Read Online Gently North-West by Alan Hunter - Free Book Online Page B

opinion,’ Gently said.
    ‘I’m not surprised,’ Brenda said. ‘They looked things square in the face in those days. It’s all very well being sloppy and romantic, but a lot of mountains are a lot of mountains. You can’t farm them, you can’t make roads on them and they’re full of violence and a sort of threat.’
    ‘They’re just rocks,’ Gently said. ‘Weathering away in their own weather.’
    ‘So why do we come gawking at them?’ Brenda said.
    Gently grinned. ‘Well . . . they’re there.’
    They came down out of Glen Donach and bowled along a strath road into Kinleary, a prim, stone-built town with a torrent funnelling under a graceful bridge. Its main street was very broad and the houses were capacious and large-windowed; it had an air of detachment, as though waiting for something to happen. Beyond, the road climbed again for its fifteen-mile stride beside Loch Torlinn, and looking back one saw Kinleary riding its image in a bay of the loch. The lines of the mountains and the loch converged on it in a Turner-like construction, and the tidy, austere little town now showed an aspect of extravagant beauty.
    They met little traffic. The road stayed high, with emptiness always at its elbow. At long intervals they would pass a cottage, where a steep path would sag down to the loch-shore. Across the loch, at the width of a mile, the braes were thinly planted with deciduous trees, giving the effect of a vast park rolling endlessly along with them. The peaks behind the braes were dark, their faces to the loch being in shadow; and between them one caught glimpses of peaks yet more wild and inaccessible.
    At last they could see the loch ending squarely and rather tamely at Torlinnhead, and a sudden sharp turn and descent brought them into the village. There was one hotel, the Honest Highlandman, whose sign represented a clans-man carrying his head; Gently ran the Sceptre into the yard behind it and they went in to lunch.
    At coffee, which they drank alone in a lounge that faced straight down the loch, Brenda unfolded the map again and began poring over routes. Because of the arbitrariness of mountain highways they had either to return the way they had come, or make an extensive circuit back to Lochcrayhead by way of Logie, Bieth and Ardnadoch.
    ‘Of course, its all ravingly beautiful,’ Brenda frowned. ‘But I just don’t like having it forced on me. I’m tired of going longways through the glens. What I want now is a bit of sideways.’
    Gently looked at the map. Their line of red certainly offered no alternative. It stretched crookedly and compulsively to Logie, and only to Logie would it go. But reaching south-east from Torlinnhead was a rambling, hatched double line, crossing direct over the massif top of Glen Knockie. He put his finger on it.
    ‘There’s your bit of sideways.’
    ‘Oh my gawd,’ Brenda said, looking. ‘That’ll be another of those ‘‘guid paths’’ – and a really hairy one this time.’
    Gently referred to the legend. Its grading stopped at ‘Other Serviceable Roads’ which came below ‘Roads Requiring Special Care’; neither were indicated by hatched lines.
    ‘Not much encouragement,’ he grimaced. ‘But it must be some sort of a road. Look, there’s a farm or something along it. The hatched lines probably mean it’s unfenced.’
    ‘Why,’ Brenda said, ‘don’t I keep my big mouth shut.’
    ‘We could just take a peep at it,’ Gently grinned.
    ‘We could just jump in the loch,’ Brenda said. ‘Oh, George, I took you for a
restful
man.’
    But the hotel-keeper confirmed the road was ‘no’ a’ that a bad ane’, and spoke lyrically of the views they could expect ‘off the tap’; so the Sceptre, after idling along the road by the top of the loch, ignored the broad way to Logie and turned its bonnet to the mountains.
    The road began deceitfully. It was at first a lane sheltered by high, English hedges, apparently leading only to a barn which stood