“When you put it that way, it does sound a bit silly,” the Earl said, cheerfully enough. Then he mused, “Perhaps that is why I have felt it necessary to make this journey with a blacksmith on one hand, and a sixty-seven-year-old Doctor on the other-to lend some gravity to the proposal.”
By gestures so subtle and tasteful that they were almost subliminal, the Earl led them to understand that it was time they were underway. They returned to the coach, though the Earl lingered for a few moments on the running board to exchange civil words with a small posse of gentleman riders who had just come up out of the Gorge and recognized the arms painted on the carriage door.
For a quarter of an hour they trundled along in silence, the Earl gazing out an open window. The horizon was far away, smooth and gently varying except where it was shattered by peculiar hard shapes: protruding rocks, called Tors, shaped variously like schooners or Alchemists’ furnaces or fortress-ramparts or mandibles of dead beasts.
“You put a stop to my discourse and quite rightly, Dr. Waterhouse. I was being glib,” said the young Earl. “But there is nothing glib about this Dartmoor landscape, or would you disagree?”
“Plainly not.”
“Then let the landscape say eloquently what I could not.”
“What is it saying?”
By way of an answer, Will reached into a breast-pocket and pulled out a leaf of paper covered with writing. Angling this toward the window, he read from it. “The ancient tumuli, pagan barrows, Pendragon-battlegrounds, Druid-altars, Roman watch-towers, and the gouges in the earth wrought by the Old Men progressing west-to-east across the land, retracing the path of the Great Flood in their search for tin; all of it silently mocks London.