‘Come on,’ Sammy Joseph said again. ‘It’s only a rat.’

The storeman plunged his hand into the fissure. His bare arm twisted and worked. He braced the palm of his left hand against the bale and wrenched out the hook. With an air of incredulity he held the hook out, displaying it.

‘Look!’ he said. With an imperative gesture he waved Mr Joseph aside. The iron hook fell at Sammy Joseph’s feet. A strand of metallic-gold hair was twisted about it.

CHAPTER ONE

Alleyn at Mount Moon

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 veranda 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 foothills, 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 intervals 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.

‘Hallo!’ said the passenger. ‘Is this the top!’ And a moment later: ‘Good God, how remarkable!’

The mountain tops had marched away to left and right. The head of the Pass was an open square of piercing blue. As they reached it the black cloud drew back like a curtain. In a moment it was behind them and they looked down into another country.