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He began to try it, first running his shoes round his belt till they hung in front of him. For quite a long way he went up fast and easily, feeling with his hands, feeling with his feet, his legs, even cautiously with the back of his head. In this funnel of darkness all the strength of his temporarily useless sight went into his other senses. He even realised that his first awareness of
the opening above him came to him in a faintly different fragrance, an elusive scent of freshness in the air that he was smelling. He looked up; there wasn't any moonlight to be seen. He put one hand warily above his head and touched rock. Then he remembered, for the first time, the chock-stone, and in the same instant his body began a veritable clamour of protestations. Wedged there in the darkness, half his weight on one foot whose leg had suddenly begun to shake violently and uncontrollably with strain, and the other half on his shoulders braced against the opposite wall, he felt as if his muscles were melting and flowing through his limbs like a warm fluid. He groped for his torch and got it out of his pocket with difficulty, but its yellow light showed him instantly a respite. Just opposite and above him in the broadening chimney, a ledge quite nine inches wide ran along the wall, and he gripped it, pulled himself up, rested his arms on it and found another foothold. There he stayed for a moment, wriggling his bruised and aching shoulders a little and cursing the rope which had constantly impeded him.

When at last he had clambered on to the ledge he used his torch again and considered the chock-stone doubtfully. A child, he thought, or a small person could squeeze behind it possibly, but he remembered now that he'd tried it last time and Colin had called out something about the camel and the eye of a needle. So there was nothing for it but to stand up on the ledge where he was, for the moment, so securely seated, and launch himself out, spread-eagled, over the rounded surface of the stone. Once you're on top of it, he told himself kindly, you just walk off on to the outside ledge. So he put his torch away, hoisted himself
on to his knees, and then, carefully on to one foot. It was the rope which upset his balance. He hadn't realised how accurately, in the dark, his body was aware of its surrounding objects. He'd touched the wall behind him with his hand to make sure of its exact position, and the rest of his body, now, was acting on the information of that reconnoitring hand. It hadn't allowed for the two extra inches that the rope added to his back, and as he came up on to his other foot he felt himself pushed out sickeningly just beyond the limit of his precarious balance. It didn't, of course, take his brain one second to reassure him that an outstretched hand would bring him safely against the opposite wall, but he died, all the same, in that second of falling forward into darkness, a thousand atavistic deaths. His whole body when, with a foot braced against the wall which his outstretched hands had met, he pushed himself back again to his ledge, was soaked and clammy with sweat, and his throat closed up queerly—

And he was angry. Swearing under his breath, and reckless with sudden temper he flung himself at the chock-stone as though it were a mortal enemy. Some of his anger died with his easy conquest of it; it wasn't more than a minute later that he was sitting astride it with the moonlight on his face.

The ledge led straight away from him like a silver path along the cliff face, vanishing round a corner. Here at its beginning it was a substantial platform; as he stepped out on to it the mere thought of being able to see his way ahead of him gave him a sense of relief and confidence. He began to move along it slowly, his left shoulder brushing the wall, and was surprised to find how easy, how entirely without
terrors it was. When he turned the corner his shadow, which had kept pace beside him along the cliff wall, ran out suddenly in front of him, and he stopped, vaguely disturbed. Ridiculous, he thought, beginning rather more warily to go forward again, how a little thing like that could, for a moment, be so disconcerting. It just showed how very finely balanced your sense of equilibrium must be, how narrow a margin of safety you were allowing to your usually careless body, when a dark, wavering blot of shadow, obliterating, for a few paces ahead, the clear junction of wall and ledge could check you so suddenly. Demanding readjustments; your movements slower, your left foot feeling along the wall below your left hand, your eyes focused a yard or so farther on—

And now the gap. Well, yes, it was pretty providential that the ledge widened just here. He lifted the coil of rope over his head and threw it carefully across well beyond where his feet would land when he stepped—

His whole widely roving consciousness suddenly narrowed, contracted like the lens of a camera, focused itself with a tremendous, an agonising intentness on that one stride ahead of him. It was as though not only his eyes but every cell in his body was joined in an overwhelming co-operation of awareness. Awareness of depth, awareness of distance, of the quality of the rock, the small unevennesses of its surface; awareness of himself, the exact length of his legs, the exact strength of his arms, the steady but rather heavy pounding of his heart. Nothing at all, for the moment, existed outside a radius of three yards around him. Not Colin or Susan, or even Coolami. The world had become two points of silvered rock with a black chasm between them; he himself a nameless, emotionless,
brain-driven organism whose sole function was to cross that chasm.

It was suddenly behind him, and with a click the lens of his consciousness was wide open again, collecting from everywhere, avidly, a medley of sensations, thoughts, emotions. He thought, “Hurrah, I'm over!” and, “Damn that shadow!” seeing it again in his memory as he'd seen it in the second when he had, between heaven and earth, no support but the vanishing balance of his right foot – a black blotch leaping clumsily ahead of him—

And he thought with a strange feeling of exultation, “By jove, there's something
in
this game of Colin's!” He stood up, lifting the rope and readjusting carefully a disordered coil before he slung it again over his left shoulder. The ledge here made a slight turn to the right, so that his shadow retreated again to the wall, and he went on, feeling rather above himself, and trying to remember exactly what happened after you'd gone up the cleft and climbed out on to the wide ledge where he and Colin had eaten their lunch that day, looking out over vast undulating miles of plain and bush—

Was that where you skirted round—

No, it was the straight climb. Thirty feet or more, and only one place on it where you could stop for a moment, crouching, resting the ache, subduing the weakness of your arms. And when you got up that you were practically in Colin's cave.

The ledge turned, narrowed. Bret stood still, looking into an ascending cavern of tumbled rocks and dark, moon-silvered shrubs. He shouted again.

The nearness of the voice that answered startled him so much that he actually retreated a step before he
realised with a violent heart-thud, that he was standing on a two-foot ledge. The voice answered, hoarse, not very loud, but with a strange, echoing sound, from about half-way up the cleft;

“Here! Who's that?”

Bret called:

“That you, Colin? Where are you?”

“Bret, is it? I'm up here in the cleft. Had a spill.”

Bret moved forward cautiously. The ledge ran out on a steep slope. The softness of earth and decaying leaves felt strange to his feet after the rock and he sat down, untying his shoes from his belt. He called:

“Hurt?” and began mentally to curse himself that, moonlight or no moonlight, he'd been fool enough to come up alone to rescue a possibly badly injured man. But Colin answered:

“No. Only a few cuts and bruises. Knocked myself out for a little while. But I can get back all right if you've got a rope.”

Bret tying his shoelaces in a double knot said, “I've got a rope. Give me a call now and then. I can't see you,” and began slowly to clamber up the slope. He was thinking now that what they wanted was a car. The prospect of setting out, when they got down again, to walk the two miles or so back to the house, filled him with an enormous despair, and he began to realise acutely in every bone of his body that he was tired.

He became so exhausted at last that Colin's voice seemed disembodied, now coming from beside him, now receding to such a distance that it was almost inaudible. The sound of his heart thudding high in his chest seemed to overwhelm it, to overwhelm everything, and his thighs ached with a pain that was like
fire. He knew in a dim, irritated way that the unfamiliar and violent contrasts of light and shadow were making him spend, on what was really no more than a strenuous scramble, a vast superfluity of nervous and physical effort; so that suddenly, when a small stone rolled under his foot and brought him forward on to his knees, the sting of a prickly bush brushing his cheek made him gasp out an exasperated, “Blast the thing—!”

Colin, a few feet higher and a little to the right, said:

“Here. Can you see me now?”

The relief of stretching out, flat on his back, with the rope for a pillow and a cigarette between his lips, returned Bret to his disturbed equanimity. Colin, propped against a boulder, smoked too, a streak of dried blood down one cheek sharply visible in the moonlight. He asked:

“What made you think I was here?”

“Smoke in your cave. Wasn't there?”

“Yes. It poured this morning when I was coming up, but I always keep wood in the cave. I lit a fire to dry off.”

Bret, frowning, wanted very badly to ask why he'd left it till night time to make his descent. Colin, though, was a queer bird; you had to go warily—

But Colin said suddenly, quite without expression:

“I was shot – of course. Lord knows how I got up without crashing. After I'd lit the fire I fell asleep. It was nearly dark when I woke but—”

Bret grumbled:

“Why didn't you stay put
till morning?”

Colin said:

“I remembered the family. Thought I might get back before you all arrived. Thought you might have been delayed or something. But then I had to wait for the moon—”

He asked suddenly:

“How's Mother?”

“She's well.”

“Susan?”

Bret felt his forehead contract. That one word with its question mark was, he thought, so very much the sum total of all his own problems. But Colin without waiting for his answer went on peevishly:

“I know that handhold as I know the doorknob of my bedroom – or the gears of the car. I don't see how I missed it. Things look different somehow by moonlight—”

Bret asked:

“How – what happened to the car?” And Colin, taking his cigarette butt from his lips, repeated:

“Car? My car? Why, what
did
happen to it?”

Bret sat up wearily:

“Didn't you know it had gone over the edge down there?”

He was sorry then, in a resigned and nebulous way, that he'd spoken of the car. Colin sat quite still and said nothing at all about it except, “That hand-brake wasn't any good. I – it wanted a couple of stones under the wheels.”

There followed then a long silence. Bret was thinking between the last puffs at his cigarette that Colin sober enough to get the car through that crazy bush track was not, surely, Colin too drunk to
remember his faulty hand-brake? What other kind of nervous stress must have been added, what other mental suffering and shame? What dreadful purpose, even, had there been, perhaps, behind that desperate climb—?

He turned sharply on the thought. Colin's face in the white light looked ghastly and his eyes were shut, but as if answering Bret's sudden movement he opened them and said:

“We'd better be moving. There are two good trees I know for belays. We'll go down on a double rope. It'll be quicker and easier. What's that?”

Across the shadowed side of the tree-tops far below them a light had passed, gleaming, fading. There came then, faintly, smothered by the intervening buttress of the mountain, the sound of a car engine. Bret threw away his cigarette butt and stood up.

“Marge must have sent some one. Just as well. You're about done.”

But it wasn't till they had looped the rope and were about to descend that Colin answered suddenly, with violence:

“Far from it!”

It was slower work than they had hoped. Before they had reached the bottom, the moonlight had gone from the cleft, and even with the rope they moved awkwardly. Once it became entangled in the undergrowth and Bret had to climb twenty feet to release it. When at last, with it re-coiled on his shoulder, he came round the corner of the ledge before the gap, he saw Susan standing on the other side considering it, her bent head amber coloured in the moonlight.

T
HE
moonlight filtering through the
leaves of the tree outside the window dappled the opposite wall with faintly moving spots of brilliance. Drew watched them unwillingly, his brain heavy, his eyes weighted by a weariness which brought no sleep. When he closed them he had an illusion of still seeing the road; it curled and twisted, it shot up hills and sank away into hollows, and always, with a jerk that brought him back violently from the edge of unconsciousness, it ended in a white railing over unfathomable depths—

So he kept them open and watched the pattern of moonlight, and wondered about Colin. What the devil did they all think he was, telling him a cock-and-bull story like that? What did you do about it when your son, your only son, drank, and played the fool with his property? What? He stirred restlessly but with caution because Milly was lying so still beside him. Nothing. That was the answer all right; just plain nothing.

Colin was a grown man and the mere detail of your paternal anxieties meant nothing any more. But years ago—

“What is it, Tom?”

Milly's hand felt for his; he grumbled: