12,000 years ago, a river is born.

In a hollow at the foot of a hill on which flints lie white as eyes, water rises for the first time from a crack in the chalk—and flows away. Rises and flows, rises and flows: for days, then years, then decades, then centuries, watched by a midsummer day-moon and a berry-red winter sun, watched in all weathers, watched by deer who stand six feet tall at the withers, watched by the sentries of hawk and fox, watched in sleet and hail, watched by aurochs 11 feet long from muzzle to tail.

This spring water fell first as snow. It settled, melted, seeped slow through the bedrock, then surfaced here as a spring—a sleepless flutter of silver movement, rippling the pool it has made with its whispers and mutters.

The years below ground have clarified this water. It is transparent as glass and there is a blueness to it. North of here, the glaciers are in grudging retreat: vast crystal lobes and prows of ice, creaking as the warming climate hauls them back towards their last stand in the high places. The great ice-sheet leaves behind it scoured ground, scarred plains of bedrock, meltwater lakes and moraine. An immense weight has been lifted—and the land itself rises in relief. Trees stalk the glaciers northwards: first birch and hazel, then grey willow follows, filling the hollows. Down in the south, the frost has at last yielded its iron grip: water can soak deep into the earth, sate the aquifer—and cause this spring to flow at the foot of the hill.

Spring becomes stream becomes river, and all three seek the sea.

Now it is 8,000 years ago—the time of the linden tree. A wildwood of lime thrives, thronging right to the coasts and tight to the pool where the spring emerges. Rain-fed, the spring’s stream surges seawards: gravity at work, or something like longing. The stream joins the river who winds in fat meanders to its mouth where at last—between bronze beaches—it reaches the ocean, and is havocked into waves by tide and wind’s commotion.

Shadows shift between the trees around the spring: here are people for the first time, drawn to this place where water is born. The spring becomes a fixed point in their wanderings; a strange attractor in the loops and curls of their seasonal movements. Here they drink, eat, sleep, and use deer antlers to knap tools from knuckles of flint which are white without and dusky blue within. They haft blades to wooden shafts, craft awls and adzes, sharpen burins with which to engrave bone. They make cooking hearths from stones, leave them charred on the chalk. Their night-fires blaze in the great loneliness of this scarcely populated land, in the greater loneliness of the universe. One winter night, the aurora flickers across the heavens: shifting, radiant sky-rivers that flow and twine in currents, and pink-green light falls on the people’s upturned, astonished faces—before all is once more swallowed in the immense dark.

History runs both fleet and slow, eddying back upon itself to shape spirals where flow meets counterflow. Life and death rise and fall—and the spring, as it has always done, organizes existence around itself, exerting something like will upon the land. Settlement begins: a causewayed enclosure is dug and fortified atop a hill overlooking the spring, big enough for ten families or so. Centuries pass. The enclosure is abandoned, overgrown, absorbed by green. New dead are buried in the old chalk, and grave goods with them: pots, beads, and the sweeping horns of an aurochs killed with a poleaxe that punched a hole in its skull right between its brimming eyes.

The magic lantern flickers fast and faster. 2,000 years pass: the chalk hills are a stronghold again—the site of a huge ring-fort, ditched and palisaded. In the little wood, more springs have risen: nine of them, filling two pools. Water carriers beat a path into the earth, treading back and forth from fort to springs to fort, over and over. Water-worship floods the wider land. Springs and streams become sacred places, where water speaks in voices that cannot be understood or denied. In this age, rivers are seen and named plainly as gods: Dana (later the Danube); Deva (the Dee); Tamesa (the Thames); Sinnann (the Shannon). But if the stream who flows from the springs who pulse at the white hill’s foot is ever named, that name is lost to time.

Numberless nows become thens. The Pax Romana brings peace to the valley of the springs. Small farmers divide up the land. Their iron ploughs strike orange sparks from flints at dusk, shattering the stones so their sharp flakes lie indistinguishable from those knapped by human hand 4,000 or 5,000 years earlier. The Romans venerate the dryads of the trees and the naiads of the water. The water of each spring and stream is not interchangeable. Water’s source matters. Its course matters. Each river is differently spirited and differently tongued—and so must be differently honored. Far to the north, where glaciers once dragged their bellies, Batavian soldiers build a temple over a spring and dedicate it to the goddess Coventina, whose name they take from the Celtic word gover, meaning "little stream". Gifts are made to the water goddess, thousands of them: coins, beads of bone and lead and jet, a copper brooch of water serpents. As for the little springs with their lucid waters: each year a few legionaries turn from the straight and aggered road that runs a mile away, and come to lay down spear and dagger, slake their thirst and murmur prayers. They call the place Nona, after one of the goddesses of fate. In time, Nona will become Nine—Nine Wells. The springs of fate, where a river is born.

Time lapses, repeats, and the springs flow on, season after season. Blossom in succession: blackthorn, plum, hawthorn, dog rose, spindle. Leaves with their different greens: hornbeam, hazel, oak and maple. In the wood around the springs, owls call from ash and beech, each to each, year on year. Someone fastens an iron ladle on a long chain to a tree at the pool’s edge, so people can dip and drink the springs’ cold water.

Centuries pass. Plague moves westwards from Europe in long-legged leaps, reaches the region. Sharp-toothed and hungry, it stalks the young city of Cambridge which is now growing near the springs—and devours its people. Half of the city dies. Half of Europe dies. An old thorn tree flourishes by the springs, and petitioners come to tie rags of cloth to its branches, hoping the life of the waters will protect them from death. But the buboes still fester in their armpits and groins. Some of the dead are buried alone and with care; others are heaped together in trenches dug in churchyards. Still the springs run on, still the river seeks the sea.

It is the 1530s. Henry VIII has broken with Rome and overthrown the authority of the Pope. The Reformation is under way, but it is not only altars that are stripped and rood screens that are smashed. A purging fury is visited upon the animate land as well, bent on exorcizing that most detestable sin of idolatry. Vigilante groups fan out across the country. Running water—with its power to heal, bless and act—attracts particular persecution. Holy wells are filled and capped. A chapel built by a saint’s spring far in the west is destroyed, its attackers vowing to leave not one stone thereof upon another. Some of those who persist in making pilgrimages to springs and rivers are arrested and tried. Still people come, sometimes under darkness’s cover, and still they leave offerings. To many, the authorities’ suppression of spring sites simply confirms the numinous power of such water, welling mysteriously and wilfully from the earth as it does—as it has done for thousands of years.

Almost three centuries later a burningly handsome young poet with a limp, who is reputed to keep a bear in his university rooms, swims naked in a green pool of the river near the springs. Later he writes a poem describing a nightmare in which the sun was extinguished, and an icy Earth swung blind and blackening through space, and the rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still, while nothing stirr’d within their silent depths.

Horses give way to tractors on the slope of White Hill, as they now call the high ground beneath which the springs rise. War engulfs the world, threatens the land. The city’s people turn out in their thousands to dig a seven-mile trench into which the Wehrmacht’s tanks will supposedly plunge if they attack from the south. But the grey soldiers never make landfall, the trench is back-filled, and during the peace that follows a big new hospital arises near the springs.

The hardest winter on record comes in 1967: the springs freeze solid for six weeks, and tree branches break under the gathered weight of ice. The hardest drought comes in 1976: roads melt, scrub-fires rage and billions of aphids drift over fields and towns like plumes of green smoke. Drawn by the aphids, a plague of ladybirds swarms the south, settling in number upon people who suddenly find themselves shimmering with thousands of insects, as if they have grown their own elytra. The springs run dry for the first time since the retreat of the glaciers. And that August, at the height of the drought, a boy is born; he has very dark hair which soon turns flaxen.

The fast-growing city is thirsty for water: to flush, to wash, to drink. Boreholes are dug, the aquifer is tapped, and abstraction begins from stream and river. The water table drops as the crops, the taps and the hosepipes all take their share. Almost no one now comes to the springs, whose flow grows weaker and weaker. The stream falls into disregard, choked by algal blooms and duckweed. The river becomes slower, more polluted. The water company fears bad press if the springs run dry on their watch, so they send men with back-hoes and lengths of blue plastic piping to install an ‘augmentation scheme’: water from elsewhere in the system will be pumped into the springs to keep them alive.

Five hundred yards away in the hospital, scores of human bodies lie on ventilators, chests rising and falling to the steady rhythm of the pumps, the bleep of the heart monitors. Here in the little wood, the springs are also on life support.

The boy with flaxen hair, who is now a man, and a father for the first time, has moved to live on the edge of the city, a mile from the foot of White Hill. It takes him two years to discover the springs, forgotten as they have become, hidden as they are in a copse of beech and ash trees, tucked between fields of wheat and barley, close by the railway line. Quickly, the springs come to fascinate him. He starts to visit them often: walking, cycling or running up to the wood, sometimes three or four times a week. He likes to drink a handful of the spring water; it feels round on the tongue and has the silky chill of stone. He discovers that the stream who flows from the springs is only one of around two hundred chalk streams in the whole world; that a spring-fed chalk stream is among the rarest habitats on Earth. He discovers that on current trajectories of pollution and abstraction, the entire English chalk-stream network is unlikely to survive into the second half of the century.

Ten more years pass. The man, who is me, has three children now. It is the summer of 2022, the hottest on global record—the summer when all the rivers nearly die.

*

The rainlessness begins in June. Dry days lengthen into weeks then months of drought. Crops brittle in the fields; soil cracks into stars. Fierce light frames curtains and shutters from dawn until what passes for dusk. I dream often of rain; we all do.

One morning we wake to find that southerly gales have carried a fine red dust up from the Sahara and left a powdery film on cars, windows, and the leaves of plants. It gets in the mouth and tastes of exhaustion. The sun shines rust-orange through the haze, as in disaster movies or California.

Time falls out of joint. The mind fails to process the dissonance. The first of the year’s two autumns comes in early August, when the trees begin to shed their leaves from heat stress. Oaks and beeches stand bare-branched. Asphalt melts glossy on the pavements and sticks to our soles like black chewing gum. Each new day brings the same old weather. We wear the heat like a suit of armour.

The rivers have it worst. The Po dead-pools. Sections of the Rhine are no longer navigable to the shallow-draughted barges that keep Germany’s heartlands moving. In western Canada, spawning salmon are poached alive in gravel beds. On the banks of the Yangtze in Sichuan, parents sit their young children in buckets of water to keep them from heatstroke. In the borderlands of England and Wales, the run-off from giant chicken farms sickens the listless water of the River Wye.

The radio says: The source of the River Thames has moved nine miles downstream.

As water levels drop worldwide, things that have been hidden begin to surface and some of them are marvelous: medieval Buddhist statues; the 100,000- year-old skull of a deer; and a Bronze Age city that discloses itself on the banks of the Tigris River in Iraq. Archaeologists hurry to the site, where they wander and map the city’s light-struck streets. They find five ceramic vessels containing more than a hundred unfired clay tablets, dense with script, and are astonished that these texts could have survived so long underwater.

Lake Mead on the Colorado River shrinks deep into its sandstone belly, leaving million- dollar speedboats beached at its margins. Wise-guy ghosts appear: a decayed body, dead from a single gunshot wound, stuffed into a 55-gallon steel barrel and wearing sneakers from the early 1980s. Six other human corpses are also exposed; one is mistaken at first for the skeleton of a bighorn sheep. In nearby Death Valley, men film themselves frying eggs on the sun-scorched bonnets of Lamborghinis, and monetize the footage.

And along the edges of the Elbe, the drought stones appear: river boulders that are exposed when water levels are desperately low. They carry carved dates and inscriptions from earlier drought years: 1417, 1473, 1616, 1830. Near Děčín, close to the Czech–German border, a stone emerges that bears a warning:

Wenn du mich siest, danne weine.

If you see me, weep.

*

One day late in the long dry, I walk up to the springs with my younger son, Will.

I know what we will find that day and I cannot quite understand why we are going, but I hold hands with Will and together we cross the threshold between the hot light of the fields and the wood’s cool.

Nightshade, magpie cackle, flies scribbling the same message over and over again in floating patches of sun.

The springs have almost perished. Over-abstraction from the aquifer and a series of arid summers have done their preparatory work—and now the drought has struck. I’ve never seen the main pool so low. The hollow is choked and rank with leaves. There’s less than an inch of water in the streambed that leads from the springs, and no perceptible flow.

"Has the water died?" asks Will. He is only nine. It is painful for him to see this. He understands that there is something very wrong here, though he cannot name it. Something in the old power of this place, and its new injury, troubles him deeply.

"No, of course not," I say, but my certainty is a deceit.

As we leave the wood we see an egret, white as a slice of snow, standing stone-still in the exhausted outflow channel, as if its patience might somehow summon back the water’s life. ♦