47372 My previous letters and telegrams have kept you pretty well up-to-date as to all that has occurred in this most Godforsaken corner of the world.
47373 The longer one stays here the more does the spirit of the moor sink into one's soul, its vastness, and also its grim charm.
47374 When you are once out upon its bosom you have left all traces of modern England behind you, but on the other hand you are conscious everywhere of the homes and the work of prehistoric people.
47375 On all sides of you as you walk are the houses of these forgotten folk, with their graves and the huge monoliths which are supposed to have marked their temples.
47376 As you look at their grey stone huts against the scarred hillsides you leave your own age behind you, and if you were to see a skin-clad, hairy man crawl out from the low door, fitting a flint-tipped arrow on to the string of his bow, you would feel that his presence there was more natural than your own.
47377 The strange thing is that they should have lived so thickly on what must always have been most unfruitful soil.
47378 I am no antiquarian, but I could imagine that they were some unwarlike and harried race who were forced to accept that which none other would occupy.
47379 All this however, is foreign to the mission on which you sent me, and will probably be very uninteresting to your severely practical mind.
47380 I can still remember your complete indifference as to whether the sun moved round the earth or the earth round the sun.
47381 Let me, therefore, return to the facts concerning Sir Henry Baskerville.
47382 If you have not had any report within the last few days it is because up till to-day there was nothing of importance to relate.
47383 Then a very surprising circumstance occurred, which I shall tell you in due course.
47384 But, first of all, I must keep you in touch with some of the other factors in the situation.