‘Did we ever really climb these?’ she breathed in awestruck tones, pointing to mountains whose sides, snow-covered almost to their base, seemed to rise sheer from their dark valleys in steeps that only birds could dare.

‘Climb them!’ I cried, and laughed. ‘Yes, indeed, we ran up and down them like wild goats.’

‘They’re very steep, aren’t they?’ she said.

‘They seem steeper than they are,’ I answered.

I said to myself, ‘We did climb them.’ Not their apparent steepness made me doubt, but my own faint recollection. The dismal time past was sped. I gazed at the country we traversed a couple of days ago. One of the eagles from the Durc soared into view, climbing in a slow magnificent spiral until it wheeled out of sight, too high over its kingdom for our poor eyes to follow. I thought of its terrible vision of the world, its eyes that saw a realm of hills and a mouse stirring in the grass from that invisible throne in air where now it hid. I thought, where my imagination and my memory faltered, it saw. Our footsteps in the snow amongst the hills were plain to its gaze. Then suddenly I remembered and saw as if with the eagle’s sight. I saw the battle in the valley; I perceived our way of retreat to Loch Ericht, and our fire blazing in a cloud of snowflakes, and our return to the top of the Farrow whence we saw other ominous fires gleaming encamped below our cave. Our wanderings were like a map spread out.

‘Don’t go in,’ I begged Terry when she turned to leave me.

‘I must,’ she said.

‘You can’t do any good,’ I went on. ‘You’re tiring yourself to death—you haven’t rested for more than five minutes together—’

‘Soon I can rest,’ she said gently. ‘It’s not his good but my own—making it easier for him has changed me—it won’t be long now.’

‘Is he weak?’ I asked.

‘As water. Are you staying here?’

‘I’ll go in,’ I said.

We bent over him. He was nearly done, his breath as feeble as a child’s, scarce fretting the silence of the cave. He began to smile and whisper and open his eyes wide. He tried to sit up. Terry put her arm under his shoulders. It was ended before we knew it began; his dead weight lay on her arms. She let him back gently; she stooped to touch his forehead with her lips.

And it’s so easy then to die, to die and lose the sun, to open one’s eyes and sleep.

‘He died quiet,’ she whispered. ‘He didn’t die like a beast, alone.’