Arthur Ransome - Swallows and Amazons (Complete Series)

There were no accidents. Both the explorers climbed safely out on the bank. Sitting so close under the wall that nobody could have seen them from the road, they dried their feet on their handkerchiefs, put their shoes on again, waited for a moment when nothing seemed to be passing, and darted forward in among the larch trees.

They climbed now, up through the steep larch wood, where the beck came noisily leaping down stone stairs to meet them. Up they climbed, keeping close to the stream until the larches ended and they were once more among hazels and oaks like those in the wood they had left on the other side of the road. And then, suddenly there were no more trees, and the able-seaman and the boy stood under the open sky at the edge of the forest, looking out over mile upon mile of green and purple moorland, green with waving bracken, purple with knee-deep heather. And beyond the moorland, the sunshine searching their gullies and crags, rose the blue hills that from up here looked bigger, far, than they had seemed when looked at from Wild Cat Island or from Holly Howe.

“We must have one of them for Kanchenjunga,” said Titty.

“Which one?”

“The biggest.”

The stream came tumbling and twisting across the moorland to drop at their feet into the woods. In its winter strength it had washed away the earth round great stones and carved a deep gully for itself, so that though they could see where it was they could not see the water except close to them.

“Are we going on?” asked the boy.

“We can’t get lost if we keep close to the beck,” said the able-seaman.

She started forward again along a sheep track that led through the heather close above the stream. The boy ate a piece of the chocolate he had saved, and hurried after the able-seaman. Sometimes the bracken grew so high that they could hardly see each other. Sometimes the sheep track wound down along the edge of the stream, turning this way and that round pale grey stones, and then climbed up again to twist its way among the tough clumps of purple heather. There was the stream to guide them, and now there was a new noise to draw them on. This was the noise of falling water, the same noise that they had had close beside them while they were climbing through the larch wood, but much louder now, and different when heard on the open moorland instead of under the trees.

“Look,” said the able-seaman suddenly. “There it is.”

They hurried on until they stood below the waterfall. Above them the water poured down noisily from ledge to ledge of rock, and they could go no farther without climbing up the rocks beside the falling water or getting out of the long winding gully that the stream had carved for itself in the moor.

The able-seaman hesitated. This time it was the boy who wanted to go on. Before she had made up her mind, he was already climbing. A moment later she was climbing too, and they came together to the top of the dry rocks at the side of the fall.

“That was easy climbing,” said the boy. “Hullo! . . .”

Neither of them had expected anything like what they found when they scrambled over the top. It was a little valley in the moorland, shut in by another waterfall at the head of it, not a hundred yards away, and by slopes of rock and heather that rose so steeply that when the explorers looked up they could see nothing but the sky above them. In there it was as if the blue mountains did not exist. The valley might have been hung in air, for all that they could see outside it, except when they turned round and looked back, from the top of the waterfall they had climbed, to the moorland, the woods and the hills on the other side of the lake.

“It’s a lovely place for brigands,” said the boy.

“It’s just the place for Peter Duck,” said the able-seaman. “It’s the most secret valley that ever there was in the world.”

Peter Duck had grown up gradually to be one of the able-seaman’s most constant companions, shared now and then by the boy, but not taken very seriously by the others, though nobody laughed at him. He had been the most important character in the story they had made up during those winter evenings in the cabin of the wherry with Nancy and Peggy and Captain Flint. Peter Duck, who said he had been afloat ever since he was a duckling, was the old sailor who had voyaged with them to the Caribbees in the story and, still in the story, had come back to Lowestoft with his pockets full of pirate gold. Titty had had a big share in his invention, and now she made him useful in all sorts of ways, sometimes when she and Roger were together, but mostly when she was by herself. Anything might happen to Peter Duck and he would always come out all right. Dolls meant nothing to Titty. Peter Duck was a great deal more useful than any doll could have been. He could always tidy himself away. He never got lost. He had no sawdust to run out. And she had only to think of him, when there he was, ready for any adventure in which he might be wanted.

“He could hide here from anybody who wanted to bother him. I don’t believe he’s ever had a better place. Let’s see what it looks like from the top.”

Roger was already on his feet and crossing the stream, jumping from one dry stone to another.

“You go up that side,” Titty called to him, “and I’ll go up this, and then we’ll see if it’s as secret as it looks.”

They climbed up opposite sides of the valley and looked back at each other. They found they had only to go a few yards from the edge of it not to see that it was there. Titty in the heather above one side of the valley and Roger in the heather above the other side would never, if they had not known, have guessed that a valley lay between them.

“It’s absolutely perfect,” shouted Titty.

“I think so, too,” shouted Roger.

They scrambled down again to meet in the bottom, and followed the stream to the upper waterfall. In several of the little pools on the way they saw small trout, and in the big pool under the waterfall, just as they got there, a larger trout jumped clean into the air after a fly and dropped again into the pool in a splash of silver.

“Peter Duck’ll be able to fish,” said Titty. “He always liked it. Do you remember how he was always trailing a hook for sharks over the stern of the schooner?”

“We’ll fish too,” said Roger. “What about our tea?”

That was the worst of Roger. He might get hungry at any minute.

“Have my chocolate,” said the able-seaman. “I don’t want it.”

“Really?” said Roger.

“Of course,” said Titty.

“Let’s wait and see if that fish jumps again,” said Roger, “and I’ll eat the chocolate while we’re watching.”

Titty handed over her chocolate and looked back down the valley and out through the Y-shaped gap at the foot of it to the hills on the other side of the lake, and to other hills beyond them, hills so far away that she might have thought them clouds if the sky overhead had not been so very clear. From this upper end of the valley she could not see the moor below the waterfall, or the woods through which they had climbed. She looked at the valley itself, and its steep sides, one of them, on the right, almost a precipice of rock, with heather growing in the cracks of it, and the other, on the left, not so steep, with grass on it, bracken and loose stones. She was wishing she had her map with her, to mark in it the stream and the newly discovered valley, when, on a warm stone close to her, she saw a tortoiseshell butterfly, resting in the sunshine, with his brown and blue and orange and black wings spread out and all but still.

“Isn’t he a beauty?” she said, and as she said it the butterfly fluttered off the stone and away down the valley, never far from the ground.

“He’ll perch again and open his wings in a minute,” she said, and indeed the butterfly presently dropped on a clump of heather growing low down in a cleft in the steep slope of grey rock at which she had been looking.