Eventually, we more or less gave up looking in the shops. In part, this was because our curiosity was sated, but more because we had been several
hours in the city. with no sign of approaching the other side. The reverse, in fact. At one point, where devastation had left a great mound of rubble, we climbed up through the bushes and grass that covered it and found ourselves looking down on the waving green and crumbling stone. It stretched about us, seemingly endless, like a sea ribbed with reefs of rock. But for the compass we would have been lost, for the day had clouded and there was no sun to give us direction. As it was, we knew we were still heading south, and the day was less than half-run, but we felt the need to push on faster than we had been doing so far.

  We came to wider streets, flanked by bigger buildings, that ran broad and straight for immense distances. We stopped to eat where several of these met; there was a place where the trees had not found a purchase, and we sat chewing our meat and the hard biscuits Captain Curtis had given us—our bread was all gone—on a mossy stone. Afterward, we rested, but Beanpole got up after a while and wandered off. Henry followed him. I lay flat, looking up at the gray sky, and did not answer at first when they called me. But Beanpole called again, and sounded excited. They seemed to have found something interesting.

  It was a large hole, surrounded on three sides by rusted rails with steps leading down into the darkness. At the top, opposite the entrance, there was a metal plate which said METRO.

  Beanpole said, “The steps—they are so wide that ten people can go side by side. Where do they lead?”

  I said, “Does it matter? If we aren’t resting, we’d better be getting on.”

  “If I could see …” Beanpole said. “Why was such a thing built, so great a tunnel?”

  “Who cares?” I shrugged. “You wouldn’t see anything down there.”

  “We’ve got candles,” Henry said.

  I said angrily, “We haven’t got time. We don’t want to have to spend a night here.”

  They ignored me. Henry said to Beanpole, “We could go a bit of the way down, and see what there is.” Beanpole nodded.