Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [9]
Hwll had seen the rivers swollen with ice floes in the spring, and he surmised correctly that some new and gigantic thaw must have taken place in the north to produce this flow of waters. Whatever the cause, the implication was terrible. The forest he wanted to cross was now under the sea. For all he knew, so were the distant eastern plains and the warm lands to the south. Who could tell? But one thing was certain: there would be no crossing for him and his family. The ambitious plan for the great trek was destroyed; all the efforts they had made on their long journey had been wasted. The land to the east, if it still existed, was now cut off.
With a short gesture of despair he sat down, stared at the scene before him, and tried to put his thoughts in order. There was much to think about. When had this calamity begun, he wondered, and were the waters still rising? For if they continued to rise, they might engulf the land in which he was standing as well, even perhaps the ridge that he had left six days before. It was a thought which terrified him. For then, he considered, perhaps there will be nothing left. Perhaps this was the end of the world.
But Hwll was a practical man. He stayed where he was all afternoon, and as the sun went down he noted carefully the exact level the waters had reached. Having done so, he hunched his furs over his shoulders and waited for the dawn.
All night the hunter considered the huge forces that could unleash such a flood; for he saw that they must be powerful gods indeed. He thought with sadness of the great forest full of game that lay before him under the dark waters. For reasons that he could not have explained it moved him profoundly.
In the morning, he could detect no raising of the water level. But still he did not move. Patiently he settled down for another day and another night, minutely observing the great flood. By the end of that day he had discovered that there was a small tide, and had noted its high and low points. Then, all through the remaining night he sat awake by the shore, sniffing the salt sea air and listening in that vast emptiness to the hiss, crack and moan of the slow decline of an ice age.
On the second morning, he was satisfied. If the waters were still rising, they were doing so slowly, and unless there was a further deluge of water after this, he had time at least to lead his family to high ground where they might be safe. He rose stiffly and turned to go back to Akun. Already new plans were forming in the hunter’s tenacious mind.
What Hwll had witnessed was the creation of the island of Britain. The great forest which he had tried to cross lay off what is now known as Dogger Bank, in the North Sea. During a short period of time – very probably in the space of a few generations – the vast melting floes of the northern ice cap had passed a critical point and had broken through the land barrier across the northern sea, flooding the low-lying plain that joined Britain to Eurasia. Around this time also – the chronology is still uncertain – the land bridge across the Straits of Dover, which had been the south eastern extremity of another of the great chalk ridges of Britain, had also been breached. The land that Hwll’s ancestors had crossed was all gone, and for the whole of his short life, he had no longer been living on a peninsula of Eurasia, but on a new island. Because of that arctic flood Britain was born, and for the rest of her history, her people would be separate, protected from the outside world by a savage sea.
When he reached Akun, he explained to her in a few words what had happened.
“So, shall we go back?” she asked.
He shook his head. “No.” He had come too far to go back now, and besides, it seemed to him possible that further south there might yet be higher ground that the sea had not been able to swallow up. Perhaps there was still a way over.