Before his very eyes, lay the entrance to the great forest he had been seeking; and here was a new sea, moving inexorably southward, gouging out a mighty channel and sweeping earth, rock and tree before it.
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.
“We will go south along the coast,” he said. “There may be another way across.”
Akun stared at him angrily. He knew that she was near revolt. Vata’s eyes were sunken; but the little boy disturbed him more: he was past fatigue; there was a strange apartness about him.
“He is leaving us,” Akun said simply.
He knew it was true. The little fellow’s spirit had almost gone; if they did not recover it soon, he would die. Hwll had seen such things before.
Akun held both children close. They clung to her silently, hardly knowing what was happening to them, taking comfort from their mother’s warmth and the rancid but familiar smell of the pelts she wore. He was sorry for them, but there could be no turning back.
“We go on,” he said. He would not give up now.
The journey seemed endless, and at no point did they see anything to the east except the churning waters. But ten days later, one change was evident which gave him cause for new hope. They had left the tundra.
They encountered marshes, and large woods. Trees appeared that they had never seen before: elm, alder, ash and oak, birch and even pine. They investigated each one in turn. The pine in particular they smelt with interest, and felt the sticky gum that oozed from its soft bark. There were huge luxuriant rushes by the water, and lush green grass in enormous tufts. Signs of game appeared; one morning when he was trapping a fish in a stream, the children came to his side and silently led him a hundred paces upstream. There, ahead of him, were two long brown animals with silky fur playing on the riverbank in the sunlight. They had not seen beavers before and for the first time in months, the travellers smiled with pleasure. That same night, however, they heard another new sound – the eerie, chilling cry of wolves in the woods – and they huddled close together in fear.
For the curious paradox, which Hwll had no means of understanding, was that the very flood which cut him off from the lands to the south was part of a process which was providing him with exactly the warmth that he sought, there, where he already was. As the ice cap melted in the distant north, and the seas rose, the temperature of Britain had risen too, and would continue to do so for another four thousand years. The tundra region from which Hwll had come was itself a belt that was moving north as the ice retreated; and as the generations passed, three hundred miles to the south it was already becoming appreciably warmer. Hwll was entering these warm lands now, without needing to cross the eastern forest at all. They were the warm southern lands of the new island of Britain.
Despite this fact, Hwll was not yet ready to abandon his quest for the fabled lands to the south; there, he still believed, lay safety.
The following day, he made a mistake. After they had walked all morning he found his way south barred by a large stretch of water, on the other side of which he could see land. Obsessed as he was with the lands to the south, he said:
“It’s the southern sea.”
But Akun shook her head.
“I think it’s a river,” she replied. And so it proved to be. For they had come upon the estuary of the river Thames.
They followed the river inland for two days and crossed it easily by making a small raft. Then once again, Hwll headed his little party south east.
“If there is a way across,” he said, “I think it will be here.”
If the land joining Dover to France had not already been washed away, he would have been correct, and six days later he reached the high, chalky cliffs of the south eastern tip of the island.
This time they did see what they had been looking for: jutting over the horizon was the clear outline of the tall, grey shoreline of the European mainland. It was there: but it was unattainable. Hwll and Akun stared across the English Channel and said nothing. At their feet, the chalk cliffs descended in a sheer drop for two hundred feet, and at their base the angry waters of the channel buffeted the coast.
“This time I am sure . . .” he began.
Akun nodded. The distant shores were the path to the warm lands of the south; and the churning waters below were the reason why they would never reach them. The cliffs where they were standing had once clearly been part of a
great ridge that crossed the sea, but the waters had washed it away as they pressed south and west into the funnel of the Dover Straits.
“We could cross with a raft,” he started hopefully, although he knew that they would not. In that angry sea they would unquestionably be destroyed on any raft that they knew how to build; for they were looking at one of the most treacherous patches of water in Europe.
The quest had failed. He had been defeated. Now it was time for Akun to speak.
“We cannot go south any more,” she said bluntly. “And we cannot hunt alone. We must find other hunters now.”
It was true. And yet . . . He pursed his lips. Even at this moment of defeat his active mind was busily sketching new plans. They had come down the east coast and he knew for certain that water barred his way in that direction. But was it possible that there might, after all, be a land bridge across further west? Although he had no reason to think so, the persistent fellow refused, even now, to give up all his hopes. And if they found no land bridge in the west perhaps at least they would find another hunting group. Lastly, he was determined to find high ground. If another flood came, who knew how much land it might engulf? He did not want to be caught on the lowlands if the sea came in; he wanted to be able to flee to the mountains.
“We’ll try going west then,” he announced.
For twenty more days they travelled steadily westwards along the chalk and gravel cliffs, always with the sound of the sea on their left. On the second day the distant coastline opposite dipped low on the horizon and disappeared entirely by nightfall. They never saw it again. Looking inland he could sometimes see hills and ridges running parallel with the shore.
The fundamental facts of the geography of prehistoric Britain that Hwll was discovering were fairly simple, and governed much of Britain’s history since. To the north lay ice and mountains; to the south, the sea; and across the rich lands in between, the huge network of ridges divided the country into high ground and lowlands. Southern Britain, into which Hwll was now travelling, consisted of three main entities: water, alluvial land and chalk – rolling ridges of it lightly covered with trees; and in the alluvial land below stretched huge warm forests and marshes.
Several times now Akun asked him to stop for a few days and camp. But he was resolute.
“Not yet,” he reminded her. “We must find other hunters before the summer is over.” And he pressed on.
At last, however, there were signs which gave them encouragement: signs that other hunters had passed that way not long before. Twice they came upon clearings made in the trees and marks where fires had been lit. Once they discovered a broken bow.
“Soon we will find them,” he promised.
At the end of three weeks they came upon a sight which confirmed all Hwll’s fears, and determined the course of the last stage of the journey. This was the estuary of a huge river that rolled impressively towards them from the west, so wide and deep that it was clear they must now turn inland to follow along its bank. At this point, it ran almost parallel with the coast and as they walked along it, they could still see a line of the cliffs a few miles away to the south.
It was later that day that Hwll saw what he had feared: five or six miles away to the south, the line of cliffs was broken. The sea had breached it, formed a gully, and then poured in, flooding a large part of the low-lying area between the coastline and the river. He looked at it with dread.
“You see,” he explained to Akun, “the sea has come through the cliffs. It is breaking in everywhere. The sea has not only cut us off, but I think perhaps it will wear down all the cliffs and swallow up the whole land. That is why we must find high ground.”
He was right. In the coming centuries, the sea would break through again and again, flooding the coastal areas and wearing down the chalk cliffs. The whole chalk coastline of southern Britain would disappear under the waves, and miles of land be flooded. The great river Solent, on whose banks they stood, was to disappear completely into the sea, and all that remains of this original chalk coastline of Britain is the single, diamond-shaped chunk standing off the southern coasts that is called the Isle of Wight.
“But first we must camp,” she reminded him. “The children cannot go on.”
“Soon,” he replied, but he could see that she was right. Vata no longer even opened her eyes as she walked. The little boy had fallen three times that morning.
Now Hwll picked him up and put him on his shoulders.
“Soon,” he promised once again.
Still with their faces west towards the setting sun, the little family turned inland, and Hwll began to look for a suitable place.
The next day he discovered the lake.
It was a small, low hill about five miles inland that first attracted his attention. It looked like a place from which he could spy out the land and where they could camp at least for the night. When he reached the place, however, he was surprised and delighted to find that hidden below it and in his path lay a shallow lake about half a mile across. At its eastern end, a small outlet carried its waters away towards the sea. Tracking round the lake he found that it was fed from the north and the west by two small rivers. On its northern side was a flat, empty marsh.
The water, sheltered by the hill, was very still; there was a sweet smell of fern, mud and water reed. Over the surface of the lake, a heron rose and seagulls cried. Protected from the wind it was warm. It did not take him long to make a small raft and cross the little stretch of water.
From the top of the hill he looked inland; all the way to the horizon now, he could see low wooded ridges succeeding each other. He turned to Akun and pointed.
“That is the way that we must go.”
There were two months of summer left. This was clearly the place to rest and recoup their strength.
“We shall stay here for ten days,” he said. “Then we go inland.” And with a sigh of relief, Akun and the two children made their way down the hill to the shallow water’s edge.
The lake turned out to be a magical place, and Hwll was delighted to find that it abounded in game. The hill embraced the water like a protective arm, and animals that he had never seen before paraded themselves there: swans, a pair of herons, even a flock of pelicans waded by the water’s edge. On the open ground beyond the marsh, the soil was peaty and covered with heather, and a troupe of wild horses galloped across it one morning before vanishing towards the low wooded ridges to the north. In the rivers he found trout and salmon; one day he even crossed the Solent on a raft and reached the rock pools by the sea, returning with crabs and mussels which they cooked over the fire that night.
The children were beginning to recover their strength. Hwll smiled one morning to see Vata being chased by her little brother along the shallow waters by the lake’s edge.
“We could stay here for the winter,” Akun said. “There is plenty of food.” It was true; they could build their winter quarters in the shelter of the hill. But he shook his head.
“We must go on,” he said. “We must find high ground.”
Nothing would shake his fear of the terrible force of the sea.
“You will kill us,” said Akun angrily. But she prepared to move on.
The end of Hwll’s remarkable journey was in fact closer than he thought. But it was not to be accomplished alone.
Before leaving the lake, Hwll had decided to reconnoitre the land immediately to the north, and so one morning he began to work his way up the river, towards the first of the low ridges he had seen from the hill. The banks were lightly wooded and the river, which was only thirty feet across, glided by at a gentle pace. River fowl ducked in and out of the rushes; long green river weeds waved their tendrils in the stream and he could see the large brown fish that paused silently just beneath the surface. He had followed the river five miles, when to his great surprise he almost walked over a camp.
It was in a small clearing by the bank. It consisted of two low huts made of mud, brushwood and reeds. The slop
ing roofs of the huts were covered with turf and they seemed to grow out of the ground like a pair of untidy fungi. Tethered by the riverbank was a dugout.
Startled, he halted. There was no fire, but he thought he could smell smoke, as if one had been put out recently. The camp seemed to be empty. Cautiously, he moved forward towards one of the huts. And then suddenly he became aware of a small man, with narrow-set eyes and a crooked back watching him intently from the cover of the reeds, fifteen yards away. In his hands he held a bow, fitted with an arrow which was pointed straight at Hwll’s heart. Neither man moved.
Tep, who was the owner of the camp, had watched Hwll’s approach for some time. As a precaution, he had hidden his family in the woods, before taking up his position; and although he could have killed Hwll, he had decided to watch him instead. One never knew, the stranger might be useful in some way.
As Hwll would discover, he was a cautious and cunning hunter; but apart from these two attributes, his character had no redeeming qualities whatever.
He had a face like a rat, with narrow eyes, a long nose, a pointed chin, pointed teeth, unusual, carrot-coloured hair, a shuffling walk and one very distinctive inherited peculiarity: his toes were so long that he could even grip small objects with them. He was mean-minded, vicious without provocation, and untrustworthy. Some time before, he and his family had lived with a group of hunters fifteen miles to the north east of the lake; but after a furious quarrel about the distribution of meat after a hunt – where he had demonstrably tried to cheat the other hunters – they had cast him out. He was a pariah in the region and few of the scattered folk there cared to deal with him. But Hwll knew none of this.
Hwll made a sign to indicate that he had come in peace. Tep did not lower his arrow, but nodded to him to speak.