Paul Theroux - The Kingdom by the Sea - A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain

I said I had to go, but they stood on the path, blocking my way.

"Give me some money," Jock said.

"Which way to Corpach?" I asked, still walking.

"I'm not telling any secrets unless you pay me!"

"All right, I'll pay."

He pointed. "Down there on the road."

I gave him a ten-pence coin.

He said, "Give me sixty or seventy."

"That was only worth ten," I said. "Now step aside."

The train was the 16:30 to Mallaig. I looked back and saw the hump of Ben Nevis, with streaks and splashes of snow in some of its hollows. It was a huge gray forehead of rock, with a green bare dome in front of it and three more on the south side. All the mountains here had the contours of hogs.

Mrs. Gordon in the next seat said, "Taking the train, to me, is like going to the cinema."

It was a splendid ride to Mallaig — one of the most scenic railway journeys in the world. But the train itself was dull, the passengers watchful and reverent, intimidated by all this scenery.

Scotland had a paradoxical beauty — its landscape was both lovely and severe; it was a monotonous extravaganza. The towns were as dull as any I had ever seen in my life, and the surrounding mountains very wild. I liked what I saw, but I kept wanting to leave. And the Scots had a nervous way with a joke. Their wit was aggressive and unsmiling. I wondered: Was that meant to be funny? When they were forthright they could become personal, especially on the subject of money. A Scot I met in Oban had accused me of wasting money when I told him that I had been planning to take a first-class sleeper to London; he regarded it as wasteful and selfish that I should want to be alone. And here on this Mallaig train a man wanted to know why, if there was no youth hostel in Mallaig, I planned to stay the night there? And why hadn't I bought a round-trip ticket — didn't I know it was cheaper than the one-way fare on a weekday? This was Mr. Buckie, who saved rubber bands — he had fourteen on his wrist — and had been wearing the same tweed cap since 1953. Coronation Year. He was not trying to be helpful. Penny-pinching had made him abusive, obstructive, and cross. He ended up by disliking me, as if I were wasting his money.

But I thought: In travel you meet people who try to lay hold of you, who take charge like parents, and criticize. Another of travel's pleasures was turning your back on them and leaving and never having to explain.

I changed my seat as we passed along the shore of Loch Eil. There were high mountains rising in the west, and more lochs. Some of the mountains were three thousand feet high and some lochs a thousand feet deep (Loch Morar a few miles away was even deeper). We crossed the Glenfinnian Viaduct — it was curved and long and had Romanesque arches, and it stood at the north end of the shiny black water of Loch Shiel, which lay beneath more rugged mountains.

There was great emptiness here. The train stayed high on the hillsides and did not descend into the valleys. There were ferns and bracken in the foreground, and some trees growing in narrow sheltered gullies out of the wind, but no human beings. The westerly gales had torn the soil from most hillsides. It was hard and lovely. The beauty was only part of it; you had to be tough to live here.

The landscape widened after Loch Ailort Station, and we were heading west, where the bright sun was setting, making the water blaze on Loch Nan Uamh, which was also the sea, and making the green grass luminous and vibrant, as if the pasture were trembling a foot from the ground. The light was perfect, because there was nothing in the way: the mountains stood separate and all the sea lochs here were long and stretched westward, so that the last of the sun shone uninterruptedly down their length.

The train bucked and turned north at Arisaig. The bays were like crater crusts filled with water. And offshore islands: Rhum, Eigg, Muck, and Canna — names like items from a misspelled menu. The Scour of Eigg was a hatchet shape against the sky. And now beneath the train there was a basin of green fields for three miles to the Sound of Sleat — and above the train were mountains of cracked rock and swatches of purple heather. Suddenly a horse was silhouetted in the sun, cropping grass beside the sea.

The train stopped at the level crossing at Morar — the opening and closing of gates, the latching and unlatching, clunk, clunk; and then the train chugged into Mallaig, where people were swimming in the freezing water, the foaming waves making lace caps for their bobbing heads.

That night I stared out the window at the freakish mountains on Skye. They were sharp-pointed, fantastic, and high, like peaks in dragon stories. They were the Cuillins, and their strange shape made them look unclimbable. Although it was after eleven, there was enough light for me to see them, and then near midnight they were ghostlier still: it was like winter light, a February afternoon in Boston, with the grayness of a gathering shadow.

***

In all my coastal travel I never met a fisherman who said he was satisfied. They hated the life, they said. The prices were bad, the competition was tough, the waters were overfished. Foreign fishermen were to blame — the Russians, the Japanese, the Danes. Foreigners scooped up everything — sprats, fry, undersized fish — and beat them into fishmeal on their factory ships.

Captain Cameron on his fishing boat, Lord Roberts, at Mallaig said, "Anyone here would sell his boat if he could get a fair price for it. The fishing business is dead. I should have sold mine when I could, a few years ago. Now I'm fifty-seven, and I have to work as long as I can. I won't be able to retire — haven't got the money. I'll work until I'm too weak to go on, and then my kids will be cursed with this bloody boat."

He was taking seventeen crates of prawns' tails ashore, about a thousand quids' worth ($1700), but his fuel bill for this trip was five hundred ($850), and he had a crew of five. There was hardly any profit in it. They had been at sea for nearly a week.

"Someday there'll be no fishing at all," Captain Cameron said. "It'll pass into ancient history."

On my second morning at Mallaig, Mrs. Fleming's daughter served me my breakfast and said, "Princess Diana's had a baby boy."

Everyone was pleased: an heir to the throne. It was another national event in an eventful period. The Falklands War had started and finished as I had been traveling. The Pope had come and gone. The Royal Baby was born. A railway strike was threatened. Three million people were unemployed—13 percent of the workforce — and one person out of six in Scotland was without a job. There was a deranged murderer loose in Yorkshire. They were public events and they had the effect of making people unusually talkative. "This Falklands business—" And then the American President visited and went horseback riding with the Queen. He made a speech. People smiled a little when they heard my accent. "I just saw your President on television—" It was supposed to be a kingdom of close-mouthed people, but the war and the strife and the Pope and now the birth of a future King had brought about a relentless garrulity. I needed a little air.

I took the road north out of the town. The road ended; a track began. It was a rough stony path that circled a gray hill above the sea. I walked along the shore of Loch Nevis. Just over the hill at Loch Morar people sometimes searched for underwater monsters. I walked to Inverie, which was a house on a road that went nowhere. I wondered how much farther I should go. The coast was in-and-out for hundreds of miles. I liked walking, but I was no snorting Rambler with plus fours and a pickaxe. If I saw a sheep on the path, I stopped and stared at it. I sat down and sketched a tall thistle at Inverie — the Scottish thistles seemed to me magical, and as complicated as crystals. I looked at birds. I tried to think of descriptions for these unusual islands — they were less like islands than old bare mountains in the sea. I was distracted by all the water and rock, the great heights of cloud, the ruined stone cottages along the coastal paths, the lived-in cottages in remote places that looked as though they were growing more remote — places reachable only in small boats.