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spy out the land and where they could camp at least for the night. When he reached the place, however, he was surprised and delighted to find that hidden below it and in his path lay a shallow lake about half a mile across. At its eastern end, a small outlet carried its waters away towards the sea. Tracking round the lake he found that it was fed from the north and the west by two small rivers. On its northern side was a flat, empty marsh.
    The water, sheltered by the hill, was very still; there was a sweet smell of fern, mud and water reed. Over the surface of the lake, a heron rose and seagulls cried. Protected from the wind it was warm. It did not take him long to make a small raft and cross the little stretch of water.
    From the top of the hill he looked inland; all the way to the horizon now, he could see low wooded ridges succeeding each other. He turned to Akun and pointed.
    “That is the way that we must go.”
    There were two months of summer left. This was clearly the place to rest and recoup their strength.
    “We shall stay here for ten days,” he said. “Then we go inland.” And with a sigh of relief, Akun and the two children made their way down the hill to the shallow water’s edge.
    The lake turned out to be a magical place, and Hwll was delighted to find that it abounded in game. The hill embraced the water like a protective arm, and animals that he had never seen before paraded themselves there: swans, a pair of herons, even a flock of pelicans waded by the water’s edge. On the open ground beyond the marsh, the soil was peaty and covered with heather, and a troupe of wild horses galloped across it one morning before vanishing towards the low wooded ridges to the north. In the rivers he found trout and salmon; one day he even crossed the Solent on a raft and reached the rock pools by the sea, returning with crabs and mussels which they cooked over the fire that night.
    The children were beginning to recover their strength. Hwll smiled one morning to see Vata being chased by her little brother along the shallow waters by the lake’s edge.
    “We could stay here for the winter,” Akun said. “There is plenty of food.” It was true; they could build their winter quarters in the shelter of the hill. But he shook his head.
    “We must go on,” he said. “We must find high ground.”
    Nothing would shake his fear of the terrible force of the sea.
    “You will kill us,” said Akun angrily. But she prepared to move on.
    The end of Hwll’s remarkable journey was in fact closer than he thought. But it was not to be accomplished alone.
    Before leaving the lake, Hwll had decided to reconnoitre the land immediately to the north, and so one morning he began to work his way up the river, towards the first of the low ridges he had seen from the hill. The banks were lightly wooded and the river, which was only thirty feet across, glided by at a gentle pace. River fowl ducked in and out of the rushes; long green river weeds waved their tendrils in the stream and he could see the large brown fish that paused silently just beneath the surface. He had followed the river five miles, when to his great surprise he almost walked over a camp.
    It was in a small clearing by the bank. It consisted of two low huts made of mud, brushwood and reeds. The sloping roofs of the huts were covered with turf and they seemed to grow out of the ground like a pair of untidy fungi. Tethered by the riverbank was a dugout.
    Startled, he halted. There was no fire, but he thought he could smell smoke, as if one had been put out recently. The camp seemed to be empty. Cautiously, he moved forward towards one of the huts. And then suddenly he became aware of a small man, with narrow-set eyes and a crooked back watching him intently from the cover of the reeds, fifteen yards away. In his hands he held a bow, fitted with an arrow which was pointed straight at Hwll’s heart. Neither man moved.
    Tep, who was the owner of the camp, had watched