After a couple of hundred yards the ravine began to open out as the opposite cliff tilted away, but before that happened, at the narrowest place of all, the path ended and there hung the bridge.
It was a single strand of rope, sagging hideously over the drop, and that was all. At either end was a fair-sized platform, with the rope running a few feet above it; on the further side the rope seemed to start from a timber structure, but here it was anchored into a big iron ring set into the cliff. Theodore stared at the curving rope, which swung slowly from left to right as the wind gusted down the gorge. His palms began to prickle with the idea of height. Yes, he could imagine hooking his legs over the rope and hauling himself across, hand over hand, though when he reached the far side his weight would drag it down to such a steepness that perhaps he wouldn’t be strong enough to pull himself up those last few feet. He could see on the far side where the path led across another barren slope and vanished into a steep wood of larches. Perhaps he could reach there, and Lung, and even Mrs Jones – she could do anything – but the horses? The baggage?
‘This is a place of devils,’ said Lung. He usually spoke Mandarin to Theodore, though his English was steadily improving.
‘People get yaks across here, I think,’ said Theodore.
‘Perhaps. Perhaps there is another path, though none is marked on the map. I think we will return and tell the Princess that we can go no further.’
He turned decisively away and began to walk back along the ledge. Theodore understood very well – if it was impossible to go on and dangerous to go back, then they must stay where they were, and the idyll could be prolonged. He smiled and shook his head in sympathy, but from that moment there started to grow inside him a conviction that the idyll was not free. It would have to be paid for in the end.
Mrs Jones took the news very calmly, saying that the valley was as good a place to be as any while the weather lasted, and there were enough plants around to last her another couple of weeks, at least, and after that they’d start thinking what was the best thing to do next.
In fact it was an extraordinary relief to settle back into the coomb of the lilies, and to know that they would be staying here for another day, and another after that. Theodore hadn’t realized how weary he was with travel, not simply weary in nerves and muscles, but soul-weary with ceaseless change. Time on the journey had been like a muddy spate, full of whirling and uprooted objects, but here it settled to a clear, still stream, with even the eddies in it returning again and again to the same pattern.
Mrs Jones botanized and sketched her finds, including a small dark-red clematis which she thought was new. There were delicate little plants too in the barren-looking slopes above the tree-line, which Theodore helped her press. But the lily remained her chief delight. It grew in drifts in several places along the lake shore, often mixed with a shorter, dark-orange lily which Mrs Jones said was quite common. The yellow one stood up to four feet high and carried as many as a dozen trumpets at the top of its scrawny and metallic-looking stem; the flowers were about five inches long and less than three across at the tips of the outcurved petals; from a distance they seemed to be all of a uniform intense yellow, but in fact each petal had a streak of green along its outside, and inside the bell the colour slowly darkened from the rim and was flecked with a pattern of small orange spots; at the mouth of the trumpet poised the six large anthers on their curving stalks, the colour of plain chocolate.
‘I seen bigger lilies, of course,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘I mean, there’s Lilium auratum – I seen that a foot across, and with twenty flowers on a stalk – dead vulgar if you ask me – not a patch on this little beauty. How are you getting on, young man?’
Theodore had become obsessed with a desire to produce a drawing of Sir Nigel that would do justice to that animal’s look of utter nobility, a problem, he found, far subtler and more difficult than rendering Albert’s coarse-grained ill-will. He was developing his own style of drawing, neither like Mrs Jones’s nor P’iu-Chun’s, but chunky and stolid, as though he was as much interested in the weight of things as their shape and texture. He was unaware of this – or rather he was only aware that he liked certain effects when he got them right – until Mrs Jones pointed it out.
‘That’s not at all dusty,’ she said, looking at a picture he had made of a tree overhanging the lake shore. ‘You got it in you, more than what I have. You draw like you are.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, I dunno. Someone as didn’t know you, suppose I showed him this, he might make a guess what kind of person you are, and that’s good. It ain’t true of my pictures.’
‘If it was you’d keep running off at the edge of the paper,’ said Theodore.
She laughed and went back to her fiftieth attempt to render the spirit of her lily.
In the afternoon Theodore explored. They did not have the valley to themselves. The wood was full of birds, which sometimes called until the cliffs echoed and at other times for an hour on end failed to break the intense silence of the place. There were porcupines, and a lot of other small animals too briefly glimpsed to be sure of. There was something larger, perhaps a bear, which raided the camp one night, frightened the horses and upset one of the baggage baskets – Theodore slept through this episode, but Mrs Jones and Lung woke and drove it off. Next day they moved camp to another lake-side clearing Theodore had found, an even more secret place, further from the path because of a curve of the shore and screened by thicker undergrowth. It too had its drift of lilies, but no stream.
They would have had to make a move in any case, because the horses by now had eaten almost all the thin grass of the clearing, but the episode with the bear decided them. In the new camp Lung devised an ingenious arrangement of ropes that allowed him to haul all the baggage out of reach of bears, up among the branches. He astonished Theodore by his knack of doing this sort of thing, and the neatness of the fish-traps he wove, and his general practicality, though he pretended to despise the work.
‘A scholar does not do these things,’ he said, weaving a length of split reed between the ribs of his latest trap.
‘My father said we must worship God with our hands as well as our minds,’ said Theodore. ‘You ought to have seen the bridge he made.’
‘Good,’ said Lung. ‘Then I am worshipping the Princess with my hands.’
He tied the reed’s end in with mocking precision, as though he were making a true-love knot.
Theodore laughed aloud, though a month ago the joke would have appalled him. But now all that part of him seemed dead. Of course he said his prayers morning and evening and read a little from his Bible each day, as he had always done; but this was mere habit and he knew it needed only one more violent event to break it. It was as though deep inside him was a chapel which had once been lit and gleaming, loud with hymns or full of silent prayer; now it was shut, its air never changed, its ornaments gathered dust and mildew.
* * *
A few mornings later Theodore was lying on his stomach, drawing Sir Nigel once more. It had started as a practice study on the blank part of one of Mrs Jones’s rejected lily-drawings; but of course, being only practice, it was going particularly well, with eye and mind and hand and pencil forming a smooth-linked system so that what appeared on the paper was not only a real horse, living and solid, but was this particular horse, with its own striking combination of dash and dignity.
‘Hullo,’ said Mrs Jones, ‘here comes my admirer. What’s brought him back so soon?’
Theodore looked up and saw Lung walking towards them, carrying something slung on a stick over his shoulder. He smiled, lifted down his burden and laid it at her feet like an offering. It was a fish, more than twice the size of any he had so far trapped, blue-black above and brown below.