Atlantic Fury (37 page)

The wind was freshening now. I could feel it on my face. At five-fifteen I stopped again to listen. The waves made little rushing sounds, and away to my left, to port, I thought I heard the surge of the swell on some obstruction – thought, too, I could discern a movement in the fog.

It was getting lighter all the time, and I sat there, the minutes ticking by, straining to listen, straining to see. My eyes played tricks, pricking with fatigue. I could have sworn the clammy curtain of the mist moved; and then I was certain as a lane opened out to starboard and the fog swirled, wreathing a pattern over the broken surface of the sea. Somewhere a gull screamed, but it was a distant insubstantial sound – impossible to tell the direction of it.

I continued then, searching all the time the shifting wraith-like movements of the fog. A gust of wind hit me, blattering at the surface of the sea. A down-draught? I was given no time to think that out. A sudden darkness loomed ahead. A swirling uplift of the fog, and there was rock, wet, black rock ahead of me and to port.

I pulled the helm over, feeling the undertow at the same instant that I saw the waves lazily lifting and falling against a towering crag that rose vertically like a wall to disappear in white, moving tendrils of mist. Laerg, or Fladday, or one of the stacs – or was it the western outpost reef of Vallay? In the moment of discovery I didn't care. I had made my land-fall, reached my destination.

I celebrated with a drink from my flask and ate some chocolate as I motored south-west, keeping the cliff-face just in sight.

It wasn't one of the stacs, that was obvious immediately. That darkening in the fog remained too long. And then it faded suddenly, as though swallowed by the mist. I steered to port, closing it again on a course that was almost due south. The wind was in front of me, behind me, all round me; the sea very confused. Then I saw waves breaking on the top of a rock close ahead. I turned to starboard. More rock. To starboard again with rocks close to port.

A glance at the compass told me that I was in a bay, for I was steering now north-west with rock close to port. The rocks became cliffs again. Four minutes on north-west and then I had to turn west to keep those cliffs in sight. I knew where I was then. There was only one bay that would give me the courses I had steered – Strath Bay on the north side of Laerg itself.

I checked with the survey map, just to be certain. There was nowhere else I could be. Confirmation came almost immediately with a ninety-degree turn to port as I rounded the headland that marked the northern end of Aird Mullaichean. Course south-west now and the sea steep and breaking. I hugged the cliffs just clear of the backwash and ten minutes later the movement became more violent.

I was in a tide-rip, the sound of the engine beating back at me from hidden rock surfaces. An islet loomed, white with the stain of guano, and as I skirted it, the wind came funnelling down from the hidden heights above, strong enough to flatten the sea; and then the downdraught turned to an updraught, sucking the fog with it, and for an instant I glimpsed a staggering sight – two rock cliffs hemming me in and towering up on either side like the walls of a canyon.

They rose stupendous to lose themselves in vapour; dark volcanic masses of gabbro rock, high as the gates of hell, reaching up into infinity.
Sheer adamantine rock
. Wasn't that how Milton had described it? But before I could recall the exact words, I was through, spewed out by the tide, and Eileann nan Shoay had vanished astern, mist-engulfed as the fog closed in again.

I had marked the geo on the survey map, guessing at the position from the stories my grandfather had told of how he had stumbled on it by accident and as a result had sometimes been able to bring in lobster when the waves were so big in Shelter Bay that nobody dared put to sea. ‘I didna tell them, ye ken. A tur-rible thing that in a community as close as ours.' And his eyes had twinkled under his shaggy brows. ‘For ken it was a secret and I'm telling it to ye the noo so it willna die wi' me. There'll come a day mebbe when ye'll need to know aboot that geo.'

For me, that day was now. I closed in to the cliffs, the engine ticking over just fast enough to give me steerage away. South of Eileann nan Shoay he'd said, about as far as it is from the Factor's House to the old graveyard. Measured on the map that was just over six hundred yards. The middle one of the three – he had described the other two as full of rock and very dangerous to enter.

I saw the first of the gaping holes, black with the waves slopping in the entrance. It was a huge yawning cavity. The other two were smaller and close together, like two mine adits driven into the base of the cliffs.

Geo na Cleigeann, the old man had called it. ‘And a tur-rible wee place it looks from the water wi' a muckle great slab hanging over it.' I could hear his words still and there was the slab jutting out from the cliff face and the black gap below about as inviting as a rat hole with the sea slopping about in the mouth of it. It took me a moment to make up my mind, remembering the old devil's dour sense of humour. But this was no place to hang about with the wind whistling down off the crags above and the tide sweeping along the base of those fog-bound cliffs.

I picked up the torch, put the helm hard down and headed for the opening. A gull shied away from me and was whirled screaming up the face of the cliffs like a piece of wind-blown paper. The fog, torn by an up-draught, revealed crag upon crag towering over me. I had a fleeting impression of the whole great mass toppling forward; then the overhanging slab blotted it out and I was faced with the wet mouth of the cave itself, a grey gloom of rock spreading back into black darkness and reverberating to the noise of the engine.

The hole was bigger than I had first thought – about fifteen feet wide and twenty high. The westerly swell, broken on the skerries of Shoay Sgeir that jutted south from Eileann nan Shoay, caused only a mild surge. Behind me the geo was like a tunnel blasted in the rock, the entrance a grey glimmer of daylight.

I probed ahead with the beam of my torch, expecting every moment to see the shape of the lobster boat. I was so certain Iain must be ahead of me, and if I'd been him I thought I'd make for the geo rather than Shelter Bay. The surface of the water was black and still, and falling gently; rock ahead and I cut the engine. The roof was higher here, the sides further away. I was in a huge cavern, a sort of expansion chamber. No daylight ahead, no indication that there was a way out. The bows touched the rock and I reached out to it, gripping the wet surface with my fingers and hauling myself along.

In a westerly, with the waves rolling clean across the reef of Shoay Sgeir, this place would be a death trap. The rock round which I hauled myself had been torn from the roof, now so high that my torch could barely locate it. I probed with an oar. The water was still deep. Beyond the rock I paddled gently. The walls closed in again. The roof came down. And then the bows grounded on a steep-sloped beach, all boulders. I was ashore in the dark womb of those gabbro cliffs and no sign of Iain.

In the tension of the last hour I had forgotten how stiff and cramped I was. When I tried to clamber out I found I couldn't move. I drank a little whisky and then began to massage my limbs. The enforced wait made me increasingly conscious of the eeriness of the place, the slop of the sea in the entrance magnified, and everywhere the drip, drip of moisture from the roof. The place reeked of the sea's salt dampness and above me God knows how many hundred feet of rock pressed down on the geo.

As soon as I was sure my legs would support me, I eased myself over the side and into the water. It was knee-deep and bitterly cold; ashore I tied the painter to a rock, and then went up, probing with my torch, urgent now to discover the outlet to this subterranean world. It was over thirty years since my grandfather had been here; there might have been a fall, anything.

The beach sloped up at an angle of about twenty degrees, narrowing to a point where the roof seemed split by a fault. It was a rock cleft about six feet wide. The boulders were smaller here, the slope steeper. I seemed to cross a divide with mud underfoot and I slithered down into another cave to find the bottom littered with the same big rounded boulders.

It took me a little time to find the continuation of the fault, and it wasn't the fault I found first, but a rock ledge with the remains of some old lobster pots resting on a litter of rotted feathers. On the ground below the ledge was a length of flaking chain half-buried amongst the skeletal remains of fish. All the evidence of the old man's secret fishing, all except the boat he'd built himself and had abandoned here when he'd left with the rest of the islanders. And then, probing the farther recesses of the cavern, I saw a blackened circle of stones and the traces of a long-dead fire. Though the planking had all gone, the half-burnt remains of the stern and part of the keel were still identifiable, rotting now amongst a litter of charred bones.

I was too tired then, too anxious to locate the exit to the geo to concern myself about the wanton destruction of the boat, vaguely wondering who had made that fire and when, as I scrambled up the last steep slope to see a gleam of sunlight high above me. The slope was almost vertical here and slabs of stone had been let into the walls to form a primitive staircase, presumably the work of some long-dead generation of islanders.

The cleft at the top was wet and grass-choked, the crevices filled with tiny ferns; a small brown bird, a wren, went burring past me. And then I was out on a steep grass slope, out in the sunlight with the fog below me. It lay like a milk-white sea, lapping at the slopes of Strath Mhurain, writhing along the cliff-line to the north of Tarsaval, and all above was the blue of the sky – a cold, translucent blue without a single cloud. The sun had warmth and the air was scented with the smell of grass. Sheep moved, grazing on the slopes of Creag Dubh, and behind me white trails of vapour rose and fell in strange convoluted billows above the cliff-edge where fulmars wheeled in constant flight, soaring, still-winged on the up-draughts.

I stood there a moment filling my lungs with the freshness of the air, letting the magnificence of the scene wash over me – thanking God that my grandfather hadn't lied, that the exit from the geo had remained intact. I thought it likely now that Iain had landed in Shelter Bay and because I was afraid the fog might clamp down at any moment, I stripped off my oilskins and started out across the island. I crossed the top of Strath Mhurain, skirting black edges of peat bog, and climbed into the Druim Ridge with the sun-warm hills standing islanded in fog and the only sound the incessant wailing of the birds.

From the Druim Ridge I looked down into the great horseshoe of Shelter Bay. The Military High Road was just below me, snaking down into the fog. To my left Creag Dubh, with the pill-box shape of the Army's lookout, rising to Tarsaval; dark scree slopes falling to the dotted shapes of cleits and, beyond, the long ridge of Malesgair vanishing into the milk-white void. To my right the High Road spur running out towards the Butt of Keava, the rocky spine of the hills piercing the fog bank like a jagged reef. It was a strange, eerie scene with the surge of the swell on the storm beach coming faint on puffs of air; something else, too – the sound of an engine, I thought. But then it was gone and I couldn't be sure.

I hurried on then, following the road down into the fog, iridescent at first, but thickening as I descended until it was a grey blanket choked with moisture. Without the road to follow the descent would have been dangerous, for the fog was banked thick in the confines of the hills and visibility reduced to a few yards. It lifted a little as the road flattened out behind the beach. I could see the swell breaking and beyond the lazy beds the outline of the first ruined cottage, everything vague, blurred by the dankness of the atmosphere. And then a voice calling stopped me in my tracks. It came again, disembodied, weird and insubstantial. Other voices answered, the words unintelligible.

I stood listening, all my senses alert, intent on piercing the barrier of the fog. Silence and the only sounds the surge of the waves, the cries of the gulls. Somewhere a raven croaked, but I couldn't see it. Ahead of me was the dim outline of the bridge. And then voices again, talking quietly, the sound oddly magnified. The fog swirled to a movement of air from the heights. I glimpsed the ruins of the old jetty and a boat drawn up on the beach. Two figures stood beside it, two men talking in a foreign tongue, and out beyond the break of the waves I thought I saw the dark shape of a ship; a trawler by the look of it. Two more figures joined the men by the boat. The fog came down again and I was left with only the sound of their voices. I went back then, for I was cold and tired and I'd no desire to make contact with the crew of a foreign trawler. Looting probably, and if Iain had landed in Shelter Bay he'd have hidden himself away in one of the cleits or amongst the ruins of the Old Village. Wearily I climbed the hairpin bends, back up to the Druim Ridge and the sunlight, nothing to do now but go back down into the bowels of that geo and bring up my gear. My mouth was dry and I drank from a trickle of peat water at the head of Strath Mhurain.

And then I was back on the slopes of Aird Mullaichean, walking in a daze, my mind facing again the mystery of that fire, conscious of a growing sense of uneasiness as I approached the rock outcrop that marked the entrance to that dark, subterranean fault. Had the crew of some trawler rowed into the geo and made a fire of the boat just for the hell of it? But that didn't explain the bones unless they'd killed a sheep and roasted it. And to burn the boat … On Laerg itself and all through the islands of the Hebrides boats were sacrosanct. No man would borrow so much as an oar without permission.

I picked up my torch and started back down the slabbed stairway. Darkness closed me in. The dank cold of it chilled the sweat on my body. I tried to tell myself it was only the strangeness of the place, my solitary stumbling in the black darkness and the cavernous sound of the sea that made me so uneasy. But who would come into that geo if he hadn't been told about it? Who would have known there was a boat there, firewood to burn? I was shivering then, and coming to the cave where the boat had been, I was suddenly reluctant, filled with a dreadful certainty. Twenty-two days. I'd had only a night at sea, a single cold night with little wind. But I knew what it was like now – knew that he couldn't possibly have survived … And then I was into the cave, my gaze, half-fascinated, half-appalled, following the beam of my torch, knowing what I was going to find.