Maurice Walsh - The Small Dark Man (Maurice Walsh) (Literary Thoughts Edition)

In addressing himself he gave the odd impression of addressing a man he knew well and had no great liking for. It was something more than ordinary thinking aloud, for he seemed to project a personality outside himself and make it the butt of criticism and comment. A man like that might be remote, but never would he be lonely.

Grumblingly he stepped off the road, but, once in the path, resigned himself to himself and buckled down to the work in hand. He climbed well, lifting springingly from heel to toe and placing his whole foot on the upward slope. The path steepened as it ascended; the birches that first brushed him with trailing fronds receded and thinned; and at last he came out on a dome plumed only with grey grass. It says well for his wind that his first deep-breathing halt was on the crown of this dome. He smiled pityingly. He was looking down and across a wide tilt of stone at the impossibly steep face of Cairn Ban. The outline of it was an almost perfect triangle, shaved as with a mighty plane except for a narrow boulder-filled corrie that gashed upward a little to the left of the middle line. That corrie had to be his road—or else he must circle round to an easier face of the mountain.

“Try it, you devil!” he urged warmly, and obeyed that urge.

Out on that hot tilt of stone he found the going not so easy and yet not too difficult. The surface had been split and twisted by primeval fires, and it was pitted with scooped out basins varying in diameter from inches to yards, and all mysteriously full to the brim of limpid water—water as clear as a blue diamond, so nearly invisible that the eye could not gauge it but for the exquisite refraction of light playing through it when some faint tremor of air shivered across its surface. Once the small man lay full length and drank out of a tiny basin. “Wow!” he cried, “but it’s cold. A gallon of good whisky in the punchbowl of it and I’d climb that mountain up there and two more on the top of it.”

At a distance of half a mile the gash in the face of Cairn Ban seemed to be forbiddingly perpendicular, but on a nearer approach it promised better, and actually leant back so that, standing upright, a man could touch the rock with outstretched hand.

“A cataract of stone,” he murmured, his head back into his shoulders and his eyes tracing the terrifying slant above him. “A pebble loose-footed up there, and give me back the cliff at Suvla Beach.”

He tied the sleeves of the old burberry round his neck, drew in a full breath, and started to climb—a persistent grey ant crawling doggedly up the huge, calm face of the mountain. Head steady, hand and foot cunningly seeking sure grip, he went upwards, boulder over boulder, while the valleys and moors below him sank and widened and dwindled.

II

Two hours later Hugh Forbes was on the shoulder of the mountain a bare hundred feet below the cairn. He had safely surmounted the corrie, and his troubles seemed over. The ridge he was on ran straight up to the cairn, and he had but to make sure of his hand-grips and keep going.

And then it was as if a cold grey finger moved across the eyes that were intent on the rock before them. He steadied his grip and looked sideways into a pearly, opaque swirl that, next instant, poured over him, swallowed him, shut him in a narrow world where some devil whispered that everything was safe and without fear.

“Blast it! I can make the cairn,” said the small man in his throat, and he went on climbing, his face to the rock and his eyes on his hands. He did make the cairn, but he almost butted into it before he saw it. And there he sat on the bottom stones, propped his elbows on his knees and his head on his hands, and drew in hard breaths. The air was thin and chill, and the blood beat painfully in his ears. It was long before that hissing thud died down.

In time he lifted his head and looked around. He could not see ten feet. A steady breeze blew from the north, and the mist went by him with the smoothness of flowing water. It could not flow forever at that rate, he considered; and what was it the postmaster had said? “If a mist comes down on you at the cairn, stay there.” He would do that, and meantime fill a pipe—and save his Abernethys for later on.

As he slowly ground a flake of brown plug between his palms, and stared unseeing into the opaque flow of mist, there came to his ears from somewhere far below a small sibilant whisper, and then something near said “hu-u-sh” warningly, and after that a booming note, weirdly hollow, lifted and went by—close by—and died away, and again came that warning hush. Only the swirl of the breeze in the gouged-out face of the mountain, but the Gael sensed something inimical, and his back hairs lifted.

“They are gathering about,” he whispered, “but they have no power unless I yield it.” He lit his pipe steady-handed and gathered his hardihood close about him.

In less than half an hour the mist cleared off as quickly as it had come. One moment he was staring into nothingness, the next into immensity.

“Thunder o’ God!” he swore aloud. “ ’Tis some devil lustful of beauty that drops a curtain and lifts it to get a sudden blink.”

For the mist actually rolled up like a curtain without leaving even a fringe trailing among the rocks, and the sun-bathed width of Scotland burst on the vision. The startling change from opaque littleness to sunny immensity was dizzying. The eye swooped down and over the dark of woods, the sheen of water, the purpling brown of moors, the green of Moray Lowlands, the steel mirror of the northern firth, and, far beyond, the strung purple of the northern hills.

After a long look Hugh turned east and south and realised desolation in its ultimate. The mist that, a minute before, seemed to enshroud the world was now no more than a thin band of pearly cloud low down against the blue of the sky, and below it was a far-thrown welter of mountains: peaks and ridges and gashes flung to the horizon, dull brown, solemn grey, sombre black, swallowing and denying the sunlight, mocking the blue deeps they crouched under, weighing on the mind with some inscrutable content in their own abiding sterility. The stark white of an occasional patch of snow made that sterility all the more appalling.

“I will go now, in the name of God,” said Hugh Forbes, “for beauty and terror should not be looked upon for long.”

III

He did not delay long at the real summit. Twice the mist had rolled over him as he crossed the hollowed-out plateau to the summit-cairn, and twice he had waited grimly while the mist-whisperings approached and went by and died out. And always he had felt a great desire to crouch and move away from something that was creeping up behind him.

He had seen all he wanted to see that day; the sun was far down in the west; and somewhere below was Glen Dhu and sixteen miles of winding track. And so from the summit-cairn he went long-strided down the easy eastern slope, his old coat flapping like a mantle behind him, and his eyes watchful for the canyon of Loch Dhu. Presently the gentle slope he was on levelled out and even lifted into a slight ridge, and, thrusting upwards to the brow of it, he stopped dead. The whole side of the mountain was cut sheer away at his feet, and he looked far down into Loch Dhu, a long splash in the deep gut of the mountains. No sunlight shone on it—no sunlight ever did shine on it. In places it was black with depth, and in places purple, and in places dimly grey where basalt ledges came near the surface. At its upper end a fifteen-hundred-foot precipice lifted out of huge boulders into the breast of mighty Ben a Mhuic—a forbidding black precipice slashed with the red of iron and the white of snow. Where Hugh stood was the still clear light of the gloaming, but all Glen Dhu, as far as he could see, was in shadow, though, across the mile-wide chasm, the tops of the peaks stringing northward were lit with orange, a wild glare of colour over the gloom of the glen.