“That’s Lyonnesse, yonder.” Peter, from her seat on the topmost bar, indicated the wide shimmering tracts of grey and silver. “The sunken lands, you know. Cities and churches and meadows ... but they must have suffered some sea-change ... white bones and thick green water and the evil coil of seaweed. A dead land, now.”
Stuart said musingly: “I see Lyonnesse more as the land where the dead wait till they are wanted again.”
Peter smiled; so like Stuart, this glimpse of an afterwards as merely the rest which comes before a fresh bout of strenuous labour. Then couldn’t he even conceive of complete and utter rest? “Where the dead wait till they are wanted again” ... she caught a fleeting glimpse of dim caverns, and a tiny figure stumbling in from the outside glare, and flinging down a torch, seized instantly by an upward-springing form, who bore it forth again; while the tired intruder stretched himself in sleep....
Heigh-ho! how serious they all were. Peter looked around her, half-dazed by this long mental immersion in dark coral-caves. The sky had meanwhile deepened into blue, and all the buried colours of earth and water had leapt into being.
“Requires a dab of red in all that backcloth of green and black, doesn’t it?” queried Peter idly; to break silence; “just for the sake of artistic effect.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Oh, say against that ledge.” She pointed half-way down an apparently inaccessible formation of cliff, jutting out at right angles to the land.
Stuart seized the scarlet cap from her head, before she was even aware of his intentions, and was almost directly over the edge of safety, and out of sight.
“Stuntorian!” murmured Peter ... but her hand dug deep into the turf, tore it up in great handfuls.
It was several minutes before they again caught sight of him, scrambling with all the agility appertaining to impossible schoolboy heroes, towards the spot indicated. His figure was reduced by distance and surroundings to absurdly small dimensions. He paused on reaching his goal, hung the patch of crimson on to the ledge of rock, waved gaily towards his far-off companions; then, cramming the cap again in his pocket, swung himself round a boulder apparently poised in mid-air, and out of their line of vision.