1. There were to be trips each Summer, expeditions up the line, anniversaries, but at what cost and to where and how could the old track take the weight? No one else had heard of this and no one came.
At the junction with the main line week end amateurs from an electric age practised filing, cutting iron and nineteenth century cooking. They polished the engine flanks but said they had no power as yet, as yet. Said they were not playing at this but perhaps they were, as yet.
Yes, they said evasively, there is a way to be disclosed but no maps of the line, the office shut long since and the shares sold off, a map, maybe, in a museum somewhere, under glass, a primer to ancient pioneering, so to say 'under-invested'.
And the old workers died 'in harness', yes, and lie at the line side in neat, green graves anonymous in the sunlight reaching down through the uncut hazel woods to warm them for an hour as now. Ahead, the valley crowds, is mountainous, grows dark by early afternoon bright only where screes in a slash nearly reach down to warm the sleepers.
No one could remember the round trip, but if old report is trusted, worthwhile, if you travelled to the end, or so it is alleged. Who else might ride in these slow patched carriages? Only the miscellaneous and the mad those who looked too long for salvation in cities, were conned of hope and cash.
Some take the last chance journeys on hearsay, whispers, a late night story, or when a friend dies muttering some incoherent sense. They know time is too brief to reach the famous terminus or the desert shrine; with no hope now of hope: know too that they may come back famished and still dying to their beginning.
2. At the line's end, under a mountain black and glittering with frost the engine sighs, calls this a halt and five minutes are allowed to visit the tea hut, take film, return. Or dump memory and hope and walk towards the foggy slope.
For here, it it is alleged, the terror starts, you are naked of thought, it is cold and what passes for help are old and alien things, a copse like a wood henge, way markings of stones set at angles in the grass, a smudged hearth and sounds the ears miss or never learnt to hear, and the mist above towards which what seems to be a path seems to meander.
A whistling from below. And now, at last, the necessary silent cloud, From darkness into darkness.
Roy Ashwell