The White Mountains (The Tripods) (18 page)

We heard a stream and, on Beanpole’s suggestion, made for it. Since the three of them were apparently searching in different directions, it did not seem likely that they were following a scent, but there was a chance that they might, or might follow our tracks through grass and where the earth was soft. We got into the stream, and splashed our way along. It was only a few feet wide, luckily quite shallow and with an even, pebbly bed. The wonderful leather boots that had been made for me by the cobbler at the castle would not be
improved by the soaking, but I had more pressing things to think about.

We paused again. The stream splashed against our legs, just above our ankles. I said, “We can’t go on like this. It will have reached us in another quarter of an hour.”

Henry said, “What else can we do?”

“There’s only one Tripod now. Its light covers just about the whole of the valley floor, and perhaps a little of the sides. If we make a break for it, up the slope—it might miss us and go on past.”

“Or it might trace our tracks out of the stream, and follow us.”

“We should take the risk. We have no chance at all this way.” He did not say anything. “What do you think, Beanpole?”

“I?” he said. “I think it is too late already. Look ahead.”

Along the valley there was a light, which brightened and, as I watched, became a beam. We gazed at it in silence and despair. Then another light appeared above the ridge which I had suggested our climbing, twisted in the air, and arced down. And there were other lights, less distinct above the opposite slope. It was no longer a question of one Tripod, remorselessly gaining on us from behind. They were here in force, and all around.

“Should we scatter?” Henry suggested. “I suppose we might have more chance separated than together.”

I said, “No. The same chance. None at all, that is.”

“I think I’m going to try,” Henry said. “The way it is, once they spot one, they’ve got us all.”

Beanpole said, “Wait.”

“For what? A few minutes and it will be too late.”

“That rock, there.”

Visibility was better, because of the light diffused from the Tripods’ beams. We could see each other, as though in dim moonlight, and a little of our surroundings. Beanpole pointed down the stream. Some twenty yards ahead, there was a shadowy ridge of rock, more than head high.

“It may give some cover,” Beanpole said.

I doubted that. We might flatten ourselves against it, but the beams would still catch us. But I had nothing better to offer. Beanpole splashed off along the stream, and we splashed after him. The course of the stream ran right beside the rock, which I saw had diverted its course to some extent. The reef was about thirty feet long. Its upper part was smooth and flat with a gentle backward slope, providing no protection at all. But the lower part …

Some time in the past the stream had been stronger and more turbulent than it was now, and its fierceness had worn away a band of stone at the base. We bent down, exploring it with our hands. At its maximum the crevice was not more than two feet high, and about as deep; but it seemed to run the length of the rock. Two more beams appeared on the northern escarpment of the valley, and one of them was flicking far ahead, making spots of light that darted perilously near to where we stood. There was no room for delay. We snuggled ourselves into the crevice, in line, head to toe—Beanpole, then Henry, with myself at the end. My right
arm was against rock, but my left side felt terribly exposed. I tried to force myself farther in, even though it hurt my arm to do so. If I lifted my head just a fraction, my forehead touched the stone overhang. The sound of my breathing seemed loud in this confinement.

Beanpole whispered, “No talking. We must stay here quietly. For an hour, perhaps.”

I watched the scene outside brighten, as the Tripods came nearer, and heard the thump, heavier and heavier, of their feet. Eventually I could see light reflected from the surface of the stream farther up. Then, directly in front of my face, night became day, and I could see small stones, blades of grass, a beetle frozen into immobility, all with tremendous clarity. And the ground shook as the foot of a Tripod slammed down only a few yards from us. I pressed myself tightly against the rock. It was going to be a long hour.

A long hour, indeed. All night the beams of light played across the hills, advancing and retreating, crossing and recrossing the ground. Dawn broke at last, but the hunt did not stop. The Tripods came and went in a constant traffic: allowing for the same ones passing over us time after time, there must still have been dozens of them.

But they had not seen us, and as the hours wore slowly on we became more and more confident that they would not. Even in daylight, our cleft must be invisible from the height of the hemispheres. But by the same token, we dared not leave its shelter. We lay
there in increasing discomfort and boredom and hunger, seasoned in my case with pain. My arm began to hurt very badly, and there were times when I thought I would make my lip bleed with biting on it, and I felt tears come to my eyes and run down my cheeks.

By midday, the intensity of the search had begun to slacken. There were periods of as long as five or ten minutes in which we dared to creep out and stretch our legs, but always they ended with the distant sight of another Tripod, and every now and then a troop of them would come stamping through the valley. We could not go far from the crevice; there was no other cover of any kind.

Day drifted into dusk, and dusk into night, and there were the beams of light again. There were not so many as before, but there was never a time that one could not see them either in the valley or lighting the sky beyond the heights. Occasionally I dozed off into sleep, but never for long. The awareness of rock directly above my face was smothering—I was cold and aching, and my arm was burning and throbbing. Once I woke up, moaning with the pain of it. Surely they would go with daybreak? I watched the sky, greedy for the first inkling of natural light. It came at last, a gray cloudy dawn, and we emerged, shivering, and looked about us. There had been no beams of light for half an hour or more, and there were none now. But five minutes later we scurried back into hiding, as another Tripod lurched up the valley.

So it went on, all that morning and long into the afternoon. I was too miserable, dazed with hunger and
pain, to pay attention to anything but the business of enduring from one moment to the next, and I do not think the others were in much better shape. When, toward evening, a lengthening period without Tripods made it seem that the search might finally be off, we found it difficult to take it in. We came out of the cleft but for a couple of hours at least sat huddled by the stream, watching for signs of their return.

Darkness was falling by the time we made up our minds to go on, and it was an indication of our wretchedness and confusion that we should have done so. We were weak from hunger, and utterly weary. A mile or two farther on, we collapsed and lay all night in the open, with no hope of concealment if the Tripods came back. But they did not, and dawn showed us an empty valley, flanked by silent hills.

The days that followed were hard. For me, particularly, because my arm had festered. In the end, Beanpole cut it again, and I am afraid I was less stoical this time, and shrieked with pain. Afterward Beanpole put some of the healing herbs, which he had found, on the wound, binding them in place with a bandage made from the tail of my shirt, and Henry said he knew it must have been pretty agonizing: he would have shrieked a lot more. I was more glad of his kindness than I would have expected.

We found a few roots and berries, but we were hungry all the time and we shivered in our thin clothes, especially during the nights. The weather had changed. There was a lot of cloud and a cold breeze from the
south. We reached high ground, from where it should have been possible to see the White Mountains, but there was no sign of them—only an empty gray horizon. There were moments when I felt that what we had seen before had been a mirage rather than a reality.

Then we came down into a plain, and there was a stretch of water so immense that one could not see its end: the Great Lake of the map. The country was rich and fertile. We were able to get more food, and better, and with the satisfaction of hunger, our spirits began to pick up. Beanpole’s herbs, I found, had worked; my arm was healing cleanly now.

One morning, after a good night’s sleep among hay in a barn, we awoke to find the sky once more blue, and all things bright and light. There were the hills which fringed the plain to the south, and beyond them, splendid and looking so close that one almost felt one could reach out and touch them, the snowy peaks of the White Mountains.

Of course, they were nothing like as close as they seemed. There were miles of plain still, and then the foothills. But at least we could see them, and we set out in good heart. We had been traveling for an hour, and Henry and I were making jokes about Beanpole’s gigantic steam-kettle, when he stopped us. I thought the jokes had annoyed him, but then felt, as he had already done, the earth quiver beneath our feet.

They were coming from the northeast, from our left and behind—two Tripods, moving fast and heading directly for us. I looked around desperately, but knew
what I would see. The land was green and flat, without a tree or rock, a hedge or ditch, and the nearest farmhouse was half a mile away.

Henry said, “Shall we run for it?”

“Run where?” Beanpole asked. “It is no good.”

His voice was flat. If he recognized it was hopeless, I thought, then it was hopeless indeed. In a minute or two they would be on us. I looked away from them to the gleaming battlements of white. To have come so far, endured so much, and to lose with our goal in sight—it was unfair.

The earth shook more violently. They were a hundred yards away, fifty … They marched side by side, I saw, and their tentacles were doing strange things, probing and retreating from each other, describing elaborate patterns in the air. And something moved between and above them, a golden something that flashed with brightness, tossed to and fro against the blue of sky.

They were on us. I waited for a tentacle to reach down and seize me, conscious less of fear than of a futile anger. A great foot slammed down a few yards from us. And then they were past, and going away, and my legs felt as though they were buckling. Beanpole said, in wonder, “They did not see us. Because they were too concerned with each other? Some ritual of mating, perhaps? But they are machines. What then? It is a puzzle to which I would like the answer.”

He was welcome, I thought, both to the puzzle and its answer. All I could feel was the weakness of relief.

• • •

A long, difficult, and dangerous journey, Ozymandias told me. So it proved. And with a hard life at the journey’s end. He was right in that, too. We have nothing in the way of luxury, and would not want it if we could: minds and bodies must be kept taut and trim for the tasks that lie ahead.

But there are wonders, of which our new home itself is the greatest. We live not only among the White Mountains but inside one of them. For the ancients built a Shmand-Fair here, too—six miles long, rising a mile high through a tunnel hewn out of solid rock. Why they did it, for what great purpose, we cannot tell; but now, with new tunnels carried still farther into the mountain’s heart, it provides us with a stronghold. Even when we came to it, in summer, there was snow and ice around the opening to the main tunnel, and it emerges to a place that looks over a river of ice, inching its way down between frozen peaks to be lost in the distance. But inside the mountain, the air is no more than cool, protected as we are by the thick layers of rock.

There are viewing points where one can look out from the side of the mountain. Sometimes I go to one of these and stare down into the green sunlit valley far below. I can see villages, tiny fields, roads, the pinhead specks of cattle. Life looks warm there, and easy, compared with the harshness of rock and ice by which we are surrounded. But I do not envy the valley people their ease.

For it is not quite true to say that we have no luxuries. We have two: freedom, and hope. We live among men whose minds are their own, who do not accept the dominion of the Tripods and who, having endured in
patience for long enough, are even now preparing to carry the war to the enemy.

Our leaders keep their counsel, and we are only newcomers and boys—we could not expect to know what the projects are, or what our part in them may be. But we shall have a part, that is certain. And another thing is certain, too: in the end we shall destroy the Tripods, and free men will enjoy the goodness of the earth.