The Black Diamond

by Francis Brett Young

Abner shook his head. Nothing could now be seen but the desolate line of the beech avenue stretching away behind them. A light wind rose on their right, driving the mist in front of it. They seemed to hear the endless volumes of it hurrying by, but it was only the long sighing of a waste of heather. This sound made Mary really aware of the threatening silence that surrounded them. Even the presence of Abner standing there as stolid and unmoved as ever could not steady her.

‘We can’t stay here,’ she said. ‘It’s an awful place. It’s like a churchyard. Do let us go on.’

She left the desolate gateposts with a shiver. She hurried, taxing her strength to the last, to put them behind her. The wind rose; the mist was whirled along the slopes before them in torn fleeces. She crossed another ridge and then sank down in the heather, ready to cry herself. The buffetings of the wind were fit to break her heart.

Then a miracle happened. A gust of wind tore an opening in the mist and the vision of a heaped mountainous landscape grew before their eyes. Southward the indented bow of Radnor Forest rose blue-black, the summit of Black Mixen hugely threatening. Westward in molten clouds the sun went down over Wales and fifty miles of thin air and solid mountain were mingled in a fiery haze. The sky was a furnace in which the mountains melted away. But Abner and Mary had no desire to see these splendours. Their eyes were fixed, peering into the trough of the valley beneath them. They saw green woods, blue in the evening light, the squares of barns, the rich mosaic of fields, the gleam of a river. And their hearts fell, for each was certain that the valley beneath them was not that of the Folly Brook. It was far wilder and more strange. They looked at each other.

‘Do you know where it is?’ he asked.

‘I can’t think, unless it’s somewhere near Clun.’

‘Better get down while the light lasts. There’s farms there,’ he said. As he spoke the sun dipped down. White clouds swept across their window. Only the memory of what they had seen told them that they were not utterly lost.

They descended the slope carefully, for the grass was slippery and the only tracks were scattered with stones. Abner could not help her; she knew that he was far too busy saving Gladys from unnecessary jars. She fell, and Morgan cried out that she had hurt his arm. She pulled her strength together and tried to carry him. Somehow she must struggle on, for the darkness was falling. Even with their sudden vision in her mind she could not now feel certain that their direction was right. For a time they followed a wheel-track skirting the mountain, but it ended by turning upwards, and they knew that this could not help them. Downward it was difficult to go, for the fields were small and irregular, and the hedges often impassable, yet downward, somehow, they must go.

They beat through a zone of these entanglements in wood and stone. Night was falling fast. Since the revealing moment of the last summit they had sunk so deep that they must now surely be near the bottom of the valley, whatever valley it might be. But when the barrier of irregular fields lay behind them they found themselves on open, sloping ground again. Abner stalked on ahead without pausing. She, at the end of her tether, called out after him to stop for a moment, but he did not hear her. His shape went on into the dusk, and she knew that if she did not follow she must be left behind.

Suddenly the white air was full of the screaming of birds . . . a shrill, high, sound that took her back into her childhood. Once, with her father, she had been taken to Swansea on a business trip and had heard gulls calling on the Gower Cliffs. She felt that she must be dreaming. Even on a night of storm no gulls could be blown so far inland as this, and yet she was sure that her childish memory could not have failed. The cries that she heard now were the cries of gulls wheeling and screaming in the mist above her head.