They stood there aghast for a moment at this failure of their hopes. Their first thought, of course, when they saw the empty valley, was that in spite of all their efforts they had arrived too late and the Mandal men had gone. But it only needed a minute or two of search to show that there were no ski tracks anywhere in the valley bottom. Nobody had been there at all, certainly since the last storm had abated, and probably for years.
They all jumped to the conclusion then that something had gone wrong with their instructions about the meeting-place, and that the Mandal men were waiting somewhere else. They had a hurried discussion, grouped round the sledge in the valley below the bluff. It seemed extremely queer that the others should have missed the landmark, which had turned out to be even more conspicuous than they expected. A forlorn hope struck them that the men might be somewhere quite close at hand, hidden perhaps in one of the shallow deceptive hollows in the valley. Someone suggested they should raise a shout. They were strangely reluctant to do so. It seemed rash to break the deathly silence of the plateau. They had been so secretive for so long that they all felt the same absurd fear: that if they shouted, they might be heard by someone who could not be trusted. Yet of course they knew it was inconceivable that anyone could be within earshot except people on the same business as themselves. After a moment’s superstitious hesitation, they all shouted in unison. But the sound fell dead, muffled by the blanket of the snow; and nobody answered.
After this, each of them set off in a different direction to search for the Mandal men, leaving Jan lying where he was. To hunt for a party of men on the plateau was not such a hopeless project as it might seem. It was not a matter of finding the men themselves, but of looking for their tracks. If the men had been standing still, it would have been perfectly futile, but a party on the move would leave tracks which could be seen from hundreds of yards away; and in fact a search parallel to the Mandal valley could not miss them if they were there at all.
While Jan was left lying there alone, lashed to the sledge and staring at the sky, he had time to get over whatever disappointment he may have felt at the failure of the meeting, and to make up his mind to the worst that could possibly happen. As he had taken no part in the arrangements, perhaps he was not so surprised as the others that something had gone so obviously wrong. He felt it had been too much to hope for all along that there would really be men waiting for him up there, ready to take him at once to Sweden. He had never seriously pictured himself safely across the border within the next day or two. Besides, after the agony he had suffered while he was being pulled up the mountain, to be allowed to lie still was such an acute relief that nothing else seemed to matter. To lie still and rest, and perhaps to doze a little, was all he really wanted. He even felt rather glad that there was going to be some delay, and that he had not got to set off again at once. And one thing was perfectly clear to him; whatever happened, even to save his life, he simply could not face being taken down again.
When they came back, one by one, he could see from the face of each of them before he spoke that there was no sign of the Mandal party. Amandus was the last one to return. He had been right up across the watershed, and down to the head of the tributary valley running up out of Mandal, which was the route they expected the Mandal men to take. There were no tracks leading out of it. To make doubly sure, he had skirted right round the head of it and gone out on to a sheer bastion of rock which divides the side valley from Mandal itself. From there, leaning out over a vertical drop of nearly three thousand feet, he had looked down the whole length of Mandal. He had seen the houses scattered in the bed of the valley. There was no sign of life among them.
Jan knew that the four men had stayed with him already far longer than was safe. They had to get home, quickly, or their absence was perfectly certain to be discovered, and that would be the end of them, and of him as well. Marius and the others, for their part, also knew what Jan had already made up his mind to tell them; that it was out of the question to take him down again. It would take an impossibly long time; they had not enough strength left to do it; and finally, they were quite certain, as he himself was, that he would not get to the bottom alive.
Thus the decision to abandon him on the plateau did not need very much discussion. There was nothing else whatever to be done. It was a bitter decision for them all, especially for Marius, who blamed himself because the meeting had been a failure. He promised Jan he would get a message through to Mandal the moment he got home, and do everything he could to make sure that the Mandal men would come up and find him the next night. But he made this promise with a heavy heart, because he did not really believe that under the open sky Jan would last through to another day. He thought all the efforts he had made were going to end in failure, and that his hopes of redeeming his own inactive part in Norway’s war were never to be fulfilled.
They searched for a place to put Jan where he would have a little shelter, and they found a boulder where the wind had scooped out a hole in the snow. The hole was four feet deep, and exactly the size of a grave. They took off their skis, and lowered him down into it, sledge and all, and then untied the lashings which held him down. They gave him what little food they had, and the remains of the bottle of brandy.
After the last of them had climbed out of the hole, they stood grouped round it, looking down at the haggard, bearded, emaciated face which grinned up at them. Jan said he would be all right, and thanked them as best as he could. They hated what they were doing, and illogically hated themselves for doing it. But neither Jan nor Marius nor any of the others felt like being histrionic about it. One by one they said good-bye, and turned away to put on their skis again. Amandus, as it happened, was the last of them to go, and he always remembered the last words that were spoken, because they were so absurd.
“There’s nothing else we can give you?” he asked Jan.
“No thanks,” Jan said. “I’ve got everything. Except hot and cold water.”
They began the descent, feeling sure they had left him to die.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE PLATEAU
THE WAR had not had very much effect upon Mandal before Herr Legland’s urgent message was delivered. The place had had no interest for the Germans and they had left it alone, so that its placid and rather primitive and impoverished life went on much the same as usual. It is quite difficult for a stranger to see how the Mandal people can manage to make a living and feed and bring up families in such a forlorn and isolated home. There are millions of people, of course, even in Europe, who live happily enough without any road to connect them with civilisation, and a good many of them even prefer it. But the situation of Mandal seems to have nothing in its favour. The men go fishing, but their jetty is far away from either the fishing grounds or the open sea or the markets. They also farm, but their land is snow-covered and frozen for eight months of the year and the valley faces north: on every other side it is so steeply hemmed in by hills that the sun only shines into it when it is high. Only a little distance to the west, the Lyngen Alps attract tourists who provide a rich annual harvest; but Mandal has no spectacular allurements to offer to visitors, and so any stranger who comes there is a nine-days’ wonder.
But in spite of all this, between six and seven hundred people do live there, and they do not want to live anywhere else. They are far from rich, but their houses and farms are neat and tidy, and they themselves are not by any means lacking in self-respect. Their houses are scattered all up the valley for a distance of about ten miles from the jetty and shop at the seaward end. There is a road which connects them, and at least one motor truck which runs up and down it in summer but can never go farther afield. A mile and a half up from the jetty is the school; and it was this school which became the headquarters of Mandal’s efforts in rescuing Jan.
The schoolmaster, Herr Nordnes, was a local man himself and he had lived there all his life. He was another disciple in learning of Herr Legland, which no doubt was the reason why Legland chose him to
organise the rescue. He knew everybody who lived in the valley, and almost everything that went on there, and practically all the young men in the place had received the whole of their education from him and regarded him still as their teacher. He himself was in middle age, but there could not have been a better choice for a job which called for the mobilisation of the valley’s youth.
When he got Legland’s message and had given himself time to think it over, he went to call on a few of his recent pupils and told them what he had heard and what was needed. They responded eagerly. In spite of the isolation of Mandal, and the fact that most Mandal people had not seen a German soldier or a German ship or even an aircraft, and had heard no authentic news of the world outside for years, there was much of the same feeling there as on the west side of Lyngenfjord: that nobody had had a chance so far to show what he could do to help the war. Nordnes had no lack of volunteers. His only embarrassment, in fact, was to prevent the news spreading too quickly, and to avoid having too many people who wanted to take some part in this novel adventure. Yet their enthusiasm was surprising, because the appeal for help, as it reached them, was quite impersonal. They did not have the incentive of having seen Jan, and had no idea what kind of person he was. The whole story was third or fourth hand. Not even Legland had seen him, and nor had the messenger. The only reason for thinking that he deserved their help at all was that Legland had said so, and had told Nordnes that the man who was in trouble had come all the way from England.
The Mandal men would have been more than human, in these circumstances, if they had not pointed out, as their first reaction, that to take an injured man to Sweden was not so easy as it looked. The people in Tromsö and Lyngseidet, they thought, probably had no real idea of the difficulties of what they were asking Mandal to do. They might have looked at a map and seen the frontier on it, twenty-five miles away, and imagined some kind of fence with Swedish frontier guards who would take care of Jan on the spot. They probably did not realise that there was nothing there whatever, except cairns at intervals of miles, so that you could cross the border without ever knowing you had done it, and plunge down into endless forests on the Swedish side where you might be lost for weeks without seeing a house or a road. There were no defences on the frontier simply because it was so difficult to cross that no defences were needed.
Having registered their protest, and suggested quite rightly that Lapps were better qualified to make the actual journey, they were perfectly willing to try it themselves if it was really necessary; and they were willing in any case to meet the Furuflaten men at the rendezvous they suggested, and to look after the injured man when he was handed over. They almost certainly felt some satisfaction at being asked to pull chestnuts out of the fire on behalf of a place like Furuflaten, which had always affected to despise Mandal because it was not on the road.
During the week which elapsed after the first message from Legland, while the gale was blowing which imprisoned Jan in Revdal, the Mandal people heard nothing more about what was happening. They went on with the ordinary chores of early spring, and probably their first enthusiasm faded. The whole story only existed for them in the form of a single sudden visit by a messenger. It began to seem likely that the organisation had found some other way of moving their man, or that he had died or been captured, and that they were not going to be asked to do anything after all. It was disappointing, and made them feel a little foolish.
This was the situation when the second urgent message arrived by telephone. It was very obscure: the parcel Herr Nordnes was expecting was being sent at once. It told them nothing of what was happening in Furuflaten, whether the Germans were hot on the trail, or whether the man they were expected to look after was seriously ill or not. They understood, of course, that it was impossible to say more on the telephone, but it did leave them entirely in the dark. The only shade of meaning it conveyed was one of urgency; and urgency, in that context, suggested that the Germans were suspicious.
However, what it asked them to do was clear enough, and Herr Nordnes rounded up his first party of volunteers and told them the job was on again. They were all men in their early twenties, whom he had chosen because they had been intelligent and resourceful at school, and because they were fit and strong. There had never been any question of him climbing up to the plateau himself, partly because he was a generation older than the climbers he had chosen and would only have held them back, and more especially because he was one of the very few people in Mandal who had to be at work exactly on time in the morning. But his volunteers were still willing, and all said they could make the climb that night. There was still no news of the Lapps from the ski-runner who had set off from Kaafjord to find them; but at least they could take charge of Furuflaten’s stranger till they heard if the Lapps were coming. Each of them went off to make his preparations: to change his clothes and wax his skis and pack a rucksack, and perhaps to get a little sleep before he started.
It was at this precise moment that a strange boat was sighted approaching Mandal. This was a very rare event, and plenty of people watched the boat, some with telescopes and binoculars, from the houses near the bottom of the valley. As it approached the jetty, they saw something which was to put the whole valley in a state of turmoil and apprehension: there was a party of German soldiers on board it. The boat reached the jetty, and the Germans came ashore; and a number of people who were in the know put on their skis and pelted up to the schoolhouse to warn Herr Nordnes. As the news spread up the valley, all the people he had consulted began to converge on the school to talk about this sinister development.
They all took it for granted that it had something to do with the plot which was afoot. It seemed certain that the organisation in Furuflaten had been broken up, and that the Germans knew that Mandal was involved in it; or else that somebody higher in the organisation, in Tromsö perhaps, had been arrested and that the Germans were planning a simultaneous raid both sides of the mountain. At all events, it would have been crazy to make the climb that night, before the Germans had shown some sign of what they meant to do. Herr Nordnes himself knew that his own name was the only one in Mandal so far which anyone outside could connect with the affair, and he did the only thing he could do: he told all the others to stay at home and say nothing; and for himself, he resolved that if he was arrested he would try not to give them away whatever was done to him.
That evening, the people of Mandal watched every move which the Germans made; but they seemed to be in no hurry to do anything at all. The second wave of news which spread up the valley reported that there were only six soldiers and an NCO. This seemed to suggest that they had come to arrest one single individual. But later rumour said that they were taking over a house as a billet, down by the jetty. Nobody knew whether it was for one night or for good, but obviously if there was going to be an arrest, it was not going to happen before nightfall. That night while Marius and his party were hauling the sledge up Revdal and searching the plateau, nobody was sleeping soundly in Mandal, except perhaps the Germans. When Amandus looked down from the top of the buttress in the early morning, the silent houses he saw far down below him were kept silent by anxiety and fear.
But during the night nothing happened at all. The Germans stayed in their billet, and in the morning they sallied forth and began a house-to-house check of all the inhabitants of Mandal. On the whole this relieved the tension. It pointed to a general vague suspicion of Mandal as a whole, rather than something definite against a particular person. But it meant that nobody could go away from home until the check of his own house had been completed, and to judge by the desultory way that the Germans went to work, this would put a stop to any journey to the frontier for several days. It also made it impossible for the present for anyone to go over to Lyngseidet by boat to find out what had happened; and even to ring up Herr Legland would be asking for trouble, in case he had been arrested.
The whole thing remained a mystery all that day. Whatever way Nordnes and the other conspir
ators looked at it, it was hard to believe that after years without a garrison, the sudden arrival of even a section of Germans on the very evening when the ascent of the plateau was planned could be simply a coincidence. Yet nothing the Germans did, once they had landed, seemed to have any bearing on the plot, or to suggest in any way that they knew what was going on.
This particular mystery, as it happened, was never solved. To this day it still seems incredible that the Germans arrived there by chance; yet there is no reason to think they had any suspicion, at that particular moment, that Jan had been taken across to the east side of Lyngenfjord. The last time they had seen him was when he was ski-ing through Lyngseidet, and that was nearly three weeks earlier. But perhaps the fact that he had slipped through their grasp and disappeared had brought it home to somebody in the local command that the routes to the frontier were not very well controlled. Perhaps somebody else had had a rap on the knuckles. The somewhat pathetic little garrison sent to Mandal, as well as the motorboats which suddenly appeared on Lyngenfjord, may have been part of a general tightening of the grip on the frontier, an indirect result of Jan’s journey rather than a deliberate search for him. If anyone knows the answer to this, it can only be some German officer.
However, the immediate mystery for Herr Nordnes was cleared up to some extent by an urgent message which arrived that night. It had come by a devious route, but it had originated from Marius, and it told Nordnes that Jan had been left at the meeting-place on the plateau and begged him to have him collected without delay. It also told him, by the mere fact that it had been sent, that there was nothing wrong in the rest of the organisation and that they did not even know that the Germans had come to Mandal. He went out to round up his team again, and to see whether they thought it was safe to start at once. But before the point was decided, it began to snow.
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