Читать книгу Swallows & Amazons - Boxed Set - Arthur Ransome - Страница 71

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One reason why the Amazons found it hard to make good owl calls was that they had very little breath. They had pulled hard all the way up the river and then had had to climb the steep gorge to the top of the woods. Not even guides can run uphill and make good owl calls at the same time, and the Amazons, after all, were more pirates than guides, and knew more about sailing than about climbing mountains. Still, for the moment, they were being guides, and Captain Nancy, beside her knapsack, had a huge coil of rope slung on her shoulder for easy carrying. She took it off as she came into the camp and threw herself panting on the ground.

“Where’s Peggy?” said Susan.

“Just coming. We raced from the bottom.”

“Would you like some tea?” said Susan.

“Wouldn’t I?” said Nancy, rolling over. “We had breakfast awfully early because of saying good-bye to the G.A. But it was worth it. Everybody thought so. We saw the housemaid dancing in the kitchen. And cook said, ‘Now we can breathe again.’ And it wasn’t any good mother and Uncle Jim pretending. Anybody but the G.A. would have known how they felt.”

“Come on, Peggy,” called Titty, as the mate of the Amazon struggled up out of the trees.

“I couldn’t come any faster,” said Peggy. “I could hear the nectar sloshing round in the bottle in my knapsack, and hitting the top of the bottle inside, and I thought it would bust the cork out any minute. It’s a weight, too.”

“Nothing to the rope,” said Captain Nancy. “And cook crammed my knapsack with doughnuts.”

“I’ll carry the bottle now,” said John.

“Or shall we leave everything here?” said Susan.

“And just make a desperate dash to the summit,” said Titty.

“Much better have it to drink on the summit,” said Nancy.

So while Peggy and Nancy were using the expedition’s mug to share the tea that Susan had kept for them, John shifted the big bottle of nectar from Peggy’s knapsack to his own.

“We’ll carry it part of the way,” said Nancy.

“How do we fasten the rope?” said Roger.

“Give them time to get their tea down,” said Susan.

“It’s all right,” said Nancy, “we can’t both drink at once.”

“Has the great-aunt really gone?” asked Titty.

“She jolly well has,” said Nancy. “If we hurry, we ought to be able to see the smoke of the train that’s taking her away. The quicker the better. Swallows and Amazons for ever. Hurrah for Wild Cat Island and the Spanish Main. And Swallow’s nearly ready. And Uncle Jim is so sick of being a nephew that he’s going to be a first-rate uncle for a change.”

“We packed our tent and stowed it in Amazon last night,” said Peggy.

Nancy held the mug upside down and let the last dregs of the tea hiss on the embers of the fire. “What about going on?” she said, and was going to put the mug as it was in one of the knapsacks, but Susan took it in time to save that, and washed it out in the beck and dried it so that wet sugar should not trickle out of it into places where it was not wanted. The four sleeping-bags, neatly rolled up, were packed between two rocks with everything else that was not being taken to the top. Nothing but food was being taken, besides, of course, the telescope, the compass, and the huge bottle of lemonade, nectar or grog, that Peggy had carried up from the valley.

“How do we fasten the rope?” asked Roger again.

“We fasten it to all of us,” said Nancy.

“Then we mustn’t pull different ways,” said Roger.

“Nobody exactly pulls,” said Nancy. “It’s so that nobody falls over a precipice. There are six of us. If one tumbles, the other five hang on so that the one who tumbles doesn’t tumble far.”

“Are there any precipices?” asked Roger.

“Dozens,” said Titty, “and if there aren’t we can easily make some.”

“There really are plenty,” said Peggy.

“We shan’t go by the path,” said Nancy. “When we come to a rock, we’ll go over it.”

“Let’s begin,” said Roger. “Who goes first? Can I?”

“No,” said John. “The rope isn’t a painter for you to jump ashore with. We must have somebody big in front. It ought to be Nancy. I’ll take the other end.”

“We must make loops in it,” said Nancy. “Six loops, big enough to stick our heads and shoulders through.”

It was done. There were about five yards between each loop. Nancy hung the first loop on herself. Mate Susan took the next, and after her came Able-seaman Titty, Boy Roger, Mate Peggy, and Captain John.

“Now then,” said Nancy, “everybody ready?”

“We ought really to have ice-axes,” said Titty.

Nancy heard her. “I thought of that,” she said, “but they’d get horribly in the way. Worse than the rope. Hands and feet are better, especially on the rocks.”

The long procession moved off. Just at first the rope made it difficult to talk. This was because when anyone wanted to talk to the one in front he hurried on and tripped over loose rope, while at the same time he stretched the rope taut behind him and so gave a disturbing jerk to someone else. By the time they had learnt to talk without hurrying forward or hanging back they were climbing slopes so steep that nobody wanted to talk at all. There were things to shout, such as “Don’t touch this rock. It’s a loose one,” but mostly it was grim, straight-ahead, silent climbing.

At the start they had been scrambling up beside the tiny mountain beck that was now all that was left to remind them of the river far down below them in the valley. But as soon as they had come to a place from which they had had a clear view of the summit, Nancy, the leader, had turned directly towards it, and within a minute or two everybody had learnt how useful it is on a mountain to have four legs instead of two. Sometimes Nancy turned to left or to right to avoid loose screes, but when she came to a rock that could be climbed, she climbed it, and all the rest of the explorers climbed it after her.

“The really tough bit’s still to come,” she said cheerfully.

The tough bit came when nobody expected it, and the explorers were very glad they had a rope in spite of its being such a bother from the talking point of view. They had come to a steep face of rock, not really very difficult, because there were cracks running across it which made good footholds and handholds, but not a good place to tumble down, because there was nothing to stop you and there were a lot of loose stones at the bottom of it. Nancy had gone up it easily enough, and Susan after her. Titty was just crawling over the edge at the top of it and Peggy and John were waiting at the bottom ready to start, when suddenly Roger, who was about half-way up, shouted out, “Look! Look! Wild goats!”

THE WORD “GOATS” ENDED IN A SQUEAK

If he had done no more than shout all would have been well, but he tried to point at the same time. His other hand slipped. He swung round. His feet lost their places on the narrow ledges, and the word “goats” ended in a squeak. The rope tautened with a jerk and pulled Titty back half over the edge. Susan and even Nancy herself were almost jerked off their feet on the grassy slope above the rock. It was lucky that they had moved on from the edge and had the rope almost stretched between them.

Roger dangled against the face of the rock, about four feet from the bottom, scrabbling like a spider at the end of his silk thread. Titty had grabbed a clump of heather and was being held where she was by Susan and Nancy who were now hanging on to the rope as hard as they could, and had dug their feet into the slope.

“Pull, pull!” called Titty.

“It’s all right, Roger,” said John. “Let me have hold of your feet and I’ll put them in the good places. Stop kicking.”

The scrabbling stopped, and Roger felt his feet being planted from below.

“Now then, start climbing again, or you’ll be bringing Titty down on the top of you.”

The moment Roger began to climb, he took his weight off the rope and Nancy and Susan pulling together found the weight suddenly less. Titty came head first over the edge and up on the grass above the rock.

“Keep on pulling,” she panted, “or he may go flop again. But don’t pull too hard.” She crawled on as well as she could. She had had much the worst of it, and had scratched her elbows and knees slipping back over the edge of the rock.

Roger’s voice came cheerfully from below.

“Did you see the goats?”

“Never mind goats,” called Susan from above. “Is he hurt?”

“Only another scrape,” said Roger. “But did you see the goats? There they are again.”

“Don’t point!” shouted John, just in time.

“I must,” said Roger. But he didn’t. “There! There! You’ll see them again in a minute. There they go. Right up by the top.”

The topmost peak of Kanchenjunga was directly above the explorers. But to the right of it, as they looked up, the huge shoulders of the mountain, lower than the peak itself but high in the sky above them, swept round to the north, and it was up there, almost behind the explorers, that Roger, looking over his shoulder as he climbed, had seen things moving on the grey stone slopes under the top of the crags. Up and up they were going, now close under the skyline. Just as John and Peggy caught sight of them they crossed the skyline itself, tiny, dark things, goats cut out of black cardboard against the pale blue of the morning sky.

“I see them,” called Titty.

“Five,” said John.

“There’s one more,” said Roger.

A moment later they were gone.

“Well, I’m glad we’ve seen them,” said Roger.

“Get on up to the top of the rock,” said John. “And don’t look for any more. If it hadn’t been for Titty and the others hanging on to the rope you might have broken your leg.”

“And no stretcher to carry me on.”

Roger hurried up with his climbing and was soon on the grass slope above the rock, being looked over by Susan. Neither she nor Nancy had seen the wild goats, so naturally they thought more about the accident.

“Shiver my timbers,” said Nancy, “but that was a narrow go. We really ought to have waited at the top, taking in rope hand over hand so that he couldn’t slip. But you can’t allow for everything. Who would have thought of his seeing goats just at that moment? If they were goats. Probably sheep.”

“They were goats all right,” said Peggy, climbing up. “We all saw them.”

“All right,” said Nancy. “Goats. But not such goats as some people I know. What about you, Able-seaman? Are you hurt too?”

Titty had been trying to lick the blood off her right elbow, but had found that she could not reach it, and anyway it wasn’t really bleeding enough to matter.

“Lucky it was Roger who fell and not John,” said Nancy. “Not so heavy, for one thing, and if it had been John, what would have become of the grog?”

They were more careful after that, and there were no more accidents. The last few yards up to the top of the peak were easy going. The explorers met and crossed the rough path that they might have followed from the bottom, and then, with the cairn that marked the summit now in full view before them, they wriggled out of the loops in the rope and raced for it. John and Nancy reached the cairn almost together. Roger and Titty came next. Mate Susan had stopped to coil the rope, and Mate Peggy had waited to help her to carry it.

All this time the explorers had been climbing up the northern side of the peak of Kanchenjunga. The huge shoulder of the mountain had shut out from them everything that there was to the west. As they climbed, other hills in the distance seemed to be climbing too, and, when they looked back into the valley they had left, it seemed so small that they could hardly believe that there had been room to row a boat along that bright thread in the meadows that they knew was the river. But it was not until that last rush to the top, not until they were actually standing by the cairn that marked the highest point of Kanchenjunga, that they could see what lay beyond the mountain.

Then indeed they knew that they were on the roof of the world.

Far, far away, beyond range after range of low hills, the land ended and the sea began, the real sea, blue water stretching on and on until it met the sky. There were white specks of sailing ships, coasting schooners, probably, and little black plumes of smoke showed steamers on their way to Ireland or on their way back or working up or down between Liverpool and the Clyde. And forty miles away or more there was a short dark line on the blue field of the sea. “Due west from here,” said John, looking at the compass in his hand. “It’s the Isle of Man.”

“Look back the other way,” said Peggy.

“You can see right into Scotland,” said Nancy. “Those hills over there are the other side of the Solway Firth.”

“And there’s Scawfell, and Skiddaw, and that’s Helvellyn, and the pointed one’s Ill Bell, and there’s High Street, where the Ancient Britons had a road along the top of the mountains.”

“Where’s Carlisle?” asked Titty. “It must be somewhere over there.”

“How do you know?” asked Nancy.

“ ‘And the red glare on Skiddaw woke the burghers of Carlisle.’ Probably in those days they didn’t have blinds in bedroom windows.”

“We know that one, too,” said Peggy. “But not all of it. It’s worse than ‘Casabianca.’ ”

“I like it because of the beacons,” said Titty.

John and Roger had no eyes for mountains while they could see blue water and ships, however far away.

“If we went on and on, beyond the Isle of Man, what would we come to?” asked Roger.

“Ireland, I think,” said John, “and then probably America. . . .”

“And if we still went on?”

“Then there’d be the Pacific and China.”

“And then?”

John thought for a minute. “There’d be all Asia and then all Europe and then there’d be the North Sea and then we’d be coming up the other side of those hills.” He looked back towards the hills beyond Rio and the hills beyond them, and the hills beyond them again, stretching away, fold upon fold, into the east.

“Then we’d have gone all round the world.”

“Of course.”

“Let’s.”

“We will some day. Daddy’s done it.”

“So has Uncle Jim,” said Peggy.

“Of course, you couldn’t see round, however high you were,” said Roger.

“You wouldn’t want to,” said Titty. “Much better fun not knowing what was coming next.”

“Well, up here you’re properly on the roof.” Nancy threw herself down on the warm ground. “What about that nectar? Oh, I say, I’ve forgotten all about it and let you carry it all the way up.”

“That’s all right.” John brought the big bottle out of his knapsack, and the mug began to make its rounds with lemonade rather warm after its journey, while Susan and Peggy were cutting up the bunloaf and opening the last of the pemmican tins, and Nancy emptied out the doughnuts.

“I wonder whether anybody’s ever had dinner on the top of Kanchenjunga before?” said Titty, when she had eaten her share of pemmican and was finishing off with a doughnut.

“They must have done, when they built the cairn,” said Peggy. “Think of the time it must have taken to build up all those stones.”

“Perhaps it didn’t take any time,” said Titty. “Perhaps some tribe or other had won a victory, and everybody brought one stone and put it there.”

“But they’d have a feast after that,” said Roger. “Can I climb up the cairn?”

“No,” said Susan. “You’ve had one tumble already, and there aren’t thousands of us to build the cairn up again if you go and bring it down.”

“It’s very well built.”

“That just shows the people who built it didn’t want ship’s boys to pull it down.”

“I’ll be very careful.”

“Have an apple.”

“May I lean against the cairn?”

“Anything you like so long as you don’t start climbing on it.”

Roger sat down with his back against the cairn, so as to be less tempted to climb it. It seemed a pity not to and so be a few feet higher even than the top of Kanchenjunga. He would climb it, he thought, next year or perhaps the year after. In the meantime . . . He looked down towards Swallowdale somewhere on the moors so far below, tried to see Wild Cat Island, but could not be sure if he had, watched a steamer moving at the low end of the lake, looked out to sea and then, when he had eaten his apple, rolled over and began feeling the stones at the foot of the cairn. Was it so very well built, after all?

The others were planning what they would do, now that the great-aunt was gone, and the Amazons were once more free to be pirates, and there seemed to be hope that Swallow would soon be back, when they were startled by a shout from Roger. “Look, look! What’s this?”

In his hand was a small round brass box with the head of an old lady stamped on the lid of it. Framing the head of the old lady were big printed letters: “QUEEN OF ENGLAND EMPRESS OF INDIA DIAMOND JUBILEE 1897.” Roger had found a loose stone at the foot of the cairn, had pulled it out, and seen the little brass box hidden behind it.

“She must be Queen Victoria,” said John. “She came before Edward the Seventh.”

“She really is awfully like Bridgie used to be,” said Titty.

“There’s something inside,” said Roger, shaking the box.

“Let’s open it,” said Nancy.

“I’ll open it,” said Roger, and he did. Inside was a folded bit of paper and a farthing with the head of Queen Victoria on it.

“Take care,” said Titty. “It may be a treasure chart. It may be a deadly secret. It may crumble at a touch. They often do.”

But the paper was strong enough. Roger let Nancy unfold it. She opened it, began reading it aloud, and then stopped. Peggy took it and read it aloud, while the others looked at it over her shoulder. It was written in black pencil that had scored deeply into the paper:

“August the 2nd. 1901.

We climbed the Matterhorn.

Molly Turner.

J. Turner.

Bob Blackett.”

“That’s mother and Uncle Jim,” said Peggy in a queer voice.

“Who is Bob Blackett?” asked Susan.

“He was father,” said Nancy.

Nobody said anything for a minute, and then Titty, looking at the paper, said, “So that was what they called it. Well, it’s Kanchenjunga now. It’s no good changing it now we’ve climbed it.”

“That was thirty years ago,” said John.

“I wonder how mother and Uncle Jim escaped from the great-aunt to come up here,” said Peggy. “She was looking after them, you know.”

“Probably father rescued them,” said Nancy.

“Why did they put the farthing in?” wondered Roger.

“Let’s put it all back,” said Titty hurriedly. “They meant it to stay for a thousand years.”

“Has anybody got a bit of paper?” said Nancy suddenly.

Nobody had, but Titty had the stump of a pencil. Nancy took it and wrote firmly on the back of the paper on which her father and mother and uncle had set forth their triumph of thirty years before:

“Aug. 11. 1931.

We climbed Kanchenjunga.”

“Now,” she said, “we all sign here,” and she wrote her name. “You next, Captain John. Then the two mates, and then the able-seaman and the ship’s boy.”

Everybody signed. Then Nancy folded up the paper, put it back in the box with the farthing, and gave it to Roger.

“You found it,” she said. “You put it back, and then perhaps in another thirty years. . . .” She broke off, but presently laughed. “Shiver my timbers,” she said, “but I wish we had a George the Fifth farthing.”

“I’ve got a new halfpenny,” said Roger.

“Can you spare it?”

“I’ll give you another if you can’t,” said John, “when we get back to the camp.”

Roger dug out his halfpenny. The box was closed and pushed far back into the hole at the foot of the cairn. Roger wedged the loose stone firmly in its place.

“Nobody’d ever guess there was anything there,” said Roger. “I wouldn’t have found it if the stone hadn’t worked loose.”

“And now perhaps it won’t be found for ages and ages till people wear quite different sorts of clothes,” said Titty. “Perhaps it’ll be more explorers just like us. I wonder how big Captain Flint was then?”

“I wonder if they had a clear day for it,” said Peggy.

“And saw the Isle of Man,” said Roger.

They looked out to sea.

“Hullo,” said John. “We can’t see it any more.”

“I saw it a minute ago,” said Titty.

“There must be a fog out at sea,” said John. “What luck that we came up early while it was still so clear.”

“Come along,” said Nancy suddenly. “Remember we’ve got to get down to Watersmeet and then to Beckfoot and then sail to Horseshoe Cove and carry our tent up to Swallowdale. We ought to be starting.”

“Where’s the rope?” said Roger.

“I’ll carry the rope,” said Nancy. “We used it all right coming up. I don’t see why we shouldn’t use the path going down. It’ll be lots quicker.”

A minute or two later, after a last look round from the top of the world, the six explorers who had climbed Kanchenjunga as Kanchenjunga should be climbed, were hurrying down the mountain at a good jog-trot.