The Kingdom by the Sea

by Paul Theroux

  It would have taken more than a week to walk from Mallaig to the Kyle of Lochalsh, up the coast. So I sailed there in the ferry Lochmorar, twenty-three miles along the Sound of Sleat. The boat passed more of these remote cottages. It said something about Scottish self-reliance and toughness that people willingly lived in such difficult places. In the whole of Britain there could not have been houses more inaccessible than these scattered over the shores of the Western Isles. The Scots here chose a distant ledge or a remote shore, and put up a stone house, and slammed their door on the world.

  The coast had deep inlets and high cliffs, and it was so strange and steep, it had the effect of concentrating travelers in specific places. On this boat, for example. Or on certain valley roads. In Fort William and Oban and Mallaig. In England and Wales people were quickly absorbed by the countryside, and the coastal towns could seem very empty. But here in Scotland the countryside and the coastal steepness were forbidding, so everyone traveled on a few routes—and they had always traveled on those routes. The traveler to Mull had to go to Oban, just like Doctor Johnson and Boswell in 1773.

  At the Kyle of Lochalsh I crossed to Skye, on the ferry to Kyleakin ("from Haakon, King of Norway, who sailed through here in 1263") and walked the empty roads to Broadford, eight miles. I stayed and climbed partway up a red mountain merely to have another glimpse at the Cuillins. I did not go any closer. I wanted to save them for another time. It was always a surprise and a pleasure to find a place on the British coast that I wished to return to. It gave me hope, because I knew I would not come back alone. I wanted to come here again with someone I loved and say, "Look."

  The sun on Skye warmed the pines and the flowers and gave it the fragrance of Nantucket.

  ***

  The way between the huge simple mountains and cold lochs, from the Kyle of Lochalsh to Dingwall, was one of the great railway routes of Britain. It took me off the coast, but what else could I do? The northerly shore was broken and labyrinthine. It would only be a stunt to follow every mile of it, just to report on Loch Snizort and Trotternish. And the train was a greater temptation. Anyway, many of these lochs were also notches on the coast. Loch Carron, for example—the south bank, on which this train was traveling—was sixteen miles of coast.

  Nothing looked to me colder than the Scottish lochs, and they seemed to become colder still as the clouds piled up and night deepened. But these were short nights—a few cloudy hours of wintry light, and then morning. It was eight o'clock, and every landscape feature was clearly visible—the water, the hills, the tree farms, the long valley floor of Glen Carron, which seemed to be covered with grassy mounds—tombs and tumuli.

  "Ach, some of these villages have been here since the year dot," a man named Macnab said to me. Yes, they had a mossy, buried look. But many looked bleakly exposed, plopped down, and untidy—no hedges, no bushes—the bushiest thing in Achnasheen was the stationmaster's beard.

  We were delayed at Garve. I thought: I'll give it an hour, and if we're still here I'll get off and walk up the Black Water or hitch to Ullapool. (Delays always sent me to my map for an escape route.)

  Malcolm Biles asked for a look at my map. He was twenty-three, a post office clerk from Inverness who was on a cheap day-return. I had wanted to meet a post office worker, I told him. British post office workers did much more than sell stamps. They processed car licenses, television licenses, Family Allowance, pensions, Inland Telegram postal orders, all the tasks required by the Post Office Savings Bank, and a hundred other things. They had seven weeks' training, and the rest had to be learned on the job, in full view of the impatient public. It was Malcolm who spoke of the impatience—people were much ruder than they used to be and some of them stood there and ticked you off!

  "What about dog licenses?" I asked.

  Dog licenses! It was Malcolm Biles's favorite subject. The price of a dog license was 37½ pence (about sixty cents), because in 1880 it had been fixed at seven shillings and sixpence. The fee had never been changed. Wasn't that silly? I agreed it was. There were six million dogs in Britain, but only half of them were licensed. But the amazing thing was that it cost £4 (almost $7.00) to collect the dog license—the time, paperwork, and so forth.

  "Why not abolish the fee?" I asked.

  Malcolm said, "That would be giving up."

  "Why not increase it to something realistic—say, five quid?"

  "That would be unpopular," he said. "No government would dare try it."

  "How long do you figure you'll be staying in the post office?"

  "For the rest of my life, I hope," he said. The train jolted. "Ah, we're away."

  I tried to imagine a whole lifetime in a post office. I could not imagine it. I got to the end of a few years and then nothing would come—a blur, fatigue, bewilderment, indifference. It was easier to imagine the life of that crofter talking gently to his dog at Strath-peffer.

  Still, we discussed the post office and debated the issue of dog licenses until we came to Dingwall ("birthplace of Macbeth").

  19. The Flyer to Cape Wrath

  MY BLUE GUIDE'S description of the northwest coast of Scotland suggested a setting that was straight out of Dracula or The Mountains of Madness. "The road crosses a strange and forbidding mountain wilderness," it began, "of sombre rock-strewn glens, perched glacial boulders, and black lochs." And then, "after 8 m. of lonely moor and dark bog ... the road from the ferry's w. end to Cape Wrath crosses a bleak moor called The Parph, once notorious for its wolves," and at last, "the road rises across a desolate moor..."

  It made me want to set off at once. It seemed the perfect antidote to the Presbyterian monotony of Dingwall. If the guidebook's description was accurate, it would be like traveling to the end of the world—in any case, the British world. Cape Wrath was not merely remote—the ultimate coastline—it was also such a neglected place and reputedly so empty that the method for getting there had not changed for eighty years or more. Baedeker's Great Britain for 1906 said, "From Lairg, mail-cart routes diverge in various directions, by means of which the highly picturesque country to the W. and N.W.... may be conveniently explored..."

  At Dingwall Station I asked the best way to Cape Wrath.

  "Get the post bus at Lairg," Mr. MacNichols said.

  In other words, the mail cart. There was no train, there was no bus, there was hardly a road—it was paved the width of a wagon for fifty-six miles. There were people who still called the post bus "the flyer," as they called tenant farms "crofts" and porridge "crowdie."

  The train to Lairg left Dingwall and passed along the edge of Cromarty Firth, which at this state of the tide was shallow water seeping into the mudflats. Not long before, the railway line was to have been shut down, but it had been reprieved. It passed through the bleakest, boggiest part of Caithness, where the roads were often bad, and in winter it was an essential service. But Mr. MacNichols had confided to me that in the off season there were sometimes only three or four people on board.

  To save money on the line, some of the stations had been closed. The ruined, boarded-up station building at Alness resembled many I had seen in Ulster. A large aluminum smelter had just closed at Invergordon—nine hundred more people out of work and another building left to rot. Decrepitude was decrepitude—the fury of terrorists was indistinguishable from the willfulnes of budget-cutters and accountants.

  Beyond the village of Fearn there were farms and fields of a classic kind: long vistas over the low hills, quiet houses, and smooth fields of fat sheep. There were steeples under the soft gray sky at Tain—the Tolbooth, with a conical spire and turrets, and a church spire like a freshly sharpened pencil. Pink and purple lupins shook on the station platform.

  People used this train for shopping, traveling to a place like Tain from miles up the line. Two ladies were sitting next to me. They were Mrs. Allchin and Mrs. MacFee. They were discussing the butcher.

  "Duncan is very obliging," Mrs. Allchin said. "We often give him a lift on stormy days."

>   "I think it's an ideal place, Tain," Mrs. MacFee said.

  Mrs. MacFee had two large bags of groceries, and she had also managed to find a packet of "toe-spacers" at the chemist's shop. It eased her mind to know that she had these for pedicures and nail-varnishing. Kenneth had mentioned a dinner-dance at the Lodge, and she did not want to fuss at the last minute.

  Mrs. Allchin had been very lucky in Tain. Ian's lad, wee Colum, was having a birthday, and she had found a box of something called "indoor fireworks." Apparently, you just cleared a space on the table and set them off. Apparently, they were perfectly safe. Chinese.

  "What won't they think of next," Mrs. MacFee said.

  But Mrs. Allchin's mind was elsewhere. The indoor fireworks reminded her that she was chain-smoking again She often chain-smoked in trains. It worried her, like nail-biting.

  "I dinna drink, at any rate," Mrs. Allchin said.

  We traveled inland, toward the hills at Culrain, which had a ruined look. And the roof was off the station at Invershin. Some other stations had clearly been sold off to be turned into common bungalows or holiday homes. There were cabbages growing where the platform had been.

  We went through Acharry Glen—the River Shin on the left. I had settled down to watch the mountains passing, but soon we came to Lairg and I had to get out.

  There was something very disconcerting about leaving a train in the middle of nowhere. It was all activity and warm upholstery, and then the clang of a carriage door and the train pulled out and left me in a sort of pine-scented silence. Lairg Station was two miles from Lairg, but even Lairg was nowhere.

  I saw a man throwing mailbags and bundles of newspapers into the back of an old-fashioned vehicle. It was a cut-down version of a bus, about the size of a hearse. Still the man went on loading it with the bags and bundles the train had left.

  I cleared my throat. He looked up. I said I was going to Durness on the post bus.

  "This is the post bus," he said. "We can leave as soon as I get these bags loaded."

  His name was Michael Mathers. He pronounced it "Maithers." His accent was not Scottish. It was fairly Gaelic and very Scandinavian, a soft Norse whirr in every syllable. Later, I discovered that everyone in his part of Sutherland had the same accent, a legacy of the Vikings. This accent was all that remained of the local dialect, Norn.

  We set off for Lairg and picked up more mail and an old couple on their way to Scourie. Michael said that this was a Bedford bus, only ten years old. It had gone 400,000 miles.

  "When I took over," he said, "we had an Albion. Made in Glasgow. That one went 650,000 miles in fifteen years."

  He had been driving for twenty-one years. He was forty-four and had the solemn, kindly face of a fisherman. He had once tried working on a fishing boat. He said, "You need a strong stomach for that." It was cold, it was hard, there wasn't much money. At midnight on a pitching boat, struggling with nets, he would look into the distance and see the lights of Durness: the lucky people indoors. So he had chucked it.

  We headed out of Lairg and were almost immediately in a bog. It was a wide dark landscape, with rocks and grass and heather close by, and mountains ahead.

  There was no better glimpse into the life of remote Sutherland than through the smeared windows of this eight-seater. The post bus was a lifeline and Mr. Mathers much more than a driver. He not only picked up mail and dropped it off, and ran with it to houses in the rain, and carried scribbled messages from house to house; he also drove along a single-track road for the whole of the way north, which meant he had to stop when a car approached from the opposite direction—eighty or ninety times in a single trip—because the road was only wide enough for one car. He carried milk. He carried newspapers. He carried shapeless bundles labeled For Graham.

  He stopped the bus at the Reeks, in the middle of a peat field, and with the mist flying sideways he hurried to the door with a pint of milk, the T.V. Times, today's Scotsman, and a birthday card for Mrs. Campbell. Farther down the road, at Fernside, it was two pints and a Mirror, and then a five-minute trot up a muddy path to deliver a junk-mail Sunglasses Special Offer from the Automobile Association (though Mr. Innes was expecting a long-overdue letter from his daughter in Australia), and then a copy of the Sun to Hope Cottage, and another favor—fifteen pounds of wet fish in a plastic shopping bag for a householder who had asked for it over at Kinloch. And more newspapers. Such effort and expense to bring people copies of the gutter press! But that was Mr. Mathers' job. And he was never abrupt. Whenever he handed something over, he exchanged a greeting. "How's your mother feeling?" and "The sheep are looking well" and "It feels like rain."

  We came to an unearthly, gigantic landscape along Loch More in the Reay Forest. The fields looked bitter and brown and the loch very cold, and the mountains were vast shrouds of rock. One of these silver mountains was the most beautiful I had so far seen in Britain—a great bulge glittering with cataracts of scree. It looked as if it had just frozen in that carbuncular shape the day before.

  "That's Arkle," Mrs. MacGusty said. She wasn't local. Her accent was amused and tentative, like someone nibbling shortbread, the tones of Morningside—the genteel landlady accent of Edinburgh. "It's Icelandic, you see."

  What did that mean?

  "It's all turned over. These high mountains"—she seemed to be describing babies, her voice was so affectionately savoring the words—"Ben Stack and Arkle—what should be on the bottom is on the top, they reckon, the geologists. You look at them and you think, They all look duffrent!'"

  Mr. MacGusty said, "They're also very beg."

  This was Achfary, "the Duke of Westminster's estate," Mrs. MacGusty said.

  "Does he farm here?" I asked.

  "Oh, no. It's an estate. He keeps it for the shooting and the fishing. Prince Charles comes here in a helicopter sometimes, for the shooting. Och! I expect you're a republican!"

  We were sitting by the roadside in the post bus as the rain came down. Mr. Mathers was bringing a copy of yesterday's Express to a cottage behind a high wall.

  I said, "So it's all gamekeepers here?"

  "Aye," Mr. MacGusty said. "The duke owns a good butt of Sutherland." He thought a moment. "It's the old way of life." He thought again. "It's very unfair, in a way."

  It was more a shrug than a protest. But he was resigned. After all, we were talking about feudalism.

  The past was accessible here as a present fact. Not only in ducal estates and private game reserves, but also in ancient names. The MacGustys got off the bus at Laxford Bridge. It w?‹s a Norse name—lax meant salmon (and of course the Yiddish lox for smoked salmon was a cognate). Then Mr. Mathers told me how his parents had both been fluent Gaelic speakers and that he spoke it fairly well. And peat-cutting was part of the past, too. The peat was free, but cutting it was backbreaking work. It was cut and left to dry in stacks, so everything depended on good weather. Even present-day crime sounded somewhat outdated—sheep rustlers and squatters and poachers.

  We drove up the narrow track to Rhiconich. This was actually the coast, a muddled maze of islands and lochs. We went to Kinlochbervie, which was a busy fishing port on a sea loch, dealing in whitefish and lobsters.

  We stopped twenty more times. Mr. Mathers did this twice a day on this small windy corner of Scotland. When he stopped and parked, the wind shook the bus and rattled the cottage gates and moaned against the telegraph wires. A pint of milk, a Scotsman, and a printed postcard saying This is to acknowledge your communication of the 13th inst. to Mrs. Massey at Drumbeg.

  "Cape Wrath doesn't mean 'angry,'" Mr. Mathers said. "It's from a Norse word that means 'turning point.' This is where the ships turned south. Sutherland is another Norse name—it was south for them."

  Then he smiled. "Don't be disillusioned," he said. "The weather can be hellish here. In 1952, when I was still at school, we had a January storm. The winds were a hundred and twenty miles an hour—roofs were torn off houses. The Irish ferry was lost that night. It's often bad weather�
�horrible weather. I pity the lads in those wee fishing boats."

  We came to Durness. He said, "This is it. There aren't more than three hundred people here. It's the work problem, you see. There's no employment."

  The village was empty, but the wind was a presence—wild gusts flew in from the direction of the Faeroes.

  I walked back through the sandy cliffs, among the rabbit holes, to Keoldale and the Cape Wrath Hotel, and had my first good meal for days. There were a number of English anglers at the hotel. They blustered when the national news came on. They were all Tories. They called the Prime Minister "Maggie." Her nonsense suited their nonsense. One said he wanted to shoot the man being interviewed, who claimed he had known all along that the Falklands were going to be invaded. "Too many bloody people giving advice!" Another said that half the Labour Party should be shot for treason. One thing about anglers, though. They went to bed early.

  The next day I crossed the Kyle of Durness and walked seven miles to Kearvaig, which was like the end of the earth. But this was Cape Wrath proper and had peaty soil—it was crumbling cliffs and sand at Durness.

  I saw a seal take a salmon. People told me that seals did not really eat them—that they just took bites of a fish's shoulders and threw the rest away. But this seal lay on his back with the eight-pound salmon in his mouth, and he tossed his head and snapped his jaws and ate the whole thing.

  Then on my way back I saw a flock of sheep crossing a sandbar in the Kyle of Durness. The tide was coming in. The sheep started moving. Soon they were swimming, the big horned sheep in front, the lambs behind, with their noses out of the water. They were North Highland Cheviots. They moved very slowly, for the tide was still rising and they were still far from the bank. Fifteen minutes later the Kyle was filled, there were fewer sheep visible, and then there were none. They had all drowned, about nine of them, under the gray torn sky.