He looked at me blankly. “Why yes. You know I do. I beat them at everything.”
“Really, Nuaman,” I said. “You're almost as bad as Katia sometimes. No wonder you understand her so well. I don't mean that kind of beat. I mean whip.”
He gave a hoot of laughter. “You mean like Sarkissian with the pony? Whip them to make them go faster? Shall I? Then perhaps they will beat me. Shall we put them in harness one day and see?”
I walked on again. “I almost believe you would if you had a cart to harness them to, and I believe they'd be daft enough to pull it. Katia would, anyway.”
“I say,” he said, grinning with mischief. “That's a better idea. You and Katia. I could make a chariot, you know. That would be fun! I'd be the chariot−driver and then you'd beat me because you'd be in front of me and I should beat you because I was behind you.”
“Would you!” said I. “You'd have to get me in harness first, and that would be a bit more difficult than you think. But look here, are you coming all the way to Staineshead with me?”
“No. I'll just come up and show you the road if you must go, though I had much rather you didn't.”
He sounded so wistful that I all but changed my mind. But I had taken it into my head to be obstinate, so I hardened my heart and carried on. He went with me as far as where the drive joins the track from Blagill. There, to my surprise, because I did not know he knew the district outside the Park, he gave me quite detailed directions about the path which, he said, was not easy to find.
I should have been glad of his company, but he was determined not to go, so we parted among the scattered stones in which Dr Ravelin sees his ancient ceremonial avenue. I turned right. The path was narrow, but quite distinct. No wheeled traffic goes that way now but shepherds and walkers must use it still. On the verge of a dip I looked back towards the fork and the Standing Stones. Nuaman was near where we had parted. He had perched himself cross−legged on one of the grey stones lying in the heather, a little, lonely, pixie−like figure in the wideness of the moor. Just before I turned with a wave to continue my way I saw, out of the tail of my eye, another little figure come up, as it were out of the deep heather, to join him; a little figure in brown and grey. The girls had been wearing their brown knitted silk jerseys and grey shorts that morning, but at that distance I could not tell which of them it was. When I came up the other side of the hollow and glanced back again both figures had disappeared.
As I remembered from the map, the path to Staineshead slants away gradually from Ringstones valley, bending in a westerly direction before it goes over Nither Edge and down into the Nither valley where Staineshead lies. I thought I ought to have been able to see the Edge, which was marked on the map as a crest or cliff, soon after getting out of sight of the Stone Circle. I suppose I had not taken into account that I was coming to it from the plateau and that it would look like a cliff only from the Nither valley below. I did not trouble much about looking out for the various marks Nuaman had described to me—a stone here and a tarn there; my path seemed fairly clear, and though I lost it a few times in boggy tracts of rushes where I had to make detours to keep my feet dry, I picked it up again on the drier ground where it wound among the heather.
I don't think I have ever been in such silence before. When I stopped to look round and there was no longer the scrunch or squelch of my own feet there was not a sound. The day was close and muggy; there was not a breath of air, and that, I thought, must be a rare thing on the moor. Not a curlew and not a single sheep called. I spoke aloud to myself once or twice, just for the companionship of my own voice, and I could not help wishing that Nuaman or the girls had come with me. I suppose that on a path that you don't know, in an unfenced stretch of country, with neither wall nor building, tree nor post to give you some idea of your progress, you are apt to be deluded about the distance you are traveling. After a time it seemed to me that I had done a good deal more than three miles and yet I had not come in sight of the edge of the moor where the land should drop down to the Nither. I am a fast walker, normally, but picking my way over that rough path and winding about for dry ways through the boggy places must have taken more time than I thought. It was, of course, simply because every bit of the moor looked so much like every other bit, and I knew it at the time, but I kept having the feeling when I saw some particular little pool in a hollow or a hillock with a stone or two on it that I had already passed that place before. I could almost fancy the last section of the path that I had covered sliding away and sneaking along behind a fold of the moor on one side to get in front of me and lay itself down ahead to drag out my way interminably. I kept glancing behind me, and I'm not sure that I didn't do so with half an idea that I might catch the path at its trick.
I don't usually mind being alone in the country. When I set out from the Hall I never gave a thought to the loneliness of the walk. When I was at home, at Whitehill, I often used to go for long walks by myself and never minded solitude. But I did feel lonely on Ringstones Moor. It wasn't “country” in that sense, at all. It was a strange, private sort of region. I felt that I was somewhere where I had no right to be, that I was trespassing. I wished that there was somebody with me to reassure me. It was absurd, because I knew the whole moor belonged to Dr Ravelin, and there was only the remotest likelihood of anybody but myself being on it, but I felt that at any moment I might be challenged. I began fervently to long for the sight of something other than heather and rough grass, brown peaty earth and yellowy−grey moss. I didn't like the wildness of the moor at all, now. I began to appreciate people's feelings about such places long ago when it was not good to be alone on a desolate heath. I remembered a place I had noticed on the map called 'Foul−Play Knowe'. The expanse all round me seemed quite empty, but it would have been difficult to see anything standing or crouching against the background of the heather.
At length I came to a long, gradual upward slope which, I thought with relief, must give me from its top the expected view down into the valley. I stumbled up it eagerly, but from the top I saw in front of me still a wide, hollow stretch of moorland, rising on its further side, which seemed to me in my disappointment and anxiety to be at least three miles away, to just such a long, heather−clad wave of ground as the one I was standing on. I suppose it was then that I admitted to myself that I had lost the way. I stood and looked all round. There was nothing at all that I could recognise. Away to my right, or a little behind me, I thought, should be the ridge of Blagill Moor, the Eastern ridge which we had seen so clearly from the Stone Circle the day before. But from this different position I could not recognise anything in the dim outline of the hill there, blurred as it was by the heavy, hanging clouds. On the opposite side my horizon was another line of dark grey hill, and before and behind me the brown sweep of the moor, very still and empty.
If there had been a gleam of sunshine I might have been able to decide roughly in what direction I was facing, but the clouds were a thick, uniform grey over all the sky. Perhaps, I thought, I had taken one of the side−paths against which Nuaman had warned me, and that now I ought to be heading for the higher ground away on my left; perhaps the Nither valley in reality lay beyond that. But I hesitated to leave my little path, faint as it had become, and go ploughing through the waste of heather and bog. So, after some anxious thought, I struck down across the hollow in front.
I had not gone far when I came into a region of brown pools, bare, spongy earth, stretches of greasy mud, and banks that collapsed under my feet into holes full of green slime. I lost my uncertain path entirely here, and in turning and twisting about, trying to follow some sort of way along the necks of ground between the pools, I lost all idea of my direction. Then I did what I had been afraid of doing: I let myself become frightened of that still, dead, slimy place. I let my imagination get the better of me, and gave way to the thought that the place had deliberately trapped me among its blind, dull pools and its hoary, treacherous mosses. I felt its blackish−brown banks of peat curling round me just as Nuaman had shown me one day the sticky leaves of a butterwort slowly curling over a midge caught in its glue. The moor frightened me. Its silence was not mournful, but hostile. I began plunging and leaping wildly across the pools and mosses with no idea but to get away from that place.