Collected Short Stories. Patrick O’Brian

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СКАЧАТЬ he said: and Now for it, he said, as he passed into a hurtling rush down; but still he hunched his shoulders to protect his head and forced his hands into the snow. The sense of responsibility was gone and with it his fear: he expected one dark blow, a smashing blow and the end, but not without a certain constancy of mind.

      His feet were against a rock, a firm rock. It was all over; and he was still, unmoving and unhurt. He lay for a moment, for some minutes, breathing and looking at the sky. He was wet, soaked through and through; the whole of his back was wet through and the caked snow was forced into his clothes. Was he hurt? No, he was not hurt. His hands were strange to him, but he was not hurt – all whole. He got up, trembling and shaken: he did not think very clearly now, in this strong reaction.

      The trees were a good deal nearer: Brown was halfway down the mountain-face. He could not see the others when he looked up, nor could he be sure of the place where he had started. He looked down, but the huntsman was no longer to be seen.

      He felt that there was a strong necessity to go on, not to stop, not to make anything of it. He thought slowly: perhaps he had been stunned, had been unconscious for a while without knowing it? How otherwise could Emrys have vanished like that?

      He went on a few steps farther down to look from side to side: no man could he see, but there was a neat precipice, only fifteen or twenty feet deep, but sheer, and if he had not fetched up where he did he would have gone over it without any sort of doubt. This shocked him unreasonably and he turned his face to the dark crags above him. How he longed for the rough, strong rocks, firm and true: their steepness was nothing, he said inwardly, for they were reft and fissured and it was like going up a ladder.

      Without thinking any more he started to move up. From where he was the crags seemed continuous right from where the grass ended to the very top, and once the rock was gained it did not look at all difficult to go up over the summit of Wenallt.

      His new way was easier than creeping sideways across the mountain, but it meant going on all fours, and soon the snow had so numbed his battered hands that all the strength left them. They would hardly even open and close, so when he reached the first of the rocks he could not go up. He rested a long while before they recovered, and in a few minutes that he took in climbing the first stretch their strength went again. Again he rested, this time under an overhanging rock where sheep had stood years beyond counting in hard weather. By some freak his sandwiches had escaped being crushed into a mess, and eating them brought Brown back to common things and to a comforting sense of ordinariness – a feeling that had been quite stripped from him for some time before. He was shivering in his soaked clothes, soaked in front now as well as behind, for he had groped upward through deeper snow on his hands and knees; but his courage was fairly well as he came out of the sheep’s place.

      He could see three separate masses of rock above him, and no more: he would be climbing them, he could see, in the right direction – that is, his path would carry him over toward Cwm Dyli, and he reckoned that from the top of the third crag he would see round into the valley on the other side.

      The first crag was steady, exhausting climbing, not difficult, but needing continual strong effort. At the top of it was a stretch of open shale before the foot of the next crag. This was anxious going, very, for the snow was far thicker at this height, and it was not a pretty task to creep over unseen shale pitched at that angle and with that vast amount of world below. Brown set himself to it, and worked up along the edge of the scree, where he knew the bigger stones would be lying under the snow.

      His good fortune brought him up to the top, under the second crag, trembling with the effort. He had to wait for his hands again, and now for the first time, as he squatted out of the way of the little breeze, cramps seized him with force and anguish, so that he grunted aloud. Now his heart began to falter a little, less at the pain and the fear that they might grasp him again when he was crucified on a rock than at the new appearance of the crag above him: rocks that had appeared to be joined when he decided to climb them now had showed themselves to be far apart, separated by stretches of snow that might conceal anything, stretches that tilted shockingly, so that some of them looked almost vertical.

      However, he hoisted himself up the nearest rock, and reached for the next handhold; it was a high, flat rock-face that he was going up now, and he had to walk up it with his feet while he held on with both hands. As he looked down to see whether his right foot was well placed, looking down with his chin in his chest, he saw beyond his foot black rock and snow stretching down forever, then that horrible plane slope, and infinitely far away the trees and the lake. These he saw upside down, and he sickened at the sight. With a convulsive, wasteful effort he struggled to the top and lay there. He knew that he must not look down any more, for his courage was beginning to go, and with it his freedom from the terror of height.

      It was while he was on the third mass of rock, worming himself across a gully to a climbable rock, that he came face to face with a hound. It was Ringwood, obviously coming down from the top. He was followed by others: they looked momentarily at Brown and went on. Even with four legs they found it hard, and one slipped twenty feet and more while Brown watched them. He no longer minded about hounds: all that he wanted, and the huge want filled him to the exclusion of all else, was firm ground, level ground, under his feet and the sky in its right place over his head.

      The topmost piece of the third crag was an ugly, out-leaning breast of rock with a narrow cleft in it. The strength of his hands was gone again, and as he stood wedged in this cleft he thought he was going to fall at last. He did not fall, though he swayed backward; his elbow held, and with his chin ground down to the top of the rock and a chance grip for his knee he came up to the top. Kneeling there, almost sick with the muscular effort, he saw that what he had climbed was a false crest. Beyond and above him stretched three hundred feet of nearly perpendicular rock, interspersed with gullies and patches of shale. A wide tract of flattish ground that led back from the top of the false peak had hidden all this from him as he stood below: even now what he saw as the top might not be the real summit.

      Without allowing himself to formulate anything about this, Brown began to walk across the dead ground. The gesture was very well, but after he had climbed a little way cold despair overtook him. This was worse than the mountain below: the rocks were farther apart, the bare, smooth slopes steeper and wider. It was unclimbable; his strength was almost gone and there was no way down.

      When he came to a platform with a sheltering slab over it Brown stopped. The last phase of climbing had had a nightmarish quality; not daring to look down any more, he had won the last fifty feet at the cost of cruel labour and intense apprehension with each movement. All the time stark, naked fear had been on him, and it was on him now, and he knew that it was a rightful fear.

      For a long time he squatted, inert and unfeeling. A cramp revived him and he noticed that the sun had come round the edge of the mountain. The sky was still the same unclouded perfection of a sky that it had been in the morning. He did not know the time – could not guess it, either. His watch had stopped when he had gone down.

      Now that he was wholly determined not to go on he felt better. He looked down, pressing his back against the firm rock, and he experienced that sense of flying that comes with some kinds of giddiness. This passed, and he surveyed the country below him. He had come a long way: the trees were even more distant. A feeling of utter, desolate remoteness filled him: he seemed quite cut off from the world. But so long as he was no longer going to drive himself up he did not mind very actively: no more fruitless crawling up, with knees and hands slipping and every movement perilous, arduous beyond bearing: to be left alone, that was the thing.

      How kind the weather has been, he said after a great timeless pause; if it had blown hard or snowed some more I should have gone before now. How long would it be? he asked; but made no reply.

      Far, far down, a little above the wood there was Gonville running with the immense strides of a man going downhill; СКАЧАТЬ