After an hour they bore south-east. The long grass was replaced by a short wiry ground cover of creeping plants and low wiry shrubs. At first the walking was easier, since now they could see where they were putting their feet, but slowly the ground began to rise, more and more steeply, until they found that they were having to stop and catch their breath and rub cramped leg muscles.

At noon the Initiator called a halt for lunch. They all collapsed thankfully onto the short turf. The meal was a silent one. All of them were busy with their thoughts. Each of them looked back, from time to time, towards that curve of the Dome that shone silver under the noon sun. Six kilometres away it lay, like a silver lens in the grass. The Web was growing weaker now. It was hard to hold on to. Soon it would be gone. So they were silent.

Only Ruth was not concerned with the Web. She looked eagerly eastward towards the mountains. They seemed to roll on for ever, like a dark tree-covered ocean. Somewhere there... but how could Luke lead them to the exact spot?

“Where are you?” she said softly, so the others could not hear. “Who are you, Tomi? And why do you call to me?”

The hills and mountains were silent. No psyche reached out to meet hers. Only a little breeze riffled the grassland that lay like a broad lake between the foothills and the mountains.

By midafternoon they had turned due cast. Now the Ark was out of sight and ahead of them lay thirty kilometres of grassland. On its verge they made camp for the night.

The low brush provided plenty of dead wood for their fire. They scraped a place free of vegetation and surrounded it carefully with stones. At the touch of a match the fire crackled and sent sparks shooting up into the sky. The living flame was like a kind of magic to them. Its cheerful noise thrust back the silence of the empty world.

From a small stream they drew water for cooking. Then they washed their blistered feet. The Healers anointed and bandaged them and laid their hands on them. Soon the redness and the throbbing lessened.

“But we have to be more careful. If you feel a wrinkle in a sock stop at once and take your boot off and smooth it out,” Paola warned. “We'll be useless lame.”

“How far did we walk today?” Angela asked.

“About fourteen kilometres,” said Luke.

“How far do we have to go?”

“Perhaps another hundred.”

“A hundred!” Their heads all turned, as if pulled by an invisible thread, to look at the dark line to the cast.

“We'll never make it,” Charity said despairingly.

''Yes, we will. It's going to be all right,” Ruth said. “We're not accustomed to it yet, that's all. Each day will be easier.”