Jacqui had made up her mind; she was going to the top of the mountain.
‘Why?’ John asked her.
‘Because it’s there.’
She had a vague idea that someone had said that before, but never mind.
‘Your folks’ll leather you, they find out.’
They wouldn’t do that but they might forbid it, if they knew what she was planning.
‘Shan’t tell them.’
‘What’s up there?’
The Cloud Forest was up there, and the mystery. The answer to all the stories she had heard: Great-grandfather Colin, who’d been the first to see it; Grandfather Charlie, who’d come all the way from France yet never even reached Queensland; Arthur, who lived right here at the foot of the mountain yet, as far as she knew, had never set foot on it.
Frances had told her that Colin had been her age when he’d climbed it. Whatever he’d found had started the story that had carried on ever since. Now it was her turn to find out what was up there.
‘Maybe there’s nothing there at all,’ John said.
‘At least we can find out, can’t we? One way or the other?’
‘Your uncle’s never done it. Your granddad, neither, what you told me.’
That, too, was part of the mystery. ‘Maybe it’s something only kids can do.’
‘To climb a mountain?’
‘To understand what’s up there.’
John was staring at her. ‘You’re barmy, you know that?’
‘Don’t have to come, you don’t want to.’
‘Course I’m coming.’
They said they were going for a picnic; which was true, in a way. They took a rucksack, some rolls and a piece of sausage, chocolate, a sticky bun each, a full water bottle.
‘Where are you going?’ Judy asked.
‘Up into the forest, maybe,’ said Jacqui, deliberately vague.
‘No,’ Judy said.
Jacqui looked at her. ‘No?’
‘None of this maybe business. I want to know. In case we have to come looking for you.’
‘Up the mountain,’ Jacqui said. ‘We thought we’d go and play in the forest.’
‘Take care, you hear?’
To Arthur, Judy said: ‘Should we let them?’
‘Why not?’
She loved him as dearly as ever — more, if that were possible — but sometimes his reluctance to become involved in things made her want to strangle him.
‘Because of Luke Shaughnessy.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about him.’
‘You don’t think he’d do anything?’
‘Not in a million years. Blokes like that, it’s talk rather than action. Always.’
She wished she could feel so sure. ‘I hope you’re right.’
‘I am. There’s another reason, in any case,’ Arthur said.
‘Which is?’
‘If we allow people like Luke to frighten us into not doing the things we want to do, it means we’ve let them beat us.’
‘We’re talking about two little children,’ Judy objected. ‘What chance would they have against someone like Luke Shaughnessy?’
‘Even little children have to live their lives. Them most of all.’ He put his hand on her shoulder. ‘I really don’t see Luke as a problem, even if he knew where they were. Do we, incidentally?’
‘Jacqui was a bit vague. Deliberately so, I’d say. But she mentioned the mountain.’
He looked at her. ‘You don’t think she’s planning to go to the top, do you?’
‘I reckon she might.’
‘That damn rock … I should’ve done it myself, I suppose; that would’ve taken all the nonsense out of it. I’ve thought about it enough times but somehow it’s never happened.’
Arthur was not a man of action unless his emotions were involved, which took some doing, as Judy knew better than most. On the other hand he’d chased Luke off his verandah, no worries. She knew all about that, too, had stickybeaked on their conversation, if you could call it that. She’d almost cheered when Luke had gone belting off into the night. She remained uneasy, all the same; she feared that Luke was a man who believed in vengeance.
‘I don’t see even Luke doing anything to two little kids,’ Arthur said.
‘Sober, they’re about the only ones he would go for,’ she told him.
He tried to make a joke of it. ‘Maybe we’d better hope he’s drunk, then.’
‘Drunk, he’ll go for anyone.’
‘Where d’you two think you’re going?’ demanded Betty. ‘Heading straight into trouble, I know anything about it.’
‘It’s only a picnic.’
They had gone to see Frances and missed her. Betty was alone, with her prophecies of catastrophe.
‘Picnics cause troubles, same as anything else.’
As soon as they could they fled, while Betty’s portents of disaster rumbled like thunder: gonna get lost, gonna fall off a cliff, gonna break your necks, and the mountain opened its green arms to them in invitation.
Up into the forest, then, where the shadows drew close about them.
The air was different here and both of them felt it. For the first time they were alone upon the mountain, not simply to explore, but with the determination to get to the top. It was a challenge both to themselves and to the landscape of rocks, water and ferns that represented the mystery that Jacqui, at least, had come here to solve.
By midmorning they had reached the point where they had turned back before. From here on they would be on new ground. The mystery closed about them with the chilly tang of the cloud that now hung not far above them.
John pointed at it. ‘Get into that, we won’t see a thing.’
‘Don’t you start.’
But he was right. The tendrils of mist drifted through the tree ferns, resting on the lichen-flecked rocks, winding around the trunks of trees. The children climbed higher. The mist cuddled close about them. They sipped its cold breath and the world was grey.
‘Did you know it was going to be like this?’ Like his body, John’s voice appeared ghost-like amid the mist.
‘Of course I knew.’
But she had not. The mystery was here, all right, but whether she wanted to know about it she was now less sure. What was so wonderful about a spooky place that was so dark you could hardly see where you were going?
She was still thinking that it might all have been a mistake, that they should never have come up here at all, when the mist opened as though a curtain had been drawn back.
A glitter of sunlight; trees spangled with moisture as bright as diamonds; the vastness of the mountain’s flank plunging steeply into the distant trees.
The slanting rays of the sun pierced the lacy canopy of leaves. Everything was sparkling and alive; the water shone silver in the streams; creepers festooned the branches of the trees or hung in loops almost to the ground; birds flashed like gleams of red and green light.
They stopped, transfixed, and stared about them. It was wonder, yet more than wonder. It was something unlike anything either of them had seen before. The vegetation — bent trees with their heavy bark black with moisture, the delicate tracery of leaf and fern — was strange and mysterious, utterly different from what they were used to down on the hot plain.
‘The Realm of Ultimate Desire …’
John stared. ‘What?’
‘Frances called it that once.’
She had forgotten she had ever heard the words yet now, with the Cloud Forest all about them, they came back to her with the crystalline clarity of a bell ringing in the green light, uniting past and present, perhaps even the future, in this moment of wonder and delight.
She raised her hands as high as they would go and turned and turned, her eyes embracing everything about her.
‘The Realm of Ultimate Desire,’ she repeated, throwing the words exultantly into the trees and the shining air. She still wasn’t sure what the words meant, knew only that they sounded good, right. She turned eagerly to John. ‘It was worth coming up here, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?’
John was a bit lost with all this talk of realms and desires, was beginning to wonder if he’d ever known this girl at all. He jerked his head up the steep slope that might lead them eventually to the summit of the mountain, still so far away. ‘If we’re going to the top we’d better get on with it.’
But now Jacqui did not want to go further, not because she was afraid of what might lie ahead but because it seemed to her wrong to do so. That was the place of magic, the source of the mystery. Here they had come to an awareness of that magic, had felt it in the air about them, in the green and smiling trees. Here was close enough.
She wasn’t sure about saying that sort of thing. She wouldn’t be comfortable trying to put it into words. She was also afraid that doing so might make John think she was even more loopy than he probably did already.
‘We’d better go back,’ she said. ‘They’ll be after us if we’re late.’
All they needed was to have Betty, Frances, Judy, even Arthur trampling all over everything in search of them. And then to be chivvied and scolded down again … No.
She wondered about that. Those four people she loved more than anyone she knew, yet she didn’t want them here. What she had felt when the cloud opened around them had been so private and wonderful that she didn’t want to share it with anyone, was frightened that it might be damaged if she brought it into the light. The feeling tied her to the boy who had stood here a hundred years before and who must have felt as she did now. It was an odd thing to be so close to the past that you felt a part of it.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s get moving.’
‘Maybe we’ll have a chance to look at that cave I spotted last time,’ John said.
She had forgotten about the cave he had found, or said he had found. If they had time, and if they could find it again, why shouldn’t they look at it? She quite fancied the idea; like everything else about the day, it would be part of The Great Adventure that she had set her heart on and that had now been so gloriously fulfilled.