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We had finally met the Dartmoor Mists. As advertised, they snuck up on us in no time, with little warning. One moment they seemed a mile away, the next moment, we were swathed in them, barely able to see each other.
No matter. We were at the top of Yes Tor and all we needed to do was follow our walking guide to the next point. It would be easy enough to orient ourselves given that we finally knew our location.
Except it wasn’t.
The mists hid all the landmarks we needed to move towards. So the walking guide? Pointless. One down. I thought of our GPSs. Then I thought of the vapour messing them up if I took them out. The mists were so thick at this point, it would have been akin to pulling out electronics in pouring rain. Sadly, we hadn’t thought to bring a waterproof cover for them. Two and three down. The Compass.
And this is where I got another shock.
I have a reasonably decent sense of direction. My husband drives, I navigate, and rarely – very rarely – have I led us wrong. It’s just one of those things that clicks for me.
Now you hear that thick mists can muddle you. That you can end up going in circles in them. That you lose all sense of where you came from, which way you need to go. But no amount of anecdotes or horror movie trope knowledge can match the sinking feeling of actually experiencing such disorientation.
I thought we’d come up Yes Tor from this direction. Of course we had. This rock here looked familiar, didn’t it?
But The Compass said nope, you came up the diametrically opposite way.
“I promise you we came up this way!” I said, knowing how lost and desperate I sounded even as I said it.
“It’s okay,” said my husband gently. “Let’s just follow The Compass to our next landmark.”
Climbing up Yes Tor, we’d gone through less than a hundred metres of mist. Now though? It had spread all the way to the very distant bottom and as far as the eye could see. There was just no end to it.
So we went on down through the mist, taking frequent readings on The Compass. We seemed to be going nowhere useful. We could have passed every single landmark without noticing it through the shrouds around us. After a while, long past the time we should have reached our next stop, we realised that yes, we were lost again. This time in the mist with nothing to orient ourselves by. It was three in the afternoon by this point. We had maybe another three hours of daylight ahead of us. And mists? They only grow thicker as evening gathers.
“Let’s just head back to the reservoir,” said my husband, “and let’s risk the GPS.”
“Okay.”
We got out the GPS. Booted it up.
“You are off-road. Location not found.”
Hmm. Let’s try the other GPS.
“Sorry. Signal not found.”
It’s not a pleasant feeling, that, being stuck goodness knows where, unable to see more than a few feet ahead, and your primary means of navigation – the ones you’ve been saving as your last resort – ditch you. No, it’s not a pleasant feeling at all.
Logically, I knew we couldn’t be more than five, maybe six miles, from civilization. But in which direction? If we picked the wrong way to go, we had at least a twenty mile trek before we hit somewhere populated. Twenty miles. More than thirty kilometres. That’s three-quarters the distance from one end of Singapore to the other as the crow flies. And we had just a few hours of daylight left. We couldn’t afford to pick the wrong way.
Out came The Compass.
I kissed it for good luck. I did.
“It says that’s where we started,” I told him. “Double-check for me, please.”
“Think you’re right.”
“Here goes nothing then.”
We changed direction and started moving in a straight line the way The Compass told us to. There wasn’t even a hint of a trail the places we were walking now.
And then I met my first bog.
It didn’t swallow me like the poor pony in The Hound of Baskervilles, but it was miry enough that I almost lost a shoe.
I had to shake my head at how ridiculous our situation was. All my fears – mists, being lost, bogs – everything was coming together. The only thing that was left was for us to hear a dull howl echoing through the mists.
We trudged on. I kept checking The Compass to ensure we were on track. My husband kept checking the GPS. “Sorry. Signal not found.”
We trudged on. By this time, I’d stumbled into enough boggy patches that my shoes were soaked through, mud was caked on my trousers, I’d been pricked a few places by the gorse bushes that seemed so beautiful from a distance.
And then I saw it on the ground.
A skull.
Something had died out here. Had been picked clean until only its bones remained. Picked clean by what? We hadn’t seen a single animal on the moors except some sheep.
So there I was. Lost, soaked, blinded by the mist, staring at a skull that, in homage to every cliche out there, was grinning up at me.
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To be continued.












