“What’s all this about the dam?” Jeff asked.
“To hell with the dam!” Johnny’s eyes were angry. “But if that rat—” 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.”
When he had gone. 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.”
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 Johnny?”
“Johnny?” He laughed. “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. 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 healer too.”
The road up Thunder Creek was like the bed of a stream. 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.
Both he and the car were thoroughly tested before the timber finally fell back behind us and the headlights blazed on the most colossal rock fall I have ever seen. And above the slide — high, high above it — towered the black shadow of the cliff race, a gleam of white at the top where the moon caught the snow caps.
We dropped steeply several hundred feel and fetched up at a square concrete building I lint looked like an enormous pillbox. On the side facing us was a timbered Hinging 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 onto 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. “From what Johnny’s told me, it runs to a concrete pylon at the top of the slide and then in one great loop up to another pylon on the lip of the fault. Quite a place, isn’t it?”
I didn’t say anything. That 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 engine house,” I said.
“Sure.”
Jeff flung me a duffel coat from the back of the car and then we pushed down through the wind to the engine housing. Inside we were out of the wind, but the cold was bitter.
The interior 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. A control panel was fixed to the concrete and there was an ex-service field telephone on a wooden bracket. Back of the main engine house was a storeroom, 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.
The thing that had been in my mind ever since I had seen the slender thread of that cable suddenly crystallized, and I turned to Jeff. “They had that engine going today, didn’t they?”
He nodded, straightening up and facing me, a frown on his friendly, open features. “What’s on your mind?”
I hesitated, strangely unwilling to put my idea into words, for fear it should be impracticable. “You’re a mechanic, aren’t you?” I said. “Can you start that engine?”
“Sure, but—” He stopped and then he stepped forward and caught hold of my arm. “Don’t be crazy, Bruce. You can’t go up there on your own. Suppose the thing jammed or the motor broke down?”
The thought had already occurred to me. “There must be some sort of safety device,” I said.
He nodded reluctantly. “There’ll be something like that, I guess. If the driving cable were disconnected gravity ought to bring it down.” He took me outside and we climbed onto the cage. It was a big contraption, bigger than anything I had seen in the Swiss Alps. He flashed the beam of his torch onto the cradle where the two flanged wheels ran on the cable. “There you are,” he said. It was a very simple device. The driving cable was fixed to the cradle by a pinion on a hinged arm. If the motor failed, all one had to do was knock the pinion out. The driving cable then fell onto a roller, and a braking wheel automatically came into action. It was then possible to let the cage elide down on the brake.
“See if you can get the motor started,” I said.
Jeff hesitated, then he turned with a slight shrug of his shoulders. “Okay,” he said.
There was a pilot engine for starting the big Diesel. It was a petrol engine with battery starter. It started at a touch of the button. Jeff pulled the tarpaulin clear of the Diesel, turned on the oil, and a moment later the concrete housing shook to the roar of the powerful motor. I went to the car and got another coat and a rug. Jeff met me at the entrance to the housing.
“I don’t like it,” he said.
“I’ll be all right,” I said.
He looked at me, frowning slightly. “Okay. Better take this.” He handed me his torch. “They’ve rigged a phone up, by the look of it. Ring me from the top.” He glanced at his watch. “If there’s anything wrong with the phone. I’ll bring the cage down at nine o’clock, giving one false start to warn you. If you don’t come down then. I’ll run it up again and bring it down every half hour. Okay?”
I nodded and checked my watch with his. Then I climbed onto the wooden platform of the cage. He shouted “Good luck!” to me and disappeared into the concrete housing. A moment later the note of the Diesel deepened as it took up the slack of the driving cable. I watched the loop of the cable level out and become taut. The cage shook gently and then lifted from its staging. The wheels of the cradle began to turn, creaking slightly. The cage swung gently to and fro. I watched the engine housing slowly grow smaller and then I turned and faced the black rampart of the cliff.
It was an odd journey, alone there, slung in space in the moon-filled night. The rock jumble of the slide fell away steeply below me, a checkerboard of black and white. But ahead all was deep in shadow. A great concrete pillar moved toward me and slid past in the night, a vague shape as the cage ran from moonlight into shadow. For a moment the sound of the cradle wheels changed as they ran on the solid fixing of the cable. Then the whole cradle began to tilt sharply and the rate of progress slowed as it began to climb the vertical cliff face. Looking back, the moon-white valley seemed miles away. I could barely see the tiny square block of the engine housing. I seemed hung in space, like a balloonist caught in an updraft of air and slowly rising.
It could have been only a few minutes, but it seemed an age that the cage was climbing the bare rock face of the fault. Then we lipped the top end I was in moonlight again and the world around was visible and white. The concrete pylon passed me so close I could have touched it. The cradle toppled down to an almost horizontal position. Ahead of me now I could see the dam, a gigantic concrete wall, unfinished at the top and crumbling away in the center where the stream ran through. The cage climbed the northern slope of the cleft until I was looking down onto the top of the dam. Then it slowed and moved gently into a wooden staging that finished abruptly at a concrete housing similar to the one at the bottom. The cage stopped with a slight jerk that set the cables swaying.