Swallowdale. Arthur Ransome
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harnessed one before the other, and after them the thing that they were pulling, the trunk of a great tree chained down to two pairs of big red wooden wheels, a tree four or five times as big as the tall lighthouse tree on Wild Cat Island. One man was leading the first of the horses, and another man was resting, smoking a pipe, sitting high in air on the thin end of the great tree which stuck out over the road behind the second pair of wheels. He had his back towards the explorers, or he might easily have seen them from so high above the wall.
“Where is it going?” said Roger.
“Probably to be made into boats,” said Titty.
The larch wood at the farther side of the road looked easier going than the tangled jungle through which they had come.
“Can’t we wriggle a bit nearer to the road,” said Roger, “and then rush across when none of the natives are looking?”
“It’s no good,” said Titty. “There’s someone passing every other minute.”
As she spoke another motor car went trumpeting by.
“I say,” said Roger a minute or two later. “The natives couldn’t see us if we went under their road instead of across it.”
“Of course they couldn’t,” said Titty.
“There must be a bridge,” said Roger, “where the stream comes through.”
“That’s a jolly good idea.”
“I thought perhaps it would be.”
“We’ll get back to the beck at once,” said Titty. They could hear it, not very far away, when they listened for it, and indeed they had left it only when they had been tempted by seeing the clearing where the cart-track ran through the wood. They jumped up and plunged back into the bushes, found the stream and hurried along its banks. Not more than fifty yards from the place where they had lain watching the road through the gap in the old wall, they came to the bridge, a low, wide, ivy-covered arch. The road ran over it, but the ivy was so thick and the trees below the bridge grew so close to it that the explorers found that they could follow the stream right into the arch without being seen by anybody, unless some native happened to be looking down from the bridge at the moment. Looking through under the archway they could see the bright greens and browns of the larch wood and the glitter of sunlight on the water at the other side.
The able-seaman sat down. “Take off your shoes, Boy,” she said.
“Aye, aye, sir,” said the boy.
“Tie the laces together so that you can hang them round your neck.” Her own shoes were off as she spoke. It was easier to untie them when there were no feet in them to put them into awkward positions. She untied them and took the end of a lace from each and tied the two ends in a bow. “You needn’t tie yours so tight,” she said, looking to see what the boy was doing. “You’ll want them when we get through. Now, then. Put your feet exactly where I put mine.”
She stepped into the water. It rose to her ankles at the first step she took, and nearly to her knees at the second, but after that it got no deeper, and at one side, under the bridge, it was quite shallow.
“Slip in here,” said the able-seaman. “I wish your legs were a bit longer. Don’t let your knickers get wet. Roll them up as high as you can. Keep to this side.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“And whatever you do, don’t tumble down.”
THE EXPLORERS
Steadying themselves with their hands against the low arch of the bridge that curved over their heads, and paddling in shallow clear water over stones slippery with moss, they crept carefully through under the bridge.
A big motor lorry passed overhead, making the old bridge shiver. The boy looked with scared eyes at the able-seaman. But this was one of those dangers that was gone before you had really had time to know it was there, and the able-seaman was already feeling for steadier stones in the pool above the bridge to find the best way to the bank.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Keep close along the wall. Don’t step on the big stone. It waggles, but there’s a good one here.”
There were no accidents. Both the explorers climbed safely out on the bank. Sitting so close under the wall that nobody could have seen them from the road, they dried their feet on their handkerchiefs, put their shoes on again, waited for a moment when nothing seemed to be passing, and darted forward in among the larch trees.
They climbed now, up through the steep larch wood, where the beck came noisily leaping down stone stairs to meet them. Up they climbed, keeping close to the stream until the larches ended and they were once more among hazels and oaks like those in the wood they had left on the other side of the road. And then, suddenly there were no more trees, and the able-seaman and the boy stood under the open sky at the edge of the forest, looking out over mile upon mile of green and purple moorland, green with waving bracken, purple with knee-deep heather. And beyond the moorland, the sunshine searching their gullies and crags, rose the blue hills that from up here looked bigger, far, than they had seemed when looked at from Wild Cat Island or from Holly Howe.
“We must have one of them for Kanchenjunga,” said Titty.
“Which one?”
“The biggest.”
The stream came tumbling and twisting across the moorland to drop at their feet into the woods. In its winter strength it had washed away the earth round great stones and carved a deep gully for itself, so that though they could see where it was they could not see the water except close to them.
“Are we going on?” asked the boy.
“We can’t get lost if we keep close to the beck,” said the able-seaman.
She started forward again along a sheep track that led through the heather close above the stream. The boy ate a piece of the chocolate he had saved, and hurried after the able-seaman. Sometimes the bracken grew so high that they could hardly see each other. Sometimes the sheep track wound down along the edge of the stream, turning this way and that round pale grey stones and then climbed up again to twist its way among the tough clumps of purple heather. There was the stream to guide them, and now there was a new noise to draw them on. This was the noise of falling water, the same noise that they had had close beside them while they were climbing through the larch wood, but much louder now, and different when heard on the open moorland instead of under the trees.
“Look,” said the able-seaman suddenly. “There it is.”
They hurried on until they stood below the waterfall. Above them the water poured down noisily from ledge to ledge of rock, and they could go no farther without climbing up the rocks beside the falling water or getting out of the long winding gully that the stream had carved for itself in the moor.
The able-seaman hesitated. This time it was the boy who wanted to go on. Before she had made up her mind, he was already climbing. A moment later she was climbing, too, and they came together to the top of the dry rocks at the side of the fall.
“That was easy climbing,” said the boy. “Hullo! . . .”
Neither of them had expected anything like what they found when they scrambled over the top. It was a little valley in the moorland, shut in by another waterfall at the head of it, not a hundred yards away, and by slopes of rock and heather that rose so steeply that when the explorers looked up they could see nothing but the sky above them. In there it was as if the blue mountains did not exist. The valley might have been hung in air, for all that they could see outside it, except when they turned round and looked back, from the top of the waterfall they had climbed, to the moorland, the woods and the hills on the other side of the lake.
“It’s a lovely place for brigands,” said the boy.
“It’s just the place for Peter Duck,” said