Red In The Morning by Dornford Yates Page B

be nothing hidden if only you use your eyes. Add to that that it was to the west that the fall of water came down…
    That same afternoon we drove to the south of Arx and climbed to the spot to which Mansel had made his way: but though we stood directly above the fall, we could see next to nothing except a reach of the road in the valley below. And between that and where we stood the cliffs were precipitous. It seemed there was nothing for it, but to approach from the west, and at dawn the next day we made a reconnaissance in force.
    There were two parallel roads, running east and west. One was the road which served the valley of Arx; the other lay three miles south. The six of us set out to prove the country which lay between.
    At five o’clock that morning we took up a ragged line, some three miles west of Arx, and, as the dawn came up, we moved, as beaters do, from west to east. Of such was the country we could not be all in touch, but Carson and Bell were in the middle, John Bagot and Rowley to the south, while Mansel and I took care of the northern side. In fact, Mansel used the road which served the valley of Arx; but I made my way through the forest a quarter of a mile higher up. (I say ‘a quarter of a mile’, but sometimes it was very much more; for the going was far from easy and simply did not allow me to hold my course.)
    I had been moving for an hour and had covered perhaps a mile when I heard the sound of water somewhere at hand. It was not very loud, but had a more vigorous note than the voice of a rill; and yet I could see no fall nor any sign of one. This seemed phenomenal, for water can run but one way on a mountainside; and though it had nothing to do with the matter in hand, I felt I must find out the reason for such a remarkable thing. I, therefore, listened as carefully as I could and, judging the sound to be coming from directly above me, I made for a little recess about forty feet higher up. I call it a ‘recess’ for lack of a better term, but it looked like the very rough step which some giant had made and used when climbing the mountainside. As I went up, it was clear that the sound was coming from there, yet even above the recess the ground was dry. It took me five or six minutes to reach the spot, but there was the answer to the riddle as clear as day.
    The recess had been made by the caving in of the soil, and the soil had at this point caved in because it was only a crust: beneath this crust was a grotto, down in whose depths was running the stream that had made it when Earth was young. Several such grottoes exist in the Pyrénées: possibly there are hundreds, but only a few are known. This seemed to be one of those which had not been found, for the hole into which I was peering had certainly never been entered for many years: yet the grotto to which it admitted was of a considerable size. Not that I could see it, for I could see nothing at all; but the torrent which I could hear running was some little distance off.
    Having solved my mystery, I turned again to my duty of searching the ground to the east, but half a mile farther on a cliff rose out of the mountain, to block my way. I could have gone down and round the base of the cliff: but, so far as I could judge, Mansel would be able to answer for the ground that ran up to its foot: and so I turned up the mountain to gain its head.
    This proved a much harder task than I had supposed, for the farther I climbed, the steeper the ground became, until this, too, rose into a cliff or cornice, up which I could not go. To skirt this, I turned again, until I was facing west, but I had to move for nearly a quarter of a mile before the cornice gave way and let me come up.
    That is the way of mountains: indeed, I know no country which may be so hard to cross as mountain, thick clad with forest, in summer time. Again and again you are forced to compass some feature of which, if you could have seen it, you might have steered clear: and when at last