Look – up ahead where the road bends: two figures, moving forwards, about to vanish from view.
At this distance, their forms are indistinct, but look harder and certain details will come clear: two young men, both carrying knapsacks. One of them is short – five feet, six inches to be precise (you can say this with some certainty). He is wearing a stovepipe hat (this is an informed supposition), dark jacket and trousers, loose about the thighs. If you could somehow leap ahead, meet him head on, you’d see a fleshy face, softly boyish despite a pronounced widow's peak; a broad and bulbous brow; and eyes set deep behind little wire-rimmed spectacles (there's excellent evidence here). The other figure is harder to discern. Taller, you might say; certainly a few years older; and probably dressed in similar garb. But just one small detail is absolutely clear: the square ruler, strapped to his knapsack.
Two figures, up ahead, about to vanish from view. Follow them!
The line of the road is perfectly familiar, though it lacks today's tarmac: the bend where the brook begins its sharp descent to the cove at Portheras, then the slight rise to the upper part of Bojewyan. But the jumbled grey cottages to the right have a strange, shape-shifting quality. There are buildings here, alright, as there should be. But when you try to fix them in their familiar positions, the rough-cut quoins tumble out, reconfigure elsewhere. But as the two figures move past the houses, stride towards the next bend at Keigwin, solidly familiar ground opens in the distance: the intersection of sea with coast; the rough rising hulk of Watch Croft, then the shallow saddle sweeping up to the twin granite crags of the Carn, all darkly tawny under a lowering sky.
The two figures are already around the Keigwin bend. Hurry! Follow them down the slope to the bridge on the parish boundary, past the turn to Chypraze. Watch them into the little hamlet clustered by the church, watch their response to this place.
