"There doesn't," he said. "Can you understand how practically the entire physical features of the place have changed so much?"
"Frankly I can't. But they apparently have, and that's about all we can say. We'll just have to keep our eyes open and trust to luck."
"Our luck seems to have held good so far," Moira said, turning to me with high hope in her face.
"Mind your footing," I said warningly. "You want to watch every inch of the way. There's all sorts of rocks and boulders under this stuff."
"I'll be careful," she smiled, and scarcely were the words out of her mouth than her foot caught in something. She pitched forward on her face before I could spring to her assistance. I lifted her up carefully, but she seemed none the worse for her fall.
"I don't know what it was that tripped me," she confided. "It wasn't a boulder or anything of the sort. I think it was a log of wood, yet my foot seemed to catch underneath it."
I was on the point of offering a suggestion, but something held me silent, and instead I dropped down on my knees and felt feverishly in the undergrowth. Of course it was a silly thing to do—there might have been snakes and all manner of noxious crawling things there—but I didn't think of that at the time. I was too intent on solving the riddle. My hand touched something.... I straightened up and faced the others.
"Moira and Cumshaw," I said. "I've found the hut. That's a piece of it there." Bending down, I dragged to light a rough-hewn beam that possibly had been the threshold plank. It was weather-worn, and in places the fungus had grown thickly on it; but I could see for all that that it had been warped and twisted and charred in the blaze of a fire. Three pairs of eyes met across the plank, and three lips put the same idea into words.
"There's been a fire here," we said in chorus.
"And that," I added on my own account, for the benefit of the others who had not jumped to the same conclusion as I had, "and that explains everything that's puzzled us since we entered the valley. There's been a bush fire here at some period during the last twenty years. It destroyed the hut, it burnt down the wood, and it made that pile of lime you found, Cumshaw."