SPACE (1912)

I had arrived that afternoon from the south, while he had been taking an off-day from a week’s stalking, so we had walked up the glen together after tea to get news of the forest.  A rifle was out on the Correi na Sidhe beat, and a thin spire of smoke had risen from the top of Sgurr Dearg to show that a stag had been killed at the burn-head.  The lumpish hill pony with its deer-saddle had gone up the Correi in a gillie’s charge, while we followed at leisure, picking our way among the loose granite rock and the patches of wet bogland. The track climbed high on one of the ridges of Sgurr Dearg, till it hung over a cauldron of green glen with the Alt-na-Sidhe churning in its linn a thousand feet below.  It was a breathless evening, I remember, with a pale-blue sky just clearing from the haze of the day.  West-wind weather may make the North, even in September, no bad imitation of the Tropics, and I sincerely pitied the man who all these stifling hours had been trolling on the screes of Sgurr Dearg.   By and by we sat down on a bank of heather, and idly watched the trough swimming at our feet.  The clatter of the pony’s hoofs grew fainter, the drone of bees had gone, event the midges seem to have forgotten their calling.  No place on earth can be so deathly still as a deer-forest early in the season before the stags have begun roaring, for there are no sheep with their homely noises, and only the rare croak of a raven breaks the silence.   The hillside was far from sheer – one could have walked down with little care – but something in the shape of the hollow and the remote gleam of white water gave it an air of extraordinary depth and space.  There was a shimmer left from the day’s heat, which invested bracken and rock and scree with a curious airy unreality.  One could almost have believed that the eye had tricked the mind, that all was mirage, that five yards from the path the solid earth fell away into nothingness.