BOOK I
CHAPTER I
THE MAN ON THE CAIRN
Fifty years ago a wild and stormy sky spread above the gorges of Lyd, and the vale was flooded in silver mist, dazzling by contrast with the darkness round about. Great welter of vapour, here radiant, here gloomy, obscured the sinking sun; but whence he shone, vans of wet light fell through the tumultuous clouds, and touched into sudden, humid, and luminous brilliancy the forests and hills beneath.
A high wind raged along the sky and roared over the grave-crowned bosom of White Hill on Northern Dartmoor. Before it, like an autumn leaf, one solitary soul appeared to be blown. Beheld from afar, he presented an elongated spot driven between earth and air; but viewed more closely, the man revealed unusual stature and great physical strength. The storm was not thrusting him before it; accident merely willed that the wind and he should be fellow-travellers.
Grey cairns of the stone heroes of old lie together on the crest of White Hill, and the man now climbed one of these heaps of granite, and stood there, and gazed upon an immense vision outspread easterly against oncoming night. It was as though the hours of darkness, tramping lowly in the sun's wake, had thrown before them pioneers of cloud. Two ranges of jagged tors swept across the skyline and rose, grey and shadowy, against the purple of the air. Already their pinnacles were dissolved into gloom, and from Great Links, the warden of the range, right and left to lower elevations, the fog banks rolled and crept along under the naked shoulders of the hills. Over this huge amphitheatre the man's eyes passed; then, where Ger Tor lifts its crags above Tavy, another spirit was manifest, and evidences of humanity became apparent upon the fringes of the Moor. Here trivial detail threaded the confines of inviolate space; walls stretched hither and thither; a scatter of white dots showed where the sheep roamed; and, at valley-bottom, a mile under the barrows of White Hill, folded in peace, with its crofts and arable land about it, lay a homestead. Rounded clumps of beech and sycamore concealed the dwelling; the farm itself stood at the apex of a triangle, whose base widened out into fertile regions southerly. Meadows, very verdant after hay harvest, extended here, and about the invisible house stood ricks, out-buildings, that glimmered cold as water under corrugated iron roofs, and a glaucous patch of garden green, where flourished half an acre of cabbage. One field had geese upon it; in another, two horses grazed. A leat drawn from Tavy wound into the domains of the farm, and a second rivulet fell out of the Moor beside it. Cows were being driven into the yard. An earth-coloured man tended them, and a black and white speck raced violently about in their rear. A dog's faint barking might be heard upon the hill when the wind lulled.
THE CAIRNS ON WHITE HILL
The contrast between the ambient desolation and this sequestered abode of human life impressed itself upon the spectator's slow mind. Again he ranged the ring of hills with his eyes; then lowered them to Ruddyford Farm. Despite the turmoil of the hour and the hum and roar of the wind; despite the savage glories of a silver sunset westerly and the bleak and leaden aspect of the east; despite the rain that now touched his nape coldly and flogged the forgotten tomb on which he stood; this man's heart was warm, and he smiled into the comfortable valley and nodded his head with appreciation.
The rain and the wind had been his companions from childhood; the sunshine and the seasons belonged to him as environment of daily life. He minded the manifestations of nature as little as the ponies that now scampered past him in a whinnying drove; he was young and as yet knew no pain; he regarded the advent of winter without fear, and welcomed the equinox of autumn as indifferently as the first frost or the spring rain. These things only concerned him when they bore upon husbandry and the business of life.