Part 28 (2/2)

”It's a good job I went to the point last night,” said Raft, ”else we wouldn't be able to start in this smother, not knowing what was beyond there.”

”Will we be able to start in this?” she asked.

”Lord, yes,” replied he, ”the cliffs will give us a lead, it'll be slow going but we'll do it all right, it's not more than six miles or so to the break from the point there.”

”When can we start?”

Raft listened to the water below, it was breaking now against the near rocks but not yet against the cliff base.

”In another three hours or maybe a bit more,” said he.

An hour later, as though the Fog spirit had been listening and watching, and as though it despaired of its attack on the heart of the prisoners, the smother began to thin; by the time the tide reluctantly began to free them it had broken up and patches of the blessed blue sky shewed overhead.

By the time they reached the point and had a view of the great cliff break-down that would give them release it was fine weather, with a gently heaving sea breaking in beneath a sky of summer.

It was as though their troubles were ended. At noon they reached the great break-down and a new form of country.

Stretching inland almost to the foothills lay a broad valley, boulder strewn, and looking like the bed of some vanished river. Before them to the west the ground rose from the valley, gently, unbroken, desolate, like nothing so much as the desolate country that borders the Riff coast of Morocco. But it was ease itself compared to the tumble of rocks around and beyond the Lizard Point.

Down the middle of the valley came a little wimpling rivulet like the remains of the river that had once been. They drank from it and rested and had some food, then they started with light hearts, taking the easy ascent to the high ground, treading a moss dark and springy like the moss that covers the old lava beds of Iceland.

”Look!” said the girl.

They had reached the highest point and before them, away to the west, stretched the same rolling dark-smooth country, making low cliffs at the sea edge and then, as if weary of little things, springing gigantic and bold towards the sky.

”It's over there the bay would be,” said Raft. ”Ponting said it was a black brute of a bay between two cliffs rising higher than a s.h.i.+p's top masts. Well, there's our chance before us--if you call it a chance. It's a long way, taking it how you will.”

Chance! Despite her optimism and belief in being led, as she stood now with the wind blowing in her face it seemed to her that she stood before absolute hopelessness.

Nothing, not even the sea corridor, had balked her like that terrible distance, calm, sunlit, yet gloomy like a rec.u.mbent giant.

The monstrosity of the whole adventure unmasked itself of a sudden; travelling to find a bay they had heard of on the chance of finding a s.h.i.+p--a s.h.i.+p on a coast where s.h.i.+ps were scarcely to be found.

And even if they found the bay they could not wait for a s.h.i.+p. Here there was no food, with the exception of rabbits and gulls. The s.h.i.+p would have to be there, waiting for them.

Raft must have been mad! mad! mad! She herself must have been mad to dream of such a thing.

Her lips felt dry as pumice stone and she glanced at her companion as he stood with the bundle at his feet and the harpoon in his hand, looking about him, far and near, as unconcerned as though beyond that great hump on the skyline lay a sure town with a railway station.

No, Raft was not mad. He was unconcerned. He knew, even better than she, the hopelessness of their position, yet he was calm and unmoved, never from the first moment she had seen him had he been otherwise; before everything, like a rock, he continued.

Yet it was only now, as he quietly stood there surveying their ”chance,”

that he came home to her truly as he was, unbreakable; simple, vast, forged by the sea. She swallowed down the devil of doubt and despair as she stood looking at him standing so, and she was about to speak when, catching sight of something along the high ground to the right he pointed it out to her. She saw a white point on the ground a couple of hundred yards away.

<script>