May 1943

A service car pulled out of the township below the Pass. It mounted a steep shingled road until its passengers looked down on the iron roof of the pub and upon a child’s farm-animal design of tiny horses tethered to verandah posts, upon specks that were sheep-dogs and upon a toy sulky with motor-car wheels that moved slowly along the road, down-country. Beyond this a system of foot-hills, gorges, and clumps of Pinus insignis stepped down into a plain fifty miles wide, a plain that rose slowly as its horizon mounted with the eyes of the mounting passengers.

Though their tops were shrouded by a heavy mask of cloud, the hills about the Pass grew more formidable. The interval between cloud roof and earth floor lessened. The Pass climbed into the sky. A mountain rain now fell.

“Going into bad weather?” suggested the passenger on the front seat.

“Going out of it, you mean,” rejoined the driver.

“Do I?”

“Take a look at the sky, sir.”

The passenger wound down his window for a moment and craned out. “Jet-black and lowering,” he said, “but there’s a good smell in the air.”

“Watch ahead.”

The passenger dutifully peered through the rain-blinded windscreen and saw nothing to justify the driver’s prediction but only a confusion of black cones whose peaks were cut off by the curtain of the sky. The head of the Pass was lost in a blur of rain. The road now hung above a gorge through whose bed hurried a stream, its turbulence seen but not heard at that height. The driver changed down and the engine whined and roared. Pieces of shingle banged violently on the underneath of the car.