Great Northern?. Arthur Ransome
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“We ought to fetch Nancy and Peggy. We’ll tell them about it when we get back. They wouldn’t come anyhow,” he added. “Not when they’re in the middle of their scraping and scrubbing. I say, it’s an awful pity we haven’t got that chart to mark exactly where it is.”
“But I have got it,” said Titty. She pulled the little chart out of her knapsack, unrolled it and spread it out flat.
“Pict-house Hill,” said Roger. “Put it in with a pencil. You can ink it afterwards.”
“It’s a good name anyhow,” said Dorothea. She stood up and looked round. “That long ridge can be the Northern Rockies. Then there’s Low Ridge on the other side of the valley. It gets lower and lower till it turns into those rocks we didn’t want to hit in the fog.”
“What about Dick’s tarns?” said Titty.
“Upper and Lower,” said Dorothea, “but they’re lochs, not tarns.”
“And the lump that wouldn’t let us see them till we got up here and still doesn’t let us see the stream …”
“Burn,” said Dorothea, “not stream.”
“It would be a beck if we were at Holly Howe,” said Roger.
“That lump’s not big enough for a hill,” said Titty.
“Let’s call it the Hump,” said Roger. “It’s very camelious.”
Just putting in those few names on the chart made the valley seem almost their own.
“I wish we weren’t sailing tomorrow,” said Dorothea.
“I’m going in again,” said Roger, “to see how far I can get.”
“Look out,” said Titty. “Remember the tunnel in Kanchenjunga. More of it may cave in on the top of you.”
“All right,” said Roger, and slid down the steep side of the mound. Dick was down there, too, making a sketch of the entrance to show his father. Eager as he was to get away to the lochs, he was Professor Callum’s son and, for the moment, had to turn from birds to ancient monuments.
Titty and Dorothea were alone in the shallow saucer where the ancient roof had fallen in, and long, long ago been grown over with green turf.
“It is a most gorgeous place,” said Titty. “And wasted. Think of no one knowing about it but us.”
“Perhaps no one’s ever been here since the last of the ancient Picts died fighting to defend it as the strangers from the sea came roaring up from their boats.”
Roger, a good deal dirtier than before, came climbing over the edge. “Someone’s using it,” he said, looking round over the wild moorland as if he expected to see that someone close at hand. He held out a biscuit box. “I’ve been as far as I can, and I found this when I was feeling round where the tunnel comes to an end. It’s somebody’s provisions.”
He shook the box and they could hear something sliding about inside it. There was, alas, no doubt that the box had not been left by an ancient Pict. Much of its paper covering was still sticking to it and they could see the trademark and the name of a famous firm of Glasgow biscuit-makers.
“Oh well,” said Titty, “it can’t be helped … and it doesn’t really matter. It isn’t as if we were ever going to be here again.”
“I’m going to open it and see what’s inside,” said Roger.
“But it isn’t ours.”
“It’s treasure trove,” said Dorothea. “Roger found it. He can’t do any harm by looking at it.”
She wanted to know what was in it, and so, in spite of her scruples, did Titty.
“Of course there may be a message in it, like the one we left in the cairn.”
“Urgent, perhaps,” said Dorothea. “Think if people didn’t open bottles cast up on the shore just because the bottles weren’t theirs.”
“I’m going to open it anyhow,” said Roger.
He put the box on the ground and took the lid off. They saw at once that the thing that had been sliding about was a paper parcel.
“Provisions,” said Roger. “I thought so. Bread … no … cake of a sort …” He had opened the paper and found a heavy hunk of cake, very dark, like Christmas pudding.
“It’s not old,” said Dorothea, poking it with a careful finger. “Soft and still sticky. What’s that underneath it? I say, perhaps it’s someone writing a story.” From the bottom of the box she pulled out an ordinary school exercise book.
“French verbs more likely,” said Titty. “I had to fill a whole book of them the summer we found Swallowdale.”
“Do you think I’d better taste the cake?” asked Roger.
“Of course not,” said Titty. “Wrap it up again and put it away.”
“All right,” said Roger. “You never know. There may be poison in it.”
Dorothea had opened the exercise book. “It’s all in a foreign language,” she said.
“Let me look,” said Titty. “If it’s French … but it isn’t. And it isn’t Latin either. Perhaps it’s a secret code.”
“It looks like a diary,” said Dorothea. “Those numbers must be dates.” She and Titty pored over the book together. Yes. It looked as if the figures at one side of the page might be dates, but they could make nothing of the words: “Da fiadh dheug … damh a fireach …” On and on it went, short entries and each with its figure at the side. “Damh is eildean.” Here and there was a short word like “is” and a shorter like “a” but all the other words belonged to no language that they knew, and if it was written in code, perhaps even “is” and “a” did not mean what they usually meant.
“I know what it is,” said Titty suddenly. “It’s Gaelic. It belongs to one of the natives. A savage Gael. Look here, Roger. You put it back where you found it.”
All three of them looked at the ridge before them, and up the long wild valley and down again at the cove far away below them where the mast of the Sea Bear spoke to them of friends and allies. There were no Gaels to be seen. Up here, on that hill above the sea, on the top of the old dwelling place of Picts who had been dead a thousand years, they might have been the only people in the world. But there was the biscuit box and its contents to show that someone counted the old Pict-house so much his own that he could safely leave his things in it.
“Dick,” said Dorothea, “do look, before Roger puts it back.”
But Dick took no more than a polite interest in the biscuit box, exercise book and hunk of cake. He was bursting to be gone and had almost done what he had to do. He had made a sketch of the mound from one side, giving a rough idea of its shape. Now he was making a drawing of it to show as well as he could the way in which it was built. There was a circle with a smaller circle for the dip made by the fallen roof and dotted lines to show how the tunnel lay.
“Bother whoever he is,” said Roger, slipping over the edge with the box to put it back in the tunnel.
“Father’ll want to know how big it is round,” Dorothea was saying, looking over Dick’s shoulder, as Roger came climbing back, wiping the earth from his hands. “It’s for Father,” she explained. “He always wants to know shapes and sizes when anybody finds antiquities.”
“Boats are what Daddy always measures,” said Roger.
Dick was pacing earnestly across the dip. “Five steps,” he said, “and it’s about thirty round. Very thick walls. And the dip isn’t quite in the middle. That means that the wall is thickest where the tunnel goes in.” He wrote the figures beside his diagrams.
“And now,” he