SUDDENLY I was sick of the savagery of the world. I was sick of the wars and the killing, the rise of new tyrannies, the refinement of old ones, the lies and the politics, the drug culture and the arid pornography, the midden stink of cities, the horror that hung over every tomorrow. I was engulfed in a black despair. I was afraid and ashamed and sad to be a man. I cried for a new birth or at least a baptism into a new brotherhood. I could not have the one or the other. The world would not stop for me. I could only jump off it into a dubious eternity.
I began to suffer from a recurrent nightmare. I dreamed of monsters, reptilian giants in a landscape of ferns and lycopods and swamps leprous with strange flowers. The skies were black with flapping terrors. The sea deeps writhed with saw-toothed predators. I was there too, wrenched out of time, set back in that vast slaughterhouse which was the reality behind man’s dream of the Garden of Eden. I was alone, shouting my terror among the mindless megamorphs. I cowered from the spectacle of their bloody battles. I ran, witless, through a primeval jungle, deafened by nightmare discords. I would wake, sweating in my tangled sheets, trembling under the impact of so vast an obscenity.
I became, in the end, a stranger to myself. Even my own hearth seemed a hostile place, as if all the talismans which defined my identity had changed to hostile fetishes. I felt myself cracking into scraps and shards. I knew that if I could not sit down, collect the pieces and put them together again, I might well go mad, or surrender all hope of selfhood by an act of absolute negation.
Then happened a kind of magical accident, which even today I contemplate with wonder and awe.
It was a morning in early August. The black mood was on me and I was strolling, aimless, along the Old Appian Way, where the tumbled stones and the marble fragments and the spoliated tombs celebrate the futility of human endeavour. It had rained during the night, and I was poking around the damp earth of the verge, hoping to turn up one of those coins or amulets which sometimes come to the surface of the leached, friable soil. Then a voice called my name and gave me a greeting, in English, with a soft Scots burr to it.
I looked up, startled and resentful at this intrusion on my childish pastime. The speaker was a tall, muscular fellow, six feet and a half in his walking boots, with a shock of snow-white hair, a ruddy, freckled face and a grin that gave him the look of a satiated goat-god. I stared at him, gape-mouthed as recognition dawned.
‘My God! Alastair Morrison! I thought you were still doctoring the heathen in Thailand.’
‘I gave it up a year ago – being confused as to who were the heathen and who weren’t. What are you doing in Rome?’
‘The same question to you – and a lot of others besides.’
I was quoting him out of a time remembered. He laughed and so did I. Strange and sad to think I had not laughed in a long time. I took him home with me then and fed him wine and pasta, and we talked of a time when he had been a medical missionary in Chiengmai and I a writer, footloose and feckless in southern Asia. He told me he had retired to his family lodge and bought himself feu-rights and fishing water in the clan lands of the Lews. I told him what I had done and of the strange sickness that had crept upon me in the latter months. He listened, puffing on an old pipe, interjecting a laconic comment or a barbed question. When I had talked myself out, he poured himself another glass of wine and delivered himself of a diagnosis.
‘Sometimes a man falls sick of the sunlight itself. He sees everything so clearly that he becomes blind and sees nothing at all. Sometimes he falls sick of reason because the juices which feed his dreaming dry up. It’s time to go then. Time to stick a shell in his hat, pick up the pilgrim staff and take the road.’
‘What road?’
‘To the place of unknowing.’
‘And where the devil is that?’
‘A place where you are strange and a stranger and lonely, and because of that, perhaps afraid.’
‘At this moment I’m afraid even to walk into the city, and I know it like the palm of my hand. I’m afraid to look into a mirror because I will see the fear in my eyes.’
‘You’ve got it bad, laddie.’
‘Yes, I’ve got it bad.’
He fell silent a while, watching me from behind a cloud of smoke. I remembered, irrelevantly, that even the mosquitoes of Chiengmai were daunted by that foul briar of his. Then he made me the offer.
‘Come to me if you like. Long time or short, it doesn’t matter. The place is empty as a barn and you’ll pay your lodging and your liquor, though you’ll have the fishing for free, and a lot more besides.’
‘That’s very generous of you.’
‘Och, we’re a generous people. Most of the time, that is.’
‘Do you mind if I think about it?’
‘Don’t think too long, else the sickness will be at you again, and you’ll do nothing. Besides, the air is soft now and the salmon will be starting to run and, if you remember the right prayer, the sea might set calm for your crossing.’
‘How will I let you know?’
‘You needn’t. I’ll give you the address, and then you’ll either come or you won’t. But even if you take another road you’d better start walking, laddie, else you’ll be like one of those old statues they have here: no ears, no nose, no parts to make love to a woman, no eyes to see the starlight or the sun on the hilltops.’
It took me ten days to gather my wits and my courage; then I turned my face to the north and set out to find the road to the Isles.
I left in a state of panic, a man without a skin, all nerve ends and raw tissue. Fiumicino Airport was a horror of harassed tourists and polyglot confusion. London was another; and I drank myself into anaesthesia while I waited for the flight to Inverness. We were packed like sardines into a lumbering Viscount, we climbed into a low overhang of rain cloud and I slept, uneasily, until the touchdown.
Then a new terror took hold of me. I was born in the sun. I had lived all my life in the bright lands of the Pacific and cities of the Mediterranean littoral. Here was a black runway, shining from the last rain shower, a verge of brown stubble with green pasture beyond, a hillock of black pines whose topmost branches were veiled in ragged cloud. Here was a low sky and a cold unwelcoming light and myself a foolish pilgrim in vain flight from himself.
I had ordered a car to meet me so that I could move at will – and flee the faster if I needed to; but the car was not there, and I waited half an hour while the tiny airport emptied itself and the old melancholy grew and grew inside me.
The car came at last. An apple-cheeked girl gave me an apology, a contract, a set of keys and a road map of the Highlands, then left me. I remember that I sat behind the wheel a long time, pretending to study the map, which made as little sense to me as the writing on a rune stone. I was immobilized like a cataleptic, looking and not seeing, knowing and yet unable to direct myself to a single movement. Then the syncope passed. I started the engine, drove out of the gates and took the road to Inverness and the west.
If I linger over the retrospect of that journey, it is because I understand now that every stage of it was a preparation for what happened to me when I came to the Outer Isles. There were no accidents. Everything was predestined. I was an actor being groomed, all-unknowing, for a drama the text of which he had never read, the dimension of which he could never have dreamed in a lifetime. I, the man of reason, had forgotten how to dream; I, the once believer, had lost belief in destiny, benign or malignant; so I was very ignorant, very open and very, very vulnerable.
A mile or so from the airport there was a turn-off and a sign: National Monument, Culloden. I was tempted to drive past it. I had no mind to add an ancient sadness to my own very present ones. Then I told myself that this was a folly. I was a pilgrim man and a pilgrim must offer a piety at the shrines along his way, else their saints might turn their faces from him and their demons dog his footstep. I went, therefore, where I did not want to go and embraced a memory which was no part of my inheritance.
Or was it? Not all a man’s heritage comes to him by will and devising. Once, in Rome, I had lived in the palace where died Henry Stuart, Cardinal Duke of York, brother of Bonnie Prince Charlie, last of the royal line. The Romans, a remembering if not a pious people, had set up a plaque in his honour; and I read it, perforce, at my comings in and my goings out.
Now I was standing on the field where the Young Pretender had fought the last, tragic battle for the Crown of England. I saw the grave mounds, where, they say, no heather has grown or ever will grow: the grave of the English, the graves of the clans, Camerons, Mackintoshes, Frasers and the rest, the grave of the Campbells of Argyll, who fought against the Highlanders for the German king. I laid a sprig of heather on their mound because, although there is no Scot in me, I am related to the Campbells by a marriage. I rested by the Keppoch stone where Alasdair, sixteenth of the name, died leading the charge of his clansmen. I remembered – how did I remember and why? – the lament that was made for him by his bard:
…Worthy son of Coll, him of the battleaxes,
Whom even the Southmen honoured,
The hawk, bravest of the flight…
I saw the memorial to the Jacobite Irish, the Wild Geese, the sons of Mileadh, who fell in the rearguard action before Cumberland began his butchery of the Highlanders and their wild, sad hopes. Then I drove away through the avenue of pines, recalling what I had long forgotten: that I, too, was descended from the Wild Geese, who had taken wing in the bad times and flown to the far corners of the world, Australia and Canada and America and all the seaports of China.
Of Inverness I remember little except the courtesy of the folk who directed me, the English tourists and their prattle in the bar, the cry of gulls, constant over the grey rooftops, the first, unfamiliar lilt of the Gaelic. For the rest, it was a town, busy with people, and I was in flight from busyness and argument and congress and commerce. I was headed westwards to the Islands and the dark ocean. Only nightfall or the weariness of the road would hold me.
The weariness overtook me at Fort Augustus, the bleak little township on Loch Ness from which Cumberland launched his harrying of the glens. There was a cold wind blowing from the east, and rain in the wind, and the waters of the loch were dark and hostile. The hotel was jammed with the English; but there was an attic room if I could bear the cramp of it, and dinner if I could be ready in twenty minutes, and the night porter would serve me a dram any time I felt the need.
I accepted the cramp and the dinner, stodgy but generous; the dram I could not drink because the lounge was full of the English, little knots and enclaves, some talking softly and some loudly, because they were strangers in a land which their fathers had made desolate and habit had made them too certain or too uncertain of themselves. I was uncertain too – God, how rickety a man I remember from that night! – so I walked out into the wind and the blown rain, looking for a place to drink and be cheerful with it. I found it two minutes away: a tiny stone tavern, with a single bar, and that crowded to bursting, a peat fire, two barmaids, twins of the Earth Mother herself, and an old piper, blowing himself up like a bullfrog with reels and pibrochs.
I wedged myself into a far corner, ordered a double dose of malt whisky, brown as bog water, and tried to forget who and what I was. Soon I found myself singing – not the words, because they were in the Gaelic and I did not know them; but the melodies I knew, many of them, though I could not for the life of me remember where I had heard them first. Because I sang, my neighbours talked to me; and one tall fellow threw his arm around my shoulder and ordered me to drink with him, ‘to wet the pipes’, he said, ‘because even a thrush canna warble without a dewdrop in his throat’.
There was a wild and primitive merriment about the place that lifted the spirit. The pipes skirled. The talk rose high, salty and bawdy, Scots burr and Gaelic lilt intertwining, bubbling out of the same thirsty gullet. The girls, buxom as clover-fed heifers, shouted with the rest and poured brown ale into the mouths of their boys. The barmaids bustled and sweated. An elderly crofter did a flailing reel in the middle of the floor while his audience roared and stamped approval. The air was a blue fog of tobacco smoke and peat smoke and damp tweeds and human exhalations. But it was alive. It was a place of union, of warmth and brotherhood, for those who farmed their tiny crofts on the uplands, grazed their sheep on sparse mountain croppings and wondered if the cash and the baled hay would feed them and their cattle through the winter.
For me, it was something else: a posthouse on the road to a place of unknowing. I could stay here a twelvemonth and I would be no closer to them than I was now. I had no roots in their clan life. What to them was a poignant folk memory, a familial yesterday, to me was a chapter of history, closed, done, forgotten. They would never close their doors to me, or refuse me bed and board if I needed it; but themselves they would hold private behind the hedge of the old language and the old separatist faith, and their fear of the outsiders who, once and again, had robbed them of their lands to run sheep, and deer for gentlemen to kill in sport.
By ten o’clock I was awash with whisky and sentiment. The piper, drunk as a bard should be, played me out of the bar with the rest of them. But they went home, while I walked back in the rain, climbed three flights of stairs to my attic room and tumbled myself into bed, drunker than the piper himself. That night there were no monsters in my dreams; but with the head I had on me in the morning, I forgot to be grateful for so singular a mercy.
In spite of the hangover I was determined to be early on the road. A sleepy night porter fed me tea and toast and set the course for me.
‘You’ll go now by Glengarry and that will carry you into Glen Shiel. If there’s mist on the mountains – and what with the early hour there might well be – then you’ll drive slow and steady, because the road is high and narrow and there’s many a poor body has tumbled off it into the lochs. When you pass the Five Sisters – they’ll be the hills beyond Kintail – then you’ll come to the Shiel Bridge and then to the Croe Bridge, which is at the head of Loch Duich. After that, the loch is on the left of you always, and there’s no place to go on the right, so you must come to Eilean Donan, which used to be the stronghold of the MacRaes. If you have half a crown in your pocket, then they’ll let you see two rooms of the place, which isn’t worth it, because with that much you can buy a dram at the hotel which is only a spit and a jump away down the loch. After that you come to Ardelve, where there’s nothing worth a look. And after Ardelve there’s Kyle of Lochalsh, and there, if the tourists haven’t swamped it and the Board of Trade hasn’t lifted its licence, you can put yourself and the car on the ferry for Skye. After that it’s Macleod country, and may Saint Donan stand between you and harm!’
Whereupon, as the old chroniclers used to say, I paid the score and pointed myself in the direction of Glengarry. There was little traffic on the road, so I trundled along at a steady forty miles an hour, because I wanted to blow the whisky fumes out of my brain and rest my bloodshot eyes on the greenery, tall pines and feathery birches, and the heather climbing the rock banks, and bracken, knee high in the dells.
I was five minutes past Glengarry, still in the woodland, when I heard a long trumpeting behind me. I looked in the rear-vision mirror and there was a red sports car, coming up fast, with a woman at the wheel. There was a sharp curve in front, so I braked to let her pass. The shock wave slammed into my flank as she swept by. She would have to corner tight if she was going to make the curve. She didn’t make it. Thirty yards before the elbow a truck, loaded with pine logs, rounded the turn. She was forced to swing wide. Her wheels hit the gravelled verge and she plunged straight on down the slope and out of my sight. I heard the crashing as she plunged through the birch grove and then a grinding of metal as she brought up hard against the pine boles. The truck was already gone and I was left to deal with whatever I might find in the hollow.
There was less than I had feared. The birch grove had saved her from rolling and cushioned her impact against the pines. The left side of the car was stove in, but the driver was climbing out, apparently unharmed. She stood for a moment, straddle-legged, surveying the wreck, then she sat down abruptly on the damp turf, her head hanging down between her knees. I scrambled down to her.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I think so. Leave me be for a moment, please.’ There was a touch of Scots in the voice but more of the English. I could not see her face, but her hair was raven black and her legs were good and she was wearing a skirt of the McNeil tartan. I let her be. I walked down to the car, switched off the engine, unlocked the trunk and took out the luggage, a valise, an attaché case and a small vanity pack. I carried them up the slope and stowed them in my own car.
When I came back she was sitting upright, smoothing back her hair from a pale, oval face. She announced, rather redundantly, ‘I’m a bloody fool.’
‘I agree. So now what?’
‘You don’t happen to have a brandy on you?’
‘No. But I’ll get you one at Glengarry. We can phone a doctor from there.’
‘I don’t need a doctor. I am one. There’s nothing broken and there’s no blood. But I’ll probably get the shakes very soon. Help me up, please.’
I hoisted her up the slope, bundled her into the car and drove her back to Glengarry, where they fed her brandy and strong tea and telephoned the Auto Club to take care of the wreck. She did get the shakes and she was very terse and professional until they were past. Then she asked:
‘Where were you heading?’
‘Kyle of Lochalsh, for a start.’
‘Could you give me a lift?’
‘Of course. I’ll be glad of the company.’
‘And you’re a safer driver than I am. Let’s go.’
We went; but before we went, we had – God help us! – one of those breathless formal introductions. She was Kathleen McNeil, Doctor of Medicine, Edinburgh and London; and, in a nice ladylike way, she was putting bedamned to any thoughts I might be having about wayside encounters and madcap drivers in distress. Come to that, bedamned to her too. Open your mouth, say ‘Ah’, breathe deeply, now cough, once again, please, and don’t think I’m not a good medico because I have good legs and a good figure and I’m not a day older than thirty-two – or is it thirty-five? Well, dear madam, it’s manners not to refuse until you’ve been asked; besides which, if it were the Queen of Sheba herself, I couldn’t be interested at this moment. And, what’s more, you may have the best cure in the world for gallstones and goitre, but you’re a bloody menace behind the wheel of a car!
The mist was still down in Glen Shiel, so we climbed slowly along the flank of the hills, praying no crazy Highlander would come roaring out of the murk, sure that the God of the Free Kirk was holding his hand on the wheel. We were wrapped in an eerie stillness, broken only by the sound of cascading water or the bleat of a sheep, startling as the cry of a lost child.
Then, abruptly, we broke out into a brightness, a morning glory that I had never seen before, or hoped to see. The sky was a pale blue, clear of cloud. The hills climbed into it, royal with purple heather and the diamond-flash of springs and runnels, the shine of grey granite. Below, the land fell away, through peat beds and bogs white with swamp asphodel, to the shining water of Loch Cluanie. I pulled the car into a lay-by. We got out and stood together, the only humans in a primal solitude. The sheep were there, black-faced and shaggy, ambling over the peat mounds. High in the blue, a peregrine falcon planed in a lazy circle. For the rest, there was only the sky and the water and the harsh, alien beauty of the hills.
I remember that I was near to tears at that moment. I understood, very clearly, the impulse of the anchorites to flee the confusion of the ancient cities, their injustices and corruptions and cruelties. I understood the lure of the deserts and the high places, where a man could begin to be again. I found myself wondering how my private terror would end: in an explosive madness of frustration, or a passive imbecility in which I would simply survive, without hope, trapped in a desolation of my own devising?
‘That’s a grim thought you’re having,’ said Dr Kathleen McNeil.
‘It is.’
‘Then you should leave it here and forget it.’
‘I’ll take your advice, Doctor.’
She laughed then; her face was suddenly young and beautiful, and I was glad to have her there. At least we could talk and be easy for the rest of the journey.
‘Where are you heading?’ I asked her.
‘To Harris. That’s in the Outer Islands. I’m doing a locum for an old friend of my father’s. It’s the only kind of holiday I can afford just now.’
‘I’m for Lewis. I’m staying the night on Skye. Then, if there’s a place, I’ll take the first ferry from Uig in the morning. If you want to save a long bus ride and linger through the landscape, you’re welcome to ride along.’
‘Thank you. I’d like that.’
Looking back now, I marvel at the simplicity of that moment and the violence of the drama to which it committed us both in the end. We were strangers, met by chance in a Highland glen. We were private from one another. Each for a separate reason was determined to remain private. We shared only the casual intimacies of fellow-travellers – the hands’ touch, the moments of common wonder and enthusiasm. We restrained our curiosities about each other. We offered no opinions that might touch the core of ourselves. We talked only of what was outside us, immediately visible, immediately experienced. Yesterday was a closed book because tomorrow would be another day and we would be strangers again. As well that neither of us guessed what Muirgen, the sea-born enchantress of the Celts, was weaving into the cloth of our mutual destinies.
The pattern she wove for us that day was simple and beautiful. If there were spells in it at all, they were all healing ones for me. There was a music of strange names: Morvich and Auchtertyre, Balmacara and Luib, Sligachan and Kensaleyre. There was the black boat beached on a pebble strand, and no man or woman or child within five miles of it; there was the old, old man, knee deep in a trout burn, casting with a ritual grace, as if he were performing a sacred rite; there were the Cuillins, high and magical, spent volcanoes from the age of the cataclysms; there was the golden bladder wrack spread like a carpet on the black rocks below the tide line, and the wheeling of white gulls over the white cottages by the seashore. There was the woman turning the scythed grass and piling it into stooks; there was the shepherd with his Shetland kelpie, herding his black-faced flock, while we halted to give him the rights of the road, which were his due. And everywhere there was the heather and the green moss, and sometimes a pine stand planted by the Development people and sometimes a vast tumble of stones from an ancient glacier.
When we came to Uig, in the long, slow fall of the evening, there was the warm wind from the Gulf Stream with the smell of the ocean in it, and the promise of fair weather for the morning.
At the little hotel there was dinner for the two of us, but only one room with two beds in it, which we could have shared if we were married or looked like it; but we weren’t and we didn’t. So I found myself a room in a crofter’s house where they promised me bacon and eggs for breakfast – with porridge if I wanted it – and guaranteed to wake me in time for the ferry. As for Dr Kathleen McNeil, Edinburgh and London, I wished her good night, hoped she slept well, and truly cared not a tinker’s damn whether she did or she didn’t. I would call for her at eight in the morning, drive her down to the dock and, after that, good luck and good-bye.
That night I lay awake a long time, listening to the faint wash of the tide and watching the moon climb over Beinn Edra. I had never been so solitary in twenty years, and never, never so glad of the solitude. I had a sudden comical vision of Atlas, bone-weary from carrying the world on his shoulders, deciding one day to shrug it off and let it bounce away on its own crazy course. Now he was flexing his cramped muscles and wondering why the hell he had carried the thankless burden so long. What he might do with his liberty was another matter, for another day.
At eight-fifteen we were parked in the first line of cars, waiting for the ferry to Tarbert, the southern port for the Isles of Harris and Lewis. The boat would be late this morning, they told us, because of trouble with the hoists; so we had an hour to kill. Dr Kathleen McNeil was in need of another cup of coffee because she had hurried her breakfast. She wandered off to find it in the little clapboard café on the far side of the jetty. I strolled down to the beach to look at the sailboat anchored in the inner pool. She was a beautiful thing, fifty-odd feet, built sturdy and beamy for the Northern seas, but still with a hull line that promised a close work and good turn of speed with it. The nameplate on her counter said, ‘The Mactire, Stornoway’. There was a dory hitched to her stern and, as I watched, a fellow, with his arm in a sling, came out of the cabin hatch and began hauling the dory alongside. He scrambled into it awkwardly, picked up an oar and began sculling himself towards the beach with the oar over the stern.
He was a big fellow, half a head taller than I, with a shock of bright red hair and a red Viking beard and a chest on him broad as a herring barrel. I offered him a hand to haul the dory onto the shingle, but he refused with a grin.
‘I still have one good hand. But you wouldn’t happen to have a car, would you? I slipped on the deck this morning – fool thing to do – and I think I’ve cracked my wrist. I’d better find a doctor to splint it for me.’
I told him I had both the car and a tame doctor, and he threw back his head and laughed.
‘There’s a providence if you like. Now all I have to do is find a sail hand to run The Mactire back to Stornoway with me.’
It was then that I walked myself straight into the mesh that the sea-goddess had been weaving for me. On a wild impulse I told him, ‘I just might know one at that.’
‘A local lad?’
‘No, myself.’
‘And what can you do?’
‘I can set a sail and hold a compass course.’
‘And where have you sailed?’
‘Sydney and the waters south. The Tyrrhenian and the Greek Islands.’
‘What about your wife?’
‘She’s not my wife. But if I can get her to drive the car onto the ferry and drive it off at Tarbert, you’ve got yourself a sail hand.’
He gave me a long look, measuring me. His eyes were blue and cold as the sea. I read him for a man who could do murder if you crossed him on the wrong day, and yet tear down mountains for a promise made. Then he grinned and held out his good hand. ‘You’re signed on then. And thanks. Now let’s go talk with this doctor-woman of yours.’
So it was done, easily and casually, in the manner of the Islands. So, though we could not know it, the magical square was completed – Alastair Morrison of the Morrison, Dr Kathleen McNeil of Edinburgh and London, the big redbeard whose given name was Ruarri Matheson and myself, the stranger in the land of the Gael.
I wonder still why I was chosen to bring us all together. I have not yet determined how far I am responsible for the moon madness and the epic terror that overtook us all in the end.