It was a silly thing to do, for I mistimed some of my jumps and I might well have landed in a pool that had no bottom. As it was, I went over my knees at once and before I reached a higher bank of dry ground and clutched the safety of the heather roots I had been up to my waist and felt the suck of some dreadful depth of ooze on my body. I lay for a short time in the heather after I got out of that bog−hole; then, having pulled myself together, I wrung out my frock and tried to clean myself up a little. I even tried to whip up some spirit by reminding myself of the joke of Mrs. Sarkissian's saying the moor would be dry this summer. The infernal place would never be dry: it was like a living body that secreted its own fluids.
Once away from that horrible still tract of bog I was more annoyed with myself than scared. Why couldn't I have taken better note of my bearings? Why couldn't I have paid more attention to Nuaman's directions? Why hadn't I watched my original path better? Tired though I had become, I drove myself vindictively forward across the stubborn, broken ground as a kind of punishment for my own stupidity.
I was quite lost. The only thing I could think of was something I had once read of in an adventure story: to find a stream and follow it down, no matter how hard the going. Thus, eventually, I should get off the moor down into some valley, and in a valley there would be fields, a wall, a path to guide me at last to a house or road. The thing to do, I told myself, as I recovered, bit by bit, from my annoyance with myself, was to take it steadily. It was impossible to be lost for very long or to come to any harm in England, provided no accident happened. I must not sprain an ankle, though, by stumbling among the roots or blundering down a bank. Provided I went steadily I was bound to find somewhere recognisable before nightfall, and even if I didn't I could sleep in a dry place in the heather and be none the worse for it. (I perhaps didn't sound very convincing to myself about this, feeling my frock wet up to the middle of my back.)
I made very toilsome progress, pushing my way through more than knee−deep heather and ling over frightfully uneven ground in the direction I had chosen, but, as if determination of itself can achieve results, I came suddenly to the lip of a deep, narrow valley in the bottom of which there rushed quite a big stream. I did my best to reason out where I could be. For all my weariness I could not have come so far from Ringstones. I might even have been making a great circle, as, I vaguely remember, people are said to do when they are lost in the Bush. Anyway, I thought, there could not well be more than one stream of this size within the distance from Ringstones Park that I could have come. This must, in fact, be the Ringstones beck, and I had come out on it somewhere well below the Park. If I followed it down it would bring me out into the Nither valley, but a long way from Staineshead, and I had lost a lot of time. I hated to have to go back and confess I had lost my way, but it was the only sensible thing to do. Besides, I was in no fit state to appear in the town. So I turned along the edge of the valley upstream, and soon found an easy sheep−track which led me along the slope, alternately over rough grass and through belts of tall bracken, below the level of the moor. I dared scarcely admit to myself what a relief it was to see bracken again instead of heather and moss and the bleached cotton−grass and the little dull orange spikes of bog asphodel, which I had almost come to look upon as a personal enemy by now. Then I saw a black−faced sheep. It might have been any sheep, anywhere, but it unreasonably convinced me that I was on familiar ground. My path grew broader and more assured. It led me round a jutting shoulder above a crag, and as I rounded that shoulder I had the strongest feeling that the view of the valley before me was familiar. The next crag, half a mile in front of me, which closed the glen to me from where I stood, must, I felt sure, be one of those two that stood like gate−towers at the end of Ringstones Park; and these thickets of birches below and the tufts of copse on the opposite side must be the ones I had glimpsed from the end of the Park itself. While there, beyond a little patch of level turf, screened by birch trees and thorns, was a dark opening between two slabs of rock; and that, surely, could only be the mouth of the ancient mine−shaft which both Dr Ravelin and Nuaman had described to me.
A moment later and I was quite certain, for among the birch trees I saw four or five human figures moving about. At least, my first momentary impression was that there were four or five of them, but then I saw I had been mistaken. Three figures came into plain view by the side of the beck and even at that distance I recognised the girls' brown jerseys, while the third figure, which seemed almost naked, though it had a glint of white about it, went leaping among the tumbled boulders at the water's edge in a way that would have betrayed Nuaman though he had been twice as far away.
He saw me and, while I made my way slowly along my high track, he crossed the stream and came slantwise up the steep slope to intercept me, running on all fours up the slippery grass as nimbly as a hare. He was wearing his white bathing trunks, the water still stood in droplets on his skin and his short dark curls were plastered to his head.
He took in my own bedraggled state with one long understanding look. He grinned, but I was so glad to see him that I forgave him his superior tone when he said:
“I knew you wouldn't find your way alone. Only Sarkissian and I can do that.” “Well,” I said. “I found my way back. That's something!”
“Yes,” he said, gravely, “but you must not go.”
Without bothering about his clothes—or perhaps he had left them in the house—he led me up the glen, over the guardian crag and down into the Park. Never before had I trod its soft turf with such appreciation.
The girls were already back when we reached the house. I saw them hovering in the gallery in their white frocks. The way from the old mine along the waterside is probably shorter than the high path which we had taken, but, even so, I could not help wondering at the speed with which they had got home and changed.
“Now,” said Nuaman, slyly, as we went upstairs, “you'll have to let me mend your watch strap.”
“Dash it!” I said as I handed it to him, “I could almost believe you told me the wrong way just so that I shouldn't take the wretched thing to Staineshead instead of letting you have it!”
(10)
It was a very shamefaced account of my adventures that I gave Dr Ravelin that evening. After a bath I felt I felt little the worse for them, physically. My feet ached from stumbling in wet shoes over the heather roots, but I had escaped blisters. However, I suppose I must have spoken with some feeling about the mental impression the moor had made on me. Dr Ravelin looked at me curiously when I told him about my fright in that dreary tract of pools. He quoted something which I think was Greek, and then explained:
“Your sensations, you know, have been shared by other people in lonely places, and since buses and bicycles led people to give up using the path over to Staineshead, Ringstones Moor is a lonely place. I felt them once myself, long ago, in a desolate land, and I knew that that voice the pilot Thamus heard was a lying voice. Great Pan is not dead. He frequents his holy places still, and if we trespass there the fear of him falls upon us.” “I thought Pan was a kindly god,” I said. “But that place was evil. I was afraid of something.”