Sightlines

by Kathleen Jamie

  Now we’re looking at stalagmites, by the soft lamplight. Some are seven or eight feet high, clotted, fatty shades, but hard and damp. They’re like huge pathological specimens, the kind preserved in jars in anatomy museums, leached of colour. Perhaps that’s what gives the cave its solemnity: it feels like we’re doing something intimate, transgressive, which we can speak about only in whispers. We have entered a body, and are moving through its ducts and channels and sites of processes. The very chamber we stand in is streaked with iron-red; it’s like the inside of a cranium, a mind-space, as though the cave were thinking us.

  ‘El Castillo—you see,’ says Tomas, lifting his lamp. ‘This one is like a castle! And this one’—a figure drenched in calcium carbonate—‘like a bride’s dress. And look—we call this one The Family, you see—four people, two big, two small.’ Smiling, we take up the game. It’s reassuring, in this gallery of uncanny forms, to map them onto things we know in the world outside. ‘That one up there—like an owl!’ ‘Ugh—see—a guillotine.’ ‘Like’ is the word. This is like that, connected.

  We are deep in a hall of similes.

  Leaving the stalagmites, we climb a stone ramp in which steps have been cut, and enter into another stone space, higher and wider. The cave mouth, the outside world, is already a memory. This time the lamps reveal a high ceiling with formations like the gills on the underside of mushrooms. The air is steady and humid. When the five of us are gathered round, Tomas steps toward the wall with his lamp, to show us a thick, black stain on the pale wall, which begins at the floor and tapers up into the gloom of the roof space. Fuego, he says—fire. For thousands of years, Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers crept in here to sleep, bands of twenty or twenty-five people. So long ago, the soot has calcified, has turned to stone.

  A soot stain on a cave wall. It makes my neck creep. It’s like gazing back to the birth of human consciousness.

  The girl beside me shifts the weight of her bag. I shouldn’t have smiled. Stone tools, water, berries, wood to burn. Her baby. Wherever she went, she’d have been encumbered.

  The lamps move, the shadows spin, we’re moving on. But first, just as we are about to file into a narrow passage out of the fire-hall, Tomas stops. He wants us to understand something about the space we’re leaving and the deeper space we’ll shortly enter. A distinction. This place with the fire, he says, was for everyone, communal, together. It had been used for thousands of years. Frightening maybe, to crawl in here by tallow-lamp, past the stalagmites, up the stone ramp, but better to be in here, all together, than out in the night with its weathers and beasts. However, the deeper caves we are about to enter may only have been used by specialists, and not for ordinary purposes. He says—do you understand? We think it was for ritual, and not for everyone.

  We have entered a place, this cave-body, full of similes and transformations, where a stalagmite becomes a castle, fire turns to stone—but also a place of distinctions. We nod gravely as Tomas speaks. When we distinguish and segregate, we are serious-minded. When we make connections, when we say look, this is like a dress, like an owl, I am like you—then we laugh.

  We leave the chamber with the smoke stain. The two men enter the passage first. They have to duck and turn their shoulders sideways, the gap is so narrow. The girl with the bag is ahead of me; her friend with the lamp comes behind. I can smell the lamp, hissing like an animal, its body heat at my calf.

  * * *

  There was a time—until very recently in the scheme of things—when there were no wild animals, because every animal was wild; and humans were few. Animals, and animal presence over us and around us. Over every horizon, animals. Their skins clothing our skins, their fats in our lamps, their bladders to carry water, meat when we could get it.

  Now we’re crouching, like hunters, because Tomas, who is also crouching, has angled his lamp to throw the soft light into the back of a low niche, and when we look, we gasp, because in the back of the niche is a horse. So fresh! Part of a horse: with a single red line the artist has caught the droop of the jaw; another line is its neck. A rub of mane, small forward-pointing ears and a mere gesture where the left leg joins the body is enough to show that the horse is walking. That’s all—the forequarters of a small wild horse, walking in an unseen landscape.

  We don’t linger; too much light will cause the paint to fade. Tomas moves on, the horse returns to its long darkness. But soon two male ibex appear on the walls, or through the walls, with long spines and elegant back-tilted horns. They’re side by side, facing right and tilted upward, as though cautiously moving uphill and away. Then, two small bulls are revealed to us. One bull is drifting slowly upwards, his horned head melded into that of another bull, angled down. No animal is complete; all are partial, half-­disclosed, which is much how we encounter them alive.

  Here and there a dark smudge on the wall still shows where an artist’s lamp rested, smoking a little, while he or she worked. The very paints are cave minerals mixed with animal fat. But why the animals should appear in deep caves, we don’t know. Hallucinations, maybe. Shaman work. Perhaps people were drawing, in the other sense. Coaxing animal presence out of the deep source, the cave-uterus.

  We are deep in metaphor, the membranes between body and stone, and cave and animal are dissolved: melded, like the two turning bulls. We move on. Every time I think, surely, this is the end, we move on.

  There is nothing to betray the presence of water until a drop falls and silent ripples spread at our feet. The water is perfectly clear, the floor under the water visible as thick grey silt. In that silt, Tomas says, was discovered much Neolithic pottery.

  Again he lifts his lamp. Behind the pool the cave wall is a panel of crazed black hatchings and scores, like combs or rakes. Tomas says—‘these are Neolithic, made maybe 5000 years ago. By then the people were farmers, no longer hunter-gatherers. Everyone tries to interpret these marks. Many people say they are calendars but no one knows.’

  Whatever they were, compared to the Palaeolithic animals, these black hatches seem anxious and nervy, as though they addressed new human concerns. To what problems were such markings the solution? The Neolithic traces leave you with that tip-of-the-tongue feeling, like you know what they are, just can’t quite bring it to mind. But the red horse and the ibex and the floating bulls, so much, much older—those we recognise at once.

  ‘You see,’ Tomas says. ‘They knew there was water here.’ They must have told the children, even brought them all the way down here, saying—remember this cave, in case the springs run dry in the world above. Take a lamp, hold your nerve, keep going and don’t give up, there will be water.

  The wall is close, the floor uneven. When I put out a hand to steady myself, I’m very aware of that touch, aware of our exhaled breath. Many other caves which hold Palaeolithic art—Chauvet, for example—are closed to lay visitors. At the dramatic (and younger) Lascaux, with its teeming bestiary, one visits a replica, fabricated above ground. These places are closed to preserve them. As long ago, specialists and researchers only may enter, but not ordinary folk.

  You wonder if this is what drives us, what has brought us thus far: discriminations and resentments on the one hand. You, but not you. On the other hand, our ability, born perhaps of thousands of years of watching the transforming play of firelight—to think in simile, in metaphor. We can say look, that shadow is like an antler, this line suggests an ibex horn, that girl is a deer, this problem is like that; therefore, that solution might just do the trick. The connective leaps, the careful taxonomies, how our minds work.

  We leave the pool. In the midst of the Neolithic panel of hash marks and scores, there is a bird-man, flying with outstretched wings.

  * * *

  There must have been a day when people quit the cave for the last time. A gradual withdrawing, then an age of forgetting. Perhaps there have been several such times of darkness, when only animals entered to shelter, then periods of rediscovery, when the cave fulfilled new needs.

&nbs
p; Different needs for different eras. Our Palaeolithic kinship with animals, with nature, is over, broken, or so we say. Strange, though, that it should have been animals—bats—who led the way to the cave this time round. And that it should have happened just as we were discovering a new relationship, closer than ever: discovering that we’d all travelled together, separating and overlapping, out of a deep, shared evolutionary origin.

  The lamps shift again. The shadows lope. Incredibly, we are going on, farther still.

  MAGPIE MOTH

  THE LOCHAN, one of the numberless lochans on the moor, was kidney-shaped, and the breeze had formed ripples at its eastern end. It held no reeds or water lilies; it was just a blank pool formed in a complex bit of land.

  I was eating breakfast by its side, and in due course I made my way down to the water to rinse the bowl. There were three large rocks in the water, big enough to crouch on. The residue of the milk swilled away; I dabbled the spoon.

  Then I saw a moth. It caught my eye, because it was floating captive in the triangle of water held between the three rocks. An attractive moth, its white wings patterned with brown and orangey dabs. It was pinned down, without the pin, held flat by the surface tensions of the water.

  Maybe I should just have left it be—why intervene, after all? It only leads to trouble, but I was crouched above a stricken moth with a spoon in my hand. Deliverance, in the middle of nowhere, in the form of the Great Teaspoon. What were the chances of that?

  As soon as the spoon took up the moth’s infinitesimal weight, the creature jerked its legs, but it was so water­logged that its wings clamped to the spoon and wrapped around the spoon’s rim onto its convex side. I didn’t fancy scraping its wings with my fingernail, so lowered the spoon back into the water. The moth floated free and relaxed into its shape of open helplessness. This time I lifted the spoon more carefully, trying to ensure the moth was centred in the spoon’s concavity. The trick, I reckoned, was to bring a little water, too, enough to slide the moth from the spoon onto the rock the right way up.

  Partial success. The moth lay on the rock. The wings on the left were unfurled, but those on the right were all scrunched up. The rocks were covered in thin dabs of yeasty lichens, and against those colours the moth, so open and flagrant on the water, was immediately lost.

  Though the morning sun was warm enough to dry the moth’s wings, I doubted now they would function; some sort of coating, their back-of-the-cupboard mothy dustiness, looked like it had been ruined. Besides, there was something about the balance of the moth which was awry.

  Awry, but it was moving. With some apprehension, I looked more closely. With one antenna the moth was testing the minute facets of rock, a back-and-forth movement like a blind man’s stick. But something was certainly lopsided, and I didn’t like it. Perhaps I should just have left it alone. A fish would have got it soon enough.

  Then I remembered my magnifying glass. It had been my birthday, and a friend had given me a foldaway magnifying glass. The moth, having been rescued for good or ill, would now suffer itself to be scrutinised. But not without dread: I feared I’d done it damage. I was in there, implicated now.

  The glass showed me its two black lightless moth eyes, and a tuft of fur at the back of its head. There was the rolled spotted rag of its body, not three quarters of an inch long. A magpie moth. Why magpie? There was nothing pied about it. Moth eyes. What do they see with their moth eyes?

  But now, as I angled the glass, the cause of its lopsidedness became apparent. The tip of the moth’s left front leg was hooked round and glued to its left eye by a tiny droplet of water. A water-drop—what strength is there in that? Too much for a moth to break, apparently. It was stuck in a grotesque posture, but also a bit comic: it looked like a gentleman holding up a monocle, the better to inspect me, as I peered at it through my own lens.

  The monocled moth. The loop formed by the bent leg would accept something very small. A reed, perhaps, but there were none. The nib of a pen. Half lying on the rock, magnifying glass in one hand, I fumbled to open the pen in my pocket. Then, with the moth’s black eye in my sights, I made one tiny tweak; the moth’s leg was free.

  Like one released from a spell, the moth began a frantic crawling over the rock. God, I thought, it’s in pain. I’ve wounded it. With its good wings open, as pretty as ever, the right wings still furled up, the moth dragged itself over the rock-edge and walked headfirst down the sheer side, straight back toward the water. A few inches down, however, it stopped. It was in the shade, all four legs like guy ropes, holding it to the rock. An instinct, maybe, to get out of the sight of birds.

  Enough. The bubble of my attention popped. I stood too quickly, swooned a little, because there was the wide moor, the loch and breezy grasses reaching for miles, all scaling up to meet me. I’d been absorbed in the minuscule: a moth’s eye, a dab of lichen; been granted a glimpse into the countless millions of tiny processes and events that form the moor. Millions! Tiny creatures, flowers, bacteria, opening, growing, dividing, creeping about their business. It’s all happening out there, and all you have to do, girl, is get your foot out of your eye.

  Ach, perhaps I should have left the moth alone; I’d probably done it more harm than good. After all, laid on the water, its patterned wings unfolded and perfect, it looked to be in a state of bliss, but what do we know?

  I shook myself, went back up to the car.

  ON RONA

  FAR OVER THE HORIZON, out in the north Atlantic, where one might expect a clear run to Iceland or even Labrador, or, if anything, just a guano-streaked gull-slum, the island of Rona is one last green hill rising from the waves.

  Or so they tell me. It’s forty miles out, several hours’ sailing, but pretty soon I was prostrate on the aft deck, shivering under the wind- and engine-noise. From deep in my sick cocoon I heard the others calling they could see Rona on the horizon, then more cold, salt-immobiled ages passed until the boat slowed, the wind-rush dropped. When they cut the engines and sent down the anchor, I felt gratitude, but then the boat began wallowing. Worse than the leaping waves was that awful wallowing. There were guillemots, but they sounded as though they were stuck down a well, because we were in the shelter of a geo—a steep-sided inlet. There were dark cliffs on either side, a rattling as the dinghy was lowered, and voices, one, a man’s, saying, ‘Let’s get her ashore.’

  I must have jumped from the dinghy and scrambled up the slabby rocks as per instructions and, meeting grass, collapsed on it. A green unheaving bosom. Blessed deep core of steady rock, reaching down and down. Lay there till the nausea passed, and the shivering.

  Coming back to myself, I heard land-birds, starlings, rolled over, looked up at the sky, smelled a sweet smell, some kind of wildflower, thrift maybe. How lush the grass was! That surprised me. Lush-long and harsh at once. The sky was high and bright with fleet clouds. Lay there, as slowly the sun and breeze dried my waterproofs. Bob the skipper blew the boat’s horn as he left, then Stuart and Jill appeared up from the shore, grinning, laden with gear, and we were on our own.

  So, for a short while last summer we had Rona to ourselves. Alone in the encircling ocean, me and my companions, Stuart Murray and Jill Harden. Stuart’s of that sterling tradition of self-taught naturalists; a bird-man who says, ‘Believe what you see’—but a prerequisite of that believing is a great accuracy of seeing, and a rough idea of what you’re looking at. For him Rona was an old and beloved haunt; he had brought notes in his own hand from thirty years before—lists and columns of figures pertaining to puffin colonies, to black back gulls and storm petrels. Jill is an archaeologist and, like Stuart, not one to be fanciful. Though she knew most of the Scottish islands, Rona was new to her; it intrigued her because, despite being so remote, as we would say nowadays, when our sense of centre is different, it had been inhabited for centuries. On its south-facing side, there’s a long-abandoned village surrounded by a swirl of field systems, and a very early Christian chapel. These remains are themselves ancient,
but who knows what lies beneath.

  Those two, Jill and Stuart, were great observers. Late on the afternoon we arrived, when I’d recovered myself and we’d unpacked all the food and gear, I was out walking, when I caught sight of Stuart in characteristic pose. He was hunkered against an exposed rock that offered views of a cliff loud with guillemots and kittiwakes. He had binoculars in one hand and a notebook pressed open on his knee. I was back at the bothy when he arrived through the heavy door.

  ‘Well?’ I said, meaning, ‘How goes the world?’

  ‘No’ bad.’

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘Just having a damn good look.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Kittiwakes have young, two sometimes.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘It is good. Maybe it’s the start of a recovery. How many gulls have you seen?’

  ‘Me?’ I said. ‘Gulls? Some. A few.’

  A few standing on a broken wall, keeping a steely eye on us interlopers.

  ‘Exactly. There were near a thousand pairs of great black backs in 2001, chicks running everywhere. They’ve completely collapsed.’

  Then Jill arrived back, too, carrying her drawing board. Already she’d been down at the chapel, and the semi-subterranean village where she’d spend much of her time, brushing earth from stones with her strong hands, crawling into passages, shining a torch into gaps unlit for ages.

  ‘Well?’ I said again.

  That merry smile. ‘Ooh, interesting.’

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘Oh, just . . . having a look!’

  * * *

  Inhabited once, but now the island is returned to birds and seals; grey seals in thousands breed there, many seemingly disinclined to leave. Every day, all around the shore, were rocks softened by the shapes of seals, watching us from the waters. What we called ‘the bothy’ was properly a field station for a team of biologists who arrive every November to study the seals at pupping time. The bothy was a green shed, galeproof and insulated, with two rooms, one with bunks and the other with a kitchen and table, and a container for well-water. Every store and roof­-space was crammed with equipment and supplies. There were spades and ropes and cupboards of tinned food, and a shelf of fantasy novels and thrillers, which says much about Rona in November. There was even a handwritten copy of Kipling’s ‘If’, pinned to the wall—‘If you can keep your head when all about you / are losing theirs’. But there was little fear of that: though we were on our own and far from anywhere, Stuart and Jill were both relaxed and robust, old hands at this kind of thing.