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._”