live up there, nothing but the white fire-things. And there are
the lava-flows, too, and the choking smoke”
“Well, we can’t climb these cliffs, Honath’s quite right,”
Alaskon said. “And we can’t climb the Basalt Steppes, either
there’s nothing to eat along them, let alone any water or
cover. I don’t see what else we can do but try to get up into
the foothills.”
“Can’t we stay here?” Mathild said plaintively.
“No,” Honath said, even more gently than he had intended.
Mathild’s four words were, he knew, the most dangerous
words in Hellhe knew it quite surely, because of the im-
prisoned creature inside him that cried out to say “Yes” in-
stead. “We have to get out of the country of the demons. And
maybejust maybeif we can cross the great Range, we
can Join a tribe that hasn’t heard about our- being condemned
to Hell. There are supposed to be tribes on the other side of
the Range, but the cliff people would never let our folk get
through to them. That’s on our side now.”
“That’s true,” Alaskon said, brightening a little. “And from
the top of the Range, we could come down into another tribe
instead of trying to climb up into their village out of Hell.
Honath, I think it might work.”
“Then we’d better try to sleep right here and now,” Chart
said. “It seems safe enough. If we’re going to skirt the cliffs
and climb those foothills, we’ll need all the strength “we’ve got
left.”
Honath was about to protest, but he was suddenly too tired
to care. Why not sleep it over? And if in the night they were
found and takenwell, that would at least put an end tc