en-le-Frith and went on, amid hilly scenery and some extraordinary bends in the road, to Castleton and Hope.
‘Well, at least we know how to get to Castleton now,’ said Laura. ‘You know, if we have time, we ought to do some walking while we’re in these parts.’
The church itself held little that was of interest, but the Saxon cross was indisputable. They gave it solemn attention and then Gavin said:
‘You know, it hasn’t taken us all that time to come here. Why not do Castleton while we’re more or less on the spot? Then we could do some other cave tomorrow.’
‘I think there’s too much to see. We need a whole day. There are four places and we’d need to see them all. There’s the Peak Cavern, the Speedwell Mine, (which involves a boat on an underground lake), the Blue John Mine and the Treak Cliff cavern. It would be silly to do a bit of all that, and still have to come back and do the rest at another time.’
‘How right you are. Well, then, let’s have a look at the church and that square-faced Norman keep on the top of the hill.’
The keep was Peak Castle, stone-built on the site of an earlier wooden structure, and was a grim little fortress on a hill which overlooked the village it had once both threatened and guarded. The view from the courtyard was extensive and very fine, and Laura became more determined than before to walk such a glorious, hilly countryside. They drove into Glossop for tea and the next morning set out again for Castleton.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Eldon Hole
‘It is a very hazardous place, for is a man or beast too near the Edge of the bank and trip, they fall in without retrieve.’
« ^ »
The excursion on the following day proved interesting, but, from the point of view of Laura’s mission, unfruitful.
‘Trippery, but quite good exercise,’ was her comment as, after a Stygian boat-ride on an underground lake in the Speedwell Mine, she and her husband had climbed more than a hundred steps back to daylight.
‘Rather nice, though, that passage between the rocks, and the Aladdin’s cave place with the candle-light,’ said Gavin.
‘A sort of Dutch effect,’ commented Laura. ‘One of those dimly-lit interiors where so much is suggested and so little revealed. A pretty good waterfall, too, in that enormous cavern where we disembarked. I must say I relish the sound of a roaring cascade.’
The guide had no information to give them about Florian.
‘We get so many,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t notice anyone in particular unless they misbehaved themselves, or were foreigners, or something of that.’
‘Well, we’ve done the Peak Cavern and the Speedwell Mine,’ said Laura, as she and Gavin, after a restaurant lunch, made for the Blue John mine on the road to Mam Tor, ‘and I don’t suppose this next one will yield anything, either.’ She was right. The Blue John was interesting, beautiful and historically important, but again yielded no information of the kind which they sought.
‘Well, personally, I’ve had enough of climbing steps,’ said Gavin, as they emerged on to the road. ‘Let’s see. We did a hundred and six, at the very least, this morning, and a hundred and seventy-seven this afternoon. I’m gittin’ fair wore out, as the gentleman said. Do we
‘Well, it’s modern and electrically lighted and everything made easy, so I don’t suppose it would have interested Florian much, but I’d better leave no stone unturned. It’s just along here.’
‘Still no luck,’ said Gavin, when they had admired the stalactites and stalagmites, the blue fluor spar in the rock formations, the anemolites and the general effect of the modern lighting. ‘But you didn’t think he would have come here. Remains to do — what and when?’
‘The Eldon Hole. Tomorrow afternoon. It’s by far the likeliest place for him to have tried, so long as he had a good head for heights and could climb a bit. We’ll go there after an early lunch. I’ll tell you what else we’ll do. We’ll take the car as far as Chapel-en-le-Frith and walk the rest. It will be perfectly simple, so long as we take the map with us, and I’d love a hike over those hills.’
From Chapel-en-le-Frith, with its panoramic view from the churchyard, a secondary road, which led them uphill and then dropped to meet the main road to Peak Forest, brought them, on the following day and at the village crossroads, to a narrow way past Dam Hall and Old Dam. Here the map indicated a turn to the left and this took them on to an uphill, northerly bridle-path which soon degenerated into a footpath which led them to the Hole.
This was on the slope of Eldon Hill and proved to be an awe-inspiring place, an immense yawn in the landscape, as though one of the giants of Scandinavian mythology had changed himself by his magic into a hillside, but had been unable to disguise his vast and partly-open mouth.
‘Quite something,’ said Gavin, gazing over the fence at the apparently bottomless hole. ‘And where do we go from here?’
‘Down it, of course,’ said Laura briskly. ‘Why do you suppose I’m wearing slacks?’
‘
‘Don’t be silly. It’s only two hundred feet deep.’
‘And do you happen to notice (a) that it’s fenced in, (b) that it has a sheer drop on three sides, (c) that the bushes which cling to it would hardly serve to sustain us if we fell, and (d) that even if we did find Florian’s corpse down there, we couldn’t get it up by ourselves?’
