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before a squall, a stronger wind is on its way, such as might tip you head over heels’. He invariably spoke the Scots more quickly than the English.
    â€˜But I prefer the Prophet’s predictions,’ he continued. ‘He goes about with a gun. Ye’ll see for yourself soon enough.’
    The earlier sun had gone. The Holy Loch looked cold and grey now, its surface flecked by a raking pattern of white cat’s paws, every rippling line and distortion derived from physics and chemistry, even the clouds reflected in its waters.
    â€˜That’s where the Prophet lives,’ said Mackellar, pointing with his whip as we approached a solid, square magnolia-painted house set among gardens and situated a little way back from the road behind a stone wall. ‘My ain farm’s just beyond.’
    On a hillside above Ryman’s home (which was Georgian, I suppose, with two bay windows), I saw another wall and beyond that a farmhouse and outbuildings. There were also stables and a cowshed and a barn stacked with hay, together with some glasshouses. In the field between the farm and Ryman’s house stood a much older stone building, beside a trough at which two Highland cattle were drinking. Higher up ran a stripe of beech trees. Mackellar told me there was a stream in the middle of the beech wood, with a small bridge across it.
    Further still up the hill was the forestry: line after line of forbidding spruce, broken only where logging had taken place – and also by a long steel chute. It looked like a child’s slide. ‘The foresters use tha’ for getting the wood out,’ explained Mackellar, seeing me looking.
    We had stopped at the wrought-iron gate of the Ryman house, which was decorated with a solar design surrounded by signs of the zodiac. I wondered for a second if I had strayedinto a location with laws other than those of Newton, a place of signs and wonders, a glen of omens. But then I saw a sundial in the garden and also a large telescope on a pedestal, and somehow with those instruments rationality reasserted itself.
    â€˜That building next to the tree, the auld cot-house, that’s where they put your kit,’ said Mackellar, pointing up the hillside. ‘There’s a bed, but I cannae say it looks very comfortable. I’ll take you there.’
    â€˜No, no thank you,’ I said. ‘I may as well pay the professor a visit now I’m here. But if you could take up my suitcase, I’d be most grateful.’
    â€˜That I’ll dae,’ said Mackellar gruffly.
    I climbed down from the trap.
    â€˜Now the Prophet,’ he said, raising his whip for emphasis, ‘he disnae like folk to bang at the door.’ He paused. ‘So you must go in sleekit-like. He’ll like you mair, if you make it so,’ he added.
    The farmer followed this statement with a thrusting movement of the other hand that needed no interpretation. I searched in my pocket for the fare and gave it him. As the trap made its way up to my new home I walked up to the front door of Ryman’s house.
    I was about to knock when I remembered Mackellar’s warning. I pushed against the heavy black door. It was locked.
    Behind me, from somewhere across the loch or deep up the Firth, I heard a ship’s foghorn sound. It was like the groan of a dying mammoth or mastodon, as if some early drama of evolution was being played out across the archipelagic waters of the Cowal. I stood and waited, feeling uneasy again. This really did, after all, seem an odd, obscure place for the logical transparencies of science to have triumphed, as far from the mechanistic projections of the Ryman number as could be imagined.

6
    Hearing a sound, I turned to see a tall woman emerge from an outhouse behind me. Her blonde hair was scraped under a scarf and she wore a woollen jumper, corduroy trousers and wellington boots. She was carrying an empty hand seed sower, an instrument that allowed one to