“And don’t straggle!” snapped the colonel, regarding them with exasperation. “In country like this we must all keep together. Soon we shall be entering a region of Kafiristan where headhunting is a regular practice. It is a sport for them, like polo: successful hunters, on returning to their villages, are showered with wheat. I must request you not to behave in a manner which will put your companions at risk by obliging them to halt and turn back in search for you. Do you understand?”
“Of course we understand, Rob,” replied Miss Musson calmly. “We none of us wish to lose our heads. You have experience, you are the leader, the children perfectly comprehend this. No one questions your authority.”
“Very well,” Cameron said. “Now: a further point. We are making for the pass of Lowacal, which is, I conjecture, some forty or fifty miles from here. We shall try to procure mules, but I doubt if we shall succeed; and part, indeed most, of the journey will in any case have to be done on foot—and it must be done fast; the rains are upon us, but as soon as the rains reach these lower valleys the rivers begin to flood and may become impassable; furthermore, higher up, the rains become snows, and Lowacal itself may be blocked unless we reach it with all possible speed. Therefore we must make haste. No dallying to pick bouquets or gaze at romantic vistas—is that understood?” he demanded, gazing sternly at Scylla.
She nodded, biting her lip; then, as he still held her eyes, replied in a cool detached manner, “Certainly it is, Colonel Cameron; you have made it abundantly clear.”
“Very well!” He added, “It is becoming dark, and we have put a fair distance between ourselves and the river, I think we may venture to stop here for the night.”
Their path was climbing beside a cliff face, and, at one point where it curved around, a rough cave had been dug in the mountainside, evidently used as a shelter by other travelers before them; one or two heaps of pebbles were crowned by withered marigolds, probably in propitiation of some mountain god.
Thankfully they set down their loads, the men gathered brushwood for a fire, Scylla fetched water from a spring to make lentil soup, Miss Musson fed the baby, and Cal returned in triumph from a wood-gathering excursion with a pouch full of walnuts.
They were all tired out and lay down as soon as they had eaten, wrapped in their half-dried cloaks, the women at the rear of the shallow cave, the men in front. A misty moon threw pine shadows on the rock wall; some beast howled in the distance.
“Are there wolves in these mountains, Rob?” Miss Musson sleepily inquired, and he answered briefly:
“Wolves, tigers, bears, leopards—hyenas, jackals, apes—”
“Oh well, I daresay they will not greatly trouble us,” she murmured. Next moment Scylla heard her softly singing an Urdu lullaby to the child: “‘Roti, makan, chini, chota baba nini (Bread, butter, sugar, little baby sleep).’” And she went on, even mote softly, into one that her own mother must have sung to her. “By-low, baby, my wee baby, By-low, baby, Mother’s little lamb.”
Outside, an owl hooted among the pines; Scylla felt waves of sleep drifting over her.
In the cave entrance Cal said to the colonel, “How long do you think it will take us to reach the Lowacal Pass, sir?”
“We shall try to procure a guide in a mountain village. Then, with luck, perhaps three weeks.”
“Three weeks? To go fifty miles?”
Cameron merely grunted, “You will see,” and, burrowing his head into his sheepskin jacket, composed himself for sleep.
* * *
They did see. They soon began to understand how, in that country, it was sometimes a matter for self-congratulation if they achieved half a mile in an hour. They managed to obtain a guide in a hill village, where Miss Musson also purchased a goat. But mules were not to be had. The goat, Ammomma, sometimes seemed of more use man the guide; she had an infallible instinct for picking her way along a treacherous track that was half washed out by rain. The guide, Hazarah, a sad-looking little man with slightly mad, wandering eyes, appeared to be an outcast in the village where they hired him, and to Scylla he seemed the last person likely to be able to conduct the party through these confusing, precipitous hills to a far-distant mountain pass. But Cameron professed himself satisfied. “The man is a Kafir; he comes from Weran; he has trodden that trail many times.”
The trail itself was a nightmare. Sometimes it led over slopes of shale, which threatened at each step to slip down and set the whole hillside sliding into an avalanche; sometimes they must cross gorges, over crazy cantilever bridges of tree trunks; sometimes the bridge was but a single trunk with branches left on, or a trunk split in half. Sometimes, traversing the sides of a precipitous gorge, they found that the path became no more than a rickety platform of pine branches woven together and jammed into cracks in the rock, extending from the cliff face hundreds of feet up, over white water roaring among boulders, or wicked-looking black mountain lakes which the sun never reached, so deep were they sunk among their slimy cliffs; sometimes the party must clamber up nearly vertical slopes where the path was but a series of toe holds and a single slip would have meant a fall of half a mile; sometimes they were slogging knee deep through snow, high above the tree line in a windy valley, or exposed to frightful gusts, traversing some immense rocky shoulder; at other times, having gone down, down, down, exhaustingly, till the backs of their legs felt ready to split with agony and their toes threatened to push through the tips of their boots, they must cross rushing mountain torrents where already crusts of ice were beginning to form along the bank.
Scylla could not imagine how Miss Musson, at her advanced age, managed to bear up. She herself was often so weary, her heart pumping furiously, a metallic taste like blood in her mouth, that she longed for nothing but to throw herself down by the track and be left there to die; only pride kept her going. But the older woman plodded on, indomitable, and always appeared serene, cheerful, even able to take an interest in what lay about them. When Scylla was staggering on, her whole attention engaged in counting her steps on the muddy, sliding stones under her feet—“Five hundred and two, five hundred and three”—Miss Musson would lightly touch her arm. “Do see, my dear, the bear in the cherry tree!”
“A bear, ma’am?” Scylla would gaze foggily up to where her guardian pointed. “Will he attack us?”
“Not he! Much too engaged with his own affairs!”
And indeed the black bear—“moon bear,” Hazarah called him—was busily occupied, perched in the branches, pulling them toward him and munching the wild cherries, then bending the stripped boughs into a platform on which he reclined, reached out for more distant clusters and dragging off the fruit with his claws; he hardly spared a glance for the procession winding slowly past his tree.
Or, as they balanced precariously along some hideously slippery sloping track, barely eighteen inches wide, that snaked its way across a vertical wall or rock, while Scylla tried to remember Cameron’s various exhortations on equilibrium, she would hear Miss Musson’s quiet voice ahead:
“Do, my dear, pray observe this eagle hovering so close to us; a lammergeier, I believe my dear brother would have termed it; only see, what an immense creature! I believe it must be at least nine feet across the wings!”
And, casting a cautious, sideways glance at the great golden-headed bird floating so serenely beside them without a single flip of its pinions, Scylla could not help a faint lifting of the heart.
There was no sympathy, during these hardships, to be had from Cameron: at the end of an exhausting day’s march he expected each member of the party to do a fair share of work in fetching wood and water and making camp; the women were shown no favor, not even Miss Musson, though he accepted with stern resignation the fact that most of the older lady’s evening duties lay toward the baby; Scylla sometimes relieved her of those tasks but Miss Musson seemed to have a natural gift for child care and could feed, reswathe, and dandle the little cr
eature with such calm, swift, and gentle movements that it hardly roused from its daylong slumbers.
“You are the best baby in the world,” she could sometimes be heard murmuring to it, and even Cameron was obliged to acknowledge that, as babies went, it gave remarkably little trouble.
Scylla was more concerned for Cal; slender and small-framed like herself, he had never been of an athletic turn, although a good horseman; and since she had learned that his moods, silences, tendency to long, heavy slumber, and moments of strange blank inaccessibility were caused by an epileptic disposition, she had been in a state of constant subdued concern about him, which was greatly increased by their present situation of danger and hardship. Suppose, for instance, he should take an epileptic spasm while crossing one of these vertiginous pine-tree bridges? But when she privately confided these fears to Miss Musson, on a rainy morning as they waited for the men to jam back into place one such tree-trunk bridge that had slipped from its precarious anchorage, the older woman was reassuring.
“Do not be troubling your head about it too much, my dear; I believe that, so long as our boy’s attention is fully engaged, he does not ran the risk of taking a fit; I have observed this with other epileptics, even those much more severely afflicted than Cal; it is when their minds are vacant, or lulled by music or regular movement, such as that of a fan, for example, that a seizure is likely to occur. In general I believe that all this outdoor activity is doing your brother nothing but good.”
This statement, Scylla was bound to agree, certainly accorded with Cal’s own remark that his attacks seemed to follow inertia, not activity. Nevertheless, his sister continued to worry about him, for she knew that he very much disliked heights, as she did herself; with all the sympathy of one twin for another, she could sometimes feel his distress as they inched their way along some narrow dizzy path, with wet rock on one side and giddy vacancy on the other. But then, suddenly, the telepathic sensation of strain would lift and, glancing aside, she would notice the red-gold flash of a maple tree in the mist far below, or the cloudy white ribbons of half a dozen waterfalls winding their zigzag way in silence down the opposite cliff, half a mile distant; and, thankfully, she would realize that the exhilaration of such a sight had power to turn his mind away from his own ordeal.
Once, though, they came to a bridge of a different kind. They had been creeping along the lip of a deep gorge all day and in midafternoon arrived at a point where a sheer vertical wall lay ahead of them; the path appeared to come to an abrupt stop.
“It must go on somewhere,” Miss Musson remarked with her usual placid certainty.
But even Hazarah appeared momentarily perplexed; apparently a recent rockfall had caused the blockage in front of them; he scratched his head.
Then the Therbah, uncharacteristically taciturn, pointed in silence to a tree that stood near the path, a great twisted mountain oak. Peering through the misty rain that was falling, the travelers could just perceive what seemed to be a rope which snaked down from its branches—down and out, across to the opposite side of the gorge; the human eye could hardly follow its threadlike progress, but it seemed to terminate in a similar oak tree low down on the farther bank.
Cameron asked some question of the Therbah in his own language; he replied with a single word. Then, setting down the conical basket in which he carried his load, he climbed with rapid agility into the oak tree, up to the fork where the rope was attached.
“You don’t mean to say that we have to go down that?” Scylla demanded in tones of incredulous horror.
Cameron remarked coolly, “Can you suggest any other means of crossing the gorge, Miss Paget?”
Of course she could not. Below the slope on which the tree grew, as she was aware, a vertical cliff fell three hundred feet to the river beneath. And ahead of them the way was blocked—
“To go back?” she suggested uncertainly.
“All the length of the gorge? Are you mad? Think how long it has taken us. Besides—” Silently he pointed back and down, to a lower, far-distant section of the track they had followed. Dimly, faintly, Scylla perceived the flash of metal, white dots of turbans, the movement of six, eight, ten, twelve little objects as they rounded a corner.
“Who is that?” she breathed in horror. And then: “After—?”
He shrugged. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. In the mountains, one does not wait to see.”
Now the Therbah descended the oak again and reported on the condition of the rope, which he had tested by hanging from it; the rope itself, made from twisted, plaited canes, appeared to be in good condition, but the fastening to the tree itself needed reinforcement.
“But how shall we manage? Surely we do not hang by our arms from that rope?” Scylla murmured, appalled, to Miss Musson, as the four men began slashing among the undergrowth to procure suitable lengths of sapling. “And what about the baby? The goat?”
“There should be a species of hanging chair—I remember Winthrop telling me about such a means of crossing rivers, from a high bank to a low, but I have never seen it myself,” Miss Musson replied composedly. “There should be two ropes, I believe, one to pull the chair back, but I suppose the second one has perished. They will have to construct it, and the chair also, which is likely to take them some time; while they do that, we might as well prepare a meal. Do you kindle a fire, my dear.”
And in the most matter-of-fact way she laid little Chet Singh down between two massive tree roots and walked off to a nearby spring to fill her water pot.
Scylla did not mention the glimpse of armed men on the distant road; since Cameron had not seen fit to do so she assumed he did not wish to raise alarm in the party before it was necessary.
A dish of barley porridge and some chupattis had been prepared before the fastening was mended and the second rope constructed. Meanwhile the Therbah, whose eyesight was even keener than that of Cameron, declared that he could see the missing chair on the far bank. Having gulped down his meal at speed, he proceeded, without the least apparent disquiet, to climb the tree again, make fast one end of the new rope, tie the other end around his waist, and shake out the rest of its length so that it hung free. Then, holding onto the original rope with his hands, he hooked his knees over it also and launched off, with a cheerful shout, into space.
Scylla gasped in sheer disbelief, watching his small, muscular figure shoot downward and dwindle almost to the size of a fly as the curve of the rope took him out over the water.
Would the rope hold? Unconsciously, they had all suspended their breath. Miss Musson peered shortsightedly and let out a little sigh of anxiety.
“You require hard hands to perform that trick,” Cameron remarked to her in a dry, quiet tone. “If any one of us had tried it, our palms would have been cut to ribbons.”
Miss Musson smiled at him, as if grateful for the relief of his prosaic comment.
“Look! He has got there!” exclaimed Cal.
Far away, on the lower bank, the Therbah’s tiny figure waved a triumphant arm. Then he busied himself with something on the bank and waved again.
“He has found the chair,” observed Cameron. “That has saved us hours of work; which is as well.”
His glance just brushed that of Scylla and moved on past her, she turned to follow where he was looking, but a mist had crept up the side of the gorge; she could see nothing.
Presently a third signal from the Therbah indicated that they were to pull in on the secondary rope. Cameron, climbing the tree, did so, and in due course up came a thick, wishbone-shaped piece of wood, carved from a tree root. Between the two arms of the wishbone, which pointed downward, a kind of leather saddle hung suspended. This was not in good condition; more time had to be spent repairing it with pieces of leather cut from the end of a goatskin tent which Cameron had purchased for the women. At last it was declared ready.
“Good,” said Cameron. “One of the ladies ha
d better go first. Miss Paget.”
Scylla drew in a sharp breath but said nothing as she met the cold stare in his unrelenting blue eye. Attempting to still the violent tremor which, quite independently of her control, had started up in her arms and legs, she clenched her teeth together, pressed her clammy palms against her thighs, and replied in, she hoped, as dispassionate a tone as Cameron’s:
“Very well. Shall I take the baby?”
“No; Miss Musson has a better hand with him,” Cameron replied baldly. “You had best take charge of the stores and the medicines.”
Sick with fright, thankful at least that her thick mountain garments concealed what she felt must be the visible thudding of her heart in her breast, Scylla scrambled up into the oak tree, assisted from above by Cameron and from below by her brother; she would have liked to avoid Cal’s eyes but could not help meeting them, and the tortured comprehension in them did nothing to allay her own terror—rather augmented it. She wriggled herself uncomfortably into the insecure, frail-seeming perch and passively allowed Cameron to tie the bundles of food and medicines onto her back and into her lap; this he did with brisk efficiency and as little emotion as if he were loading up a pack mule.
“Good. Now, raise your hands above your head and grasp the arms of the fork. Are you balanced? Off you go,” he said, and without a pause dispatched her into the gulf by means of a strong push in the small of her back.
Scylla shut her eyes and felt freezing wet air shoot past her cheeks; her hands, frantically gripping the wooden arms of the wishbone, became numb at once; she could feel nothing but the rain dashing in her face, hear nothing but the whine of the wind and a strange humming noise that rose to a shriek as her ramshackle sling chair shot down the wet cable.
I must open my eyes, she thought. I have to know what is ahead of me; I have to be ready. But her eyes refused to open, a fierce ache of cold burned her temples; fighting with her mutinous eyelids, she traveled on, down and down; the descent seemed unending; at last a warning shout ahead roused her from this almost trancelike state of fright and, by themselves, her eyes opened to see the wooded riverbank approaching her at a hurtling pace, a terrifying pace. “Watch out, missy sahib!” shouted the Therbah once more, dancing up and down in agitation on the bank, and some words that she did not catch, ending in “Jump, must jump!” She grasped his meaning, realized that if she did not eject herself from the sling in time she ran the risk of having her brains dashed out among the branches of the mooring tree and, as the sloping bank shot by under her she gulped, let go, and launched herself sideways, landing with bent knees, rolling over and over along the wet ground.