Where the gannets came from I don’t know, for until that moment I had seen none. They appeared as though by magic, coming up from all angles and all heights and the little bombplumes of their dives spouted in the sea all round me. My presence didn’t seem to disturb them at all. Perhaps it was because the dinghy was so different in shape and appearance to any boat they had encountered before. Three of them dived in quick succession, hitting the water so close that I could almost reach out and touch the plumes of spray. They surfaced practically together, each with a herring gripped in its long beak. A vigorous washing, a quick twist to turn the fish head first and then it was swallowed and they took off again, taxiing clumsily in a long run, wings and feet labouring at the surface of the water. Other birds were there — big herring gulls and black-backs; shearwaters and razorbills too, I think, but at that time I was not so practised at bird recognition. The smooth-moving hillocks of the sea became littered with the debris of the massacre; littered, too, with porpoise excreta — small, brown aerated lumps floating light as corks.
It was over as suddenly as it had started. All at once the birds were gone and I was left alone with the noise of the engine, only then realising how the scream of the gulls had pierced that sound. I looked at the Monachs and was surprised to find they had scarcely moved. There was nothing else in sight, not even a fishing boat, and the only aircraft I saw was the BEA flight coming into Benbecula, a silver flash of wings against the blue of the sky.
Though less than four miles long from Stockay to the lighthouse, the Monachs were with me a long time. It was not until almost midday that they began to drop out of sight astern. Visibility was still very good then. The stone of the lighthouse stood out clear and white, and though the North Ford and all the low-lying country of Benbecula and the Uists had long since disappeared, the high ground remained clearly visible; particularly the massive brown bulk of the Harris hills.
It was about this time that I thought I saw, peeping up at me over the horizon ahead, the faint outline of what looked like a solitary rock. The peak of Tarsaval on Laerg? I couldn’t be certain, for though I stared and stared and blinked repeatedly to re-focus my eyes, it remained indefinite as a mirage, an ephemeral shape that might just as easily have been a reflection of my own desire; for what I wanted most to see — what any seaman wants to see — was my objective coming up right over the bows to confirm me in my navigation.
But I never had that satisfaction. It was there, I thought, for a while; then I couldn’t be certain. Finally I was sure it wasn’t, for by that time even the Harris hills had become blurred and indistinct.
I was conscious then of a drop in temperature. The sun had lost its warmth, the sky its brilliance, and where sky met sea, the pale, watery blue was shaded to the sepia of haze. Where I thought I had glimpsed Laerg there was soon no clear-cut horizon, only a pale blurring of the light like refraction from a shallow cloud lying on the surface of the sea.
Fog! I could feel it in my bones, and it wasn’t long before I could see it. And at 13.3 °Cliff Morgan confirmed my fears. After giving me a weather forecast that was much the same as before, he added: Your greatest menance now is fog. Weather ship ‘India’ reports visibility at 11.00 hours 50 yards. The BBC forecast at 13.40 merely referred to Chance of fog patches. I had already put on my sweaters again; now I put on my oilskin jacket. Within minutes the atmosphere had chilled and thickened. A little wind sprang up, cats’ paws rippling the oily surface of the swell. One moment the hills of Harris were still there, just visible, then they were gone and the only thing in sight, besides the sea, was the tower of the Monachs lighthouse iridescent in a gleam of sun. Then that, too, vanished, and I was alone in a world where the sky seemed a sponge, the air so full of moisture that the sun scarcely percolated through it.
Half an hour later I entered the fog bank proper. It came up on me imperceptibly at first, a slow darkening of the atmosphere ahead, a gradual lessening of visibility. Then, suddenly, wreathing veils of white curled smoky tendrils round me. The cats’ paws merged, became a steady chilling breeze; little waves began to break against the bows, throwing spray in my face. Abruptly my world was reduced to a fifty-yard stretch of sea, a dank prison with water-vapour walls that moved with me as I advanced, an insubstantial, yet impenetrable enclosure.
After that I had no sense of progress, and not even the sound of the engine or the burble of the propeller’s wake astern could convince me that I was moving, for I took my grey prison with me, captive to the inability of my eyes to penetrate the veil of moisture that enclosed me.
Time had no meaning for me then. I nursed the engine, watched the compass, stared into the fog, and thought of Laerg, wondering how I was to find the entrance to the geo — wondering, too, whether I should be able even to locate the island in this thick wet blanket of misery that shut out all sight. It would be night then, and the slightest error in navigation …
I checked and re-checked my course constantly, the moisture dripping from my face and hands, running down the sleeves of my oilskin jacket on to the Celluloid surface of the chart case. Tired now and cold, my limbs cramped, I crouched listless at the helm, hearing again my grandfather’s voice; stories of Laerg and his prowess on the crags. He had claimed he was fleeter than anyone else. Even at sixty, he said, he’d been able to reach ledges no youngster dare visit. Probably he was justified in his claims. At the time the islanders left Laerg there were only five men left between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, and remembering those long, almost ape-like arms, those huge hands and the enormous breadth of his shoulders, I could well imagine the old devil swinging down the face of a thousand-foot cliff, his grizzled beard glistening with the vapour that swirled about him as he sought some almost invisible ledge where the guillemots or solan geese were nesting.
In just such a fog as this he had gone down the face of the sheer cliffs on the north side of the island, below Tarsaval, lowering himself on the old horse-hair rope that had been part of his wife’s dowry when they married at the turn of the century. Those cliffs were over 1,300 ft. high, the most spectacular volcanic wall in the British Isles. He was on his own and he had missed his footing. His hands had slipped on the wet rope and he had fallen fifty feet, his foot catching in the loop at the end. They had found him hanging there head-downwards in the morning. He had been like that most of the night, a total of five hours, but though he was frozen stiff as a board and his joints had seized solid, he nevertheless managed to walk down to his cottage. He had been fifty-two years old then.
These and other stories came flooding back into my mind; how when he had married my grandmother he had had to undergo the ordeal of the Lovers’ Stone. That sloped crag, jutting out high over the sea where it boiled against the base of the cliffy, had made an indelible impression on my young mind. He had told us that all bridegrooms had had to pass this test, walking out along the tilted stone to stand on the knife-edge, balanced on the balls of their feet and reaching down to touch their toes. It was a test to prove that they were competent cragsmen, men enough to support a woman on an island where the ability to collect eggs and birds from their nesting places could make the difference between a full belly and starvation in winter. ‘Aye, and I was fool enough to stand first on one foot and then on the other, and then put my head down and stand on my hands — just to prove I wasna scared of anything at all in the whole wide wor-rld.’ The old man’s voice seemed to come to me again through the roar of the engine.