Part 4

I remember that one of the most strange and perturbing pleasures of my childhood was in watching, from a grassy height, the stealthy motions of the tides. The fascination never waned, nor has it yet waned: to-day, as then, I know at times the old thrill, almost the old fear, when through a white calm or up some sea-loch I watch those dark involutions, in sudden twists and long serpentine curves, as the eddies of the tide force their mysterious way. For one thing my childish imagination was profoundly impressed by the words of an old islander whom I had asked where the tides came from and what they were and had they names. We were on the steep slope of a small grassy hill, and overlooked the eastern end of an island where the troubled waters of a caoileas or strait to the south met the vast placid reach of ocean on the north. Through the lustrous green of the Sound, fleckt with long mauve shadows or clouded here and there with great splatches of purple-brown; and, again, to the left through the near calm heave of deep water so blue that as a child I could not understand why the shells which were washed up from it were not blue also: to right and to left I saw the sudden furtive motions of the flowing tide. I had often watched the blind-worm move thus through the coarse sea-grasses, and again and again had seen the adder dart through the bracken like one of those terrible living arrows of Faerie of which I had heard: often, too, I had followed the shadow-swift underwave glide of the hunting seal: and once, in a deep brown pool in Morven, when I was looking with trembling hope for the floating hair or dim white face of a kelpie, I had seen an otter rise from the depths ... rise like a fantastic elfin face and half-human figure in a dream ... make a soundless sinuous plunge and in less than a moment vanish utterly, still without sound or the least ruffling of the brown depths. So, it was natural that I should associate those mysterious gliding things of the sea with these sinuous things of the grass and heather and the shadowy pool. They, too, I thought, were furtive and sinister. There was something as of the same evil enchantment in their abrupt and inexplicable appearing and in their soundless departures. Thus it was I felt no surprise when my old island-friend Sheumais remarked to me:

“They are creatures of the sea.”

“What are they, Sheumais?” I urged; “are they great eels, or adders, or what? Can they put death on a swimmer? Have you ever caught one? Have----”

“Ay, for sure they might put death on a swimmer: and by the same token I will be remembering that Rùaridh Stewart, the Appin poet, has a rann about them as the Hounds of the Sea.”

“And have they names?”

“For sure, that: Luath (Swift) and Gorm-Dhu (Blue-Black), Luath-Donn (Fleet-brown-one) and Braco (Speckled), Rùn-fo-tuinne (Underwave Secret) and Cu-Bhais (Hound of Death), and others that I will be forgetting.”

“But, Sheumais,” I persisted, “are they male-seafolk and women-seafolk like the seals, and have they little ones, and where do they go, and where do the big tides come from?”

“Well, well, I will not be knowing that, though, for sure, it is likely. But as to where they come from, and where they go, there will be none in all the world who can tell that; no, not one. They will be just like the wind, that no one knows the road of, behind or before. Ay, the sea’s just like the grey road: the green road an’ the grey road, they show no tracks. The wind an’ the tides, they just come an’ they just go. ‘Blind as the wind,’ ‘blind as the tide’ ... ay, it may be; but not so blind as we are, for they know their way, an’ brightest noon an’ darkest night, an’ summer an’ winter, an’ calm an’ storm, are one an’ the same to them.”

It is long ago now since I heard these words from old Sheumais Macleod, but I am certain (so deeply did they impress my childish imagination, and sink into a child’s mind) that I repeat them almost exactly. I had no hesitation in believing in Gorm-Dhu and Luath-Donn, and the rest, and took these names to be real names of actual creatures, as Daoine-Vhara (folk of the sea) for seals, or as piocach for the brown saithe I was wont to watch swimming amid the fronds of the seaweed, or as sgàdan for the flashing herring whose shoals so often made a dazzle in the offing beyond the strait, and whose radiant scales glorified as with gems the nets hauled up in the moonshine or in the pale rose and cowslip-yellow of August dawns.

And, in truth, I am not much the wiser now. There is no great gain in wisdom in the knowledge that the tides are not mysterious creatures of the deep, and are nameless as the winds, as homeless as they, as silent, furtive, as formless, as incalculable almost, as variable. The old islander knew how to turn into service their comings and goings, how to meet them when friendly, how to evade them when hostile, how to wonder continually at their strange beauty, how to reverence the terrible order of their rhythmic flow and ebb. What matter if, also, his old-world Gaelic imagination imaged to him these dark forces of the sea as living creatures; not of flesh and blood as the slim brown seals who, too, can glide not less swiftly and secretly through dusky green water-ways; not even of such consistency as the tide-wrack floating on the wave, or the dim, wandering medusæ which drift like pale, quenchless fires in the untroubled stillness of the twilit underworld; but at least of the company of lightning, of fire, of the wind, of dew, of shadow ... creatures without form as we know form, but animate with a terrible and mysterious life of their own--a secret brotherhood among the visible and invisible clans of the world. What matter if, remembering songs and old tales and incalculable traditions, he thought of them with names, as the ‘fleet-brown-one,’ as ‘swift-darkness,’ as ‘the dark-courser,’ as ‘the untameable,’ as ‘the hound of death’? These tell us neither more nor less (to many of us more, not less) than the abstruse algebraical formulæ of Newton and Laplace. The imagination does not move like flame among intricate calculations, though the mind may be compelled and convinced; and some of us at least would learn more of the tides and their occult nature and laws from an old islesman telling of lionadh and srùth-mara than from the bewildering maze of the five-and-fifty columns which the Encyclopædia Britannica devotes to the subject.

Everywhere this tidal mystery, this beauty of flood and ebb, is to be seen ... along whatever coasts sea-waters move or wherever they penetrate. The ‘tideless Mediterranean’ is but a phrase. Even along the shores of Malta and Sicily there is a perceptible rise and fall, and at a thousand points between Marseilles or Tangier and Venice or Cape Matapan the tidal movement is as mysterious and impressive as among the shoals of Ushant or in the Norsk fjords. There are few places where the trained eye could not perceive a difference of rise or fall. I recollect being shown a spot on the Argive coast of the Peloponnesus where, it was said, the tidal difference was non-existent. On that very day, a day of windless calm, I noticed a fall of over a foot in depth. Dark, steep rocks shelved to deep waters, and to all ordinary appearance there was nothing to indicate the slightest variance between flow and ebb. Even a Morean Greek declared ‘there is no flood, no ebb, here.’

But, in our own home-waters, what marvellous changes take place under the strong continuous pull of the lunar reins. Think of wind and flood-tide on the Channel coasts, with the strange sound as of a murmurous host confusedly marching: think of the daily two-fold flooding of estuaries, and the sinuous invasion of the sea past curving banks and among remote inland meadows. Are rivers not enhanced in mystery when through the downward flow a salt serpentine envoy from the distant sea forces its way, revealing itself in circuitous eddies, in dark revolving rings, in troubled surface-seethe: bringing to the flags and rushes, to the leaning grasses and gold kingcup and purple mallow that salt lip, which a score or half-score miles away had been laid on the sea-grapes of the bladder-wrack, or on the slow-involving tresses of the twisting long-weed. Then there is that miraculous halt, when the cold hand of the tide can reach no farther: when at a boat’s helm a curl of dark brackish water will indolently lapse, while at the prow the clear-brown rippling rush will be fresh with gathered rains and dews and the unsullied issues of wellsprings and sunlit sources.

The tide-flow may be more beautiful and obvious seen from the high shores of certain estuaries, as, say, from the Falmouth uplands, or from the hillsides of our narrow Highland sea-lochs, but the mind is deeplier impressed and the imagination compelled by the more obscure, menacing, and almost terrifying swift arrivals along vast shallow estuaries, such as The Wash or the inner reaches of Solway Firth or by the Sands o’ Dee. With what abrupt turbulence the calms are violated, with what a gathering sound the invisible host is marshalled, with what impetuous surge the immeasurable sortie advances! Of a sudden those little shallows in the sands, those little weed-hung pools below slippery rocks covered with mussel and dog-whelk, shiver. A faint undulation thrills the still small world. A shrimp darts from a sand-mound: a blood-red anemone thrusts out feathered antennæ: now one, now another shell-fish stirs, lifts, gapes. It is the response of the obscure, the insignificant, and the silent, to that mighty incalculable force which is hastening from the fathomless depths and across countless leagues of the great Sea. Soon the flood will come: perhaps in furtive swiftness and silence, perhaps with a confused multitudinous noise among which are inchoate cries and fragmentary bewildering echoes of muffled songs and chants, perhaps as in charging hordes of wild sea-horses where the riders are not seen in the dazzle of spray nor their shouting heard in the tumult of wave dashed against wave and billow hurled on billow.

To be in some such place ... say, again, where the Breton tide races against the flank of Normandy and in a few minutes isolates Mont St. Michel from the mainland; or where the Northumbrian flood pours across the narrow sands of Lindisfarne; or, more than everywhere else I think, where the fierce Atlantic tides leap with bewildering surge and clamour across the vast sea-gates of Uist and rush like a cataract into the Hebrid Sea ... to be in some such place and at the first mysterious signals of the oncoming flood, by night, is to meet the unforgettable, and, as Blake says, to be at one with the eternal mystery.

Flow and ebb, ebb and flow ... it is that ancient inexplicable mystery, the everlasting and unchanging rhythm which holds star to star in infinite procession, which lifts and lowers the poles of our sun-wheeling world, which compels the great oceans to arise and follow the mysterious bidding of the moon. It is wonderful that the moon travels along the equator at the rate of a thousand miles an hour: but more wonderful that these loose, formless, blind and insensate waters should awake at the touch of that pale hand, should move to it and follow it as the flocks of the hills to the voice of the shepherd.

Flow and ebb, ebb and flow ... it is the utterance of the divine law, the eternal word of Order. It is life itself. What life is there, from the phosphorescent atom in the running wave to the enfranchised soul stepping westward beyond the twilights of time, that is not subject to this ineffable rhythmic law. The tides of the world, the tides of life: the grey sap, the red blood, the secret dews, the tameless seas, birth and death, the noons and midnights of the mind of man, the evening dusk and the morning glory of the soul ... one and all move inevitably, and in one way: in one way come, and go, and come again.

“Mar a bha, Mar a tha, Mar a bhitheas Gu brath

* * * * *

Ri tràgadh, ’S ri lionadh.”

“As it was, As it is, As it shall be Evermore

* * * * *

With the ebb, With the flow.”

THE HILL-TARN

Isolated, in one of the wildest and loneliest mountain-regions of the Highlands of Ross, I know a hill-tarn so rarely visited that one might almost say the shadow of man does not fall across its brown water from year’s end to year’s end. It lies on the summit of a vast barren hill, its cradle being the hollow of a crater. Seven mountains encircle Maoldhu from north, south, east, and west. One of these is split like a hayfork, and that is why it is called in Gaelic the Prong of Fionn. Another, whose furrowed brows are dark with the immemorial rheum of the Atlantic, is called the Organ of Oisin, because at a height of about two thousand feet it shows on its haggard front a black colonnade of basalt, where all the winds of the west make a wild and desolate music. I have heard its lamentation falling across the hill-solitudes and down through the mountain-glens with a sound as of a myriad confused sobs and cries, a sound that is now a forlorn ecstasy and now the voice of the abyss and of immeasurable desolation. Another, that on the east, is an unscalable cone, from whose crest, when sunrise flames the serrated crags into a crown of burning bronze, the golden eagle sways like a slow-rising and slow-falling meteor. All day, save for a brief hour at noon, shadow dwells about its knees, and never lifts from the dark grassy lochan at its feet. It is called Maol Athair-Uaibhreach, the Hill of the Haughty Father: I know not why. ‘The Haughty Father’ is a Gaelic analogue for the Prince of Darkness--son of Saturn, as he is called in an old poem: ‘God’s Elder Brother,’ as he is named in a legend that I have met or heard of once only--a legend that He was God of this world before ‘Mac Greinne’ (lit.: Son of the Sun) triumphed over him, and drove him out of the East and out of the South, leaving him only in the West and in the North two ancient forgotten cities of the moon, that in the West below the thunder of grey seas and that in the North under the last shaken auroras of the Pole.

It is not easy to reach this tarn of Maoldhu even when the hillways are known. The mountain-flanks have so vast a sweep, with such wide tracts of barren declivity, where the loose stones and boulders seem to hang in the air like a grey suspended fruit though the first tempest will set them rolling in avalanche; there are so many hidden ravines, and sudden precipices that lean beneath tangled brows like smooth appalling faces; on the eastern slopes the mountain-sheep cannot climb more than halfway; on the south and west the wailing curlews are in continual flight above wide unfrontiered reaches of peat-bog and quaking morass; so many crags lead abruptly to long shelving ledges shelterless and slippery as ice, and twice an abyss of a thousand feet falls sheer from loose rock covered by treacherous heather for a yard or more beyond the last gnarled, twisted roots.

But, when it is once reached, is there any solitude in the world more solitary than here. The tarn, or lochan rather--for if it is not wide enough to be called a loch it is larger than the ordinary tarn one is familiar with on high moorlands and among the hills--has no outlook save to the lonely reach of sky just above it. A serrated crest of herbless and lifeless precipice circles it. On the lower slopes a rough grass grows, and here and there a little bog-myrtle may be seen. At one end a small dishevelled array of reed disputes the water-edge, in thin, straggling, disconsolate lines. There is nothing else. Sometimes the ptarmigan will whirr across it, though they do not love crossing water. Sometimes the shadow of an eagle’s wing darkens the already obscure depths. But the mountain-sheep never reach this height, and even the red deer do not come here to drink these still, brown waters: ‘One sees no antlers where the heather ceases,’ as the shepherds say. The clouds rise above the crests of the west and pass beyond the crests of the east: snow, the steel-blue sleet, the grey rains, sweep past overhead. In summer, a vast cumulus will sometimes for hours overlean the barren crater and fill the tarn with a snowy wonderland and soft abysses of rose and violet: sometimes a deep, cloudless azure will transmute it to a still flame of unruffled, shadowless blue. At night, when it is not a pit of darkness to which the upper darkness is twilight, it will hold many stars. For three hours Arcturus will pulsate in it like a white flame. Other planets will rise, and other stars. Their silver feet tread the depths in silence. Sometimes the moon thrusts long yellow lances down into its brooding heart, or will lie on its breast like the curled horn of the honeysuckle, or, in autumn, like a floating shell filled with fires of phosphorescence. Sunset never burns there, though sometimes the flush of the afterglow descends as on soft impalpable wings from the zenith. At dawn, in midsummer, long scarlet lines will drift from its midmost to the south and west, like blood-stained shafts and battle-spears of a defeated aerial host.

Few sounds are heard by that mountain-tarn. The travelling cloud lets fall no echo of its fierce frost-crashing shards. Dawn and noon and dusk are quiet-footed as mist. The stars march in silence. The springing Northern Lights dance in swift fantastic flame, but are voiceless as the leaping shadows in a wood. Only those other wayfarers of the mountain-summit, tempest, thunder, the streaming wind, the snow coming with muffled rush out of the north, wild rains and whirling sleet, the sharp crackling tread of the hosts of frost: only these break the silence; or, at times, the cries of ‘the eldest children of the hill’ as the mountain-Gael calls the eagle, the hill-fox, and the ptarmigan--the only creatures that have their home above the reach of the heather and in the grey stony wildernesses where only the speckled moss and the lichen thrive.

When I was last at this desolate and remote tarn I realised the truth of that hill-saying. After the farthest oaks on Sliabh Gorm, as the ridge to the south-west is called and up which alone is a practicable if rough and often broken way, came scattered groups and then isolated trees of birch and mountain-ash. Thereafter for a long way the heather climbed. Then it gave way more and more to bracken. In turn the bracken broke like the last faint surf against huge boulders and waste stony places. The grouse called far below. The last deer were browsing along their extreme pastures, some five hundred to eight hundred feet below the precipitous bastions of Maoldhu. Higher than they I saw a circling hawk and three ravens flying slowly against the wind. Then came the unpeopled wilderness, or so it seemed till I heard the wail of a solitary curlew (that spirit of the waste, for whom no boggy moors lie too low and desolate, for whom no mountain-ranges are too high and wild and solitary), and once, twice, and again in harsh response but faint against the wind, the barking of a hill-fox and its mate. All life had ceased, I thought, after that, save an eagle which in a tireless monotony swung round and round the vast summit of Maoldhu. But suddenly, perhaps a hundred feet above me, six or seven ptarmigan rose with a whirr, made a long sailing sweep, and settled (slidingly and gradually as flounders in shallow waters among grey pebbles and obscuring sand-furrows) among the lichened boulders and loose disarray of speckled granite and dark and grey basalt and trap--an ideal cover, for even a keen following gaze could not discern the living from the inanimate.