Away below him, distant and separated from him by the black void, were the lights of cars moving on the roads between Dulverton and Exford, and Hawkridge and Withypool, and Liscombe and Winsford.
The moor was his, as the Beqa'a had been his and Crane's. He walked silently in this wilderness, each footfall tested, and for company he had the deer herds, and the hunting foxes, and the rooting badgers, and the sheep that had been freed from the pens in the valley and allowed to wander in search of the new summer grass of the higher ground.
He walked until the dawn light seeped onto the royal purple expanse of the moor, and when it was time for him to settle into his lying up position then he came down from the moor and took the road to the stone house that was the home of his mother and father.
In the early morning he packed a bag, and he told his mother that he was going back to work, and he asked his father to drive him to the railway station at Tiverton Junction.
His father gazed into the secret and unexplaining eyes of his son.
'Are you all right, Holt?'
'I'm all right, it's the others who have been hurt.' bleached stones. The cairn marked the grave of a young man who had given himself the n a m e of Abu Hamid who had been a fighter for a refugee people, who had been a foreign cadet at the military academy at Sim feropol, who had once been frightened of death, who had a crow's foot scar on his cheek.
The depth of the grave, the weight of the stones, were reckoned to be proof against the hyenas who would come to scavenge the camp site once the army engineers had lifted the tents onto their lorries and driven away.
