The Wild Places (Penguin Original) Page 6

  As we were walking the final miles back down the side of the loch, the weak sun seething in the water drops still on our skin, and the river beside us shaking out its own light, I saw that a rainbow had formed in the sky over the valley below us, joining both sides of the sanctuary. We walked on towards the rainbow, and as we advanced, it seemed always to retreat, keeping the same patient distance from us. I recalled a quotation I had once written down in a notebook, but for which I had lost the source: ‘Landscape was here long before we were even dreamed. It watched us arrive.’

  The morning we left, the sky was a slurless blue. Before beginning the walk out, we took a last swim in the water of Loch Coruisk. We slipped into the loch from a warm tilted shore rock, having laid our clothes out on boulders to take up the sun’s heat. The water was cool from the night, and still as stone. Its peaty colour gave my skin a goldish lustre, the colour of old coin.

  A hundred yards or so out across the loch was an island. Just a shallow hump of bare black rock, smoothed by the passage of the glaciers, and no more than a foot above the water at its highest point. It looked like the back of a whale, and its form reminded me of the outline of my beechwood.

  I swam across to it, clambered out and stood there, dripping, feeling the roughness of the rock beneath my feet, and the warmth it had already gathered from the sun. Then I lay down on my back, tucked my hands behind my head and looked into the sky.

  After three or four minutes, I found myself struck by a sensation of inverted vertigo, of being on the point of falling upwards. The air was empty of indicators of space or time; empty, too, of markers of depth. There was no noise except the discreet lapping of the water against the island. Lying there, with no human trace except the rim of my own eyes, I could feel a silence that reached backwards to the Ice Age.

  In the Basin I had come to imagine time differently, or at least to experience it differently. Time seemed to express itself in terms not of hours and minutes, but of shades and textures. After only a few days I found it hard to think out of Coruisk: to the ongoing world of shops, colleges and cars, with its briskness and urgency, or even to my family, my city home and my garden, where the branches of the apple tree would be lolling with fruit.

  The Basin kept many different kinds of time, and not all of them were slow. I had seen quickness there too: the sudden drop of a raven in flight, the veer of water round a rock, the darts of the damselflies, the midges who were born, danced and died in a single day. But it was the great chronologies of its making - the ice’s intentless progress seawards, down the slope of time - which had worked upon my mind most powerfully.

  To be in the Basin, even briefly, is to be reminded of the narrow limits of human perception, of the provisionality of your assumptions about the world. In such a place, your conventional units of chronology (the century, the life-span, the decade, the year, the day, the heartbeat) become all but imperceptible, and your individual gestures and impulses (the lift of a hand, the swimming stroke taken within water, the flash of anger, a turn of speech or thought) acquired an eerie quickness. The larger impulses of the human world - its wars, civilisations, eras - seem remote. Time in the Basin moves both too fast and too slowly for you to comprehend, and it has no interest in conforming to any human schedules. The Basin keeps wild time.

  In a valley of such age, you feel compelled to relinquish your habitual methods of timekeeping, to abandon the grudging measures and audits that enable normal life. Time finds its forms minerally and aerially, rather than on the clock-face or in the diary. Such human devices come to seem brittle and inconsequential. You want quietly to yield them up - to surrender your diary at the sanctuary’s gateway, to turn your watch so that it faces inwards. There will be opportunity afterwards to recover these methods of record, you think.

  Birds began to move across the empty sky above me. Nothing more than black marks at first, until my eyes started to sort them. Gulls turning on their wing-tips in the lower terraces of the air; three crows above them, crackling; and finally in the upper reach, a buzzard. Suddenly the sky’s depth was fathomable, its space divided into tiers and circles. And Coruisk itself was changed: this place, so alien to me, was home to these birds, the place in which they hunted, played and lived.

  I swam back to shore. Near the mouth of the loch, where the water was only eight or nine feet deep, I dived down to the floor, seized a big black fin-shaped rock and held myself there, so that my body and feet tilted up to the vertical, and then inclined downstream, nudged by the gentle current, like water-weed. As my breath ran out, I let go of the rock and bobbed to the surface, back into the bright air.

  We left the sanctuary by an old forester’s path, which followed a stream up and over the lowest of the passes to the south of the Basin. A hundred feet or so from the pass, which was indicated by a wide cairn, I found a little beach of stones, rinsed by the water and shiny white, as if in affinity with the ice that had shaped them. I took one for the cairn, and put one into my mouth to keep myself from getting thirsty, rolling it round, and keeping up a steady molar clatter as we followed the path upwards.

  At the cairn, which marked the point of exit from this magical place, I stopped and looked around. To the north-east was the cleared valley of Sligachan, where the scattered wall-stones of ruined houses lay in the river’s loops, grown over by grass and moss. Away to the west I could see the Inaccessible Pinnacle casting a sharp dark shadow. Far below it, Loch Coruisk gleamed and tilted like a mirror. We began the walk down into Sligachan, and the landscape watched us leave.

  4

  Moor

  Years ago, on a warm autumn evening, I climbed Buachaille Etive Mor, the arrowhead-shaped mountain which stands at the eastern gateway to Glen Coe. When I reached its summit, the sun was low over the sea behind me, so that the Buachaille had become the pointer of a sundial, casting a triangle of shadow eastwards across the golden circle of Rannoch Moor. I stayed for an hour, watching the mountain’s shadow narrow and lengthen over the Moor, changing its form from pyramid to chalet gable to obelisk. I decided then that, at some future point, I would return to cross the Moor on foot, and spend a night out somewhere in its distant centre.

  Many people know Rannoch Moor, for they have looked down on to it from the mountains on its perimeter, or driven through it on the road that crosses its western marches. More know of it who have never seen it, for it is across the Moor that Alan Breck and Davey Balfour flee in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped. After travelling over ‘wild, and houseless mountains’ and ‘among the well-heads of wild rivers’, the two fugitives come across a region of ‘low, broken, desert land’ that lies ‘as waste as the sea; only the moorfowl and the peewees crying upon it, and far over to the east, a herd of deer, moving like dots’. This is the Moor, and crossing it nearly kills Davey. And people have died there in winter, lost in its expanses, harassed to death by the cold that settles upon it, hardening its extensive waters and binding its few trees in ice.

  Many know the Moor, then, but relatively few enter it, for it is vast and trackless and has a reputation for hostility at all times of year. Sea storms blow across it, funnelling down through Glen Coe. It is a high-level, hyena-coloured prairie - etched and roughened by glaciers, and still bearing the marks of those harrowings. Skeins of swans land on its two main lochs, intricate Loch Bà and antler-shaped Loch Laidon. On a clear night, from the top of one of the mountains that surround it, you can see its uncounted lochans, streams and rivers gleaming in the moonlight. It is only at such moments that you realise how much of the Moor is made of water.

  Later that same warm autumn, I drove through the Moor at night. The crossing seemed to go on far longer than I had thought possible, mile after empty mile of it. It was as though I had driven into a pool of black and limitless space, and were passing through another, not altogether earthly, place. On the downslope of the Moor, I had to brake sharply and slow almost to a standstill, for deer were flowing across the road before me, making for their haunts in
the Black Corries. In the brightness of the car’s headlights, I could see the deer crowded closely together as they crossed the road, each laying its nervous head against the back or flank of the one in front. In the cold air their breath clouded out from their nostrils, and the whites of their eyes caught and returned the car’s light, so that they glowed orbishly in the dark. As I drove down the waning slope of the Moor, towards the Bridge of Orchy, two or three more herds crossed the road before me, off to the corries of the Black Mount.

  Four years after that deer-haunted crossing, I returned to Rannoch Moor to keep the promise I had made on the Buachaille’s summit, and to add another panel to my map of the wild. I had also been drawn back to the Moor by W. H. Murray, whose essays I had been reading in the weeks after Coruisk, and who was, along with the monks and Sweeney, another quester for the wild, another precedent for my own journeys.

  Although he was brought up in Glasgow, Murray had not thought of venturing into the Highlands until in 1933, when he was nineteen, he heard an acquaintance describe a winter traverse of An Teallach in Wester Ross: ‘clouds lifting off a high and rocky mountain ridge, sun-shafts lighting a glen deep below’. Murray was entranced; a desire to experience such things struck him, he remembered, ‘with all the suddenness of a conversion in faith’. From then until the outbreak of the Second World War, he explored the islands, moors and mountains of Scotland whenever he could - in all four seasons, and by night as well as by day - journeying up into what he called the ‘wildland of the skies’. He came to know the glens and the peaks superbly well: their weather habits and weather histories, the natures of their rocks, plants and animals. Wildness assumed for him a near-mystical importance: it would also, though he was not then to know it, save him from madness.

  Several of those who met Murray in adulthood, noting his curved nose, his precise, observant manner and his capacities for sustained calm and sudden action, spoke of him as a raptor - ‘a frugal, contemplative eagle’, as Hamish MacInnes put it. Of all his wild eyries, none was more important to Murray than Buachaille Etive Mor, with its dove-grey and pale pink rocks, and its vantage at the brink of Rannoch Moor.

  On 3 September 1939, Murray was crossing the Moor en route to Glen Coe. He stopped at the King’s House, the inn on the western edge of the Moor, and there he was told that war had been declared. He knew that mobilisation would take him away from the Scottish landscape he loved, perhaps for ever. ‘My instinctive reaction’, he remembered afterwards:was to turn to the mountain that had given me most - the Buachaille. So I walked across the moor in a smirr of rain, and climbed the Crowberry Ridge to the summit. I remembered many days and nights on this mountain - the beauty and brilliance of moonlight, ice glinting, the climbing hard. I remembered the stillness and the music of silence when it seemed to merge with the mountain . . . Were those days over? Days of inner and outer exploration? . . . I spent a full hour on the top, and came down as slowly as I knew how. Every rock and stone seemed familiar to me.

  Murray joined up in April 1940. After training, he was commissioned and posted to the Highland Light Infantry. His crack battalion, the 2nd, was posted to the deserts of North-East Africa to fight Rommel’s newly formed Afrika Korps.

  On 19 June 1941, Murray and his men were moved west to the Libyan frontier, and entered an expanse of rock and sand vaster than France and Germany combined. So empty and featureless was the terrain, wrote Murray afterwards, that maps of it resembled ‘sea charts, blank sheets apart from the coastline’. Despite the deprivations and the dangers of the situation, he found a beauty in that hard and hostile sand world. He grew to love the desert: its clarity of line, its fiery sunrises - ‘when the huge sun-disc lifted up from the horizon, the cool stillness then, the vastness of blue skies’ - and the light, which at the brightest hours gave the impression of having bleached the sand so white that it seemed as if snow had settled upon the desert.

  In 1942, on what would be his last leave before action, Murray climbed the ‘arête’ of the Great Pyramid of Giza, and then tried a bold new ascent of the Sphinx. Diplomacy overcame audacity, however. ‘The chin,’ he reported later, ‘was the main obstacle, and it seemed . . . a dubious act to use pitons on the rock of a friendly state.’

  The fun ended in August of that year. In the part of the Libyan desert known as the Cauldron, his battalion was thrown into the first of a series of infantry advances against Rommel’s Panzer divisions. The tactic was a Great War relic, and fatal in its anachronism. Murray and his men were ordered to advance on foot, over half a mile of flat ground, in daylight, against tanks.

  Murray would later recall that advance. First, the deafening silence after the supporting artillery barrage had stopped. Then the enemy guns opening upon the walking men: the whine and zip of bullets, the noises of the falling shells. A truck full of hens struck by a mortar, feathers blown skywards. Murray turning to speak to his runner, to find only a pair of legs, trunkless and smoking.

  Murray survived that day; six hundred men did not. The battalion was given little respite. On 28 June, having been restored to strength by a new draft of men from Scotland, it was ordered to dig in near El Fuka, a coastal position forty miles west of El Alamein, and there to hold its line against Rommel’s advancing 15th Panzer Division. Murray and his men excavated shallow slit trenches, and positioned their light two-pounder guns, the only ordnance they had with which to repel the oncoming Mark IV tanks. Dusk was falling, and the first glimmer of stars lit the smooth desert sky, when news arrived of the approach of Rommel’s division. They were to be expected within half an hour. Murray’s brigadier approached him in the failing light. ‘By tonight,’ he said, ‘you’ll be either dead meat or a prisoner.’

  Down in the half-light of the slit trench, Murray sorted through his pockets and destroyed anything which might be of use to the enemy: his prismatic compass, his identity cards, his cartographic notes. He found his address book and glanced through it. Most of the names were of mountaineers. At that instant, Murray later recalled, he was overwhelmed by a sudden access of memory of the mountains and moors over which he had ranged, and the people with whom he had done so. The memory came to him ‘whole, in an instant’s flash - the mountains . . . charged with a beauty not theirs pouring through them’.

  The first wave of German tanks struck an hour later. Dark bulks on the top of the escarpment, twenty of them abreast, their tracks whisking the sand into ochre clouds. The shells from the two-pounder guns glowed in the dusk, and made short red arcs through the sky. The tanks fired their machine guns, pouring white tracer into the backs of the Allied trucks, and down into the trenches and the gun emplacements. The slaughter was swift and almost total. Again, Murray escaped harm. He was taken prisoner, and flown 600 miles to Campo 21, in the province of Chieti in north Italy.

  Conditions in the Chieti camp were onerous, but not appalling. There were books, and there was food, though never enough. Brutality was expedient rather than gratuitous: prisoners were clubbed with rifle butts for misdemeanours, but nothing worse than this. Most importantly, there was a view: away and up to the west, through the wire mesh of the camp’s perimeter fence, Murray could see the Abruzzi mountains. Those mountains became, during his months of imprisonment, the home of his hope. When winter arrived, the first snows settled on the Gran Sasso, the highest of the range, and it appeared to Murray like a blue and white ghost floating in the sky, the embodiment of ‘a freedom of spirit’ that could not be constrained by fence and hut and sentry.

  Ten weeks after arriving at Chieti, Murray began to write: about the wild places he had known before his incarceration, about the Scottish mountains, moors and ridges he had loved and explored.

  Paper was scarce. At first he wrote on toilet paper, but the diet of the camps meant that there was little to spare. Then Murray’s mother sent him via the Red Cross a copy of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, ‘printed on the finest India paper’. He bartered pages of the book - pages whose firmness and texture were much appreciated by
the men of the camp - for sheets of blank toilet paper on which he could write.

  The writing Murray did there was a kind of dreamwork: a casting back and a summoning up of the open spaces of Scotland, its ‘rock, snow and ice, as well as the high plateaux and long ridges and wide moors’, from within his confinement. As his stamina waned, his imagination grew stronger. He thrived on the recollections of openness and freedom. The book that Murray began in Chieti, Mountaineering in Scotland - ‘a book written from the heart of a holocaust’, in his phrase - must stand as one of the finest expressions of the power of the wild to act, even in retrospect, even remotely, upon the mind.

  In October, Murray was moved to the Moosburg camp in Bavaria. Prisoners were housed in wire-fenced compounds, in jam-packed bunkrooms, ‘like rats in a slum’. Fleas and lice proliferated, and at night bedbugs swarmed from the mattresses. Still he wrote.

  After a short time, he was moved again, this time to a camp in Bohemia, the westernmost province of Czechoslovakia. The prisoners were searched on arrival. Murray’s thick wad of toilet-paper manuscript was found, and he was interrogated by Gestapo officers, who believed it to be a coded account of troop movements. They took the manuscript from him, and destroyed it. Even to a man of Murray’s mental resilience, it was a severe blow.

  During the years of his confinement, Murray’s health deteriorated. Towards the end of the war, Red Cross parcels were prevented from reaching the camps. The inmates of Murray’s camp had to survive on black bread and minimum rations of potato and turnips. When possible, they would catch and kill dogs and cats, and eat strips of their flesh. Tuberculosis was rife. ‘I am literally a skeleton,’ Murray wrote in a sad letter to a friend. His fingernails became corrugated through vitamin deficiency. His hair had thinned. He could not walk ten yards without stopping to rest, could not walk at all without dizziness. He assumed that, even if he were to survive the war, he would never again be able to climb mountains.