‘They don’t speak German in these parts.’

‘It was Gaelic probably.’

‘What do you make of this, then?’ and I quoted the stuff about birds with which they had greeted each other.

Wake looked interested.  ’That’s Uber allen Gipfeln.  Have you ever read Goethe?’

‘Never a word.  And what do you make of that?’ I pointed to a flat rock below tide-mark covered with a tangle of seaweed.  It was of a softer stone than the hard stuff in the hills and somebody had scraped off half the seaweed and a slice of the side.  ’That wasn’t done yesterday morning, for I had my bath here.’

Wake got up and examined the place.  He nosed about in the crannies of the rocks lining the inlet, and got into the water again to explore better.  When he joined me he was smiling.  ’I apologize for my scepticism,’ he said.  ’There’s been some petrol-driven craft here in the night.  I can smell it, for I’ve a nose like a retriever.  I daresay you’re on the right track.  Anyhow, though you seem to know a bit about German, you could scarcely invent immortal poetry.’

We took our belongings to a green crook of the burn, and made a very good breakfast.  Wake had nothing in his pack but plasmon biscuits and raisins, for that, he said, was his mountaineering provender, but he was not averse to sampling my tinned stuff.  He was a different-sized fellow out in the hills from the anaemic intellectual of Biggleswick.  He had forgotten his beastly self-consciousness, and spoke of his hobby with a serious passion.  It seemed he had scrambled about everywhere in Europe, from the Caucasus to the Pyrenees.  I could see he must be good at the job, for he didn’t brag of his exploits.  It was the mountains that he loved, not wriggling his body up hard places.  The Coolin, he said, were his favourites, for on some of them you could get two thousand feet of good rock.  We got our glasses on the face of Sgurr Alasdair, and he sketched out for me various ways of getting to its grim summit.  The Coolin and the Dolomites for him, for he had grown tired of the Chamonix aiguilles.  I remember he described with tremendous gusto the joys of early dawn in Tyrol, when you ascended through acres of flowery meadows to a tooth of clean white limestone against a clean blue sky.  He spoke, too, of the little wild hills in the Bavarian Wettersteingebirge, and of a guide he had picked up there and trained to the job.

’They called him Sebastian Buchwieser.  He was the jolliest boy you ever saw, and as clever on crags as a chamois.  He is probably dead by now, dead in a filthy jaeger battalion.  That’s you and your accursed war.’

‘Well, we’ve got to get busy and end it in the right way,’ I said.  ‘And you’ve got to help, my lad.’

He was a good draughtsman, and with his assistance I drew a rough map of the crevice where we had roosted for the night, giving its bearings carefully in relation to the burn and the sea.  Then I wrote down all the details about Gresson and the Portuguese Jew, and described the latter in minute detail.  I described, too, most precisely the cache where it had been arranged that the messages should be placed.  That finished my stock of paper, and I left the record of the oddments overheard of the conversation for a later time.  I put the thing in an old leather cigarette-case I possessed, and handed it to Wake.