“Right! That’s my mark. Sit tight!”
She flung up her tail like a sounding whale and buried us in a fifteen-foot deep bridle-path buttressed with the exposed roots of enormous beeches. The wheels leaped from root to rounded boulder, and it was very dark in the shadow of the foliage.
“There ought to be a hammer-pond somewhere about here.” Kysh was letting her down this chute in brakeful spasms.
“Water dead ahead, Sir. Stack o’ brushwood on the starboard beam, and—no road,” sang Pyecroft.
“Cr-r-ri-key!” said Hinchcliffe, as the car on a wild cant to the left went astern, screwing herself round the angle of a track that overhung the pond. “If she only had two propellers, I believe she’d talk poetry. She can do everything else.”
“We’re rather on our port wheels now,” said Kysh; “but I don’t think she’ll capsize. This road isn’t used much by motors.”
“You don’t say so,” said Pyecroft. “What a pity!”
She bored through a mass of crackling brushwood, and emerged into an upward sloping fern-glade fenced with woods so virgin, so untouched, that William Rufus might have ridden off as we entered. We climbed out of the violet-purple shadows towards the upland where the last of the day lingered. I was filled to my moist eyes with the almost sacred beauty of sense and association that clad the landscape.
“Does ’unger produce ’alluciations?” said Pyecroft in a whisper. “Because I’ve just seen a sacred ibis walkin’ arm in arm with a British cock-pheasant.”
“What are you panickin’ at?” said Hinchcliffe. “I’ve been seein’ zebra for the last two minutes, but I ’aven’t complained.”