Part 9 (2/2)
Two miles farther south I could see the entrance to the famous Roost of Una, where, when tide and wind collide, there is a wall like a house, so that a small steamer cannot pa.s.s it. The only signs of human habitation were about a small gray farm in the lowlands toward the Roost, but the place was full of the evidence of man - a herd of Norland ponies, each tagged with its owner's name, grazing sheep of the piebald Norland breed, a broken barbed-wire fence that dropped over the edge of the cliff.
I was only an hour's walk from a telegraph office and a village which got its newspapers not more than three days late. It was a fine spring noon, and in the empty bright land there was scarcely a shadow.
All the same, as I looked down at the island I did not wonder that it had been selected for attention by the saga man and had been reputed holy. For it had an air of concealing something, though it was as bare as a billiard table. It was an intruder, an irrelevance in the picture, planted there by some celestial caprice. I decided forthwith to make my camp on it, and the decision, inconsequently enough, seemed to me to be something of a venture.
That was the view taken by John Ronaldson, when I talked to him after dinner. John was the postmistress's son, more fisherman than crofter; like all Norlanders, a skillful sailor and an adept at the dipping lug, and noted for his knowledge of the western coaSt. He had difficulty in understanding my plan, and when he identified my island he protested.
”Not Skule Skerry!” he cried. ”What would take ye there, man? Ye'll get a' the birds ye want on Halmarsness and a far better bield. Ye'll be blawn away on the skerry, if the wind rises.”
I explained to him my reasons as well as I could, and I answered his fears about a gale by pointing out that the island was sheltered by the cliffs from the prevailing winds, and could be scourged only from the south, southwest, or west, quarters from which the wind rarely blew in May.
”It'll be cauld,” he said, ”and wat.”
I pointed out that I had a tent and was accustomed to camping.
”Ye'll starve.”
I expounded my proposed methods of commissariat.
”It'll be an ill job getting ye on and off.”
But after cross-examination he admitted that ordinarily the tides were not difficult, and that I could get a rowboat to a beach below the farm I had seen - its name was Sgurravoe. Yet when I had said all this he still raised objections till I asked him flatly what was the matter with Skule Skerry.
”Naebody gangs there,” he said gruffly.
”Why should they?” I asked. ”I'm only going to watch the birds.”
But the fact that it was never visited seemed to stick in his throat and he grumbled out something that surprised me. ”It has an ill name,” he said.
But when I pressed him he admitted that there was no record of s.h.i.+pwreck or disaster to account for the ill name. He repeated the words ”Skule Skerry” as if they displeased him.
”Folk dinna gang near it. It has aye had an ill name. My grandfather used to say that the place wasna canny.”
Now your Norlander has nothing of a Celt in him, and is as different from the Hebridean as a Northumbrian from a Cornishman. They are a fine, upstanding, hardheaded race, almost pure Scandinavian in blood, but they have as little poetry in them as a Manchester radical. I should have put them down as utterly free from superst.i.tion and, in all my many visits to the islands, I have never yet come across a folk tale - hardly even a historical legend.
Yet here was John Ronaldson, with his weather-beaten face and stiff chin and shrewd blue eyes, declaring that an innocent-looking island ”wasna canny,” and showing the most remarkable disinclination to go near it.
Of course, all this only made me keener. Besides, it was called Skule Skerry, and the name could only come from Earl Skuli, so it was linked up authentically with the oddments of information I had collected in the British Museum - the Jarla Saga and Adam of Bremen and all the rest of it.
John finally agreed to take me over next morning in his boat, and I spent the rest of the day in collecting my kit. I had a small E.P. tent, and a Wolseley valise and half a dozen rugs, and since I had brought a big box of tinned stuffs from the stores, all I needed was flour and meal and some simple groceries. I learned that there was a well on the island, and that I could count on sufficient driftwood for my fire, but to make certain I took a sack of coals and another of peats.
So I set off next day in John's boat, ran with the wind through the Roost of Una when the tide was right, tacked up the coast, and came to the skerry early in the afternoon.
You could see that John hated the place. We ran into a cove on the east side and he splashed ash.o.r.e as if he expected to have his landing opposed, looking all the time sharply about him. When he carried my stuff to a hollow under the knoll which gave a certain amount of shelter, his head was always twisting round.
To me the place seemed to be the last word in forgotten peace. The swell lipped gently on the reefs and the little pebbled beaches, and only the babble of gulls from Halmarsness broke the stillness.
John was clearly anxious to get away, but he did his duty by me. He helped me to get the tent up, found a convenient place for my boxes, pointed out the well and filled my water bucket, and made a zareba of stones to protect my camp on the Atlantic side. We had brought a small dinghy along with us, and this was to be left with me, so that when I wanted I could row across to the beach at Sgurravoe. As his last service he fixed an old pail between two boulders on the summit of the knoll, and filled it with oily waste, so that it could be turned into a beacon.
”Ye'll maybe want to come off,” he said, ”and the boat will maybe no be there. Kindle your flare, and they'll see it at Sgurravoe and get the word to me, and I'll come for ye though the Muckle Black Silkie himsel' was hunkerin' wi' the skerry.” Then he looked up and sniffed the air. ”I dinna like the set of the sky,” he declared. ”It's a bad weatherhead. There'll be mair wund than I like in the next four and twenty hours.”
So saying, he hoisted his sail and presently was a speck in the water toward the Roost. There was no need for him to hurry, for the tide was now wrong, and before he could pa.s.s the Roost he would have three hours to wait on this side of the Mull. But the man, usually so deliberate and imperturbable, had been in a fever to be gone.
His departure left me in a curious mood of happy loneliness and pleasurable expectation. I was left solitary with the seas and the birds. I laughed to think that I had found a streak of superst.i.tion in the granite John. He and his Muckle Black Silkie! I knew the old legend of the North which tells how the Finns, the ghouls that live in the deeps of the ocean, can on occasion don a seal's skin and come to land to play havoc with mortals.
But diablerie and this isle of mine were worlds apart. I looked at it as the sun dropped, drowsing in the opal-colored tides, under a sky in which pale clouds made streamers like a spectral aurora borealis and I thought that I had stumbled upon one of those places where Nature seems to invite one to her secrets. As the light died the sky was flecked as with the roots and branches of some great nebular tree. That would be the weatherhead of which John Ronaldson had spoken.
I got my fire going, cooked my supper, and made everything snug for the night. I had been right in my guess about the migrants. It must have been about ten o'clock when they began to arrive - after my fire had died out and I was smoking my last pipe before getting into my sleeping-bag.
A host of fieldfares settled gently on the south part of the skerry. A faint light lingered till after midnight, but it was not easy to distinguish the little creatures, for they were aware of my presence and did not alight within a dozen yards of me. But I made out bramblings and buntings and what I thought was the Greenland wheatear; also jacksnipe and sanderling; and I believed from their cries that the curlew sandpiper and the whimbrel were there. I went to sleep in a state of high excitement, promising myself a fruitful time on the morrow.
I slept badly, as one often does one's first night in the open. Several times I woke with a start under the impression that I was in a boat rowing swiftly with the tide. And every time I woke I heard the flutter of myriad birds, as if a velvet curtain were being slowly switched along an oak floor. At last I fell into deeper sleep, and when I opened my eyes it was full day.
The first thing that struck me was that it had got suddenly colder. The sky was stormily red in the east, and ma.s.ses of woolly clouds were banking in the north. I lighted my fire with numbed fingers and hastily made tea.
I could see the nimbus of seafowl over Halmarsness, but there was only one bird left on my skerry. I was certain from its forked tail that it was a Sabine's gull, but before I got my gla.s.s out it was disappearing into the haze toward the north. The sight cheered and excited me, and I cooked my breakfast in pretty good spirits.
That was literally the last bird that came near me, barring the ordinary shearwaters and gulls and cormorants that nested round about Halmarsness. (There was not one single nest of any sort on the island. I had heard of that happening before in places which were regular halting-grounds for migrants.) The travelers must have had an inkling of the coming weather and were waiting somewhere well to the south.
About nine o'clock it began to blow. Great G.o.d, how it blew! You must go to the Norlands if you want to know what wind can be. It is like being on a mountaintop, for there is no high ground to act as a windbreak. There was no rain, but the surf broke in showers and every foot of the skerry was drenched with it. In a trice Halmarsness was hidden, and I seemed to be in the center of a maelstrom, choked with scud and buffeted on every side by swirling waters.
Down came my tent at once. I wrestled with the crazy canvas and got a black eye from the pole, but I managed to drag the rums into the shelter of the zareba which John had built and tumble some of the bigger boulders on it. There it lay, flapping like a sick albatross. The water got into my food boxes and soaked my fuel, as well as every inch of my clothing.
I had looked forward to a peaceful day of watching and meditation, when I could write up my notes; and instead I spent a morning like a Rugger scrum. I might have enjoyed it, if I hadn't been so wet and cold, and could have got a better lunch than some clammy mouthfuls out of a tin.
One talks glibly about being ”blown off” a place, generally an idle exaggeration - but that day I came very near the reality. There were times when I had to hang on for dear life to one of the bigger stones to avoid being trundled into the yeasty seas.
About two o'clock the volume of the storm began to decline, and then for the first time I thought about the boat. With a horrid sinking of the heart I scrambled to the cove where we had beached it. It had been drawn up high and dry, and its painter secured to a substantial boulder. But now there was not a sign of it except a ragged rope end round the stone. The tide had mounted to its level, and tide and wind had smashed the rotten painter. By this time what was left of it would be tossing in the Roost.
This was a pretty state of affairs. John was due to visit me next day, but I had a cold 24 hours ahead of me. There was of course the flare he had left me, but I was not inclined to use this. It looked like throwing up the sponge and confessing that my expedition had been a farce. I felt miserable, but obstinate, and, since the weather was clearly mending, I determined to put the best face on the business, so I went back to the wreckage of my camp, and tried to tidy up.
There was still far too much wind to do anything with the tent, but the worst of the spindrift had ceased and I was able to put out my bedding and some of my provender to dry. I got a dry jersey out of my pack and as I was wearing fisherman's boots and oilskins I managed to get some slight return of comfort. Also at last I succeeded in lighting a pipe. I found a corner under the knoll which gave me a modic.u.m of shelter, and I settled myself to pa.s.s the time with tobacco and my own thoughts.
About three o'clock the wind died away completely. That I did not like, for a dead lull in the Norlands is often the precursor of a new gale. Indeed, I never remembered a time when some wind did not blow, and I had heard that when such a thing happened people came out of their houses to ask what the matter was. But now we had the deadest sort of calm.
The sea was still wild and broken, the tides raced by like a millstream, and a brume was gathering which shut out Halmarsness - shut out every prospect except a narrow circuit of gray water. The cessation of the racket of the gale made the place seem uncannily quiet. The present tumult of the sea, in comparison with the noise of the morning, seemed no more than a mutter and an echo.
As I sat there I became conscious of an odd sensation. I seemed to be more alone, more cut off not only from my fellows but from the habitable earth than I had ever been before. It was like being in a small boat in mid-Atlantic - but worse, if you understand me, for that would have been loneliness in the midst of a waste which was nevertheless surrounded and traversed by the works of man, whereas now I felt that I was clean outside of man's ken. I had come somehow to the edge of that world where life is and was very close to the world which has only death in it.
At first I do not think there was much fear in the sensation; chiefly strangeness, but the kind of strangeness which awes without exciting. I tried to shake off the mood and got up to stretch myself. There was not much room for exercise, and as I moved with stiff legs along the reefs I slipped into the water, so that I got my arms wet. It was cold beyond belief - the very quintessence of deathly Arctic ice, so cold that it seemed to sear and bleach the skin.
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