Some gods saw all time at once.
I wished only to see — no, merely go — beyond where I was.
In order not to be between.
I had killed a moving watchman perhaps, if only through the threat of a pistol probably loaded.
A motorbike with two peasants in leather and helmets came up under the hill — forty miles off the coast of the Scottish mainland — and flew over the crest with revs to spare where I sat on a rock.
It was not Sunday, for I found a place open in a village and bought bread and milk and sardines. The old man asked if I was going to Tarbert, which I knew to be the steamer stop in Harris fifteen or twenty miles south of here through the mountains.
Why had I not asked him for Paul’s hut? The question yielded an answer to another. The other numbers I now saw were hundred-meter grid references, 08 north, 15¼ east.
I had a light but if I found myself — as indeed I preferred — approaching the hut in the dark, I wanted to know the map. The lines of dots in the area meant it was marshy, though the terrain was generally rugged.
Passing Ardvourlie Castle I was in Harris without a doubt. Down to my left in a newly changed scale was Loch Seaforth grandly widening southeastward, not a boat or tree or human body; and ahead of me was the first pass through the mountains toward Tarbert, and the rain began.
The map and the country seemed to try to alter each other’s accelerations. Sixty meters south of the 09 grid reference, the road (as the map promised) came tangent with the electrical power line; I paced off forty meters from that point and prepared to leave the road; I estimated that grid west must be five or six degrees right of west on my compass.
I had come twenty-five miles, even more with my archaeological detours, yet I was not tired. I was impatient; I was still in Glasgow. My way would have been easier had I not determined to stay on the grid fine. There’d been hardly enough gradation of light to show where the sun had been, and now there was no real light let alone sun. So I set my track at fifty-meter intervals on the peak of a bush or rock. I went down into a hollow tight with copse and surprisingly dry. I went up a spongy precipice and was wet to the knees.
Circumstance had held me up. You could not have conveyed my idea of that on film. You’d have needed, back in view of Callanish, to feel against your ribs last night’s dark collision and the similarity Krish’s tailoring bore to my own which had, so to speak, had a hand in my near-accident when I’d been pushed down the stopped escalator now perhaps three mornings the far side of this light pack and these strong shoes.
I shone Krish’s lighter to see my compass and my watch. I held my breath to hear voices. I didn’t need to breathe. Ned Noble — no, Andsworth — said you could master a way of breath-holding so that at a new limit of need you fell through an edge of your own head into an internal source of breath. I never believed in such miracles, but I didn’t forget.
I’d climbed a thousand feet from the road. It wasn’t possible.
Ahead voices were alight with feeling but ahead all I saw was a dark rise and over it a cleared space I thought was the rainy sky.
I heard Frenchman and dynamite.
I could tell something about the men talking but did not yet understand what they said. The deep, flatly unmodulated voice bored in: No sweat. The gentler intellectual voice given to ups and downs said, How’s he going to find this god-forsaken place? He’s no Sherman. The deep voice — which I took for Gene because I’d last seen Sherman the hiker from St. Louis in Gene’s house — said, God forsaken! This hut’s been a regular mecca from what I’ve heard, I had no trouble getting here. Oh, said the gender voice — Paul’s I thought (which if so made me the third brother, Jack), you’ve camped in the Northwest Territories, brother, you’ve trapped and portaged, you’ve strip-mined (haven’t we?), you’ve killed, you’ve expanded, you’re great, you’ve blasted craters for factory foundations with magnificent views, you’ve flown your own red plane out of the wilderness and home to Chicago, you’ve made a killing in real estate, you are a child in the fun warehouse of the profit system, you are a man, oh are you a man, never mind the Midwest, what do we have in New York City, Jack?
So the deep voice was Jack not Gene.
Jack said, You forget the Midwest, you’re living over here. What do you mean what do we have in New York? You know what we have — a warehouse and a parking lot.
Oh a parking lot, that’s new. And what’s the price of natural gas?
Washington’s had the lid on since the middle fifties, but you wouldn’t know that.
I think you’d gladly liquidate Paul is what I think.
Jack said, Look, Krish planned to come and he would have come two weeks ago but he had to be in London; look, when he acts he doesn’t leave anything to chance.
The other voice said, How come you’re here, then? Oh you’re just like Dad.
Thanks for the welcome, said Jack.
This isn’t my place, said the other, who was obviously not Paul.
On the crest of the rise I wanted to check the compass. But I knew that if my steady stumbling steps were right, I’d come some 350 meters, close enough for Krish’s lighter to be seen if Paul’s hut was on target. So I should just be able to hear the voices.
But I’d heard them more than just.
But as I stood on the crest wondering if I had not heard the answer to the big question that the gentler voice had asked Jack because I had started going away from the voices, I smelled a peat fire and found a shape slightly to my left — and lower down (though I knew I was looking at Clisham’s upward slope rising to a summit 1100 feet above me): and as I saw the shape, it gained uncertain light as if I had exhaled tentatively then with confidence into its stony window, and Jack’s voice answering some inaudible complaint said, I don’t know why he’s not here yet but let’s give him some help, and who’s around except someone’s sheep.
The dots on the map meant bog, possibly between me and the hut. The light barely curved out beyond the window frame but I imagined the roof was the thick gray-brown Hebridean thatch I’d actually seen little of today, that is held down with wire netting weighted at the edges with rocks and that can last as many as ten well-insulated winters. The hut’s walls were evidently stones jammed together like the stone wall separating the cow pasture from the west side of the Callanish site.
Instead of descending directly to the hut, I moved westward along a sort of ridge and came to the hut from the southwest seeing into a window on this other side of the hut from an angle that did not let me quite see the speakers and then I went up to my knees in bog, and then I saw blond hair and on the other head a hat.
I leaned onto dry ground, scratched my hands, crawled, crouched head up, watching the man with the deep voice, Jack, till he moved and sat down. He wore an olive green bush hat and had a thick growth of dark stubble. The wind was all around me as if the influence of Clisham created a wilderness of currents. The voice I’d thought was Paul’s came again, and then I saw him.
I wasn’t paying strict attention. It didn’t matter to my luck that I paid attention of that sort. I felt my automatic and wondered if its use last night had lightened it. Even if I hadn’t killed Krish he might die in the ditch, he might turn into a new peat fraught with force, through a change accelerated by the fact that the moor had never had an Indian like Krish to absorb before. The automatic felt like about two pounds but maybe I couldn’t judge now. Prolonged weightlessness shrinks the heart. I was powerful.
Well, I’m wasting my time too, said the gentle voice, and furthermore you didn’t have to come.