Read Online The Wild Places (Penguin Original) by Robert Macfarlane - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Robert Macfarlane
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and the river beside us shaking out its own light, I saw that a rainbow had formed in the sky over the valley below us, joining both sides of the sanctuary. We walked on towards the rainbow, and as we advanced, it seemed always to retreat, keeping the same patient distance from us. I recalled a quotation I had once written down in a notebook, but for which I had lost the source: ‘Landscape was here long before we were even dreamed. It watched us arrive.’
The morning we left, the sky was a slurless blue. Before beginning the walk out, we took a last swim in the water of Loch Coruisk. We slipped into the loch from a warm tilted shore rock, having laid our clothes out on boulders to take up the sun’s heat. The water was cool from the night, and still as stone. Its peaty colour gave my skin a goldish lustre, the colour of old coin.
A hundred yards or so out across the loch was an island. Just a shallow hump of bare black rock, smoothed by the passage of the glaciers, and no more than a foot above the water at its highest point. It looked like the back of a whale, and its form reminded me of the outline of my beechwood.
I swam across to it, clambered out and stood there, dripping, feeling the roughness of the rock beneath my feet, and the warmth it had already gathered from the sun. Then I lay down on my back, tucked my hands behind my head and looked into the sky.
After three or four minutes, I found myself struck by a sensation of inverted vertigo, of being on the point of falling upwards. The air was empty of indicators of space or time; empty, too, of markers of depth. There was no noise except the discreet lapping of the water against the island. Lying there, with no human trace except the rim of my own eyes, I could feel a silence that reached backwards to the Ice Age.
In the Basin I had come to imagine time differently, or at least to experience it differently. Time seemed to express itself in terms not of hours and minutes, but of shades and textures. After only a few days I found it hard to think out of Coruisk: to the ongoing world of shops, colleges and cars, with its briskness and urgency, or even to my family, my city home and my garden, where the branches of the apple tree would be lolling with fruit.
The Basin kept many different kinds of time, and not all of them were slow. I had seen quickness there too: the sudden drop of a raven in flight, the veer of water round a rock, the darts of the damselflies, the midges who were born, danced and died in a single day. But it was the great chronologies of its making - the ice’s intentless progress seawards, down the slope of time - which had worked upon my mind most powerfully.
To be in the Basin, even briefly, is to be reminded of the narrow limits of human perception, of the provisionality of your assumptions about the world. In such a place, your conventional units of chronology (the century, the life-span, the decade, the year, the day, the heartbeat) become all but imperceptible, and your individual gestures and impulses (the lift of a hand, the swimming stroke taken within water, the flash of anger, a turn of speech or thought) acquired an eerie quickness. The larger impulses of the human world - its wars, civilisations, eras - seem remote. Time in the Basin moves both too fast and too slowly for you to comprehend, and it has no interest in conforming to any human schedules. The Basin keeps wild time.
In a valley of such age, you feel compelled to relinquish your habitual methods of timekeeping, to abandon the grudging measures and audits that enable normal life. Time finds its forms minerally and aerially, rather than on the clock-face or in the diary. Such human devices come to seem brittle and inconsequential. You want quietly to yield them up - to surrender your diary at the sanctuary’s gateway, to turn your watch so that it faces inwards. There will be opportunity afterwards to recover these methods of record, you think.
Birds began to move
The morning we left, the sky was a slurless blue. Before beginning the walk out, we took a last swim in the water of Loch Coruisk. We slipped into the loch from a warm tilted shore rock, having laid our clothes out on boulders to take up the sun’s heat. The water was cool from the night, and still as stone. Its peaty colour gave my skin a goldish lustre, the colour of old coin.
A hundred yards or so out across the loch was an island. Just a shallow hump of bare black rock, smoothed by the passage of the glaciers, and no more than a foot above the water at its highest point. It looked like the back of a whale, and its form reminded me of the outline of my beechwood.
I swam across to it, clambered out and stood there, dripping, feeling the roughness of the rock beneath my feet, and the warmth it had already gathered from the sun. Then I lay down on my back, tucked my hands behind my head and looked into the sky.
After three or four minutes, I found myself struck by a sensation of inverted vertigo, of being on the point of falling upwards. The air was empty of indicators of space or time; empty, too, of markers of depth. There was no noise except the discreet lapping of the water against the island. Lying there, with no human trace except the rim of my own eyes, I could feel a silence that reached backwards to the Ice Age.
In the Basin I had come to imagine time differently, or at least to experience it differently. Time seemed to express itself in terms not of hours and minutes, but of shades and textures. After only a few days I found it hard to think out of Coruisk: to the ongoing world of shops, colleges and cars, with its briskness and urgency, or even to my family, my city home and my garden, where the branches of the apple tree would be lolling with fruit.
The Basin kept many different kinds of time, and not all of them were slow. I had seen quickness there too: the sudden drop of a raven in flight, the veer of water round a rock, the darts of the damselflies, the midges who were born, danced and died in a single day. But it was the great chronologies of its making - the ice’s intentless progress seawards, down the slope of time - which had worked upon my mind most powerfully.
To be in the Basin, even briefly, is to be reminded of the narrow limits of human perception, of the provisionality of your assumptions about the world. In such a place, your conventional units of chronology (the century, the life-span, the decade, the year, the day, the heartbeat) become all but imperceptible, and your individual gestures and impulses (the lift of a hand, the swimming stroke taken within water, the flash of anger, a turn of speech or thought) acquired an eerie quickness. The larger impulses of the human world - its wars, civilisations, eras - seem remote. Time in the Basin moves both too fast and too slowly for you to comprehend, and it has no interest in conforming to any human schedules. The Basin keeps wild time.
In a valley of such age, you feel compelled to relinquish your habitual methods of timekeeping, to abandon the grudging measures and audits that enable normal life. Time finds its forms minerally and aerially, rather than on the clock-face or in the diary. Such human devices come to seem brittle and inconsequential. You want quietly to yield them up - to surrender your diary at the sanctuary’s gateway, to turn your watch so that it faces inwards. There will be opportunity afterwards to recover these methods of record, you think.
Birds began to move
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