“I suppose so.” They all thought of visitors, scornfully. “Oh well.” Jane put the shell in her pocket and looked around helplessly. “This is awful. We’re stuck. What can we do now?”
“There must be something up here, there must.”
“We don’t really know . . . perhaps it’s just another step on the ladder after all.”
“But there’s nothing else marked to follow. Let’s have a look at the map again.”
Simon squatted down on the grass and unscrewed the telescope case, and they peered at the manuscript, its words and lines faint brown in the sun.
“I’m certain he meant this to be the end of the quest,” Barney said obstinately. “Look at the way the end of the headland stands all on its own. There’s nothing to lead anywhere else.”
Simon stared pensively at the map. “Perhaps it just leads back where we started from. He might have been pulling our legs all the while. A sort of insurance policy, to make it difficult for anyone to find the grail.”
“Perhaps he hid it somewhere we shall never find.”
“Perhaps he took it with him after all.”
“Perhaps it doesn’t exist.”
They sat round in a gloomy group, ignoring the sunshine and the magnificent sweep of coast and sea. There was a long despondent silence. Barney glanced up idly. “Where’s Rufus got to?”
“Dunno,” Simon said morosely. “Fallen over the cliff, I expect. Sort of stupid thing that animal would do.”
“Oh no!” Barney scrambled to his feet in concern. “I hope he’s all right. Rufus! Rufus!” He put two fingers in his mouth and let out an ear-splitting whistle. Jane winced.
They saw nothing, and heard nothing but the wind, and then they became aware of a curious noise just above their heads; a kind of snuffling, scrabbling whine.
“He’s up there!” Barney clambered round the side of the rocks, and they saw the top of his fair head appear behind a jutting grey hump as he stood up. Then he suddenly vanished. His voice came over the rocks to them on the wind, muffled but tense with excitement. “Hey! Come over here, quick!”
The rocks made a kind of fortress, rising one after the other like rows of battlements. They found him in the middle, crouching beside one of the peaks, watching Rufus. The dog stood quivering and intent, his nose close against the rock, one paw scraping feebly as he whined and sniffed.
“Quick,” Barney said without turning round. “I don’t know what he’s trying to do, but I think he’s found something. I’ve never seen him like this before. If it’s rats or rabbits he just goes mad and barks and rushes about, but this is different. Look at him.”
Rufus seemed to be standing in a trance, unable to tear himself away from the rock-face.
“Let me look,” Simon said. He stepped carefully past Barney and put one arm round Rufus’s neck, fondling him under the chin as he drew him away from the rock. “There’s a tiny gap here.” His voice came back to them. “I can get my fingers inside—ow! I say, this top rock moves! I felt it shift, I’m sure I did. It nearly caught my hand. It’s terrifically big, but I think . . . Jane, can you get round on my other side?”
Jane squeezed herself between the rocks next to him.
“Now get hold there,” Simon directed her. “That jutting out bit . . . when I tell you, push as hard as you can away from you, towards the sea. Wait a minute, I’ve got to get a grip on my side . . . I don’t know if this’ll work . . . now, heave!”
Obediently, but without any idea of what she was supposed to be doing, Jane pushed with all her might at the rock-face, with Simon panting and heaving beside her. For a long strained moment nothing happened. Then just as their lungs seemed about to burst, they felt the rock move beneath their hands. It gave a very slight tremor, and then a grinding, grating lurch. They staggered back, and the great rough round rock rolled away from their hands and down into the nearest hollow. They could feel the crunching thud of its fall shake the rock where they stood.
Where the boulder had been there was a dark, shapeless hole about two feet across.
They stood still, gaping. Rufus pattered forward across the rocks, bent his head to sniff delicately at it and then turned back, his tail waving and his tongue hanging out over his teeth as if he were grinning.
Simon moved forward at last and pulled away a couple of smaller rocks from the edge of the hole. He knelt down by it and peered inside, then put his arm in to see how deep it was.
His arm disappeared up to his shoulder, until he was lying flat, and he could feel nothing but rough rock at the sides. He blinked up at Barney and Jane. “I can’t feel any bottom to it,” he said, hushed.
His voice brought back their own, and they found they had been holding their breaths.
“Get up, let’s have a look.”
“This must be it, mustn’t it? It must be where he hid the grail!”
“How deep d’you think it goes?”
“Gosh, this is terrific! Clever old Rufus!”
Rufus waved his tail faster.
“That chunk of rock,” Jane said, looking at it reverently where it lay tumbled on its side. “It must have been there for nine hundred years. Imagine . . . nine hundred years . . .”
“Well, it wasn’t exactly loose, was it?” Simon flexed his strained arm muscles tenderly. “Though it must have been fairly delicately balanced, or we shouldn’t have been able to shift it at all. Anyway, we’ve got to find how deep this goes before we know if there’s anything there.”
He looked thoughtfully at the gaping dark mouth in the rock. Jane sighed to herself and stopped thinking about the centuries.
“Drop a stone down, then you can hear how deep it is. Like thunderstorms. You know, counting the seconds between the lightning and the thunder to see how far away the storm is.”
Simon picked up a loose chunk of rock from the edge of the hole and poised it over the blackness. He let go, and it dropped out of sight. They listened.
After a long time Jane sat back on her heels. “I couldn’t hear anything.”
“Nor could I.”
“Try again.”
Simon dropped another stone into the hole, and again they strained their ears to hear it strike the bottom. Nothing happened.
“There wasn’t anything then either.”
“No.”
“It must be bottomless!”
“Don’t be an idiot, it can’t be.”
“Perhaps it comes out in Australia,” Barney said. He looked nervously at the hole.
“It just means the noise was too far away for us to hear,” Simon said. “But it must be tremendously deep. I wish we’d brought a rope.”
“Look in your pockets,” Jane said. “They’re always full of junk. So are Barney’s. At least Mother’s always saying so when she has to empty them. You might have some string or something.”
“Junk yourself,” Simon said indignantly, but he turned out his pockets on to the rock.
The results, though interesting, were not very much help. Simon laid out an array of belongings including his knife, a very dirty hand-kerchief, a little scratched glass-covered compass, two and sevenpence-ha’penny, a stump of candle, two screwed-up bus tickets, four toffees in battered cellophane wrappings and a fountain pen.
“Well,” he said, “we can have a toffee each anyway.” He handed them round solemnly. The toffees were slightly furry at the edges where the cellophane had come loose, but tasted none the worse for that. Simon gave the fourth to Rufus, who made a few grimacing attempts to chew it and then swallowed it whole.
“What a waste,” Barney said. He emptied his own pockets, in a shower of sand: a green glass marble with an orange pip in the middle; a small white pebble, a sixpence and four farthings, a headless lead sailor, a handkerchief miraculously much cleaner than Simon’s, and a thick piece of wire curved round at both ends.
“Whatever do you carry that around for?” demanded Jane.
“Well, you never know,” Barney said vaguely. “It might c
ome in useful. Come on, let’s have a look at yours.”
“Nothing in them,” Jane said, a trifle smugly. She pulled both pockets of her jeans inside out.
“Well, you brought your duffle coat,” said Simon. He crossed the rocks, climbed down to the grass of the headland where they had been standing, and brought the jacket back. “Here we are. One handkerchief. Two hair-grips. Just like a girl. Two pencils. A box of matches. Whatever d’you want those for?”
“Like Barney—they might come in useful. A lot more useful than that old bit of wire anyway.”
Simon felt in the other pocket. “Money, a button. . . what’s this?” He brought out a spool of cotton. “Now that’s an idea. Pretty daft thing to carry about, but it might help us find how deep the hole is.”
“I’d forgotten I had that,” Jane said. “All right, you win, I carry junk round too. But you must admit it’s sensible junk.” She took the cotton-reel from him. “It says there’s a hundred yards of cotton on this. Well, no hole could be that deep, surely?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised, with this one,” Simon said. “Tie something to the cotton, and lower it down.”
“Have to be something pretty light,” Barney said. “Or it’ll break.”
Jane unwound a length of cotton and pulled on it. “Oh, I don’t know, it’s pretty strong. Here, I know, give me that bit of wire.”
Barney looked at her doubtfully, but handed it over. Jane tied one end of the cotton to its curved end. “There. Now we just lower away and wait till it hits bottom.”
“I know a better way.” Simon took the reel back, and put one of Jane’s pencils through the hole in the middle. It was just long enough to protrude at either side. “See, you hold on to both ends of the pencil and the reel unwinds of its own accord, because of the weight. Like playing a fish.”
“Let me do it.” Jane knelt down beside the hole and dropped the wire into its dark mouth. The cotton-reel spun round as the thread disappeared, and they held their breath. Then suddenly the reel slowed, turned wearily and came to a halt. Just as they were thinking that the wire had reached firm ground, they saw the end of the cotton blowing loose.
“Bother,” Jane said in disappointment. ’It’s broken.” She looked down into the blackness in a vain attempt to see where the cotton had gone. Simon took the reel from her and examined it.
“Half the cotton’s gone, anyway, and it still hadn’t hit anything. That means the hole must be at least fifty yards deep. That’s a hundred and fifty feet. Good grief!” He tapped Jane on the shoulder. “Come on, dopey, you won’t see anything down there.”
Jane flapped her hand at him, still bending over the hole. “Shut up.”
They waited patiently until she straightened herself, red in the face. “I can hear the sea,” she said, blinking in the sunlight.
“Of course you can hear the sea. So can I. It’s just over the edge of the headland.”
“No, no, I mean you can hear it down there.”
Simon looked at her, tapped his head and sighed.
But Barney lay down close to the hole and put his head inside. “She’s right, you know,” he said eagerly, looking up. “Come and put your ear down here.”
“Hmmm,” said Simon sceptically, and lay down beside him. Then he heard very faintly, coming up from the depths of the hole, a hollow booming sound. It faded and then rose again, slow and regular. “Is that the sea?”
“Of course it is,” Jane said. “That deep gonging sort of noise, don’t you recognise it? The sort of noise waves make when they wash into a cave. And think what it means . . . the hole must go all the way down through the cliff to the sea, and there must be an entrance down there. And that’s where the Cornishman hid the grail.”
“But it can’t go all that way.” Simon sat up slowly, rubbing his ear. “Couldn’t this be vibration or something, coming through from the edge of the rocks down below?”
“Well, I ask you, does it sound like it?”
“No,” Simon admitted. “It doesn’t. Only . . . how could anyone have made such a narrow little hole so deep?”
“Goodness knows. But he did, didn’t he? Perhaps that little shell I found was thrown up through it somehow.”
“Then if the grail is down there, we have to get at it from the entrance where the sea comes in. There must be a cave. I wonder if we can climb round from the harbour?”
“Listen!” Barney suddenly scrambled to his feet and stood upright, his head cocked. “I heard something. Like an engine.”
Simon and Jane stood up, and listened to the distant waves and the wind. They could hear sea-gulls crying, the plaintive yelping calls blown gustily towards them from below. And then the noise Barney had heard; the low thrumming of an engine from the direction of the harbour.
It was Simon who caught sight of the long white bow of the yacht moving out round the curve of Kemare Head. He crouched low. “Get down, quick!” he said hoarsely. “It’s them! It’s the Lady Mary!”
Barney and Jane dropped to the ground beside him. “They can’t see us if we keep behind the rocks,” Simon said quietly. “Don’t move, anyone, until they’ve gone out of sight.”
“I’ve got a gap here,” Barney whispered. “I can just see them through the rock. . . . Mr. Withers is on deck, and his sister with him. Their skipper’s not there, he must be in the cockpit . . . they’re looking this way, not up here, they seem to be looking at the cliffs. . . . Mr. Withers has got binoculars . . . now he’s put them down, and he’s turned to his sister to say something. I can’t see the expression on his face, they aren’t near enough. I wish they’d come closer.”
“Oh!” Jane swallowed, husky with agitation. “Suppose there is a cave down there, where the grail is, and they see it!”
The idea was paralysing, and they lay rigid, three minds wishing the boat away. The noise of the Lady Mary’s engine grew louder, passing the end of the headland close below them.
“What are they doing?” Simon hissed urgently.
“I can’t see, there’s a rock in the way now.” Barney wriggled with frustration.
The noise of the engine filled the air. But it did not stop. As they listened, breathless, it grew gradually less, moving away across the sea.
“I can see them again now, there’s another gap . . . he’s still looking at the coast through the binoculars. I don’t think he’s seen anything, it looks as if he’s still hunting . . . now they’ve gone round the corner.” Barney rolled over and sat up. “If they are looking for a cave, how did they know?”
“They can’t know, they haven’t seen the map,” Jane said in anguish. “They couldn’t possibly. I mean even if the vicar is in league with them, and they know about the outline I drew in the guide-book, it hasn’t got any sort of clue. I didn’t put any of the clue marks in.”
“But if they don’t know where to look, why are they looking in the right place?”
“I think,” Simon said reassuringly, “it’s just part of their routine. I mean, they don’t know where to look, so they look everywhere. Great-Uncle Merry said something like that the very first day we talked. It’s like the way they searched the house—all at random, without any sort of plan. Perhaps they’ve thought of the idea of a cave, vaguely, and they’re scouring the whole coast in case they find one. Not just this part, but all the way up and down. They don’t know there is one.”
“Well, we do. If it’s there, why didn’t they see it?”
“Perhaps they did,” Barney said gloomily.
“Oh no, they can’t have done. They’d have stopped. At any rate they wouldn’t have gone on looking like you said they were. You did say that, didn’t you?” Jane looked at him nervously.
“Oh yes—old Withers was still squinting hard through his glasses when they went out of sight.”
“Well then.”
“There’s one other thing it might be,” Simon said reluctantly. He paused.
“What?”
“We heard the sea, so the mouth of
the cave might be covered. It might be under water. That could be why they didn’t see it. There are lots of underwater caves in Cornwall, I remember reading about them somewhere. It might not have been like that when our Cornishman hid the grail, but perhaps the land’s sunk a bit in nine hundred years.”
“Well, that’s good,” Barney said. “They’d never be able to find it then.”
Simon looked at him, and raised his eyebrows, “Nor should we.”
Barney stared. “Oh. Oh, surely we could. You can dive pretty well.”
“We wouldn’t have a chance. I can dive, but I’m not a fish.”
“I suppose the whole thing would be full of water,” Jane said slowly. “And the grail would be under the sea, and all eaten away like wrecks of ships.”
“Covered in barnacles,” said Simon.
“It can’t be. It mustn’t be. He said over the sea, and it must be over the sea.”
“We shall just have to find out. Great-Uncle Merry will know.”
They stared at one another in consternation.
“Gumerry! I’d forgotten all about him.”
“Where is he?”
“We’ve been up here for ages. He must have woken up hours ago.”
“Barney, what exactly did you ask Mrs. Palk to tell him?”
“I said would she say we’d gone for a walk with Rufus, he’d know where. She looked at me a bit funny, but she said she’d give him the message. I tried to make it sound like a game,” said Barney, very serious.
“I do hope nothing’s happened to him,” Jane said anxiously.
“Don’t worry, I expect he’s still snoring,” Simon said. He looked at his watch. “It’s half past eleven. Let’s get down quickly before the yacht comes back. We might not be so lucky next time—if they came back under sail we shouldn’t hear them. I wonder why they didn’t last time, there’s more than enough wind.” He frowned.
“Oh never mind,” Barney said. “Let’s go and find Gumerry. Round the back again—that boy might still be watching the front.”
“No, we shall have to go the front way, Gumerry might be coming up. I’ve got a feeling we haven’t much time left. We shall just have to risk getting caught. Come on.”