Before, the light from the blister-sun, however feeble, had kept the canyon walls in silhouette; they’d presented only a black, flanking frame to Jazz’s eyes, with the main picture lying directly ahead. That picture had been the false horizon at the head of the saddle, the scree-littered way to it, and the thin arc of bright yellow light beyond; which, Jazz noted, had moved gradually from west to east, until now it was lying in the very corner of his picture.
When during the last two or three miles he’d turned his gaze away from the sun for a moment, turned his face to the flank and looked up, then, as they’d grown accustomed, his eyes had been able to spy the dark, forested heights, and above them the sharp silver gleam of snow. But in fact he’d had little time for sight-seeing; mainly his attention had been glued to the non-existent trail, picking a way through rocks and fallen jumble, always choosing the easiest way ahead. It had scarcely dawned on him that as he progressed, so indeed there had been something of a trail. In his own world he’d have expected one, and so in this world it had failed to make an impression. Until now.
But here the gorge was a great deal narrower. Where two hours earlier, at the mouth of the pass, the distance between walls had been something more than a mile, maybe even a mile and a half, here it had narrowed down to less than two hundred yards, almost a bottleneck at the foot of steep canyon walls. The crest of the saddle, as he judged it, was only a quarter-mile ahead now, when at last he’d be able to look down and spy something of the world on the sunlit side of the range.
What had caused him to freeze was this:
The moon, rising swiftly over the western side of the gorge, now shone its silvery-yellow light down on the eastern wall. Jazz was close to that side of the gorge, so that the previously silhouetted face seemed to tower almost directly overhead. But no longer in silhouette – no longer a vertical, soaring jut of black rock – the mighty cliff of the canyon had taken on a different aspect entirely.
Picked out now by the moon in sharp detail, Jazz saw a castle built into the vertiginous heights! A castle, yes, and no way he could be mistaken on this occasion. Where once a wide ledge had scarred the cliff’s face, now the walls of a fortress rose up fantastically to meet the massy overhang of natural stone high overhead. A castle, an outpost, a grimly foreboding keep guarding the pass. And Jazz knew he’d hit upon its purpose here at the first throw: a keep guarding the pass!
Craning his neck, he took in its awesome moonlit bleakness, the gaunt soullessness of its warlike features. There were battlements, with massive merlons and gaping embrasures; and where towers and turrets were supported by flying buttresses, there yawned the mouths of menacing corbels. Stone arches formed into steps joined parts of the architecture which were otherwise inaccessible, where the natural rock of the cliff bulged or jutted and generally obstructed; flights of stone stairs rose steeply between the many levels, carved deep into the otherwise sheer rock; window holes gloomed like dark eyes in the moon-yellowed stone, frowning down on Jazz where he crouched in the shadows and gazed, and wondered.
The structure started maybe fifty feet up the cliff face, half-way to the top of a lone, projecting stack. In the chimney between cliff and pillar, stone steps were visible zigzagging upwards to the mouth of a domed cave; presumably the cave was extensive, with its own passageways to the castle proper. Higher still, the fortifications themselves spread outward across the face of the cliff like some strange stone fungus, covering nature’s bastions with the lesser but more purposeful works of … men? Jazz could only suppose so.
But whoever had built this aerie, they were not here now. No figures moved in the battlements or on the stairways; no lights shone in the windows, balconies or turrets; no smoke curled from the tall chimneys moulded to the face of the cliff. The place was deserted – maybe. That ‘maybe’ was because Jazz was sure as he’d ever been that hooded eyes were upon him, studying him where he in turn held his breath and studied the cliff-fashioned castle.