The Black Down Hills were strange territory, but for those first minutes of freedom, Sam felt more at home than he had on Glover’s estate. The growing dawn dampened his spirits as it unveiled a desolate landscape. Like much of England, the hills had been ravaged; first by overpopulation and industrialization, then by the ecological terrorism to which the country had been subjected in the early part of the century. It was a scarred and battered land, tortured further by the natural and man-made disasters that had plagued it in the last few years. The awfulness began to weigh him down.