The Stolen Lake by Joan Aiken Page A

acos no one'd buy it—there's always plenty."
    "Not in the mountains," said Mr. Holystone hoarsely. He had gone deathly pale; his high forehead gleamed with sweat. He muttered, "Up on the slopes of Catelonde one must carry enough air to breathe. There are flowers—night-blooming lilies—shepherds always carry them...."
    "Oh, Mr. Holy! What can we
do
for this poor girl?"
    But Mr. Holystone was past replying. He had slid to the floor in deep unconsciousness.

5
    The rack railway train that was to carry the party from Bewdley up to a height of twelve thousand feet above sea level was such a strange-looking little conveyance that when they first set eyes on it Dido exclaimed, "Love a duck! That thing couldn't pull pussy across the parlor!"
    Captain Hughes, equally glum and dubious, observed that it resembled a row of dominoes in process of falling down. The rolling stock of the little train did indeed have a curiously tilted appearance, since most of its journey would be spent going up the side of a slope like a church steeple; consequently, while on flat ground the whole thing leaned forward as if engaged in studying its own toenails. The tiny wood-burning engine carried a top-heavy smokestack with a fuel box and water tank behind. There were three wagons: a baggage-and-mail car, loaded with straw bales, goats, poultry, salt, and dried fish; a boxcar crammed to its thatched roof with standing passengers, all wrapped snugly in the local garb of ponchos and long cloaks, which they called ruanas; and a first-class car which, for the benefit of the foreigners, was supplied with a few narrow wooden benches.
    The train ran on three rails, the center one having large cog teeth, which engaged with similar teeth on a set of wheels under the cars, so that, however steep the slope, the train could never slip backward. Gay red roses and green leaves had been painted along the sides of the wagons a long time ago. The paint, like everything else about the train, was old, dirty, and worn.
    After considerable delay the engine started with a great snorting and straining and blowing of steam and a shriek so prolonged that it seemed to be protesting against its task.
    Almost as soon as it had clanked away from Bewdley, the track stopped being level and began to climb. They rounded a corner of the Severn gorge, crept up a steep hillside, and were immediately presented with a view so magnificent that it made Dido gasp. A mile west of Bewdley the valley of the Severn was barred by a great semicircle of cliffs over which the river came racing in a huge horseshoe of boiling white water, full three quarters of a mile from side to side; white vapor rose from it like smoke, and the roar was loud enough to drown even the screeching and chugging of their engine.
    "That's what I kept a-hearing last night. I thought it was lions roaring and tigers caterwauling," Dido said to Mr. Holystone, who whispered that the cascade was known as the Falls of Hypha, and formed the lowest in a series of seven, all equally majestic. "The others are Stheino, Euryte, Medusa, Minerva, Nemetone, and Rhiannon—the seven witches who guard the secret land of Upper Cumbria."
    "Ain't there
no
way to Upper Cumbria but by this railway?" asked Dido.
    "Not from the sea. Before the rail track was cut, men thought the precipices too high to scale."
    "Then," said Dido skeptically, "how did the first lot ever get there? The ones who came over after the Battle of Dyrham?"
    "They had landed farther down the coast and traveled north through the mountains and the valley of Lake Arianrod."
    "Come in by the back way, I see."
    "That way, too, leads in through a very narrow pass; it wants but one great rock to fall, which hangs poised on the lip of Mount Catelonde, and the way would be blocked, and Upper Cumbria would be sealed off."
    "Only if the railway stopped running," Dido pointed out. "What a lot you know about it all, Mr. Holy!"
    "I have always—always been interested in ancient