On the first morning, after they had groomed and tethered the horses and had breakfast, Mrs Jones sent Lung down to the lake and told him to see if he could catch some fish.
‘You’re always on about old fishermen in them poems of yours,’ she said. ‘Let’s see if you can do anything more than talk about it. Now come along here, young man. I got to start painting my lilies before they goes over, but you’ll find that a bit dull. What’d you like to have a go at?’
‘The mountain,’ said Theodore immediately.
She shook her head.
‘Bit of a mouthful,’ she said. ‘Surprising how tricky that sort of subject is. No, supposing you settle up there and have a go at that bit of the hollow. You got the tents there, give it a bit of shape, and Albert. Not that horses is easy, but they’re easier than mountains . . . Don’t waste more paper than you can help . . .’
She gave him two pencils, a piece of charcoal and a brand-new notebook, and he settled down to do as he was told. He drew a tent and decided it looked quite like, so he put the other one into the same picture. He started to draw the bottoms of the tree-trunks beyond but found that they seemed to be floating in mid-air, so he experimented with grass-tussocks to try and suggest the bank of the coomb, but they floated too. He was beginning on Albert when Mrs Jones came over and sat beside him.
‘Why, that’s not so dusty,’ she said. ‘Who’s been teaching you?’
‘Nobody. Mother was an artist, but she died when I was four.’
‘Then you got it in you. I see we’re going to have to take this serious. Look, I’ll show you a trick for doing shadows. Lend me that pencil. Ta . . . like this, see. It ain’t the only way, course, but it’s the easiest. And this bit here . . . you don’t want to draw quite so careful as I do, mind you. It’s the only way I know how, but except for flowers it’s a bit . . . oh, I don’t know. Remember how Mr What’s-is-name drew? That’s the thing to aim for.’
Theodore could see what she meant. She had added several touches to his picture which had anchored the trees to the top of a definite slope, but there was something vaguely niggling about them. It was as though the richness of her personality stopped at her finger-tips and could find no way out through her pencil. When she left him he practised shadows for a while and then went back to Albert, achieving a shoulder and a haunch that were quite horse-like but a head that was far too small and looked more like a dragon’s or even a sheep’s. Not that Albert’s head was really a model for all horses . . .
He was surprised to find how high the sun was above the mountain by the time of the next interruption. At a low whistle from the bottom of the coomb he glanced up and there was Lung, looking both shy and triumphant and carrying something hidden behind his back. He marched up to Mrs Jones, still hiding his booty.
‘I catch fish,’ he said, grinning.
‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ said Mrs Jones.
‘Flying fish?’
‘Garn!’
She grabbed at him and he dodged away, slipping on the slope and almost falling. He flung out his hidden hand to steady himself, revealing the body of a dark brown duck.
‘Ho! Mighty hunter!’ said Mrs Jones. ‘How did you manage that? Make yourself a bow and arrow?’
‘I make trap,’ said Lung, producing a length of cord with a noose on the end. ‘Tomorrow I make better trap, with basket. Plenty reed for basket.’
‘Good for you. Let me have it. H’m, bit of meat there. I better pluck it while it’s still warm. Now, you two, you can go up to the path, back along the way we come, try and wipe out any marks we might of made . . .’
Theodore and Lung spent the rest of the morning doing that, smoothing out hoof-prints and foot-prints and sprinkling pine-needles over them. After lunch Lung showed no inclination to leave the coomb, so Theodore climbed up through the wood and continued to work alone, doggedly smoothing and scattering till he reached the beginning of the trees and found that the sun was almost down behind the mountain ranges to the west. He had to pick his way down in near dark, trying not to spoil his work by leaving yet more foot-prints, and met Lung coming up the path to look for him. They smelt the roasting meat before they reached the clearing.
The duck was oily and incredibly tough, but they chewed up every scrap and threw the bones on the fire. After the chill nights on the plateau it was strange to be sitting out under the stars without having to creep at once into a blanket-roll; they talked, and tried to prevent the big moths from flying into the fire, and listened to the steady tearing rasp of the grazing horses. Mrs Jones began to tease Lung into translating his poem about her and he made up uncomplimentary lines and pretended they were parts of it, but when he quoted in Mandarin it was clearly the real thing. Mrs Jones answered him with flowery speeches from old pantomimes, and even once a bit of Shakespeare. Then she started to sing.
‘The boy I love sits up in the gallery,
The boy I love is looking down at me . . .
‘Not that I’m the right type to sing that one,’ she broke off. ‘What you want is a neat little ingenue, all pink and white and countrified, rolling her big blue eyes up at the clerks and ’prentices in the top of the house. Never mind. You’ll have to make do with what you got . . .
‘There he is, can’t you see, waving of his handkerchief . . .’
It was a sign which Theodore understood perfectly well. She wanted to be alone with her lover. He rose, muttered a goodnight and walked up the dell to his tent, where he slid between his blankets and started to say his prayers. The singing stopped, replaced by whispers. A low laugh reminded him that he ought to pray for the other two, that they should recognize their sinfulness and be forgiven, but he had hardly begun when he stopped, feeling that it wasn’t right. The peppery wild scent of the lilies drifted through the night. He felt the stillness and the isolation of the valley all around with the three humans at the centre of it, as though they were cradled in the palm of the mountains. Things that happened here seemed to him to have no weight, no effect on the rest of the world. Any act was simply itself, neither good nor evil. It existed, and that was all, like one of the lilies.
So day followed day, restful and quiet. The only serious effort anyone made came on the third day when Lung, irritated perhaps by Mrs Jones’s obsession with her lilies, announced that he was going to explore the path to the bridge marked on P’iu-Chun’s map. Theodore went with him.
They followed the track through the wood and came quite soon to a place by the water’s edge which was clearly used as a camp-site by other travellers. There were remains of cooking-fires, and scatterings of yak-dung. After that the path climbed for a couple of miles through the wood and came out on a vast slope of sour-looking earth, above which the rock face rose precipitously to the snow-fields. The path continued to climb, but far less steeply than it would have needed to if it had been aiming to leave the valley at the skyline. Instead it led towards a point where the mountain cliffs seemed to come down and close the valley off. Steadily, as Lung and Theodore climbed, the tilt of the slope became steeper, until it was a slope no more, and the path was a mountain ledge running with vertical cliffs above and below, and the cliffs of the opposite mountain now incredibly near. They were, in fact, now walking along the wall of a vast ravine, with a river growling towards the lake a thousand feet below. An unsteady wind whipped through these narrows, with sudden little lulls, as though it was trying to trick the traveller into unwariness and then hurl him over the edge with its next gust.