It is the waterfall, rather than the house, that has always seemed to me the soul of Camusfeàrna, and if there is anywhere in the world to which some part of me may return when I am dead it will be there.
If it is the waterfall that seems the soul of Camusfeàrna, it is the burn and the sea that give its essential character, that sparkling silver that rings the green field and makes it almost an island. Below the house the beach is long and shelving, the tide running back at low springs for more than two hundred yards over alternate stone and sand. There is only one thing lacking at Camusfeàrna; within its narrow compass it contains every attraction but an anchorage. To look down from the hill above upon the bay and the scattered, intricate network of islands and skerries it would appear incredible that not one of those bights or niches should afford shelter, yet because of the long ebb of the tide each one of these seemingly tranquil miniature harbours dries out at low water. For years I had no boat at Camusfeàrna, and when at last I did buy a dinghy I was intimidated by the thought of those interminable hauls to and from the water’s edge, and I bought a little nine-foot flat-bottomed pram that one could almost pick up. But to have a boat again at all, even that toy, brought a hankering to extend one’s range up and down the coast and over to Skye, and now I have two dinghies with outboard motors, one of them a sturdy lifeboat’s dinghy of fifteen feet, with decked-in bows. There are moorings laid in the bay where the burn flows out to the sea, and the pram is kept drawn up on the beach as ferry to and from the larger boat, but when the wind blows strong from the south it is always an anxious business. The suddenness and intensity of West Highland squalls, even in summer, has to be experienced to be understood; pale-blue satin water can become in a matter of minutes an iron-grey menace raging in white at the crests of massive waves. But the compensations outweigh the anxiety, for it was frustrating to live at the sea’s edge and be unable to voyage upon it, to be unable to visit the distant islands, to fish in summer, to reach the nearest shop without the long climb to Druimfiaclach. The possession of the boats opened a whole new world around Camusfeàrna, a wide extension of its small enclosed paradise, and in summer the hours afloat drift by with work unheeded and the business of life seeming far off and worthless.
There is a perpetual mystery and excitement in living on the seashore, which is in part a return to childhood and in part because for all of us the sea’s edge remains the edge of the unknown; the child sees the bright shells, the vivid weeds and red sea-anemones of the rock pools with wonder and with the child’s eye for minutiae; the adult who retains wonder brings to his gaze some partial knowledge which can but increase it, and he brings, too, the eye of association and of symbolism, so that at the edge of the ocean he stands at the brink of his own unconscious.
The beaches of Camusfeàrna are a treasure house for any man whose eye finds wealth at the sea’s edge. There are more shells than I have seen on any other littoral; a great host of painted bivalves of bewildering variety and hue, from coral pinks and primrose yellows to blues and purples and mother-of-pearl, from jewel-like fan shells no bigger than a little fingernail to the great scallops as big as a side-plate; nutshells and Hebridean ark shells and pearly top-shells and delicate blush-pink cowries. The sandbars and beaches between the islands are formed of the disintegration of these myriad calceous houses, true shell sand that is blindingly white under the sun and crusted in deep layers at the tide’s edge with tiny intact empty shells gaudy as multi-coloured china beads. A little above the shells, because they are heavier, lies a filigree of white and purple coral, loose pieces each of which would lie in the palm of a hand, but there are so many of them that they form a dense, brittle layer over the sand. On still summer days when the tide wells up the beaches without so much as a wrinkle or ripple of wavelet at its edge, the coral floats off on the meniscus of the water, so that the sea seems to be growing flowers as an ornamental pond grows water lilies, delicately branched white and purple flowers on the aquamarine of the clear water.
Where shells lie thick it is often those that are broken that have the greatest beauty of form; a whelk is dull until one may see the sculptural perfection of the revealed spiral, the skeletal intricacy of the whorled mantle. Many of the shells at Camusfeàrna, and the stones, too, have been embroidered with the white limy tunnels of the serpulid tube-worm, strange hieroglyphics that even in their simplest forms may appear urgently significant, the symbols of some forgotten alphabet, and when a surface is thickly encrusted it assumes the appearance of Hindu temple carving, or of Rodin’s ‘Gates of Hell’, precise in every riotous ramification. Parts of the sculpture appear almost representational; a terrified beast flees before a pursuing predator; a well-meaning saint impales a dragon; the fingers of a hand are raised, like those of a Byzantine Christ, in a gesture that seems one of negation rather than benediction.
But above all it is the fantastic colouring of the beaches that as an image overpowers the minutiae. Above the tideline the grey rocks are splashed gorse-yellow with close-growing lichen, and with others of blue-green and salmon pink. Beneath them are the vivid orange-browns and siennas of wrack-weeds, the violet of mussel-beds, dead-white sand, and water through which one sees down to the bottom, as through pale green bottle-glass, to where starfish and big spiny sea urchins of pink and purple rest upon the broad leaves of the sea-tangle.
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The beaches are rich, too, in edible shellfish. Besides the ubiquitous mussels, limpets and periwinkles, there are cockle beds, razor-shell beds, and even an oyster bed, though this last remains one of the mysteries of Camusfeàrna. The oysters were introduced many years ago by a former owner of the estate, in a little circular bay almost closed from the sea and no more than twenty yards across, where a trickle of fresh water comes down over the sand from an island spring. At the tideline above this bay arrives a constant litter of tantalizingly freshly emptied oyster shells that would not disgrace Wheeler’s, and, very occasionally, a live oyster, but for all my searching year by year I have never discovered where the bed lies. This is as well, perhaps, for I suspect that by now the colony would have succumbed to my gluttony.
Below the tide around the islands the white sand alternates with a heavy rubbery jungle of sea-tangle or umbrella weed. The lobsters lurk in this dimness by day, and lobster-pots set in the sand patches between the weed are rarely unsuccessful. A variety of other life besides lobsters enters the pots, creatures couth and uncouth; sometimes the bait is covered with gigantic whelks, and almost always there are big edible crabs. Often there is a curious beast called the velvet swimming crab, with a shield of brown velvet and reproachful red eyes, and once I caught one of the most repulsive creatures I have ever come across, a spider crab. It was not only the enormously long legs and absence of pincers that were nauseating; he was grown over from head to foot, as it were, with a crinkly, purplish-red seaweed, lending him the same air of doubtful reality as a shroud traditionally imparts to a ghost. The weed is, in fact, grafted into position by the crab itself, for camouflage, and this implication of furtive cunning coming on top of the outrageous personal appearance is not reassuring.
4
Spring comes late to Camusfeàrna. More than one year I have motored up from the south early in April to become immobilized in snowdrifts on the passes twenty miles from it, and by then the stags are still at the roadside down the long glen that leads to the sea. By mid-April there is still no tinge of green bud on the bare birches and rowans nor green underfoot, though there is often, as when I first came to Camusfeàrna, a spell of soft still weather and clear skies. The colours then are predominantly pale blues, russet browns, and purples, each with the clarity of fine enamel; pale blue of sea and sky, the russet of dead bracken and fern, deep purple-brown of unbudded birch, and the paler violets of the Skye hills and the peaks of Rhum. The landscape is lit by three whites – the pearl white of the birch trunks, the dazzle of the shell-sand beaches, and the soft filtered white of the high snows. The primroses are beginning to flower a
bout the burn and among the island banks, though all the high hills are snow-covered and the lambs are as yet unborn. It is a time that has brought me, in all too few years, the deep contentment of knowing that the true spring and summer are still before me at Camusfeàrna, that I shall see the leaf break and the ground become green, and all the snow melt from the hills but for a few drifts that will lie summer through.
It has its own orchestration, this little prelude to the northern spring; every year there is the sound of the wild geese calling far overhead as they travel north to their thawing breeding grounds, and sometimes the wild unearthly beauty of whooper swans’ voices, silver trumpets high in the clear blue air. The eider ducks have arrived to breed about the shore and the islands; they bring with them that most evocative and haunting of all sounds of the Hebridean spring and summer, the deep, echoing, wood-wind crooning of the courting drakes.
One by one the breeding bird species return to the beaches and the islands where they were hatched; the sand martins to the sand cliff at the burn foot, the wheatears to the rabbit burrows in the close-bitten turf; the black guillemots and the gulls to the Camusfeàrna islands. The herring gulls come first, to the biggest island, where the lighthouse stands, some two hundred and fifty pairs of them, and the air above the white-splashed rocks and sea pinks scattered with broken shellfish is vibrant with the clang of their calling and their wheeling white wings. Among them are two or three pairs of great black-backed gulls, massive, hoarse-voiced and vulturine. Then come the common gulls, delicate, graceful, segregated shrilly on to a neighbouring promontory, beadily mistrustful of the coarse language and predatory predilections of their neighbours; and, lastly, not until well into May, come the terns, the sea-swallows, to their own outlying skerry. They arrive in the same week as the swallows come up from Africa to nest in the old ruined croft across the field, and with the thin steel oar-beat of their wings spring has almost given place to summer.
By then the colour everywhere is green. The purple birch twigs are hidden in a soft cloud of new leaf; the curled, almond-bitter rods of young bracken have in those short weeks pushed up three feet from the earth and unfurled a canopy of green frond over the rust of last year’s growth; the leaves of the yellow flag iris that margin the burn and the shore form a forest of broad bayonets, and the islands, that but for rank rooty patches of heather growing knee-deep seemed so bare in April, are smothered with a jungle-growth of goose grass and briar. To me there is always something a little stifling in this enveloping green stain, this redundant, almost Victorian, drapery over bones that need no blanketing, and were it not for the astringent presence of the sea I should find all that verdure as enervating as an Oxford water-meadow in the depths of summer.
Early in May comes the recurrent miracle of the elvers’ migration from the sea. There is something deeply awe-inspiring about the sight of any living creatures in incomputable numbers; it stirs, perhaps, some atavistic chord whose note belongs more properly to the distant days when we were a true part of the animal ecology; when the sight of another species in unthinkable hosts brought fears or hopes no longer applicable. When the young eels reach the Camusfeàrna burn – no more than a uniform three inches long nor thicker than a meat-skewer, steel-blue when seen from above, but against the light transparent except for a red blob at the gills – they have been journeying in larval form for two whole years from their breeding grounds south-west of Bermuda, through two thousand miles of ocean and enemies. During that long, blind voyage of instinct their numbers must have been reduced not to a millionth but a billionth of those who set forth, yet it is difficult to imagine that there can have been vaster hordes than reach the Camusfeàrna burn; still more difficult to realize that these are but a tiny fraction of the hosts that are simultaneously ascending a myriad other burns.
Where the burn flows calm through the level ground their armies undulate slowly and purposefully forward towards the seemingly insurmountable barrier of the falls; on, above the bridge, into the stretch where the water rushes and stumbles over uneven stones; round the rock-twist to the foot of the falls. Here, temporarily daunted or resting before their assault upon the vertical, spray-wet rock-face, they congregate almost motionless in the rock pools, forming a steel-blue carpet inches deep; dip a bucket here, and it comes up with a greater volume of elvers than of water. Some mistake the true course of the burn, and follow steep trickles leading to cul-de-sac pools of spray water; to and from these (for the miraculous powers of their multitudes do not appear to include communication or deduction), there are simultaneous streams of ascending and descending elvers, while the spray-pool itself is filled to the brim with an aimlessly writhing swarm.
It is here, during the wait at the foot of the falls, that the last heavy toll is taken of their numbers; for a week or two the rocks below the waterfall are splashed white with the droppings of herons who stand there scooping them up by the bill-full, decimating yet again, on the verge of their destination, the remnants of the great concourse that has been travelling thus perilously for two years.
But one has not been witness to the long core, as it were, of that mighty migration, and so it is in the elvers’ final ascent of the falls that the colossal driving power of their instinct becomes most apparent to the onlooker. At first, where at the edges of the falls the water splashes into shallow stone troughs among the horizontal ledges, the way is easy – a few inches of horizontal climb and the elver has reached the next trough. But after a foot or two of this ladder-like progression they are faced either with the battering fall of white water at their left or with a smooth black stretch of rock wall in front, hit every few seconds by heavy splashes of spray. For a few feet at the bottom of this wall grows a close slimy fir of waterweed, and among its infinitesimal tendrils the elvers twine themselves and begin, very slowly, to squirm their way upwards, forming a vertical, close-packed queue perhaps two feet wide. Sometimes a big gob of spray lands right amid their ranks and knocks a hundred of them back into the trough below, but slowly, patiently, they climb back again. I have never marked an elver so that it is recognizable, and for all I know this may happen to the same elver many, many times in a day or even in an hour. Perhaps it is something to do with the transparency of the creatures, besides their diminutive size and bewildering numbers, that makes the mind rebel both at the blind strength of their instinct and their inherent power to implement it, as though the secret power-house should be visible.
Once above the water-draggled weed there is no further incidental support for the climbing elvers; there is just sheer wet rock, with whatever microscopic roughness their transparent bellies may apprehend. They hang there, apparently without gravity, with an occasional convulsive movement that seems born of despair. They climb perhaps six inches in an hour, sometimes slithering backward the same distance in a second, and there are another twelve feet of rock above them.
It is not possible for more than a moment or two to identify oneself with any single one of this mass, but there is a sense of relief, of emotional satisfaction, in looking upward to the lip of the falls where they spill over from the hidden pool above, and seeing the broad band of glistening elvers that have accomplished the apparently impossible and are within an inch of safety.
Perhaps a few million out of billions top the Camusfeàrna falls; some, certainly, surmount the second and third falls too, and I have seen elvers of that size more than two thousand feet up the peak where the burn has its source. In perspective, the survival rate must be high when compared with that of spermatozoa.
Only once at Camusfeàrna have I seen any other living creatures in numbers to compare with those elvers, but I remember the occasion vividly. In the warm evenings of later summer, when the sun still flared a finger’s breadth above the saw-tooth peaks of the Cuillin and glowed on the dense red berries of the rowans, the MacKinnon children would come down the hill from Druimfiaclach to bathe at the white sand beaches of the islands. Long before I could hear them my dog Jonnie, growing a little c
orpulent and stiff now, would prick his ears and whine, and the feathery white stub of his tail would scuff softly on the stone floor. I would go to the open door and listen and Jonnie would sit very upright on the stone flags outside, staring up at the high skyline with his nose twitching and questing, and I would hear nothing but the sounds of ever-moving water and the faint, familiar bird-cries of the wilderness, the piping of shore birds and perhaps the mew of a buzzard wheeling overhead. There was the murmur of the dwindled waterfall and the trill of the burn among the boulders, and at the other side the muted sound of wavelets breaking in a small tumble of foam along the shore; there was the twitter of sand martins hawking flies in the still golden air, the croak of a raven, and gull voices from the sea that stretched away as smooth as white silk to the distant island of Eigg lying across the sea horizon. Sometimes there was the warning thump of a rabbit from the warren among the dunes behind the house.
But Jonnie always knew when the children were coming, and when at last I could hear them too, treble voices faint and far off and high above us, he would assume a sudden unconcern, walking with stiff indifference to lift his leg in a flourish over a nearby tuft of rushes or a post that guarded the small flower-bed. From the time that the boys’ heads were bobbing small on the hill horizon it would be some five minutes before they had descended the last and steepest part of the track, crossed the bridge, and come up over the green grass to the door, and all the time I would be wondering what they had brought – longed-for or unwelcome letters, some supplies that I urgently needed, a bottle of goat’s milk from their mother, or just nothing at all. When it was nothing I was at once relieved and bitterly disappointed, for at Camusfeàrna I both resent the intrusion of the outside world and crave reassurance of its continued existence.