31

Smoke Over High Topps

THE CAMP DOZED in the sweltering heat. Titty, Roger and Dorothea slept their well-earned sleep. Even Sappho, alone in the big cage, was silent, and slept upon her perch, her bill buried in the feathers of her breast.

Hour after hour went by.

There came a change in the air. The pigeon was the first to notice it, stirring uneasily in her cage. A smell of burning found its way into the dreams of the three sleeping miners. Roger patted the ground in his sleep. He was closing a leak in the earthy crust of the charcoal pudding, where the smoke was coming through. Dorothea dreamed of singeing a handkerchief in taking off a kettle. Titty was the first to be actually waked by the strange new smell. She rolled over and sniffed and sniffed again. Was it Susan’s cooking fire? Had the embers of the charcoal-burning somehow started again? As for the furnace, she remembered miserably how everything had gone wrong, and how the furnace had been pulled to pieces and the fire in it killed by anxious seekers for gold among its ashes. Susan must be making tea. Perhaps it was already late. How long had she slept? Titty did not know. Perhaps it was already next day.

‘Susan,’ said Titty quietly, so as not to wake the others. ‘Is he back? Is it gold after all?’

There was no answer.

Instead there was the whirr of wings overhead and the startled cry of frightened grouse. … ‘Go back. Go back. Go back!’ Several times during the last ten days the prospectors had put up grouse from among the heather, and Titty herself had once all but fallen backwards when an old cock grouse whirred up from under her feet with that sudden, loud, disturbing cry.

Why didn’t Susan answer? Or was it one of the others at the fire? Titty sat up and flung herself round so that she could see out into the camp. There was no one there. The camp fire, damped down by Susan, was dozing peaceably under its clods, from which little thin wisps of smoke were rising. All that smell of smoke could not be coming from there. It was a different smell, too. The ashes and ruins of the furnace were not smouldering. Nor were the remains of the charcoal. But how strong that smell was. And there was something funny about the camp. For the first time in daylight since they had been there, things were not casting shadows. No pattern of dappled leaves was dancing over the pale gold canvas of the tents. Something had happened to the sun.

More grouse whirred overhead.

Titty crawled out of the tent. On all fours at the mouth of it she sniffed again, and listened. A smell of burning, but not quite like the smell of wood smoke. And what was that noise? Sharp, sudden crackling. And the haze above the trees?

‘Roger … Dot … Get up … Get up at once.’

She reached into Roger’s tent, caught him by a foot and pulled him out. Dorothea’s face, startled, questioning, showed that she was at least awake.

‘Come out,’ said Titty. ‘It’s … At least I think it is. There’s a fire somewhere. …’

‘Where,’ said Roger. ‘Anyway, you shouldn’t pull me out like that. … It’s my foot. …’ But Titty was gone.

‘There really is a fire,’ said Dorothea.

Titty ran out of the camp by the little path that led to the well and so to the hedgehog’s bramble thicket and the narrow gully that made a pathway for them up the Great Wall. If there was a fire someone ought to tell the others at once. They would know what to do. That crackling was quite near. And she knew now that the haze overhead was smoke. She raced up the gully.

A huge wall of smoke lay across High Topps. Dimly, above it she saw the summit of Kanchenjunga. Along the foot of it was a line of crackling flames, now thin and broken, now suddenly leaping upwards like the tossed crest of a wave. Everything beyond it, until, far away, the top of the mountain climbed into the sky, was hidden by the rolling smoke. Somewhere over there was the gulch, but Titty knew at once that it was no use trying to get there. It never came into her head that the elders might be themselves in danger. They were cut off from the camp by this wall of smoke and the fire that made it. It would take them a long time to come to the rescue. Meanwhile she had to do the best she could. What would Susan be doing if she were here? Or John? And anyway, what was there to be done? Minute after minute passed and she still stood there looking at the smoke and the line of fire along the foot of it.

Dorothea and Roger climbed up and stood beside her.

‘Golly,’ said Roger. ‘Mrs Tyson’ll be saying “I told you so”.’

‘Dick’ll be safe at Beckfoot by now, won’t he?’ said Dorothea.

‘Ages ago,’ said Titty.

What little wind there was had been blowing from the south. There was a sudden change. The smoke rolled towards them as if Kanchenjunga had puffed at it. A moment later it rolled back again and they saw that in a dozen places the flames beneath it had leapt nearer.

‘It’s coming this way,’ said Roger.

‘Yes it is,’ said Dorothea.

‘We’ve got to save the camp,’ said Titty. ‘Once it gets to the trees nothing’ll stop it. Come on. Get the tents down.’

There was another sudden hot breath from Kanchenjunga across the Topps, another loud crackling as the fire leapt forward over the dry bent, and some patches of bracken flared up into the smoke.

The three of them rushed down the gully and back into the camp.

‘Roll up your sleeping-bag, Roger, and get your tent down. You, too, Dot. We’ll have to do everybody’s. And then we’ll have to get them down somehow. We’ll never be able to manage the handcart by ourselves. Oh dear, and there’s the pigeon’s cage. … And Sappho.’

‘Let her fly,’ said Roger. ‘She’ll be able to look after herself.’

Titty checked herself.

‘Well done, Rogie. We’ll send her for help. An S.O.S. Oh, if only she was Homer or Sophocles. … You can’t count on Sappho. But we’ll try. Anyway, she’ll be all right. She’ll get home some time or other. What are you doing, Dot?’

Dorothea was pushing The Outlaw of the Broads into her knapsack.

‘I must save the Outlaw,’ she said.

‘Let’s have a bit of paper,’ said Titty, and Dorothea, without hesitating a moment, tore off half the title-page of her precious novel.

‘And here’s a pencil,’ she said.

Titty wrote three words only:

‘FIRE HELP QUICK.’

She tore off the strip of paper on which she had written them and rolled it into a thin slip. Roger, who was on very good terms with Sappho, caught her without difficulty. He croodled to her to keep her calm. Dorothea was telling her to fly straight. ‘Keep out of the smoke and you’ll be all right. And you’ll find Dick at Beckfoot. Only do fly straight, just this once.’

Titty slipped the message under the rubber ring on Sappho’s left leg.

‘Shall I let her go?’ said Roger.

‘Not in the trees,’ said Titty.

They hurried back to the edge of the Topps. A wave of smoke rolled towards them.

‘Now,’ said Titty. ‘Quick!’

Roger threw the pigeon into the air.

‘You simply mustn’t hang about,’ said Titty. ‘Go home. Quick. Quick.’

And Sappho rose high above the smoke, and was gone.

‘She may not get home till tomorrow,’ said Dorothea. ‘You can’t count on Sappho.’

‘Come on and pack the tents,’ said Titty, and then, running down the gully, she remembered something else. Below the Great Wall was the bramble thicket. And in the bramble thicket was the hedgehog. What about him? It was no good calling to the hedgepig to come out. And if the fire came leaping down from the Topps, the bramble thicket would roar up in flames and the hedgepig would be cooked in the middle of them.

‘Never mind the tents,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to save the hedgepig.’ This was dreadful. First one thing and then another. No settled plan. Nancy or John would have thought of everything at once and there would have been none of this dithering.

‘We’ve got fire-brooms,’ suggested Roger.

‘If it gets to the edge of the Topps, we’re done,’ said Titty.

‘It’s blowing the other way now,’ said Dorothea, who had her knapsack on her back, empty except for the Outlaw.

At that moment the wind veered again. A hot breath blew in their faces and the smoke rolled towards them. It was only for a moment, but as the smoke rolled back and lifted, they saw that the fire had taken hold of a new wide strip of withered bent and bracken.

Titty looked about her. They were standing on the top of the long ridge of rock that made the Great Wall. There was very little grass there for the flames to catch, none at all, except in the cracks of the stone and in the gully that made a path down into the wood. Then, beyond the Great Wall, Nancy’s turf-cutting had made another obstacle for the fire, in the wide strip of ground from which the grassy clods had been lifted and used for the damping of the charcoal fire. If only the wind did not help the flames to leap across it, or send flying sparks to light the brambles and grass below the rock. Yes, there was just a chance … if the wind did not change.

‘We’ll want the fire-brooms,’ said Titty. ‘But first we must wet all the grass along the top of the Wall. …’

‘A chain of buckets going from hand to hand,’ said Dorothea.

‘We’ve only got one bucket,’ said Titty. ‘If they didn’t take it to the gulch. But there’s the kettle. If only we hadn’t used such a lot of water yesterday. …’

Roger was already in the camp and lugging a couple of the fire-brooms along the ground.

‘There’s lots of water in the well,’ Titty shouted. ‘Kettle, Dot!’

‘The kettle’s full,’ called Dorothea. ‘Susan filled it.’

‘Oh good,’ said Titty, looking quickly round the camp. ‘But they’ve taken the saucepan. And they’ve got the bucket, too. …’

‘There’s a biscuit tin,’ said Roger. ‘We can eat the biscuits or put them in our pockets.’

‘Come on, then. Damping first. Fire-brooms later.’ She took the big sugar tin and emptied all the lump sugar out on the ground. Susan herself would not have tried to save it. If only they had thought of anything like this happening, they would never have taken the bucket. Titty filled the sugar tin and raced after Dorothea, who had run on with the kettle.

‘What am I to do with it?’ said Dorothea.

‘Wet the grass at the top of the gully,’ said Titty. ‘Wet all the grass along the top of the rock, on this side of Nancy’s digging. The fire’ll go out if it has nothing to burn but stone.’

Titty slopped the water out of the sugar tin. Dorothea used the kettle as a watering-can, pouring the water on the dry ground, that was so dry that the water did not sink into it but lay in sparkling drops. They raced down the gully to the well, and met Roger coming carefully up with a biscuit tin full to the brim.

‘What have you been doing?’ said Titty.

‘I hadn’t got room in my pockets for all the biscuits,’ said Roger. ‘So I piled the rest in the store tent.’

‘Buck up,’ said Titty. ‘There ought to be fifty of us instead of three.’

The fire was nearer each time they came back to the top of the rock. It checked for some minutes at one of the ridges of stone that pushed up out of the heather. They began almost to think it had been stopped, and then they saw little flames trickling over the ridge, following the moss and grass that had found foothold between the rocks. It flared up again on the near side of the ridge as the flames caught a wide patch of bracken.

Backwards and forwards they ran, with kettle, biscuit tin, sugar tin, pudding bowl and even washing-up basin, Titty and Dorothea managing two things at once. But after the first few journeys, the level of the water in the well began to fall. Good little spring though it was, they were taking water out faster than it was coming in.

‘It wouldn’t be much good if there were fifty of us,’ said Roger at last, out of breath with running to and fro. ‘The well’s empty. I’ve scooped the last mud with the lid of the tin. We’ve got to give it time to fill up again.’

‘It’ll be too late,’ said Dorothea.

‘John and Susan and the Amazons’ll be here soon,’ said Titty, looking desperately into the high wall of smoke that was rolling towards Ling Scar and now hid even the peak of Kanchenjunga. ‘They’ll be able to get round behind it. …’

And then once more, when it had almost seemed that the fire was sweeping past them, the wind wavered, a line of fire raced across the ground under the smoke, and the sea of bracken, in which so often scouts had lurked, flared up with a crackling roar as if someone were wasting thousands of fireworks by lighting them all at once.

‘It’s coming,’ said Roger. ‘What ought we to do about the tents? …’

‘Oh PLEASE rain. … PLEASE rain. …’ Dorothea did not know that she was saying the words aloud.

‘Beat it out,’ cried Titty. ‘Beat it out … wherever it starts. … Look out. There’s a bit burning behind you. … On the rock.’

The fire was licking along the edge of the Topps. If the wind were to swing round to the west and stay there, nothing could save them. Even as it was, smoke filled their eyes, and sparks fluttered in the air like burning moths. They hurried this way and that along the Great Wall, stumbling, half-blind, flailing away with their fire-brooms at tufts of grass that caught fire, smouldered and flared at their very feet.

‘I do wish they’d be quick,’ said Titty to herself. ‘Stick to it, Rogie! Well done, Dot!’ and then, to herself again, ‘We’ll never do it alone. …’