aper. It was the wind flowing across miles of reeds and grass and
heather from the distant Atlantic. But it was not until half an hour
later, when we breasted the crest of the great hog-back that stretched
before us like a rampart, that we ourselves met the wind. It came out
of the west, athwart the sun's rays, a steady rush of warm air; and
with it came the tang of the sea and hint of honey and new-mown hay
that somehow clings to Devon moorland through all the changing seasons.

A cluster of giant rocks piled against the sky to our left drew us
momentarily out of our course. With some difficulty we scrambled up
their warm surfaces, where the lichen clung bleached and russet, and
stood looking out across the rolling uplands of Devon. Worthier
adventurers would have improved the shining hour with debate as to the
origin of this upflung heap of Nature's masonry. Had it served
departed Phoenicians as an altar? Heaven and the archaeologists alone
knew.

To the northward the patchwork of plough and green corn, covert and
hamlet commenced at the edge of the railway and stretched undulating
over hill and dale to where a grey smudge proclaimed the sea.

South lay the moor, inscrutable and mysterious, dotted with the
monuments of a people forgotten before walls ringed the seven hills of
Rome. The outlines of tors, ever softening in the distance, led the
eye from rugged crest to misty beacon till, forty miles away, they
dissolved into the same grey haze.

The Indiarubber Man pointed a lean, prophetic forefinger to the rolling
south. "There's Wheatwood," he said. "Come on." And so, shouldering
our coats, with the hot sunlight on our right cheeks and the day before
us, we started across Dartmoor.

For nearly two hours the tor from which we had started watched with
friendly reassurance over intervening hills; then it dipped out of
sight, and we were conscious of a sudden loneliness in a world of
enigmatic hut-circles, peopled by sheep and peewits. We were working
across a piece of ground intersected by peat-cuttings, and after half
an hour of it the Indiarubber Man fished out the map and compass from
his pocket.

"There ought to be a clump of trees, a hut-circle, and a Roman road
knocking about somewhere. Can you see anything of them?"

I searched the landscape through glasses from my recumbent position in
the heather, but prolonged scrutiny failed to reveal a single tree, nor
was the Roman road startlingly obvi