It was just before we mobilised for the summer—a mobilisation which, had we but known it, was to last until our book of pleasant memories was thumbed and dog-eared and tattered with much usage—that the Indiarubber Man suggested taking a day off and having what he called a "stamp." He fetched our ordnance map and spread it on the ward-room table, and we pored over it most of the evening, sucking our pipes.
All Devon is good; and for a while the lanes had called us, winding from one thatched village to another between their fragrant, high-banked hedges. "Think of the little pubs . . ." said the Indiarubber Man dreamily. We thought of them, but with the vision came one of cyclists of the grey-sweater variety, and motorists filling the air with petrol fumes and dust.
There was the river: woodland paths skirting in the evening a world of silver and grey, across which bats sketched zigzag flights. Very nice in the dimpsey light, but stuffy in the daytime. So the moor had it in the end. We would trudge the moor from north to south, never seeing a soul, and, aided by map and compass, learn the peace of a day spent off the beaten tracks of man.
We had been in the train some time before the Indiarubber Man made his electrifying discovery.
"Where's the map?" We eyed one another severely and searched our pockets. "We were looking at it before I went to get the tickets," he pursued. "I gave it to you to fold up."
So he had. I left it on the station seat.
At a wayside station bookstall we managed to unearth an alleged reproduction of the fair face of South Devon to replace the lost map.
The Indiarubber Man traced the writhings of several caterpillars with his pipe-stem. "These are tors," he explained generously. After this we studied the map in silence, vainly attempting to confirm our recollections of a course marked out the previous evening on an ordnance survey map.
We were both getting slightly confused when, with a screech of brakes, the train pulled up at the little moorside station that was our destination by rail. Sunlight bathed the grey buildings on the platform and the sleepy village beyond. From the blue overhead came the thin, sweet notes of a lark, and as we listened in the stillness we heard a faint whispering "swish" like the sound of a very distant reaper. It was the wind flowing across miles of reeds and grass and heather from the distant Atlantic. But it was not until half an hour later, when we breasted the crest of the great hog-back that stretched before us like a rampart, that we ourselves met the wind. It came out of the west, athwart the sun's rays, a steady rush of warm air; and with it came the tang of the sea and hint of honey and new-mown hay that somehow clings to Devon moorland through all the changing seasons.
A cluster of giant rocks piled against the sky to our left drew us momentarily out of our course. With some difficulty we scrambled up their warm surfaces, where the lichen clung bleached and russet, and stood looking out across the rolling uplands of Devon. Worthier adventurers would have improved the shining hour with debate as to the origin of this upflung heap of Nature's masonry. Had it served departed Phoenicians as an altar? Heaven and the archaeologists alone knew.