and ran dizzily to the door of the cave. There he saw her standing in the downpour, knee deep in water, naked as the rain itself. The lightning was playing continuously now, lighting her as though she were a thing of fire herself, now flickering across her in a yellow half light.
As he stared a kind of ecstasy filled him. He had no sense of losing her - but only the blind and vaunting pride that he had held her in his arms; that naked creature that was now crying again, derisively in a language of her own.
It was finality. Titus knew in his bones that he could expect no more than this. His teeth had met in the dark core of life. He watched her almost with indifference - for it was all in the past - and even the present was nothing to the pride of his memory.
But when, out of the heart of the storm that searing flash of flame broke loose, and ripping a path across the dazzled floods, burned up the 'Thing' as though she had been a dry leaf in its path, and when Titus knew that the world was without her for ever, then something fled in him - something fled away or was burned away even as she had been burned away. Something had died as though it had never been.
At seventeen he stepped into another country. It was his youth that had died away. His boyhood was something for remembrance only. He had become a man.
He turned and retraced his steps to where Fuchsia leaned against the wall. They could not speak.
How pitifully human she was. When he parted the long locks that straggled over her face and saw how defenceless she was, and when she pushed his hand away with the tired disillusion of a woman twice her age, then he realized his own strength.
At a time when he should have been broken by the scene he had just witnessed - by the death of his imagination - he found himself to be emptied of distress. He was himself. He was free for the first time. He had learned that there were other ways of life from the ways of his great home. He had completed an experience. He had emptied the bright goblet of romance; at a single gulp he had emptied it. The glass of it lay scattered on the floor. But with the beauty and the ugliness, the ice and the fire of it on his tongue and in his blood he could begin again.
The Thing was dead... dead... lightning had killed her, but had Fuchsia not been there he would have shouted with happiness for he had grown up.
It was a long time before a word was exchanged. They sat exhausted side by side. Fuchsia had been persuaded to take off her long red dress, and Titus had wrung it out and it was now spread before the fire he had re-kindled. He longed to leave the cave. It was now so much dead rock. It was over and done with. But Fuchsia, sick with exhaustion, was in no state to start the return journey for an hour or more.
While he moved about the cave, Titus caught sight of some dead birds on a ledge of rock but his hunger had never returned.
Then he heard Fuchsia's voice, very low and heavy.
'I thought perhaps you'd be here. I am better now. We must go back. The flood is rising.'
Titus walked quickly to the door of the cave. It was true. They were in danger. Far from lessening the rain was heavier than ever with formidable massings of cloud.
He returned quickly to her side.
'I told them you had lost your memory,' she said. 'I told them you had been like this before. You must say the same. We'll part near the Castle. Come on.'
She got to her feet and pulled her damp red dress over her head. Her heart was raw with disappointment. Her fear had been for Titus' safety and she had risked her neck for him, but her hopes had been that he would be proud of her. To struggle all that way, and to find him with... the 'Thing'!
Clinging fiercely and painfully to her pride, she swore to herself that she would never ask him - would never speak of her. She had thought that there was no one so close to him as herself - or that if there was, he would tell her. She knew that she was only his sister but she had had a blind faith that even though she had defied him over Steerpike, yet she was more necessary to him than Steerpike had ever been to her.
Titus was gazing at her as he tucked the torn and fateful shirt into his trousers.
'She is dead, Fuchsia.'
She lifted her head.
'Who?' she murmured.
'The wild girl.'
'The... wild... girl...? So soon?'
'The lightning.'
Fuchsia turned to the cave-mouth and began to move towards the storm. 'Oh God,' she whispered as though to herself. 'Is there nothing but death and beastliness?' and then, not turning as she spoke, but raising her voice. 'Don't tell me, Titus. Don't tell me anything. I would rather know nothing. You live your life and I'll live mine.'
Titus joined her at the mouth of the cave. It was a frightening sight that lay before them. The landscape was filling up with water. There was not a moment to lose.
There's only one hope,' said Titus.
'I know, said Fuchsia. The tunnel.'
They stepped forward together and received the weight of the cascading sky.
Thereafter their journey was a nightmare of water. Time after time they saved one another in the treacherous flood as they waded towards the entrance of the long underground passage. A hundred incidents befell them. Their feet were caught in underwater creepers; they stumbled over submerged bushes; the limbs of trees fell headlong into the water at their sides, and all but struck or drowned them. At times they were forced to return and make long detours where the water was too deep, or too marshy. When they came to the high bank on
