To a tourist, a dire land with a beauty of exile.
To a motion intent as mine, a place maybe potentially as static as the eastern Steppes.
According to my map Mount Clisham lay hazed way to the south; but to find my point on it I must go west to the stones Jenny had penciled at Callanish. Was there haze, then, on my map? I breathed breaths deep as a compressed dream. She could not have meant to give a false lead. But it might still be a lead. She had picked up that English interest in archaeology whose cachet is like that of anthropology in the States. Surrounded by the noise of a small city, English coeds ready to work like Trojans sign up for a summer of dusty sifting at the site hard by Exeter Cathedral, the way adolescent girls at genteel schools fall in love with horses.
Callanish was where I trusted to find the way on to Paul. I was alone and alert. I breathed out and in.
I knew nothing.
The pack focused my shoulders. I would walk all the way. I turned as a skier turning leans downhill, and looked back stiffly as if for a car, but really to see what I saw — which was the Indian.
He was at a quai-side fence looking at a boat basin. A long white trenchcoat tailored like my tan one now packed in my case in Glasgow. Nothing in his hands or on his back. He lived in the present, Cosmo said.
I was on the edge of Stornoway, the colorless sky low and long.
A drunk swung by and disappeared.
A car beeped. The driver of a bright red mini beckoned. The Indian was watching the empty boats.
I could still feel my pack after I’d dumped it in back.
My driver switched off the music.
We drove around the next corner and Stornoway lapsed. The man said I was from America. I thought him about my age; he looked younger; he had Irish in his voice; I’d seen nothing but black hair and blue eyes in Stornoway, but this man had brown hair and brown eyes. He said I was going to see the stones, and I said yes. He wasn’t going all the way, he was turning off. I asked if this was dark for three o’clock in October. He said no, but this wasn’t too bad a time to come.
A wind pushed a flicker of rain over the road and it was dry again. I asked about December, what was it like here. My companion laughed and said nothing.
I drew upon Stonehenge five hundred-odd flying miles somewhere to my left: I said the stones at Callanish might be worth visiting December 22, the winter solstice.
He didn’t know.
He and some friends assembled for sunrise at summer solstice, drank a few pints, but did not dress up in robes or speak spells. I said he knew about the solstice… He said, the longest and shortest days. I said another way of seeing it was that the sun at those times appeared to stand still between northward and southward motion. He doubted if Stone Age man could have observed that.
I did not know what I would say next. It was a fact that once in Honduras Catherwood’s American companion John Lloyd Stephens had dropped his dagger into the mountain mud and then had fallen off his mule almost onto the dagger which had stuck blade up. He passed a fork and he said that was where he’d been going to turn. I thanked him and asked if there had been Americans at Callanish. Americans were always writing books, he said.
He didn’t come into this area, he lived several miles from here. Lewis was better than the mainland. In his view the stones were interesting, but no one would ever know what they really meant. It was lucky I wasn’t up here on a Sunday because “the locals” he said might object to my doing the stones on the Sabbath. Stornoway was shut up and there were no buses or cars on the road, so be sure not to travel on Sunday. Many emigrated from the Hebrides to America.
I did not say, I am looking for my daughter.
Anyway, was I?
He asked where I was staying. I said I didn’t know — I had an address — a number with Callanish after it. A crofter’s cottage. Maybe they would take me in.
He didn’t comment.
I asked if the peat would ever give out.
No, he said, not unless the population drain were reversed, but maybe not even then.
Figures were cited.
Rain blew across the road more than once.
I wanted to say to this man that the film did not matter.
He did not speak of America. He spoke of peat.
America and Canada have forty million acres of it. It has to have special conditions, so you’d think it would yield something special. Now south of here—
Down by Clisham? I said.
Oh no. Down three islands to South Uist — there’s a seaweed factory on the beach. They dry and pulverize seaweed and send it out to England. Process it for fertilizers, nylon, and some binding agent used in false teeth. A very special seaweed of huge plants like cables, and it comes by steamer from the Orkneys and takes two days to unload out of two holds. But what’s peat good for? Burn it of course. The men make a party and go off digging on a Saturday. They spade up sods and stack them. The drying takes six weeks unless it’s as wet as it was this summer (and you probably know, it’s precisely wet weather coupled with poor drainage that encourages the formation of peat). Well elsewhere they may use excavators and heating chambers but in the Hebrides it is by hand, big square sods out there and you can see what the work is like right where you see the strip-trenches.
There’s going to be an international commune in Chile, I said, ecologically based, self-supporting, recycling, all that, five hundred people.
They might make it, said the man.
Can you walk out there? I asked, say directly overland to Mount Clisham so as to cut the roundabout distance by road.
There are only three reasons to go out on the moor, said my driver: to find your sheep, to take a short walk for it’s handsome country, and to cut peat. No good trekking; you run into high heather, and lochs, and bogs of moss that you’ll go right down into.
My driver might have been an engineer or a schoolteacher. I wanted to ask if he had an independent income. I reviewed the air and steamer connections available to him (for instance the four-hour crossing from Stornoway to Kyle of Lochalsh). He could not easily or cheaply commute to the mainland; I had heard somewhere of a process of boiling peat in a weak solution of sulphuric acid, then neutralizing with lime, whereby a ton of peat could yield twenty-five gallons of alcohol for motor fuel. A Highgate neighbor had once, but only once, urged me over his fence to try peat on the stubborn rhododendron in one far corner of our garden.
My driver nodded ahead across three or four miles of road and field and moor. The stones, he said.
And as he continued his information on peat, I saw on a rise and blanched by the brightening but now later light a gathering of what must be quite high stones, some pointed like weapons with contours like heads, but more than in any of their single shapes they seemed from here more intelligible as a gathering. There was in the midst one greater than others.
They can make it into coke briquettes, said my driver. Pulp it, mill it, homogenize it, bake it, press it so it’s like lignite — and the end product’s a fuel as hot almost as coal with less sulphur. They can also convert the nitrogen in peat into ammonia.
I looked at the stones as they moved off to my left as if toward Clisham. You’ve studied chemistry, I said. And geology, he said. What about peat for caulking, I said.
But here, said my companion, they cut it; and when the dug peat dries, they burn it.
We stopped at a house on a rise: A red-faced heavy-set woman in a thick pink cardigan said hers was not the number I wanted and told me where to go, pointed across a valelike depression containing a loch, to a rise on the other side where a few cottages of wood frame or stone were scattered along a couple of miles of road from a church on the right or north to the neolithic site fenced off on the higher headland to the left above a considerable body of water.