Siegfried, meanwhile, was galloping on; but in a moment or two I reined him in. We were well across the bowl, and the other slope, steep and slippery, was before us. At the top of a knoll four huts were gathered in jumbled array. No one seemed to be living in them, but a dog came out and sniffed at Siegfried’s heels, without, however, barking.
We came to a fork in the trail. I stopped to consult my military map and get my bearings. Straight in front of me, the Grand Cap blocked the horizon with a formidable chaos of precipitous rocks. Its first foothills were perhaps a mile and a half ahead. Now this was East; so North would be on my left hand. I studied the map for a while. It was not so very clear, but I did make out the fork where I then was standing and the two paths between which I had to choose. So far as I could see, they both led up to the battery; the one to the right, by way of the old convent of Saint Hubert and the village of Morière-la-Tourne; the one to the left, through the hamlet of Morière-les-Vignes and Morière itself. I decided to take the latter route.
Had I selected the other, Adventure doubtless would have missed me!
As I went on again, I thought I could make out a sort of pinkish cast to the clouds heaped up along the mountain. I was headed west now. That radiance must be, therefore, a shaft from the setting sun making its way through the bank of mist and fog. Before long it would be pitch dark. Instinctively, I looked back to the eastward, better to gauge the approach of night; and frank uneasiness came over me as I thought of the long distance still to go. Darkness, indeed, had already settled on the plains. It was climbing the heights of Solliès, engulfing the basin of Valaury, and striding rapidly, stealthily, along up the mountain trail behind me. Now it was passing us, reaching the dangerous slopes of the mountain far ahead. The path was barely perceptible, and Siegfried kept slipping alarmingly.
For the first time, I clearly realized that my mission involved far greater risks that an uncomfortable night of wandering out in the cold and rain.
V
It must have been somewhere on the northernmost spur of the Maurras range that I lost my way. It was not yet night, exactly, but it was far from broad daylight. The trail seemed to come to an end in a tangled clump of bushes, that looked like all the other underbrush on the solitary heath. Siegfried went courageously in, however, slipping about, but shrewdly feeling the ground with a forefoot before he rested his weight upon it. I relied mostly on his instinct to determine what was path and what was heather. Unfortunately I had forgotten that at the northern tip of the ridge the Tourris trail makes off to the left from the route to the Grand Cap. I should have remembered this, I suppose; for the Tourris trail makes a well-known tramp from Toulon—up to the famous Col de la Mort de Gauthier. Strangely significant name!
My horse turned off on that trail, a fact of which I was not at once aware, because I had not even noticed the fork when we came to it.