‘You should have stayed on board if you don’t like it out of doors,’ Appleyard said. ‘Before the war I used to run up Kinder Scout like a jackrabbit.’
‘Life was a piece of cake ten years ago,’ said Bull.
The slope was less steep where the watercourse descended. Maybe what we were looking for was in that direction, but whichever way, the clock would turn against us if the seaplane spotted us in daylight.
Rose was breathless when he came back from working with Bennett. ‘Bring the theodolite. Skipper wants to sight the angles.’
I humped the twenty-pound box onto my shoulder, and Bull carried the tripod which weighed almost as much. Rose turned from his path-finder’s position in front. ‘Don’t drop your load, Sparks, or you’ll have to go all the way back to Blighty to steal another from the stores.’
The distance was less to Bennett’s second station, though far enough on puddled terrain. I looked intently at the moss to make sure I didn’t step into an unexpected hole. ‘Mind you,’ Rose said, ‘I think a box sextant would have done just as well, and you could have carried that in a haversack.’
Bull reshouldered the weighty tripod, and told him to embark on a course of action which, Rose realized before turning to me, was all the nastier for being suggested among such superb scenery. It was uncalled for, and best ignored, and hard to say whether he was being serious till he went on: ‘It’s a pity we have to be so super-accurate to get anywhere or find anything. Takes the sport out of life. I lost something when I became a navigator, Adcock.’
I felt pain at his baleful tone. ‘Maybe you gained something as well.’
‘Not very much. As we get older we lose more than we gain, however much we change.’
‘I don’t like to think so.’
‘No one does,’ he said. ‘We’re the end of the line.’
‘Speak for yourself. I’m not a fish on the end of any line.’ Even while I spoke I had a strong impression I was wrong and that Rose, detecting my lack of conviction, knew why there was no need to answer.
I changed pressure to another shoulder, for in spite of my padded jacket the box had a fine time grinding the bone. Bennett’s voice came on the strengthening wind. ‘Pull your bloody fingers out. Come on! We’ll have the fog back soon.’
Gravel had worked into my left boot, and grated the skin off my heel. Hurry was impossible if I was to avoid dropping the theodolite and spoiling its accuracy. Cloud covered the mountaintops. Rose said that the peak to the north – though Bull cursed him for a schoolmaster – was over two thousand feet. Skuas stayed high, enraged that we had invaded their territory, making a noise as if calling for reinforcements to drive us away.
Bennett worked his computations on a small drawing board and, having fixed the length of the base line and its angle, took the surveyor’s pole from the pipe and set up the tripod, gauging the perpendicular with a plumb line from the box. He and Rose then clamped the theodolite onto the base plate.
We stood aside while they aligned on the pole which I had installed, and then set the sights according to the bearing which Bennett extrapolated from his notes. I wondered whether the German hadn’t scribbled a few jottings in order to play a joke on anyone foolish enough to be taken in. Perhaps he had buried a mine which, at the greedy touch of an exploring spade, would blow any treasure-seekers into pieces-of-eight and back again.
Bull and I smoked in silence while the drill of checking for collimation went on. Sundry technical terms floated away on the wind, and I wondered what surprises the other party had for rendering our efforts null. They had no directions for getting at the treasure, but maybe there was more than one vessel to bottle up the Aldebaran once they located us. I mulled on our plight, supposing such thoughts to be better than brooding about Anne and why we had left each other – as for some reason I began to do, convinced by now that the separation had been good for us both.
Thinking of her took me away from the activity around. The landscape was no longer inspiring. A feeling of vulnerability replaced the sense of adventure. Questions cracked the structure of our group. My sending of false signals had disordered the edifice, so that from now on I could only live as the moments came, which didn’t seem like living at all.
‘Adcock! Come out of that ten-foot hole!’ He pointed at the theodolite telescope, and then along the line of its bearing. Parallel to a turn of the coast, and a thousand yards southwest, was a short ridge of black rock, green and yellow vegetation at the summit. A watercourse beyond streaked down the re-entrant and ran into the sea. ‘It’s on that rise.’
I was to station myself there with the surveyor’s pole, and find the line of the bearing according to Bennett’s signals, which Bull would observe through binoculars. It sounded a plain enough routine, and I set off over the rocks and moss with the pole on my shoulder, cheerful now that I had a task which needed a good eye and some activity. The wind from the port quarter did not let me hear myself whistling. The sun was as high as it would get that day. Bennett worked against the storm, having a good idea from where it might come. I’d have felt safer if any of us could know where danger from men was likely to appear – who were perhaps a worse part of Nature’s wrath.
The ridge, separated from the main line of the mountains, lost itself for a while in the general undulations, and I maintained track by counting the paces, releasing one digit from a clenched hand every hundred, knowing I would be more or less there when both hands were open. I kept my steps as even as possible, and though many fell short and I zigzagged to avoid large rocks, I realized the eminence was under my feet when the land sloped down before me and I could see the hidden section of the watercourse.
The hill was four hundred feet high, sea nearly a mile away. Bennett and Rose were waving their arms. Appleyard sat by the dinghy like a statue, as if marooned until death. Our flying boat heaved on the water: if the roaming seaplane came close it would soon find how spiky she was. Bull focused the binoculars. ‘They want you to go to the right.’
I hoisted the pole so that they could mark me, and moved ten paces.
‘A bit more.’
I walked twenty.
He laughed. ‘They’re having fits. You’re to go back.’
I went, two by two.
‘Stop!’
The wind whistled, and pushed hard, but I kept the pole vertical. ‘Now what?’
‘Left,’ he said. ‘But creep. None of your bloody two-step, or they’ll have your guts for garters.’
I took half a pace.
‘Stop again. You’re spot on – I think.’
I scooped a circle in the mossy ground, and stabbed the pole in. Bull grinned at my useless work. ‘They want you to move to the right.’
The hole I dug filled with water. A cold wind beat on my jacket. If this was summer, I preferred Singapore. He put down the field glasses and hammered the stave which, though bolstered with rocks, nothing would make firm. ‘You’d better sit on top.’
‘You’re not my bloody oppoe,’ I told him.
We carried stones, and though the first hundredweight displaced water, even on a hilltop, we gradually erected a pyramid.
‘They’re giving the thumbs-up. Rose is making semaphore signals. Flag-wagging isn’t up my street.’
I preferred lamp-work, but was able to read semaphore slowly, which was all right because Rose couldn’t send quickly. Arms outstretched meant R. The left at one o’clock said E. The same over the head, and the right at ten o’clock signified T. ‘V’ of the arms added U to the word that was coming. Two arms fully horizontal again denoted R. And both at the inverted ‘V’ position ended the word with N.