Search for the Sunlight
Chapter 33

Everything was ready. The Wing Commander briefed his passengers on flight procedure and, with no forthcoming questions from either, he bid them both a safe journey and wished them every success in their search for the sunlight.

With a single nod of his head, the worker bats took up the slack and passed the ends of the hawsers up the steep embankment to the various logistics units who were standing by.

“Chocks away!” the wing commander ordered, picking up the ping pong bats again and waving them frantically in the air. This time, his over enthusiastic handling of the little creatures caused their eyes to spin round and round, like marbles in a jam jar lid, and their tongues to extend from their mouths to an unfathomable length. Their normally pale-grey faces turned an alarming purple colour, but they didn’t seem to mind.

All at once, there was a great deal of commotion as sixty six million feet and three hundred and thirty million toes - given that sporting bats have five toes on each foot - grappled and gripped onto the cat gut hawsers and, with a mass synchronised beating of wings, the aviators rose steadily into the air and soared out over the dusty plains.

“What a racket!” Harry exclaimed...

The flight banked to the north east and continued, onwards and upwards, rising steadily to a great height and in just under an hour, like a giant whale surfacing from the depths of the ocean, the haunting black peak of Goat Fell appeared through the fog.

In the half-light the bats circled the mountain a dozen times, searching for a place to land until eventually, with sonar precision, they found a suitable spot and lowered their cargo slowly down onto solid ground.

Without wasting a moment the stringer bats unhitched the supporting hawsers and, with a loud cheerio, the wing commander and his devoted entourage disappeared into the mist, leaving Harry and Sherlock alone, somewhere on the cold mountainside. As they sat mesmerised, taking in their new surroundings, with a clattering of rubble and loose stones, Basil and Herbert appeared. Another squadron of bats had simultaneously carried them to the same destination and now, all four were reunited again.