I reflected upon further information received from my driver.
I went back and got in beside him, said I knew where I was going and would walk it from here; I thought I would like to arrive on foot; I thanked him for going out of his way. He did not ask what would happen if they couldn’t take me in over there. He said it was a pleasure to talk to an American and asked what line I was in. I said business, a bit of this, a bit of that. Random enterprises. He said it sounded like I was quite free. I said that in fact I had a great untapped capacity for work. University of Lancaster had I said? The Chilean commune? Yes, I said, University of Lancaster. He said an American firm had got into fish-processing in Stornoway, but he doubted it would keep people here. Did I know there was a factory in Michigan that used to turn peat into paper?
A breeze brought the rain racing across the loch and from the far cottages and over along the road and over the car, but the late sun on the headland lit the Callanish stones.
I decided there was nothing in his having picked me up. He made this run from Stornoway often on a weekday afternoon an hour or so after the Glasgow plane.
Peat fires, the man said, were an acquired smell; it was one reason he’d always planned to come back to Lewis, the smell was different in India.
But, I said, they use ox and camel dung there.
Yes, mainly, he said — but there is an Indian peat that forms from decaying rice plant material, it hasn’t that brackish acrid odor of peat in the Western Isles.
You’ve traveled, I said.
He looked at me closely as I reached back for my pack and I was about to ask if he knew of an American in these parts named Paul (and it hit me I’d never asked Dagger Gene’s surname), but the man (now looking through me as if out beyond the Callanish stones to the great loch from the sea, a meaning, a Norse source, an old sequence inspiring him) said the word sphagnum and said it again; yes, it was where some of this came from — amazing stuff, a moss that thrives on acid conditions, and grows at the top while it decays at the bottom so the heather is maintained above and the decayed matter sinks and settles in deposits that eventually form peat which if it were put under great subterranean pressures would in fact become coal. Ancient forests at different levels, he said.
He shook his head, and I nodded mine. I said, So there were trees here in Neolithic times. The Callanish stones look from here like old weathered trunks.
He hadn’t heard of an American named Paul. He hadn’t picked up any Americans going to or from Callanish in a year, the stones were probably a calendar, he said.
I felt his own words about peat had made him think. He shook his head again. I thanked him again. He said he’d expected to take me all the way. I hauled out my rucksack, and he said it didn’t look very full.
I wanted to get away. I put up my hood. The landscape was bare and low and rolling.
He said I was going to get wet.
I shook hands, closed my door, hoisted the pack, and walked out ahead of the car. But I turned when his voice came again: Don’t try walking far on the moors. You’ll sink in.
He grinned behind the windscreen wipers which had started swinging again.
Time seemed far away. A thousand days passed in a blink of the eye. I knew nothing or tried to, except the man in front of me and the stones and the crofter’s cottage across the vale behind me — and the cottage right here where the woman was watching through the vertical slit between the curtains. That was what I knew. The browns and faint rusts and purples fading into the firm fine gray of the rain seemed almost enough to die into, and a voice, my own, called suddenly, Who was that last American you picked up a year ago you said?
A beautiful woman, he called back. And she knew about the stones, she knew about the northward avenue — I forget what it was if she ever said. She had green eyes and she said the god Apollo used to visit the island every nineteen years, and she was most concerned about the Great Menhir, the big stone there in the center. Its shadow falls over the cairn which you’ll see; she was concerned about that.
When does the shadow fall?
At the spring equinox, said the man, as if giving me something just because I deserved it.
So it was March, I said, passing around to his side where the window was open.
This year. And something about twenty days after the equinox, a constellation rising before sunrise. Mean anything? I don’t know if she stayed twenty days.
I smiled at him and said without hesitation and beyond doubt, and hovering in the rain between truth and truth: And her hair — her hair was red.
The man looked up into my eyes and then he smiled and marvelously found no cause to say what we both knew. That I was right. And perhaps he guessed that I knew her name, though I knew I was far from sure.
I said, You know your peat.
I should, he said.
Which left something between us as I went away down across the vale.
The rain god received here a superfluity of propitiation and rained steadily if gently all year long, twenty days, twenty thousand days.
The crofter’s widow I stayed with had the cheekbones of a Pawnee, and blue eyes deep as a skull’s. She translated my queries and her answers into Gaelic for an old person who sat upright in a shawl snuffling at the fire of fibrous quiet peat-squares. The cells of the moss must hold plenty of water. But the water didn’t get a chance to increase the dilution of the plant; the water impeded bacterial decay, the man had said: and the dead bottom of the plants sank to form peat. There was a cycle of mounds and hollows where a water-loving moss grew upward, got drier, gave way to slower-growing heather which became the new hollow now to be outgrown and overgrown by moss coming up from below to make new mounds. I went round and round trying to get straight how the water could spread downward, yet the osmosis, if it was osmosis, rather than diluting the system’s capacity to do work, increased that capacity — through creating peat. But maybe it wasn’t a closed system. I had a great wish to know, to be thorough. A god could allow himself to be diverted by a study of this kind. I had to have more time, a year to myself, twenty thousand days, but instead as in a dream I had to settle for the things that were jammed together. The bog peat between Stornoway and Callanish wasn’t all from sphagnum.
If there were messages in the stones they would not be magic-markered on the base of the Great Menhir or on some huge arrowhead stone of the avenue.
Yes, said my host, there was Thanksgiving in the Western Isles, it was going to be made earlier next year, she’d heard, on account of the weather. She knew of no recent Americans, but a boy and a girl had come on a motorbike the other day and had stopped up at the stones and then later came back down and before they went away, the girl came to the door and asked for a drink of water. Yes the girl had light hair, the boy dark. They had rucksacks.
The woman did not ask anything except when I would like my tea.
She said, You’re American, and faintly smiled.
From my second-floor room, which seemed under its low ceiling to be bigger than my outside view of the cottage had made it look able to hold, I looked east over the bleak vale and moor along a black strip of trench to where the vacant road appeared. The light was lowering, but lowering slowly, respecting the great arc of the north.
It took me five minutes to walk past the few cottages and up through the gate to the stones, and then past a post with a Ministry of Monuments plaque which I did not read except the dates 2000–1500 B.C. and felt from the southerly direction in which I now followed the right or west-side of the two lines of stones forming the avenue, weak reminders of the British Museum and the Highgate Scientific Institution with its white paint and peaceful newspaper room visited each morning by a stocky gentleman in a white beard to whom I had nodded for years, and the musty library in the back rooms and a book Jenny had taken out once when she was doing biology that told of plant freaks such as the squirting cucumber that builds up in its interior against its elastic casing such osmotic pressure taking water that anything can set it off — the stalk pops like a plug, and seeds squirt thirteen yards. Not the same thing as a bog-burst where peat or swamp having been bound in by the roots of bushes builds up water pressure till it lets go as a kind of mud flow. Think of a peat bomb.