VI

The rain had ceased, but the quay of Burra offered no other benefit.

I was down there before dawn. Morning had not come, but I suppose

the downpour had washed some of the dark out of the night, for all

the quay was plain. It was not the quay I knew, but its wan spirit;

and the vessels moored to it were ghosts, the faint impress of dead

ships on a world that now just retained a memory of them. There was no

sound. There were only phantoms in a pallor. Perhaps it had ceased

to rain because rain would be too substantial for a bodyless world.

The irregular pools on the quay were not water, but descents to the

profound. Rain would at once enlarge them till the quay dissolved

and became as the Estuary, and as the sky, for both sea and sky were

nothing. They were the depth of the future, in which were hints of what

some day might see the sun.

I felt I ought not to be there. There was no telling whether I was too

soon or too late, whether I was the first man, or the last. I doubted

that hush, and that dim appearance about me. When the air did stir, it

was as if it were the breath of death, and the earth were the body of

death. Then I made up my mind. It was no use going to sea, as I had

intended. I would go back to bed. At that moment there were footsteps,

and the quay at once became solid. Two black figures approached, the

size of men. One of them put his foot into a great hole in the quay,

and he did not vanish instantly, but made a splash and an exclamation.

That voice certainly was something I knew. The other man laughed

quietly, the familiar satiric comment which comes of resignation to

fate. We were all going to sea, as far as the Foreland.

That cape is the western horn to the bay, and nobody goes there,

except sailors who die because they see the loom of it, or hear its

warning, too late. The Foreland to the people of Burra is like the

clouds. It is part of their own place, but it is unapproachable. At

times it is missing. In some winds it will evaporate; though usually

at sunset it shapes again, high, black, and fantastic, the end of

the land to the west, and as distant and sombre as the world of the

sagas. Is it likely, then, that one would ever think of a voyage to

it? That cape, which one sees either because the light is at the right

incidence, or because one is dreaming, might be no more than a thought

turned backward to vague antiquity; to Ultima Thule, where the sun

never rises now, but where it is always evening twilight. It would

have no trees. It would be a desolation of granitic crags, mossed and

lichened, and the seas below would be sounding doom, knowing that even

the old gods were dead. It was not likely that we could credit such

a voyage; yet the truth is we had assembled for it, and because of a

promise made carelessly with an ancient mariner in a tavern on the

previous afternoon. What, on such a morning, and in such a place, was

such a promise? As intangible as was our quay when I first saw it that

morning, and no more matter than the Foreland itself, which is always

distant, and then is gone.

Yet here we were. We had met before dawn, for that very voyage, because

of an indifferent word spoken yesterday. The bar, too, would have to be

crossed. The bar! Besides, we were getting most unreasonably hungry,

and so could not smoke; and this induced the early morning temper,

which is vile, and would be worse than the early morning courage but

for the fact that that sort of courage is unknown in man, never rising

to more than a bleak and miserable fortitude.

Charon hailed us from below the quay. He had with him a nondescript

attendant. We embarked for his craft, which he said was anchored in

midstream. We recognised him as our sailor of yesterday, though now

there was something glum and ominous about him. He had no other word

for us, but rowed steadily, and looked down his beard. His bark was

like himself, when, still in resignation to what we had asked for, we

boarded her. She was flush-decked, her freeboard was about eighteen

inches, she had no bulwarks--to tell the truth, she was but a very

barge, with that look of stricken poverty which is the sure mark of

the usefulness of the merely industrious. She would float, I guessed,

if not kept too long in seas that washed her imperfect hatch-covers.

She would sail her distance, if the wind did not force her over till

the water reached the rent in her deck. She could carry thirty tons of

stone; and, in fair weather, with reckless men, thirty-five tons. She

had a freeboard, I repeat, of one foot six inches, now she was light,

and peering through the interstices of her hatch-boards I could see her

kelson, and note that though she did not leak like a basket she was

doing her best. We were going to the Foreland to gather stones for the

ballast of ships. Absurd and desperate enterprise! We could hear faint

moaning, when attentive. That was the voice of the bar, three miles

away.

The skipper and his man hoisted the mainsail, and we three manned the

windlass, working in link by link a cable without end, till we were

automata going up and down indifferent to both this life and the life

to come. The barge gave a little leap as the anchor cleared.

The foresail was set. We drifted sideways round the hill. The silent

houses, with white faces, looked at us one by one. We found a little

wind, and the barge walked off past the lighthouse, which still was

winking at us. There came a weighty gust; the gear shook and banged,

but held taut. Off she went.

Burra was behind us. Before us was a morose grey void. The bay

apparently was only space, uncreated, unlighted; though in the

neighbourhood of our barge we noticed there was the beginning of form

in that dim and neutral world. Long leaden mounds of water out of

nowhere moved inwards past us, slow and heavy, lifting the barge and

dropping her into hollows where her sails shook, and spilled their

draught. We three grasped stays, and peered outwards into the icy

vacancy, wondering whether this was the free life, whether we were

enjoying it, whether we wanted to go to the Foreland, and how long this

would last. In the east there formed a low stratum of gold. Some of the

leaden mounds were now burnished, or they glinted with precious ore.

When the light broadened the air seemed to grow colder, as though day

had sharpened the arrows of the wind.

The hollow murmur from the bar increased to an intermittent plunging

roar, and presently we fell into that noise. The smother stood the

barge up, and stood her down, and drenched the mainsail to the peak.

But it was only in play. We were worth nothing worse. We were allowed

to go by, and one of us pumped the wash out of her, for the play had

been somewhat rough.

In the long swell of the bay our movements became rhythmic, and we

settled down quietly in a long reach. A vault of blue had shaped

over us. The Foreland was born into the world. It looked towards the

new day, and was of amber; but over the moors to the north-east the

rain-clouds, a gathering of sullen battalions, challenged the dawn

with an entrenched region of gloom. Yet when the sun arose and looked

straight at them, they went. It was a good morning. Now we could see

all the bay, coloured and defined in every hanging field, steep, and

combe. The waters danced. The head of the skipper appeared at the

scuttle--only one at a time could get into our cabin--and he had a

large communal basin of tea, and a loaf speared on a long knife.

The Foreland, to which for hours our work seemed to bring us no nearer,

which had been mocking the efforts to approach it of an obstinate

little ship with a crew too stupid to realise that efforts to reach

an enchanted coast were futile, suddenly relented. It grew higher

and tangible. At last we felt that it was drawing us, rather too

intimately, towards its overshadowing eminence. The nearer it got, the

greater grew my surprise that in a time long past man had found the

heart to put off in a galley, to leave what he knew, and to stand in to

an unknown shore, if it offered no more than our cape. The apparition

of the Foreland was as chill as the shadow in the soul of man. It

appeared to have some affinity with that shadow. Though monstrous and

towering, it seemed buoyant and without gravity, an image of original

and sombre doubt. Above our mast, when I looked up, earthquakes and

landslides were impending, arrested in collapse. But I thought they

were quivering, as though the arrest were momentary. That vast mass

seemed based on rumblings, shouts, and hollow shadows. Our craft still

moved in, projected forward on vehement billows, past black jags in

blusters of foam, and then anchored with calamity suspended above. Our

ship heaved and fell on submarine displacements. The skipper and his

man went below.

When they reappeared they were naked. It was a good and even necessary

hint. We got into the boat, and pulled towards a beach which was a

narrow shelf at the base of a drenched wall. The rocks which flanked

that little beach were festooned with weeds, and sea growths hung

like curtains before the night of caves. Somehow there the water was

stilled, and all but one of us leaped into it. One man remained in the

boat.

The ocean was exploding on steeples and tables of rock. It formed domes

green and shining over submerged crags. The midday sun gave the foam

the brilliance of an unearthly light. The shore looked timeless, but it

smelt young. The sun was new in heaven.

And what were those ivory figures leaping and shouting in the surf?

As I watched them in that light a doubt shook me. I began to wonder

whether I knew that little ship, and those laughing figures, and that

sea. Who were they? Where was it? When was it?