"It will not be I," answered Linforth. "It will be the Road. The power of the Road is beyond the power of any Government."
"Yes, I remember and I understand." Shere Ali lit his pipe and lay back among the straw. "At first I did not understand what the words meant. Now I know. The power of the Road is great, because it inspires men to strive for its completion."
"Or its mastery," said Linforth slowly. "Perhaps one day on the other side of the Hindu Kush, the Russians may covet it—and then the Road will go on to meet them."
"Something will happen," said Shere Ali. "At all events something will happen."
The shadows of the evening found them still debating what complication might force the hand of those in authority. But always they came back to the Russians and a movement of troops in the Pamirs. Yet unknown to both of them the something else had already happened, though its consequences were not yet to be foreseen. A storm had delayed them for a day in a hut upon the Meije. They went out of the hut. The sky had cleared; and in the sunset the steep buttress of the Promontoire ran sharply up to the Great Wall; above the wall the small square patch of ice sloped to the base of the Grand Pic and beyond the deep gap behind that pinnacle the long serrated ridge ran out to the right, rising and falling, to the Doight de Dieu.
There were some heavy icicles overhanging the Great Wall, and Linforth looked at them anxiously. There was also still a little snow upon the rocks.
"It will be possible," said Peter, cheerily. "Tomorrow night we shall sleep in La Grave."
"Yes, yes, of course," said his brother.
They walked round the hut, looked for a little while down the stony valley des Étançons, with its one green patch up which they had toiled from La Bérarde the day before, and returned to watch the purple flush of the sunset die off the crags of the Meije. But the future they had planned was as a vision before their eyes, and even along the high cliffs of the Dauphiné the road they were to make seemed to wind and climb.
"It would be strange," said Linforth, "if old Andrew Linforth were still alive. Somewhere in your country, perhaps in Kohara, waiting for the thing he dreamed to come to pass. He would be an old man now, but he might still be alive."