Читать книгу The Small Dark Man (Maurice Walsh) (Literary Thoughts Edition) - Maurice Walsh - Страница 8

II

Two hours later Hugh Forbes was on the shoulder of the mountain a bare hundred feet below the cairn. He had safely surmounted the corrie, and his troubles seemed over. The ridge he was on ran straight up to the cairn, and he had but to make sure of his hand-grips and keep going.

And then it was as if a cold grey finger moved across the eyes that were intent on the rock before them. He steadied his grip and looked sideways into a pearly, opaque swirl that, next instant, poured over him, swallowed him, shut him in a narrow world where some devil whispered that everything was safe and without fear.

“Blast it! I can make the cairn,” said the small man in his throat, and he went on climbing, his face to the rock and his eyes on his hands. He did make the cairn, but he almost butted into it before he saw it. And there he sat on the bottom stones, propped his elbows on his knees and his head on his hands, and drew in hard breaths. The air was thin and chill, and the blood beat painfully in his ears. It was long before that hissing thud died down.

In time he lifted his head and looked around. He could not see ten feet. A steady breeze blew from the north, and the mist went by him with the smoothness of flowing water. It could not flow forever at that rate, he considered; and what was it the postmaster had said? “If a mist comes down on you at the cairn, stay there.” He would do that, and meantime fill a pipe—and save his Abernethys for later on.

As he slowly ground a flake of brown plug between his palms, and stared unseeing into the opaque flow of mist, there came to his ears from somewhere far below a small sibilant whisper, and then something near said “hu-u-sh” warningly, and after that a booming note, weirdly hollow, lifted and went by—close by—and died away, and again came that warning hush. Only the swirl of the breeze in the gouged-out face of the mountain, but the Gael sensed something inimical, and his back hairs lifted.

“They are gathering about,” he whispered, “but they have no power unless I yield it.” He lit his pipe steady-handed and gathered his hardihood close about him.

In less than half an hour the mist cleared off as quickly as it had come. One moment he was staring into nothingness, the next into immensity.

“Thunder o’ God!” he swore aloud. “ ’Tis some devil lustful of beauty that drops a curtain and lifts it to get a sudden blink.”

For the mist actually rolled up like a curtain without leaving even a fringe trailing among the rocks, and the sun-bathed width of Scotland burst on the vision. The startling change from opaque littleness to sunny immensity was dizzying. The eye swooped down and over the dark of woods, the sheen of water, the purpling brown of moors, the green of Moray Lowlands, the steel mirror of the northern firth, and, far beyond, the strung purple of the northern hills.

After a long look Hugh turned east and south and realised desolation in its ultimate. The mist that, a minute before, seemed to enshroud the world was now no more than a thin band of pearly cloud low down against the blue of the sky, and below it was a far-thrown welter of mountains: peaks and ridges and gashes flung to the horizon, dull brown, solemn grey, sombre black, swallowing and denying the sunlight, mocking the blue deeps they crouched under, weighing on the mind with some inscrutable content in their own abiding sterility. The stark white of an occasional patch of snow made that sterility all the more appalling.

“I will go now, in the name of God,” said Hugh Forbes, “for beauty and terror should not be looked upon for long.”