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It was blue.
The beautiful, deep, flawless azure of his dreams.
2.
The midday heat forced the couple to retreat deeper into the cave, but
not too far. The bright light banished many of the cave's shadows and
encouraged them to exlore, although they stayed away from the crooked passage
at the end. Ewen found a flat area of the cave's wall that was covered in
scratch marks. He trained the discharge tube on it.
"Look, Jenine - names."
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Jenine peered at the faint markings. They were all illegible but she
could make out at least twenty different scrawls. "All those people have found
this escape route?" she wondered.
"Could be more. The others wouldn't be able to write."
Jenine nodded to the rear of the cave. "Do you suppose he... He was one
of the others?"
"I don't know. I didn't see a medallion." Ewen found a scrap of plastic
wrapping paper and smoothed it out. It was a vending machine snack food bag.
"Maybe he thought he could live on this junk?" He angrily screwed the wrapper
into a ball and threw it out. "Afterall, he was the only one not to escape."
He looked at the roof. Something caught his attention. He held the light
higher. More scratch marks.
"Maybe they all jumped over the edge eventually?" Jenine suggested.
Ewen didn't answer. These markings were too legible to have been
scratched on the roof. Someone had used a laser cutter. He realised that he
was trying to read the legend upside-down.
"Jenine - look."
She stood on her toes and examined Ewen's find. Cut into the rock were
two clear and unequivocal words:
SIMO BELAN.
* * * *
It was three hours after sunrise and the heat near the cave's opening
became intolerable. It was cooler towards the rear of the cave but that wasn't
an option so far as Jenine was concerned. She peeled off all her clothes. It
seemed a sensible thing to do so Ewen followed suit.
"It's not so much the heat that's making us uncomfortable, it's the
humidity," Jenine reasoned, trying to remember everything from their 4th year
environment and air- conditioning studies. "It's been set far too high. The
result is that our sweat doesn't get the chance to evaporate properly and so
conduct excess heat away from our bodies."
"Which is just as well," Ewen observed, sitting on his pile of clothes
and staring out of the cave entrance at the sparkling sea and the haze-laden
horizon.
Jenine sat opposite him. Her pale body gleaming with perspiration, blonde
curls matted against her temples. "Why's that?"
"If the humidity was much lower, we'd feel cooler because the evaporation
rate of our sweat would be higher. Right?"
She considered and nodded. Weighing up these seemingly mundane factors
helped preserve their sanity.
"Therefore we'd dehydrate much more rapidly than we are already," said
Ewen. He wiped his brow and looked at the trail of moisture on his forearm.
"Even so, we're still losing a lot of fluid. We've had nothing to drink for
some hours. We've got to get out of here as soon as possible."
* * * *
Two hours later the unrelenting sun had moved so that it no longer beat
down into the cave's entrance. The couple ignored their mounting thirst and
moved to the opening to take careful stock of their surroundings. Their cave
was set into a steeply sloping cliff face of the same grey and reddish-
streaked rock of Arama. Clumps of gnarled thornbush trees grew at intervals
all the way down to the restless sea. At that moment the strange moaning sound
that they had heard during the night started again. In daylight it was not so
frightening, but they listened to the rising and falling note in silent
apprehension until it finally died away.
"It's definitely coming from outside - somewhere behind us," Ewen
muttered.
"Some sort of machine?"
"Has to be," Ewen agreed uncertainly.
"The water's gone back," said Jenine, pointing down. "It was right up
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against the rocks before."
Ewen peered down. She was right - the sea had receded from the base of
the cliff, exposing a narrow strip of wave- worn boulders and a belt of
shingle that led to the left to a broad beach of golden-yellow sand. Was it
sand? It had to be sand. His dream came back to him: his frantic attempts to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]