Johnnie didn’t move. He stood there, staring at the closed door and for a moment I thought he was going to follow Trevedian. But instead he came back to our table and knocked back the rest of his beer. ‘What’s all this about the dam?’ Jeff asked.
‘To hell with the dam.’ Johnnie’s eyes were angry.
‘But if that bastard-’ He suddenly laughed. ‘Well, maybe Stuart was right. If he was willing to let things take their course, I guess I should be, too.’ He put down his glass. ‘I’m going down to have a talk with Jean.’ He turned then and went out of the room. And as the door closed behind him a buzz of conversation filled the smoke-laden atmosphere.
‘What did he mean — about the dam?’ I asked Jeff.
‘I don’t know. Never heard him mention it before.’
We discussed it for a while and then Jeff said, ‘You know, I’d like to see this dam there’s all the fuss about. Have you seen it?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I saw it the other day from Thunder Creek. What I want to do is get up there. I want to see the Kingdom.’
‘Thunder Creek’s where they’re building the road, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right.’
He suddenly laughed. ‘Well, what are we waiting for? It’s a fine night and there’s a moon. Let’s go right on up there.’
I stared at him. ‘Now?’
‘Sure. Why not?’
But some instinct of caution made me hesitate. ‘It would be better to go up by daylight,’ I said. ‘Could we go up tomorrow? Then you’d get a good view of the dam and I might be able to persuade-’
‘Tomorrow’s no good,’ he said. ‘We’re leaving tomorrow.’ He got to his feet. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’ll go up there now.’
‘What about Johnnie?’
‘Johnnie?’ He laughed. ‘Johnnie wouldn’t come anyway. He just hates automobiles. We’ll leave a message for him. How far do we have to go up Thunder Creek?’
‘I think it’s about ten or eleven miles,’ I said.
‘And the road has only just been made. Hell! We can be there and back in an hour and a half. Come on. You don’t need a coat. We got some in the station wagon and it’s got a heater, too.’
PART TWO
CHAPTER ONE
The road up Thunder Creek was like the bed of a stream. Water poured across it. The groundgrips of the big car were either slithering and spinning in a morass of yellowish mud or bumping over stones and small boulders washed down from above. Some of the log bridges were unable to dispose of the volume of water coming down the gullies they spanned. It banked up above them and poured across, a foot deep in places, so that they looked like small weirs. But Jeff never once suggested turning back. A car to him was an expendable item, a thing to fight nature with and he sang softly to himself as he wrestled with the wheel.
Above us, through the trees, the moon sailed fast among ragged wisps of cloud, a full circle of luminous yellow that lit the winding trail in a macabre light, half drowning the brilliance of the headlights. Thunder Creek, below us to the left, was a dark canyon of shadow out of which came the steady, relentless roar of water. And as we climbed, the black shadow of the fault capped by the snow-white peaks shouldered its way up the sky till it blotted out the moon and seemed to tower right over us.
It was here, in the dark shadows, that we suddenly emerged from the timber into a clearing where roofless log huts sprawled amongst the sapling growth. We had reached the camp built in 1939 when work on the dam had begun. The trail, blazed by the piles of slash on either side, ran straight across it and into the timber again. Gradually the trees thinned out. The surface of the road under its frozen powdering of snow became hard and bumpy. Then the timber finally fell back behind us and the headlights blazed on the most colossal rock fall I have ever seen. Great blocks of stone the size of houses were piled one on top of the other, balanced precariously and hung like the playthings of the Cornish giants against the moon-tipped edges of the racing cloud wisps. And above the slide — high, high above it — towered the black shadow of the cliff face, a gleam of white at the top where the moon caught the snowcaps, a gleam of white that Wavered and moved as mare’s tails of wind-driven snow streamed from the crests.
The headlights swung across the fantastic, gargantuan jumble of the slide as the track turned away into the wind that funnelled up the dark cleft of the valley. The track here had been hammered out of the edge of the slide itself and the wheels bounced and jolted over the uneven surface of stones. We dropped steeply several hundred feet and fetched up at a square, con Crete building that looked like an enormous pillbox. On the side facing us was a timbered staging on which rested a heavy wooden cage suspended by wires to a great cable the thickness of a man’s arm. Jeff stopped the car and switched his spotlight on to the cable, following it up the slope of the slide. It gleamed dully in the light like the thick thread of a spider, running in a long loop away up the slide until it faded into nothing, reaching beyond the range of the spotlight. Below it two subsidiary cables followed the pattern of the loop.
‘Well, that’s it, I guess,’ Jeff said. ‘Quite a place, isn’t it?’
I didn’t say anything. I was staring along the threadlike line of the cable, following it in my imagination up the dark face of the cliff, up into the narrow V between the peaks of Solomon’s Judgment. The slender thread was the link bridging the dark gap that separated me from the Kingdom. If I could travel that cable … A queer mood of excitement was taking hold of me. I pushed open the door. ‘Let’s have a look in the enginehouse,’ I said.
‘Sure.’
The door flung to behind me, slammed by the wind. Inside the car we had had the heater going full blast and had been protected from the wind. Outside I found I could hardly stand. The wind tore up the valley. It was not a cold wind, but it had no power to dispel the frozen bite of the air trapped in the circle of the valley head. It was a gripping cold that thrust through one’s clothing and ate into one’s guts.
Jeff flung me a duffle coat from the back of the car and then we pushed down through the wind to the engine housing. Though McClellan had only left the place a few hours ago snow was piled up against the pinewood door and we had to scoop it away before we could open it. Inside we were out of the wind, but the cold was bitter. A powdery drift of snow carpeted the floor and the draught of air that whistled in through the horizontal slit window that faced the slide could not dispel the dank smell of the concrete and the less unpleasant smell of oil and combustion fumes.
The interior of the engine housing was about the size of a large room. One wall was taken up entirely by a huge iron wheel round which the driving cable of the hoist ran. This was connected by a shaft to a big diesel engine that stood against the other wall, covered by a tarpaulin lashed down with rope through the eyeholes. Shovel marks showed on the floor where the party which had come up that morning had cleared out the winter’s accumulation of snow. A control panel was fixed to the concrete below the slit and there was an ex-service field telephone on a wooden bracket. Back of the main engine house was a store room and in it I saw the drums of fuel oil that had been brought up from Come Lucky.
I stood there for a moment, absorbing it all, while Jeff peered under the tarpaulin at the engine. I turned slowly, drawn by an irresistible impulse. I went over to the slit and, leaning my arms on the sill, peered up to the snow-lipped top of the cliff face. The moon was just lifting above the lefthand peak of the mountain. I watched the shreds of cloud tearing across the face of it, saw the shadows of the mountain receding, watched till all the whole slide was bathed in the white light of it. The thick thread of the cable was plainly visible now, a shallow loop running from the engine housing in which I stood up to a great concrete pillar that stood on a huge slab of rock that marked the highest point of the slide. From there the cable rose steeply, climbing the black face of the cliff and disappearing into the shadows. My eyes followed the invisible line of it, lifting to the top of the cliff and there, etched against the bright luminosity of the sky, was another pillar, no bigger than a needle, standing like an ancient cromlech on the lip of the cliff.