[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Dartmoor is, in short, a fascinating fantasy region, where several of the tors have their own ghosts—which is only to be expected in such a place—but I fancy their ectoplasm is only a matter of mist, myth, and legend.Most of them.Some of them, certainly…I won’t say where I went that first time—which is to say the first time anything peculiar happened—for reasons which will become amply apparent, but it was close to one of our favourite places.Close to, but not the precise spot, for that would have meant feeling my mother’s presence.Her memory, or my memory of her, in that place, might have interfered with my concentration.And I’m not talking about ghosts here, just memories, nostalgia if you like: a sentimental longing for times spent with someone who had loved me all of her life, now gone forever.And if that makes me seem weak, then explain to me how even strong men find themselves still crying over a pet dog dead for months and even years, let alone a beloved parent.And there is no paradox here, in my remembering yet needing to hold the memories to some degree at bay.I missed my Ma, yes, but I knew that I couldn’t go on mourning her for the rest of my life.Anyway, it was in the late summer—in fact August, this time of year—when less than an hour’s drive had taken me onto the moor and along a certain second-class road, to a spot where I parked my car in a lay-by near a crossroads track leading off across the heather.Maybe a quarter-mile away there was a small domed hill, which faced across a shaded, shallow depression one of Dartmoor’s more accessible tors: an oddly unbalanced outcrop that looked for all the world as if it had been built of enormous, worn and rounded dominoes by some erratic Titan infant and was now trying hard not to topple over.An illusion, naturally, because it was entirely possible that this was just one massive rock, grooved by time and the elements into a semblance of many separate horizontal layers.And here I think I had better give the stack a name—even one of my own coining—rather than simply call it a tor.Let’s call it Tumble Tor, if only because it looked as if at any moment it just might!My mother and I had tried to paint Tumble Tor on a number of occasions, never with any great success.So maybe I could do it now and at least finish a job that we had frequently started and just as often left unresolved.That was the idea, my reason for being there, but as stated I would not be painting from any previously occupied vantage point.Indeed, since the moors seem to change from day to day and (obviously) more radically season to season, it would be almost impossible to say precisely where those vantage points had been.My best bet was to simply plunk myself down in a spot which felt totally strange, and that way be sure that I’d never been there before.As for painting: I wouldn’t actually be doing any, not on this my first unaccompanied visit to Tumble Tor.Instead I intended to prepare a detailed pencil sketch, and in that way get as well acquainted as possible with the monolith before attempting the greater familiarity of oils and colour.In my opinion, one has to respect one’s subjects.It had been a long hot summer and the ground was very hard underfoot, the soil crumbling as I climbed perhaps one third of the way up the knoll to a stone-strewn landing where the ground levelled off in a wide ledge.The sun was still rising in a mid-morning sky, but there in the shade of the summit rising behind me I seated myself on a flat stone and faced Tumble Tor with my board and paper resting comfortably on my knees.And using various grades of graphite I began to transpose my oddly staggered subject onto paper.Time passed quickly…Mid-afternoon, I broke for a ham sandwich with mayonnaise, washed down with a half thermos of bitter coffee.I had brought my binoculars with me; now and then I trained them on my car to ensure that it remained safe and hadn’t attracted the attention of any overly curious strangers.The glasses were also handy as a means of bringing Tumble Tor into greater resolution, making it easy to study its myriad bulges and folds before committing them to paper.As I looked again at that much wrinkled rock, a lone puff of cloud eased itself in front of the sun.Tumble Tor fell into shade, however temporarily, and suddenly I saw a figure high in one of the outcrop’s precipitous shoulders: the figure of a man leaning against the rock there, peering in a furtive fashion—or so it seemed to me—around the shoulder and across the moor in the general direction of the road.Towards my car? Perhaps.The puff of cloud persisted, slowly moving, barely drifting, across what was recently an empty, achingly blue sky, and I was aware of the first few wisps of a ground mist in the depression between my knoll and Tumble Tor.I glanced again at the sky and saw that the cloud was the first of a string of cotton-wool puffs reaching out toward Exeter in a ruler-straight line.Following this procession to its source, I was able to pick out the shining silver speck that had fashioned the aerial trail: a jet aircraft, descending toward Exeter airport.Its long vapour trail—even as it broke up into these small “clouds”—seemed determined to track across the face of the sun.I looked again at Tumble Tor, and adjusted the focus of my binoculars to bring the lone climber—the furtive observer of some near-distant event?—into sharper perspective.He hadn’t moved except to turn his head in my direction, and I had little doubt but that he was now looking at me.At a distance of something less than four hundred and fifty yards, I must be visible to him as he was to me [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]