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Page 127
This was Saint Conan's Landing, and it occurred to me that if the
holy man came in rough weather from the Irish coast he required,
in truth, all the perspicacity of a saint to get his boat in
without having it impaled on these devil's needles.
There was no garden to speak of about the house. It was grown up
like the moor. Two or three images of Buddhas stood about in it;
one of them was quite large - three feet in height I should say
at a guess. They were on rough stone pedestals. I examined them
carefully. They were all defective; the large one had an immense
flaw in the shoulder. The gorse nearly covered them; the unkept
hedge let the moor in and there were no longer any paths, except
one running to the boathouse.
I did not follow the path. But I looked down at the boathouse
with some interest. This was the building that my uncle had
turned into a sort of foundry for his weird experiments. There
was a big lock on the door and a coal-blacked chimney standing
above the roof.
It was afternoon. The whole coast about me was like an
undiscovered country. I hardly knew in what direction to set out
on my exploration. I stood in the path digging my stick into the
gravel and undecided. Finally I determined to cross the bit of
moor to the high ground overlooking the loch. It was the sloping
base of one of the great peaks and purple with heather. It
looked the best point for a full sweep of the sea and the coast.
I jumped the hedge and set out across the moor to the high
ground.
There was no path through the gorse, but when I reached the
heather where the foot of the mountain peak descended into the
loch there was a sort of newly broken trail. The heather was
high and dense and I followed the trail onto the high ground
overlooking the sweep of the coast.
The loch was dappled with sun. The air was like wine. The
mountains above the moor and the heather were colored like an
Oriental carpet. I was full of the joy of life and swung into an
immense stride, when suddenly a voice stopped me.
"My lad," it said, "which one of the Ten Commandments is it the
most dangerous to break?"
Before me, at the end of the trail, seated on the ground, was a
big Highlander. He was knitting a woolen stocking and his
needles were clicking like an instrument. I was taken off my
feet, but I tried to meet him on his ground.
"Well," I answered, "I suppose it would be the one against
murder, the sixth."
"You suppose wrong," he replied. "It will be the first. You will
read in the Book how Jehovah set aside the sixth. Aye, my lad,
He ordered it broken when it pleased Him. But did you ever read
that He set aside the first or that any man escaped who broke
it?"
He spoke with the deep rich burr of his race and with a structure
of speech that I cannot reproduce here.
"Did you observe," he added, "the graven images that your uncle
has set up? . . . Where is the man the noo?"
"He is gone to Oban," I said.
He sprang up and thrust the stocking and needles into his
sporran.
"To Oban!" He stood a moment in some deep reflection. "There
will be ships out of Oban." Then he put another question to me:
"What did auld Andrew say about it?"
"That my uncle was gone to Oban," I answered, "and had set no
time for his return."
He looked at me queerly for a moment, towering above me in the
deep heather.
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