Now he was waist deep in a valley of bracken. Now he was climbing a slope of reddish sandstone; now he was skirting a rock face whose crown overhung its base and whose extensive surface was knuckly with the day nests of innumerable martins; now he had below him a drop into a sunless valley; and now the walnut-covered slopes from where, each evening, with hideous regularity a horde of owls set sail on bloody missions.
When Flay, topping the brow of a sandy hill, stood for a moment breathing heavily and stared down into the little valley, Titus, who had insisted upon walking by himself for some while past – for even Flay had not been able to sustain his weight during the uphill climbs – stopped also, and with his hands on his knees, his tired legs rigid, he leaned forward in a position of rest.
The little valley, or dell, beneath them was shut in by tree-covered slopes, save to the south where walls of rock overgrown with lichen and mosses shone brightly in the rays of the declining sun.
At the far end of this grey-green wall were three deep holes in the rock – two of them several feet above the ground and one at the level of the valley’s sandy floor.
Along the valley ran a small stream, broadening out into an extensive pool of clear water in the centre, for at the far end of the lake where it had narrowed to a tongue was a rough dam. Long evenings had been spent in its making, simple as it was. Flay had hauled a couple of the heaviest logs he could manage and laid them close to one another across the stream. Titus could see them plainly from where he stood, and the thin stream of the overflow at the dam’s centre. The sound of this overflow trilled and splashed in the silence of the evening light, and the little valley was filled with its glass-like voice.
They descended to the patchwork valley of grass and sand and skirted the stream until they reached the dam and the broad expanse of the trapped water. Not a breath of air disturbed the tender blue of its glass-like surface in which the hillside trees were minutely reflected. Rows of stakes had been driven into and against the inner sides of the logs to form a crib. This space had been filled with mud and stones until a wall had risen and the lake had formed, and a new sound had come to the valley – the tinkling sound of the glittering overflow.
A few moments later they were at the mouth of the lowest of the openings into the rock. It was but a cleft, about the width of an ordinary door, but it widened into a cave, a spacious and fern-hung place. This inner cave was lit by the reflected light thrown from the sides of the wide natural chimneys whose vents were those mouth-like openings in the rock face a dozen feet above the entrance. Titus followed Flay through this fissure-like doorway and when he had reached the cool and roughly circular floor of the inner cave he marvelled at its lightness, although it was not possible for a single ray of the sun to pierce unhindered, for the wide rocky chimneys wound this way and that before they reached the sunlight. Yet the sunbeams reflected from the sides of the winding chimneys flooded the floor with cool light. It was a high domed place, this cave, with several massive shelves of rock and a number of natural ledges and niches. On the left-hand side the most impressive of these natural outcrops stood out from the wall in the form of a five-sided table with a smooth shelving top.
These few things Titus was able to take in automatically, but he was too exhausted and sick with hunger to do more than nod his head and smile faintly at the long man, who had lowered his tilted head at Titus as though to see whether the boy was pleased. A moment later Titus was lying on a rough couch of deep dry ferns. He closed his eyes and, in spite of his hunger, fell asleep.
TWENTY
When Titus awoke the walls of the cave were leaping to and fro in a red light, their outcrops and shelves of stone flinging out their disproportionate shadows and withdrawing them with a concertina motion. The ferns, like tongues of fire, burned as they hung from the darkness of the dome-ing roof, and the stones of the crude oven in which an hour or more ago Flay had lit a great fire of wood and fir-cones, glowed like liquid gold.
Titus raised himself on his elbow and saw the scarecrow silhouette of the almost legendary Mr Flay (for Titus had heard many stories of his father’s servant) as he knelt against the glow with his twelve-foot shadow reaching along the gleaming floor and climbing the wall of the cave.
‘I am in the middle of an adventure,’ Titus repeated to himself, several times, as though the words themselves were significant.
