The Wind Off the Small Isles

by Mary Stewart

  I don’t know whether it was the same emerald fish I had seen before, or one like him, but this time I came full on him at a distance of about two feet as I rounded one of the lava buttresses into a pool where the sunlight struck full on the golden floor of the sea. It was hard to say which was the more startled, the fish or I. We both stopped short, back-pedalling, staring at one another, I with delight, and the fish with no expression that I could read; there was almost certainly no delight, but there was no fear, either. He hung there just ahead of me, green and gold and kingfisher-blue in the clear water, for a full ten seconds before he jack-knifed away into the shadow of the cliff.

  To this day I can’t be sure if it was just reflection from the brilliant sea-bed, or if he really did switch his lights on as he went into the darkness, but I saw him flash away under the buttress, trailing light like tracer fire. I moved in to get a closer look, swimming down from the sunlit pool into the black inkwell of shadow under the cliff. For half a minute or so I had him still – a moving glimmer of green in water black as squid’s ink, then I lost him. As I trod water, searching, my feet found sand and I surfaced once more, to find that I had swum right in under the cliff, and was standing at the back of a shallow cave, looking out under a low arch at the bright distant prospect of the other side of the bay.

  The water came up to my armpits, and the roof of the cave was barely two feet above my head. The air was warm enough, but it smelt oozy, and in contrast to the brilliant light outside the place was gloomy and full of echoing gaps of blackness and the horrible sense of the impending weight of the cliff above. I don’t like caves. Besides, the outer arch of this one barely cleared the surface of the water, and would be filled by any kind of swell. I preferred to look at the sea-bed, where motes of sunlight dropped towards me through the bright ellipse. I put my head down and pushed off in a shallow dive towards the light and the open air.

  Or rather, flexed my knees to push off. I was barely afloat when something, some enormous disturbance of the water, surging into that cave like blast, drove me back off my feet and clean off balance and pitched me with a shock-wave of noise and violence and bellowing water, right up against the roof of the cave.

  I must have been knocked unconscious for a few seconds. All I remember is the sudden shock, turmoil, and then blackness. My head must have struck the roof of the cave, but the mask and snorkel had taken the worst of the blow, and though I later found bruising and grazes on my back and shoulders, the chill of the water had deadened the skin, and now I felt no pain. With the breaking of the tube of course my mask had filled with water, and I suppose that, half-conscious as I was, all my instinct and sense were concentrated on the struggle to get out of the mask and into the air before I drowned. The same instinct kept me afloat, but here without any effort of mine the sea helped me. When at length I tore my mask off, gulping for air, I found I was high and dry on what seemed to be a narrow shelf of sand and shingle running steeply up against slimed and pitted rock.

  I say ‘seemed to be’. Because now I could see nothing. I clung to the rock, feeling the tug and suck of the sea and the pebbles which grated away from under me, pushed the soaking hair back out of my eyes and, gasping and retching for breath, tried to fight off the feeling of unbelieving nightmare. The cave-mouth had disappeared. Where there had been a slit of brilliance doubled by its reflection, there was now nothing but pitch-black night and storming water and this appalling, booming echo that slammed through and through my brain and body as though I were some blind polyp lodged helpless in the roaring spiral of a shell.

  But even when the tossing of the sea had smoothed a little and the echoes begun to abate, and sense came back and with it balance, the steadying of my world brought me no comfort. I realised now what had happened. A section of the cliff had slipped from above, and falling into the shallows, had set up the shock-wave that had mercifully thrown me back on to the dry inner shore of the cave. But at the same time it had sealed me in. Of the cave-mouth, the light, the outer world, there was no sign.

  4

  In sort of wakeful swoon, perplex’d she lay …

  Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain.

  KEATS: The Eve of St Agnes

  It is impossible to describe the confusion of the next few minutes, or even to remember how long I crouched, bewildered and terrified, sightlessly clinging to my rock, while the water swung and dragged at me, and with its movement the trapped air under the shallow roof beat like blast against the eardrums.

  But at length the tumult subsided. The water sank to an intermittent swell and heaving, and the terrible noise no longer rocked the air. My throat and eyes burned with salt, and I felt limp from the hammering I had received, but at last I was able to loose my panic hold of the rock, and think.

  I had almost written ‘look about me for a way out’. This, in fact, was what I found myself doing, eyes wide on the dead darkness, staring from side to side as if the very concentration of my looking could conjure up some glimmer of light to show me the way. But no light showed. The darkness was complete.

  I do not want to remember, much less describe, the waves of panic that beat at me periodically during all this time, much as the sea was beating. I think the worst of it was not being able to see. I knew there was air to breathe, and even the trapped air under the shallow roof felt fresh, as if there were an outlet somewhere, but claustrophobia is beyond reason, and though I told myself that Cora Gresham and the fisherman knew where I had gone, and must have seen the fall of rock, I could not sit still with the dark closing round me, and wait for them to start searching; I had to find a way out.

  The first thing would obviously be to reconnoitre the mouth of the cave, but of course I now had no idea in which direction this lay. The only guess I could make was that the inrushing swell would have washed me towards the back of the cave where, in the brief glimpse I had had before the extinguisher dropped, I thought I had seen a steep narrow beach which could be the one where I now sat. I convinced myself that if I slithered straight into the water at right angles to the rock, and swam carefully forward, I should be swimming towards the new fall of stone across the cave-mouth. It was even possible, I told myself, that if some big block of the cliff, breaking off cleanly, had fallen down across the opening, there might be space underneath it through which a diver could go; and there might, as the turbulence cleared, be some glimmer of light which could be seen under water to show me the way.

  The snorkel had disappeared, but I still had my mask, and this seemed to be undamaged. I put it on, lowered myself into the water and, with my hands out in front of me to protect my head, swam slowly forward.

  It is not a pleasant experience, diving in darkness, when one may be diving against rock. And rock was all I found. It was not far down to the bottom, and I kept myself down there as long as I could, and as still as I could, straining my eyes through the glass in every direction. Once, some moving creature brushed my bare arm, and I had to exert every scrap of self-control I had not to gasp myself full of water, and jack-knife to the surface or up against whatever rock overhung me. It was only my emerald fish, I told myself – only the fish; and I held myself down, groping along the sand, the rock, staring blindly round me into blackness.

  The trivial incident was enough, in these circumstances, to shake me badly. The moment I had convinced myself that there was nothing to be seen, no possible safe way out, I surfaced, about-turned, and floated myself cautiously back towards my beach.

  And even the simple right-about-turn proved to be impossible. I miscalculated. Where my outstretched hand should have met sand and shingle, it met rock, and at the same moment my knee jarred and grounded on a subterranean ledge, and some belated swell washed me once again hard against the wall of the cave.

  Luckily here the wall was as smooth as licked toffee, but the shock and unexpectedness of it threw me off balance, so that, forgetting the dangerous lowness of the roof, I grabbed for the nearest bit of wall, found a handhold, and heaved
myself out of the water to kneel upright on the ledge.

  And stayed upright, safely anchored to the slippery rock. There was plenty of headroom here. I don’t know how many seconds it took me to grasp the fact that my handhold was a smooth metal ring embedded in the rock.

  I explored it with my fingers. It was big and heavy, and obviously corroded with age. It was like one of those enormous handles you find on cathedral doors, or the rings to which you moor a boat. And you don’t moor a boat – I thought, with sudden excitement – anywhere where you can’t step out of it … Whoever had driven that ring into the rock must have stepped out on the ledge where I now knelt. This was flat and smooth, with a right-angled rise behind it just like a step …

  It was a step, just above water level, hewn out of rock – as my questing fingers told me – but smooth and flat, and lifting in its turn to another rise, and another step …

  I suppose if I had stopped to think it would have occurred to me that this might merely be a landing stage for boats using the cave in some long-past time for storage or shelter, but I wasn’t reasoning. To the blind creature that I was, crawling about the bottom of the black well, steps led upwards, steps led somewhere out of the trap, into air and light …

  I stripped my mask off, then, with my right hand clamped tightly on the ring, and my left arm bent above me to protect my head, slowly let myself stand upright. There was room. Above my head my hand met nothing. I straightened the arm, stretched it – nothing. I felt carefully forward with a foot. Another step … and another …

  I let go the anchoring ring, and carefully, using hands and feet, began to edge my way up the steps. Four, five, six … and my left hand met rock, and the stairs shrank V-shaped as the staircase bent right-handed. I clambered on, all the time protecting my head.

  I did not stop to wonder where the steps could possibly be going, or what purpose they could ever have served; I just blindly dragged myself up this miraculous escape from darkness towards the upper air.

  And the air was fresher here. There was even a slight warmth, a reminder of sunlight not too far away.

  And at last, light.

  Not so much light as a faint slackening of the darkness, the promise of a gleam round some upper curve of the stairway; but it had all the collision and glory of the first light on the first day of creation. You would have thought it was a floodlight shining right down the stairs and illuminating every step. I straightened my body, dropped my hands, and ran up towards the glimmer as if the rough steps were a well-lit staircase at home, and at the top was a landing and a lighted door.

  There was indeed a landing, of a sort. The steps gave on what seemed to be another cave, and the light was here, filtering somehow indirectly but effectively enough through cracks in the roof and right-hand wall – the wall which should be the outer shell of the cliff. Because the rock was black basalt it drowned, instead of reflecting, the light, but at least I could grope forward without flinching, and where there were small cracks open to the light, there might be bigger ones.

  The wall to my left – immediately beside me as I emerged from the stairway – showed lighter than the rest; it even had some faint colour about it, a sort of ghost of burnt umber; and as I put a hand to it to feel my way forward I felt a different texture, crumbly, ash rather than basalt. As my hand patted and groped along it trickles of dampish ash dislodged and fell with a whisper. Behind me, like an echo, came another whisper, another fall. I stood still, my heart hammering. I was remembering what Mike had told me about the cracks in the lava crust on this side of the bay, and how the later eruptions had filled them with ash. There had been ash on the steps, I remembered; and in the swirling pool below I had been bombarded with gritty particles too heavy for sand. There must have been a fall of ash into the sea when the rock came down. Surely I hadn’t climbed this miraculous stairway of escape just to find myself at the source of the avalanche?

  Another fistful of the russet ash broke away just beside me, smoking down to spatter over my ankles. I moved cautiously clear, trying not to cough, and bent to smooth the sharp stuff from my bare feet. Something caught my eye, something that the fall had uncovered, a pale-coloured object lodged in the hollow the falling ash had left. It was greyish-white, and the light caught it clearly. A hand, stiffly protruding from the wall. A hand and arm, draped in a grey fold of cloth from which the ash still scaled with a pattering like small sleet.

  Even the darkness had been better than this. I seem to remember standing there for quite a long time with my eyes shut, telling myself first of all that my senses had lied, that this could not possibly be a hand, and at the same time insisting – shouting to myself – that the hand was dead, and that dead hands and dead bodies do no harm …

  I would have to look at it. Presumably when I got out of this prison (my brain shied from the word tomb) I would have to tell someone about it. I opened my eyes, and looked again.

  It was still there, and still unmistakably a hand, but now almost immediately something about its colour and the disposal of the drapery along it brought a doubt, and with the doubt, relief.

  The arm, now exposed to some way above the elbow by the constant steady crumbling of ash, was curved as if holding some large object, and from this graceful and protective-seeming curve the drapery fell in folds like the cloak of a statue. That this was what it must be I now saw. The greyish-white colour, the stony texture of flesh and drapery alike … It was, after all, only a statue.

  Only? Under the circumstances I wasn’t prepared to get excited about the possibilities of a ‘discovery’ – but I had to be sure. I reached forward and touched the cloak. My relieved guess had been right … It was stone or plaster. I left it and turned again to my quest for a way out.

  It has taken a long time to tell this, but from my first moment of startled fear to the moment when I touched the arm and turned away, not more than three or four minutes can have gone by. All the time I had been conscious of the continual crumbling and falling and pattering of the ash near me. Now before I had taken three steps there was a soft, swishing rush and thud, and another section broke from the wall and mushroomed softly up from the floor at my feet.

  With it fell something that went with a small dry rattle. I caught a glimpse of some white, stick-like object. A fragment – perhaps a finger? – had broken from the stone hand. The thing was probably rotten with time and damp and stress … it was probably slipping, and the mass of compressed ash with it …

  I fled to the other side of the cave, feeling my way along the rough and mercifully solid basalt, with a wary eye on the rotten wall of ash. Half the statue was exposed now. It was life-sized, the arm curved to cradle something, the shoulder forward, the head bent … And it was certainly moving. It wavered and stirred in the now rapidly growing light.

  Two seconds later, perhaps, it got through to me that it wasn’t the statue that was moving; it was the light. That whatever natural light had led me up to this level had been supplemented for the last half minute by the light of a torch, held in a living hand. And that the owner of the hand was now picking his careful way down from somewhere above and ahead of me, the torchlight welling in front of him through the confines of the cave.

  5

  And listen’d to her breathing …

  Which when he heard, that minute did he bless,

  And breathed himself.

  KEATS: The Eve of St Agnes

  It had to be Mike, of course.

  Not only had it occurred to me that I must have climbed some way towards the inner curve of the bay and the environs of the farm, which was the only building hereabouts, and which must have at some time been connected with the steps and the landing stage, but also, somehow, his coming was inevitable. After the first jump and jerk of my heart when I saw the moving light, I simply stood there and waited for him. I suppose I had been knocked half silly, and then badly frightened, and so was for the time being as entirely self-centred as anyone can be; at any rate I assumed, absurdly enoug
h, that he was coming to look for me, sent (miraculously, I suppose, for there had been no time) by his mother. I leaned against the wall and waited for him quietly, all fear stilled.

  What I didn’t reckon on was the fright I would give him. The sound he made was something between a gasp and a yelp, then his breath went in more smoothly and he said with commendable mildness, ‘Good gracious me.’

  I took a step. I was surprised to find how weak my knees felt. ‘Mike. Oh – Mike!’

  ‘Perdita! For heaven’s sake! How in the world did you get down here?’

  ‘I – I didn’t get down. I came up. You – you did come down? There really is a way out up there?’

  ‘Yes, of course I came down. We’d just got back to the house when the fall took place, and—’ I heard his breath catch again as it got through to him what I had been saying. ‘You said you came up?’ The torch raked me. He said sharply: ‘You were swimming? … You mean you came up from the sea? What’s happened? Surely that was Mother I saw on the old ship?’

  ‘Yes. A fisherman took her over. I didn’t go with her. I was swimming, and I was in a cave down there, about halfway along the side of the bay, and there was a fall outside, and I was shut in. I – I found some steps, and started to climb—’

  I broke off. Suddenly reaction and cold, together, got through to me and I began to shiver uncontrollably. ‘I – I’m sorry. I got a bit of a knock when the backwash hit the cave, and then it was pitch dark and I thought I wasn’t going to be able to get out—’

  He took two quick steps and pulled me into his arms and held me tightly. ‘Here, love, pack it in, you’re all right now. We’ll be out of here in two shakes.’

  ‘Sh – shakes is the word … I’m sorry. I’m all right really … Oh, Mike, you’re sure we can get out?’