Sarum by Edward Rutherfurd Read Free Book Online Page A

empty space. His broad face broke into a smile. At last: this was what he wanted. Even if the sea broke down the cliffs and swamped the low ground across which he had been travelling, it would never, he was sure, be able to break down this huge plateau. He was safe.
    He turned to look at the rivers in the marshy ground below, where the swans made their stately way upon the water.
    “This is where I will stay,” he said.
    He had found Sarum.
    For the great plateau he had reached was Salisbury Plain, the huge, empty tract of high ground where all the natural land roads in southern England meet. From this rolling upland, the long ridges spread out south-west, east and north including, far to the north, the part of the great Jurassic ridge down which he had begun his journey from the tundra. To the east also stretched another ridge he had already encountered: for he had stood upon its last section as he stared across the Straits of Dover, where the sea had cut through it like a knife. These and other ridges, extending hundreds of miles over the island, all ran down to the great central hub of Salisbury Plain.
    He looked at it with awe.
    “It’s like a sea,” he murmured. “The land folds like waves.”
    He would have been astonished to know how close to the truth this statement was. For the geology of Salisbury Plain is not unduly complicated. About sixty-five million years ago, the plain and most of southern Britain lay under water, and when subsequently the sea receded in the so-called Cretaceous period, a massive layer of chalk, sometimes hundreds of feet thick and forming the covering of the ridges, was laid over the older shelf of Jurassic limestone beneath. It is this chalk which forms the soil of the high ground. Recently however – that is to say in roughly the last two million years – the wind and water of a long succession of ice ages interspersed with warm spells produced a very thin, very delicate sediment of earth over the chalk; and it was in this rich and shallow earth that the trees he saw were growing. This was the land of Salisbury Plain.
    It was deserted. But Hwll was by no means the first hunter to encounter the place. Hunters had intermittently made the plateau and the valleys below their home for a period of a quarter of a million years, roaming over them, leaving small traces of their passing – arrowheads, the bones of animals – in the shifting soil, and then passing out of sight. They too had recognised the benefits of this little collection of valleys.
    “The place is as you said,” he remarked dryly to Tep. He knew now that the cunning little hunter had deliberately misled him in the first place by indicating that the place was hard to find. Obviously, he would easily have discovered it himself simply by walking up river. No wonder Tep had taken them north so slowly! But though he had been cheated, he had made a promise, and there was nothing to be gained by quarrelling with the only fellow hunter he had been able to find since he left the tundra.
    “When the time comes,” he said, meaning the moment when the girl reached puberty, “your son may come for her.” And with that, he turned back to the valley below.
    The following day, he investigated the area thoroughly, paying particular attention to the hill that protected the entrance to the northern valley. It rose steeply, jutting out from the edge of the high chalk ridge like a sentry post. From the top of the hill there was a magnificent view in every direction; and at the bottom, the ground sloped gently to the river.
    “I think this is the place,” he said to Akun, and she nodded. So on the south west side of the hill, which faced towards the place where the five rivers met, they built their shelter together. It lay in a small hollow with the hill behind it and a lip of ground in front, so that it had complete protection from the wind but, at the same time, an unsurpassed view. A tangle of stunted trees gave further cover.
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