The train bucked and turned north at Arisaig. The bays were like crater crusts filled with water. And offshore islands: Rhum, Eigg, Muck, and Canna — names like items from a misspelled menu. The Scour of Eigg was a hatchet shape against the sky. And now beneath the train there was a basin of green fields for three miles to the Sound of Sleat — and above the train were mountains of cracked rock and swatches of purple heather. Suddenly a horse was silhouetted in the sun, cropping grass beside the sea.
The train stopped at the level crossing at Morar — the opening and closing of gates, the latching and unlatching, clunk, clunk; and then the train chugged into Mallaig, where people were swimming in the freezing water, the foaming waves making lace caps for their bobbing heads.
That night I stared out the window at the freakish mountains on Skye. They were sharp-pointed, fantastic, and high, like peaks in dragon stories. They were the Cuillins, and their strange shape made them look unclimbable. Although it was after eleven, there was enough light for me to see them, and then near midnight they were ghostlier stilclass="underline" it was like winter light, a February afternoon in Boston, with the grayness of a gathering shadow.
***
In all my coastal travel I never met a fisherman who said he was satisfied. They hated the life, they said. The prices were bad, the competition was tough, the waters were overfished. Foreign fishermen were to blame — the Russians, the Japanese, the Danes. Foreigners scooped up everything — sprats, fry, undersized fish — and beat them into fishmeal on their factory ships.
Captain Cameron on his fishing boat, Lord Roberts, at Mallaig said, "Anyone here would sell his boat if he could get a fair price for it. The fishing business is dead. I should have sold mine when I could, a few years ago. Now I'm fifty-seven, and I have to work as long as I can. I won't be able to retire — haven't got the money. I'll work until I'm too weak to go on, and then my kids will be cursed with this bloody boat."
He was taking seventeen crates of prawns' tails ashore, about a thousand quids' worth ($1700), but his fuel bill for this trip was five hundred ($850), and he had a crew of five. There was hardly any profit in it. They had been at sea for nearly a week.
"Someday there'll be no fishing at all," Captain Cameron said. "It'll pass into ancient history."
On my second morning at Mallaig, Mrs. Fleming's daughter served me my breakfast and said, "Princess Diana's had a baby boy."
Everyone was pleased: an heir to the throne. It was another national event in an eventful period. The Falklands War had started and finished as I had been traveling. The Pope had come and gone. The Royal Baby was born. A railway strike was threatened. Three million people were unemployed—13 percent of the workforce — and one person out of six in Scotland was without a job. There was a deranged murderer loose in Yorkshire. They were public events and they had the effect of making people unusually talkative. "This Falklands business—" And then the American President visited and went horseback riding with the Queen. He made a speech. People smiled a little when they heard my accent. "I just saw your President on television—" It was supposed to be a kingdom of close-mouthed people, but the war and the strife and the Pope and now the birth of a future King had brought about a relentless garrulity. I needed a little air.
I took the road north out of the town. The road ended; a track began. It was a rough stony path that circled a gray hill above the sea. I walked along the shore of Loch Nevis. Just over the hill at Loch Morar people sometimes searched for underwater monsters. I walked to Inverie, which was a house on a road that went nowhere. I wondered how much farther I should go. The coast was in-and-out for hundreds of miles. I liked walking, but I was no snorting Rambler with plus fours and a pickaxe. If I saw a sheep on the path, I stopped and stared at it. I sat down and sketched a tall thistle at Inverie — the Scottish thistles seemed to me magical, and as complicated as crystals. I looked at birds. I tried to think of descriptions for these unusual islands — they were less like islands than old bare mountains in the sea. I was distracted by all the water and rock, the great heights of cloud, the ruined stone cottages along the coastal paths, the lived-in cottages in remote places that looked as though they were growing more remote — places reachable only in small boats.
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!