They climbed the more southerly col, and beyond the crest the path traversed a broken slope of rocks, and brought them down into a high green bowl not unlike the one they had left, but smaller and more sheltered. There was a single, isolated farm here, too remote to be incorporated in any collective, and therefore still operated privately. There were smoky brown cows in the pasture, and poultry in a paddock behind the house. A handsome old woman, tall as a man, and coiffed elaborately in lace, was scything clover in a meadow. A middle-aged man came striding through the yard with two large milking pails; but he was short and gnarled like a mountain tree. A plump woman shrilled at him from a window of the house. They saw no one else there.
Two of them, of course, were not looking for anyone in particular. Toddy and Christine walked and scrambled and bathed, and sunned themselves, and saw nothing constrained or secretive in their companions. Everything was as open and candid as the day to them.
They were on their way back into the highest bowl of Zbojska Dolina, lunging down the scree, when the first heavy, solitary drops of rain fell. Ten minutes previously the sky had been clear and blue, now a curtain of heavy purple was being drawn slowly over the crests behind them.
“We’re going to get caught,” said Toddy, and paused to look round for the quickest way to shelter. The huts lay nearer to the path from the other col. “Let’s cut a corner. If we traverse from here to the other track we may make it to shelter. There’s a contour path, look—it cuts off a long run in the open.”
The thin grey ribbon danced its way round the side of the bowl, threaded a few clumps of stunted bushes at the edge of an outcrop of rock, and balanced along the rim of a fifty-foot face of sheer, fluted cliff. At the foot of this expanse a shelf of rock jutted out irregularly, some twelve to fifteen feet wide, and below that the level dropped again, though less abruptly, sliding away down open rock and rubble and scree into the bottom of the bowl.
They saw, when they had tramped smartly along the sheep-path in single file, and brushed through the bushes suddenly fragrant with the first spurt of rain, that this whole face of the bowl, the only one scoured clear of vegetation from top to bottom, formed a slightly hollowed channel, a groove not much more than twenty yards wide down the side of the basin. Where they stepped out on the rock itself, the path was solid and not even very narrow but polished and sloping, so that they checked and trod carefully. Looking up on their left hand towards the crests, they could see the reason. Two or three pale slides of rubble and scree, chalk-lines on the greyer rock, converged upon this ledge, and for centuries had been sending the detritus of their weathering slithering down by this route into the valley. The ledge on which the path crossed, too narrow to check the slide, had been honed into steely glossiness by its onward passage. The broader ledge below had collected the rubble as in a saucer, stacking it up neatly in a talus against the cliff.
Toddy peered respectfully over the edge. The declivity was not sheer, after all, when seen from above, nor quite without vegetation. Apart from the centre of the slide, where the polishing of friction had smoothed away all irregularities, it would not have been impossible to climb down the slope. And there below, a pie-crust of heaped boulders and stones and dust, the talus leaned innocently against the mountainside, while its accumulated overspill of years lay desultorily about the bottom of the valley, a hundred and fifty feet below.
“Look at that!” Toddy forgot the ominous, slow slapping of the rain for a moment, and hung staring in fascination. “Wonder how long it took to build up all that lot?”
Christine took one quick glance below, and withdrew to the inner side of the path. “Longer than it’ll take to shift it, my boy, if you miss your step.”
“And do you realise the process grades all that stuff down there? Piles it up with the boulders as a base, and the finer stuff above. I read it once in some book by Norman Douglas about the Vorarlberg. And it builds up at the steepest angle maintainable. It looks as solid as a wall, and if you blew on it the whole lot would go.”
“Then don’t blow. Come on, the rain’s coming.”
In single file they paced cautiously across the level of the rock, and came thankfully out on to terraced, coarse grass and a milder slope, where they could take to their heels and go bounding towards the huts. A soft crackle of thunder and a lipping of lightning along the crests, beneath the spreading purple cloud, nipped at their heels and drove them as corgis drive cattle. The plunge of their descent carried them lower than the highest hut, and towards the cluster below. They were still a hundred yards from them when the cloud parted with a sound like the tearing of rhinoceros hide, and the rain came down in a slashing fall. They ran like hares. The nearest door was held wide open before them, and a long brown arm hauled the girls in. In the dark, warm, steamy interior, with the fodder-loft above one end, and rough wooden benches round the walls, six of the herdsmen were gathered already, and others came running hard on their heels, scattering water from their black felt hats and frieze capes as they shed them inside the doorway.
Broadly smiling faces loomed at them through the steamy air, weather-beaten faces of large-boned young men, seamed, teak faces of hawk-nosed old men. The entire upland population of Zbojska Dolina was gathering into shelter from the first thunderstorm of August. There could not be a better place for studying them, or a better time.
They made room for the foreigners on the most comfortable bench, close to the small iron stove. An old man with thin metal chains jingling round his hat, and the traditional cream-felt trousers still worn without affectation to his daily work, embroidered thighs and all, offered them mugs of coffee, and a young fellow brought out of his leather satchel soft, light buns filled with cream cheese and poppy-seed. The air was heavy with scent of clover and damp felt and garlic breath, and it began to feel like a party. Except that at a party you do not look steadily round at every face in the company, as Tossa was doing now, memorising their lines and measuring them against a remembered face that is not present.
They had now seen, surely, every soul who habitually frequented Zbojska Dolina. But they had not seen the man Tossa was looking for.
The rain stopped as abruptly as it had started. In a matter of seconds, before they had realised that the drumming on the roof had ceased, a finger of sunlight felt its way in at the open door, and the tatters of cloud melted magically from half the sky. They emerged into a washed and gleaming world, withdrawing themselves almost reluctantly from a discussion conducted in mixed German and Slovak, with an English word thrown in here and there, notably the now international word “folk-lore,” which the herdsmen batted about among them with a note of tolerant cynicism in their voices. The party clamour fell behind them, with their own thanks and farewells, and the hut emptied.
The four of them walked in silence in the wet grass, the eastern sky pale and clear as turquoise before them, the ring of crests picked out with piercing sunlight beneath a still ominous darkness to westward.
“Listen!” Christine halted, head reared. “What’s that?” She looked round the slopes of the bowl, and back towards the huts, but the sound that had caught her ear seemed to have no source.
Then they heard it, too; a sudden rippling, vibrating entry on a high note, that shook down a scale into a deep, still, slow melody, breathy and hushed, like a bass flute. Soft and intimate, and yet from no visible source, and therefore as distant as the summits, at least, and perhaps from beyond them. There are sounds that can whisper
