In September of last year I was ferried across the Sound of Kerrera by
an old boatman.
That afternoon I went with my friend, a peasant farmer near the south
end of Kerrera, and lay down in the grassy, bouldered wilderness
beneath the cliff on which stands the ruin of Gylen Castle. The tide
called in a loud insistent whisper, rising to a hoarse gurgle, from
the Sound. The breeze that came from the mountains of Mull was
honey-sweet with heather smell. The bleating of the ewes and lambs,
the screaming of a few gulls,--nothing else was audible. At times, it
is true, like a deep sigh, the suspiration of the open sea rose and
fell among the islands. Faint echoes of that sigh came round Gylen
headland and up the Kyle. It was an hour wherein to dream of the sons
of Morven, who had landed here often, long before the ancient
stronghold was built; of Fionn and the Féinn of the coming and going
of Ossian in his blind old age; of beautiful Malvina; of the galleys
of the Fomorians; of the songs and the singers and all the beautiful
things of "the old ancient long ago."
But the tale that I heard from my friend was this:
* * * * *
You know that my mother's people are Skye folk. It was from the mother
of my mother that I heard what you call the Incantation of the Spirit,
though I never heard it called anything but old Elsie's _Sian_. She
lived near the Hart o' Corry. You know the part? Ay, true, it is wild
land--wild even for the wilderness o' Skye. Old mother Elsie had "the
sight" at times, and whenever she wished she could find out the lines
o' life. It was magic, they say. Who am I to know? This is true, she
knew much that no one else knew. When my mother's cousin, Fergus
MacEwan, who was mate of a sloop that sailed between Stornoway and
Ardrossan, came to see her--and that was in the year before my mother
was married, and when she was courted by Fergus, though she was never
for giving her life to him, for even then she loved my father, poor
fisherman of Ulva though he was (though heir, through his father's
brother, to his crofter-farm on Kerrera here)--when Fergus came to see
her, because of the gloom that was upon his spirit, she foretold all.
At first she could "see" poorly. But one wild afternoon, when the
Cuchullins were black with cloud-smoke, she bade him meet her in that
lonely savage glen they call the Loat o' Corry. He was loath to go,
for he feared the place. But he went. He told all to my mother before
he went away next dawn, with the heart in him broken, and his hope as
dead as a herring in a net.
Mother Elsie came to him out of the dusk in that wuthering place just
like a drifting mist, as he said. She gave him no greeting, but was by
his side in silence. Before he knew what she was doing she had the
soles of her feet upon his, and her hands folding his, and her eyes
burning against his like hot coals against ash. He felt shudders come
over him, and a wind blew up and down his back; and he grew giddy,
and heard the roaring of the tides in his ears. Then he was quiet. Her
voice was very far away when she said this thing, but he remembered
every word of it:
By that which dwells within thee,
By the lamps that shine upon me,
By the white light I see litten
From the brain now sleeping stilly,
By the silence in the hollows,
By the wind that slow subsideth,
By the life-tide slowly ebbing,
By the deith-tide slowly rising,
By the slowly waning warmth,
By the chill that slowly groweth,
By the dusk that slowly creepeth,
By the darkness near thee,
By the darkness round thee,
By the darkness o'er thee--
O'er thee, round thee, on thee--
By the one that standeth
At thy side and waiteth
Dumb and deaf and blindly,
By the one that moveth,
Bendeth, raiseth, watcheth,
By the dim Grave-Spell upon thee,
By the Silence thou hast wedded....
May the way thy feet are treading,
May the tangled lines now crookèd,
Clear as moonlight lie before me!
_Oh! oh! ohrone, ochrone! green the branches bonnie:
Oh! oh! ohrone! ochrone! red the blood-drop berries:
Achrone, arone, arone, arone, I see the green-clad Lady.
She walks the road that's wet with tears, with rustling sorrows
shady....
Oh! oh! mo ghraidh._
Then it was that a great calm came upon Fergus, though he felt like a
drowned man, or as one who stood by his own body, but speechless, and
feeling no blowing of wind through his shadow-frame.
For, indeed, though the body lived, he was already of the company of
the silent. What was that _caiodh_, that wailing lamentation, sad as
the _Cumha fir Arais_, which followed Elsie's incantation, her spell
upon "the way" before him, that it and all the trailed lines of this
life should be clear as moonlight before her? _Oh! oh! ohrone,
ochrone! red the blood-drop berries_; did not these mean no fruit of
the quicken-tree, but the falling drops from the maimed tree that was
himself? And was not the green-clad lady, she who comes singing low,
the sprouting of the green grass that is the hair of the earth? And
was not the road, gleaming wet with ruts and pools all of tears, and
overhung by dark rustling plumes of sorrow, the road that the soul
traverses in the dark hour? And did not all this mean that the Grave
Spell was already upon him, and that the Silence was to be his?[10]
[10] (1) _Caiodh_ (a wailing lament) is a difficult word to
pronounce. The Irish _keen_ will help the foreigner with _Kúë-yh_
or _Kúë-yhn_. (2) The _Cumha fir Arais_ (pronounce _Kŭv'ah feer
Arooss_) means the lament of the man of Aros--_i. e._, the
chieftain. Aros Castle, on the great island of Mull, overlooking
the Sound, was one of the strongholds of Macdonald, Lord of the
Isles. (3) The quicken (rowan, mountain-ash, and other names) is a
sacred tree with the Celtic peoples, and its branches can either
avert or compel supernatural influences. (4) The green-clad Lady
is the Cailleach, the Siren of the Hill-Sides, to see whom
portends death or disaster. When she is heard singing, that
portends death soon for the hearer. The grass is that which grows
quick and green above the dead. The dark hour is the hour of
death--_i. e._, the first hour after death.
But what thing it was she saw, Elsie would not say. Darkly she dreamed
awhile, then leaned forward and kissed his breast. He felt the sob in
her heart throb into his.
Dazed, and knowing that she had seen more than she had dreamed of
seeing, and that his hour was striding over the rocky wilderness of
that wild Isle of Skye, he did not know she was gone, till a
shuddering fear of the silence and the gloom told him he was alone.
* * * * *
Coll MacColl (he that was my Kerrera friend) stopped here, just as a
breeze will suddenly stop in a corrie so that the rowan berries on the
side of a quicken will sway this way and that, while the long thin
leaves on the other will be as still as the stones underneath, where
their shadows sleep.
I asked him at last if Elsie's second-sight had proved true. He looked
at me for a moment, as though vaguely surprised I should ask so
foolish a thing.
* * * * *
No sleep came to Fergus that night, he resumed, quietly, as though no
other words were needed, and at daybreak he rose and left the cot of
his kinsman, Andrew MacEwan. In the gray dawn he saw my mother, and
told her all. Then she wished him farewell, and bade him come again
when next the _Sunbeam_ should be sailing to Portree, or other port in
Skye; for she did not believe that her mother had seen speedy death,
or death at all, but perhaps only a time of sorrow, and even that she
had done this thing to send Fergus away, for she too had her eyes on
Robert MacColl, that was my father.
"And so you will come again, Fergus my friend," she said; and added,
"and perhaps then you will be telling me of a Sunbeam ashore, as well
as that you sail from Ardrossan to the far away islands!"
He stared at her as one who hears ill. Then he took her hand in his,
and let it go suddenly again. With one arm he rubbed the rough Uist
cap he held in his left hand; then he brushed off the wet mist that
was gray on his thick black beard.
"You are not well, Fearghas-mo-charaid," my mother said, and gently.
When she saw the staring pain in his eyes, she added, with a low sob,
"My heart is sore for you!"
With that he turned away, and she saw him no more, that day or any
day of all the days to come.
"And what thing happened, Coll?"
"They kept it from her, and she did not know it for long. It was this:
Fergus McEwan did not sail far that morning. He was ill, he said, and
was put ashore. That night Aulay Macaulay saw him moving about in that
frightful place of the Storr Rock, moaning and muttering. He would
have spoken to him, but he saw him begin to leap about the pinnacled
rocks like a goat, and at last run up to The Old Man of Storr and beat
it with his clinched fists, blaspheming with wild words; and he feared
Fergus was mad, and he slipped from shadow to shadow, till he fled
openly. But in the morning Aulay and his brother Finlay went back to
look for Fergus. At first they thought he had been drowned, or had
fallen into one of the fissures. But from a _balachan_, a 'bit
laddie,' as they would call him in the town over the way [Oban], they
heard that a man had pushed off that morning in John Macpherson's
boat, that lay about a mile and a half from the Storr, and had sailed
north along the coast.
"Well, it was three days before he was found--stone-dead. If you know
the Quiraing you will know the great Needle Rock. Only a bird can
climb it, as the saying goes. Half-way up, Finlay Macaulay and a man
of the neighbourhood saw the body o' Fergus as though it were glued to
the rock. It was windless weather, for he would have blown away like a
drifted leaf. They had to jerk the body down with net-poles. God save
us the dark hour of Fergus, that died like a wild beast!"