The weather was cold, wet, and messy, as grey sweeps of rain came across the vales below Uffington and swirled up the hill into the long, coarse grass into which Bracken emerged from the tunnels below. Not normally conditions in which a mole much likes to wander about, but Bracken did not mind, for there was a certain wild freshness about the air that suited his mood.
He headed westwards, as Quire had suggested, and with his usual talent for finding the right route, soon came upon a run of long grass that gave him good protection and headed the right way. He did not know what he was looking for but, as often in the past, he knew he would find it when he got there. It was hard to say at what time of day he set off, because the sky was so overcast that the sun might as well not have existed.
But there was the feeling of late afternoon to the air when he finally began to think he ought to arrive somewhere, and the sky was beginning to gloom over even more. To the right of the line of grass in which he made his way was a ploughed field of thin soil, more grey than brown and with many flakes of mottled blue flint and hard off-white chalk, and not a single sign of plant growth yet. To the left was a rutted, grassy track, potholed and puddly, where the soil and chalk had formed a light-grey clay. If Bracken had been able to fly up into the air, he would have seen what he knew by instinct, that the chalk downlands stretched far away all around him, except to the right, beyond the ploughed field, where the chalk escarpment fell many hundreds of molefeet downwards.
Then he heard a familiar and welcoming sound, the rushing of wind through bare beech-tree branches and twigs somewhere ahead. Its sound was subtle and variable, so that at first he had to pause in his passage through the long, whipping grass to catch it. But it soon got stronger and more persistent and he had the illusion for a moment that he was moving up the slopes of Duncton Hill towards the beeches that surrounded the Stone.
The air was clearing of rain as the wind increased and he found that he was, indeed, moving uphill and that ahead the light was darker and more confused as the great, tall shapes of the beech trees he had heard came into view. They were thinner than the Duncton trees, giving the illusion that they were taller, and stood in such a neat, tight group that from a distance their branches seemed to form one great crown, as if there were only one tree there.
They were to the right of his path, fenced off all by themselves in the middle of the ploughed field he had been skirting, so that he had to pick his way across the wet earth, flints and chalk fragments to reach them. The trees whipped and whistled high above him, and as he entered among them he saw that they formed a single oval stretching away from him, and there was such a pool of quietness in the centre where the wind was still that it was like entering into a peaceful burrow.
Inside the oval, nearest to where he had entered it, stood a sight more magnificent than any he had ever seen on the surface before. Four great sarsen stones stood in a gnarled, dark line with a gap in the middle between them beyond which there were more stones sunk into the ground. Among them were deep shadows and a wet, dark stillness and they formed an entrance to a great mound or barrow that stretched to the far edge of the oval of beeches. There was an air of great solidity and silence about the whole place, as if the very weather itself stopped and knocked before it entered. The sky above formed a great oval of light, though for the time being it was gloomy and lowering grey.
The grass in the oval was short and soft, and it covered the barrow behind the stones, although there and there a smaller sarsen stone poked its grey, wet snout out at the edge of the barrow and formed a pattern that delineated its long shape.
Sensing that he was in a very holy place, Bracken skirted around the edge of the stones and barrow at first, travelling its full length and then back the other side. Only when he had made a full circuit did he plunge into the gap between the stones, sniffing among them for mole-scent. There was nothing much, certainly nothing fresh, until he went right into a cell formed by the stones from beyond which, through gaps between them, he sensed the presence of recent mole activity. The scent was dry and a little mysterious, like sun- bleached wood or the husks of beech nuts. He fancied he sensed movement, secretive and silent, ritualistic and arcane—or was it vibrations from the great, shadowy stones about him, before which many a mole ritual must have been enacted, that he heard? He moved carefully and silently, as if the slightest movement would disturb the peace about him.
