London - Edward Rutherfurd [3]
In this way the river was born.
Somewhere, during these later comings and goings of the ice, came Man. The dating is uncertain. Even after the river came through the Goring Gap, Neanderthal Man had still to develop. Not until the latest Ice Age, a little over a hundred thousand years ago, did Man as we know him evolve. At some time during the ice wall’s withdrawal, he moved into the valley.
Then, at last, somewhat less than ten thousand years ago, the waters from the dissolving Arctic ice-cap swept down, swamping the plain on the promontory’s eastern side. Cutting through the chalk ridges in a great J-shape, they washed right round the base of the promontory into a narrow channel running westwards to the Atlantic.
Thus, like some northern Noah’s Ark after the Flood, the little promontory became an island, free but forever at anchor, just off the coast of the great continent to which it had belonged. To the west, the Atlantic Ocean; to the east, the cold North Sea; along its southern edge, where the high chalk cliffs gazed across to the nearby continent, the narrow English Channel. And so, surrounded by these northern seas, began the island of Britain.
The great chalk V, therefore, no longer led to an eastern plain but to an open sea. Its long funnel became an estuary. On the estuary’s eastern side, the chalk ridges veered away northwards, leaving on their eastern flank a huge tract of low-lying forest and marsh. On the southern side, a long peninsula of high chalk ridges and fertile valleys jutted out some seventy miles to form the island’s south-eastern tip.
This estuary had one special feature. As the sea tide came in, it not only checked the outflow from the river, but actually reversed it, so that at high sea tide the waters ploughed up the narrowing funnel of the estuary and a considerable distance upriver too, building up a huge excess volume in the channel; as the sea tide ebbed, these waters flowed swiftly out again. The result was a strong tidal flow in the lower reaches of the river with a difference of well over ten feet between high- and low-water marks. It was a system that continued for many miles upstream.
Man was already there when this separation of the island occurred, and other men crossed the narrow, if dangerous, seas to the island in the millennia that followed. During this time human history effectively began.
54 BC
Fifty-four years before the birth of Christ, at the end of a cold, star-filled spring night, a crowd of two hundred people stood in a semicircle by the bank of the river and waited for the dawn.
Ten days had passed since the ominous news had come.
In front of them, at the water’s edge, was a smaller group of five figures. Silent and still, in their long grey robes they might have been taken for so many standing stones. These were the druids, and they were about to perform a ceremony which, it was hoped, would save the island and their world.
Amongst those gathered by the riverbank were three people, each of whom, whatever hopes or fears they may have had concerning the threat ahead, guarded a personal and terrible secret.
One was a boy, the second a woman, the third a very old man.
There were many sacred sites along the lengthy course of the river. But nowhere was the spirit of the great river so clearly present than at this quiet place.
Here, sea and river met. Downstream, in a series of huge loops, the ever widening flow passed through open marshland until, about ten miles away, it finally opened out into the long, eastward funnel of the estuary and out to the cold North Sea. Upstream, the river meandered delightfully between