When I stood up I found I was under an overhang, free of vegetation but facing a screen of trees that almost concealed the next giant block. We’d be able to force a way through the screen, no doubt getting torn and scratched a lot more, but there was no guarantee we could get around or over or under the granite. I sidestepped along, peering through the screen, looking for possibilities, as the others started joining me. Fi was the fourth, arriving a little breathless but without fuss; funnily enough it was Kevin who was unnerved by the insects. He slid the last few yards down the tree in a rush, yelling hysterically, ‘God no, help, there’s creepy-crawlies everywhere! Get them off me! Get them off me!’ He spent the next three minutes brushing himself fiercely, spinning round and round in the narrow space we had, trying to catch glimpses of any more that might be on him, shaking his clothes frantically. I couldn’t help wondering how he coped with fly-struck sheep.

Things calmed down with Kevin but we still couldn’t see any way out of the overhang.

‘Well,’ said Robyn cheerfully, ‘looks like we camp here for a week.’

There was a bit of a silence.

‘Ellie,’ Lee said kindly, ‘I don’t think we’re going to find a way down. And the further we go, the harder it’s going to be to get back.’

‘Let’s just try for one more step,’ I asked, then added, a little wildly, ‘Three’s my lucky number.’

We poked around a bit more, but rather doubtfully. Finally Corrie said, ‘There might be a chance if we wriggle through here. We might be able to get around the side somewhere.’

The gap she’d picked was so narrow we had to take our packs off to get through it, but I was game, so I took Corrie’s pack while she wrestled her way into a prickly overgrown hole. Her head disappeared, then her back, then her legs. I heard Kevin say, ‘This is crazy’, then Corrie said, ‘OK now my pack’, so I pushed that through after her. Then, leaving Robyn to look after my pack, I followed.

I soon realised that Corrie had the right idea, but it sure was difficult. If I wasn’t such a stubborn pig-headed idiot I would have surrendered by this point. We ended up crawling along like myxo’d rabbits, me pushing Corrie’s pack ahead of me. But I caught glimpses of a wall of rock on my left, and we were definitely going downhill, so I figured we were probably getting around the third of Satan’s Steps. Then Corrie paused, in front of me, forcing me to stop too.

‘Hey!’ she said. ‘Can you hear what I hear?’

There are some questions that really annoy me, like ‘What do you know?’, ‘Are you working to your full capacity?’ (our Form teacher’s favourite), ‘Guess what I’m thinking?’, and ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing young lady?’ (Dad, when he’s annoyed). I don’t like any of them. And ‘Can you hear what I hear?’ is in the same category. Plus I was tired, hot, frustrated. So I gave a bad-tempered answer. After a minute’s pause Corrie, showing more patience than me, said, ‘There’s water ahead. Running water.’

I listened, and then realised I could hear it too. So I passed the word back to the others. It was only a small thing, but it kept us going that little bit longer. I crawled on grimly, listening to the sound get louder and closer. It had to be quite a busy stream, which at this altitude meant a spring. We could all do with a fresh cold drink of the water that came from these mountain springs. We’d need it for the struggle back up to the top of Hell. And it was time we started that struggle. It was getting late; time to set up a campsite.

Suddenly I was at the stream and there was Corrie, standing on a rock grinning at me.

‘Well, we found something,’ I said, grinning back.

It was a pretty little thing. The sun didn’t reach it, so it was dark and cool and secret. The water bubbled over rocks that were green and slippery with moss. I knelt and soaked my face, then lapped like a dog as the others started to arrive. There wasn’t much room but Robyn started exploring in one direction, stepping gingerly from rock to rock, as Lee did the same in the other direction. I admired their energy.

‘It’s a nice creek,’ said Fi, ‘but Ellie, we’d better start heading back up the top.’

‘I know. Let’s just have a relax first, for five minutes. We’ve earned it.’

‘This is worse than the Outward Bound course,’ Homer complained.

‘I wish I’d gone on that now,’ Fi said. ‘You all went, didn’t you?’

I’d gone on the course, and enjoyed it. I’d done a lot of camping with my parents but Outward Bound had given me a taste for something tougher. I’d just started thinking about it, remembering, when suddenly Robyn reappeared. The look on her face was almost frightening. In the dense overgrowth I couldn’t stand, but I straightened up as far as I could, and quickly.

‘What’s happened?’

Robyn said, with the air of someone who is hearing her own voice but not believing her own words, ‘I just found a bridge’.

Chapter Three

The path was covered with leaves and sticks, and was a bit overgrown in places, but compared to what we’d been down, it was like a freeway. We stood spread out along it, marvelling. I felt almost dizzy with relief and astonishment and gratification.

‘Ellie,’ Homer said solemnly, ‘I’ll never call you a stupid dumb obstinate slagheap again.’

‘Thanks Homer.’

It was a sweet moment.

‘Tell you what,’ said Kevin, ‘it’s lucky I wouldn’t let you pikers give up back there, when you all wanted to wimp out.’

I ignored him.

The bridge was old but had been beautifully built. It crossed the creek in a large clearing and was about a metre wide and five metres long. It even had a handrail. Its surface was made of round logs rather than planks but the logs were matched and cut with perfect uniformity. Joints cut in each end married the logs to crossbars and the first and last ones were then secured to the crossbars by wooden pegs.

‘It’s a lovely job,’ said Kevin. ‘Reminds me of my own early work.’

Suddenly we had so much energy it was as though we were on something. We nearly decided to camp in the clearing, which was cool and shadowy, but the urge to explore was too strong. We hoisted our packs on our backs again, and chattering like cockatoos we hustled down the path.

‘It must be true about the hermit! No one else would have gone to all that trouble.’

‘Wonder how long he was here for.’

‘How do you know it was a he?’

‘The locals always talked about him as a male.’

‘Most hims are talked about as males.’ That was Lee, being a smartarse.

‘He must have been here years, to go to all that trouble with the bridge.’

‘And the track’s so well worn.’

‘If he did live here years he’d have time to do the bridge and a lot more. Imagine how you’d fill your time!’

‘Yeah, food’d be the big thing. Once you’d organised your meals, the rest of the day’d be yours.’

‘I wonder what you’d live on.’

‘Possums, rabbits maybe.’

‘Wouldn’t be many rabbits in this kind of country. There’s wallabies. Plenty of possums. Feral cats.’

‘Yuk.’

‘You could grow vegetables.’

‘Bush tucker.’

‘Yeah, he probably watched that show on TV.’

‘Wombats.’

‘Yeah, what would wombats taste like?’

‘They say most people eat too much anyway. If he just ate when he was really hungry he wouldn’t need much.’

‘You can train yourself to eat a lot less.’

‘You know Andy Farrar? He found a walking stick in the bush near Wombegonoo. It’s beautifully made, handmade, all carved and everything. Everyone said it must be the Hermit’s but I thought they were joking.’

The track was taking us downhill all the time. It wound around a bit, looking for the best route, but the trend was always downhill. It was going to be quite a sweat getting back up. We’d lost a lot of altitude. It was beautiful though, quiet, shady, cool and damp. There were no flowers, just more shades of green and brown than the English language knows about. The ground was deep in leaf litter there were times when we lost the track beneath heaps of bark and leaves and twigs, but a search around under the trees always found it again. Every so often it brought us back to Satan’s Steps, so that for a few metres we’d be brushing alongside the great granite walls. Once it cut between two of the steps and continued down the other side: the gap was only a couple of metres wide, so it was almost a tunnel through the massive hunks of rock.