After a first few minutes I had grown used to the narrator's voice, but boy, did those first minutes require a lot of concentration. There is a difference between speaking slowly and going to a great effort to speak slowly. It just didn't sound like natural slow speech, and was hard to process. Whether I, then, got used to it or the narrator found her natural rhythm of slower-but-not-dragged-out speech, was a relief. As for the intonation and cadence ... well, English is Foreign to me, so if there is any deviation from "received pronunciation" of BBC radio news, I try to shrug it off. The intonations there were no different to me from Southern, Geordie, Islands, or Aussie accents. A bit of local colour, that's all.
I was wondering why the harpist might not have walked five minutes with one harp, left it waiting, gone back for the other harp, walk ten minutes with that, left that one and bring the other one ahead... But then the slower rate of progress down the mountains would have forced a choice anyway, and in the desperate need to get home from the driving rain the clarity of the harpist's emotions would not have come through in all their poignancy and stuff. Perhaps better this way, but the old hiker in me wondered for a moment.