He took two blankets for her; he dared not cumber himself with more.
“Now, Emmie, my lad,” he said, smiling at her, just before they started. “Left foot foremost. And don’t hurry.”
CHAPTER X
IT was nine days later before they met their first chance of aid. They had emerged from the labyrinth and were coming down the seaward slopes, along a flat gulley between two low ridges of granite. Before them at a great distance lay the surface of the ocean, placid as its name, majestic as death, like a vast enveloping obliviousness on the confines of man’s brief futile life; between this and them, but still invisible, stretched a broad land of hope and plenty, the grazing grounds of Chile, woods as pretty as gardens, little nestling hamlets, and then thriving towns, splendid cities, the noise and bustle of prosperous ports;—but as yet nothing of all this in sight, not one stunted shrub, not a trace left by human kind. Behind them lay those nine pitiless days and the eight unendurable nights; a plodding delirium of cold, hunger, and toil. For more than forty-eight hours he had not been able to give her anything to eat. How long it was since he himself had eaten he did not count. He was carrying her on his back, his arms about her thighs, her arms about his neck, her blackened shrunken face close against his hairy dust-begrimed cheek. At intervals he had carried her in this manner throughout the ordeal, but now his burden was becoming pitifully light.
“It’s all right, darling,” he whispered as he stalked along. “Keep up your spirits. On my honour I see daylight at last. We have come out just where I wanted. Sense of direction, what! Trust A. D.”
“Put me down, Tony. You must be tired. Let me walk again.”
“Yes, directly. There’s another steep bit ahead.”
He set her upon her feet soon, and helped her to scramble with him from the gulley down into a sort of plateau or wide terrace running north and south upon the hillside. At the southern end of this terrace they stopped to rest.
They were a pair that might well arouse swift pity in all but the hardest of hearts. Their thinness alone sufficed to tell their story and to urge their immediate need. The manifold print of famine was upon them. Dyke, ragged and dirty, had mysteriously preserved his strength; while Emmie rested he examined the ground, peered over the edge of the plateau at the precipitous but not impossible cliff, went forward to find a better way; moving to and fro, he looked gaunt, dingy, dangerous as a famished wolf. Emmie, with lips that the sun had split for want of grease, with blood rusty and dry upon her chin, with matted hair plastered to her forehead, looked like an emaciated boy who had been huddled into the worn-out garments of a grown man. She seemed weak to the verge of complete exhaustion; her eyes in the enlarged orbits seemed enormous, spheres of dull glass without flash or glow. Yet her faith in her companion was quite undaunted, her love for him quite untouched.
He came and stood by her, snapped his bony fingers and produced a chuckle in his hollow throat. He said that there was an unmistakable track straight through this ledge and at the end descending in zig-zags as far as he could see. It most certainly would lead them to habitations and the road.