by David Alric
‘Thank heavens she’s safe!’ said Clive as Queenie led Helen out of the undergrowth towards the cliff. ‘And there’s no sign of the villains. As soon as she’s up we’ll pull the ladder up and let it down on the other side for the others.’
He leant over the ladder as Helen approached the base of the cliff, cupped his hands round his mouth and shouted down.
‘Quick, Mum – go for it!’
Helen looked up, unable to hear him properly but, as Clive frantically beckoned, she gave an apprehensive smile, glanced back to the bushes to check she wasn’t being followed, then scrambled up on to the ladder. As she began to climb she was surprised at how taut the ladder felt – almost as if Clive had secured it at the base. She knew that wasn’t the case, for the end had been dangling free, well clear of the ground. It also vibrated in a way that seemed at times unrelated to her own climbing movements but she put this down to Queenie scampering up and down above her as she clambered up the rungs. The climb was exhausting and frightening. In the original plan it had always been envisaged that the non-mountaineers would be assisted and reassured by the experienced climbers, but now she had to face the formidable ascent on her own. She stopped for a rest now and then, clinging close to the rungs; she wanted to look down to see if she was being followed, but didn’t dare do so for fear of vertigo. The vibrations in the ladder got worse as she climbed and she was disconcerted to notice that they continued, undiminished, even after Queenie had left the ladder altogether. She decided they must be due to the currents of wind swirling along the cliff face.
There was still no sign of any pursuers and Clive began to breathe more easily. Once Helen was up and the ladder pulled up behind her they would be temporarily safe from the villains and could devise a plan of action.
Eventually she reached the top, breathless from the gruelling climb, and hugged Clive and Clare.
‘Well climbed, Mum,’ said Clive. ‘Are we glad to see you! We’ve been worried about you ever since we got your note. Were you followed?’
‘Not as far as I know,’ said Helen, ‘but Queenie kept sniffing the air and looking back. It was frustrating because without Lucy I couldn’t ask her what the problem was.’
Clare then told Helen how she had reached the crest of the escarpment through the roof of the cave and about the fate of Sam and his cronies.
Chopper and Biggles, who had been climbing the ladder some way behind Helen, reached the top at this point. They had found it impossible to climb without tucking their invisibility robes up around their waist to free their legs and took a chance that none of those on the cliff top would look down and see two pairs of legs climbing the ladder. In the event, those on top were too busy exchanging stories to pay any attention to the ladder and the villains eventually made it to the top undetected. Chopper, fat and out of condition, was utterly exhausted by the climb and would never have made it but for the driving power of his greed. On the top rung he let down his robe to its full length and clambered as silently as possible on to the ridge, followed closely by Biggles. Once the pair had more or less recovered their breath they moved invisibly to the edge of the cliff-top group and eavesdropped on the conversation.
‘… and if Sam and the others are dead,’ Helen was saying, ‘there are only two of the thugs left, three if we count the professor – I’m still not sure about him.’
Chopper was stunned at what he heard. How on earth had his brother and the others died, and how did Helen know that he and his group were up to no good?
‘Let’s carry on with this later, Mum,’ Clive interrupted. He had been looking back to the edge of the bushes with increasing concern that the remaining crooks might appear at any moment. ‘The most important thing is to get this ladder up before they appear; if they’re armed they may be able to keep us away from the top of the ladder.’
As they all set to pulling up the ladder, the pilot gave a jump as he felt a touch on his arm. Then he heard Chopper’s hoarse whisper in his ear.
‘There you are. I lost you for a moment. Come behind that rock.’
The two of them went behind a nearby rock. Queenie followed them, sniffing the air.
‘What’s that bloody monkey doing around all the time?’ Chopper muttered and landed her a savage kick. She yelped, picked up her glasses and put them back on and limped back to the others.
‘What’s up, Queenie?’ asked Clare, taking a hand off the ladder to stroke her head. But the monkey of course could say nothing. She licked Clare’s hand and sat down.
‘Probably stung by a wasp,’ said Clive. ‘She looks OK. Lucy can let us know for certain in a few minutes when we’ve shifted this ladder to the other side.’
The pilot asked Chopper why they needed to hide when they were already invisible.
‘So they can’t see these,’ said Chopper and as he spoke a pair of powerful binoculars materialized in mid-air. Chopper had obviously just taken them from beneath his robe.
‘They’re pulling up the ladder,’ Chopper continued, ‘which means they’ve somehow twigged what we’re doing and they’re making a run for it. Sam and the others are dead’ – his voice broke slightly as he said this; Chopper had been very close to Sam – ‘and we’ll never have a better chance than this to nick their plane. If we can see it from up here we don’t need them to lead us to it – we can get to it before them and take off.’
While he was speaking Chopper was slowly scanning the dinosaur crater.
‘There’s some funny-looking animals around,’ he muttered, then suddenly stopped and hissed.
‘There it is.’ He gestured with the binoculars and then handed them to the pilot. Biggles could just make out a tail fin through the trees.
‘That’s it OK,’ he said, ‘they must have landed on that open plain beyond the trees. The pilot must have a lot of guts – I’m not sure I’d have taken a chance on it. A lot of this marshy stuff’ – he pointed to a large bog nearby, ‘would look just like long grass from the air.’
‘Well, he landed it, and it’s our free ride home,’ said Chopper tersely. He couldn’t care less about the skill of some unknown pilot. ‘Let’s go for it. As soon as they lower that ladder we’ll beat them down it and get to the plane first.’ He paused and frowned. ‘I presume you can hot-wire a plane without the keys or anything?’
The pilot laughed softly.
‘Are you kidding? I could start any single-engined plane on earth, in the dark, with my eyes shut.’
‘Good,’ said Chopper. ‘It will be a lot less messy than having to deal with them.’
Biggles felt his blood chill. He was in little doubt as to what Chopper meant by ‘messy’, and he was more than relieved that they could now get to the plane and leave without any confrontation. It was one thing leaving the other party stranded – they would almost certainly have some contingency arrangements in place for their ultimate rescue – quite another to shoot innocent civilians, including a child, in cold blood. He also felt less guilty about the professor. He would now, almost certainly, eventually be rescued with the other group rather than being marooned alone in the crater for the rest of his natural life.
In the meantime, Helen, Clare and Clive had finished hauling the ladder to the top of the ridge and Clive started to look for a suitable place to fix it on the other side so they could lower it into the dinosaur valley. Lucy, Richard and Julian were still sitting patiently in their rocky refuge below. Unfortunately there was only smooth bare rock at the top of the ridge above where they waited, and Clive could find nowhere safe to fix the ladder. He walked along the cliff top, nearer to where Chopper and Biggles were waiting, and eventually found what he wanted – an irregular rocky surface onto which he could hook the top of the ladder, and deep narrow fissures in the underlying rock into which he could drive his supporting pitons.
One-handed, but with the help of the others, he dragged the ladder along the ridge, secured it at the top and then lowered it down into the dinosaur crater. It reached the ground with several feet to spare –
the rocks at the base were higher than in the other valley – and the redundant ladder folded up on the ground. The place it ended up was separated by a small ravine from where Richard, Julian and Lucy were sitting. They had seen Clive and his companions moving along the ridge and clapped and cheered them as they lowered the ladder down the cliff.
‘He obviously couldn’t fix it safely anywhere nearer to us,’ Richard said to the others. ‘We’ll have to get out of here to get to it. Let’s just hope that those things that look like rottweiler kangaroos stay away for the next few minutes.’ He paused, frowning, and peered at the cliff top more intently, shielding his eyes from the afternoon sun.
‘What’s up?’ asked Lucy.
‘I could have sworn I saw something glinting up on the cliff, just past where Clive is standing.’
‘Probably the sun reflecting off something in the rock,’ said Julian.
‘No, said Richard,’ mystified. ‘It was up in the air – five or six feet from the ground. It must have been some curious effect from floating dust particles or something. Anyway, it’s time we moved.’
They sidled through the narrow cleft that led out from their sanctuary, praying that, after all the dangers they had faced and survived, they wouldn’t now fall prey to some hungry dinosaurs. It would be the ultimate irony to die in the gorge they now had to cross, only yards away from the waiting ladder.
Chopper was anxious to get to the plane well ahead of the group and as soon as the ladder had been fixed he and Biggles had hurried to clamber down it ahead of Clare, Clive and Helen. Neither of them realized that the three standing on the ridge had no intention of descending the ladder, and that the real challenge was for them to get down before those on the ground started to climb up. Descending the ladder with their invisibility robes on was much easier than ascending it, and the pair were well clear of the ladder and already heading for the plane before Lucy, Richard, and Julian, the rifle slung across his back, reappeared from the gorge. As they approached the ladder Julian noticed a package on the ground and, puzzled, bent to pick it up. At that moment an unearthly yelping sound came from the edge of the little glade surrounding the gully they had just traversed. The three spun round at the blood-chilling sound to see a hunting pack of raptors streaming from the eastern edge of the forest towards them, as the horrified onlookers at the top of the cliff screamed at them to hurry.
‘Quick, Lucy, get up the ladder!’ said Richard, his first instinct being to save his daughter as Julian quickly slipped the package in the pocket of his bush jacket.
‘No, Dad,’ said Lucy firmly, ‘you and Julian go while I try and delay them.’
It made sense, and Richard obeyed, pushing Julian ahead of him up the ladder. They scrambled up as fast as they could and when Lucy was on the bottom rung she turned and spoke to the oncoming beasts. They were terrifying to look at, razor-sharp teeth in their snarling mouths and vicious hooked claws outstretched to tear into their victims’ flesh.
‘We’re poisonous!’ Lucy shouted. ‘If you eat us you will die.’ The pack stopped in their tracks just short of the ladder. No prey had ever spoken to them before. When Richard was at a safe height he turned and looked down to see what was going on. The pack had stopped and the leading dinosaur was looking at Lucy who was obviously speaking to him. As she spoke, Richard saw that she was gradually edging further up the ladder. Then the pack grew restless and the nearest animals gathered themselves to spring. Lucy was still not out of reach and realized further delaying tactics were necessary. It occurred to her that the animals had never been lied to before.
‘Our mother is just behind you,’ she said. ‘She’s vicious and as large as the trees and she will eat you all!’ The dinosaurs couldn’t help but turn round and look into the trees behind them. In those few vital seconds Lucy scrambled up the ladder as fast as she could. When she was about fifteen feet from the ground the leading creature, realizing he had been fooled, suddenly twisted round, snarled and leapt at her. It was an astounding feat of agility for, from a stationary start, the dinosaur grasped her trailing foot without apparent effort as she tried to climb. To his surprise her foot, as he thought, came off in his mouth and he fell to the ground. This was the first interaction on earth between a dinosaur and a shoe. His teeth had sunk into the rubber sole of Lucy’s trainer and for a few seconds he paused as he pawed and grappled to remove the shoe from his jaws. Soon, however, the other pack members tore it from his mouth and its remnants disappeared down a dozen throats.
By now Lucy was even higher up the ladder and the dinosaur changed his mode of attack, attempting to climb up the rungs of the ladder, using the giant claws on his forefeet as a climbing hooks. As he moved up towards Lucy, Richard delved frantically in his rucksack and produced his bush knife.
‘Here,’ he cried, thrusting the handle into her hand. ‘Cut the ladder!’
She reached down and cut through the ladder stays. As she did so the voracious animal was almost within biting distance and she could smell the putrefactive odour of its breath as it snarled and snapped at her feet. As the bottom of the ladder fell to the ground with the dinosaur Lucy looked up and grinned at her father.
‘Close one, Dad!’ she said.
‘Too close for my liking,’ he called back down. ‘What on earth did you say to them?’
‘I’m afraid I had to tell them some fibs,’ she joked, ‘but it worked!’
When they were almost halfway up Clare, watching from above, suddenly clutched Clive’s arm and pointed to the trees, a look of horror on her face.
‘Look out, you lot – get up as quick as you can!’ she shouted down to the climbers on the ladder.
The three on the ladder looked down again. The raptors below were still snarling and circling round the crumpled section of detached ladder on the ground. Some of them were fighting over the remnants of Julian’s discarded rucksack while the remainder, at the periphery of the group, were looking up in case one of the climbers should fall.
‘No, not down there. Back over there!’ screamed Clare, pointing to the trees.
The climbers twisted round and looked back across the glade. Out of the trees was lumbering a giant dinosaur, four times as tall as a giraffe. As she let out a deafening roar the pack of dinosaurs turned to look at the monster. They were carnivores and she was a herbivore but they were the size of wallabies and she weighed one hundred tons. Her intentions were unmistakable as her prodigious bulk bore down on the marauders and their ferocious snarls and grunts soon turned to yelps of fear and alarm as they fled back the way they had come.
By now Richard and Julian were well on their way to the top of the ladder but, to everyone’s bewilderment, Lucy was actually climbing down a little.
‘What on earth’s Lucy doing?’ said Clare in distress. ‘She’s back in reach.’ Sure enough, Lucy was now only about sixty feet from the ground and well within reach of the monster whose neck seemed interminably long. It headed straight for the ladder and extended its great head at Lucy.
As it did so Julian and Richard finally reached the top and scrambled over the edge to join the others.
Richard looked back for Lucy, saw what she was up to, and turned to see that Clare was white with fear for her sister.
‘It’s OK, love,’ he said, giving her a comforting hug, ‘she’s not in the slightest danger. That’s Tina! She’s just given Lucy and Julian a ride to the plane and back.’ He smiled and pointed to the rope around the dinosaur’s neck. ‘You don’t think Julian would ride on one of the old-fashioned models without a safety strap fitted, do you?’
As he spoke, to Clare and Clive’s astonishment, Lucy turned and stroked the dinosaur’s head and that gargantuan animal nuzzled Lucy as gently as a Shetland pony.
‘We saved her eggs and her life, actually,’ added Richard in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘and she’s just come to say goodbye.’
‘You what?’ exclaimed Clare.
‘Saved her eggs and saved her life,’ repeated Richard nonchalantly.
‘It’s a long story – we’ll tell you all about it later.’
‘Many, many times I expect,’ added Julian with a grin. ‘Ad nauseam, in fact.’
As they looked down, Lucy was speaking her final words to Tina:
‘I must bid thee farewell O Prodigious One,’ she said. ‘Thou hast rendered great service to me and my kin.’
‘Thou and thy kin saved my young,’ replied the dinosaur, ‘and I shall remain forever in thrall to thee and all of thine ilk. But now I must depart hence, for the Implacable One draws nigh. Fare thee well.’
After this once-in-a-planet’s-history scene had been enacted, the observers on the cliff-top watched as the behemoth turned away and Lucy, her face streaming with tears, started to climb up the ladder once more.
As Lucy clambered over the top, the monkeys all swarmed down into the valley.
‘Where are they off to?’ said Helen in alarm.
‘It’s OK, they’ll soon be back,’ said Lucy, smiling weakly through her tears. ‘I think they prefer Cretaceous figs to Pleistocene figs and have gone back to stock up, but what they don’t know is that we’ve just cut the bottom of the ladder off!’
She hugged her sister closely.
‘I’ve got so much to tell you,’ she said, out of breath from the climb.
‘I’ve got one or two things to tell you too,’ said Clare gently. ‘Don’t think you’re the only one to have exciting adventures!’
At that moment, just as Lucy had predicted, the monkeys reappeared, looking somewhat crestfallen.
‘It is as well that you cannot return to the valley,’ Lucy said to them. ‘The Prodigious One fears that her roar may have attracted the Implacable One; that is why she has left in haste.’
Julian was looking very excited.
‘Did you see that dromaeosaur trying to get up the ladder after Lucy?’ he said. ‘It was using its giant hooked claw to try and climb the ladder. That’s fascinating because some scientists think their claws were adapted for climbing rather than for slashing or tearing. I must make a note.’ He fumbled in his pocket for his notebook and then his face changed as he did so.
