And so we came to the lifting of our anchor on the last day, and as we stood down the second half of Loch Oich, the weather was moist and windless and the white sail lay sodden along the deck. Our hope had been for sparkling water and a following wind, so that we might have set both sails in a final splendid run up the twenty-four miles of Loch Ness and have come with gratitude, if regret, to our last anchorage. But this was denied us. And, unfortunately, the sad weather did not make the prospect of leaving the sea more appealing. It merely deepened the sadness. An odd sort of perversity this, but there it was.
Yet so valiantly did the Crew ‘Whistle for Bridge’ at Aberchalder that the adventurous spirit was restored, and we smiled and admired the land and saw the mists dragging their phantom armies up Corrieyairack Pass.
At the first lock I shut off the engine in such good time that we finally moved by slow inches while the lock-keepers, when they could spare their hands from the midges, waved us in with not unnatural impatience. But presently it was explained to them how we had so strange a beast in our keeping that, given its head at the wrong moment, it might charge the locks and break them down and so spread havoc over this sunny land.
So they laughed and helped us through.
‘You find the midges bad?’ said the Mate to one keeper.
‘I do that,’ he answered. ‘I am not a native and have never got used to them.’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Thirty-four years.’
‘And the clegs?’
‘Aye, there are clegs. See that man over there—when he came first he could not shave for three months with the lumps on him.’
We exchanged sympathies in the moist weather and so off again on our winding wooded ways to Kytra. There is a friendliness in being helped through locks in a small vessel. And here a stranger addressed me by name and asked if we could take two little girls and a boy to Fort Augustus.
I said we should be delighted and helped our shy passengers on board. The Thistle was being promoted in the sphere of social service, and we were not untouched by this evidence of trust in her. She responded very properly, making a steady wash behind and waves that ran up the banks in a pretty rhythm. The Mate suggested that if the worst came to the worst, I might seriously contemplate turning her into a passenger vessel—to run hazardous trips, based, say, on Iona.
‘Or Arisaig of the perches,’ said the Crew.
But I refused to be drawn, for the thought had been vaguely worrying me as to what, in fact, I was going to do with her. Our rule had been to live from day to day. And actually at that moment I did not know where we were going to tie up in the evening—which must be our last, for the reason that we could go no farther, except into the North Sea, and already the corn was turning to gold and the rowan berries were red.
But here was Fort Augustus and the Crew got ready to sound the last trump.
‘Take off your sou’wester,’ said the Mate.
She blew and better blew, but no one answered that last impressive summons.
‘A poor show for Fort Augustus,’ she said, ‘and it with a monastery.’
We tied up alongside the wooden landing stage at top of the five locks and I set off to find what was wrong. The lock-keepers were down at the bottom end awaiting the great event of the day, the arrival of the Gondolier, with her cargo of tourists from Inverness, and though that paddle steamer was not due for over twenty minutes—and did not appear for half an hour—our small craft must wait until she had come, and climbed, and passed. As we were going nowhere in particular, we did not mind the wait of two hours. For it had stopped raining for the time being and we wandered about this open little town which has arisen around the ancient fort.
There is still some of the old wall left, though in place of the fort there is now a Benedictine Abbey, with a school and green lawns, and we watched a black robe floating out behind a cricket pitch roller. Peace here now.
For Fort William, Fort Augustus and Fort George are no longer required as Hanoverian outposts of civilisation to keep the Gaelic barbarians in check. Which, taking all things by and large, is maybe a pity.
The lock-keepers said they were sorry about the delay and did all they could to make our transit comfortable. Tourists watched our descent. While the last gate was being opened, I got the engine going, for immediately beyond was the bridge of the busy main road already swinging to let us through. Just the sort of moment for the engine to show off her trick of social satire. And for a little we struggled together, for she obviously wanted to spite the waiting motor-cars; but at last she thought better of it and we sailed away.
As Loch Ness opened before us the rain started again, and soon it was coming down straight and pitiless. The Crew was putting a new spool in the camera, for there was talk of the Monster. ‘I should like more than one photograph of him,’ she explained. But soon she and the Mate went inside to cook some food.
There was no life in the water underneath. On the calmest day at sea there is always some movement, a faint swell, a restlessness. Here the engine went plugging solidly on, and the way seemed long; though I knew this stretch could be stormier than Loch Lochy. I also knew that it was deeper here than anywhere in those western seas we had travelled or seen, for one has got to go far into the Atlantic to get the depth of some 130 fathoms recorded off Urquhart Castle, the favourite haunt of the Monster. I had once tried to illustrate this depth by saying that if the earth were raised or the waters dried until the North Sea vanished and one could go to St. Kilda on foot, there would still be deep water in Loch Ness; but the illustration was considered complicated.
Now as we headed up the loch, I got a fresh view of this land, which had been my home for so many years. Out of the mist, headland behind headland plunged down into the deeps. In the tortured rock fissures far below, there was room for any sort of life. I knew of one diver who had gone down some distance, come back to the surface and refused to go down again, though he would not say why.
Even in the translucent waters of the sea, long before one reaches the 900 feet of Loch Ness, red, orange, yellow, green, and violet have in turn disappeared, leaving only a blackish blueness. In the deeper parts of the opaque waters of Loch Ness, there must be perpetual night.
But when Professor Beebe the other year went down in his bathysphere to a depth of 3,000 feet he still found life, although a life of which we had hitherto not even dreamed. Schools of luminous fish in the absolute darkness; strange monsters lit up as a ship is seen lit up through its portholes.
We know little of the living marvels of the deep, and when we have rigged up a bathysphere (a steel ball with a small window), complete with telephone and electric beam after the Beebe model, to take us to the bottom of Loch Ness, we may be able at least to provide a new thrill for our tourists, some sort of alternative to the Well of the Heads. Always assuming we could first overcome the more difficult matter of arranging landlord rights by getting royalties per peep fixed at a reasonable figure.
And now through the haze arose the ruins of Urquhart Castle. Edward First, that old hammer of the Scots, had actually laid siege to it. He probably had had the luck to get good weather. And in any case would have ravaged all he could for his comfort. When Edward got hold of Scots he did the only completely satisfying thing with this bad brood: he killed them. Wallace saw the perfect logic in this, and so when there were Englishmen within his reach, he slew them to a man. And if Edward got as far as Urquhart Castle, Wallace got as far as St. Albans. But Wallace hadn’t the real royal logic in him through and through. The old Celtic stock of the Cuchulains and the King Arthurs (from whom he had the misfortune to be descended) had that drooling pathetic regard, yclept chivalry, for women and children, and even for priests, that is about as remote from high statesmanship as Beebe’s bathysphere. So Edward stuck Wallace’s head on top of his Traitor’s Gate and distributed his limbs throughout his kingdom for all to see. When chivalry is carried beyond the ladies’ coloured ribbons of the jousts (whence our school ties), it does no more than provide some ditchside old poet with a theme, as he scratches the thigh of a verminous poverty.
Yet they continued to have great wallops at each other, the English and the Scots, and are inclined to have a sly one still when the chance offers, though it looks at last as though the English have got the Scots where and how they want them, helped nowadays by, the proletarian dream, as personified in the Clydeside communist, which happily lifts us far above consideration of paltry national issues. We are all Englishmen now.
Urquhart Castle was once the stronghold of the Grants, but the Grants were even simpler than Wallace. A few of them out of Glenmoriston agreed, after Culloden, to surrender to Cumberland’s written offer of free pardon. But once Cumberland had got hold of them he forgot his offer, and had them promptly tied up and sent to the hulks on the Thames. One can imagine Cumberland’s expression and even his possible words: ‘You thought to save yourselves, did you?’ It is difficult to forgive the Grants for such credulity in face of such an enemy.
Perhaps my thoughts were a bit gloomy, like the landscape. Though in a moment one saw there was no mere gloom in the landscape; rather some quality of fantasy, near and remote; and one could readily imagine a traveller from a flat country being so deeply impressed that he would have searched for elements of mysticism in the inhabitants (the ‘Celtic twilight’ is hardly a native product).
But there is little mysticism in sailing home a boat and suddenly it came to me that I should take her to Bona at the north end of Loch Ness, where a yachtsman lives in a wooden house by the water. He had been very helpful when I was fitting out, and in his spare hours from his town business, he deals in boats; which is about the next best thing to sailing them on new seas.
The Crew and the Mate appeared with some hot food, which the gentle rain cooled.
‘This is very dull,’ said the Crew.
‘What?’
‘This calm water.’
‘The rain is taking off,’ said the Mate.
So I told them my plan.
It was voted sound. The Crew had promptly an irrational affection for the boat, but, as I pointed out, the important thing for us was the discovery that living on a boat was cheaper than living in a house.
‘For one thing you don’t eat so much,’ said the Mate, when he had made sure where the horn was. But the Crew merely went in to begin packing up.
Castle Urquhart was now behind and in front the smoke of a vessel which turned out to be a drifter going west, so I moved towards him a little to get his wash. The skipper leant out of his wheelhouse and we saluted each other. I must have been wishing him good luck or envying him, for I forgot to warn the Crew. As we pitched, she grabbed the nearest support in astonishment.
‘The Monster!’ we cried. But she was not deceived.
We came abreast of Tor Point and went slowly towards Bona and the white house of the ferry, where we dropped our anchor in less than a fathom of water on the Dores side. As we looked around the sun came out, warm and brilliant. We sat in it until my friend appeared from Inverness, and, after a proper seaman’s welcome, dispelled all doubts and difficulties over the laying up of the Thistle.
Hurtling through space at nearly thirty miles an hour, we mutinied, and the Mate at the wheel eased off a bit, and gave us time to realise that we had acquired some elementary knowledge of navigating a small boat in unknown waters. With a bigger boat we might adventure farther—say, to Norroway over the foam, to the west of Ireland, to the Orkneys, the Shetlands, the Hebrides, even in some nostalgia for the sun to the Mediterranean and so open out for ourselves the fabulous mountains of Africa.
So the peace of Iona and its light came back upon the mind, the tumultuous seas of the Torranan Rocks, the spacious bays of Oban and Tobermory, the granite walls of the Bull Hole, the lobster fishers, the seaweeds, the calling of night birds, that day—already bordering the realm of the unreal—when we had rounded Waternish and Dunvegan and seen the fixed dream of the Outer Isles over the fins of basking sharks. Portnalong and Eigg, the Cuillin and Rum. Loch Etive of legend and sun. Should we ever find anything more memorable? One may perhaps hazard the enigmatic smile the Crew directed upon us when she saw the cloud of light over Iona. All the same, it would be fine to make sure. And with a land like this behind us, how naturally generous should be our appreciation of the marvels and beauty of a strange land. For all lands have one common bond—the sea.