One day this summer I sailed with Padruic Macrae and Ivor McLean,
boatmen of Iona, along the south-western reach of the Ross of Mull.
The whole coast of the Ross is indescribably wild and desolate. From
Feenafort (Fhionnphort), opposite Balliemore of Icolmkill, to the hamlet
of Earraid Lighthouse, it were hardly exaggeration to say that the whole
tract is uninhabited by man and unenlivened by any green thing. It is
the haunt of the cormorant and the seal.
No one who has not visited this region can realise its barrenness. Its
one beauty is the faint bloom which lies upon it in the sunlight—a bloom
which becomes as the glow of an inner flame when the sun westers without
cloud or mist. This is from the ruddy hue of the granite, of which all
that wilderness is wrought.
It is a land tortured by the sea, scourged by the sea-wind. A myriad
lochs, fiords, inlets, passages, serrate its broken frontiers.
Innumerable islets and reefs, fanged like ravenous wolves, sentinel
every shallow, lurk in every strait. He must be a skilled boatman who
would take the Sound of Earraid and penetrate the reaches of the Ross.
There are many days in the months of peace, as the islanders call the
period from Easter till the autumnal equinox, when Earraid and the rest
of Ross seem under a spell. It is the spell of beauty. Then the yellow
light of the sun is upon the tumbled masses and precipitous shelves and
ledges, ruddy petals or leaves of that vast Flower of Granite. Across it
the cloud shadows trail their purple elongations, their scythe-sweep
curves, and abrupt evanishing floodings of warm dusk. From wet boulder
to boulder, from crag to shelly crag, from fissure to fissure, the sea
ceaselessly weaves a girdle of foam. When the wide luminous stretch of
waters beyond—green near the land, and farther out all of a living blue,
interspersed with wide alleys of amethyst—is white with the sea-horses,
there is such a laughter of surge and splash all the way from
Slugan-dubh to the Rudha-nam-Maol-Mòra, or to the tide-swept promontory
of the Sgeireig-a’-Bhochdaidh, that, looking inland, one sees through a
rainbow-shimmering veil of ever-flying spray.
But the sun spell is even more fugitive upon the face of this wild land
than the spell of beauty upon a woman. So runs one of our proverbs: as
the falling of the wave, as the fading of the leaf, so is the beauty of
a woman, unless—ah, that _unless_, and the indiscoverable fount of joy
that can only be come upon by hazard once in life, and thereafter only
in dreams, and the Land of the Rainbow that is never reached, and the
green sea-doors of Tir-na-thonn, that open now no more to any wandering
wave!
It was from Ivor McLean, on that day, I heard the strange tale of his
kinsman Murdoch, the tale of “The Ninth Wave” that I have told
elsewhere. It was Padruic, however, who told me of the Sea-witch of
Earraid.
“Yes,” he said, “I have heard of the _each-uisge_ (the sea-beast,
sea-kelpie, or water-horse), but I have never seen it with the eyes. My
father and my brother knew of it. But this thing I know, and this what
we call _an-cailleach-uisge_ (the siren or water-witch); the
_cailliach_, mind you, not the _maighdeann-mhàra_ (the mermaid), who
means no harm. May she hear my saying it! The cailliach is old and clad
in weeds, but her voice is young, and she always sits so that the light
is in the eyes of the beholder. She seems to him young also, and fair.
She has two familiars in the form of seals, one black as the grave, and
the other white as the shroud that is in the grave; and these sometimes
upset a boat, if the sailor laughs at the uisge-cailliach’s song.
“A man netted one of those seals, more than a hundred years ago, with
his herring-trawl, and dragged it into the boat; but the other seal tore
at the net so savagely, with its head and paws over the bows, that it
was clear no net would long avail. The man heard them crying and
screaming, and then talking low and muttering, like women in a frenzy.
In his fear he cast the nets adrift, all but a small portion that was
caught in the thwarts. Afterwards, in this portion, he found a tress of
woman’s hair. And that is just so: to the Stones be it said.
“The grandson of this man, Tòmais McNair, is still living, a shepherd on
Eilean-Uamhain, beyond Lunga in the Cairnburg Isles. A few years ago,
off Callachan Point, he saw the two seals, and heard, though he did not
see, the cailliach. And that which I tell you—Christ’s Cross before
me—is a true thing.”
All the time that Phadruic was speaking, I saw that Ivor McLean looked
away: either as though he heard nothing, or did not wish to hear. There
was dream in his eyes; I saw that, so said nothing for a time.
“What is it, Ivor?” I asked at last, in a low voice. He started, and
looked at me strangely.
“What will you be asking that for? What are you doing in my mind, that
is secret?”
“I see that you are brooding over something. Will you not tell me?”
“Tell her,” said Phadruic quietly.
But Ivor kept silent. There was a look in his eyes which I understood.
Thereafter we sailed on, with no word in the boat at all.
That night, a dark, rainy night it was, with an uplift wind beating high
over against the hidden moon, I went to the cottage where Ivor McLean
lived with his old deaf mother, deaf nigh upon twenty years, ever since
the night of the nights when she heard the women whisper that Callum,
her husband, was among the drowned, after a death-wind had blown.
When I entered, he was sitting before the flaming coal-fire; for on Iona
now, by decree of MacCailin Mòr, there is no more peat burned.
“You will tell me now, Ivor?” was all I said.
“Yes; I will be telling you now. And the reason why I did not tell you
before was because it is not a wise or a good thing to tell ancient
stories about the sea while still on the running wave. Macrae should not
have done that thing. It may be we shall suffer for it when next we go
out with the nets. We were to go to-night; but no, not I, no no, for
sure, not for all the herring in the Sound.”
“Is it an ancient _sgeul_, Ivor?”
“Ay. I am not for knowing the age of these things. It may be as old as
the days of the Féinn for all I know. It has come down to us. Alasdair
MacAlasdair of Tiree, him that used to boast of having all the stories
of Colum and Brighde, it was he told it to the mother of my mother, and
she to me.”
“What is it called?”
“Well, this and that; but there is no harm in saying it is called the
Dark Nameless One.”
“The Dark Nameless One!”
“It is this way. But will you ever have been hearing of the MacOdrums of
Uist?”
“Ay: the Sliochd-nan-ròn.”
“That is so. God knows. The Sliochd-nan-ròn ... the progeny of the
Seal.... Well, well, no man knows what moves in the shadow of life. And
now I will be telling you that old ancient tale, as it was given to me
by the mother of my mother.”
On a day of the days, Colum was walking alone by the sea-shore. The
monks were at the hoe or the spade, and some milking the kye, and some
at the fishing. They say it was on the first day of the _Faoilleach
Geamhraidh_, the day that is called _Am fheill Brighde_.
The holy man had wandered on to where the rocks are, opposite to Soa. He
was praying and praying, and it is said that whenever he prayed aloud,
the barren egg in the nest would quicken, and the blighted bud unfold,
and the butterfly cleave its shroud.
Of a sudden he came upon a great black seal, lying silent on the rocks,
with wicked eyes.
“My blessing upon you, O Ròn,” he said with the good kind courteousness
that was his.
“_Droch spadadh ort_,” answered the seal. “A bad end to you, Colum of
the Gown.”
“Sure, now,” said Colum angrily, “I am knowing by that curse that you
are no friend of Christ, but of the evil pagan faith out of the north.
For here I am known ever as Colum the White, or as Colum the Saint; and
it is only the Picts and the wanton Normen who deride me because of the
holy white robe I wear.”
“Well, well,” replied the seal, speaking the good Gaelic as though it
were the tongue of the deep sea, as God knows it may be for all you, I,
or the blind wind can say; “Well, well, let that thing be: it’s a
wave-way here or a wave-way there. But now if it is a Druid you are,
whether of Fire or of Christ, be telling me where my woman is, and where
my little daughter.”
At this, Colum looked at him for a long while. Then he knew.
“It is a man you were once, O Ròn?”
“Maybe ay and maybe no.”
“And with that thick Gaelic that you have, it will be out of the north
isles you come?”
“That is a true thing.”
“Now I am for knowing at last who and what you are. You are one of the
race of Odrum the Pagan.”
“Well, I am not denying it, Colum. And what is more, I am Angus
MacOdrum, Aonghas mac Torcall mhic Odrum, and the name I am known by is
Black Angus.”
“A fitting name too,” said Colum the Holy, “because of the black sin in
your heart, and the black end God has in store for you.”
At that Black Angus laughed.
“Why is there laughter upon you, Man-Seal?”
“Well, it is because of the good company I’ll be having. But, now, give
me the word: Are you for having seen or heard aught of a woman called
Kirsteen McVurich?”
“Kirsteen—Kirsteen—that is the good name of a nun it is, and no
sea-wanton!”
“Oh, a name here or a name there is soft sand. And so you cannot be for
telling me where my woman is?”
“No.”
“Then a stake for your belly, and the nails through your hands, thirst
on your tongue, and the corbies at your eyne!”
And, with that, Black Angus louped into the green water, and the hoarse
wild laugh of him sprang into the air and fell dead against the cliff
like a wind-spent mew.
Colum went slowly back to the brethren, brooding deep. “God is good,” he
said in a low voice, again and again; and each time that he spoke there
came a fair sweet daisy into the grass, or a yellow bird rose up, with
song to it for the first time wonderful and sweet to hear.
As he drew near to the House of God he met Murtagh, an old monk of the
ancient old race of the isles.
“Who is Kirsteen McVurich, Murtagh?” he asked.
“She was a good servant of Christ, she was, in the south isles, O Colum,
till Black Angus won her to the sea.”
“And when was that?”
“Nigh upon a thousand years ago.”
At that Colum stared in amaze. But Murtagh was a man of truth, nor did
he speak in allegories. “Ay, Colum, my father, nigh upon a thousand
years ago.”
“But can mortal sin live as long as that?”
“Ay, it endureth. Long, long ago, before Oisìn sang, before Fionn,
before Cuchullin was a glorious great prince, and in the days when the
Tuatha-De Danànn were sole lords in all green Banba, Black Angus made
the woman Kirsteen McVurich leave the place of prayer and go down to the
sea-shore, and there he leaped upon her and made her his prey, and she
followed him into the sea.”
“And is death above her now?”
“No. She is the woman that weaves the sea-spells at the wild place out
yonder that is known as Earraid: she that is called
_an-cailleach-uisge_, the sea-witch.”
“Then why was Black Angus for the seeking her here and the seeking her
there?”
“It is the Doom. It is Adam’s first wife she is, that sea-witch over
there, where the foam is ever in the sharp fangs of the rocks.”
“And who will he be?”
“His body is the body of Angus the son of Torcall of the race of Odrum,
for all that a seal he is to the seeming; but the soul of him is Judas.”
“Black Judas, Murtagh?”
“Ay, Black Judas, Colum.”
But with that, Ivor Macrae rose abruptly from before the fire, saying
that he would speak no more that night. And truly enough there was a
wild, lone, desolate cry in the wind, and a slapping of the waves one
upon the other with an eerie laughing sound, and the screaming of a
sea-mew that was like a human thing.
So I touched the shawl of his mother, who looked up with startled eyes
and said, “God be with us”; and then I opened the door, and the salt
smell of the wrack was in my nostrils, and the great drowning blackness
of the night.
_THE SMOOTHING OF THE HAND_