‘Okay. But don’t be too long. And see you don’t slip or anything,’
‘I’ll be all right,’ I said. ‘It’ll probably take about an hour if I’m to have a look round and get those figures.’
‘Okay.’
I hung up and went outside. I stood there for a moment, gazing beyond the buttress to the Kingdom. It was a crystal bowl surrounded by peaks and it wasn’t difficult to imagine how my grandfather had felt when he had first seen it. Spring would come late here, but when it came it would be splendid, and solitary. The light died out of the whiteness of the plateau until it was no more than a distant glimmer. The moon had blacked out behind a veil of cloud. The mountains closed in on either side, dark, hulking shapes. I glanced back across the lip of the fault towards the valley now deep in shadow. Far away beyond Come Lucky the moon showed white on snowy mountain slopes. I watched as the light sailed up the valley, until the dam and the rock around me were picked out in ghostly brilliance again. The moon sailed clear of the cloud veil. The stars shone in the pallid purple of space and way, way to the west a dark shadow climbed the sky. The clouds were thickening up. I turned and climbed the rock-strewn slope to the buttress.
It didn’t take me long to reach it and from the summit the whole Kingdom lay before me. And there, huddled against the lower slopes of the mountain away to my left was a low range of buildings half-buried in snow. There was nothing of the shack about them and they appeared to be constructed of logs after the fashion of Norwegian saeters. A belt of timber fringed the slopes above them.
It shouldn’t have taken me long to reach them, for it was not more than a mile, but the going was very slippery, the snow frozen into a hard crust and glazed over so that it was like ice. The altitude was also affecting me and I had to stop repeatedly to get my breath. The solitude was frightening. I felt curiously as though I were entering a dead man’s world. Everything was so white and so frozen still.
I was sheltered from the wind by the mountain, but from the slopes above me a whirl of snow came hurtling, curling and curving towards the moon like a scimitar blade. The huddle of buildings seemed crouched low against the onslaught, attempting to hide beneath their mounds of snow. The whirling snow devil swept over them and flung itself on me, a howling rush of wind and ice powder small as ground glass. It stung my face and swept on and all was still again.
I glanced back, panting with the shortness of my breath. The line of my footprints showed faintly in the powdery top layer of snow leading back to the buttress and the dark shadow of the cleft. I could no longer see the valley of Thunder Creek. I was ringed with rock and snow and the dam was again a puny man-made wall against the vast bulk of the southern peak of Solomon’s Judgment.
Behind the crystal white of the peak a heavy cloud obscured the sky like a back-drop of deepest black erected to offset the cold remoteness of the mountain. It was a monster of a cloud, great billows piled up and up into the night. Even as I watched I saw the hard edge of it reach out and clutch at the moon.
The shadow of it raced towards me across the snow. I glanced at the buildings, now less than five hundred yards away. The light was queer, distorted and refracted by the snow. It seemed to me a figure, stood there, watching me from the corner of the nearest of the buildings. I thought I saw it move. But then the shadow of the cloud was upon me and I had to adjust the focus of my eyes. And in that second the shadow had passed on and engulfed the buildings and I could see nothing but the snow gleaming white in the moonlight on the further side of the Kingdom. And then the peaks vanished, too, as though blotted out by a giant hand.
All was sudden and impenetrable blackness, and from high up on the peaks above came a dry rustling, a murmur like leaves or the soft escape of steam.
I hesitated, uncertain what to do; whether to go on to the homestead or turn back to the dam. Then all hell broke loose. There was a steady roaring on the mountain slopes above me. The wind came with a drift of powdery snow whipped up from frozen ground and behind the wind came snow, heavy, driving flakes that were cold and clinging, that blinded my eyes and blanketed the whole world that only a moment before had been so bright and clear in the moonlight.
There was no question now of fighting my way back to the top of the hoist. I knew the direction in which the homestead lay and I made for it, head down against the blinding fury of the blizzard and counting my steps so that I should not overshoot it in the impenetrable dark. I switched on the torch Jeff had given me, but it was worse than useless. It converted absolute blackness to a dazzling white world of driving flakes.
I walked straight on with the wind over my left shoulder for seven hundred counted yards and then stopped. I could see nothing. Absolutely nothing. I put the wind on my back and walked two hundred yards, turned right and walked another two hundred; faced into the wind and completed the square, eyes and nostrils almost blocked by the icy, clinging particles of the blizzard. I walked into it for another two hundred paces and again made a square. But I couldn’t see anything and I couldn’t even tell whether I was walking on the flat or not. For all I knew I might have stumbled right over the top of the buildings, half-hidden as they were under drifts. Only if I walked bang up against a wall of the homestead had I any chance of locating it.
I stood still for a moment and considered, knowing that I mustn’t panic, that I must keep calm. Carefully, with the wind as my one fixed point, I searched the ground, patterning it in squares. But I might have been stumbling through an empty plain. I began to doubt whether I had seen any buildings at all. And that figure standing in the snow… There wasn’t a soul up in the Kingdom besides myself. If I could have imagined one thing I could have imagined the others. I stopped and wiped the snow from my frozen face. God, it was cold! I glanced at the luminous dial of my watch. Nine-fifteen. Nearly nine hours to go before dawn began to break. Those buildings had to be real — they had to be!
I started off again and then stopped, trying to remember what square in my pattern I had completed last, trying to get some spark of sense out of my numbed brain. It was then that I saw a faint glow though the snow, an aura of warmth as though a weak sun were trying to rise and penetrate the murk of the blizzard. It was away to my left and I stared at it, wondering whether it was a trick of my imagination or whether it was real. I blinked and rubbed at my snow-encrusted eyes. But the glow remained, a soft radiation that lit the driving snow like the deeper tints of a rainbow. It was unnatural, a queer ema nation of colour that warmed the frozen solitude of the Kingdom.
I turned towards it automatically, drawn like a moth to a candle flame in the dark. With every step the colours deepened — orange and red and yellow flamed in the blackness, spreading rosy tints into the flakes of driven snow. And then suddenly the veil of the blizzard seemed to fall back and I saw flames licking skywards and against their lurid light was etched the rough-hewn corner of a log building. A few steps more and I was in the shelter of a group of buildings low, log-built barns stretching out like two arms from a central ranch-house that had doors and windows. It was one of the barns that was on fire.
The warmth of the flames came licking out of the storm and I ran towards them, drawn by the heat, absorbing it with a feeling of sudden lassitude and wonderful, weary gratefulness. And as the warmth closed round me, melting the snow from my clothes, there was a slow creaking, a crackling of timbers, a movement, a sagging in the heart of the flames. Then with a great roar the roof collapsed. A shower of sparks shot upwards to be caught and extinguished instantly by the storm. The whole centre of the fire seemed to collapse inwards and as it collapsed half-melted snow rolled into the gap from the drift at the back. Steam rose with a roar, a great cloud that was momentarily lit by the glow of the fire. Then the fire was gone. Black darkness closed in and all that was left was a few glowing embers and the soft sizzling of snow melting in contact with red-hot ash.