II

Fitting Out

With copies of the Motor Boat, the Yachting Monthly, and similar periodicals (not to mention cruises in book form of small craft on most of the seven seas) lying about me, I realised that I had gone against every authority and precedent in first buying my boat and then proceeding to find out the sort of boat I should have bought. I was a stranger to this sea-cruising world, with no knowledge of its technical needs, and with a very indifferent stomach for its heave and roll, yet I hadn’t even invited lists of second-hand vessels from the Clyde yachting yards, and so have ensured certain positive aids in the way of equipment and comfort.

As, a Caledonian, I should presumably blush to mention this, but in my desire to help other men who, equally ignorant with myself, may yet have the sea in their blood, I must leave the hard-headed myth to its place of origin. I did things first and met the consequences after. And as this is largely a record of these consequences, I must set them down as they arose.

I soon learned—particularly from catalogues of yacht equipment, like Simpson, Lawrence & Co.’s of Glasgow—that my boat was, beyond all argument, the merest shell. The engine was in the cabin, and I knew only too well what internal combustion engines are capable of in the way of fumes and noise. The cabin was unlined, and the more the Crew pondered the lack of locker accommodation—for there was nothing beyond the pantry-box—the more disturbed I became. Smooth water and sunny days are not altogether the rule on the West. While as for gear, the total outfit consisted of two anchors and some chain and even these were not galvanised. There was no navigation equipment; no place for cooking, no galley. And, of course, no dinghy.

Assuming the fifteen-year-old engine broke down in a stiff sea with rocks on a lee shore, what then? I knew how the tides could swirl through these western narrows at anything up to seven or eight knots, and, against the wind, what jabbling infernos they could kick up, not to mention rips over sunken reefs. Curiously enough, I was never afraid of being able to handle the vessel, if only I could contrive to keep her under way. I should always know what to do so long as I could get the bow pointing the way I wanted. To be broken down and helpless might not only be perilous in the extreme, but would brand the seaman a fool, if, with the seaman’s foresight, he had not made such arrangements as he could. One can resign oneself to an Act of God, but hardly to the dilemma of a fool.

For some weeks my investigations, after working-hours, were carried on with the greatest interest. Mostly this consisted of long lazy meditations where some visualising processes went on that every now and then had to be checked by reference to catalogues or charts. No other writing had the slightest interest, and often I found myself astonished that people should read novels or plays or daily papers (apart, conceivably, from the advertising or financial columns). The possibility of a world war was a little upsetting, but the vision of a kettle of hot water upsetting over the Crew, if there were no gimbals, faded it out easily.

I walked with the sea and boats. The Crew remembered how once, as a little girl, she had prayed for a bicycle. But the pleasantest sarcasm was unavailing, for somehow the whole idea sailed best of all in a breeze of laughter. These were happy preoccupied weeks, and out of them let me try to get some order.

And first the sea itself, for if your boat keeps going, you must take her somewhere, against wind and tide, beyond headlands, by reefs, round islands, into inlets, until you come to a safe anchorage. And here I record my first gift—two Admiralty charts covering the whole west coast of Scotland (nos. 2475 and 2515). They were presented, duly inscribed with a gallant verse of poetry, by an Orkney Sagaman who has charted the more dangerous human reefs as far a-sea as America and China. I got a third chart of the Hebrides, from Barra Head to Scarpa Island (2474), and a fourth of the north from Thurso Bay to the North Minch, including Sulisker (1954). These more than covered the whole of any possible cruise, and though the scale is small (about two and a half miles to the inch), I found the one book to help it out, namely the Clyde Cruising Club Sailing Directions for the West Coast of Scotland.

The easiest way for me to praise this book is to say that for any amateur yachtsman on the West Coast it is indispensable. Simple and direct in statement, with details of coasts and buoys and large-scale charts of many anchorages, it does not forget to tell you where to find water and stores, a post-office, a telephone, an inn. Its tidal information is particularly useful, as we found, for example, when, lying in Oban, we thought we should like to tackle the Falls of Lora. I got the new 1937 edition (8s. 6d.). Along with it, I purchased Brown’s Nautical Almanac (3s.), so that by certain calculations I should be able to tell the times of high and low tide fairly accurately on any day at any place. Most of its information went over my head and therefore thoroughly astonished me, for the knowledge man has got of the sea is very marvellous.

The Admiralty charts (4s. 6d. each) held an unending fascination. Hours were spent following imaginary voyages, checking up anchorages from the Sailing Directions. Nothing of all this remained in mind, though possibly a certain familiarity with the idea of sailing routes was engendered. The only other books I got together were two or three on bird and plant life and on geology.

Meantime the Crew had been arranging for the purchase of a good and suitable camera. She finally left the choice to our friend Fritz Wolcken, who does marvels with a Leica, and he got her a reasonably priced little box with which she was delighted, particularly as she did not require to remove it from its slung leather case while taking photographs—a useful consideration when scrambling over rocks or trying to keep upright on a plunging deck.

But photography is an art and we hardly knew the beginnings of it. Moreover, as we kept moving about from place to place, the Crew could not get her spools developed and delivered in time to benefit from her failures. Landscapes and seascapes that had looked magnificent to the eye turned out to be quite undistinguished in the print. And the whole realm of the constructed arty photograph remained—perhaps wisely—unexplored. On the whole we derived our greatest amusement from what are doubtless photographic failures, as most of the prints in this book make quite clear—and thus, perhaps, contrive to illustrate the story of the amateur.

Of course, in the beginning the Crew did not believe there were going to be many failures. And these she would offset by a first purchase of twenty spools. The spool used was an Afga Isopan, and the camera, by a special numbering device, took twelve pictures in. x in.) instead of the usual eight. A notebook with proper headings, showing the number of the spool, time exposure, distance, lens, was duly and neatly prepared (even if, in the stress of circumstance, entries were not always kept posted!). Finally (for she had her own catalogue hunting to do) she was delighted to discover that for the sum of 3s. 9d. she could send the undeveloped spool away and receive back the developed spool together with twelve photographs (enlargements) measuring 5 x 5 inches.

Meantime I had to bestir myself to the serious business of fitting out the boat, and the first problem was that of a breakdown. We had to carry something that might take us out of a difficulty and the only conceivable thing was a sail of some sort. The high house of a motor cruiser precludes sails in the ordinary way, so that though I had read controversies on the Bermudian rig (only one halyard, me boy, and stowed in a moment) v. the gaff rig, I did not get much help. In any case, my type of boat would never tack against a wind. All I could hope for was a sail to give me steering way when running before it, so that with enough sea room I could reasonably hope to fetch a convenient anchorage.

So one day I set off for Andrew Noble, the sailmaker in Burghead, and on his knees that skilled and genial man drew my boat to scale (I in. to I ft.) in blue chalk on the floor of his once busy premises, and set the fourteen foot mast in its place. I had come to the conclusion that a gaff sail would be unsuitable for a high-decked boat and that, though not elegant to look at, a triangular sail would keep the centre of gravity low and do its work. Mr. Noble agreed and solved the two problems of rings and a boom by suggesting that the canvas be laced to the mast by a single rope which could be pulled taut in a moment once the sail was up and that a double sheet be provided without any boom. I was so pleased about this that I also got a foresail to lace to the forestay, with sheets running aft to the cockpit.

The height of the sails was twelve feet and the foot of the mainsail about the same length. For a twenty-seven foot motor cruiser these are just about the right dimensions (and here I add our own experience to what I have read). Halyards and sheets were to be fixed all ready for use and the whole sent to Duntulm in Skye. Two blocks for the top of the mast and various cleats, shackles, and odds and ends, I bought from Mitchell & Co., Inverness, the owner seeming to welcome my innumerable visits and difficulties, for he was an enthusiastic yachtsman himself. Often did we bless him for the double-acting gimbals from which our primus stove (No. 5) was slung. In truth I was surprised to find the number of persons who were keen on boats. Our banker—frequently in my mind those days—took me into his parlour to tell me about the one he had had for years. Here was a new brotherhood.

The little galley was to consist of a small platform for the primus, with suitable shelving, lined above and at the back with enamelled tin sheets. The important business of locker accommodation would have to be seen to in Skye.

Catalogues were searched for lamps, lifebelts, and other gear, while I spent an afternoon in John Macpherson’s Sporting Stores, trying out more personal material, from oilskins to beds and sea-fishing tackle. A detailed list of utensils required for the simple business of dishing up a meal rather staggered me, so I refused to have anything to do with it, beyond giving the cross measurement of the gimbals as inches. I had thought an irreducible minimum meant two or three articles that could be sort of wrapped round and carried under the arm. ‘Strike out what we don’t weed.’ but I was not being caught as easy as that. ‘Strike it out yourself,’ I replied. And if, after that, I became a bit reckless, I must at least mention one particular purchase, for its comfort had the perfection that knows no reservation. I refer to those shaped inflatable beds, made of some sort of rubbered twill, that weigh only a pound or two and can be stowed in an attaché case. Luxuriousness is not their sole virtue, for water, salt or fresh, refuses to penetrate their thin hygienic skins and the price of those we had (Li-lo) was seventeen and sixpence each. They never let us down—or not so far but that a pumpful or two of air restored the desired floating effect. I cannot conceive of anything better, laid on the laced canvas of a yacht’s folding cot. But then perhaps I am talking of pleasure cruising in confined spaces, not whaling in the Arctic. In any case, I must have presented an unusual spectacle to the young lip-sticked customer who came upon me, sans jacket and boots, extended inside a blue sleeping bag on a red Li-lo upon the top floor of Mr. Macpherson’s shop. For I was penitently trying to amend my practice of buying first and trying afterwards.

Finally there were the compass and aneroid. There is a very good little article on the weather glass in Brown’s Nautical Almanac. I paid more than I had intended for the compass with its four-inch card in a simple teak box. But it is a beauty. A very good one, however, can be got for about forty shillings. And if mine cost nearly double that, I did at least make an effort to get one second hand. In comparison, the aneroid was very cheap (if it had cost so much per tap, it would have ruined us).

 

Meantime no news was coming from Skye, but I felt sure that the engine would now be running like a sewing machine and the hull glistening in new paint. I had reckoned without the timeless West! On a chance visit, several weeks after I had bought her, Eoin discovered her to be still untouched, the old paint flaking in the sun, the seams opening like daisies, the engine scattered on the grass. There were high words, I understand, and counter orders, and Eoin arrived back fuming, far more annoyed than if the boat had been his own, for he felt his folk had let him down before the stranger!

Letters and telegrams—and a couple of weeks later Eoin and I were on the road again, assured the boat would be launched and ready.

 

May and June are, as a rule, the most perfect weather months in the Western Highlands. Early spells of cold wind, bright sun, and flying cloud, invigorating days, running into weeks sometimes without any rain, are followed by June warmth and the endless June nights.

Of all months, give me June, though it can be fine to go through May to reach it, May of the green leaves. As Eoin and I set off on an evening in mid-May the birches were out, tentative as young love, quiet as thought. For in Glenmoriston the birches in the evenings are cowled a little, like forest acolytes, their shoulders drawn together, their heads slightly bowed. As we returned two mornings later, with the sun turning every tender leaf translucent, they were pure aspiration, living green fires, holding to the earth by some miracle whose harmony took our breath.

It is a great run, by Loch Ness, up Glenmoriston, past Cluanie Inn, and down the long green defile to the Seven Sisters of Kintail and the shores of Loch Duich. If we travelled at as high a speed as the narrow twisting road would permit, it was because we had to. Besides, there is the positive exhilaration the diver gets between a high rock and the deep water, or a salmon between the deep water and the sky. And then the West again. In the evening light its grey timeless spirit came towards us and flowed in behind.

But we knew about that timelessness all right! We were not deceived any more than by the treacherous turns up Mam Ratagan, though our attention was claimed by the young forest already clothing in green that noble hillside. How magnificent the Western Highlands will yet be when afforestation has come into its own! These young trees had all the hope and sap of invincible youth.

There was a brave new ferry-boat, too, at Kylerhea, with a 30 h.p. Kelvin engine, which defeated the swift tidal current with such ease, that we tried to amuse ourselves by wondering what Boswell would have struck out of Johnson had they been here now.

As a lad I had many a time pulled my row-boat smartly into the current and then lain back to be floated away towards Glenelg. There was a Christmas memory, too, of carrying a pushbike on my back up the hillside through the snow and down the steep slopes to the shores of Loch Duich. But what sticks in the mind most persistently is a boyhood day spent on the moor beyond the stiff climb from Kylerhea.

To Eoin, this climb presented no difficulty, for he had learned the wisdom of changing down to bottom gear before tackling the two short steep slopes near the top. Not to do this is to invite stalling and temporary difficulties.

It was deep gloaming when we emerged on the moor and followed the road that winds by the little stream towards Broadford. A whole summer day the boy had spent there, guddling yellow trout, looking over the silent moors, seeing no living soul. It had been a day of such curious and intimate loneliness, so withdrawn from all practical ways of being and thought, that I can afford to wonder if it happened to me in this life, or indeed if it happened at all.

There are many stories in the West of fairy gold. The stories are very circumstantial and the gold quite real. I should be inclined to doubt, all the same, the adequacy of practical research in the matter, whether by mineralogist or folklorist.

But I should never doubt the fellow who found the fairy gold—once I had glimpsed his eyes.

It was quite dark by the time we were at Broadford, and after midnight before we had knocked up the mechanic. There was a long confidential talk on the roadside, during which we learned that the boat had been launched but was not yet altogether ready, what with cutting the peats, putting down the harvest, and one thing or another. However, he would be up at six o’clock in the morning and send off a telegram by the school children advising us of his arrival some time tomorrow, without fail. That was the best he could pledge himself to, so we said Sláinte! over again and departed amicably.

These long confidential talks in the dark—they would induce the hind leg off a donkey, so friendly their conspiracy, so warm, so pleasant. That no one is much deceived does not matter.

‘Do you think we’ll see the boat tomorrow?’ I asked Eoin.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘By one o’clock.’

I smiled in the dark and laid a bet that it would not be before four, for that was the hour at which we must depart.

 

The following morning was all bright loveliness and the sea shimmering and irresistible. We set a net between Hulm Island and the first rock on its north side and then explored the island for loose stones to weight the net. But they were difficult to find, for the volcanic rock was dark, pitted, and solidly fused. On the steep seaward ledges and on the grassy inland slope, seagulls were preparing their nests. We found one egg with dark blotches on its olive shell. There were masses of celandine in full bloom, while here and there were violet, seapink, and yellow trefoil. In the shallow western cave, where shags stuck to their nests until the very last moment, we came upon a marvellous display of sea-urchins, spined like the hedgehog. Their colouring in the clear water was very attractive, while ball-clusters of bright white and yellow adhering to the rocksides Eoin assured us were their young. After many attempts, we managed to balance an urchin, round and big as a tennis ball, on the blade of an oar and take it up and into the boat. It was low water after an exceptionally high spring tide, and the tangle-weed exposed their drooping fronds in miniature forests.

At one o‘clock Eoin’s voice called across the island, ‘Here she comes!’ I rejoined himself and the crofter in the boat and gazed as directed into the far sea haze but could see nothing. Eoin kept telling me to wait, as he had seen her all right. The crofter wasn’t quite so sure. After many minutes, I suggested he had seen her wraith, for he has an undoubted gift that way.

‘And what about the telegram we were to have had in the morning anyway?’ I gently probed.

Whereupon, digging his oars in, he grunted his criticism of those who let him down.

Above us were the ruins of Duntulm Castle and I had pointed out to me the three knolls: The Justice Knoll, the Rolling Knoll, and the Hanging Knoll. Here in times past the Macdonald of the Isles had sat in judgment with and on his people. When a man had been condemned on the Knoll of Justice he was taken to the Knoll of Rolling, put inside a nail-studded barrel, and trundled off. If he had the fortune to survive he was deemed innocent, for they had a proper respect for miracles in those days. When true Christian culture came from the south, however, it brought with it the gallows, which was given a hill all to itself, the Hanging Knoll. It did away with miracles. When it was first set up, Macdonald and his intimates were greatly taken with it and wondered just how it would behave. The story goes that they saw an old man and called to him. Such recognition by the mighty fairly set the poor old man hurrying towards them, and when he arrived he was seized and strung up. The contraption worked perfectly. Whereat they were properly astonished and laughed heartily.

I asked Eoin, still muttering threats against the absent, what he would do at the present moment if he were Lord of the Isles, with control over the three knolls. We laughed heartily at the things he said, and obeyed his instructions to cast the empty net on the south side of the island, so that it might catch such fish as chose to come in on the first of the flood. There and then the net was well anchored with three heavy stones and had lead sinkers all along its base line as well, yet it was later dragged by the tidal current right round the inshore point and in front of the sunken wreck of the steam drifter. It was my first practical demonstration of what can happen to ground tackle in the pull of a sea and I was to remember it very soon.

We poked about the wreck, which shows a barnacled gunwale above spring low water and which should be given a comfortable berth by vessels coming to anchor. I was told a war-time story about this wreck, but am not sure enough of the law of libel to repeat it. We tried to disclose the tons of coal which are said to be sunk with her but succeeded only in shoving an oar through the rust-rotten side of a latrine. The hold of the vessel was now a rich marine garden, with its scavenging eel as a fair understudy of the serpent.

Sails away towards Fladdachuain (Fladda of the ocean) attracted our attention, a white sail and a brown sail on the one boat, and we waited her coming on the flat rock that slopes slowly into the sea below Duntulm (the ridges in this rock, said to have been worn by the keels of Macdonald’s galleys, are still quite clear).

It is difficult to think quickly of anything ever made by the hand of man more beautiful than a sailing boat. A racing yacht has something of art for art’s sake about it, but the lobster fishers’ boat on that bright sea gave art its warrant. They hove to between the island and the shore and sank their lobster catch, then came on to be drawn up by all of us above high-water mark. She was a long open boat, what they called an Irish skiff, and she had in fact been built in Ireland. I had seen her kind in Kerry. There was shamrock-green paint on her, too, and she had those simple subtle lines so difficult to define, holding within them reticence, deceit, and all man’s knowledge of the treachery of the sea.

Eoin’s eye had meantime caught sight of the crabs creaking against the bottom boards, and the friendly skipper told him to take as many as he liked for they were of no value to him. The four men had spent the whole night on Fladdachuain Island, but, as it happened, without much success. Not that you would guess it from their mien. This traffic with the sea may be a despairing but is also a fascinating business, for it is a gamble not only in its catches but in its markets, and as the summer went on it claimed our attention more and more.

The skipper told us how to distinguish between the male and female crab. The last flap of shell that folds like a tail over the breast is pale and narrow in the male and purple and broad in the female. He himself would eat only the male. So Eoin and I gathered five or six males and went back to the hotel, where he insisted on having them cooked. It was now five o’clock, with all hope of seeing my boat gone and our minds committed darkly to departure. Indeed we should have been gone an hour ago. Eoin was cracking his last claw with a ruthless hammer when the telegram came advising us of the boat’s arrival that afternoon. Whereupon someone walked in saying the boat was in the bay. We went to the front door and there she lay calmly at anchor, beyond the wreck. And through an inexplicable and disturbing warmth, I thought she looked very well.

It turned out that the telegram had been handed to a schoolboy in the morning, but the schoolboy had handed it to a van-man, who had carried it on his rounds back to Portree, and thus, in a very close finish, the yacht had beaten it.

As we backed out, I was about to swing the head of the small boat against the sun when the crofter stopped me; so I immediately swung her with the sun and headed for the yacht, while Eoin’s voice assured us that she was bonny and sat the water like a swan. There are less heartening things than optimism and a kind eye. The dark mood of disappointment and irritation was lifting from us, but still a few direct words might be said. And they were, for as we stepped aboard a voice with a slow sarcastic drawl remarked:

‘You were surely in an awful hurry.’

And we found ourselves without an answer. In fact, though all that had been done to her could, to my inexperienced eye, have been done in two or three afternoons any time in the last six weeks, I was made to feel guilty and did my best to explain that we were anxious to take advantage of the presence of a carpenter about the hotel who would put in some shelving and locker accommodation. A floor board over the propeller shaft was missing, and I was told the owner would have put a new one in had I not been in such an inexplicable haste. I expressed my sorrow for that. Moreover, there had not been enough time to stow the ballast properly or quite finish the painting, while the engine throttle still needed a spring and one or two other things needed adjustment. Besides that, the old magneto had been damaged by salt water, but there was a borrowed one in her and she was going well enough. By salt water? Had the boat’s plug been left out? Hsh! said a shaken head.

Feeling confused and more guilty than ever, as if I were altogether to blame, I tried to put everyone at his ease, for perhaps I had been in too great a hurry, and anyway this was my own boat and I had not yet got to know her. So we lifted anchor, the mechanic swung the flywheel, and there was a roar.

After the soft hush of a motor car, it was an impressive, an obliterating sound. I sat beside the mechanic in the cabin and tried to catch what he shouted into my ear and sometimes succeeded, though a dumb show of feeling the circulation system and cylinder heads, pointing to the oil-drip feed and the throttle, indicating forward, neutral, and reverse, was more immediately intelligible. Then he gave her the load, and as I stepped out to the cockpit, we were under way, with Eoin at the tiller and the small boat in tow.

The land began slipping past. We were headed for Fladdachuain, confused once in the remote past with Tír na n-Óg, the Land of the Ever Young, the Gaelic paradise.

But we did not land there. We were hardly prepared for Tír na n-Óg yet, despite all our experiments with time, so we put her about and came back to Skye, the basaltic masses of the Quirang behind Ruadha Hunish—a magnificent side-face of rock running into the sea, with the coastguard’s lookout perched on its brow. She was going well, steady on the helm, as I brought her in between the rocks off Hulm Island and so back to her anchorage.

The two anchors had folding stocks and we decided to put both out, for this can be an uncomfortable berth when a sea-wind comes down the channel. With the larger anchor, some difficulty was experienced in getting the pin into its hole in the stock. It was hammered, but went little more than half way home; which might have been far enough, I thought, if only the binding wire had been fixed more securely. But unfortunately I said nothing. Eoin and I then took measurements inside for the use of the carpenter. By the time we had finished it was eight o’clock.

So there could be no Inverness that night. There was, however, the still unsolved question of a dinghy, and after we had toasted the day’s work, we set off.

I liked the look of the dinghy when I saw her in the half-dark. About nine feet long, and beamy, with bottom boards. And a grand sea boat, I was told. So we decided to try her. She was no sooner in the water than the sea came pouring in through her seams, and five yards from shore she was about half full. So we hurriedly leapt to dry land, emptied her, and hauled her up. I accepted the assurance that there was nothing wrong with her but the seams, which would take up after a few days in water. As it happened, she belonged to the man from whom I had got the motor boat, so we repaired to his house, where there was talk and bargaining in two tongues, until in the end the one cheque was written for both boats, and the owner asked me if I would like to rob him of his suit of clothes as well. By that time he was tearing the tissue paper from a bottle of whisky, a beverage with a long history in the Island and still not unknown, despite its vindictive price.

Some time about midnight it occurred to Eoin and myself that we were expected in Inverness more than two hours before, so we had to hunt for a telephone and found one in the inn where we had spent the pleasant night. No one was in bed and I was now no longer a stranger.

 

When between four and five in the morning we left Duntulm, the mists were curling up from frost. Beyond the castle ruins, two Loch Fyne boats were ring-netting for herring and we remembered the oily patches on the sea’s surface the day before. The evolutions of the boats were slow and friendly, as if they were playing a game. The two buoys of Eoin’s net, which he had forgotten to haul, were still athwart the invisible wreck. (The crofter would perhaps haul it sometime.) Beyond, lay the Thistle at anchor. I thought she looked very well. I turned again and had another gaze at her. She was so peaceful there on that quiet sea in the silver morning that she might well have been wondering what on earth I was going away for. I suggested as much to Eoin. ‘I don’t blame her,’ said he.

And so on through Kilmuir, once the granary of Skye (did not Pennant find the fields ‘laughing with corn’?) with enough peaceful and bloody and romantic history between the ruins of the monastic establishment on Columba’s Loch (long since drained) and the sheep-disturbing siren of a Ford V-8 to fill a whole shelf with volumes of Transactions.

And long before the time of St. Columba, strange ongoings resounded down there by the shores of Loch Snizort. When Finn MacCumhail (or Fingal) and his men lost touch with the deer, they sent Caoilte, the Thin Man, to find them, while they resigned themselves to gather limpets and make a hash of them with milk from the grey-cheeked cow.

Caoilte was so swift, it was said of him that he could appear as three individuals; just as Bran, Finn’s dog, could appear simultaneously as a separate dog at every opening or gap around. A conception of speed which is still a trifle beyond our age.

But the truth of it can be read on a rock, for one day when Caoilte, sent to find deer, let out his mighty shout, a Fian (or Fingalian) on the shore spewed out the limpet hash on a rock in front of him. With its grey splotch, it is known in Gaelic to this day as the Rock of the Mouthful. And the grazing fields of the grey-cheeked cow may be found on the modern map both in Gaelic and in Norse. A philologist once told me that in Skye for every two place names in Gaelic there are fully three in Norse. Already I had seen more than one mountain-top where a princess of Lochlann had elected to be buried.

Who would blame her on a morning like this? The rising sun flashing up through the hollows of the hills; mist not all-pervasive but here and there in snow-white clouds clearly defined as the skylines; the quiet moors with their enchanted cottages, the arms of the sea, the sea itself, the Ascrib Isles, Fladdachuain, the far Hebrides. And beyond the seas, over the foam—Norroway. There is something more than the eagle in a spirit prepared to fold its wings on a mountain-top. But what that something more may be we seem to have forgotten, though it moves us still.

Then suddenly, right across Skye, we saw the serrated tops of the Cuillin. Pale in the morning sun, they seemed at an infinite distance, like guardian mountains to a strange and fabulous country.

It was not difficult to believe in that moment that the warrior Cuchulain had performed daring deeds there in the crossing of the Bridge of Cliffs, in war, and in love. Cuchulain, ‘the small dark sad man’—what is there, in the designation, of strength and insight and love, that still has its grip on the imagination? Dunscaith, on the other side of the Cuillin, was his castle. But with troubles brewing in Ireland—an old story—back he had to go to the wars, leaving his ‘lovely sunbeam of Dunscaith’ to look in vain across the sea for his return.

But, like MacCrimmon, he never returned.

Dunscaith and Borreraig are both in ruins.

Crofting and fishing are still the main occupations in Skye, though they have been declining for years into the grey economic decrepitude that has overspread most of the West. Here and there houses have been enlarged for tourists. One comes, particularly in places like Broadford, on roadside signs displaying the word BOARDING, with an initial surprise that quickly enough fades into indifferent acceptance. And why not? Why not Broadford as well as Blackpool? High time that antiquarian sentiment was abolished in these things. Yet the effect the historic change has had on the living creative spirit that lured Cuchulain to Dunscaith and the MacCrimmons to music in the piper’s hollow at Borreraig, is a matter for long uneasy speculation—particularly in the bodiless hours of an early summer morning.

 

By the time we came in sight of the Red Hills the sun was rising beyond them and turning their hollows into fiery chasms. The hills seemed to emit a red granitic dust that splintered the white shafts of light and dissolved them in molten air. I had never seen anything in landscape so startling, so magnificent. The chasms, too, appeared to be of an immense size and the hills themselves heightened and etherialised. By comparison, the Cuillin, standing back on the right, were now pale and insignificant. Rarely does the witchery of light perform so astonishing a miracle. And I hesitate in mentioning it here because I know how unexceptional, apart from their pink (and not very attractive) colour, the Red Hills normally appear. But that is the whole gamble of sight-seeing in Skye or, for that matter, anywhere on the West. The miracle is come upon unexpectedly and seldom if ever repeated.

That morning the Red Hills gave life to geological time. Though one realised in a flash that here the word time had no more meaning than the convenient word ether. It was something in which immense geological periods had a certain relation to one another. Skye, for example, was mostly a manifestation of the last or Tertiary period, at the beginning of which molten matter welled up quietly through great surface cracks and flowed over the land, filling up hollows, until there were formed those basaltic plateaux we had come upon in the north. This out-flowing happened many times, not only in Skye but right down as far as the north of Ireland, and in Mull to this day one can count as many as thirty terraces on the mountain side, thirty layers one above another, to a depth of about 3,000 feet. In between these eruptions were quiescent ages lasting so long that they still have evidence of plant and animal life.

But such out-flowings did not exhaust the reservoirs below, and when the heavy blankets of basalt tried to keep the molten matter down, it searched for the weakly cemented spots between the basalt and the rock it lay on, and heaved. Down in the Cuillin area this rock—or skin of the earth—was fairly tender, and the molten mass of basic rock, called gabbro, shot upward through vents or pipes until it heaved the basalt sheets into a dome, as a boy makes a ‘tent’ of his bedclothes with his toes. Under the strain the sheets cracked, and the gabbro thrust itself into the cracks, and having done all this more than once, it found such relief that it let its topmost anger cool—and solidify. Then through long ages (in this recent geological period) the basalts were weathered or worn away and the gabbro was laid bare in those shattered, angular, fantastic precipices we call the Cuillin. And being coarse-grained and tough, it makes for grand climbing.

Ages later there was a similar sort of disturbance in the region of the Red Hills, and molten masses this time of a granite-like rock (hence the red and sometimes yellowish colour) were thrust up through both basalt and gabbro, and, after more ages of denudation, showed themselves with some of their ancient fire to us on a summer morning.

And all this, including the complete weathering away over vast areas of the whole 3,000 feet of tough basalts, took but a short while in the immense space of time that goes back to the formation of the Lewisian gneiss now exposed in Sleat.

 

Against such conceptions of time the thought of the length of a human life draws a smile from that odd detached wisdom that comes one knows not whence.

And taking everything into account, particularly the recent pattern of our rather hectic doings, the smile was decidedly ‘on me’!

For here was I, suddenly become the owner of a boat—with the prospect of three weeks’ cruising! Three weeks! It sounded like some love relation, rather than an adventure into—or out of—time! In fact, bad weather might very easily prevent our going to sea altogether. What then?

What had really prompted the buying of the boat? Was it that I wanted to outdo the folk of the West in their disregard of time (‘You were surely in an awful hurry’), to have some sort of revenge on the monstrousness of time itself?

Facile speculation, perhaps, that yet could crystallise into a definite picture—as vague hope generally does in the lazy mind. For I could always become haunted by one very clear picture: a sea-loch, the boat at anchor, evening passing into the peace and glimmer of summer midnight, with a sea-bird calling along the shore to intensify the quiet.

That at least was no vague dream. It was a piece of reality that I had experienced more than once. I knew it in all its intricate detail of thought and mood and sound and silence and sight, flowing and merging; too intricate ever to reproduce, to do more than hint at.

It is easy, of course, to dismiss the picture by calling it the escapist’s dream, and difficult to defend it, without pretentiousness, by an excursion into speculative thought on the condition of human affairs in the world to-day.

Have we, in this sense, grown afraid to escape, become dominated by the idea of a social duty that must keep our noses to the human grindstone, the grindstone that an ever-increasing mass hysteria keeps whirling with an ever-increasing madness of momentum? Work, records of unemployment, misery, conflicting politics, wars, and the lowering nightmare of a universal war, until sensitive beings can hardly listen in to the wireless news, so grisly its tales of disasters and mass human destruction. Are we in social honour bound to increase this ghastly momentum by adding the thrust of our own forebodings and fears? or has a time come when it may be the better part of courage to withdraw sufficiently far from it to observe with some sense of proportion what exactly is taking place? Not to mention the purely personal point of view that one has only one life to live and that, before shuffling off, a little peace may be necessary in which to exercise one’s mental attributes and try to get some glimmering of what all the madness is about, or even of what is due to oneself, despite all the man-made duties in the world?

For at least nothing seems more certain finally than the loneliness of one’s own self, which no mass hysteria, or political creed, or religious faith, can save from the last lonely departure that is death. It seems more than a pity to go out into that final dark without making some sort of effort to discover what glimmerings of harmony may visit the mind if we give it a reasonably receptive chance.

When the average man goes away in his yacht, be he wealthy or poor, what is the driving force behind his desire? And when his brother who cannot go envies him, why the envy? What is being searched for beneath all the ordinary human reactions? What has been lost, what is being missed? And, anyway, how can one answer honestly for oneself without time for personal experience and dispassionate thought?

Time again! Then one night Eoin called on me about midnight in Inverness and took me apart with the air of a man at a funeral. ‘I wanted to tell you by yourself,’ he said. ‘I have just had a ’phone message from Skye. The Thistle dragged both her anchors yesterday in a terrific gale and went ashore on the rocks of Hulm Island.’