Arthur Ransome - Swallows and Amazons (Complete Series)

“Well,” said the mate cheerfully, “you’ve been taking your time.”

“We’ve been up the Watch Tower Rock. Hullo! What a gorgeous place for Polly. When did you make it? It wasn’t here before.”

“While you two were cutting heather.”

“We’ve been up on the rock, too. You can see a hundred miles from it all ways.”

“North, south, east and west,” said Roger.

“And there’s a bit of a hollow in the top of the rock so that if you lie down, nobody can see you except with a telescope from the tops of the mountains.”

“Come and look at it,” said Roger.

“Dinner first,” said the mate. “Come here, Able-seaman, and you too, Boy, and shell peas, so that the captain can be making the broom. Then you can all go to look at the rock after dinner while I’m sweeping out the larder.”

“Peter Duck’s,” said Titty.

The able-seaman and the boy set to work on the rest of the peas. They gave a pod to the parrot, and he shelled the peas beautifully, and tore the pod to bits and threw them away, but he dropped the peas and anyhow Susan said they would not be clean enough to put in with the rest. As soon as the peas were shelled, Susan was able to hurry on with the dinner: a good one, hotted pemmican and green peas with a lot of butter on them, and after that the usual bunloaf and marmalade, chocolate and apples. Meanwhile, John took the other half of the carrying-pole, left after making the perch for the parrot, and bound a huge bundle of heather to the end of it with stout string, whipping it round and round the black woody stems of the heather and finishing it off so that you could not see where the string began, as if he were putting a whipping on the end of a rope. He made a really good job of it, and when the mate saw her broom she was almost as eager to use it as the others were to go up to the Watch Tower Rock. But by that time dinner was ready, and no cook likes to let a cooked dinner wait, so the broom was propped against a rock until the meal was over and the dirty things were at the bottom of the little whirlpool being washed by clean beck water.

For one moment the able-seaman and the boy thought they would like to help in cleaning out the cave. But the mate stopped all thought of that.

“It’ll be very dirty,” she said, “and there won’t be room to turn round in it if we are all crowding in there. Let me get it swept out and clean so that we know where we are, and then you can come in as much as you like.”

“Come along,” said the captain. “No camp’s much good without a proper look-out place. We must have a good place for looking out over the moor. Remember what the Amazons said about a surprise attack. They’ll make it too, but they’ll be the ones to get the surprise.”

“There couldn’t be a better place than the rock,” said Titty.

“Well, leave the mate to her job and let’s go to the rock to make sure.”

The rock was all that Titty and Roger had promised. It was more, for the best way of climbing it, up or down, was on the side of it nearest to Swallowdale.

“It’ll do,” said Captain John, after he had tried it by leaving Titty and Roger on the top of it and going off himself a long way over the moor, waving his hand to show them when to start and finding that they were already down and creeping to meet him along a sheep-track in the heather while, watching the rock as hard as he could, he was still thinking that they hadn’t stirred.

“Good scouts!” he said. “Nothing could be better. Someone must keep watch up here every day, and then slip back to Swallowdale to give warning the moment the enemy are in sight.”

They went rejoicing back to Swallowdale to find the mate standing by the tents and looking at the side of the valley above the entrance to Peter Duck’s cave.

“What’s the matter?” said John, as he rushed down the steep slope on the other side and cleared the stream with a jump.

“Look,” said the mate.

“What is it?”

“Look.” The mate pointed to the rounded end of a stout stick poking out through a clump of heather above the way into the cave and a bit to one side. “That’s the broom handle. I pushed it through from inside. I had a candle lantern in there and knocked it over while I was brushing. And then I saw just a glimmer higher up in the roof, and I poked at it with the broom handle and it went right through. That’s why the air in the cave is not bad, except for the dust. I expect people lived in it once.”

“Well done, Susan,” said John. “Then it’ll be all right for us all to hide inside the cave in case of an attack. It’s exactly what we wanted. I was bothered about it a bit. I’ll go up and clear the hole.”

“It means it’ll be all right to let the parrot sleep there at night,” said Susan. “We can’t put up the stores tent for him, and there isn’t room for him in Titty’s, and it wouldn’t have done for him to get stifled.”

“It was probably Peter Duck who knocked the lantern over so that you would see the hole,” said Titty. “He knew the parrot was coming to stay with him.”

“Well, it may have been,” said Susan, who was very pleased indeed to find that her larder was properly aired, and did not mind Peter Duck making any use of it he liked.

John climbed up the rocky side of the valley, pushed the broom handle in again, so that the broom fell on the floor of the cave, and cut away a little of the heather, enough to let more air through the hole, but not enough to make anyone notice it.

Then everybody went into the cave. Susan had made a different place of it. The dust was gone. She had brought water from the beck and slopped it on the ground before brushing. “Another time, I’m going to use tea-leaves,” she said. “To-day I’d thrown them away before thinking of it.” The biscuit-tins and all the other loose bits of luggage were already neatly packed along the walls. The biscuit-tins would do for seats, as Titty and Roger found at once. Along the side of one wall there was a deep fault in the stone which made a shelf, not quite level, but level enough in places for a candle lantern to stand there, well out of the way. “Just right,” said John. “Except in the dark, no one would see a glimmer of it from the doorway.” The air-hole up above gave very little light, even after John had cut the heather.

“Now,” said the mate, when everybody had admired enough, “we’ve used all the wood for to-day’s dinner. The camp’s ready. Let’s settle down to work. All hands to gather fuel. And after that what about holiday tasks?”

“There’s the bathing-pool to make,” said John.

“A dam to build,” said Roger.

“We must do that, or we shan’t be able to bathe to-morrow,” said Titty.

“Well, I suppose we ought to have a proper bath,” said the mate. “But we must pile up a store of wood first.”

By tea-time there was a wood-stack in the cave as good as the stack the Amazons had made for them on Wild Cat Island. By supper-time the explorers, splashed from head to foot, were resting from their labours, and watching the water lapping over the edge of a dam firmly built of large stones, with small ones between them, smaller stones scraped up from the bottom of the pool to fill in the gaps, flat turfs laid against all this and yet another layer of big stones to keep all firm. The dam raised the water more than a foot, and the waterfall at the head of the valley fell now with a new note into a pool not perhaps big enough to swim in, but far better than any ordinary bath. The explorers wriggled down in their tents that night with the knowledge of a good day’s work behind them. Life in Swallowdale had begun.

THE CAMP IN SWALLOWDALE