The Dangerous Islands

by Ann Bridge

  ‘Cut them?’

  ‘No! Untie, and unpick—don’t cut anything unless I say so.’

  ‘Okay,’ Julia said; she realised that Philip was in a fearful tizzy about his lovely new mainsail.

  Meanwhile the three men set about taking off the gaff (the much smaller spar which on old-fashioned boats supports the top of a cutter’s mainsail) and stowing it; then they released the rings which fastened the sail to the mast-hoops, on which it is raised or lowered. All this had to be done very fast; the sail must be brought to deck level and ‘smothered’, i.e. crushed together, so that the wind could not get into it, while the yacht was bucking about in the heavy swell like an angry steer. It was a long job, however fast and hard they worked. At one point Julia asked for a marlin-spike to prize the cords undone. ‘Can’t spare it,’ Philip said brusquely; Julia went below and fetched her nail-scissors, and used the joined points for her by no means easy task. The deck was covered with damp canvas, under which she had to burrow to get at the boom lacings; all this time the yacht was still rolling heavily, and the huge boom, as it was progressively released from the mast and the sail, began to flog about, menacing Edina, sitting at the wheel in the cockpit.

  ‘Hi! Can’t you make that wretched boom fast?’ Philip’s wife shouted to him. ‘It’ll brain me any moment.’

  ‘Not yet—as soon as we can. Duck your head.’

  The two young women remained in this extremely uncomfortable situation for some considerable time, Edina ducking her head when the boom lurched across her, Julia working away at the lacings, and constantly being toppled over into the cockpit by the huge piece of timber. The Colonel saw these goings-on with dismay.

  ‘Can’t we at least make the after-end fast?’ he asked the Skipper—he was afraid that Miss Probyn might be knocked overboard.

  ‘Presently,’ Reeder said impatiently. ‘We must finish getting the sail unbent first, in case the wind gets up.’ The Colonel thought, rather indignantly, that his host was worrying more about his new mainsail than about his wife or his cousin. But at last the job was done; the mast-head tackle for lifting weights (curiously called a burton) raised the boom up off the dinghy, whose resilient timbers sprang back into place—it was moved a few feet forward, and the now useless boom was lashed at an angle along the starboard rail. But then the mainsail had to be disposed of. Folding and compressing a thousand superficial feet of stiff canvas is not easy; at one point Reeder stood on the tough material and stamped on it. Finally it was shoved down through the fore-hatch and stowed in the fo’c’sle. Then the weary crew dragged out the try-sail from a locker in the cockpit, bent it to the mast, and made fast the ropes which held it in position without either boom or gaff; finally it was hauled up into place.

  ‘Right, let’s try her,’ Reeder said, taking the wheel; and indeed under this curious contraption—known, Heaven knows why, as a ‘jury-rig’—the yacht proved to sail quite well. The wind, having done what damage it could, now blew steadily again; they sailed on northwards. The delay had made them late—the Colonel, to his great satisfaction, took a photograph after 10 p.m. of the Skipper’s shadow flung, enormous, by the setting sun on the try-sail.

  One of the supreme satisfactions of sailing is the curious exhilaration produced by normal habits broken up, by customary hours for sleep and meals turned topsy-turvy; one hails with delight the response to this treatment of a mind and body growing perhaps a little stiff, but not yet grown rigid beyond repair. Colonel Jamieson tried to express something of this to Julia as they sat on deck after supper, eaten at 10.30 p.m.—Edina had scrounged some chives and parsley on Canna, and made them a superb omelette.

  ‘Yes, I know what you mean. One does get groovy in towns: always drinks before lunch, drinks before dinner—which must be about eight. Of course Spain is a help, though I don’t really care to dine perpetually at half-past ten—on land, I mean.’

  This response satisfied the Colonel, casual as it was; he was asking Miss Probyn why she knew Spain so well when she interrupted him with an exclamation—‘Oh, do look at the gannets!’

  The gannet, that enormous bird, conspicuous by its size, its snowy plumage, and the black tips to its wings is normally seen soaring high, patrolling for fish, or making spectacular plunges into the sea after its prey. But here, in groups of four or five, they were flying northwards—so fast that they overhauled the yacht—only a few feet above the water. ‘We must tell Philip,’ the girl said, getting lightly onto her feet and walking aft, to the Colonel’s amused dismay; he had hoped to prolong this agreeable conversation in the bows.

  ‘Philip, why are those gannets flying so low?’ she asked. ‘Do look.’

  ‘I never saw that before in my life,’ Reeder said, gazing at the birds—‘but then I don’t sail at night if I can help it.’

  It was by now what passes for night in high latitudes in the month of June. The sun had set, leaving a broad reddish glow along the northern horizon; it was not truly dark, they could distinguish the white shapes of the great birds as they flew alongside and past the boat. This northern twilight has its own peculiar mystery, and Jamieson, to whom it was quite new, felt its spell strongly; he wondered if Miss Probyn did.

  ‘Come and sit in the bows again,’ he suggested, hoping for more talk. But Edina had gone to bed and her cousin dutifully went below, undressed, and crept into her bunk.

  The three men remained on deck: Colin because he felt that he ought to, the Colonel because he was fascinated by the strange light, and the unwontedness of the whole performance. Julia having gone he sat in the cockpit with Reeder, while Colin stretched out on the deck, and snored.

  ‘Do keep on talking,’ the Skipper said, when their mutual flow of soldierly reminiscences had at last dried up. ‘One gets so sleepy at the wheel—and one mustn’t. I suppose you want to go into North Loch Roag?’

  ‘Are there two?’ The Colonel’s office had failed to supply him with this piece of information—he felt rather foolish, but it was no good pretending.

  ‘I’m aiming for Dun Carloway or Callernish,’ he said carefully. ‘Not sure of the exact spot, of course.’

  ‘They’re only a few miles apart, anyhow,’ Reeder said, ‘and both on North Loch Roag. Good—it’s an excellent anchorage, and I believe there’s a telephone. I must get a new stick as soon as possible.’

  The Colonel faithfully kept on talking, while the red sunset band along the northern horizon gradually brightened and broadened into what would presently become a sunrise. But it was still in that curious half-darkness that they turned into Loch Roag, and Reeder, handing the wheel to Jamieson, went below and started the engine; they motored up the loch in a dead calm. Suddenly Reeder, again on deck, gave a sharp exclamation.

  ‘Good God! What on earth is that?’ He put the wheel over as a shadowy shape loomed up towards them; it was a large trawler, steaming down the loch without lights.

  ‘Poachers in territorial waters, I expect,’ the Colonel replied, remembering what the pleasant woman in the hotel at Rodel had said only the day before. ‘Can you see her markings?’ he asked.

  ‘No, the light’s still too faint. I’m always meaning to put a small searchlight on this boat. Why do you say poachers?—though I daresay you’re right.’

  Jamieson told him why.

  ‘H’m. That might be pretty relevant for you.’

  ‘So I think.’

  Philip Reeder roused Colin to help while they cast anchor—it was 3.30 a.m., Summer Time.

  ‘Any hurry for you?’ the Skipper asked—‘or can we get some sleep?’

  ‘Oh, let us sleep by all means!’ The Colonel realised that he had been up and about for eighteen hours on end; some of those hours extremely active, and all in a cool breeze. He was yawning as they went below to bed.

  Chapter 4

  Everyone slept so late that they passed up breakfast, and began the day with lunch at 12.30. Philip Reeder’s main preoccupation was to get a new boom; this might conceivably be procured in Sto
rnoway, the fishing port on the farther side of the island, and he, with Colin and Jamieson, rowed ashore to telephone about it the moment after lunch; Julia and Edina remained on board and did some washing.

  ‘Here are some absolutely filthy socks in the Colonel’s locker,’ Julia announced, ‘and a rather sordid shirt. Think he’d mind if we washed them?’

  ‘I should think he’d absolutely love it if you did,’ Edina said, with a quizzical glance at her cousin. ‘You’re always a fast worker, J., but this seems to be your quickest job so far.’

  ‘Edina, if you’ve been using your eyes you may have noticed that I haven’t been working at all,’ Julia said, slightly ruffled. ‘He has, I grant you; but not me. You might be fair.’

  ‘Yes. You haven’t done much so far, and no one can help their face,’ Edina said. ‘All right, give them to me.’ She plunged the Colonel’s garments into a bowl of Lux and ammonia. ‘I’ll say I did them, too,’ she added generously; ‘now rinse this lot.’

  When the men returned the whole yacht was festooned with clothes flapping in the breeze. ‘Good,’ Reeder said briefly. They had gone to the Shore Station of the lighthouse on the Flannan Islands, many miles out to sea, which possessed one of the few telephones at Carloway, and had spoken to Stornoway; there seemed a fair possibility of getting a new spar there. So after tea Reeder and Colin attacked the boom with a saw, and cut off the portions at each end to which the metal fittings were attached; then they lowered the rest of the useless broken thing overboard and towed it ashore at high tide, leaving it on the beach above highwater-mark—out of the way of boats, and a handy source of fuel for the islanders in that treeless place.

  This performance took up most of the afternoon and evening. But the Colonel was fretting a little. He was thinking about how he was to find what he had been sent to look for, and had gone ashore with the telephone party in the hopes of gossiping with the locals; in this he had failed—for the very simple reason that the Island of Lewis is Gaelic-speaking. The younger men and women have learned laboriously to speak English in the village schools; but the men were away catching herring, and the women busy gutting them in Stornoway; the bodachs and cailleachs, the old men and the old women, had no English at all—as for the children they fled, giggling, at the sight of a stranger, to peer at him from behind walls.

  The indications he had been given were rather vague, too. ‘Well it might be near a sort of tower or fort called Dun Carloway; more likely near a place called Callernish,’ Captain Brown had said. ‘Anyhow it may be somehow tied in with archaeology, to the extent that there’s an old type who certainly goes digging, and we rather suspect that he may not only dig but plant things, if you follow me.’

  ‘A Hun?’ the Colonel had asked.

  ‘No; unfortunately a British subject. Mind you we’re not a bit sure; the idea has been raised, that’s all.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Oddly enough we don’t know it. We’ve got very little to go on but reports from rather ignorant country-folk. They call him “the English Professor”.’

  That was something; but slender enough, Jamieson thought gloomily. And then there was this business of the Russian trawlers. How was he to find out if the trawler they had met was Russian?

  ‘You look bothered,’ Julia said, as they sat on deck.

  ‘I am bothered.’ He told her about the trawler. And I can’t think how I’m to find this hellish installation.’

  ‘Oh, ask the locals! I still speak Gaelic after a fashion, and that always unlocks doors. I’ll help. Tell me what you know.’

  Jamieson gave her the few indications he had.

  ‘Goodness, your people aren’t much good, are they? Well, we must just try. Let’s go ashore tomorrow—I know Edina wants to see Dun Carloway and Callernish—and to get milk, as usual. That will give an opening for a nice chat.’

  Next morning Colin and Reeder set off early, taking the two metal-fitted ends of the boom with them; Julia rowed them ashore to meet a car hired the previous day from a local resident. The Colonel stood watching the dinghy’s progress towards a massive stone-built pier; to his surprise Miss Probyn turned the boat aside and landed her passengers on the rocks beyond it.

  ‘Why is she doing that?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, poor Lord Leverhulme! It’s rather funny in a way.’ Edina gave a low laugh. ‘When he bought most of Lewis and Harris he was full of benevolent modern ideas: make proper roads, build bridges, build piers for the fishing-fleets to land at. The roads and bridges are all right, an excellent job; but the engineers who built his piers weren’t seamen, and forgot about the tides, so a lot of them dry out at low water.’

  ‘Yes, that is funny—and rather pathetic. Poor old chap.’

  When Julia returned they all three went ashore to inspect Dun Carloway, and to get milk. They fell in almost at once with an immensely old lady, clothed in full black skirts, with a shawl over her head, leading a cow on a rope; with small unfenced fields everywhere, cattle could not be allowed to graze at will. Edina addressed her in English, but got no response; Julia tried her in Gaelic with much more success: the old woman said that if they returned in two or three hours the cow ‘would have milk in her again’, and she would fill their pannikin.

  ‘You go off and look at the broch; I’ll keep on with the job,’ Julia said—causing the Colonel a slight twinge of conscience. And while the other two clambered all over that strange circular edifice, which rises to a height of thirty feet, she continued to talk with the old woman. No, she hadn’t heard any boat in the bay; she slept well. But her son in the croft over yonder might know. Julia pursued the son—already more than middle-aged—and had a long ‘crack’ with him.

  ‘That trawler you met was Russian,’ she told the Colonel when he and Edina rejoined her.

  ‘What trawler?’ Mrs. Reeder asked in surprise.

  ‘We were asleep—she was coming out, sailing without lights. Look, Colonel J., we must let Mrs. Reeder in on this; we shall get nowhere if we try to keep up a sort of phoney secrecy. It’s she who got you to Erinish Beg, and really who’s got you here. Will you tell her what goes on, or shall I?’

  The Colonel thought he would, and did so.

  ‘How very peculiar—and how horrible!’ Mrs. Reeder said, with sudden anger. ‘These darling places! Yes—let’s find everything, and get it all cleared out.’

  This attitude pleased the Colonel very much.

  ‘Did you get anything on the Professor?’ he asked Miss Probyn.

  ‘Yes. He’s digging away like mad, down near Callernish.’

  ‘Could we go there?’

  ‘Yes rather—I’m dying to see it,’ Mrs. Reeder said. ‘You know it was the pre-Christian holy place up here. You don’t mind a bit of a walk, do you?’ she asked. ‘It’s six or seven miles, and I think Philip has taken about the only available car.’

  The Colonel didn’t mind walking; Julia however asked where they would eat?—it was now half-past eleven.

  ‘Sandwiches,’ Mrs. Reeder said, tapping a small haversack slung over her shoulder. ‘And tea at some croft, I expect.’ They set off on their walk southward through the low flattish country, set with numerous small lakes full of water-lilies, towards the head of Loch Roag.

  The traveller approaching Callernish by land sees first, on a slope of rising ground, a forest of slender upright stone slabs, profiled against the low horizon; but on closer inspection their arrangement becomes clear. A double avenue—in fact it is nearly thirty feet wide and a hundred yards long—leads up to a circle of stones about forty feet across, from which extend on both sides short arms; beyond the circle there projects a second avenue, also quite short, and narrower than the great avenue of approach.

  This monument aroused great excitement in the Colonel. He took from his pocket a surveyor’s measuring-tape in a round leather case, and measured and jotted down the width and length of the main avenue, and the diameter of the central circle; then he began on the short upper part. But while the ma
n measured and wrote Julia, woman-like, had leapt to the essential conclusion, as had her cousin; presently they went up to Jamieson.

  ‘Well, here’s the origin of the Celtic Cross that we were wondering about on Canna the other day,’ Julia said. ‘Enormously long shaft, central boss, short side-arms, short top-shaft above the boss. It’s complete.’

  He stared at her.

  ‘But this is pre-Christian, by many centuries.’

  ‘Yes of course,’ Edina said, with feminine impatience. ‘But I told you before that this was the great holy-place for all this coast. When St. Columba settled in lona to Christianise the Highlands he probably came and saw it; even if he didn’t he will certainly have made it his business to learn about it, and its shape—and then adapted his own Christian symbol to come as close as possible to the earlier beliefs.’

  ‘It’s a fascinating theory,’ Jamieson said. ‘I wonder if it can be the answer.’

  ‘But isn’t it rather obvious?’ Edina asked crisply. ‘The early missionaries—so unlike the Baptists today!—always took the trouble to find out about the current local pagan religions, and then tied them in with the Christian faith. After all, why is Easter called Easter in England? It’s Pâques, or Pascua, on the Continent.’

  ‘I’m ashamed to say I don’t know.’

  ‘Because Eostre was the Anglo-Saxon Goddess of Spring. So St. Augustine of Canterbury, and his workers, were smart enough to give her name to the festival of the Resurrection. Spring is a sort of resurrection, after all, so it fitted quite well.’

  ‘That is a nice piece of evidence for your theory,’ the Colonel said temperately.

  They ate their sandwiches down near the road; an old man came pottering along, and paused to speak to them.

  ‘Lar blar d’hiu’ (It’s a warm day today) he said—to his evident pleasure Julia replied in his own tongue, and a long conversation in Gaelic ensued.

  ‘Julia, ask him if there’s a croft where we could get a cup of tea,’ Edina said.