"What became of your bloodhounds, Lord Randal, my son?

any minute... . What was in that last load you were bringing up?" He didn't really have to askhe himself had arranged for the breaking up of the equipment into three separate loads before he'd left the ledge. It wasn't even that he suspected his tired mind of playing tricks on him; but it was tired enough, too tired, to probe the hidden compulsion, the nameless hope that prompted him to grasp at nameless straws that didn't even exist. "The food," Andrea said gently. "All the food, the stove, the fueland the compasses." For five, perhaps ten seconds, Mallory stood motionless. One half of his mind, conscious of the urgency, the desperate need for haste, was jabbing him mercilessly: the other half held him momentarily in a vast irresolution, an irresolution of coldness and numbness that came not from the lashing wind and sleety rain but from his own mind, from the bleak and comfortless imaginings of lost wanderings on the harsh and hostile island, with neither food nor fire.. . . And then Andrea's great hand was on his shoulder, and he was laughing softly. "Just so much less to carry, my Keith. Think how grateful our tired friend Corporal Miller is going to be. . . . This is only a little thing." "Yes," Mallory said. "Yes, of course. A little thing." He turned abruptly, tugged the cord, watched the rope disappear over the edge. Fifteen minutes later, in drenching, torrential rain, a great, sheeting downpour almost constantly illumined by the jagged, branching stilettos of the forked lightning, Casey Brown's bedraggled head came into view over the edge of the cliff. The thunder, too, emptily cavernous in that flat and explosive intensity of sound that lies at the heart of a thunderstorm, was almost continuous: but in the brief intervals, Casey's voice, rich in his native Clydeside accent, carried clearly. He was expressing himself fluently in basic Anglo-Saxon, and with cause. He had had the assistance of two ropes on the way up the one stretched from spike to spike and the one used for raising supplies, which Andrea had kept pulling in as he made the ascent. Casey Brown had secured the end of this round his waist with a bowline, but the bowline had proved to be nothing of the sort but a slip-knot, and Andrea's enthusiastic help had almost cut him in half. He was still sitting on the cliff-top, exhausted head between his knees, the radio still strapped to his back, when two tugs on Andrea's rope announced that Dusty Miller was on his way up. Another quarter of an hour elapsed, an interminable fifteen marco digital camera recommendation minutes when, in the lulls between the thunderclaps, every slightest sound was an approaching enemy patrol, before Miller materialised slowly out of the darkness, half-way down the rock chimney. He was climbing steadily and methodically, then checked abruptly at the cliff-top, groping hands pawing uncertainly on the topsoil of the cliff. Puzzled, Mallory bent down, peered into the lean face: both the eyes were clamped tightly shut. "Relax, Corporal," Mallory advised kindly. "You have arrived." Dusty Miller slowly opened his eyes, peered round at the edge of the cliff, shuddered and crawled quickly on hands and knees to the shelter of the nearest boulders. Mallory followed and looked down at him curiously. "What was the idea of closing your eyes coming over the top?" "I did not," Miller protested. Mallory said nothing. "I closed them at the bottom," Miller explained weanly. "I opened them at the top." Mallory looked at him incredulously. "What! All the way?" "It's like I told you, boss," Miller complained. "Back in Castelrosso. When I cross a street and step up on to the sidewalk I gotta hang on to the nearest lamp-post. More or less." He broke off, looked at Andrea leaning far out over the side of the cliff, and shivered again. "Brother! Oh brother! Was I scared!" Fear. Terror. Panic. Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain. Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain. Once, twice, a hundred times, Andy Stevens repeated the words to himself, over and over again, like a litany. A psychiatrist had told him that once and he'd read it a dozen times since. Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain. The mind is a limited thing, they had said. It can only hold one thought at a time, one impulse to action. Say to yourself, I am brave, I am overcoming this fear, this stupid, unreasoning panic which has no origin except in my own mind, and because the mind can only hold one thought at a time, and because thinking and feeling are one, then you will be brave, you will overcome and the fear will vanish like a shadow in the night. And so Andy Stevens