Free The Wine-Dark Sea by Robert Aickman Page B

the Quiet Valley?’
    ‘I don’t care what it’s called. It’s a bad valley all right.’
    Margaret looked at her. Mimi was staring defiantly ahead as she strode forward. ‘You mean because there are no people?’
    ‘I mean because I know it’s bad. You can’t explain it.’
    Margaret was inexpert with intuitions, bred out of them perhaps. The baking, endless road was certainly becoming to her unpleasant in the extreme. Moreover, the foul coffee had given her indigestion, and the looseness of her belt made it impossible to loosen it further.
    ‘If you hadn’t heard that train, we’d never have been here.’
    ‘If I hadn’t heard it, we’d quite simply have been lost. The path on the map just gave out. That’s apt to happen when you merely choose paths instead of making for definite places.’
    In her vexation Margaret raked over another underlying dissimilarity in their approaches to life, one already several times exposed. Then reflecting that Mimi had been perfectly willing to wend from point to point provided that the points were Youth Hostels, Margaret added, ‘Sorry Mimi. It’s the heat.’
    A certain persistent fundamental disharmony between them led Mimi to reply none too amicably, ‘What exactly do you suggest we are going to do?’
    Had Margaret been Mimi there would have been a row: but, being Margaret, she said, ‘I think perhaps we’d better take another look at the map.’
    This time she unslung her rucksack and got out the map herself. Mimi stood sulkily sweating and doing nothing either to help or to remove the sweat. Looking at her, Margaret suddenly said, ‘I wonder what’s become of the breeze we had this morning?’ Then, Mimi still saying nothing, she sat down and looked at the map. ‘We could go over into the next valley. There are several quite large villages.’
    ‘Up there?’ Mimi indicated the rocky slope rising steeply above them.
    ‘The tunnel runs through where the mountains are highest . If we go on a bit, we’ll reach the other end and it may be less of a climb. What do you say?’
    Mimi took a loose cigarette from a pocket of her shirt. ‘Not much else to do, is there?’ Her attitude was exceedingly irritating. Margaret perceived the unwisdom of strong Indian tea in the middle of the day. ‘I hope we make it,’ added Mimi with empty cynicism. As she struck a match, in the very instant a gust of wind not only blew it out but wrenched the map from Margaret’s hands. It was as if the striking of the match had conjured up the means to its immediate extinction.
    Margaret, recovering, closed the map; and they looked behind them. ‘Oh hell,’ said Margaret. ‘I dislike the weather in the Quiet Valley.’ A solid bank of the dark grey cloud had formed in their rear and was perceptibly closing down upon them like a huge hood.
    ‘I hope we make it,’ repeated Mimi, her cynicism now less empty. They left their third set of grey stones demarcating emptiness.
    Before long they were over the ridge at the top of the valley. The prospect ahead entirely confirmed the sentiments of the man at the Guest House. The scene could hardly have been bleaker or less inviting. But as it was much cooler, and the way for the first time in several hours comfortably downhill , they marched forward with once-more tightened belts, keeping strictly in step, blown forward by a rising wind. The recurring tension between them was now dissipated by efficient exertion under physically pleasant conditions; by the renewed sense of objective. They conversed steadily and amiably , the distraction winging their feet. Margaret felt the contrast between the optimism apparently implicit in the weather when they had set out, and the doom implicit in it now; but she felt it not unagreeably, drew from it a pleasing sense of tragedy and fitness. That was how she felt until well after it had actually begun to rain.
    The first slow drops flung on the back of her knees and neck by the following wind were sweetly