The century of summers and winters had taken a severe toll of the yard-wide track. Rains, sun and snows had furrowed and ridged it, while trees and bushes had fallen across it. And dozens of quakes, including the big one on the previous night, had totally shattered several long sections, washing dirt down the side of the cliff.
It became obvious very early in the climb that it was going to take a whole lot longer for Ryan and Trader than the three hours suggested by the old notice.
“Only about one step in ten’s left of the trail,” Trader complained. “Look. We’ve climbed around a hundred feet and I’m clapped out already.”
Ryan was beginning to appreciate the warning about taking sufficient water with them, apart from the fact that neither of them now had a canteen.
The sun was soaring, flooding the bright walls of the canyon with its fiery light.
And its ferocious, scorching heat.
Trapped within the sandstone cliffs, the lower part of the gorge swiftly became an oven.
By the time they were only one-quarter of the way up, it was Ryan, by far the younger man, who was suffering most.
“Take five,” he panted, sitting down and leaning against the rough bark of a bristle-cone pine. His breath was coming in rasping bursts, and he could feel his heart pounding in his chest like a trip-hammer.
A band of iced steel tightened around his forehead, and his eye felt as though a stickie were pushing at it from inside his skull.
“Problem?” Trader said, leaning on the Armalite, glancing at the heights above them. “Still a long way to go.”
“I know. I can fucking well see that for myself!”
Trader grinned maliciously. “Finding it hard to keep up with the old man?”
“Think I’m dehydrated. Felt a touch feverish for a couple of days.”
Trader’s smile vanished. “Sorry for greasin’ your wheels, Ryan. Anything I can do?”
“No. I’ll sit a spell.”
But when he tried to carry on, he found his knees were turning to jelly after three or four minutes, and his sight was blurring. The pain in his chest was worse, and it crossed Ryan’s mind that he might be having a heart attack.
But that was a profoundly worrying thought that he chose to keep to himself.
“Want me to go ahead, or stay with you? Could be I might find some water or some help on top. Then I could come back for you, Ryan.”
“Just let me rest a minute or two.”
The time stretched to nearly a quarter of an hour. Ryan recovered enough to look back down the crooked trail and see how relatively little distance they’d covered so far, and how the top of the sun-etched canyon still seemed impossibly far ahead and above them.
But the thought of failureparticularly in front of Tradermade him try again.
He stood. Trader had been flicking pebbles at a tiny emerald lizard that kept scuttling back and forth at a lower level of the path.
“Sure?” he asked.
Ryan nodded. His stomach was knotted with surging coils of sickness, and he felt freezing cold, despite the sweating heat of the morning.
“Going to try fifty steps, then rest a bit,” he said. “See how that goes.”
Trader looked at him. “Go for it.” For a moment Ryan expected one of his old leader’s familiar sayings, but Trader shook his head. “Go for it,” he repeated.
Fifty paces, counted out slowly, took Ryan to where a section of retaining wall had crashed down from high above. He sat on the warm rocks, breathing slowly, watching a large turquoise butterfly feeding on the corpse of a tiny rodent. He decided that he maybe wasn’t going to die, after all.
“How is it?” Trader asked.
“It’s not too bad. No, not too bad.”
After completing four sections, stopping each time after fifty steps and sitting down for two or three minutes, Ryan realized, to his enormous relief, that he could make it.
That he definitely wasn’t going to die after all.
THE TOP OF THE CANYON was less than two hundred feet above them. The track here was better preserved, and there had even been a couple of stretches where the original wooden handrail remained.