The Living Mountain

by Nan Shepherd

  These people are bone of the mountain. As the way of life changes, and a new economy moulds their life, perhaps they too will change. Yet so long as they live a life close to their wild land, subject to its weathers, something of its own nature will permeate theirs. They will be marked men.

  1. Those named are now, with the exception of Carrie, daughter of Sandy Mackenzie, all dead, but their descendants live on.

  TEN

  Sleep

  Well, I have discovered my mountain—its weathers, its airs and lights, its singing burns, its haunted dells, its pinnacles and tarns, its birds and flowers, its snows, its long blue distances. Year by year, I have grown in familiarity with them all. But if the whole truth of them is to be told as I have found it, I too am involved. I have been the instrument of my own discovering; and to govern the stops of the instrument needs learning too. Thus the senses must be trained and disciplined, the eye to look, the ear to listen, the body must be trained to move with the right harmonies. I can teach my body many skills by which to learn the nature of the mountain. One of the most compelling is quiescence.

  No one knows the mountain completely who has not slept on it. As one slips over into sleep, the mind grows limpid; the body melts; perception alone remains. One neither thinks, nor desires, nor remembers, but dwells in pure intimacy with the tangible world.

  These moments of quiescent perceptiveness before sleep are among the most rewarding of the day. I am emptied of preoccupation, there is nothing between me and the earth and sky. In midsummer the north glows with light long after midnight is past. As I watch, the light comes pouring round the edges of the shapes that stand against the sky, sharpening them till the more slender have a sort of glowing insubstantiality, as though they were themselves nothing but light. Up on the plateau, light lingers incredibly far into the night, long after it has left the rest of the earth. Watching it, the mind grows incandescent and its glow burns down into deep and tranquil sleep.

  Daytime sleep, too, is good. In the heat of the day, after an early start, to lie in full daylight on the summits and slip in and out of sleep is one of the sweetest luxuries in life. For falling asleep on the mountain has the delicious corollary of awaking. To come up out of the blank of sleep and open one’s eyes on scaur and gully, wondering, because one had forgotten where one was, is to recapture some pristine amazement not often savoured. I do not know if it is a common experience (certainly it is unusual in my normal sleep), but when I fall asleep out of doors, perhaps because outdoor sleep is deeper than normal, I awake with an empty mind. Consciousness of where I am comes back quite soon, but for one startled moment I have looked at a familiar place as though I had never seen it before.

  Such sleep may last for only a few minutes, yet even a single minute serves this end of uncoupling the mind. It would be merely fanciful to suppose that some spirit or emanation of the mountain had intention in thus absorbing my consciousness, so as to reveal itself to a naked apprehension difficult otherwise to obtain. I do not ascribe sentience to the mountain; yet at no other moment am I sunk quite so deep into its life. I have let go my self. The experience is peculiarly precious because it is impossible to coerce.

  A 4 am start leaves plenty of time for these hours of quiescence, and perhaps of sleep, on the summits. One’s body is limber with the sustained rhythm of mounting, and relaxed in the ease that follows the eating of food. One is as tranquil as the stones, rooted far down in their immobility. The soil is no more a part of the earth. If sleep comes at such a moment, its coming is a movement as natural as day. And after—ceasing to be a stone, to be the soil of the earth, opening eyes that have human cognisance behind them upon what one has been so profoundly a part of. That is all. One has been in.

  Once, however, I fell asleep where I would not have chosen to do so. We were on Braeriach. It was a day with hazed horizons and a flat view that had little life or interest; so we lay on our faces just beyond the summit, as near to the edge as we dared, our bodies safe to the earth, and looked down into Coire Brochain. The burns were full and everywhere there was the noise of waterfalls. We watched them drop, pouring on and on over the rock faces. Far below us on the floor of the hollow, deer were feeding, small moving specks. We watched them move. Then the sun came out and warmed us, and the pattern of movement and sound made us drowsy. Then abruptly I awoke and found myself staring down black walls of rock to a bottom incredibly remote. It is actually, I believe, some 2000 feet from the summit to the bed of the burn below; to the bottom of the inner corrie, where the deer were still feeding, is not much over a thousand; but to that first horrified stare, dissociated from all thought and all memory, sensation purely, the drop seemed inordinate. With a gasp of relief I said ‘Coire Brochain,’ turned round on my back, eased myself from the edge, and sat up. I had looked into the abyss.

  If the depth of its insensibility is the boon of daytime sleep on the mountain, nights under the sky are most delectable when the sleep is light. I like it to be so light that I am continually coming to the surface of awareness and sinking back again, just seeing, not bedevilled with thought, but living in the clear simplicity of the senses. I have slept in the open as early as May and as late as the first week in October, a time when, in our odd and unbalanced climate, there is usually a splash of radiant weather.

  My one October night without a roof was bland as silk, with a late moon rising in the small hours and the mountains fluid as loch water under a silken dawn: a night of the purest witchery, to make one credit all the tales of glamourie that Scotland tries so hard to refute and cannot. I don’t wonder. Anyone caught out of doors at four or five on such a morning would start spelling wrong. Faerie and glamourie and witcherie are not for men who lie in bed till eight. Find an October night warm enough to sleep out, and a dawn all mixed up with moonshine, and you will see that I am right. You too will be mis-spelled.

  I do not like glamourie. It interposes something artificial between the world, which is one reality, and the self, which is another reality, though overlaid with a good many crusts of falseness and convention. And it is the fusion of these two realities that keeps life from corruption. So let us have done with spells.

  Most of my nights out of doors have been simple summer nights, and I like waking often in them because the world is so beautiful then, and also because wild creatures, and birds, come close to a sleeper without suspicion. But there is an art in waking. I must come fully awake, and open my eyes without having moved. Once, sleeping in the daytime, I jerked awake, to find that a young blackbird, accustomed to feed from the hand, had been walking along my leg. He had asked for his alms in the odd throaty chuckle he affected, too deep in pitch to penetrate my sleep. And once a chaffinch touched my breast. In both these cases I was so lightly asleep that I felt the contact and was awake in time to catch the startled flight of my visitor. If only I had not been such a fool as to jump! But then my sleep had been broken. No, it must be a natural awakening: my eyes were closed, and now they are open, nothing more than that; and ten yards away from me a red deer is feeding in the dawn light. He moves without a sound. The world is entirely still. I too am still. Or am I? Did I move? He lifts his head, his nostrils twitch, we look at each other. Why did I let him meet my eyes? He is off. But not for far. He checks in his flight and eyes me again. This time I do not look at him. After a while he drops his head, reassured, and goes on feeding.

  Sometimes I have floated up from sleep at dawn, and seen a roe, and sunk back into sleep again before my conscious mind had registered the thing. The glimpse remains a vision, wholly true, although I could not swear to it in court. When I wake for good that morning I have forgotten it. Later in the day the thought teases at the edges of my brain—But did I dream that roe?—and because I can’t be sure it haunts me for a long time.

  Or the paling below my sleeping place may be alive with finches. I have counted twenty of them when I opened my eyes. Or tits, turning themselves about in the engaging way these morsels have. Of all the tit f
amily the one who does this to perfection is the rarest of them, the tiny crested tit, whom I have seen more than once showing himself about, now back, now front, now side, keeping each pose for a moment before flirting to a new one on a higher or a lower twig. A finished mannequin.

  At other times the ear awakens first. Snipe are drumming. Then I sit up in the bag and search the sky to see the lovely downward swoop. Sometimes it is still too dark (even in a Scots midsummer) to see the pattern of movement, only the zooming fall hangs on the ear.

  Out of sleep too I have heard the roaring of stags; but these are no longer outdoor nights. The nights then are cold and dark, and the roaring is fearsome as it comes from the hills that are usually so silent. The silence may be broken by another roaring. When the snows melt, cataracts sound in my ears all night, pouring through my sleep; and after many days of rain I have waked to hear the burns come down in spate, with a duller and more persistent roar than that of the stags, but in its own way as fearsome.

  ELEVEN

  The Senses

  Having disciplined mind and body to quiescence, I must discipline them also to activity. The senses must be used. For the ear, the most vital thing that can be listened to here is silence. To bend the ear to silence is to discover how seldom it is there. Always something moves. When the air is quite still, there is always running water; and up here that is a sound one can hardly lose, though on many stony parts of the plateau one is above the watercourses. But now and then comes an hour when the silence is all but absolute, and listening to it one slips out of time. Such a silence is not a mere negation of sound. It is like a new element, and if water is still sounding with a low far-off murmur, it is no more than the last edge of an element we are leaving, as the last edge of land hangs on the mariner’s horizon. Such moments come in mist, or snow, or a summer night (when it is too cool for the clouds of insects to be abroad), or a September dawn. In September dawns I hardly breathe—I am an image in a ball of glass. The world is suspended there, and I in it.

  Once, on a night of such clear silence, long past midnight, lying awake outside the tent, my eyes on the plateau where an afterwash of light was lingering, I heard in the stillness a soft, an almost imperceptible thud. It was enough to make me turn my head. There on the tent pole a tawny owl stared down at me. I could just discern his shape against the sky. I stared back. He turned his head about, now one eye upon me, now the other, then melted down into the air so silently that had I not been watching him I could not have known he was gone. To have heard the movement of the midnight owl—that was rare, it was a minor triumph.

  Bird song, and the noises birds make that are not singing, and the small sounds of their movements, are for the ear to catch. If there is one bird-call more than another that for me embodies the spirit of the mountain, it is the cry of the golden plover running in the bare and lonely places.

  But the ear can listen also to turmoil. Gales crash into the Garbh Choire with the boom of angry seas: one can hear the air shattering itself upon rock. Cloud-bursts batter the earth and roar down the ravines, and thunder reverberates with a prolonged and menacing roll in the narrow trough of Loch Avon. Mankind is sated with noise; but up here, this naked, this elemental savagery, this infinitesimal cross-section of sound from the energies that have been at work for aeons in the universe, exhilarates rather than destroys.

  Each of the senses is a way in to what the mountain has to give. The palate can taste the wild berries, blaeberry, ‘wild free-born cranberry’ and, most subtle and sweet of all, the avern or cloudberry, a name like a dream. The juicy gold globe melts against the tongue, but who can describe a flavour? The tongue cannot give it back. One must find the berries, golden-ripe, to know their taste.

  So with the scents. All the aromatic and heady fragrances—pine and birch, bog myrtle, the spicy juniper, heather and the honey-sweet orchis, and the clean smell of wild thyme—mean nothing at all in words. They are there, to be smelled. I am like a dog—smells excite me. On a hot moist midsummer day, I have caught a rich fruity perfume rising from the mat of grass, moss and wild berry bushes that covers so much of the plateau. The earthy smell of moss, and the soil itself, is best savoured by grubbing. Sometimes the rank smell of deer assails one’s nostril, and in the spring the sharp scent of fire.

  But eye and touch have the greatest potency for me. The eye brings infinity into my vision. I am lying on my back, while over me huge cumuli tear past upon a furious gale. But beyond them, very far away, in a remote pure sky, there float pale exquisite striations of cloud that can hardly be detected. I close one eye and they recede, only with both eyes open do they come into sharp enough focus for me to be sure that they are there. So now I know that the mountain makes its own wind, for these pale striae float almost motionless, while still the gale above my head drives the monstrous cumuli on. It is the eye that discovers the mystery of light, not only the moon and the stars and the vast splendours of the Aurora, but the endless changes the earth itself undergoes under changing lights. And that again, I perceive, is the mountain’s own doing, for its own atmosphere alters the light. Now scaur and gully take on a gloss, now they shimmer, now they are stark—like a painting without perspective, in which objects are depicted all on one plane and of the same size, they fill the canvas and there is neither foreground nor background. Now there are sky-blue curves on the water as it slides over stones, now an impenetrable tarry blackness, slightly silvered like tar. The naked birches, if I face the sun, look black, a shining black, fine carved ebony. But if the sun is behind me it penetrates a red cloud of twigs and picks out vividly the white trunks, as though the cloud of red were behind the trunks. In a dry air, the hills shrink, they look far off and innocent; but in a moisture-laden air they charge forward, insistent and enormous, and in mist they have a nightmare quality. This is not only because I cannot see where I am going, but because the small portion of earth that I do see is isolated from its familiar surroundings, and I do not recognise it. Nothing is so ghostly as mist over snow. On a March day, I am climbing into the corrie that holds Loch Dubh; the snows have melted from the lower slopes and the burns are turbulent. They can be crossed only on snow bridges, levels of snow down which runs a sagging uneven line that shows where the water is pouring underneath. Further up, it is all snow. And now the cloud sinks down on me, a pale mist that washes out all the landmarks the snow had not already obliterated. Rocks loom out of it, gigantic, monstrous. The lochan below Loch Dubh seems enormous; the steep climb beyond it towers upward so giddily into nothingness that I am assailed by fear: this must be the precipice itself that I am climbing—the lochan was the loch. I have passed it and am clambering towards the cliff. I know it can’t be true, but the dim white ghostliness out of which stark shapes batter at my brain has overpowered my reason. I can’t go further. I scramble downwards, and the grey, rather dismal, normality below the mist has a glow of comfort.

  On another misty day—a transparent mist—I saw a peregrine falcon fly out from a precipice. There were the curved and pointed wings, the rapid down-beat of the pinions. Yet I stared incredulous. I was gazing upwards at a fabulous bird. No peregrine could be of such a size. It was only when he stood still on the air, before sailing back to the crag, that I believed my own eyesight; and it was only then that I understood what Hopkins meant when he wrote:

  To see the eagle’s bulk, render’d in mists

  Hang of a treble size.

  Mist, oddly, can also correct the illusions of the eye. A faint mist floating in a line of hills brings out the gradations of height and of distance in what had seemed one hill: there is seen to be a near and a far. In something the same way, the reflection of land in glassy water defines and clarifies its points, so that relative distance and height in a tumble of hills, so deceptive to the eye, are made clear in the loch reflection.

  The eye has other illusions, that depend on one’s own position. Lying on my back, and looking across the Garbh Choire to the scree slopes above Loch an Uaine,
I see them as horizontal; just as from immediately below it, the Lurcher seems a horizontal plain with erect rock masses rising from it. One year we pitched our tent below the curve of the hill above Tullochgrue, on the far side from the Cairngorms. We looked out on a field that ran upwards, and above it the whole line of mountains, cut off about the 2500 feet level: the intervening moor and forest had vanished. As I lay night after night outside the door of the tent, watching the last light glow upon the plateau, I had an odd sensation of being actually myself up there. My field felt the same height, I also lay bathed in the afterglow that had gone from all but the summits. Half-closing the eyes can also change the values of what I look upon. A scatter of white flowers in grass, looked at through half-closed eyes, blaze out with a sharp clarity as though they had actually risen up out of their background. Such illusions, depending on how the eye is placed and used, drive home the truth that our habitual vision of things is not necessarily right: it is only one of an infinite number, and to glimpse an unfamiliar one, even for a moment, unmakes us, but steadies us again. It’s queer but invigorating. It will take a long time to get to the end of a world that behaves like this if I do no more than turn round on my side or my back.

  Other delights the eye can catch—quick moments that pass and are gone for ever: spray blown like smoke from a mountain loch in a gale; a green gleam on the snow where I know a loch lies, caught before I can see the water itself; Loch Avon, glimpsed on a rainy day from the side of the rocky burn above it, as deep a green as Loch an Uaine itself; a rainbow wavering and flickering, formed on a small shower blown by a furious wind; the air quivering above sun-filled hollows on drowsy summer afternoons; a double rainbow, dark sky in between, arched over the river, its reflection stretching from bank to bank.