served the old copper mine. The ruins of the latter stood over the water. They looked grim and forlorn, a shattered venture.
‘On the other side, you’ll see, we shall begin to make some ground. We’ve been toying with it till now. We began at eleven hundred feet.’
Gently grunted, glad to rest his boots: he’d begun to wish he’d stuck to his brogues. The others were coming up the rise in a straggle with Evans and Williams well to the rear. They were talking animatedly together; Evans was making gesticulations.
‘Is our time the same as yours was on Monday?’
Overton checked with his watch. ‘A bit behind it, I’d say.’
‘We’d better get on, then. I want the timing close.’
‘It’ll be all right. We started later on Monday.’
He lit a cigarette and then started off again. Gently followed. He let Overton lead by the same distance as before. Across the causeway they went, along the shore, past the desolate mine buildings; over increasing deserts of fallen rock and up a steady sharpening of the incline. Then again the swing to the right, getting brutally steep this time, with below to the left a whitened torrent that foamed down from the lonely Glaslyn. They were certainly making ground; Gently could scarcely keep pace with Overton. The shattered rocks were taking it out of him and making the sweat roll down his brow. And beneath them the llyn was falling away, and beside them the empty space grew emptier, encroaching upon his plainsman’s resolve not to be intimidated by the mountains…
He was aware of feet scattering the rocks behind him and he turned to find Askham hard on his trail. The young man was also streaming with sweat and he had an expression which was far from happy. By a tremendous effort he got level with Gently. He turned to him an angry but apprehensive face.
‘Why — why have we got to go up this way…?’
They were both of them breathing very heavily. Gently’s boots were grinding and crashing as they laboured over the loose rocks.
‘If I’d known, I wouldn’t have come. They say… listen! They say it’s worse further on. And the other way… why can’t you listen? You could drive a car up the Llanberis track…’
Gently said nothing. He kept his face turned forward. Askham struggled to get ahead of him so that he could look at him by twisting his head back.
‘It’s stupid, I tell you… it’s dangerous this way. People have been killed. There’ve been accidents here. And it’s entirely unnecessary, you know it is! This isn’t the way Kincaid went up…’
Gently’s eyes remained averted. ‘But it was Fleece’s way,’ he said.
‘It wasn’t.’ Askham was furious. ‘He used the Pyg Track, and you know it.’
‘It joins this one higher up.’
‘So does the track from Llanberis! This is dangerous, I tell you; it’s only for people who’re used to climbing…’
He lurched a little towards Gently; was it by accident that he was on the inside of him? A hundred feet or more below them the Glaslyn torrent curled over its rocks. But no, Gently pounded on his way, insensible and never wasting a glance; completely ignoring the desperate fear in the eyes that fought to engage his own. Askham stumbled, sobbing for breath.
‘I won’t — I won’t come any further! I haven’t got a head for heights… it makes me dizzy, I shall be sick. And you won’t listen. It’s no use talking to you. Oh, my God, why won’t you listen? And you’ve dragged me into it for nothing… only because I tried to help you…’
He stumbled again, almost falling this time. He recovered his balance in a panic, shrinking closer to the wall of rock that hemmed the track at that point. There could be no doubt that he was really frightened; it wasn’t a clever simulation. About his movements there was a tense automatism that betrayed the presence of physical fear.
‘It’s crazy… it’s utterly pointless!’
Gently himself had a feeling of uneasiness. Somewhere, at a boundary that had passed unnoticed, the mountains had withdrawn their picturesque benevolence. They had begun to be wild, with an undertone of savagery; they seemed poised in a sinister potential of violence. Wherever one looked there were crushing rock- falls, unscalable cliffs, and hypnotic precipices. One experienced a sensation of being there on trial, of being small and alien and distinctly vulnerable…
‘If anything happens, then you’ll be responsible!’
Gently dashed at the sweat that lay heavy on his lids. Above them, standing easily with hands on hips, Overton rested and watched them as they laboured in the toils. One more bout and they would be there, another slam at that vicious incline! But already Gently’s thigh muscles were crying for mercy, after only a foretaste of the scramble impending.
‘If I get stuck you’ll have to bring me down…’
Gently saved his breath and kept on slogging.
‘I’ll sue you, my God… I’ll sue you!’
One last, killing stretch, and he stood shakily by Overton.
And then it was nearly worth getting up to that high vantage, worth it to peer into the inner recess which the mountain held concealed there. Level, shallow, grey, peaceful, the Glaslyn extended across its plateau, its ripples fretting the gentlest of music against its harsh rocky shore. Straight above it soared the Wyddfa, now more threatening than ever, its hollow cliffs of reddish grey exposed from their foot to their summit; and supporting them were high, frowning ridges that circled round the calm lake, leaving this rent through which spilled the torrent to join Llydaw, pale below.
‘I’d sit a minute if I were you.’
Gently plumped down on a boulder. All right; he was turned fifty and not accustomed to these larks. Askham had already dropped prone and lay gulping his breath in fierce little gasps. Overton, casual and apparently sweatless, was lighting a fresh cigarette.
‘Now you can see just where it happened. There’s the Pyg Track. Can you make it out?’
Across the flank of the rightward wall one saw a scratched white line. Along there Heslington, and then Fleece, had taken their way to the ridge ahead, moving like tiny upright ants to the man who watched from the Glaslyn shore. Then up the ridge to the staring summit, that humpty cone with its sudden conclusion, the Tarpeian Rock: and the mortal cry as the human starfish floated down…
‘You can see that apron-like projection? That’s where he struck and started rolling. There was blood on it, quite plain. He couldn’t have known anything after that. But he kept on tumbling down until he got there, where I’m pointing; and as you can judge, it was quite a feat to get across to him without equipment.’
‘For God’s sake stop it!’ Askham sat up, his eyes burning at Overton. ‘Don’t you understand? Isn’t it enough for me to be dragged up to this place…?’
Overton turned to him in surprise. ‘No offence intended, old man.’
‘There is offence. I can’t stand it. This bloody mountain is driving me crazy!’
He jumped to his feet and jerked away from them, to throw himself down again at a distance. Overton stared bewilderingly at Gently. He was wholly taken aback by the explosion.
‘What’s needling the youngster?’ he wanted to know.
Gently gave a lift of his shoulder. ‘It’s just the mountains,’ he replied. ‘They have an effect on some people.’
Had he ever been as tired and perhaps so fundamentally frightened? He didn’t know and daren’t think about it, caught in the dizzying web of the Zigzags. After the first few hundreds of feet he had begun to feel a slow panic, and all the way after that he’d had to fight it with his will. It was absurd. There was no danger, it was only the scale of the thing that sapped at him. The side of the ridge was no steeper than a house roof and was gnarled with helpful outcrops of rock. If he’d slipped and fallen he wouldn’t have rolled far, would perhaps have come off with the shock and some bruises; while at the worst — say, a broken leg — he had experienced companions to come to his aid. Yet still he couldn’t get rid of that panic, he could only oppose it and keep it under: by not looking back, down seven hundred feet; by not looking up, another five hundred. From minute to minute, just the rock-rim ahead…
Overton, mercifully, was staying down close to him. He was gruesomely enjoying this swing up the ridge. He climbed with a relaxed and familiar rhythm and apparently took nothing out of himself at all. He could even find time
