"Two soldiers. Probably searching for Herzog's gun. Back inside ladies. Look around carefully. Make sure there is no trace of us. I'll grab the blanket, Maria the towels, Rachel the soap over there by the pool. What else is there?"

Once they were back inside, David said, "The shelter is completely invisible from over there. The gully looks impassible from the corner. The ledge is tricky, and it offers no temptation to continue unless you're seeking a perfect hiding place and a delightful spa."

"What's a spa?" Maria asked as they began dressing. "I love the way you flip your trousers to flop your penis inside."

"Mineral springs, hot springs. The relaxation and health resort built around them. We have some fine ones in the Rockies. Radium Hot Springs just starting. Banff Springs Hotel, such a marvellous place, an immense castle-like hotel built up in the mountains. I was there at an Alpine Club event two or three years ago."

"This would be a much better spa if Fritz would go away," Rachel said, as she leaned against the base of the rock face. "There's a town in eastern Belgium named Spa, I was told that's where the name comes from. Here, they're called baden. This whole area of Germany we're in is the Grand Duchy of Baden. There's a town north of Freiburg, I guess it's a city, named Baden-Baden."

"Baden, those are baths in English, aren't they? We went down through Bath on our way to Bristol a couple of times on leave when we were training on the Salisbury Plains. Stopped there for a night the second time. They said the Romans established baths there in the first century, eighteen or nineteen hundred years ago."

"Looks like we're not the first ones to enjoy bathing and luxuriating," Maria said with a laugh.

"Probably goes back thous..." He paused, put his hand up, then pointed to the gabbro block, toward the entrance to the gully.

They heard the scraping again. David reached across for the weapon, flipped off its safety and sat at the edge of the triangle. Relaxed, but ready.

"Helmut! Helfen, helfen Sie mir. Ich schlüpfe," came a desperate voice from close in front of them. There was a louder scraping, a scream, a hollow crack, a dull thud and a splash, followed by a clatter of falling rocks below.

David had quickly glanced out around the block of gabbro, sensing the source of the voice would be too concerned to see him. He saw the soldier hanging by his fingertips to the edge of the ledge below the bulge, on the slippery wet rocks in the splash of the waterfall. Then he had watched as the fingers lost their grips. First, one slowly, then another, followed quickly by all of them. He watched as a trouser leg snagged on a spike of rock just into the fall and spun soldier sideways, slamming his head onto the lip of the slab before he disappeared.

"Horst!" came the cry from below. "Horst! Mein Gott! Horst, nicht du auch."

David sat at the edge and listened, staring intently at the entrance ledge with one eye barely around the corner of the rock. He ran the scenes of the past several minutes through his mind.

Then he repeated them quietly for the women to hear, "I had seen only two soldiers below when I was at the corner, but I had taken little time to look. Horst had called for help from Helmut, not from anyone else. Is that Helmut below us now? Or is Helmut on the entrance ramp? I've heard no other voices, heard no other sounds. Is that Helmut below?"

Before either of them could answer, there was a loud, breaking voice from below, bellowing up the hillside, telling whoever that Private Smidt was dead, that he needed help to bring up the body.

There was no reply, his voice most likely lost in the noise of the continuing target practice. A minute later, with still no reply, the voice from below bellowed again, then they heard loud sobbing.

"That's Helmut down there. Maria, could you hand me my small mirror? It's in the side pocket of my small rucksack, the left one."

She brought it to him, and he said, "Lean back against the rock. Put your head here, like this." He adjusted her position and kissed her, then got up and moved back out through the triangle. After gathering a few small stones, he paused to look closely at the entrance before continuing along the base of the cliff about five feet.

He stood the mirror on the slab, looked at the angles, tilted and swivelled it. "Tell me when you have a view of the entrance."

"It's too low, all I have is the slab, lean in back a bit — more — a little bit more — there. That's the ramp. It looks like the edge of the bulge. Yes, I see the light colour below the bulge. Twist it a bit toward you — oops, the wrong way. More, a bit more... Stop. Back a tiny bit... There, I now have a view from the slab to a couple metres above the entrance. Hold it and I'll watch now." She giggled.

David carefully placed his gathered rocks behind the mirror and two at the bottom front. "I need a small bush to disguise this, how's the alignment? Does it need any adjustment?"

"Still perfectly centred."

He pulled two small boughs of needles off a pine and carefully arranged them around the mirror, breaking the impact of its hard edges and screening it from easy view from across the gully.

"That's ingenious, where did you learn that?" Maria asked as he came back in and sat in the viewing position.

"It's another of those things I learned on the first of May 1915 while relaxing at a spa in the hills of the Black Forest with two beautiful women," he said with a wide grin.

"Watch you don't split your lip again. You learn so much while relaxing at spas — magic with a mirror, eye massage, an alternate use for the tongue..." Maria drifted off dreamily.

"Did you enjoy that?"

"You saw how quickly and often I exploded. You must be joking. Next to you rooting around inside, I've never had anything so intense. Let me rephrase that. Next to you doing anything, I've never had such intense feelings. Physically or emotionally."

"Sex for two is much better than for one, I've always thought." He looked at his watch. "It's twenty to five, I'm going to check over the lip to see if I can spot Helmut."

He leaned over and kissed her. "These lips are working much better, feeling much better. Thank you for your excellent nursing."

He checked the mirror, delighted at how well it worked, then crawled out through the triangle and slowly walked toward the brink, stopping six feet from the drop. Moving his head slowly back and forth, he tried to safely catch a glimpse below. Nothing. He moved a few inches farther and bobbed again.

Still nothing of Helmut.

Finally, about four feet from the brink, he caught movement and got down on all fours to move slowly forward. He craned his neck and saw Helmut, a young lad barely needing to shave, slinging two rifles and slowly dragging the lifeless Horst across the slope, angling downward toward the left side.

Toward our safe side.

Back in the shelter, he explained what he had seen. He checked the mirror again to make sure the entrance ledge was clear, and the mirror was well-masked by the screen of pine boughs. He stepped out and pinched a sprig off a bough and brought it back into the shelter. "Do you know the secret of pine needles?"

"They have secrets?" Maria asked.

"Only to those who haven't taken the time to look enquiringly. These needles are bundled in pairs like the Scots pine we have at home. Other species of pine have three, four, five or six needles bundled together. The Ponderosa Pine has three needles, the white pine usually has five. It doesn't matter how many needles are in a bundle, pull them together like this." He ran his fingers from their base to their end. "They form a thin, spiralling cylinder of two, three, five, however many equal segments."

He handed the needle bundle to Maria, and she ran her fingers along the two needles, pulling them into a thin cylinder. "Amazing, where did you learn this?"

"From pausing to observe and to think. There's a lot of wonderful quiet time alone in the mountains, and we can learn much if we keep our eyes and minds open."

"The twist, what's that from?"

"My thought is it comes from the Coriolis effect, from the force of the earth's rotation, though I've not confirmed this."

He put up his finger. "But, let's get back to here, to our present situation. Let's pull out the map and guidebook. We haven't even checked where we are and what's around us."

After he had unfolded the map sheet to the appropriate panels, he said, "Let's play a game. With eyes only, quietly trace the route you think we've followed. Determine where you think we are. No talking. When everybody's ready, I'll count one, two, three, go, and we'll all put our finger on the spot we think we are. This will be fun, but it's also a serious game. It'll give independent opinions we can discuss."

They examined the unfolded panels, traced with their minds where they thought they had come, examined the contours and hachures. He looked from face to face at the smiles and nods when he asked, "Ready? Alright, one, two, three, go!"

Three fingers piled one atop the other. "So, the discussion now is: What if we're all wrong?"

"Hard to be wrong," Rachel said, "there is logically nowhere else we could be."

"The route we followed up and then across, the edge of those large fields, the distance below the saddle, the two broad ribs, the cirques, the stream, the lines of bluffs... I cannot see how we could be anywhere else but here." Maria tapped the spot on the map. "Was this little game another of your ideas dating back to May Day 1915?"

"You're getting good at guessing, Maria," he said with a grin. "It's much better to pay heed to your senses than to try to tell your mind what to do."

He opened the guidebook and placed it on the map sheet. "Here's a trail going down from the top of Feldberg through Brandenberg to Todtnau." He looked at the scale diagram. "A little over two hundred metres across the slope from us. Helmut probably came down it from the top with Horst to search for Herzog's gun."

"With so much gentle slope all around here, I'm surprised Herzog led his troops into this line of bluffs," Rachel said.

"Maybe he was another of those aristocratic buffoons like some of the British officers who make bad decisions for our armies." He paused and looked at them. "I led you into here, but that was to find a place to hide."

"I'm so glad — we're so glad you led us into here." Maria looked across at her mother. "We would most likely have been spotted with so many hundreds of soldiers wandering around out there. Even in this hidden nook, we've been visited twice. At least twice we know of."