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Show 59 Eighteen After the valleys she discovers the moors, the high, waste places where the hedgerows end and the roads do not penetrate and only scattered sheep still graze, where a cold mist from the ocean envelops everyone, everything, almost constantly. Annis walks only a little way the first day, uncertain of the terrain, but she returns again and again, in the fog, alone. She comes to know the landmarks of the moors: small round hills, perhaps fifteen feet across; they are the burial mounds of the ancient peoples who inhabited this area, three thousand years ago. Some of the mounds have caved in, so that they are more like doughnuts than hills; she wonders if they were built that way or whether it is the work of later grave-plundering, but no one she asks can tell her. She begins to visualize an old, frugal, isolated people, living sparse, austere existences in the thick mists of these regions, their tranquility only later disturbed by invasions from the continent, from the Scandinavian islands, from the other parts of England. In her long evenings in the inns, their own few hundred years paltry in comparison with the scope of this long prehistory, she reads what she can of the development of these ancient peoples, their brief and mysterious existences, their disappearance. Perhaps she is one of their issue, she supposes, as are the ruddy English folk she has been recognizing as relatives, and she sees her own life, their lives, all lives, as tiny bits of sand, single little leaves on the gorsebushes of the moors, droplets of the mist that cloaks, recedes, and cloaks the moors again, then again, and again. It is a time of tremendous peace. |
