The Everlasting Whisper

King went about his task methodically. Gloria watched him rather than look across the rocky gorges. Slowly and with difficulty he made his way down the steep wall of rocks, dragging and pulling the roll of bedding and provisions after him. It required perhaps twenty minutes for him to get to the bottom. She wondered where he would attempt a crossing; the water looked so black in the pools, so violent over the rapids. He went up-stream; there lay an old cedar log so that it spanned the current, its sturdy old trunk ten feet above the water. For a moment King disappeared under an out-thrust ledge; then she saw him again, the pack on his shoulders. He had climbed up to the top of the log; he was crossing. Where he went now she must follow!

Fascinated, she watched him. Once she thought he was going to fall. But unerringly he trod the rude bridge underfoot, gained the other side without mishap, tossed down his bundle, and lowered himself from the log after it. Gloria marvelled at him; she could see his face and it was impassive. Could he not hear the hostile voices of the raging waters? Could he not feel the ominous threat of the bleak day and the monster cliffs? Was he a man without imagination as he seemed to be without fear?

On he went, down-stream again, clinging to the steep pitch of the gorge, until he was almost under the mouth of the cavern. He put back his head and looked up; it was a hundred feet above him and the cliffs, from where Gloria sat numb with cold and dread, looked unsurmountable. Yet he was going up them!

"And where he goes you will follow." It was as though the wild waters below were chanting it into her ears and thereafter filling the gorge with the mockery of derisive laughter.

Slowly, tediously, but with never a sign of hesitation, King made his way up the cliff. He had been here before; he knew and remembered every foothold and handhold. Nor was the task the impossible one it looked from a distance. There were cracks and crevices; there were seams of a harder material which, better withstanding the attacks of time, were thrust out beyond the general level; on them a man might stand. There were spots of softer material, scooped out into pockets by wind and water; there were flinty splinters; there were places where the wall, looking from across the cañon to be sheer and perpendicular, sloped more gently, and a man might crawl up them.

King had drawn up after him, stage after stage, the roll of bedding, using Blackie's tie-rope to haul it up and to moor it briefly. Gloria saw it swing at times like a huge, misshapen pendulum; watched it crawl up after him. She saw the wind snatch at it and set it scraping back and forth when he let it dangle at rope's end; she saw King's coat flap in the wind. Once she cried out aloud, thinking a second time that King was falling. If he fell from that height--if he were killed--what then would be the fate of Gloria Gaynor!