Many other external things had changed too. This used to be a bare moorland hillside, rough with rock and heather and bracken patches, naked and windswept and virgin; it was so when I first came to live at Camusfeàrna, with nothing but a Primus stove to cook on, nothing but a bucket to draw water from the little river a hundred yards from the house, nothing but the wood thrown up on the beach to fuel the fire in the desolate kitchen. Now there was a dense, dripping ten-year-old growth of sitka and larch at my back as I looked down upon the house, for the landlord had, after various unsuccessful experiments, decided to devote his ground to forestry.
For some unconnected reason, the once green field upon which the house of Camusfeàrna stood was now a jungle of rank rushes reaching almost to the walls of the cottage.
The house had changed too. When I first came to it Camusfeàrna had been a four-roomed cottage, two rooms upstairs and two down. Now, as I looked down upon it, I saw straggling pre-fabricated wings built with the ugliness born of what had seemed necessity and a strict regard for time. On the seaward side of the house stood two broken-down jeeps, whose stamina had not proved equal to the boulders and potholes that composed the two-mile track bulldozed four years before. Between these pieces of defeated machinery and the sea the motor launch Polar Star lay high and dry on her massive wheeled cradle, her bronze propellers glinting wetly on the grass below her stern.
Telegraph posts and wires descended the hill from one direction, electric conveyances from another. They converged upon Camusfeàrna, and around the house itself were high wooden palings confining two otters that had once been house-living pets. Each of them, more than three years before, had unpredictably produced reactions as savage as that of an untamed leopard; with dismay and with bitter remorse for wild creatures taken from their natural surroundings, I had recognized that I was the only human at Camusfeàrna who could still trust them, who in daily contact had always found them both friendly and affectionate, and I had constructed for them what I had thought of as being ideal zoo conditions. The massiveness of the damage they had inflicted upon other humans – the hysterical, almost manic, sustained attacks that characterize the mustelline family when the killer instinct is somehow aroused, precluded any possibility of allowing them liberty; the most I could do was occasionally to take them for a walk – separately, for they hated each other – and to employ staff to look after them, for I could not always be at Camusfeàrna.
Now, as I sat huddled into my duffel coat with the hail hitting me and melting so that the ice pellets became chill liquid and found their way through every broken fastening of my clothes, I was surveying what I had done to Camusfeàrna – what I had done to the animals and what I had done to myself.
For the past two years the upkeep of that cottage, centred around the otters, had been much like the maintenance of an Antarctic weather station. It had, in fact, cost more than £7,000 a year, whether I was there or in some distant country.
For the past week it had deluged with rain, it had snowed heavily and then thawed so that the mountain snows came cascading down every crevice of the hillsides, and then it had rained again, so that the Camusfeàrna burn had become a racing, surging white torrent, and flood water lay in wide pools all over the flat ground around the house. These glittered whenever the tearing clouds left the pale autumn sun momentarily uncovered; one in particular caught my attention because of its curious shape, a perfect figure of eight. It was in the otter enclosure at the northern end of the house, the pen occupied by Teko, the male otter who had been at Camusfeàrna for seven years. This was what was called a zoo pattern of behaviour, repetitive, compulsive action born of boredom and frustration; for hour after hour, day after day, he would walk this same track until it had become a pathway beaten bare of vegetation and deep enough to hold water. In time, I thought, it would be grass-grown again, and the fences would be pulled down, for they would have no further use. I had given up at last; Camusfeàrna was to be closed down, and both otters were to go to a zoo. I did not know where I should go to live myself.
A single raven swept by, high on the hustling wind, his deep guttural croaks almost muted by its force. I remembered how Wilfred Thesiger had once told me that when a camel caravan in Southern Arabia would sight a single raven overhead the Bedouin would attempt to annul the evil omen by calling to it, ‘Raven, seek thy brother!’ It seemed too late now for that invocation.
Between me and the forlorn watery pattern in Teko’s enclosure stood the rowan tree, the magic tree that stands beside every old Highland cottage, and round which is centred so much of Gaelic superstition and lore. The rowan is the guardian, the protecting power, the tree of life, infinitely malignant if harmed or disrespected; capable, too, of carrying within itself the good – or evil – wishes of those who have the power to commune with it. Few Highlanders will cut a rowan, even in the course of modern forestry operations, nor bring its bright berries into a dwelling, for they are the blood of the tree and it will curse those who shed its blood.
My rowan had shed its berries now, and the gales had stripped its branches of their scarlet leaves; but it held my attention, because I was seeing it with a new eye, and a strong, sudden, and recent recollection. Sitting there huddled against the gale on the wet hillside above Camusfeàrna my mind went back four months to the summer, to a garden on the shores of the Aegean. The sun was parching, the cicadas screeching in a heavy-laden fig tree, the flowers of morning glory that twined a trellised column beside my chair were shut tight against the brilliant butterflies that danced before them.
I sat reading the typescript of an unpublished autobiography, the life story of a poetess. I was reading with perhaps more than ordinary attention, for these pages concerned myself and painful happenings that had taken place many years before. And then suddenly a paragraph seemed to separate itself from the page and to hit up at me with an almost physical impact. Here was my rowan tree.
I cannot recall the words, the sentences, that composed that paragraph; only the shocking image with which they left me. We had quarrelled violently at Camusfeàrna, and as she left the door she had turned and said to me with a venom that utterly belied her words, ‘May God forgive you’, and I had replied, ‘He will.’ That short exchange was not on the page before me, but I was reading a sequel unknown to me, for it was years before we had met again, by chance in a London street, after my marriage to someone else.
She had always believed that she possessed great and terrible occult powers, and in that moment of hatred she had not doubted her ability to blight the years ahead of me. She had gone back to Camusfeàrna secretly by night – I pictured it now as a wild night of wind and sleet-storm, roaring surf, and a witch’s moon – and she had put her hands upon the trunk of the rowan tree and with all the strength of her spirit she had cursed me, saying, ‘Let him suffer here as I am suffering.’ Then she had left, up over the bleak hillside.
I put down the manuscript and stared at the coarse dark-green grass of the Greek lawn, thinking how exactly the pattern of the last years had paralleled her blind desire for destruction. A little of this she must have known, for it was public knowledge, and I wondered if she had exulted; but there was much more that she could not know. She could not know, amongst much else, that by now I had already taken the bitter decision to send the otters to a zoo, to find homes for my dogs, and to leave Camusfeàrna. I bore her no ill-will now, whether or not her curse could have influenced events: I just did not understand how such love and hatred could coexist.
Some say the world will end in fire
And some in ice
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire
But if it had to perish twice
I think I know enough of hate
To say that ice is also great
And would suffice.*
As I looked at the grass beyond my feet I saw a pale object about half the size of a matchstick moving spasmodically among the leaves. Sometimes it fluttere
d like a flag, sometimes it moved a few inches to the right or to the left, sometimes it advanced a little, sometimes retired. Leaning forward, I saw that it was a sliver of white, papery foliage being carried by an ant about a quarter of its size. The ant was trying to move it in my direction, but constantly it jammed between the blades of grass as would a tree trunk carried horizontally through a forest. Then the ant would shuffle, sidestep and reverse, manoeuvre one end of its burden between the obstacles, and at length move an inch or two forward. I looked round me in search of its possible destination. Behind me, and to my right, forming the corner of a rectangle, was a rough brick wall perhaps five feet high, and at the top of the wall was a terrace that led away into parched and uncultivated ground. Perhaps, I thought, the ant’s nest was somewhere in the wall, but this at its nearest point was still some twenty feet from the ant, and between the grass and the wall was a yard or so of empty herbaceous border, where the earth had been dug and lay in hard uneven lumps the size of a golf ball; whatever the ant’s destination it appeared patently impossible of achievement.
At the end of a quarter of an hour it had reached the manuscript that lay on the grass at my side. There, squarely on the typed words ‘rowan tree’, it paused to rest, shifting its burden between the mandibles as if to achieve a more balanced grip. I thought of Bruce and the spider; I became wholly and childishly absorbed, and the ant’s adventure became mine.
The ant rested for a full minute upon the glaring white paper, its antennae waving slowly as if questing for knowledge of the hazards before it. Then, quite suddenly, as though at the fall of a starter’s flag, it shot across the page at tremendous speed and plunged once more into the grass jungle between it and the wall. The same enormous but patient energy animated every movement; the same reversals and backward haulage, the same sidestepping and apparent understanding of mechanical principle, the same firm sense of direction – straight to the wall. When at length it had struggled free of the herbage and into the dry earth-cakes of the border, the enormity of the obstacles ahead seemed to cause no loss of heart; at the foot of each steep earth mountain – each, in ratio to the stature of the ant, several hundred feet high to a human – it would turn carefully, readjust its grip, and reverse up the slope. At the summit it would turn again to face forward and rush down the ensuing slope. The ant never once tried to avoid an obstacle in its path nor to circumvent the next, even when to the human eye this appeared easy; both the purpose and the direction were absolutes.
From the time at which I had first sighted with an abstracted eye the ant and the curious banner-like burden to which it appeared to attach so supreme an importance, almost half an hour had passed before it reached the foot of the wall. The bricks towered above the insect, rough and uneven; some sloped outward with vertiginous overhangs, and in their deep crevasses were dense meshes of whitish cobwebs, layer upon layer of them, like some elaborately contrived barricade.
The ant paused at the foot of the wall, the foremost pair of legs raised and feeling at it as though trying to assess the magnitude of the barrier in front. Then it turned, and began to reverse up the sheer surface at incredible speed, head downward with the prize clenched between its jaws. The first three bricks were easy; then the ant reached a ledge, backed on to it, and set off forwards again. At three feet from the ground the going became difficult, and a brick above leaned outward with a sharp overhang. The ant tried it forwards very slowly, all six feet testing every possible foothold. The length of its body now leaned outward from the perpendicular. It slipped back half an inch, miraculously recovered its hold, then slipped again. For a moment it hung by its two front feet only. There was a twisting of the body as the other legs reached frantically inward for foothold; then it fell, all the way to the rough baked earth at the foot of the wall. In our terms of relative measurement it was as if a human mountaineer had fallen an unbroken thousand feet.
For a moment the ant lay upon its back, quite motionless, the white papery object, which I now thought of as a message, still firmly held. The legs began to wave slowly, the ant righted itself, faced the wall, and rushed at it again as though in great anger.
The first high fall. I remembered mine; my marriage had been a misery for both partners. I had taken longer to recover than the ant.
At the second attempt the ant avoided, whether by chance or foresight, the brink from which it had fallen; it turned towards the corner of the wall, reached a point some inches higher than before, and found the spread canopy of cobwebs overhead. The message became enmeshed and, in a desperate scrambling struggle to loose it, the ant fell again. This time he took a little longer to recover, and when he did he was unconcerned with the wall; all that mattered was the search for what he had lost. He ran rapidly in small circles and tangents, pausing only momentarily to test the air with his antennae. At the end of several minutes he had not moved a foot from the spot on to which he had fallen.
The second fall. Marriage finished though not yet dissolved; the otters imprisoned as a public danger, Camusfeàrna mechanized and staffed and under siege by sightseers, the idyll over and the message lost somewhere in the fall. I had searched as the ant did, but I too had run in circles.
I leaned over, careful not to throw the shadow of my arm over the distraught ant, and dislodged the message from the spider’s web. It fluttered down and landed six inches away from him, lying whitely in the pale, hard earth, hidden from him, I realized, by enormous mountain ridges. It was minutes before he found it. There was an almost visible triumph and satisfaction as he adjusted his posture, gripped it anew, and rushed at the wall. He was tired now, and the ascent was slower, more hesitating; he did not even regain his former height; when he fell he lay longer, and when he moved again there was evidence of injury; only five of his six agile legs remained functional. I did not think he would try again, but he did, because he still carried his message.
The third fall. The motor accident, the unrealized injury, hospital and helplessness, pain and dragging convalescence, the feeling of defeat, a slow fighting defection from everything that had made my life what it was, an unwilling return to an unwanting womb. The ant had certainly done better.
In all the ant fell six times, and each time his recovery took longer, but after the second fall he never lost what he carried.
The seventh time, incredibly, he scaled the wall, the whole five feet of it. It had taken him an hour and twenty minutes; he was injured and exhausted, but he was there. He stood on the brink of the terrace above, on the flat dust-covered path beyond which there was jungle. I stood up and stepped over to watch him. He did not seem to move at all, but having anthropomorphized him – (he must have been neuter, a worker, but my identification with him had made him male) – I thought of him as panting with great breaths, stretching and reassuring tortured muscles, secure in the knowledge of having overcome at last the most terrible part of his journey. He still held the message; sometimes he moved it slightly between his jaws.
He had remained so for perhaps two minutes when the climactic drama took place. From the other side of the yard-wide dust path, out of the uncultivated scrub beyond, came scurrying a smaller ant, redder than he was, appearing to be of a different species. It ran swiftly across the dust, as if orientated to a known destination. It seized the message from my ant’s jaws, apparently encountering no resistance, and returned at enormous speed in the direction from which it had come, disappearing quickly into the undergrowth. My ant seemed unconscious of loss; for a moment the whole action seemed like a relay race in which each individual had fulfilled his role and played a faultless part. So, too, it had seemed to me when I was weak and exhausted; a relay race in which, at the end of my course, I had nothing to do but pass on the baton and trust my successor to carry it home to the laurels. I had nothing to do, I thought, but to rest and recover.
But then, very suddenly, my ant appeared to realize that he was no longer holding anything between his jaws. He behaved as he had at the second fall, when the messag
e had remained entangled in the spiders’ webs; he ran violently in circles, with tremendous agitation, two of the six legs held high and no longer touching the ground. After perhaps half a minute he appeared to pick up a scent, and raced after his despoiler. Then he was lost to my sight among the high vegetation.
All this I remembered in a series of vivid visual images while I crouched shivering on the cold wet hillside above Camusfeàrna, looking down at the house that had been my home. The sun was beginning to set now, a cold glary sunset behind the jagged peaks of Skye, the clouds damp and muzzy with the south-westerly gale. I looked down at Camusfeàrna, trying to refocus my eyes which had been too long centred upon the slow heat of that Greek garden in July. There was water in my shoes and cold water running down my spine. The ant, I supposed, was dead now, but he remained a challenge. I was not dead yet.
I watched as a girl came out from the door of Camusfeàrna, carrying fish for the otters. She and her seven-year-old daughter were the only other human occupants of the house. There were more than a dozen dogs around her. Three of them were mine, two deerhounds and their six-months-old puppy. The rest varied in size from Great Danes to miniature poodles; I had no contact with any of these, no contact with Camusfeàrna any more.
I stood up and started to walk down to the house. It was dark now, and only lights showed, the lights of the house, of Isle Ornsay Lighthouse, and of a single fishing boat in the Sound, heading south for Mallaig. I was on a fleeting farewell visit to Camusfeàrna; everything had been arranged. The otters were going to a zoo, the remaining dogs to what good homes they might find. Gus, my favourite dog, the reputedly savage and untamable Pyrenean Mountain Dog, who in reality had been as soft and soppy as a spaniel, had been killed during my absence, hanged by his own choke chain while left out at night.