Read Online The Wild Places (Penguin Original) by Robert Macfarlane - Free Book Online

pocked with deep sink-holes. The steep ground to our left was a mosaic of brown rock, grouted with grass and streaked vertically with water from the previous night’s storm. The angle of tilt of the mountain’s face and the angle of fall of the light were such that every wet face of rock was set glinting - thousands of them at once, all on the same alignment.
    The sink-holes in the marsh brimmed with water. The mild ferrosity of the rocks meant that the water in the holes was stained red around the edges: they shone like pools of drowned blood. Only faint deer paths showed us a safe way through.
    The air was moist and smelt swampish, oozy. The ground was dense with plant-life: mare’s tails, among the oldest plants in existence, and the dark green leaves of a plant whose name I did not know. I reached out and scooped one of the leaves up from beneath. It felt heavy and limp as an old vellum map, drooping loosely over my palm.
    Weather blew rapidly in and over us as we walked: squalls of sunlight, then rain, then a sudden fusillade of hail. Near the head of the loch, after three miles in the marshlands, we emerged on to a hard rock landscape of flat gabbro floors, each up to a quarter of an acre in size and punched with holes. Glaciers had flattened and rounded these off tens of thousands of years ago. In the bottom of each hole, I noticed, was a pebble or rock that fitted the hole snugly, like the head of a countersunk screw.
    At the head of the loch, we began to climb. Around us, exploiting the unpredictable wind laws of the Cuillin, ravens practised their flying skills - stalls, rolls, flic-flacs, Immelmann turns - and their sharp calls rang off the cliffs like ball-bearings striking tin. Here and there were rugged rowans, their knuckly roots binding the wet scree together.
    Progress was hard, and we stopped to rest by a flat-topped rock over which a stream ran. Hanging from the rock’s lip were three plump green hives of moss, the shape of weaver-bird nests. The water that ran over the rock was so smooth it resembled plastic, sheened and artificial. I put my hand just beneath the surface and watched the water flow over it and take its shape, like a second translucent skin. Looking up, I could see the fin of the Pinnacle. The wind up at the height of the ridge was strong, and shreds of white cloud were tearing over black rock. I felt a quick buzz of fear, remembering the description of the Pinnacle by one of its first ascensionists: ‘a knife-edge ridge with an overhanging and infinite drop on one side, and a drop on the other side even steeper and longer’.
    As we climbed higher, we entered the cloud and the temperature plunged. The rock was slick with settled moisture. We reached a bealach - a narrow notch in the ridge between two peaks - then scrambled up to the false lower summit of Sgurr Dearg, and from there picked our way down the steep overlapping scales of basalt to the base of the Pinnacle.
    A small circular refuge of rocks, like a rough sheepfold, offered some shelter. We hunched in it for a few minutes, sharing a chocolate bar, not speaking. I kept looking up at the Pinnacle’s black summit, hundreds of feet above me, angled up into the racing white cloud.
    I stood, walked to the start of the Pinnacle’s incline, and laid a hand against its rock. It was so cold that it sucked the warmth from my skin. But this rock had once been fluid, I thought. Aeons ago it had run and dripped and spat. On either side of the Pinnacle, the ground dropped immediately away. I took a few steps up the fin. Suddenly I felt precarious, frightened: balanced on an edge of time as well as of space. All I wanted to do was get back off the ridge, back down into the Basin. We had talked of climbing the Pinnacle, had brought ropes to do so. But here, suddenly, there seemed neither point nor possibility to such an act. It would be dangerous, and impertinent.
    So we retreated; back up the dragon-skin of the basalt, along the ridge, and