Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [5]
It was then that Hwll made his decision.
“I am travelling south,” he told the others, “to the warm lands. If we leave now, we can reach them before the snows.” He said this to encourage them, because in fact he did not know how long the journey would take. “I am going to cross the great forest of the east,” he said, “and go south to where the lands are rich and men live in caves. Who will come with me?”
It was a brave statement and it was based on the ancient store of oral tradition which was all he knew. The geography that had been handed down to Hwll through scores of generations by word of mouth was fairly simple. Far to the north, it was said – he did not know how far – the land grew colder and even more inhospitable until finally one reached a great wall of ice, as high as five men, that cut across the landscape from east to west. The ice wall had no beginning and no end. Beyond it lay the ice plateau, a shimmering white land that extended northwards for ever: for the land of ice had no end. Far to the west lay a sea, and that, too, had no end. To the south lay tundra, and thick forests, until one reached a sea too wide to cross. On three sides, therefore, the way was cut off. But to the south east there was a more inviting prospect. First one walked south many days until a great ridge of high ground arose, and down this it was possible to travel easily for several more days. Then from this ridge, turning east, one could cross other, lesser ridges, until a gently shelving plain led to a huge forest through which there were tracks that could safely be followed. By crossing the eastern forest it was possible to by-pass the southern sea; at the end of the forest began a great steppe, and when he reached that, he must turn south again and travel for many days until he reached those fabled warm lands where the people lived in caves.
“There it is much warmer,” he had been told, “and the hunting is good.”
Vague as it was, all this information was correct. For Hwll was standing in what would one day be called the north of England. Far to the north, the ice wall of the last glacial age, some thirty feet deep, had been retreating steadily and was still melting; only centuries before it had covered the place where their camp was now. To the west lay the Atlantic Ocean. With the exception of the island of Ireland, about which he did not know, the water continued until it reached the coast of North America, and would not be crossed for nearly nine thousand years. To the south lay the midlands and the broad lowlands of southern England, and further still the large estuary of the river Rhine had, with other rivers, been slowly carving out the small sea now called the English Channel for several thousand years. To the south east however, lay the great land bridge that joined the peninsula of Britain to the continent of Eurasia. Here, a vast plain stretched unbroken, forest interspersed with steppe, from eastern Britain for two and a half thousand miles to the snow-capped Ural Mountains of central Russia.
Across this land mass the hunters of the northern hemisphere had wandered for tens of thousands of years: moving south when successive Ice Ages came, and north once more each time the ice receded. Because of these migrations, Hwll’s ancestors could have been traced to many lands: to the Russian steppe, to the Baltic, to Iberia and the Mediterranean. It was the distant memory of these travels that had been handed down to him and which formed the basis of his world view now. Two centuries before, his ancestors had roamed through the huge eastern forest onto the British peninsula and had followed the game north to the area in which he now found himself. In his ambitious journey to the warm lands of the Mediterranean basin, fifteen hundred miles to the south, he would therefore be retracing their steps. Had he realised how far it was he might never have started; but he did not. All he knew was that the warmer lands existed and that it was time to go in search of them.
The plan was daring. It would also have been sound –