“Yes,” he agreed eagerly, remembering how abruptly that sickle of icy heads had appeared in the sky on their left hand, like a mirage of snow-fields and honed blue slopes and trailing banners of cloud beyond the green, lush flats of the Váh, fifteen miles wide. “Yes, there he’d want his kit.”
“I asked him how he could bear to leave sortie overé Pleso, but he said he had pulled a muscle in his arm, so he came away where he could walk, and not be tempted to use it too soon.”
“Strbské Pleso? That’s where he was staying, over there?”
“It means the lake of Strba. It is at the western end of the Freedom Road, that high-level road that runs along the range. Hand me that tray, will you, please? So, and there is your coffee.”
He thanked her, and lifted the tray, balancing it carefully. He had reached the doorway, encrusted with stars, when she said quietly behind him: “Dominic…”
“Yes?” He turned his head alertly.
“Do you know you have been asking me all the same questions your friend asked me this afternoon? The little dark girl—Miss Barber, I think she is called.”
“Yes… I thought she might have,” said Dominic, and wavered in the doorway for a moment more. “Did she ask what hotel he was staying at, over there?”
“No, she did not. But in any case he did not tell me that, and I did not ask him.”
“All right. Thanks, anyhow!”
He carried the tray of coffee out to the terrace. It was not at all surprising that he should arrive just in time to hear Tossa saying, with the sinister, bright edge to her voice that he was beginning to know only too welclass="underline" “How about making a sortie over into the High Tatras, to-morrow?”
All the way along the winding road that brought them out of the range, with the enchanting little river bounding and sparkling on their left hand, and the firs standing ankle-deep in ferns along its rim, Dominic was waiting with nerves at stretch to see how she would manage to direct their movements exactly where she wanted to go, and how much she would give away in the process.
“To the right,” Tossa instructed him, poring over the map as though she had not already learned it by heart, “and keep on the signs for Poprad.”
At Liptovsky Hradok there was a promising fork, where the left-hand road seemed to set course directly for the roots of the mountains.
“Don’t take it,” warned Tossa, “keep on towards Poprad. It doesn’t join the Freedom Road, it goes straight over into Poland, and we can’t go, and anyhow I think the frontier’s closed there. It’s a broken line on this map. There’s a left fork from this road, oh, twenty kilometres on, that takes us up on to this Freedom Road, and then it runs on along the range all the rest of the way.”
All of which Dominic knew as well as she did; he’d been doing his homework even more industriously. He also knew that the first-class route up to the Freedom Road was nearer forty kilometres ahead than twenty, and joined the shelf highway in mid-course; but the turning to which she was directing them, short, second-class and quite certainly extremely steep to make the gradient in the distance, would lead them to the western end of the upper road, and straight to the lake of Strba.
That didn’t take much accounting for, of course; so much she had learned from Dana. What he was waiting to see was what she would do and where she would lead them when they got there. Because she wouldn’t know precisely where to look for her stepfather’s traces in the lake resort, unless she had information Dana didn’t possess.
The road streamed eastward along the floor of the great valley, threading the cobbled streets and spacious squares of small towns, and emerging again into the empty, verdant fields, that fantastic back-drop of peaks still unrolling steadily beside it.
Two main streams combine to form the river Váh, the White Váh the white mountain water from the High Tatras, the Black Váh from the district of Mount Royal in the Low Tatras. Their road crossed the White Váh for the last time, not many miles from its source, and they were over an imperceptible water-shed, no more than the heaving of a sigh from the valley’s great green heart, that separated the westward-flowing Váh from the eastward-flowing tributaries of the Poprad, which is itself a tributary of the Dunajec, and joins it to wander away northward into Poland beyond the Tatra range. Those tiny streams they were leaving were the last of the Danube basin. This new and even tinier one, crossed soon after they turned on to Tossa’s climbing road and headed precipitately towards the foothills, was the first innocent trickle of the vast drainage area of the Vistula. A couple of miles and a slight heave in the level of the plain determined their eternal separation.
The van climbed dizzily, on a roughly-surfaced but adequate road, left the viridian levels of the river plain, and wound its way between slopes of forest and cascades of rock rich with mountain flowers. The gradient increased steadily. The peaks had abandoned them, they were tangled in the intimacy of the foothills, and there were no longer any distances before them or behind.
They emerged at last on to a broad, well-made road that crossed them at right-angles, and went snaking away left and right along the shoulder of the range.
“Which way now?”
“Whichever you like,” offered Tossa with deceptive impartiality. “This must be the Freedom Road. Left is the highest end, and we’re quite near it here. How about going up there to Strba Lake for lunch, and then we can drive the length of the road to Tatranská Lomnice at the other end, and see if we can go up the funicular?”
It sounded a reasonable programme, and they accepted it readily. The great road climbed still, between slopes of noble pines, until it brought them out suddenly on a broad, open terrace, and the whole panorama of the plain below expanded before them, an Olympian view of earth. They parked the van in a large ground thoughtfully provided opposite the terrace, and rushed to lean over the railing, and marvel at the pigmy world from which they had climbed.
The whole flat green valley of the Váh lay like a velvet carpet beneath them, shimmering coils of cloud drifting between. Through this wispy veil they could see clearly the white ribbon of the road, and the silver ribbon of the river, threading the emerald field, and the little towns splayed like daisies in the grass of a meadow.
“But wait till we go up to the Lomnice Peak!” Tossa promised them, and the magic of joy had penetrated even Tossa’s absorption, and made her eyes shine and her voice vibrate. “This, and another leap on top of it—an enormous one, it looks in photographs. Quick, lock the van, and let’s go in to the lake.”
The snow-peaks, exquisitely shaped, bone-clean, polished granite and gneiss, reappeared as soon as they turned inward to the heart of the range, head beyond beautiful head materialising as they walked the curves of the road towards the blue gleam of the lake in its oval bowl. First there were white villas and large modern hotels, and then as the water opened before them broad and gracious, the older hotels, partly timbered, marking their age by their wooden towers and little lantern turrets, an element of fantasy that turned out later, surprisingly, to be traditional; for these towers for tourists were the lineal descendants of the timber churches and belfries of Slovakia, some as old as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
There were hotels round almost a quarter of the lake shore, but above and beyond rose the mountains, forested in their lower reaches, sharpened to steel above, etched with piercing patterns of ice, and snowfields radiant as flowers. Across the water, not far from the shore, towered the timber structure of a ski-jump, like an out-of-season shrub barren in summer and simulating death.
They walked the whole circuit of the lake, staring, exclaiming, photographing, as hordes of other holiday-makers, probably of a dozen nationalities at least, were also doing all round them. And Tossa took stock of every hotel they passed, and gave no sign of seeking or finding.