The hour or two after arrival provide a relaxation that is extremely pleasant. I had thought, before we started out, of long quiet evenings, when a man might get the size and balance of things. And evenings like these were given. I can still hear the thin piping note of a young oyster-catcher, haunting the still night with its plaint, like a new-born infant a darkened tenement, a spiring wail out of the gulf, a beginning in pain and fear carrying already the overtone of the end. On nights like these, things come whole into a silence that the brimming and choking and recession of the sea deepen unfathomably.
But the general picture of actual living conditions was much thicker or grosser—particularly in the hour or two following the making of a good anchorage, when the hissing of the primus stove and the smell and taste of food enwrap released bodies in a divine ease. One sits, feet out, and goes over the events of the day, and exhorts the Crew, now cook, and takes what comes, and feels the sun and the wind and the rain and the glitter all warm in the face and lazy in the shoulders and at rest in the legs; while the only touch of mystery or wonder is in the astonishing amount the other fellow prepares himself to consume. Good nature moves about this festival too lazy to laugh outright, but full of nods and sly sayings and frank remembrances. ‘All that I am hoping’, says the Mate in a doleful voice, ‘is that I’ll be able to get a blink of sleep to-night.’ Now he sleeps exactly like an Egyptian mummy. But should a man who so sleeps chance to be disturbed for two minutes in some silent watch, the morning memory of it is multiplied like a reflection in a room of mirrors, until the whole night has become peopled with his restlessness. A luxurious picture of suffering that, once established, he does not readily give up. And particularly when it draws mockery from the Crew. ‘I’m afraid I cannot take all this,’ he complains, prepared with a forearm of defence. ‘You just leave what you can’t eat,’ says the Crew. ‘All right,’ he agrees, resignedly.
However often these fatuous things are repeated, or suggested in dumb play, they never lose some air of drollery, something of friendliness caught from the rigours of the day. It is not the moment for wit, hardly even for humour, certainly not for seriousness: it is a moment for the body and requires some invention of drollery to be chuckled at despite oneself.
Then the question of to shave or not to shave, seeing we must go ashore, and the Book says, ‘Shop. P.O. Tel. Inn at Bunessan.’ The evening is fair and fresh and we can stroll there looking at all the new things on the way. If we shaved now, then we shouldn’t have to shave to-morrow. Moreover, we never care about drinking direct out of the water tank, and after a strenuous and exciting day the body is, in sober truth, wrung dry. Finally the Mate carries a packet of blue blades that make shaving almost a luxury, and he is very generous with them. So we shave in the cockpit and wash in the salt water, and by the time the Mate has combed his hair —about which he continues to be particular—the Crew appears complete with milkpail, handbag, and creases in her blue trousers. And we sally forth on dry land.
‘What’s the time?’ asks the Mate suddenly, for only the Crew carries a watch.
‘Half-past eight,’ she answers.
Lengthening his stride a little, he observes, ‘I wonder why the fellow who compiled the Clyde Cruising Club Sailing Directions thought of inserting “Inn at Bunessan”? Why Inn? What, strictly speaking, has that got to do with navigation? I have been trying to think it out, but can make little of it.’
‘Look!’ says the Crew, and dives to the ditchside where some curious weed is growing.
‘Marvellous!’ agrees the Mate, absent-mindedly getting between her and the ditch.
‘I hope’, she says, ‘we’ll be able to get some milk.’ And then she spies a croft house well off the road.
‘But why get milk there now—then carry it into Bunessan —and then carry it back?’ he asks with helpful logic.
But Bunessan is farther away than we thought, and by the time we reach the roadside public hall, we find that it is nine o‘clock and that the district is en fête with a cake and candy sale. As we enter the village, the Crew asks a woman where she can get milk and is directed to the inn—‘round the back’.
The Mate, shaking his head sadly at this conjunction, leads us round the back and we find ourselves in a crush of men in a dark passage. After he has had a few confidential words with a black-haired maid, we are led into the dining room in front, and there the Crew at last arranges for a bucket of milk.
After we had wished one another a continuance of good health, there was no great hurry, and in the shop that is also the post office, we got fresh stores, including tomatoes that were quite firm. And somewhere or other the Crew got new-laid eggs.
There was a great press of life in Bunessan that night, for the cake and candy carnival was to be followed by a dance, and quite a bit of tartan was swinging around visitors’ legs, while young women flitted from point to point in that sort of aimless excitement that is very catching.
Bunessan itself does not look a flourishing place. Decay seems to have touched a past busy-ness and left its mark on the untidy foreshore. It is finely situated, as indeed are all the villages and towns round the inner crescents of the bays of the West.
But to-night Bunessan is alive. The old native life has natural colour in its cheeks. After much anticipation, the excitement of an opening reel to the ancient music sets a healthy body clean daft. Hooch! and swing and set and hooch! again. ‘That’s the stuff, Davy!’
You can tell the visitors by the civilised way in which they mix between dances. They have not the old native manners that set the men and the women apart, like two opposing electrodes. The current of music, the flash: they miss that intensity of the flash. This easy familiarity is very civilised and pleasant; but its potential seems low. In a country dance, anyway. For there is something strangely attractive about a country dance. It may be the wide world outside that is strange, the stars, the mid-summer glimmer on the horizon, a greyer glimmer of sea with dark islands, and secret dark hollows everywhere. The meeting of the creative forces of the earth in a lighted room, like the manifestation of the earth’s electrical energy in a dynamo. And there is something dynamic in a country dance.
A weather-lined face, thin, with an untidy moustache, leans towards Davy, catches him by the shoulder, for the good-natured mouth from the hills hasn’t had time to take anything beyond a drink or two.
‘It’s not the dance, Davy. No—not only the dance—it’s the walk hom’.’
‘Wheesht!’ says Davy.
It was getting dark enough by the time we took our own road home. We had to walk three miles. With the midnight glimmer on the water, we did not bother to light our lamp. We had seen enough to reflect upon as we stretched ourselves on our soft bunks. It must have taken me nearly a minute to go off, and in that time I asked the Mate something but got no answer.
All this western part of the Ross of Mull, from Bunessan to the Sound of Iona, is red granite, and in several places we came across evidence of quarries that were once worked. We admired the solid sea-wall of granite, as we left Bunessan the following night, and got the Mate talking on geology. The effect of sea-action was particularly marked on the foreshore just opposite our boat, where there are one or two small indifferent bathing bays (and the warmest sea-water we struck on all the West Coast). The gradation from the solid granite boulders above high-water mark to the granitic sand, almost mud, over which we bathed provided about the clearest ‘object lesson’ I have seen.
Seaweeds were noticeably lacking in variety, being composed almost entirely of the two common varieties of bladder wrack and, below low-water mark, of the chorda filum. In fact we were struck every now and then, during many days we spent on the Ross, by an absence of life or, at least, of multitudinous life. Shell life was quite healthy, but lacking in number and variety. We fished all round these inner bays and caught nothing and saw only one native small boat on the water while we were there, and though we watched it for a long time saw no fish being landed. The Mate, who knows much about the ways of rabbits and asserts that in July the young are tender, was certain from the greenness of bracken and undergrowth that ‘the whole place must be crawling with them’. For there was little evidence of sheep and cattle on the ground, and less evidence than usual of obtrusive landlordism. But the total number of rabbits he saw was three. They ran at terrific speed. No gentle hopping and looking up. And where they disappeared one charge of dynamite would not have been enough. We saw no grouse at all and very little bird life. Though we hardly expected to see grouse in a deer forest. And we were too low to see deer.
The wind kept us in Loch Caol for over three days, and though we grudged the time, we had many fine exploratory walks. After Portnalong, no anchorage could be uncomfortable, and we resisted the Mate’s sugestion to move into the shelter of a headland. The sun was bright, and on land the wind defeated the efforts of the only truly abundant life we found there, namely horse-flies or clegs.
All this land, however, was under an ‘influence’. We could feel it without being quite able to explain it. Perhaps the cloud over Iona had a little to do with it, and perhaps it is possible that ages of pilgrimage do communicate something even to inert matter. Anyway, we were always aware that Iona was at hand and that in some fashion it drew life towards it.
Along the road an occasional bus could be seen with its load of passengers to Fionnphort, where the ferry is. For thirteen hundred years pilgrims had gone that way.
‘We are now treading’, says Dr. Johnson, in his celebrated passage on Iona, ‘that illustrious isle which was once the luminary of the Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived the benefits of knowledge and the blessings of religion.’
But Columba, who knew all the corners of his Caledonia, put the emphasis differently on that last day of his life when he climbed the little hill overlooking his mill and his granary and the enclosure with the simple round cells encircling the little church (what ear can catch the tread of his footsteps?), and blessed what he looked upon, saying: ‘Unto this place, small and mean though it be, great homage shall yet be paid, not only by the kings and people of the Scots, but by the rulers of barbarous and distant nations with their people.’
Is it possible that the learned doctor would have been moved at the thought that he was perhaps fulfilling the prophecy better than he knew?
So the Mate and I set out on foot one day along the road, not as pilgrims but because we were told there were shops in Fionnphort and it was not much farther away from our boat than Bunessan. It was easy and lightsome going that road with the sun on our backs and a bracken switch for the clegs. It is an up and down road, too, with pleasant birch glades and unexpected turns. When we had gone a long way we came on an old man cutting hay in a field whose tall drystone dyke was built of red granite boulders, so we asked him if it was far to Fionnphort, and he told us, after laying down his scythe, that it was all of two miles.
‘You haven’t much of a hay crop?’
‘No,’ he said sadly. ‘The deer tramped it down.’
‘Do they jump these walls?’
‘Oh yes—easy that.’
‘Why don’t you shoot them?’
‘It’s not my hay. I’m just working here. . . . Besides, it would get me the jail.’
He looked sad and worn and a little stupid, as if centuries of overlordship had drained the spirit out of him.
‘Who owns all the land?’
He gaped as if he had not heard aright. Then he muttered something about ‘The Duke’, and breathing ‘Aye, aye’, by way of salutation and farewell, returned slowly and sadly to his work.
The benefits of knowledge and the blessings of religion. Aye, aye. But O for a touch of the roving barbarian and the clan savage that Columba knew!
We made a good two miles of it, before we went down into the hamlet of Fionnphort and stared across the Sound at Iona.
They are kind smiling folk in Fionnphort, with quiet voices and obliging ways. We got half a dozen eggs which the gentle lady of the shop could hardly spare. The ‘influence’ here was very strong. A brightness difficult to describe and full of peace. Doubtless Fionnphort (Fionn’s or Fingal’s port) like other little places, has its ‘human dramas’. But it would be, I should imagine, distinctly difficult here to work up a pathological aptitude to run amock. Despite one’s very best effort, the crest of it would tend to slide down like a wave, and slide down, and slide down, into the evening glimmer of calm. Or else one would clear out and be haunted remorselessly by the brightness of peace forever more.
Not so long ago I talked to a lady who had once worked here professionally, administering to the ills, ailments, and births of her generation. It was decided to buy her a bicycle with pneumatic tyres, and when it arrived it was the wonder of the place. The tyres, however, were flat, and though the more cunning detached the pump and applied it to the valve and worked it hard, they remained flat. In the end the contraption was brought before the minister, who examined it carefully, retired, returned with the manse bellows, and worked them right strongly but equally without result. So the committee solemnly packed up the pump and sent it back to the makers, requesting a proper pump in its place. But the makers merely returned the same pump together with the suggestion that, before using, it would be as well to withdraw the flexible piece of tubing from one end of the pump and attach it properly to the other end and to the valve. This they did, whereupon the tyres blew up, and she rode about to the admiration of everyone, young and old. But there was one who appreciated her riding above any other, and this was the minister’s horse, for this horse had once drawn a cab in the mighty city of Glasgow, and when he saw the lady coming on her bicycle he would turn and trot away abreast of her, happy once more to be in touch with old days and civilisation.
But many wonderful things happened in Fionnphort a generation ago, and the district round about was well populated, for in addition to the active crofting and fishing life, there were the granite quarries where large numbers of men were employed.
But meantime we had encountered a man who spoke of the Sound as of a road he knew well. He confirmed our belief that there was no good anchorage on the Iona side, but said that we might lie with some comfort on the Ross side in behind Eilean na mBan in what is called the Bull Hole. We enquired about Martyr’s Bay, mentioned in our Directions. Looking across at its white sands, he shook his head. ‘Besides’, he added, ‘you might foul your anchor on the telegraph cables. The best on that side is Port-na-Fraing.’ And he pointed up the Sound, northward. ‘Do you see that house near the shore?’
‘Do you mean that shed—’
‘I should not advise you to call it a shed—not over there,’ he suggested with a glimmer of humour. ‘It is a house erected by——’ and he named a city firm of builders.
We apologised for the deficiencies in our sight, due to the very considerable distance, and parted still smiling.
We got a lift in a car which was hastening to Salen on Mull Sound to pick up a load of tourists from the steamer. I kept looking around the countryside because if I looked ahead at the turns on the narrow road I might sprain a tendon putting on imaginary brakes. ‘This is all over the clegs,’ said the Mate nonchalantly.
But, for our courage, the woman in the farmhouse just beyond the road on the south side of Loch Caol introduced me to her garden. The farm may not have had a notably prosperous look, but the garden was a marvel in that land. Lettuces were growing in abundance, and cabbages, carrots, leeks and similar green things, all young and of a ravishing tenderness. I got whatever I wanted, including milk and eggs, and smiled at my astonishing luck and was ashamed of the small cost.
In our absence the Crew had dressed ship with a washing and a gay sight it was, flapping in the breeze. So we ahoyed jocundly. Our gifts were received with proper avidity and in a very short time we were deep in a salad that was crisp and succulent and full of the pleasantest surprises. It was enough for a whole meal in its tempting variety quite apart from the more solid fare, and the cream cheese and biscuits and fresh butter that the Mate proceeded finally to toy with merely kept him, he explained, from drinking his coffee while yet it was too hot. As for fruit or fruit in jelly—later, perhaps. After walking in a hot sun, one should, above all things, be abstemious.
‘I have a hard time of it with you both,’ said the Crew.
By Sunday morning we were really anxious to be off, but the weather was not too good and the glass depressing. We might just as well lie here as in the Bull Hole. It began to spit rain.
We decided to climb a hill-top to get a better view of the weather. As we ascended, curlews and terns kept calling out over the water beneath the overhanging gloom. We crossed a wide marsh of bog asphodel in flower and another of bog myrtle that scented all the air. Behind Bunessan a loch lay in the hills. A livid light shone down on the inner waters of Loch Scridain, and low headlands went out into it and created a phantasmagoria of the nether world. The green terraces—I think we counted over twenty of them once—were shrouded in mists, while Ben Mor and all peaks beneath it were lost in dark cloud. But to the north of the promontory a headland was caught in a diffused light that the gloom turned to a strangely ominous pink. This sabbatical light touched an end of Inch Kenneth, but, beyond, Ulva could be no more than vaguely discerned. Staffa we had come to call the ship, for from Loch Lathaich it looked very like a battleship raked clean. It was still menacingly at anchor, bearing on the Dutchman’s Cap, which, in the thick weather, came and went like the Flying Dutchman of legend.
As we stood there, the wind died quite away into a listening calm. In the crofting land beyond Loch Lathaich a cock crew, and the sound was very forlorn. Out at sea, but invisible, gulls were crying. From far away in the hills came the lowing of a cow.
Our eyes fell to Eilean Lathanach, and there, amid the encircling gloom, uprose the white finger, man’s beacon light.
We decided to go.