Hammond Innes - Campbell's Kingdom

The line of the timber loomed ahead. Soon it had closed round us, the trees silent and black, their upper branches sagging under the weight of the snow. The road was furrowed by wheel tracks and here and there the broad tracks of a bulldozer showed through the carpet of snow. Wherever there were drifts the snow had been shovelled aside in great banks and the edges of the road were piled with the debris that had been torn out to make it; small trees, chunks of ice and hardpacked snow, gravel and dirt and stones and the rocks of minor falls.

The road was about twelve feet wide with passing points almost every mile. Where streams came down, which was often, the gullies had been packed with timber to form a bridge and damp patches had been surfaced with logs placed corduroy-fashion.

We were climbing steeply now, reaching back into a tributary of Thunder Creek to gain height. The road twisted and turned, sometimes running across bare, smooth rock ledges, sometimes under overhanging cliffs.

We topped a shoulder of rock, bare of trees, and I caught a brief glimpse of two snow-covered peaks towering above the dark, timbered slopes and of a sheer wall of rock that fell like a black curtain across the end of the valley, its gloom emphasised by a tracery of snow-packed crevices and occasional patches of ice. ‘That’s the slide I was telling you about,’ the driver shouted. ‘And that’s Solomon’s Judgment, those twin peaks.’ He revved the big diesel engine and changed gear.

‘Do you know Campbell’s Kingdom?’ I asked him. ‘Heard of it,’ he said, keeping his eyes on the road, which was running sharply down to the bed of a ravine. ‘Can’t say I’ve ever been there.’

‘Do you know where it is?’

‘Sure.’ He eased the big truck over the logs that bridged the stream bed and nursed it up the further side. As the lorry’s snout lifted above the slope the twin peaks rose to meet us above the trees until they filled the whole sky ahead. ‘Campbell’s Kingdom is up there,’ he said, pointing to the peaks.

My heart sank. It looked a hell of a climb. ‘How far does the road go?’ I asked.

‘The road? Well, it doesn’t go up to the Kingdom.’ He laughed. ‘There’s two thousand feet of cliff there.’

He swung the truck round a bend and there, straight ahead of us, two bulldozers and a gang of men were working on a section of the track that had been completely obliterated. There was a closed three-tonner parked at the end of the road and we drew in behind it and stopped.

We were standing on the lip of an almost sheer drop of several hundred feet. Somehow the pines managed to cling to the slope and I found myself looking down over their snow-laden tops to the creek below. Now that the engine was stopped I could hear the roar of the water. Ahead of us, where the construction gang was working, the road swung round under an overhang. Part of the cliff had gone, taking the road with it. The place looked as though it had been blasted by shell fire. All the trees had been swept clean away on a broad front, swept down into the valley bottom with millions of tons of snow. ‘An avalanche did that by the looks of it,’ the driver said. The snow had completely engulfed the waters of Thunder Creek which flowed out from a black arch underneath it. ‘Heh, Ben! I got your other bulldozer for you.’

Creasy was coming back up the road towards us. He was dressed in a fleece-lined jacket and ski cap. ‘About time,’ he said. ‘This is a fair cow, this one.’

He looked across at me. ‘You haven’t wasted much time getting out here.’ He turned to the driver who was already in the back of the truck loosening the securing tackle of the bulldozer. ‘Okay, George. There’s a good snow bank over there. I’ll get some men on to it right away, then you back up and we’ll run her off same as we did the others.’

I left them to it and went down the road to where the bulldozers were working. They had blasted back into the cliff face and the big D7s were hefting the rocks out with their broad blades and shovelling them over the edge, steadily building outwards. I stood on the lip of the road and stared up at the twin peaks of Solomon’s Judgment. From their summits powdery snow streamed lazily upward like smoke. Separating the two peaks was a narrow cleft, a dark gash in the mountain face, and across the upper end of it was wedged a shelf of rock like a wall. Something about that wall caught and held my gaze. Though it was breached in the centre it was too regular to be natural and it was of a lighter shade than the rock walls of the cleft.

‘Like to have a look through these?’ The driver was standing beside me and he was offering me a pair of binoculars. I focused them on the cleft and instantly the lighter coloured rock resolved itself into a wall of concrete. I was looking at a dam, completed except for the centre section.

‘When was that built?’ I asked the driver.

‘It was begun in the summer of 1939,’ he replied, ‘when the Government reckoned they’d need to open up the Larsen mines for the rearmament drive. They stopped work when the States came into the war. It became cheaper to get out ore from across the border, I guess. Now, of course, with the price of lead at the level it is today-’

‘They’re going to complete the dam — is that it? That’s what this road is for?’

He nodded. ‘You can just see the cable of the hoist if you look carefully. It runs up to a pylon at the top.’

I searched the cliff face and gradually made out the slender thread of the cable rising to a concrete pylon on the cliff top and snaking back to a squat housing to the left of the dam and a little above it.’

I lowered the glasses, the truth slowly dawning on me. ‘Where exactly is Campbell’s Kingdom?’ I asked him.

‘Up there.’ He nodded towards the dam. ‘Just through the cleft.’

‘Where’s the boundary of the property?’

‘I wouldn’t know exactly.’

I turned as a bulldozer thrust a great pile of blast-shattered rock towards the lip of the road. They’d been so damned sure I’d sell that they’d started the work without even waiting for me to sign the deeds.

I looked round. Creasy was standing a little way up the road. I got the impression he had been watching me. No wonder they’d been worried last night. Anger boiled up inside me. If they’d given me the details, if they’d explained that there was a dam three-quarters built already… I went over to him. ‘Who ordered you to build this road?’ I demanded.

‘That any of your business?’ His tone was sullen.

‘This road is being built to bring material up to complete the dam, isn’t it?’ I asked. ‘And if the dam is on my property-’

‘It isn’t on your property.’

‘Well, where’s the Campbell land start?’

‘Just the other side of the dam.’ He turned away and moved towards the face of the overhang. ‘Looks like we got to do some more blasting,’ he said to his foreman. I followed him over and listened to him giving instructions to the driller. The compressed air unit started up with a roar and the drills began to eat into the rock.- Above the din I shouted, ‘You still haven’t told me who you’re building this road for?’

He turned on me angrily. ‘Suppose you leave me to get on with it. I’m paid to build the damned thing, not to answer a lot of questions. You may own old Campbell’s Kingdom, but this is Trevedian land and what happens down here is nothing to do with you.’

‘I think it is.’

‘All right. Then go and talk to Peter Trevedian and stop worrying me. Blasting this stuff isn’t as easy as it looks.’ He turned his back on me and shouted instructions to his drillers. Somebody yelled at me to get out of the way and a bulldozer started towards the lip of the road, thrusting about five tons of rubble in front of its blade.