Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [3]
The northern world was a quieter place too. Over the ice, and the tundra, there reigned a silence that seemed to have no end. True, there were terrible winds, huge blizzards that howled across the land of ice; true, in the arctic tundra there were sparse forms of life – a meagre vegetation, small groups of hardy animals – which eked out a bleak existence in the freezing wastes; but to all intents the land was empty: thousands upon thousands of miles of desert; and in the vast glacial cap itself, all forms of life and the seas which might have spawned them were locked up in the great stasis of the ice.
Such was the last Ice Age. Before, there had been many like it; after it, there will be many more. And in the gaps between these ages, men have come and gone upon the northern lands.
Centuries passed; thousands of years passed, and nothing changed, nor seemed likely to. Then, at some time around 10,000 B.C., a change began to occur: at the outer edge of the frozen wastes, the temperature began to rise. It was not enough to be noticed in a decade, hardly in a century, and it did not yet have any effect upon the ice; but it rose nonetheless. Centuries passed. It rose a little more. And then the ice cap began to melt. Still the process was gradual: a stream here, a small river there; blocks of ice a few yards across in one place, half a mile in another, breaking away from the edge of the ice cap, a process hardly noticeable against the thousands of miles of the vast continent of ice that remained. But slowly this melting gathered pace. New land, tundra, emerged from under the ice; new rivers were born; ice floes moved southwards into the seas, which began to rise. A new ferment was in progress upon the surface of the earth. Century after century, the face of the continents changed as new lands began to define themselves and new life began, cautiously, to spread across the earth.
The last Ice Age was in retreat.
For several thousand years this process continued.
About seven thousand five hundred years before the birth of Christ, in the still bleak and uninviting season that was summer in those northern lands, a single hunter undertook a journey that was impossible. His name, as nearly as it can be written, was Hwll.
When she heard the plan, his woman Akun first looked at him in disbelief and then protested.
“No one will go with us,” she argued. “How shall we find food without help?”
“I can hunt alone,” he replied. “We shall eat.”
She shook her head vigorously in disbelief.
“This place that you speak of; it does not exist.”
“It does.” Hwll knew that it did. His father had told him, and his father’s father before that. Though he did not know it, the information was already several centuries old.
“We shall die,” Akun said simply.
They were standing on the ridge above their camp: a pitiful little cluster of wigwams made of reindeer skins and supported on long poles, which the five families that comprised their hunting group had set up when the winter snows departed. Across the ridge, as far as the eye could see, stretched the empty expanse of coarse grey-brown grass, dotted with the occasional bush, dwarf birch or clump of rocks, to which ragged lichen and stringy moss had attached themselves. Grey clouds scudded over the brown land, driven by a chill north east wind.
This was the tundra. For when the ice of the last glacial age began to retreat, it laid bare a desolate region that extended uninterrupted across the entire northern Eurasian land mass. From Scotland to China, in these vast, empty spaces similar in climate to Siberia today, small bands of hunters known to archaeologists as Upper Paleolithic, followed by Mesolithic man, had followed the sparse game that roamed the barren wastes. Stocky bison, reindeer, wild horse and the stately elk would appear on the horizon, then disappear again, and the hunters would follow, often for many days, in order to make their kill and survive another season. It was a cold, precarious life that continued for hundreds of generations.