Читать книгу Swallowdale - Arthur Ransome - Страница 10

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“By mutual confidence and mutual aid

Great deeds are done, and great discoveries made.”

pope’s Homer

For some time, as the able-seaman and the boy pushed their way through the bushes and small trees by the side of the stream, they could hear the talking of the others, Nancy and Peggy very loud and clear, John and Susan not so loud. Then they could hear only the voices of Nancy and Peggy. Then Nancy’s voice alone was stronger than the rippling of the stream at the explorers’ feet. Then they heard even Nancy’s talk no more, though now and then, faint and far away as it was, there was no mistaking her cheerful laugh. After that, they could hear nothing but the noise of the water toppling over six-inch waterfalls and down pebbly rapids. The stream was too wide to jump across, but there were places where it was possible to hop from stone to stone and to get across with dry feet if you were lucky. The trees grew close to the stream, and in some places the water had hollowed out a way for itself almost under their roots. There were little pools, foaming at the top where the stream ran in, and smooth and shallow and fast at the hang before it galloped away again down a tiny cataract.

“There’s a fish,” said Roger.

“Where?”

“There isn’t one now. But there was. Look! Look! There’s another!” But that fish too was gone before the able-seaman had seen just where the ship’s boy was pointing.

“They needn’t be frightened,” said the able-seaman. “It isn’t as if we were herons. Keep still when you see the next one. Don’t point at it.”

The boy hurried on with his eyes on the water close ahead of him. Suddenly he stopped dead, like a dog that smells partridges in a field of stubble. Titty crept up, stooping low, till she was close beside him.

“There,” said Roger. “By the stone with the moss on it. Look! He’s sticking his nose out.”

A widening ripple was washed away with the stream, but it had been enough to show Titty where to look. There, in the clear water, she could see a small speckled fish which stayed almost in one place as if it were hung in the stream. As she looked it suddenly slanted up and broke the water again.

“He isn’t a bit like the perch we caught in the lake,” said Roger.

“It’s probably a trout,” said Titty.

“I wish we had our fishing-rods,” said Roger. “We’d catch dozens and dozens and take them back to feed the camp.”

“We couldn’t fish in all these trees,” said Titty.

“Well, there are lots of fish,” said Roger.

“Anyway, we can’t fish now. We are explorers, sent out into the jungle by the rest of the expedition. We mustn’t think of anything else. At the very moment when we were looking at a fish there might be a yell. . . .”

“A blood-curdling kind of yell?”

“Of course blood-curdling. Boomerangs and arrows might come whizzing through the air. And even if we weren’t killed at once the savages would tie us up and take us away, and then when the others came to look for us they would walk into the very same trap.”

“What’s that noise?” said the ship’s boy suddenly.

It was the noise of a motor horn. They both knew what it was, but it was far too good a noise to waste.

“The trumpets of the savages,” said Titty. “There’s probably a causeway through the forest. We must be near the edge of the jungle.”

Another horn sounded, on a different note, and they could hear the fierce throbbing roar of a motor bicycle.

“Trumpets and tom-toms,” said Titty. “The savages have their scouts on the road trumpeting to each other. We shan’t be able to go much farther. Peggy said we couldn’t.”

“Well, let’s go as far as we can,” said Roger.

This part of the wood was all smallish trees, growing thickly together. There were hazels, oaks, birches, and here and there an ash, and here and there a stout prickly bush of holly, or a lonely feathery pine waving high above the rest. There was honeysuckle, too, tangling bough with bough. It was as good a jungle as anyone could want. And through this jungle ran the little stream hurrying on its way to the lake.

The able-seaman and the boy pressed on. Suddenly they saw what looked like an opening in the trees away to the left. They crossed the stream and pushed through the bushes towards the opening, and found a cart-track, which led through the trees to a gap in the stone wall along the edge of the wood. Perhaps there had been a gate in the gap once upon a time, but there was no gate now, and the ends of the wall had fallen down. Beyond the wall lay the road, and on the other side of the road was another wall of loose stones covered with moss. Beyond that was another kind of wood, larches and pines and a few firs climbing steeply up into the sky.

The able-seaman saw the road first. She dropped flat at once on the ground by the side of the cart-track. The boy waited for half a second and then dropped beside her.

“We don’t know whether they’re friendlies or not,” said the able-seaman.

“The only people we know on this side of the lake are the Amazons,” said the boy.

“Well, we know where they are, so anyone on the road must be someone else.”

A motor car flashed across the gap in the wall. For a moment they caught through the trees the glint of sunlight on something bright; then they saw it in the gap; then it was gone. Then three natives on bicycles passed the gap, going the other way. Then came a noise which promised something better. It was the noise of horses’ hoofs clumping on the hard road.

“Trotting or walking?” said Roger.

“Probably walking,” said Titty. “It usually is when it sounds like the other. A lot of them, anyhow.”

The horses were a long time coming into sight, but when they came they were worth waiting for. Through the gap in the wall the able-seaman and the boy saw them pass by, three huge ruddy-brown horses, 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.

THE EXPLORERS

“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 then 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.”

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 the able-seaman. “It’s the most secret valley that ever there was in the world.”

Peter Duck had grown up gradually to be one of the able-seaman’s most constant companions, shared now and then by the boy, but not taken very seriously by the others, though nobody laughed at him. He had been the most important character in the story they had made up during those winter evenings in the cabin of the wherry with Nancy and Peggy and Captain Flint. Peter Duck, who said he had been afloat ever since he was a duckling, was the old sailor who had voyaged with them to the Caribbees in the story and, still in the story, had come back to Lowestoft with his pockets full of pirate gold. Titty had had a big share in his invention, and now she made him useful in all sorts of ways, sometimes when she and Roger were together, but mostly when she was by herself. Anything might happen to Peter Duck and he would always come out all right. Dolls meant nothing to Titty. Peter Duck was a great deal more useful than any doll could have been. He could always tidy himself away. He never got lost. He had no sawdust to run out. And she had only to think of him, when there he was, ready for any adventure in which he might be wanted.

“He could hide here from anybody who wanted to bother him. I don’t believe he’s ever had a better place. Let’s see what it looks like from the top.”

Roger was already on his feet and crossing the stream, jumping from one dry stone to another.

“You go up that side,” Titty called to him, “and I’ll go up this, and then we’ll see if it’s as secret as it looks.”

They climbed up opposite sides of the valley and looked back at each other. They found they had only to go a few yards from the edge of it not to see that it was there. Titty in the heather above one side of the valley and Roger in the heather above the other side would never, if they had not known, have guessed that a valley lay between them.

“It’s absolutely perfect,” shouted Titty.

“I think so, too,” shouted Roger.

They scrambled down again to meet in the bottom, and followed the stream to the upper waterfall. In several of the little pools on the way they saw small trout, and in the big pool under the waterfall, just as they got there, a larger trout jumped clean into the air after a fly and dropped again into the pool in a splash of silver.

“Peter Duck’ll be able to fish,” said Titty. “He always liked it. Do you remember how he was always trailing a hook for sharks over the stern of the schooner?”

“We’ll fish too,” said Roger. “What about our tea?”

That was the worst of Roger. He might get hungry at any minute.

“Have my chocolate,” said the able-seaman. “I don’t want it.”

“Really?” said Roger.

“Of course,” said Titty.

“Let’s wait and see if that fish jumps again,” said Roger, “and I’ll eat the chocolate while we’re watching.”

Titty handed over her chocolate and looked back down the valley and out through the Y-shaped gap at the foot of it to the hills on the other side of the lake, and to other hills beyond them, hills so far away that she might have thought them clouds if the sky overhead had not been so very clear. From this upper end of the valley she could not see the moor below the waterfall, or the woods through which they had climbed. She looked at the valley itself, and its steep sides, one of them, on the right, almost a precipice of rock, with heather growing in the cracks of it, and the other, on the left, not so steep, with grass on it, bracken and loose stones. She was wishing she had her map with her, to mark in it the stream and the newly discovered valley, when, on a warm stone close to her, she saw a tortoiseshell butterfly, resting in the sunshine, with his brown and blue and orange and black wings spread out and all but still.

“Isn’t he a beauty?” she said, and as she said it the butterfly fluttered off the stone and away down the valley, never far from the ground.

“He’ll perch again and open his wings in a minute,” she said, and indeed the butterfly presently dropped on a clump of heather growing low down in a cleft in the steep slope of grey rock at which she had been looking.

Titty, on tiptoe, followed to look at him, but when she was almost near enough to touch the heather on which he had settled, she forgot all about him. When the butterfly fluttered away once more, she did not even see him go.

“Roger! Roger!” she cried. “It’s a cave!”

Roger heard her, in spite of the noise of the waterfall. He did not hear the words, but there was something urgent in her voice that was enough to put the trout out of his head. What had she found? He came, running, and found her looking under the clump of heather into a dark hole in the wall of grey rock. It was a hole, narrower at the top than at the bottom, big enough to let a stooping man use it as a doorway, and yet so well sheltered by the rock which, just here, leaned outward over it, and so deep in the shadow of the thick bushy heather that was growing out of cracks in the stone above it and on either side of it, that it would have been easy to think it was no more than a cleft in the rock, and easier still not to notice it at all. The two explorers crouched together, and tried to see into the black darkness inside.

“Fox,” said Roger, “or perhaps bear. It’s big enough for bear.”

“I wish I had my torch,” said Titty. “To-day I haven’t even got a box of matches.”

They picked up stones and threw them in. Nothing came out at them, though they almost thought that something might. Titty held the heather aside and reached in the full length of her arm, just for a moment.

“It gets bigger inside,” she said. “Higher too. I believe we could stand up in it. Shall we go in? It’s not much good in the dark. Or shall we?”

“Let’s go and get torches,” said Roger.

“Come on,” said Titty. “We’ll go and fetch the captain and the mate. We’ll leave Peter Duck to look after it till we come back. It’s his cave. I expect he’s known about it always. Come on.”

They ran down the valley, scrambled down the rocks by the lower waterfall, and raced along the sheep tracks through the heather and bracken. Just where the beck left the moorland to tumble headlong down through the steep woods, Titty pulled up.

“The Amazons are there too,” she said.

Roger looked at her, more than a little out of breath.

“They’ve discovered almost everything there is to discover,” she said, “but perhaps they don’t know about that. We’ll tell them about the valley, but keep the cave a secret, for us and Peter Duck.”

“We’ll tell John and Susan.”

“We’ll get them to come to see the valley and then have the cave for a surprise. A cave’s far too good a thing to waste, and it’s wasted if too many people know about it. Of course,” she added, “if they won’t come to see the valley, we’ll have to tell them about the cave.”

They dropped quickly down through the trees, tore off their shoes and splashed their way under the bridge. They put their shoes on again without waiting to do much drying, and came breathless altogether to the shores of Horseshoe Cove.

They found, like many explorers before them, that somehow, in their absence, they had got into trouble at home. Tea had been made and drunk, scouting parties had been out to look for them, the Amazons were in a terrible hurry to be starting back, and the mate wanted to know why they had been away so long. The tea that had been saved for the able-seaman and the boy was nearly cold, and they were quickly bundled aboard the Swallow and told to drink it on the voyage home, for unless they started at once the Amazons, who were late already, would have to go without seeing the new tents.

But while the Swallow and the Amazon were being launched, the able-seaman and the boy began pouring out their story. They both began talking at once, but the boy soon gave up. After all, Titty could do it better. And Titty told of the moor above the wood, of the waterfall, and of the little valley above the waterfall, a valley so secret that anybody could hide in it for ever.

“Honest pirate?” called Nancy, who was already paddling Amazon towards the mouth of the cove. “Honest pirate, or is it a Peter Duck story?”

“Peter Duck’s in it, of course,” said Titty, “but it’s all true.”

The two little ships got under way. Nancy and Peggy in the Amazon waited for the Swallow outside the cove, and they sailed for Wild Cat Island within comfortable talking distance.

“That’s the Pike Rock,” said Nancy, pointing out the rock opposite the southern of the two little headlands. “You wouldn’t be able to see it if the lake wasn’t so low.”

“We saw it when we were coming in,” said John.

“It’s awfully jagged,” said Peggy. “Uncle Jim saw a fisherman sink his boat by rowing into it.”

In Swallow Titty was still talking of the secret valley. “Nobody would find it,” she said, “if they didn’t know it was there.”

“She may be quite right,” said Nancy, from the Amazon. “We’ve never gone up to the moor from this side. Are you sure about it, Able-seaman? A real secret one?”

“You couldn’t tell it was there at all if you hadn’t gone right into it,” said Roger.

“It might be just the place to go to when the great-aunt says we mustn’t sail,” said Peggy.

“Do you think I haven’t thought of that?” said Captain Nancy.

“You’ll make me upset the mug,” said Roger, as Titty prodded him gently with her finger.

“They don’t know about it,” she whispered.

“What about going there to-morrow?” said Nancy across the water.

“Say yes, say yes,” said Roger and Titty together.

“I don’t see why we shouldn’t,” said Captain John.

John and Nancy sailed their ships past the harbour at the foot of the island, up the inner channel, and brought them in at the landing-place.

“Just for one second,” said Nancy. “We’re late already.”

“We always are,” said Peggy. “But the great-aunt makes being late seem much worse.”

They raced up from the landing-place and looked round the camp. Susan thanked them for the wood-pile. Titty dived into her tent and brought out the envelope with the eight green feathers she had saved for them. John brought the arrow from behind the boxes in the store tent. Both the Amazons said, “How do you do” and “Pieces of eight” to the parrot, but the parrot had seen the green feathers and so would do nothing but squawk at them, though Titty tried to make him show off. They looked, sadly, at the place where their own tent used to stand. They said how good were the new tents of the Swallows, and then they hurried down to the landing-place, tumbled into the Amazon and pushed off.

“What about to-morrow?” asked Susan at the last minute.

“We’ll go to see Titty’s valley,” called Nancy. “It might be very useful. Mother’s taking the great-aunt out to lunch, so we needn’t be in till tea. We’ll sail straight to Horseshoe Cove in the morning. Be there before you are. Bet you anything. So long, Swallows!”

The four Swallows went up to Look Out Point to watch the little white sail grow smaller and smaller as the Amazon sailed away towards the Peak of Darien.

“I don’t see why they shouldn’t have come here in the morning,” said Susan.

“It’s beastly for them not being able to camp on the island when we can,” said John. “After all they knew the island first.”

When the Amazon had sailed away so that the pirates could not hear shouts, let alone whispers, it was hard for the able-seaman and the boy to keep their secret. But keep it they did, though they came near giving it away.

“There’s something more we discovered,” said Titty.

“Something better than anything we’ve told you yet.”

“What is it?” said Susan. “Probably a caterpillar.”

“Well,” said Roger, “a butterfly did help.”

“If it hadn’t been for the butterfly we wouldn’t have found it,” said Titty.

“What is it?” said John.

“It’s the very thing Peter Duck’s always been wanting.”