“Just a spring,” I told her as we looked up at the dark streak that marked a fold in the massive cliff.
“Just a spring,” she mocked. “In this land of little water is there such a thing as just a spring?”
“It’s not worth anything,” I protested, following her up into the air. “You can’t even drink from it.”
“It could ease a heart hunger, though. The sight of wetness in an arid land.”
“It can’t even splash,” I said as we neared the streak.
“No,” Salla said, holding her forefinger to the end of the moisture. “But it can grow things.” Lightly she touched the minute green plants that clung to the rock wall and the dampness.
“Pretty,” I said perfunctorily. “But look at the view from here.”
We turned around, pressing our backs to the sheer cliff, and looked out over the vast stretches of red-to- purple-to-blue ranges of mountains, jutting fiercely naked or solidly forested or speckled with growth as far as we could see. And lazily, far away, a shaft of smelter smoke rose and bent almost at right angles as an upper current caught it and thinned it to haze. Below, fold after fold of the hills hugged protectively to themselves the tiny comings and goings and dwelling places of those who had lost themselves in the vastness.
“And yet,” Salla almost whispered, “if you’re lost in vast enough vastness you find yourself-a different self, a self that has only Being and the Presence to contemplate.”
“True,” I said, breathing deeply of sun and pine and hot granite. “But not many reach that vastness. Most of us size our little worlds to hold enough distractions to keep us from having to contemplate Being and God.”
There was a moment’s deep silence as we let our own thoughts close the subject. Then Salla lifted and I started down.
“Hey!” I called. “That’s up!”
“I know it,” she called. “And that’s down! I still haven’t found the spring!”
So I lifted, too, grumbling at the stubbornness of women, and arrived even with Salla just as she perched tentatively on a sharp spur of rock on the edge of the vegetation-covered gash that was the beginning of the oozing wetness. She looked straight down the dizzy thousands of feet below us.
“What beautiful downness!” she said, pleasured.
“If you were afraid of heights-’”
She looked at me quickly. “Are some people? Really?”
“Some are. I read one, one time. Would you care to try the texture of that?” And I created for her the horrified frantic dying terror of an Outsider friend of mine who hardly dares look out of a second-story window.
“Oh, no!” She paled and clung to the scanty draping of vines and branches of the cleft. “No more! No more!”
“I’m sorry. But it is a different sort of emotion. I think of it every time I read-‘neither height nor depth nor any other creature.’ Height to my friend is a creature-a horrible hovering destroyer waiting to pounce on him.”
“It’s too bad;’ Salla said, “that he doesn’t remember to go on to the next phrase, and learn to lose his fear-“
By quick common consent we switched subjects in midair.
“This is the source,” I said. “Satisfied?”
“No.” She groped among the vines. “I want to see a trickle trickle, and a drop drop from the beginning.” She burrowed deeper.
Rolling my eyes to heaven for patience, I helped her hold back the vines. She reached for the next layer-and suddenly wasn’t there.
“Salla!” I scrabbled at the vines. “Salla!”
“H-h-here,” I caught her subvocal answer.
“Talk!” I said as I felt her thought melt out of my consciousness.
“I am talking!” Her reply broke to audibility on the last word. “And I’m sitting in some awfully cold wet water. Do come in.” I squirmed cautiously through the narrow cleft into the darkness and stumbled to my knees in icy water almost waist-deep.
“It’s dark,” Salla whispered, and her voice ran huskily around the place.
“Wait for your eyes to change,” I whispered back, and, groping through the water, caught her hand and clung to it. But even after a breathless sort of pause our eyes could not pick up enough light to see by-only faint green shimmer where the cleft was.
“Had enough?” I asked. “Is this trickly and drippy enough?” I lifted our hands and the water sluiced off our elbows.
“I want to see,” she protested.
“Matches are inoperative when they’re wet. Flashlight have I none. Suggestions?’”
“Well, no. You don’t have any Glowers living here, do you?”
“Since the word rings no bell, I guess not. But, say!” I dropped her hand and, rising to my knees, fumbled for my pocket. “Dita taught me—or tried to after Valancy told her how come—” I broke off, immersed in the problem of trying to get a hand into and out of the pocket of skin-tight wet Levi’s.
“I know I’m an Outlander,” Salla said plaintively, “but I thought I had a fairly comprehensive knowledge of your language.”
