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THE Quirang is one of the
wonderful sights of Skye, and if you once visit it you will believe ever
afterwards the misty and spectral Ossian to be authentic. The Quirang is a
nightmare of nature; it resembles one of Nat Lee’s mad tragedies; it
might be the scene of a Walpurgis night; on it might be held a Norway
witch’s Sabbath. Architecture is frozen music, it is said; the Quirang
is frozen terror and superstition. ‘Tis a huge spire or cathedral of
rock some thousand feet in height, with rocky spires or needles sticking
out of it. Macbeth’s weird sisters stand on the blasted heath, and
Quirang stands in a region as wild as itself. The country around is
strange and abnormal, rising into rocky ridges here, like the spine of
some huge animal, sinking into hollows there, with pools in the hollows—glimmering
almost always through drifts of misty rain. On a clear day, with a bright
sun above, the ascent of Quirang may be pleasant enough; but a clear day
you seldom find, for on spectral precipices and sharp-pointed rocky
needles, the weeping clouds of the Atlantic have made their chosen home.
When you ascend, with every ledge and block slippery, every runnel a
torrent, the wind taking liberties with your cap and making your plaid
stream like a meteor to the troubled air, white tormented mists boiling up
from black chasms and caldrons, rain making disastrous twilight of
noon-day,—horror shoots through your pulses, your brain swims on the
giddy pathway, and the thought of your room in the vapoury under world
rushes across the soul like the fallen Adam’s remembrance of his
paradise. Then you learn, if you never learned before, that nature is not
always gracious; that not always does she out-stretch herself in low-lying
bounteous lands, over which sober sunsets redden and heavy uddered cattle
low; but that she has fierce hysterical moods in which she congeals into
granite precipice and peak, and draws around herself and her companions
the winds that moan and bluster, veils of livid rains. If you are an
Englishman you will habitually know her in her gracious, if a Skye man in
her fiercer, moods.
No one is independent of
scenery and climate. Men are racy of the soil in which they grow, even as
grapes are. A Saxon nurtured in fat Kent or Sussex, amid flats of heavy
wheat and acorn-dropping oaks, must of necessity be a different creature
from the Celt who gathers his sustenance from the bleak sea-board, and who
is daily drenched by the rain-cloud from Cuchullin. The one, at his best,
becomes a broad-shouldered, clear-eyed, ruddy-faced man, slightly obese,
who meets danger gleefully, because he has had little experience of it,
and because his conditions being hitherto easy, he naturally assumes that
everything will go well with him ;—at worst, a porker contented with his
mast. The other, take him at his best, of sharper spirit, because it has
been more keenly whetted on difficulty; if not more intrepid, at least
more consciously so; of sadder mood habitually, but wizen happy, happier,
as the gloomier the cloud the more dazzling the rainbow ; — at his
worst, either beaten down, subdued, and nerveless, or gaunt, suspicious,
and crafty, like the belly-pinched wolf. On the whole, the Saxon is likely
to be the more sensual; the Celt the more superstitious : the Saxon will
probably be prosaic, dwelling in the circle of the seen and the tangible;
the Celt a poet: while the anger of the Saxon is slow and abiding, like
the burning of coal; the anger of the Celt is swift and transient, like
the flame that consumes the dried heather: both are superior to death when
occasion comes—the Saxon from a grand obtuseness which ignores the fact;
the Celt, because he has been in constant communion with it, and because
he has seen, measured, and overcome it. The Celt is the most melancholy of
men; he has turned everything to superstitious uses, and every object of
nature, even the unreasoning dreams of sleep, are mirrors which flash back
death upon him. He, the least of all men, requires to be reminded that he
is mortal. The howling of his dog will do him that service.
In the stories which are
told round the island peat-fires it is abundantly apparent that the Celt
has not yet subdued nature. In these stories you can detect a curious
subtle hostility between man and his environments; a fear of them, a want
of absolute trust in them. In these stories and songs man is not at home
in the world. Nature is too strong for him; she rebukes and crushes him.
The Elements, however calm and beautiful they may appear for the moment,
are malign and deceitful at heart, and merely bide their time. They are
like the paw of the cat—soft and velvety, but with concealed talons that
scratch when least expected. And this curious relation between man and
nature grows out of the climatic conditions and the forms of Hebridean
life. In his usual avocations the Islesman rubs clothes with death as he
would with an acquaintance. Gathering wild fowl, he hangs, like a spider
on its thread, over a precipice on which the sea is beating a hundred feet
beneath. In his crazy boat he adventures into whirlpool and foam. He is
among the hills when the snow comes down making everything unfamiliar, and
stifling the strayed wanderer. Thus death is ever near him, and that
consciousness turns everything to omen. The mist creeping along the
hill-side by moonlight is an apparition. In the roar of the waterfall, or
the murmur of the swollen ford, he hears the water spirit calling out for
the man for whom it has waited so long. He sees death-candles burning on
the sea, marking the place at which a boat will be upset by some sudden
squall. He hears spectral hammers clinking in an outhouse, and he knows
that ghostly artificers are preparing a coffin there. Ghostly fingers tap
at his window, ghostly feet are about his door; at midnight his furniture
cries out as if it had seen a sight and could not restrain itself. Even
his dreams are prophetic, and point ghastly issues for himself or for
others. And just as there are poets who are more open to beauty than other
men, and whose duty and delight it is to set forth that beauty anew; so in
the Hebrides there are seers who bear the same relation to the other world
that the poet bears to beauty, who are cognisant of its secrets, and who
make those secrets known. The seer does not inherit his power. It comes
upon him at haphazard as genius or as personal beauty might come. He is a
lonely man amongst his fellows; apparitions cross his path at noon-day; he
never knows into what a ghastly something the commonest object may
transform itself—the table he sits at may suddenly become the
resting-place of a coffin; and the man who laughs in his cups with him
may, in the twinkling of an eye, wear a death-shroud up to his throat. He
hears river voices prophesying death, and shadowy and silent funeral
processions are continually defiling before him. When the seer beholds a
vision his companions know it; for "the inner part of his eyelids
turn so far upwards that, after the object disappears, he must draw them
down with his fingers, and sometimes employs others to draw them down,
which he finds to be much the easier way." From long experience of
these visions, and by noticing how closely or tardily fulfilment has
trodden upon their heels, the seer can extract the meaning of the
apparition that flashes upon him, and predict the period of its
accomplishment. Other people can make nothing of them, but he reads them,
as the sailor in possession of the signal-book reads the signal flying at
the peak of the High Admiral. These visions, it would appear, conform to
rules, like everything else. If a vision be seen early in a morning, it
will be accomplished in a few hours,—if at noon, it will usually be
accomplished that day,—if in the evening, that night,—if after candles
are lighted, certainly that night. When a shroud is seen about a person it
is a sure prognostication of death. And the period of death is estimated
by the height of the shroud about the body. If it lies about the legs,
death is not to be expected before the expiry of a year, and perhaps it
may be deferred a few months longer. If it is seen near the head, death
will occur in a few days, perhaps in a few hours. To see houses and trees
in a desert place is a sign that buildings will be erected there anon. To
see a spark of fire falling on the arms or breast of a person is the sign
that a dead child will shortly be in the arms of those persons. To see a
seat empty at the time of sitting in it is a sign of that person’s death
being at hand. The seers are said to be extremely temperate in habit; they
are neither drunkards nor gluttons; they are not subject to convulsions
nor hysterical fits; there are no madmen amongst them; nor has a seer ever
been known to commit suicide.
The literature of the
second sight is extremely curious. The writers have perfect faith in the
examples they adduce; but their examples are far from satisfactory. They
are seldom obtained at first hand, they almost always live on hearsay; and
even if everything be true, the professed fulfilment seems nothing other
than a rather singular coincidence. Still these stories are devoutly
believed in Skye, and it is almost as perilous to doubt the existence of a
Skyeman’s ghost as to doubt the existence of a Skyeman’s ancestor. In
"Treatises on the Second Sight," very curious tracts, compiled
by Theophilus Insulanus, Rev. Mr Frazer, Mr Martin, and John Aubrey, Esq.,
F.R.S., and which hint that a disbelief in apparitions is tantamount to
disbelief in the immortality of the soul, the following stories are
related:-
"John Campbell,
younger of Ardsliguish, in Ardnamorchuann, in the year 1729, returning
home with Duncan Campbell, his brother, since deceased, as they drew near
the house, in a plain surrounded with bushes of wood, where they intended
to discharge their fusees at a mark, observed a young girl, whom they knew
to be one of their domestics, crossing the plain, and having called her by
name, she did not answer, but ran into the thicket. As the two brothers
had been some days from home, and willing to know what happened in their
absence, the youngest, John, pursued after, but could not find her.
Immediately, as they arrived at home, having acquainted their mother they
saw the said girl, and called after her, but she avoided their search, and
would not speak to them; upon which they were told she departed this life
that same day. I had this relation from James Campbell in Girgudale, a
young man of known modesty and candour, who had the story at several times
from the said John. Campbell."
"Mr Anderson assured
me, that upon the 16th of April 1746, (being the day on which his Royal
Highness the Duke of Cumberland obtained a glorious victory over the
rebels at Culloden,) as he lay in bed with his spouse towards the dawning
of the day, he heard very audibly a voice at his bed-head inquiring if he
was awake; who answered he was, but then took no further notice of it. A
little time thereafter, the voice repeated, with greater vehemence, if he
was awake. And he answering, as formerly, he was, there was some stop,
when the voice repeated louder, asking the same question, and he making
the same answer,. but asking what the voice had to say; upon which it
replied, The prince is defeated, defeated, defeated! And in less than
forty-eight hours there-after an express carried the welcome tidings of
the fact into the country."
"Captain Macdonald of
Castletown (allowed by all his acquaintances to be a person of consummate
integrity) informed me that a Knoydart man (being on board of a vessel at
anchor in the sound of the Island Oransay) went under night out of the
cabin to the deck, and being missed by his company, some of them went to
call him down; but not finding him, concluded that he had dropt from the
ship’s side. When day came on, they got a long line furnished with
hooks, (from a tenant’s house close by the shore,) which having cast
from the ship’s side, some of the hooks got hold of his clothes, so that
they got the corpse taken up. The owner of the long line told Captain
Macdonald that for a quarter of a year before that accident happened, he
himself and his domestics, on every calm night, would hear lamentable
cries at the shore where the corpse was landed; and not only so, but the
long lines that took up the corpse being hung on a pin in his house, all
of them would hear an odd jingling of the hooks before and after going to
bed, and that without any person, dog, or cat touching them; and at other
times, with fire light, see the long lines covered over with lucid
globules, such as are seen drop from oars rowing under night."
The foregoing are examples
of the general superstitions that prevail in the islands ; those that
follow relate to the second sight.
"The Lady Coll
informed me that one M’Lean of Knock, an elderly reputable gentleman,
living on their estate, as he walked in the fields before sunset, he saw a
neighbouring person, who had been sick for a long time, coming that way,
accompanied by another man ; and, as they drew nearer, he asked them some
questions, and how far they intended to go. The first answered they were
to travel forward to a village he named, and then pursued his journey with
a more than ordinary pace. Next day, early in the morning, he was invited
to his neighbour’s interment, which surprised him much, as he had seen
and spoke with him the evening before; but was told by the messenger that
came for him, the deceased person had been confined to his bed for seven
weeks; and that he departed this life a little before sunset, much about
the time he saw him in a vision the preceding day."
"Margaret Macleod, an
honest woman advanced in years, informed me that when she was a young
Woman in the family of Grishornish, a dairy-maid, who daily used to herd
the calves in a park close to the house, observed, at different times, a
woman resembling herself in shape and attire, walking solitarily at no
great distance from her; and being surprised at the apparition, to make
further trial, she put the back part of her garment foremost, and anon the
phantom was dressed in the same manner, which made her uneasy, believing
it portended some fatal consequence to herself. In a short time thereafter
she was seized with a fever, which brought her to her end; but before her
sickness, and on her deathbed, declared this second sight to
several."
"Neil Betton, a sober,
judicious person, and elder in the session of Diurinish, informed me, as
he had it from the deceased Mr Kenneth Betton, late minister in
Trotternish, that a farmer in the village of Airaidh, on the west side of
the country, being towards evening to quit his work, he observed a
traveller coming towards him as he stood close to the highway; and, as he
knew the man, waited his coming up; but when he began to speak with him,
the traveller broke off the road abruptly to the shore that was hard by;
which, how soon he entered, he gave a loud cry; and, having proceeded on
the shore, gave a loud cry at the middle of it, and so went on until he
came to a river running through the middle of it, which he no sooner
entered than he gave a third cry, and then saw him no more. On the farmer’s
coming home he told all that he had heard and seen to those of his
household: so the story spread, until from hand to hand it came to the
person’s own knowledge, who, having seen the farmer afterwards, inquired
of him narrowly about it, who owned and told the same as above. In less
than a year thereafter, the same man, going with two more to cut wattling
for creels, in Coillena-Skiddil, he and they were drowned in the river
where he heard him give the last cry."
"Some of the
inhabitants of Harris sailing round the Isle of Skye, with a design to go
to the opposite mainland, were strangely surprised with an apparition of
two men hanging down by the ropes that secured the mast, but could not
conjecture what it meant. They pursued the voyage; but the wind turned
contrary, and so forced them into Broadford, in the Isle of Skye, where
they found Sir Donald Macdonald keeping a sheriff’s court, and two
criminals receiving sentence of death there. The ropes and masts of that
very boat were made use of to hang those criminals."
Such are some of the
stories laboriously gathered together and set down in perfect good faith
by Theophilus Insulanus. It will be seen that they are loosely reported,
are always at second or third hand, and that, if the original teller of
the stories could be placed in the witness-box, a strict cross-examination
would make sad havoc with him and them. But although sufficiently
ridiculous and foolish in themselves, they exemplify the strange ghostly
atmosphere which pervades the western islands. Every one of the people
amongst whom I now live believes in apparitions and the second sight. Mr M’Ian
has seen a ghost himself, but he will not willingly speak about it. A
woman gifted with the second sight dwells in one of the smoking turf huts
on the shore. At night, round a precipitous rock that overhangs the sea,
about a hundred yards from the house, a light was often seen to glide, and
evil was apprehended. For years the patient light abode there. At last a
boy, the son of one of the cotters, climbing about the rock, missed his
footing, fell into the sea and was drowned, and from that hour the light
was never more visible. At a ford up amongst the hills, the people tell me
doleful cries have been heard at intervals for years. The stream has
waited long for its victim, but I am assured that it will get it at last.
That a man will yet be drowned there is an article of faith amongst the
cotters. But who? I suspect I am regarded as the likely person. Perhaps
the withered crone down in the turf hut yonder knows the features of the
doomed man. This prevailing superstitious feeling takes curious possession
of one somehow. You cannot live in a ghostly atmosphere without being more
or less affected by it. Lying a-bed you don’t like to hear the furniture
of your bedroom creak. At sunset you are suspicious of the prodigious
shadow that stalks alongside of you across the gold-green fields. You
become more than usually impressed by the multitudinous and unknown voices
of the night. Gradually you get the idea that you and nature are alien;
and it is in that feeling of alienation that superstition lives.
Father M’Crimmon and I
had been out rabbit shooting, and, tired of the sport, we sat down to rest
on a grassy knoll. The ghostly island stories had taken possession of my
mind, and as we sat and smoked I inquired if the priest was a believer in
ghosts generally and in the second sight in particular. The gaunt,
solemn-voiced, melancholy-eyed man replied that he believed in the
existence of ghosts just as he believed in the existence of America—he
had never seen America, he had never seen a ghost, but the existence of
both he considered was amply borne out by testimony. "I know there is
such a thing as the second sight," he went on, "because I have
had cognisance of it myself. Six or seven years ago I was staying with my
friend Mr M’Ian, as I am staying now, and just as we were sipping a
tumbler of punch after dinner we heard a great uproar outside. We went out
and found all the farm-servants standing on the grass and gazing seawards.
On inquiry, we learned that two brothers, M’Millan by name, who lived
down at Stonefield, beyond the point yonder, fishermen by trade, and well
versed in the management of a boat, had come up to the islands here to
gather razor-fish for bait. When they had secured plenty of bait, they
steered for home, although a stiff breeze was blowing. They kept a full
sail on, and went straight on the wind. A small boy, Hector, who was
employed in herding cows, was watching the boat trying to double the
point. All at once he came running into the kitchen where the farm.
servants were at dinner. ‘Men, men,’ he cried, ‘come out fast; M’Millan’s
boat is sinking—I saw her heel over.’ Of course the hinds came rushing
out bareheaded, and it was the noise they made that disturbed my friend
and myself at our punch. All this we gathered in less time than I have
taken to tell you. We looked narrowly seaward, but no boat was to be seen.
Mr M’Ian brought out his telescope, and still the sea remained perfectly
blue and bare. Neither M’Ian nor his servants could be brought to
believe Hector’s story—they thought it extremely unlikely that on a
comparatively calm day any harm could befall such experienced sailors. It
was universally agreed that the boat had rounded the point, and Mr M’Ian
rated the herd-boy for raising a false alarm. Hector still persisting that
he had seen the boat capsize and go down, got his ears soundly boxed for
his obstinacy, and was sent whimpering away to his cows, and enjoined in
future to mind-his own business. Then the servants returned to their
dinner in the kitchen, and, going back with me to our punch, which had
become somewhat cold, Mr M’Ian resumed his story of the eagle that used
to come down the glen in the early mornings and carry away his poultry,
and told how he shot it at last and found that it measured six feet from
wing-tip to wing-tip.
"But although Hector
got his ears boxed it turned out that he had in all probability spoken the
truth. Towards the evening of next day the M’Millan sisters came up to
the house to inquire after the boat, which had never reached home. The
poor girls were in a dreadful state when they were told that their
brothers’ boat had left the islands the previous afternoon, and what
Hector the cow-herd averred he had seen. Still there was room for hope; it
was possible that Hector was mistaken, it was possible that the M’Millans
might have gone somewhere, or been forced to take shelter somewhere—and
so the two sisters, mustering up the best heart they could, went across
the hill to Stonefield when the sun was setting, and the sea a sheet of
gold leaf, and looking as it could never be angry or have the heart to
drown anything.
"Days passed, and the
boat never came home, nor did the brothers. It was on Friday that the M’Millans
sailed away on the fresh breeze, and on the Wednesday following the bay
down there was a sorry sight. The missing sailors were brave,
good-looking, merry-hearted, and were liked along the whole coast; and on
the Wednesday I speak of no fewer than two hundred and fifty boats were
sailing slowly up and down, crossing and re-crossing, trawling for the
bodies. I remember the day perfectly. It was dull and sultry, with but
little sunshine; the hills over there (Blaavin and the others) were
standing dimly in a smoke of heat; and on the smooth pallid sea the
mournful multitude of black boats were moving slowly up and down, across
and back again. In each boat two men pulled, and the third sat in the
stern with the trawling-irons. The day was perfectly still, and I could
hear through the heated air the solemn pulses of the oars. The bay was
black with the slowly-crawling boats. A sorry sight," said the good
priest, filling his second pipe from a tobacco pouch made of otter’s
skin.
"I don’t know how it
was," went on the Father, holding his newly-filled pipe between his
forefinger and thumb; "but looking on the black dots of boats, and
hearing the sound of their oars, I remembered that old Mirren, who lived
in one of the turf huts yonder, had the second sight; and so I thought I
would go down and see her. When I got to the hut, I met Mirren coming up
from the shore with a basket full of whelks, which she had been gathering
for dinner. I went into the hut along with her, and sat down. ‘There’s
a sad business in the bay to-day,’ said I. ‘A sad business,’ said
Mirren, as she laid down her basket. ‘Will they get the bodies?’
Mirren shook her head. ‘The bodies are not there to get; they have
floated out past Rum to the main ocean.’ ‘How do you know ?’ ‘Going
out to the shore about a month ago I heard a scream, and, looking up, saw
a boat off the point, with two men in it, caught in a squall, and going
down. When the boat sank the men still remained in it—the one entangled
in the fishing-net, the other in the ropes of the sails. I saw them float
out to the main sea between the two wines,’—that‘s a literal
translation," said the Father, parenthetically. "You have seen
two liquors in a glass—the one floating on the top of the other? Very
well; there are two currents in the sea, and when my people wish to
describe anything sinking down and floating between these two currents,
they use the image of two liquors in a wine-glass. Oh, it‘s a fine
language the Gaelic, and admirably adapted for poetical purposes,—but to
return. Mirren told me that she saw the bodies float out to sea between
the two wines, and that the trawling boats might trawl for ever in the bay
before they would get what they wanted. When evening came, the boats
returned home without having found the bodies of the drowned M’Millans.
Well," and here the Father lighted his pipe, "six weeks after, a
capsized boat was thrown on the shore in Uist, with two corpses inside,—one
entangled in the fishing-net, the other in the ropes of the sails. It was
the M’Millans’ boat, and it was the two brothers who were inside.
Their faces were all eaten away by the dog-fishes; but the people who had
done business with them in Uist identified them by their clothes. This I
know to be true," said the Father emphatically, and shutting the door
on all argument or hint of scepticism. "And now, if you are not too
tired, suppose we try our luck in the copses down there? ‘Twas a famous
place for rabbits when I was here last year." |
