He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees.
The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass.
There was a stream alongside the road and far down the pass he saw a mill beside the stream and the falling water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight. 

He spread the photostated military map out on the forest floor and looked at it carefully.
The old man looked over his shoulder.
He was a short and solid old man in a black peasant's smock and gray iron-stiff trousers and he wore rope-soled shoes.
He was breathing heavily from the climb and his hand rested on one of the two heavy packs they had been carrying. 

The young man, who was studying the country, took his glasses from the pocket of his faded, khaki flannel shirt, wiped the lenses with a handkerchief, screwed the eyepieces around until the boards of the mill showed suddenly clearly and he saw the wooden bench beside the door; the huge pile of sawdust that rose behind the open shed where the circular saw was, and a stretch of the flume that brought the logs down from the mountainside on the other bank of the stream.
The stream showed clear and smooth-looking in the glasses and, below the curl of the falling water, the spray from the dam was blowing in the wind. 

The young man, who was tall and thin, with sun-streaked fair hair, and a wind- and sun-burned face, who wore the sun-faded flannel shirt, a pair of peasant's trousers and rope-soled shoes, leaned over, put his arm through one of the leather pack straps and swung the heavy pack up onto his shoulders.
He worked his arm through the other strap and settled the weight of the pack against his back.
His shirt was still wet from where the pack had rested. 

Bending under the weight of the packs, sweating, they climbed steadily in the pine forest that covered the mountainside.
There was no trail that the young man could see, but they were working up and around the face of the mountain and now they crossed a small stream and the old man went steadily on ahead up the edge of the rocky stream bed.
The climbing now was steeper and more difficult, until finally the stream seemed to drop down over the edge of a smooth granite ledge that rose above them and the old man waited at the foot of the ledge for the young man to come up to him. 

He sat by the packs and watched the old man climb the ledge.
It was not hard to climb and from the way he found hand-holds without searching for them the young man could see that he had climbed it many times before.
Yet whoever was above had been very careful not to leave any trail. 

The young man, whose name was Robert Jordan, was extremely hungry and he was worried.
He was often hungry but he was not usually worried because he did not give any importance to what happened to himself and he knew from experience how simple it was to move behind the enemy lines in all this country.