They fell swiftly behind him as he climbed the pathway in the night, months of hard hunting had toned him to the peak of physical condition and he ran at the hill. She had not been able to warn him. What words were there to describe the creature in the cave on the hilltop. She had told him simply: ‘I have found Pater.’ It had deflected his anger instantly. The bitter accusations shrivelled on his tongue, and the realization dawned in his eyes. They had found Fuller Ballantyne. They had accomplished one of the three major objectives of the expedition. She knew that Zouga was already seeing it in print, almost composing the paragraph that would describe the moment, imagining the newspaper urchins shouting the headlines in the streets of London. For the first time in her life she came close to hating her brother, and her voice was crisp as hoar-frost as she told him, ‘And don’t you forget it was me. I was the one who made the march and broke trail, and I was the one who found him.’ She saw the shift in his green eyes in the firelight.
