Next day- better still, build a small turbine system further up the burn at a point where its waters fell vertically over a ledge. A fall of twenty odd feet meant power, especially given winter rainfall. Electricity at the flick of a switch, controlling the voltage, no problem in today’s technology. Fridge and washing machine, maybe there’d be a T,V. signal; on reflection no television but for certain there’d be light and heating. ‘Unlimited clean power’, the phrase resounded in my head. I had heard it before, in a meeting in London.
One evening I climbed excitedly to the spot which might just suit a mini-hydro electric project. Clear from the hill, falling and twisting, stones and boulders, over a rock shelf the burn poured into a chasm so narrow I guessed only a sun nearing the end of day would intrude. Lank grass hung over steep rock walls which enclosed its sides, thick cushions of moss, bright and green grew thick on ledges where churning water kept it moist. I stood at the edge of a deep pool. My grand scheme would require a small building to house the turbine and a three inch pipe from a dam at the top of the waterfall to feed this mini-power station. Controlling its output, not difficult, wiring my new home whilst avoiding damage to its wooden tongue and grove lining, more tricky.
The constant hiss of falling spray; I listened, it sang of the wildness of hill places. The last rays from a sunlit horizon glistened on wet rock. Dankness brightened. Rich mosses were the furnishing of a grotto hidden in a little green world of the wee folk. A sudden updraft from off the sea blew tumbling waters into the air. The rhythmic splash, splash ceased. Rocks and water and a streak of sunshine turned the falls to a cascade of yellow droplets. In the seclusion of this tiny piece of the earth’s crust the elements which gave us the power of creative thought had built beauty. How easy for me to contemplate harnessing the innocence of a waterfall, destroy its simplicity. The wind dropped as suddenly as it arrived and the spray of water fell again into a dark pool and with it my plans vanished into fresh understanding. Progress cuts a wide swath. How did the old folk manage, ten children and no washing machine? I stripped off and stood under the falls. Racing back to the house, drying in the breeze, electricity couldn’t match an inner radiance.
A food supply and how best to tackle the land, bring it back into production. My forebears possessed the knack. Relearning it by trial and error might take seasons of success and failure. Eachan would know. Marks on the field I’d trenched across to bury the water pipe followed a series of corrugations, distinct humps, maybe two yards wide. Horse plough or hand work? Digging through the humps turned up soil, black and rich, the sweat of caring generations. A foot down I came into sand and broken shell, the work of wind and tide. Good soil and sunlight could put warmth and energy into food via a poly-tunnel. Sheltering any structure from winter gales would be a challenge. It would grow our basic needs. Already I thought as ‘we’.
Would it really be possible to exist on Sandray without the latest props of modern living? Millions in the west were changing from iPods to iPhones, calculators to computers, building interaction with high tec. chips, wrapping their lives around face book, blogging and twittering, talking by text, sharing their existence with the growing dictatorship of an overarching network of manipulative communications and gadgets which replaced self reliance; a fast growing network of social influence increasingly subject to political interference and subterfuge. The more I experienced the interplay of observation, common sense and the ability to improvise, the more I respected the resourceful intelligence of previous generations. No pressing buttons for help or information, they had relied on sharp wits.
Falling into the new pattern of living couldn’t have come more easily to me. Apart from the drone of an occasional plane heading for Heathrow, no artificial noise, no need of time keeping. I’d put my watch on a kitchen shelf, didn’t need it. My stomach and a glance at the sky told me a midday snack was due. Keeping tally of the days presented more of a challenge. I started a note book. Jottings soon filled pages. The birdlife which caught my attention, sketches of flowers strange to me, the activity of the seals, cloud formations and their relevance to the next day’s weather. After an evening meal I wrote and drew, adding the thoughts which had occurred as I worked. Two candles on the table gave surprising warmth and turned the kitchens bareness to friendly shadows.
A week of heavy work passed without any outside contact. Alone, the island to myself and not a shred of loneliness, I learnt the meaning of peace. It seeped into me, altering my state of mind. There were no tensions left, only an infusion of supreme contentment. And strange as it may sound, I knew a companionship with the island. The weather changing its mood from happiness to discontent, affected me. Elation, when streaks of sun lifted the morning mist, dullness on a day of raw drizzle. Distant thoughts came as dark cloud shadows flitted across the face of the Hill of the Shroud, or became black forms racing over the sea before the emerald sun returned. The life of the elements became intimate, comforting as a heartbeat.
And each night I blew out the kitchen candles and went to my tent. Sleeping in Eilidh’s bed seemed presumptuous, nor had I ventured into her bedroom. The door stood open, there was nothing to prevent me and yet, strangely to do so suggested an infringement of her privacy, the taking for granted of an inviolable trust. Our being together, in spite of its brevity, seemed to me an unshakeable bond; still we were independent, uncommitted individuals and that I respected.
My brief case remained a stained leather object against the gable wall, its cut straps dangling. Feelings conflicted, would I destroy it, burn it, along with its cursed contents? Several times I’d hesitated, about to go in and take it, yet a reluctance to break some sort of connection prevented any action. In the recent convoluted events, this brief case had proved the key to my meeting Eilidh, central to the enigma of our finding each other. Obviously Eilidh had brought it here, to this house and to that I attached respect but surely no strategy on her part could have placed the case back within my grasp. Foresight maybe, intuition possibly, how could she believe I’d phone that number or take the ferry? The brief case’s return to me had to be outwith any form of deliberate plan on her part. Yet Eilidh’s words on the tube train, ‘We shall meet again’ rang with certainty beyond a simple hunch. In the quiet of nights alone, remote from any contact save the sound of the elements I began to believe there might be powers of another world of communication.
One shelf of the dresser carried an unusual collection of books. Somebody of catholic taste mixed Walter Scott, Conrad, and O.Henry’s short stories, with Bertrand Russell’s, History of Western Philosophy and Kauffman’s, At Home in the Universe. Alone, I read by candlelight. The wind rustling at the door, fluttered yellow light across the pages. Words quivered with fresh meaning. The ideas, theories and passions generated by the writer’s thoughts, fed my own imagination like a stream of energy. Within the interwoven strands of force which mediate all known connections, did one strand rove the extrasensory? Each night, I looked through the open door at Eilidh’s blankets, neatly folded, at the end of an iron bedstead and I talked to her.
In a kitchen cupboard I’d found a tent and sleeping bag. Beside the west gable of the old house where the short cropped grass smelt of earth, I’d pitched camp. My clothes made a pillow and through an open tent flap before sleep, I could watch and listen to the life of the bay. Sometimes the querulous bickering of oystercatchers as they poked amongst the seaweed, and as darkness closed, often the whistling of birds passing unseen, perhaps migrants heading south by the compass of the stars, maybe the same earth’s magnetism which brought them to this island. Breathing the scent of the sea my eyes would close, I’d drift into sleep feeling an affinity with others’ lives whose activities were equally as important to them, as was mine, to the conscious perspective of survival.
One night I wakened to the clamour of geese and clear on the thin air, the flapping of many wings. I arose to watch. The tip of the moon dipped into the Atlantic and gliding out of its dying glow many dark bodies emerge
d, bird after bird. Momentarily they hung with beating wings before dropping to earth. Voyagers from the Arctic, they came to rest out on the headland. At first light a restless chorus told me they were leaving. Squadrons formed high above me, long necks pointing south and the morning sun, still below my horizon, gleamed on their white under parts.
No light dimmed the October stars, nor when the night was fine, tarnished the image of our own galaxy, for it stretched in a great sway of brilliance across the still Atlantic. I lay imagining its magnificent shape from another point in space. I looked down on the curls of a giant spiral galaxy. A hundred billion stars, a hundred thousand light years across, an immensity beyond our grasp; and yet in its vastness no bigger a part of the colossus of all the created heavens than a coiling ammonite shell on the prehistoric beaches of this tiny, tiny speck we call earth.
Watching the patchwork of countless galaxies emerge from the darkening abyss of outer space brought an unusual feeling of intimacy. Within the source of their flickering light hid a mysterious world of quasi-particles, an infinitesimally small electro-magnetic domain of particle collisions. The creation of particles whose lifespan, as a parcel of energy, decayed and transformed on timescales equally minute as the timescale of cosmic change is immense. And still by some means a vast integrated system of interchange between matter and energy existed in unending realms of birth and annihilation. What and where its pulse?
On clear nights, I slept under the open sky, beneath another electro-magnetic realm; gigantic beyond calculation, equally full of collision, monstrous cataclysms ripping apart stars and their galaxies, warping time and space. I came to see the micro and macro were the same system, bonded in fantastically varying degrees of density, of energy and movement, time and distance. Not before had I realised it so clearly or simply. Be it the space and attraction between an electron circling a mother atom or the sun nursing its planets; be it our own Milky Way holding onto satellite galaxies, or the immeasurable galaxies swirling above me, one about the other in an expanding universe, was attraction and repulsion the ultimate synergy? The pulse which drove all universes? If so, what and where its heart?
Each evening I took an unhurried stroll down to the jetty to check Eilidh’s boat lay snug. That night, for the tide was full, she floated clear of the stone work and I pulled her alongside to bail out an afternoon’s heavy showers. With their clearance, came a crispness. The autumn air held its breath and utter stillness engulfed a bay whose placid surface remained as luminous as the afterglow of some great stratospheric happening.
I sat in her stern, unwilling to disturb a mirror of the surrounding island, afraid to break an image created by the elements to which my consciousness owed its being. The closeness of the stars, all about me, the air I breathed, its purity, the calmness of the night, its beauty born from the furnace of the stars, perhaps some gigantic supernova in the ever changing universe. A shiver passed over me, as though I were to be privy to the unfolding of secrets not given to mortal understanding. No movement, no bird cried into the deepening night. Alone, my breathing only, I waited. And from the shoulder of the Hill of the Shroud the light grew, until golden tipped, the moon cast its shapely peak across the water, a momentous shadow, unstoppable as the play of light on a fragile mirror.
No tendril mist to hide a far-off shore, an island peak reached out, its dimensions crept towards me. Where lay the haven of its power, the phantom of its consciousness? I watched the stars live a second on the still, black bay, a reflection of their span in the scale of cosmic birth and death.
Photons falling, incandescent from a dark vellum, Electrons, atoms, planets, suns and spiral galaxies, matter a fragile skeleton for their energy. If universe circles universe, born to crash and die, what place have we?
I reached into an abyss, greater, deeper, more penetrating than earth’s paltry night, a blackness elemental and absolute. The Universe became a spiral, spinning tighter, faster, tighter, faster, ever tighter, until a density beyond the laws of science law crunched mass to energy, heat and energy to the n’th degree, the forge of creation.
And yet is there a war of oscillating universes? Dark energy versus gravity, matter against antimatter, attraction or repulsion, expansion everlasting or contraction to oblivion, is there a dualism eternal where victory is annihilation? No, in domains of quantum gravity density curves time and space, grinds time to an instant that is the limit of all dimension. The speed of spin defies the crush of gravity and time and space burst free.
Burst free from a singularity, rupture the rotating orifice, through which all has passed and all will pass as the bundled twists of space which are the base of energy, infinitus. Understanding is the anvil on which imbalance heats the singularity, entwining knowledge is the energy, the powerhouse of the heavens. Of all the universes that have been and all that are to be, imagination is the pulse which drives their beating heart. And at their heart is still the mystery of infinity.
The Hill of Shroud looked down, a lonely hunched dark form and at the dead of night it wore a silver crown.
A redshank whistled from across the bay and I waited at the edge of understanding.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“There’s no depth to them.”
The Agent sprawled across three seats in the ships lounge, groaning. The motion felt bad enough, add in that sing song jabbering in a foreign language and these bloody islands! The whole scenario was getting to him. This ferry crossing was hideous. A group of English tourists at his back waxed loud and profound about the consummate attraction of the Hebrides. The Agent raised his head, “You lot must be off your trolley. Who the hell would stay out here for a second even if they had to sleep on a bench on the Thames Embankment?”
The shock of his comment sank in, “We’ve been coming here for years; its lovely, we just love these Scotch people and their scenery… well, it’s out of this world.” “It bloody well should be, and the damned Scotch as well,” The Agent snarled, his hatred of all things Scottish deepened, grinding his already queasy guts. He rose, barely making the ship’s toilets. A steward helped The Agent back to his seat, “Don’t worry Sir, I’ll clean up.” “Yeah, can’t your fool of a captain keep the boat still?”
Green faced and in the foulest humour, The Agent came gingerly down the gang plank. “Get me to the Castleton Hotel,” he barked at the young man handling the ships ropes, “Are there no taxis here?” “No I’m sorry, he’s away just, the man that has it.”
The Agent’s face twisted, “Where is this hotel?” The young chap seemed in no hurry to reply. “I said, where is this place?” Looking into The Agent’s eye without a waver, the reply came equally deliberately, “That’s no problem, it’s only a step or two, at the top of the street.” Glaring at the young man, The Agent snapped, “I’m not used to insolence, you’ll hear more of this, what’s your name and company number?” A slight grin appeared before the pier hand replied, “Ach we don’t worry much with numbers, everybody about here knows me,” and he flicked the ships rope off a bollard. Walking stiffly up the brae, The Agent spoke aloud, “Cheeky young bastard.”
Signing himself into the Castleton Hotel involved little thought. He scribbled, David Williams, Lymetree Gardens, Swansea. A wry smile crossed his face, it happened to be an alias he found amusing. Years back Mr. Williams owed him money, refused to pay up and strangely enough was killed in a hit and run accident. The hotelier’s wife showed him up to a bedroom overlooking the bay. He glanced out. The wake of fishing boats in from the Minch spread silver ripples, shore to shore, in the late evening sun. With a flourish he drew the curtains and snapped, “What time’s dinner?” “Just when it suits you, Mr. Williams, there’s no hurry.”
The green bile of seasickness left The Agent weak. He dumped himself on the bed, not before noticing dust on the bedside table. He wakened after nine, got to his feet, opened the only other door in the room, “For God’s sake, a bloody cupboard, no ensuite.” Chain chairs, jug and wash hand basin on the dres
ser, “What a dump.” He strode down creaking stairs to find the dining room empty.
Pushing through various doors, he landed in an echoing passage, lino on the floor and beer kegs stacked against the wall, “Fuck me, not more of that bloody Scotch music.” The strains of an accordion reached him. He opened the end door to find himself behind the bar.
Faces lined the counter, glowing from salt air and elbow exercise, “Hello, Mr. Williams, you missed your way but you came aground in the right place. What can I get you.?” Hotelier MacLeod seemed not the least surprised. The Agent’s manner changed abruptly. He needed co-operation.
“No, no, let me and give these chaps a round on me,” he insisted. “They’ve had a hard day I’m sure. I watched boats coming in from the bedroom, a fascinating sight.” He smiled down the line of local faces. In due course glasses were raised to him. “Put it on my room. Something for yourself, Mr. um, Mr.?” “No I’m fine just now thanks,” Macleod didn’t supply the name but added, “Where would you like your supper, er, dinner?” It flashed through The Agent’s mind, one more note from that bloody instrument and I’ll, I’ll, but no…. with an ingratiating smile he replied, “I’d be happy amongst the crowd, local colour you know, perhaps a table towards the back?”
A steak arrived inch thick and pouring with gravy, worth the racket all round him. A large dram appeared, one of those fishing types he guessed, raising it to the crowd at the bar. His ear caught an English voice at the next table and nodding across The Agent queried affably, “Over here on holiday?” “Oh no, I live here now, quite a native, ten years you know. You on holiday?” and without waiting for an answer, “I’m Trevor by the way, like myself you’re from London, I can tell. It’s the accent you know, can’t hide it old chap.”
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