Under way, the Mate insisted he was going to rig up the mainsail, and as we came down Loch Lathaich he sat into the mast. There was now a slight sou‘westerly breeze and, when we had passed inside the rocks at the entrance to the loch, up went the white canvas for the first time. There was a cheer at that, for this was, in fact, the very first time we could reasonably have used a sail on our type of boat, for either there had been no wind or it had been against us. Back in the cockpit, feeling the pull of the sheet, the Mate was delighted, and we had to admit that the sail both steadied us and added to our speed. To please him we had to feel the pull on the sheet. His hair was everyway. He smiled to himself and offered us cigarettes and then dislodged me from the tiller. If he had to choose between a sail and an engine—‘a sail every time,’ said he.
The shore on the north coast of the Ross of Mull is very barren. We passed some salmon nets and a strand of yellow sand, and the Mate regarded the salmon nets thoughtfully. Northward, the lowering gloom still held. The weather showed little signs of clearing up, and the waves were smashing on the rocks off the north end of Iona. Soon we opened out the pale white sands of Iona itself, the red roof and white walls of its first house, the cathedral so dull and grey that it was scarcely distinguishable, and, well down the Sound, the clustering houses of the village. Dun-I was now seen to stand above the slopes of a pleasant land, green and cultivated. One cornfield, yellow with charlock, gave us a feeling of home.
A steady small rain was carried against us, and up the Sound with it came a considerable swell. Though the weather looked anything but promising, the glass was steady at nearly 30. Very reluctantly the Mate took down his precious sail, and we entered the Sound of Iona.
We had intended anchoring in the Bull Hole, of which the Sailing Directions gives a very helpful chart, but now as we passed it on the north side and saw it hemmed in between gaunt granite rocks, it looked dull and anything but inviting. Manifestly, too, in a northerly wind it would be anything but comfortable. But that was not what was worrying me at the moment. I had the feeling that, having come into the Sound at all, we were in courtesy bound to land first on Iona. I should like to do it, anyway, and when we saw the modern dwelling, which we had inadvertently misdescribed, I suddenly made up my mind to land at Port-na-Fraing. It was not shown on our chart, but we headed for the house and discovered the anchorage just a little south of it. A short reef of black rocks half-guards its southern side, and the slipway of wet sand looks smooth as cement. The Mate, standing over the bow, could tell the depth of water at a glance, for the bottom was white sand and brown weed. He signalled me inside the outermost point of rock, just clear of the tide race. I could almost find time to be amused at his easy air of assurance.
But the engine, going slow, showed an entirely new belief in discipline. She accepted neutral, went ahead again, reversed, and remained running while the anchor was let go. It all seemed like a fairy story, and with proper solemnity we attributed it to some miraculous influence from the Island. The Crew took the depth—a couple of fathoms, with about two hours of ebb to run. Perfect—with good holding in tough weed. The heavens acknowledged our gratitude, drew the mists about us, opened their gates, and let the rain descend solidly. We had reached Iona.
In oilskins and long boots, the Crew and I got ashore at the sandy slip, and using a half-broken oar as a roller, pulled up the dinghy clear of the surf. The sand, composed of the pulverised shells of land snails, was so fine that it stuck to our hands and coated the rope. In striking contrast to the Mull shore opposite, where the broken-down granite remains sharp-edged, here the pebbles were smooth and rounded and beautifully and variously coloured. There was immediately the feeling of landing on a different, almost a strange and foreign, shore, though it was yet more intimate, as a shore of tradition, or dream, or actual past experience is intimate. On the right hand the conjunction was seen in a massive rugged boulder of red granite lying on smooth greenish-blue water-worn rock. At the head of the little slipway, where two row-boats were drawn up, springs of water came through the clean pebbles, and the scent of clover was in the air. Masses of ragged robin gave way to eyebright and buttercups. As we went up by the hayfields and over the fallow ground, we saw that this was a fertile island, and suddenly the rain was warm and soft. The barley was green and heavy in the ear. The root crops hid the soil. The fields were well barb-wired, but we won through to the pasture lands at the foot of Dun-I; and there, on impulse, we decided to climb this rock which had so attracted and baffled us from beyond the Treshnish Isles.
We took a rather steep face, but in time we reached the cairn on the top and opened out the west side of the island, the green machair land, the sandy bays, the innumerable rocks with the swell breaking on them and throwing its spume high in the air. Here at last was the true Atlantic roar.
When, after a long interval, I come upon such a scene, my mind goes back to Benbecula, to a picture of great waves on its western strand, a herd girl sheltering against a stook of corn, wild geese on a stubble field, in a grey day of small rain. What virtue there is in that picture I cannot tell, but it has already much of the force of legend, and the human feeling in it is made the more intense by a long-thoughted conception of human destiny, ironic and tragic perhaps, but not without its own worth and a certain underlying, evasive, and even defiant happiness. It is the mood of human comradeship, quiet and simple, but strong. It is the smile that acknowledges Fate—and no more.
The rain seemed to be getting heavier, if that were possible, and we sheltered for a little in the lee of the cairn. In many ways it was a typical West Coast day, with lands and islands vaguely looming and disappearing in the mists. Being properly clad, the rain could not wet us nor the long grasses get over our boots. And this in itself provided a pleasant freedom. The rain, too, kept all folk indoors, so that we saw no human being. We saw the isle itself, and in its coloured fields and soft air, in its sheep grazing here and there and its cattle, we saw also, perhaps more clearly than if the day had been fine, that it was a delectable isle. How wisely Columcille had chosen his ground!
For I feel sure, despite the legends, that this was no case of Columba’s having just happened to land here—as early European navigators happened to land on a West Indian island. Iona was an important centre in that early Druidic world. The usual scholar’s or historian’s talk about the savages and barbarians who inhabited the land in Columba’s time is very misleading. In this respect the Christian ethic certainly prejudged the Druidic truth. We do know, for example, that one king, Fergus, went to Iona for his coronation; and in that same isle he was buried, a generation before Columba landed. We learn, too, that the isle had a great number of standing stones, and late travellers talk of the existence of a Druidic temple of twelve stones, each with a human body buried beneath it. These wise early missionaries of Christianity did not believe in violence and destruction. They sprinkled the pagan monoliths with holy water and carved on them their Christian emblems. As one French writer put it: ‘They baptised these idols in order that they might continue to be adored.’ That was in Armorica; for the practice was general, and in Scotland to this day we find great menhirs with a Cross on one side and the Pagan emblems on the other.
The Synod of Argyll pursued the contrary method, and in 1560 A.D. decided that the 360 sculptured stone crosses of Iona were ‘monuments of idolatrie’ and were therefore to be cast into the sea. Possibly this Protestant Synod did more to destroy the accumulated spiritual riches of Iona than all the Viking ravages put together. But some of the stones were rescued and carried to the mainland, while it is possible that at least two of them may still be found on Iona itself.
But out of much undisciplined reading about that ancient pre-Christian world, what has always struck me is the extremely wide, if not universal, practice of what may be loosely called the standing-stone or Druidic religion. Even the attempt over many centuries to make of Europe one unified country of Catholic culture and religion, seems a small affair when set against the actual Druidic unification of that older world existing over a period of time so great that we hardly dare to compute it.
For example, the 360 sculptured stones of Iona make one traveller (C. F. Gordon Cumming) think of the Kaaba at Mecca. ‘The Kaaba at Mecca (which to all good Mahomedans is as sacred as was the Holy of Holies to the Israelites) had, from time immemorial, been accounted by all the people of Arabia, to be the very portal of Heaven. Until the time of Mahomet, it was surrounded by 360 rude unsculptured monoliths , which, to the degenerate Arabs, had become objects of actual worship, and in presence of which, they were wont to sacrifice red cocks to the sun (just as the people in these Western Isles have continued to do, almost to the present day, though of course in ignorance of the original meaning of this ancestral custom).
‘More unflinching than the Christian reformers of Iona, Mahomet would admit of no compromise. Like the Synod of Argyll, he resolved on the destruction of these “monuments of idolatrie”, and so his iconoclastic followers did his bidding, and destroyed them utterly.
‘Nevertheless, he still allowed his converts to retain their custom of walking seven times in procession round the Kaaba itself, in reverence for Abraham and Ishmael, who had rebuilt it after the deluge, but he reversed the course of circuit.’
That Columba and his brethren, who built their little church of wood and its surrounding cells of wattle and daub, so that now nothing remains of their habitation, should also have reared these 360 stones is manifestly absurd, even had we no collateral aids to judgment, such as the remarkable twelve-stone circle, with its radiating lines, at Callanish in Lewis.
Moreover, until quite recent times, Highlanders spoke of Iona as the ‘Druid’s Isle’, and long after Columba had landed on it, the Irish continued to call it by that name.
One further thing has struck me, too, in this matter, and that is the obvious feeling of respect that these early Celtic missionaries had for the older faith. There was manifestly no bitter rancour, no outflowing of righteous wrath against a degenerate creed. As he made the cross on the monolith, so Columba in one of his written prayers calls Christ his Druid: ‘mo drui . . . mac Dé’ (My Druid . . . son of God).
As we stood there by the cairn, three oyster-catchers came crying against us for disturbing their peace, and as I watched the flash of the black and white plumage and the orange beaks, I remembered the wrong I had done to these servants of Bride or St. Bridgit. For once, long ago, while out hunting, I had shot two of them, and the man who had prompted me to do this carried them home to my landlady, who had been cook to a university professor in Edinburgh. She presented them browned on toast with the suggestion that the breasts only be eaten. They were very good.
In Gaelic they are known as gille-Brigde, the servant of Bride. And here again we are back among the old gods. I (or its variants) by which Iona is known to the ancient writers means The Isle. So the Hebrides are the Ey-Brides or the Isles of Brighit or Bridgit. This Brighit was a Druidic goddess, and, attended by noble vestals, her special care was the sacred fire. They had great reverence for fire in those days, and would hardly blow out a candle without a prayer that the light be given them again from heaven. They stuck to their sacred fire in the grove so obstinately that St. Patrick sent his convert, Bridgit, to deal with them. Now just as the Columban brotherhood found it more fruitful to bless than to attempt to destroy the standing stones, so Bridgit found it possible to convert these virgins only by allowing them to continue together in a community to look after what now became a Christian fire. And so it was done, and they were the first Christian community of women, and the temple of Bridgit at Kildare became a great convent.
Columba himself did not hold much by women. Tradition has it that he would not allow them on Iona, and any island workers with women had to keep them on Eilean na mBan (Island of the Women), that small barren granite isle which shelters the Bull Hole. Indeed, he did not even allow cattle on Iona, saying, ‘Where there is a cow there is a woman, and where there is a woman there is mischief.’
Altogether he was a remarkable man. Tall, well-featured, with long hair falling to each shoulder from the temples (for the early Celtic priests shaved the front of their heads), he had a commanding presence, and was, in fact, full of a restless energy, passionate and impetuous. He had that quality of voice which does not appear to be raised when speaking to those at hand and which can yet be heard clearly at a distance. A statesman, an organiser, he was almost continuously on the move, over land, by sea, daring any peril, unsparing of himself, teaching, converting, founding, succeeding.
He succeeded very well indeed—so well that his own folk, the Gaels or Scots (Ireland is called Scotia in the old records), who landed, as he landed, on the Argyllshire part of Scotland, managed in time to give their kings to Scotland, their tongue, and their particular methods of church government. All that was distinctive of the ancient Pictish Scotland, strong enough in its time to repel the Romans, faded away before this Columban energy and statesmanship, leaving scarcely a trace behind. It is the great mystery in Scottish history, so that to this day scholars debate the identity of the Picts, what tongue they spoke and how they were governed in church and state. Statesmanship that is so successful has doubtless its own reward, even if suspicion of doubtful dealings be not inevitably aroused. In any case, I was inclined to be one of those who felt no great urge to pay further tribute to Columba and Iona; who, in fact, would rather learn somewhat more of our real forebears, the Picts, and give his proper place to that Ninian who was a missionary in Scotland one hundred and fifty years before Columba arrived. In short, it seemed unnecessary to swell the vast ranks that every year pay homage to the Iouan Island (Iona).
Perhaps the critical eye went a bit deeper, too. There is so much scholarly talk of the Gael as the tall, aristocratic, conquering type, generally golden haired and blue eyed, that up against the visible appearance to-day of the folk themselves—one wonders. Moreover, if the Gael was the fighting extravert type, whence the exquisite sad music of Hebridean melody? And from melody to poetry, courtesy, instinctive good manners, and that gift for spontaneous gaiety in a natural communal life illustrated so well by the céilidh? Priestly energy, statecraft, power, dominance—until a whole folk, with all their intricate ways of life, including the very syllables of their tongue, fade away like the poet’s insubstantial pageant.
Nearly all writers agree that in Scotland, and particularly in the Highlands of Scotland, we were a savage and barbarous people, until Columba changed our hearts. Yet how tolerantly we received Columba, though he walked amongst us as an open perverter of our Druidic faith. Our Druids disputed with him, but offered him no hurt. King Brude at Inverness even confirmed him in his possession of Iona. Were these northern folk so civilised that they could not see in Columba the emissary of a new power in church and state that should finally usurp and destroy their own power?
In a word, I was prepared to be prejudiced to the hilt against Columba. But, unfortunately, Iona is the last place in the world to help a prejudice. If one doesn’t forget it, at least one cannot be bothered with it for the moment, not in the rain, in the soft air. Presently, perhaps, should some loud-voiced person be filled with Iouan unction.
For one can also see that other half of Columba’s character, the affectionate part, full of warmth and understanding. It had the nobility from which, perhaps, all his restless energy received direction. Tolerance, temperance, kindness, simplicity, obedience, forgiveness—we know the rules that governed their lives; but, above all, from their religion they got the conception of charity, of love. It is the ancient goodness of the human heart, the primordial goodness. And a religion that enshrines it will always persist. Those who have this goodness in them are aware of life in the same way as they are aware of light. Truly, life itself is an inner light.
And, at its best, it is a universal light. Columba loved the birds, and the white horse that carried the farm produce bore Columba a special affection. Indeed, as Adamnan relates in his Life of St. Columba (written at Iona towards the end of the seventh century), the white horse wept on taking leave of its dying master. Which may be an exaggeration of the truth; but still—of the truth. And that wise and scholarly men of his age believed it to be the simple truth shows at least what they wanted to believe. Which is the essence of the matter. Beyond miracle and morality and theology, they desired this goodness. And kings and priests and murderers and perverts of all kinds went to Columba in Iona to find again the peace of that goodness.
The most remarkable thing I discovered in Adamnan’s remarkable record is this preoccupation with light as the manifestation or symbol of this goodness. The miracles are the light in legendary form. And many of them—particularly those relating to prevision or ‘second sight’—may not be so legendary as all that.
The simplest and perhaps the best expression of this conjunction of light and goodness may be found in the story of that which happened to the brethren on their return to the monastery after toiling all day in the fields on the west side of the island. When half-way home with their burdens, each had felt within him ‘something wonderful and unusual’ but had not cared to confess it, until at last it could no longer be hid, and one tried to express it thus: ‘I perceive some fragrance of wondrous odour, as of that of all flowers collected into one; also some burning as of fire, not penal but somehow very sweet; moreover, also a certain unaccustomed and incomparable gladness diffused in my heart, which suddenly consoles me in a wonderful manner, and gladdens me to such a degree that I can remember no more the sadness, nor any labour. Yea, even the load, although a heavy one, which I am carrying on my back from this place to the monastery, is so lightened, I know not how, that I do not perceive I have a load at all.’
Columba, ‘mindful of their labours’, had sent his spirit to meet their steps.
Gladness, then, is the keynote of the experience.
Adamnan knew of it in its many manifestations, and at one point writes: ‘St. Columba, as he himself did not deny . . . in some contemplations of divine grace he beheld even the whole world as if gathered together in one ray of the sun, gazing on it as manifested before him, while his inmost soul was enlarged in a wonderful manner.’
We came down from Dun-I through the fenced fields towards the modern cathedral. The first Celtic Cross we saw stood in a walled bed of fuchsia and was erected to a wife of a Duke of Argyll. The Crew tried to get at it to see why, but was prevented by iron railings. Remembering the acts of a past Synod of Argyll, one could not resist certain ironic reflections, though they gave little pleasure.
As we entered the cathedral ground, two lambs—one white and one black—came running to meet us. The Crew smiled at that and welcomed them, especially the black one. We wandered round the ruins of the old cathedral, but when we wished to enter the new building found the doors shut against us for it was Sunday. However, we were fortunate enough to meet a young man who allowed us to go in alone for a few minutes.
The interior had more than the bareness of the usual Scottish country church, for the walls themselves were bare stones, yet from those stones there came a real effect of light, wonderfully heightened by what appeared on that dull day to be a long low altar of greenish-white glowing stone. Midway on this altar stood a narrow brass vase of flowers—white irises and blue and pink delphiniums—so perfectly arranged that they were a burgeoning of light and colour, an aspiration, a loveliness. The Crew could hardly take her eyes off them, as we stood in the nave at some little distance. And in truth I must confess I have rarely encountered so direct a manifestation of ineffable harmony.
But the harmony of the whole interior was destroyed by two massive recumbent effigies in white marble of a Duke and Duchess of Argyll occupying almost all the southern transept. One hesitates to write one’s full thought about it. At the best, how sad and hopeless this heavy effort at immortality compared with the spirit that fed the birds or even the nameless hands that had arranged the flowers. Perhaps, but for these two in life, the modern church or cathedral would not have been there. We did not inquire.
Outside again, we stood before the great Cross of Iona, dedicated to St. Martin of Tours, the friend of St. Ninian. It has the easy incomparable grace of the true Celtic Cross, strong, sure in workmanship, and at rest. You could feel the harmony behind the chisel that hewed it.
Then we followed the road down towards the village and came upon the ruins of the nunnery, for Columcille’s attitude to women did not withstand the fret of time. The Crew was delighted with the blaze of colour, mostly from red and from white valerian, growing not only about the well-kept grounds but out of the old walls. And when she had seen the nooks and crannies—for apparently the commonest blossom can be a distinguished friend at times—we went down to the village, which strings its little houses along the sea front.
The rain had taken off while we had been in the cathedral, and the oasis of blue we had seen towards Ireland was now enlarging itself in so wonderful a manner that it brought forth visitors from the houses, who looked at it and called to one another. Clean-shaven faces and bright faces and fine shiny silk stockings and creased and white and coloured clothes; so very clean, this community of the Washed, that we felt a little like bedraggled seabirds, with a hanging pinion or two, so I looked carefully at the anchorage off the pier, which was crammed with small boats, and at the anchorage a little farther down, which is Martyr’s Bay, and satisfied myself that, for Iona, we were in the right spot. All the little shops being closed, we turned back, following approximately the ancient Street of the Dead, along which kings and chiefs and other important men (never a woman) were brought, after being landed at Martyr’s Bay, on the way to their burial at Reilig Orain. Though Martyr’s Bay itself is so named from that first slaughter of the monks by the Danes in 806 (Columba died 597).
The rain had now quite passed away and the air was so full of a soft brightness and warmth, that we had to stop by Maclean’s Cross and strip off our oilskins. This is the second interesting cross on the island, and the carving on it seems to have been done about the fifteenth century, though how long its shaft of characteristic bluish schist has faced the sun upright is another matter. This is the spot, we learned, where Columba rested as he returned to the monastery on the last day of his life.
When at last we turned to go down through the fields, the fragrance of the clover and wild flowers and young grass was indeed ‘of a wondrous odour, as that of all flowers collected into one’. What, in the reading, had perhaps appeared to be a trifle overstressed, was now perceived to be wonderfully precise, and we were in the silence of this when all at once the cathedral bell began clanging its summons to evening service. It rent the air to a shivering agony. Peace threw a cowl over its head and ran, bowed, seeking shelter. It was the bell of the ‘killing times’, of Covenanters and Calvin and the wrath to come. A city bell, to clang above tramcars and the clatter on the cobbled closes of slums. The monks might have rung such a bell as a warning of the coming of the murderous Danes, and a dying hand have rung it after to tell the tale. But never would the hand of Columba have clanged it for his services of faith and peace.
Perhaps we had become, after these weeks at sea, a little over-sensitive to peace, and when, having got aboard again and eaten, we heard the sound of military music, marching with precision to the beat of drums, invisible, but traversing the island, rising to a near high note and falling away to ‘the tread of infinite cavalcades filing off’, we might easily have believed ourselves forever after to have been the victims of a strange delusion, had not the Mate, who had stayed with the boat, been so positive that he kept time to the invisible feet.
In the evening the three of us went ashore and wandered along the sands until we came to the rocks at the north point of the island, where we watched two thousand miles of sea throw its fountains in the air. As we faced westward, there was no land between us and Canada, the home of the evicted.
Iona was full of visitors. We now encountered many of them. A man in his kilt, his wife with a Celtic brooch, and their two or three children following dutifully behind; a young man quietly dressed in his clan tartan, his face spiritual and aloof a little; several young men, more or less spiritual, athletic and clean; some young Glasgow women, just refraining from having a good laugh; boys bare-legged, with bathing suits; a group wandering aimlessly seeing what they had seen before; and suddenly, as we came down over a grassy knoll, an encampment on the western side, consisting of two splendid marquees and over a dozen bell-tents in army formation, to explain the martial music. The young men of the tents were playing football, deck tennis, and other games. Yet through it all the peace of Iona persisted. It is as if everyone were conscious of it. It is in the air. So that one wonders how they are affected privately by it now and then.
I remembered the lot of talk there had been in recent years over building a Celtic college in Iona. The United States had got involved, and there had been the usual—apparently inevitable—wordy battles in the Highlands. I confess I had scoffed at the idea of a college in Iona. We had had enough of that western, blue-rolling, rhetorical, impractical, sentimental, Celtic-twilight nonsense to last us for a century or two, and certainly until we had rigged up some half-decent way of getting bread and butter. If there must be such a college, let it be in Inverness; and, failing Inverness, well, all right, let it be in Oban (which was pretty handsome of one living in Inverness).
I saw now that I was quite wrong. Iona is the place. Here the things of the spirit would have to be uppermost—or a man might go mad. You could see it in the lack of noise, of shouting. It is a dedicated land. Which sounds perhaps a trifle solemn and oppressive, but which might sound: ‘I perceive some fragrance of wondrous odour, as of all flowers collected into one; also some burning as of fire, not penal but somehow very sweet; moreover, also a certain unaccustomed and incomparable gladness diffused in my heart, which suddenly consoles me in a wonderful manner, and gladdens me to such a degree that I can remember no more the sadness, nor any labour.’
I do not know. All we can be sure of is that these words were written in the seventh century of men who lived in the sixth, and that if there is anything at all in the conception of evolution we should be able to add something to the ‘incomparable gladness’ in this twentieth century of the same era. Whatever the nature of that something, it should at least be as remarkable as the recorded experience of the monks. Out of a Celtic college in Iona, it might be as remarkable. Even the Marxian dialectic might look for it there as an expression of background. But I doubt if it could come out of any Highland town on the mainland.
And the island has no anchorage for large yachts; is never by any stretch of the imagination likely to become a Society pleasure ground or meeting place. In fact, when we returned to our boat at Port-na-Fraing we found her rolling very uncomfortably and knew we could not sleep there, while if anything like a real sea got up, we might quickly enough find ourselves in difficulties. The Mate was still inclined to rub a shoulder, for he had got tossed out of bed, after we had first gone ashore, by a sudden sea impulse for which there had been no visible cause—probably the tail-end of some ninth wave dying in the Sound.
The entrance to the Bull Hole is from the south and not readily discernible until you are near the Mull shore, as the opening channel is barely a hundred yards wide. Hold by the Mull shore, for half-way up the channel there is a rock that shows only at low water. It lies about thirty feet S.E. of a very obvious rock on the Eilean na mBan side, opposite which the land on the Mull shore comes out to a point. At this point the south-going stream tends to be bottlenecked, and one can encounter for a short distance a disconcertingly strong current in a very narrow channel. The interest of making a new anchorage caught us up, and it was not lessened by seeing a yacht many times our size taking up all the available and recommended holding ground a cable-length beyond the point on the Eilean na mBan side. But as the channel widened we turned to starboard into a little bay, where there is deep water right into the very shore. After two attempts we found the mathematically perfect spot, which kept us out of the main run of the tide, while giving a reasonable clearance of each arm of the rocky bay. ‘Two fathoms,’ said the Crew. There was hardly a movement on the water and we slept a perfect sleep.
We got quite an affection for this little anchorage of the Bull Hole, which had, behind its northern rocks, looked so forbidding, and carried out all sorts of deep-sea fishing experiments, though with little success. The Mate was particularly fertile in making night lines and using many kinds of bait from crushed partan to boiled limpet. And when a seal came to visit us he was more than ever convinced that fish of some sort were about. Occasionally in the days that followed, a cobble, with outboard motor, threaded its way in through the northern rocks, and saluted us as it passed southward to meet the steamer with whatever salmon the nets on the north of the Ross may have yielded. ‘It’s easy seeing what the seal was after,’ said the Mate, who made me pull that dinghy until there were blisters between my fingers, while he ran the gamut of all my rubber eels, spoons, and minnows, and with a few gull’s feathers turned my bare hooks into mackerel flies.
The Crew in a way was to blame for this tyranny. ‘Now’, she had said to him, ‘your job is to provide the boat with fish.’
‘That’s easy,’ he had smiled, in his element.
‘Accordingly,’ she had added, ‘if you don’t catch fish and I have to buy them, then you’ll have to pay.’
‘Pouf!’ he had agreed. ‘Turn out your whole stock of fishing gear.’
He evolved a scheme whereby his fish could be run over to quiet Port-na-Fraing, landed, and sold from door to door by me on a fifty-fifty basis. ‘All you have to do’, he explained, ‘is just to continue not shaving, and even those who didn’t want fish would buy them out of pity.’ I had often a very hard time of it.
However, beyond one or two negligible small codling, he caught no fish. And, in truth, many a time on our cruise did I regret not having a net. Never again, I vowed, would I go without one. How gladly often would I have sacrificed the Li-lo itself for that midnight apostrophe: ‘Maaakrill’ I explained this to the Mate, and got some small pleasure from seeing conflicting emotions tie him in a knot; for he is really pretty good with a net.
‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘For there’s no fish in this barren spot. And that’s the whole sum and substance of it. How would the bait on that night line be fresh and untouched in the morning if there were any fish about?’
‘There’s the salmon cobble anyway,’ I suggested mildly.
‘I’ll give you a sixpence’, said the Crew to him, ‘for each fresh fish you catch not under six inches.’
That rather staggered him. And I had my laugh there and then, before he could take it out of me.
We got to know that bay and the surrounding inlets very well. One side of the inner corner of the bay is built up into a pier with huge granite blocks, and we saw that granite quarrying had been carried on here in recent times. Now the steep shore, with its great boulders and outcropping rock, looked barren enough, yet when we came to examine it closely we discovered little pockets of fertility everywhere. For example, in the face opposite to us, we gathered ripe blaeberries and cranberries while the Crew carried off a bunch of honeysuckle, whose odd whiffs surprised us for days. The place was fragrant with bog myrtle and meadowsweet, and under the jagged stones we picked up young crabs and large winkles (for which the Crew concocted a special sauce, discovering in the process that any strong flavour is fatal). Beneath some boulders we exposed a world of hundreds of young sea anemones, their red nipples like blood spots of pain: an astonishing sight. In fact, if I made a complete list of each individual thing we saw in that small corner, it might well surprise the more curious. The Crew suggested a pastime: land for ten minutes, observe, return, and then in rotation have the usual knock-out game with the objects seen. ‘I think I’ll go fishing,’ said the Mate.
Until the morning came when we went over to Port-na-Fraing, anchored, turned off the engine, and were getting ready to go ashore when the Crew said, ‘Listen!’
Very distinctly from within the body of the mechanism came an intermittent hissing, like the sound of a drop of water falling on hot metal.
I heard it with profound dismay, and opened the four priming caps. Sure enough, out of cylinder number one came a little jet of steam as each drop sizzled internally. We could hardly speak. For how could the drop get in except through a cracked cylinder casing? And if such a crack existed, with the boat in so remote a part of the world, well —obviously—we were through! The cost of the repair, even if it could be done, including mechanics and gear from Glasgow . . . we decided solemnly that it might be cheaper for us to sink her where she lay; and I actually found myself looking around for what might be a deep spot out of the way of traffic. After all we had been through, it was desperate luck. We went ashore profoundly dispirited. There was a motor boat at Iona, for we had seen it, and there might be a mechanic; we must investigate; but we had no slightest hope.
‘It would need one of St. Columba’s miracles,’ said the Mate.
And the Crew answered simply:
‘You never know.’
Her words took our breath, for to such a moment, fraught with such ruinous consequence, they seemed almost indecently insensitive. With some restraint, we ignored them, and walked up through the fields. It began to rain.
We discussed the crops. A light friable soil that should be very good for potatoes, assuming an absence of prolonged drought. The crofts looked very snug. Not many worries attached to living here. The Crew side-stepped to pick up a flowering weed, as if there wasn’t a broken-down engine in the whole world.
We held on until we came to the village, and there we entered a shop of modern Celtic silver work and carved Iona pebbles. Some of the old designs were attractive, and it was suggested by the Mate that the Crew might help herself to something. But she shook her head. This was apparently the sort of expensive moment that she could appreciate. ‘You may as well see first how deeply you are involved,’ she suggested mildly. And the efficient saleswoman told us of a man of skill in the village and came and directed us to his house. The Crew went shopping.
The more gentle dreams of Iona were in his eyes, and his courtesy was equalled only by his deep interest. On his palm he drew engine designs with a black-lead pencil. But as to what caused our trouble precisely—that was a difficulty. He would come with us now, for if the whole engine were taken down, then . . . But I decided against that. There was another man, he told us, who actually had the solitary engine of the island, so perhaps he might have had this mysterious trouble himself. What about coming to see him?
This second man, bluff and agreeable, had had various troubles in his time but not ours. And I could see that, like myself, he was no believer in tampering. ‘Keep her going on three cylinders’, he said, ‘till you come to some place.’
I was impressed by the excellence of this advice and thanked him. If our doom was written, at least it was not to be preceded by an undignified and unholy mess.
When the Crew met us, she said, ‘There are no fresh eggs or lettuces to be got anywhere.’
‘What did you expect?’
‘But’, she said, ‘I have got fresh kippers—from Stornoway —Maclver’s.’ She looked at the Mate.
‘Do you want the money now?’ he asked.
‘Oh,’ she said, suddenly remembering. ‘What about the engine?’
We walked in silence for a little way, southward and westward, for now there was no hurry. Indeed, I was aware of the tranquil feeling that is alleged to come upon those who have accepted doom. It is a subdued feeling, perhaps, but not utterly unpleasant. And it conjured up little compensations. For example, the boat had been making a good drop of water. Nothing disquieting. But two pumpings a day were hardly enough. Soon it would be three. And it’s not better it would get. When we sank her—well, there would be no more pumpings.
But the real compensation was one of detachment in which, more than ever, was felt the Columban peace. This was the way the brethren walked to their work, over the back of the island, to the Machair in front of the great western bay. Somewhere hereabouts they had met the ‘incomparable gladness’.
It was fairly easy to picture them in a general way, but I suddenly got an impression of the man whose words were reported so smoothly. Of medium height, he was thin and tough, the face lined, the dark-brown thatch of hair losing its colour, the eyebrows bushy, but the eyes of a lively and penetrating brightness. The creases in the face ran naturally into a smile that was the very net of irony. And the world irony was there, or the mind could never have passed to so expressive and comprehending a serenity.
And then we came back to the knoll where Columba communed with the angels. I could never quite see Columba’s face. I could, in a way, but always, as it were, the outside face with its leadership upon it. Irony to serenity to the true humility, in which the flesh over the bone and the irises of the eyes are purified of the insignia of the boss—it is difficult to get the face of a leader like that, apart, perhaps, from the faces of one or two great religious leaders out of the East. And nothing less quite satisfies a mood grown weary of all the personal humours or manifestations of egoism. As though a modern voice cried with the agony of a pure spirit: ‘Hell, let us be shut of all that egoism meantime.’
Inevitably there was a curious prying one amongst the brethren. He stole out behind Columba, against Columba’s orders, and from a knoll near by watched the saint commune with the heavenly host. I found it difficult to see this man, for he has two faces. To one of the faces we have to return thanks for all the engines in the world, I said to the Mate, who deals in text-books and pure science.
‘And to the other’, he replied promptly, ‘the broken-down engines,’ and laughed, remembering my ordeal in Skye.
And there and then the sun came shafting out, and the rain, that had turned small and white, passed away.
The sun can behave with splendour at times; and now into its glory all the brethren were resumed like the grey rain. If the Crew had never been damped, she quite got on her toes at sight of the gleaming Atlantic breakers on the dark rocks. Photographs! We had to follow her down over the great green machair and had to shout to her to watch out as we saw a big one coming.
Suddenly the earth near us shook, as a stout lady hit it solidly and sent a little white ball a very little way. So the great machair was a golf course. We listened, but heard no words. What language could golfers use on Iona?
Or, conversely, if a retired colonel wanted a real kick out of swearing, was this the very spot? But such a thought lurking about in the jungle would be enough to put his eye out. Moreover, there were three persons walking on the sands, and only half a mile away could be seen at irregular intervals a high burst of spray from the Spouting Cave, while the obviously half-demented woman stalking waves round rocks as if they were sporting lions was enough to upset even the pendulum-swing of a putter. It is improbable that real golfers, men who know the rules, will ever come to Iona.
Over the rocky part of the island is Port-na-Curaich, where Columba first landed. There is a reef of green serpentine in the bay—the Iona stone, out of which the island pebbles are carved and polished.
Port-na-Curaich is interesting in other ways; but again it is difficulty to get past Columba, for when he turned round as he landed here and could no longer see Ireland, where his tempestuous spirit had recently raised a war, tears came into his eyes. For he loved his own land of Ireland, as all good men love their own land, and being lucky in his he had the greater heart to feel the greater grief.
In the early evening we returned to the village and picked up our parcels, and stayed a while in the nunnery garden, for the Mate’s benefit, while the Crew told the flowers, and wandered on to St. Oran’s, where she left us to hunt milk.
As we went to enter at the gate of St. Oran’s (or Reilig Orain) we were astonished to find it locked. As there was nothing to steal but the chapel ruins and the tombstones, and as nobody would steal on Iona, we decided some mistake had been made, so we vaulted the wall.
We had bought a guidebook on the island, a rather indifferent and uninspired affair—though, after all, so much is legend and tradition, that it is difficult to be positive about anything. Even the little roofless chapel, down in the corner to the left, and dedicated to St. Oran, the oldest of the ruins, is probably eleventh century. That Saxon and pious queen, Margaret, wife of Malcolm Canmore, is believed to have had it built as one of her efforts to civilise the savages of her adopted country. She stuck hard to her thankless task, yet with such success that good Scottish historians to this day bless her name. And as far as these Highland parts are concerned, her reforms slowly but surely spread until their feudalistic groundwork blossomed in the flame-bright flower of the Clearances. She was a pious statesman, whose sad and onerous duty, to herself and to God, was to spread the light in that heathen darkness where, long centuries before her redeeming advent, a benighted successor to Columcille was writing: ‘At another time, while the blessed man was living in the Iouan Island (Iona), one day his holy face lighted up with a certain wondrous and joyous cheerfulness, and, lifting up his eyes to heaven, filled with incomparable joy, he was intensely gladdened.’ They believed in those far days that ‘when the heart is glad the face blooms’. Such simple and dogged cheerfulness must be a sad trial to any true reformer. But she did her best.
Yet perhaps the most astonishing thing about the burying-ground that lies before the chapel ruin (this ‘awful ground’, as Dr. Johnson called it) is that it contains the dust of forty-eight Scottish kings, the last of whom was Macbeth. Murdered Duncan was buried here, as Shakespeare, the incomparable, knew:
‘carried to Colm’s-kill,
The sacred store-house of his predecessors,
And guardian of their bones.’
Forty-eight Scottish kings buried in this tumbled graveyard—before the Norman conquest of England in 1066. And to-day should a man be bold enough to refer to the Scottish nation, he is looked upon as a bit of a crank, and his brothers smile for him, with diffident humour, in apology. St. Margaret of blessed memory worked better than she knew, and certainly her husband, Malcolm Canmore, broke the Iona tradition by being properly buried in Dunfermline.
As late as 1594, the Dean of the Isles describes three tombs, ‘formit like little Chapels’; Tumulus Regum Scotiae, Tumulus Begum Hiberniae, and Tumulus Regum Norwegiae. In the first ‘ther lay fortey-eight crowned Scotts Kings’. In the others, Irish and Norwegian kings. ‘Within this sanctuary also lye maist pairt of the Lords of the Isles, with their lynage, twa clan Leans, with their lynage, with sundrie uthers, inhabitants of the haill isles.’
There is little evidence of all this temporal glory to be seen now, though the two ridges—the Ridge of the Kings and the Ridge of the Chiefs—are clear enough, with the chiefs looking much more important than the kings. Altogether it is a small unimpressive place—to the mind looking for physical wonders.
But to a mind otherwise concerned limitless are the perspectives that open out. There can be little doubt, for example, but that Druidism and Christianity meet here, as the story of Oran so searchingly illustrates. When Columba and his brethren started building their first chapel they found that the walls were always being overthrown by an evil spirit. In his perplexity, it was revealed to Columba that a last sacrifice must be made. And then it was that Oran came forward and offered to be buried alive.
But at the end of three days, Columba, troubled in his soul, thought he would like to see how things were going with Oran, so he caused the grave to be opened: whereupon Oran promptly sat up and began to speak heresies, and, in particular, the heresy that Hell is not ‘as it is said’. Which was a nasty thrust at the priestcraft, and, lest he reveal still more heretical things, Columba had him covered up again at once. ‘Earth, earth on Oran’s eye, lest he further blab,’ became a proverb in due course.
Until the Synod of Argyll destroyed them, three globes of white marble lay in hollows on a stone slab beside St. Oran’s, and a visitor to the island had to turn the stones thrice sunwise—deisul (thus Druidically performing the rites of sun worship on the way to the worship of God). The slab (Clach Brath) is still there, with the hollows upon it, and until quite recent times the natives used to turn three ordinary stone balls in the hollows three times deisul, for luck, every time they passed. But these later stones have gone too.
Leaving Reilig Orain, we decided to go into the grounds of the cathedral, and into the cathedral itself, for I wanted to verify what was a first impression by more exact observation; and in any case it should be a good place to rest for a little before returning to face our troubles.
But we found the outer gate locked and the walls surmounted by barbed wire. Though we could have overleapt these obstacles, we could also see that the door of the cathedral itself was locked. Just inside the gate was the box into which on our first visit the Crew had dropped her shilling for the restoration work. It was a small but very solid box, heavily padlocked. It looked as if Argyll’s Church of Scotland had less faith in all the moderns than Columba in his savages and barbarians. Thus if the Mate did not see the flowers and the light on the stone, neither did he see the great marble effigies, so doubtless there is a compensating balance in things. And, after all, there was nothing to be seen that was authentically Columban, unless indeed the stone that was reputed to have been Columba’s pillow, now locked in its little iron cage.
As we came down through the fields, the Crew was resting with her milkpail in a fragrant spot. I glanced away at the sea, and the heavy mood descended darkly, because the Mate had to get to Oban and now I could not take him there. Faith does not help when it comes to mechanism.
The crew, observing this gloom, smiled with ‘wondrous cheerfulness’, implying a faith so irrational that surely even a saint might be forgiven the movement within him of some slight exasperation. She did not, however, add to the offence by speaking.
Turning to the Mate, I worked out how by this time the top of the cylinder must have collected a fair drop of water. First of all we would have a look over the nuts, then turn the engine until the water was expelled through the priming cap. If after that we could get her going on three cylinders, we would try for the Bull Hole. It was a course of action, and helped the spirit a bit, so that I got the length of suggesting, with searching irony as I hoped, that we could hardly expect Columba to have a really deep knowledge of the internal combustion engine.
Whereat the Crew’s smile merely became more cheerful. The swell was a bit nasty, and we experienced some difficulty in launching the dinghy, and finally I pushed off with the surf above my knees.
But we got aboard and tried all outward and visible nuts. Nothing moved, for I often put a spanner over them, except one sparking plug, which took almost a turn. So much for that. Now for the expulsion of the water.
I inserted the starting handle and swung the flywheel. Instead of water, clean vapourless air came hissing through. There was no water. The small orifice did not even show damp.
I swung again, with the same result. I looked at the Mate. Nothing was said—except by the Crew, and she merely smiled. I primed all four cylinders and they went off in a splendid roar. The Mate broke out the anchor, I shoved the gear lever forward, and we headed into the Sound. Then the Mate took the tiller, while I, of little faith, stood by the engine.
When he put her about for the Bull Hole, we met a tide between the high rocks running strongly. Slowly but surely she nosed up through it, the propeller racing slightly as we were tossed from behind. She certainly could not have made the passage on three cylinders, for there was a moment off the point when I glanced ashore to make sure we were still going ahead. Anchored in the old spot, I switched off, and we listened in. There was no hissing. I opened the priming cap. There was no steam. Never again, in fact, did we experience the same trouble. We were in the midst of a debate, intricately hypothetical, as to what we had done to put the matter right, when the Crew said, ‘If you get out of my way, I’ll get the supper.’
But, if in a different fashion, quite as unexpected a thing happened to us on the morning we decided to leave for Colonsay. By six o‘clock we had the engine oiled, greased, and spanner-tight. The glass stood at 30.05, the highest it had been for weeks. The morning was calm. Colonsay anchorage is exposed to easterly winds. Presently a westerly breeze would spring up to reassure us. We were just about to start when a gust of wind hit the water. The sky was clouding. By the time we had got to a hill-top, a strong sou’easterly breeze was blowing with promise of increase. Deciding to give it an hour or so, we returned to find the glass had fallen a point. The wind rose. We were stuck.
Not that we were simple enough to have expected more than we had already got, still . . . it was a pity that we had not got the Columban blessing complete.
The amount of water the boat had been making had become a bit of a nuisance. Nothing dangerous, as our pump was good and strong, but the slow increase might become disturbing. So we decided to have a look at her hull. The Crew went ashore to hunt up some plant or other, so the Mate and I heaved out the heavy mat into the cockpit, stripped off the floor boards, and, starting at the stem, removed the iron pigs and examined planking and timbers with an electric torch. The wood in her was really excellent, sound as a bell. The Tobermory owner had oiled and re-oiled the wood to some tune. We found nothing until we came amidships, where the trouble was revealed. The water was coming in copiously from beneath the cross-board on which the end of the flooring next to the engine rested. We saw that this board was nailed to the hull from the outside, and, after thoughtful discussion, decided to prize it free. When we had done this we observed four springs of water bubbling up, each round a copper nail, loose in its socket. As we pushed a nail outward, the spring increased; as we pulled it tight, it lessened. These nails had obviously been worked loose by uneven pressure of floor boards on the cross-beam and not from any fault in the wood of the hull. Having made sure of this, I bethought me of what I had seen coopers do to a whisky cask leaking from a worm-hole (for there are worms that penetrate an inch of whiskied oak stave with so remarkable a neatness that one must assume relish). I made four spiles out of a piece of hardwood, each pointed and shaped to its nail; rubbed them with red lead, and, while the Mate held the nail, hammered in each gently but firmly until it naturally broke off in the nail hole. When the operation was complete, not one drop of water came through.
With aching backs, we sat down there amid the rusty pigs and grease and oily slime and laughed heartily as at a piece of enchantment or miracle. Then we remembered the Crew—for we had been three whole hours engrossed on the job —and when we had the cabin shipshape went out to look for her and saw her seated amid the boulders and weed, patient as the sphinx. We brought her back. She smiled. ‘Wasn’t it fortunate that the wind rose,’ she said, ‘or now we’d be in Colonsay and the leak with us for the rest of the trip.’
So she made up a splendid lunch, and we had a drink before it, and when the rain descended upon us, and the wind increased, and the glass tumbled, we made merry in as happy a small home as was on the seven seas or maybe even on the seven continents.
All that night it blew from the sou‘east, with continuous slashing rains. For the first time, too, we were troubled with one or two bad bouts of bumping by the dinghy. At seven o’clock in the morning the glass was down to 29.50 and I had to bail the dinghy with a zinc bucket. It was quite impossible to put to sea. The rain taking off for spells round about ten o’clock, we started for Fionnphort over very broken ground to fetch some fresh stores.
Going up the ravine from the Bull Hole, we came on a narrow green mound, with a low shaped granite stone at its head innocent of all writing. A few yards above it were the ruins of a cottage. In that barren place, the nameless grave and the tumbled walls made about as desolate a corner as I had ever seen.
Between the Bull Hole and Fionnphort there were extensive granite quarries that employed many men a generation ago. At Ardmore, half-way, there is a solid pier, with the double line for the bogeys or trucks rusting before the eye where it is not covered with grass. Immense hewn blocks of the red granite are still piled high here, and on the hillside nearer Fionnphort lies the largest single block ever hewn out of a British quarry (or so we were told).
No one could tell us exactly why these quarries were abandoned, though it is generally held that transport charges had become prohibitive. We had a long talk with the solitary fisherman at Ardmore, who works lines in the Sound just south of Eilean na mBan. He had his line all baited with slug worm, waiting for weather to get out. If he did not get out to-day the bait would go rotten.
He appears to be the only line fisherman on this coast, though there are a few lobster fishers, for the rocky nature of the ground is suitable for lobsters. But the great trouble here is the weather, which for long spells in the winter-time makes small-boat fishing very difficult if not impossible. It was easy to believe him, as we gazed southward at the heavy seas spouting towards the Torranan Rocks.
The Mate wanted to know why he had been so unsuccessful in his own fishing and was told that fish were certainly extremely scarce, though he could give no reason for this—apart from trawlers. He then related specific experiences, such as: he was making a fair fishing of small haddock last year in a bay round the northern point of the Ross, when one night a trawler dropped in, and ‘after that I didn’t see a tail’. ‘They often come in at night, too, to the south of Iona over there, but they are a bit frightened I think to risk coming into the Sound itself.’ He was a gentle quiet man with a young wife who obviously helped him with the fishing. He showed no animus against the trawlers. ‘It’s a fine spot this, isn’t it?’ he asked, with a Columban smile.
Lobster fishing apparently was coming on again, for white fishing was valueless. ‘At least the trawlers can’t get the lobsters!’ said the Mate.
He agreed, but said he had heard that trawlers could disturb the lobster spawn. I recalled the lobster fisherman in Tobermory, so disheartened that he thought of giving up. We did not know about lobster spawn, but it seemed reasonable enough to us that where fishing and spawning banks are cleaned up all sorts of life must be affected, for there is a balance in nature. One thing was certain, anyway, that if a man like this—and many like him I had met—were given half a chance to earn a livelihood from the sea, they would do their utmost. There is a point of despair where going on becomes impossible.
From Fionnphort the Mate telephoned to his home, and getting slightly disturbing news of illness, was anxious to be back by Saturday. It was now Wednesday, with the glass still falling. As we ploughed our way back to the Bull Hole, the sky looked anything but promising. There are times when Mull seems one of the most desolate lands on earth. There were no sheep on this southern part of the Ross and, more remarkable, we saw only two or three rabbits and these round about the deserted quarries. Peat and bog and granite. As we came down past the nameless grave, something sinister emerged from it all. We had hardly got on board when the broken skies closed over and the rain descended once more.
Towards evening our sheltered anchorage for the first time became very unsettled. The boat began to rock badly without any ostensible cause—until we found the wind had gone round to the west. If it went round still farther, towards the north, and began to blow, we should feel the sea in earnest.
So back again we went in the evening to try to pick up a weather forecast. Fortunately we ran into the ferryman in Fionnphort, who, though he had not listened in to the nine o‘clock news that evening had followed his invariable practice of taking the 10.30 a.m. shipping forecast, and he gave us heart. He explained that a depression had passed over, that the wind was changing accordingly to follow it up, that by the time we got back we might expect to see the glass rising, and that—if no other depression was following after!—we should have a good chance of getting away in the morning. His discussion of the situation impressed us and we enjoyed our talk with him very much. In his imperturbable way he described the bottom of the Sound and the course to take through the Torranan Rocks. ‘If you find a heavy swell round the red buoy out there, do not mind about that.’
We thanked him and, much heartened, turned back. On the way, we saw the fisherman and his wife in the Sound off Eilean na mBan and were glad that his bait would not now go rotten. They were obviously having no easy time of it out there, while the young children would be waiting for them at home. We wished them and their stores well, for we could not help making the contrast between this life and the life of the house-letter. Indeed, we talked of it for the rest of the way and of the comparable life on the wild north-eastern coast of Scotland we knew so well. There, strong daring men use bigger boats—these East Coast men who have carried over some of the roving Viking spirit, who know Castlebay as well as Wick, Peterhead as Stornoway. The fisherman of Ardmore was not a native.
When we got back, the glass was still inclined to fall. The wind was freshening, and the yacht over against Eilean na mBan was pitching so badly that the sailor in charge was attending to his warps, of which he had two ashore (the owners all this time had been living on Iona). We decided if it was at all a sea morning to start at six o’clock.
We had a pretty restless night and could hear the wind and the sea outside. At six we made hot drinks. The glass was low but steady. Not liking the look of things we climbed our hill and decided to wait until ten.
By that time there were breaks in the clouds, and the glass, if it moved at all, moved up. We would go out into the Sound and see what it really was like.