And maybe this was what affected my mood. Or maybe it was the humiliation I felt over what had happened with Luke. But as Dad and I drove up and up, into the landscape of the Devil’s Lair, it seemed to me to be a hostile place, barren and cold. A land strangled by coarse bracken and strewn with broken rock. The hills which reared up on all sides seemed forbidding, their summits hard and grey and uninviting. Other landscapes had filled me with awe at their beauty and power, with a sense that I belonged to their huge, natural world. But here I felt nothing but a strange sense of foreboding. And then we drove over a cattle grid and up into the highest fells: and straight into low-lying cloud. Dad swore and switched on his headlights. “Maybe we should turn back,” I suggested tentatively. But he wasn’t listening, too busy concentrating on the road ahead, switching on the wipers to clear the thin drizzle which clung to the windscreen. He had no intention of turning back; he wanted to see the caves.
