by Neil M. Gunn
Had he at last stumbled on that dish or vessel called the Holy Grail it could not have taken his breath from him more. His eyes drew nearer; it was a cinerary urn, an urn for the ashes or burnt bones left after a cremation, like that urn into which the Trojans had gathered the bones of glorious Hector, tamer of horses. But it was not made of gold, nor yet, more wonderful, of clay. It was carven in one solid piece out of stone. He touched it: steatite. But the nearest place for steatite, as he knew, was the Shetland Islands or County Donegal.
And what was a burial urn doing here? Neolithic man of the chambered cairns was not in the habit of cremating his dead. Cremation came later. Nor was the urn inverted; it sat upright and uncovered. Fully eighteen inches high and over a foot wide at the lip; without panel or overhanging collar, it had a clean elegance; from the lip its outline curved gently in and out again to a shoulder some three inches down, then sheered finely to a six-inch base. He brought the torch to the rim and looked in. But what he saw was not the grey of burnt bones. Straightening himself to come better at the matter, his head hit the top of the arch so sharply that for a little time he swayed, dizzy and sick, and with the extraordinary delusion that a figure had moved somewhere within the chamber or within his head. But he never took his eyes off the urn, and when his vision cleared he got to his knees and lifted a hand up and in.
The hand drew forth a thin metal collar or gorget of what was, to him, the lunula type, for it had exactly the crescentic shape of the jet necklace which he had found in the cist.
But the metal was pure gold.
It was not a unique find; five—perhaps six—of these had been found in all Scotland, but, with its engraved patterns, he could see that it was a distinguished, a lovely specimen.
His shaking hand went in again and brought forth a thin gold disc, like a miniature shield, several inches across, and patterned finely within concentric rings.
The next dip brought to the beam an earring some four inches long, curved like a scoop or miniature flower-basket, with the handle in the middle. It, too, was of gold.
As his hand went in once more, he could hear the trampling surge of blood in his ears, for he knew now that he had found a hoard of gold, that he was not only discovering treasure trove but creating archaeological history in his own land. Hoards of bronze had been found, but never a hoard of gold. His hand brought forth a penannular gold bracelet—with a second bracelet dangling from it, swinging, swinging towards the opening and just about to slip through when he made a grab at it and caught it, but the lunula slipped from the fingers of his other hand and for a moment he was entangled and confused; as the torch fell to the floor he cried out and was hoarsely echoed. But the light did not vanish. In a mad urgency, as though the spirits of the cairn like fiends were about to jump on him, he began dropping the ornaments, clasped against his breast, back into the urn, so that he could lift the urn out, the whole urn; which he should have done at first, in order to have the chamber in front of him, in order to have time to examine the incredible riches, this colossal find, and to defeat what might spring at his throat. Unaware of the knocks and thrusts of the stones, he got his arms round it. Staggering he turned—and faced the figure which had walked out of the monolith.
It stood beyond the beam of the torch, a solid darkness, on the sway, with dark-brown face and a glint of eyes. Sounds came from it of breath passing harshly in the throat. “Get out!” Grant yelled, for now he felt it coming upon him to envelop and crush; saw the wing-like lift of the arms. “Get out!” he screamed with all the fighting wrath that was in him.
As the claw-hands came into the shaft of light, he side stepped and staggered. The arms followed the hands, the shoulders, the face. It was Foolish Andie!
Dizzied he yelled out of a face that was a sheer flame of intolerant wrath.
But the hands came on, came at the urn; the eyes gleamed red, the mouth frothed and jabbered, and the features moved in an idiot’s smile.
Because of the urn he could not use his head to butt, but he did his wild mad best. Andie grunted and doubled over him, but his hands kept going round the urn. In a tearing effort at a side step, the archaeologist’s feet hit the loose stones and he went over backwards, with urn and Andie on top of him. His head encountered stone with a sickening whack and life went out like light from a smashed bulb.
Chapter Sixteen
The electric torch had so fallen that its beam was directed towards the south corner of the east wall and had thus without more ado provided a light suitably angled for the removal of the urn from its corbelled cell. But now that the action was over, it continued to shine on a front-row audience waiting with the inscrutable humour which knows that the action of a play is not the main thing. One face only, leaning lightly against its pelvic girdle, was uptilted to the bulging lintel in an eternal mirth. As time and the outside world declined, the light would die and the bundle on the stones assume its skeleton shape, its proper and conventional dress of bones. No artist had ever contrived a different ending to this play.
But the bundle moved, it groaned, and in time it sat up, with a hand to the head in a gesture that held as the eyes roved. The skulls watched with so peculiar an intensity that when Grant met their black eyes his fingers came upon his face and so pushed into the living flesh that his jaws were forced apart. His wide eyes roved again, saw the torch and the gaping hole in the wall . . . . But there was no Andie; and there was no urn.
There was no urn. He shot the light everywhere. He stumbled about the stones like a madman in a drunken dream. Into the middle chamber he went and then into the west chamber, searching for his urn, crying wildly, “Where are you?” Anxiety and fear, fear that he would never find the urn, blotted out the pain in his own skull; old bones clattered about his feet like sticks in a petrified forest. “Wait!” he cried desperately and stood. Everything waited. “O my God!” he cried, and through the passage he crawled like a wounded demented animal.
The grey light of the fallen night met him; its watching silence communicated the lapse of the hours; the monolith in the south-west held an ironic reserve more impervious than its own stone. Everywhere was the indifference which hid the eternally lost. Through it the urn had shot and vanished and sunk forever out of sight.
He started running round the cairn, hardly feeling his feet so light was his head. He’s hiding it somewhere! he thought. He’s burying it! This impression was so strong that it was a visualisation, an enlarged view of Andie burying the urn. But where? Where? Where the landscape and the spot? Only after he had made two sweeping circles round the cairn did he come to his normal self sufficiently to realise that Andie in his simple way would have carried the urn home. Of course! My God, of course! Belief so invaded his mind that his head throbbed. He started off on a stalk of Andie’s home. Wading through the burn, he slipped, and the cold shock cleared his head, but after he had climbed out he began to tremble with a sickening weakness and pain knocked its knuckles on his skull. As he rounded a knoll to the road a figure loomed out of the deep dusk—and stopped. Automatically the torch came up and Grant saw a face he knew, the face of a local young man whom he had met somewhere.
“I’m looking for Foolish Andie,” he said, dropping the rude light from the puzzled face. “You haven’t—seen him?”
“No,” said the man.
“I was looking for him,” he repeated, with an overwhelming feeling of helplessness, of being lost in a strange place.
“What’s wrong?”
“He’s stolen my urn. An urn, with treasure in it. I must find it. It’s—it’s important, terribly important.”
“Where did he steal it from?”
“From the cairn. I must find it before it’s lost.”
“Have you been to his house?”
“No. I’m just going. I thought you might have seen him.”
“No, I haven’t seen him.”
“I’ll go to the house.” And off he set. But when he had gone some distance it suddenly came to him th
at he should have cautioned the man to silence. He stood, uncertain, feeling the whole night charged with conspiracy, then began to retrace his steps, breaking finally into a trot. But the man had vanished. He listened but heard no footfall on the road. Perhaps he has gone to the cairn? he thought, and once more he waded through the river, climbed, came to the cairn, stood, listened, and, with the dreadful feeling that time was just tricking him, started for Andie’s home again.
The place was lightless and silent. A small thatched building stood over a little from the house. It had two doors, and when he had pushed one open, his torch shone on the beaded eyes of roosting fowls. The cock straightened himself and protested in a few hard notes of outraged dignity. The beam searched the orange-box nests and the dung. He closed the door and went to the next. A small barn full of the most amazing junk met his eyes. Closing the door behind him, he began his search. Straightening himself once, his head hit something and as he swiftly glanced up the blade of a scythe came whizzing down past his face. He had dislodged it from a rafter. When he stood on the teeth of a rake, the handle came up and hit him a crack on the forehead. By the time he had finished, he was swaying like the sole survivor on a battlefield. There was no urn.
Standing outside, he realised that all this time Mrs Mackenzie would know. She would know certainly whether her son had been on the prowl. Not that he was now doubting the whole happening in the cairn; only it was difficult to keep his mind clear. And his head throbbed. Like one step on the moving edge of the phantasmagoria, he went to the door, hesitated, breathed, and knocked.
“Who’s there?” called the woman’s muffled voice.
“It’s me, Mr Grant.”
Silence, followed by a clatter of chair legs. “Wait a minute. I’m just coming.”
At last the door opened.
“Andie? Yes, he’s in his bed.” The warmth of her low-toned astonishment hit him.
“Has he been in bed all night?”
“Yes, ever since he went to it. Why—is something wrong?”
“Is he in bed now?”
“Yes. He’s in here in the room.” It was a two-roomed cottage.
His legs began to give. “Can I come in for a minute?”
“Surely—but it’s a mess it’s in. If you’ll just wait a minute I’ll get a light. Will you excuse me?”
He fell against the doorjamb until she came for him, then he followed her, arms extended in the short passage and sat heavily in the chair, which she prepared for him. The atmosphere was warm and thick and the kitchen, with its wooden bed, was full of shadows from the swaying flame of the candle which she placed on the floor as she got to her knees before the smoored peat fire.
“Don’t bother with a fire,” he said.
“Are you sure? It won’t take me a minute.” Without the shawl her head looked curiously naked; the strong hair had been twisted into a simple knot behind. Her face was fleshy and gross but dignified in its calm anxiety. Life had prepared her for anything. She had put her skirt over her flannel nightdress and the shawl over her shoulders and breast.
He told her what had happened.
She stared at him and shook her head slowly. “I don’t understand it.”
“Has he been in all evening?”
“Yes.”
“Quite sure? Take your time. It’s very important.”
“We were a little later than usual going to bed, but he’s been in bed a long time now.”
“Does he ever get out of bed at night and go away by himself?”
“Very seldom. And I know he didn’t go this night because I never fell asleep myself.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“I’m quite sure. Sometimes the thought of things will keep me awake.” Her solemn tones were touched with a mournfulness, as though all the time she was profoundly troubled by what he had told her. She was like one caught again in a familiar and fatal mesh.
“Then you are not going to help me at all?”
“How can I? What am I to say?” Her body moved in a dumb animal-like distress. She was sitting on a small stool and her eyes went to the grey peat ash again.
“Tell me this,” he said, in tones suddenly clear and searching. “Was there never a time this evening when Andie left you? Think. I’m not against you. I would never harm you or Andie. If you can help me to find the urn, I will be grateful and—and pay you well.”
“Oh,” she said, “it’s not the pay. You have been too kind. I couldn’t go to sleep, thinking on the way you treat him, all the fun you make. To think that we were of some use, to a gentleman of learning. It came over me.” She controlled herself.
All the time he could see that she was thinking of something, of some small thing. He waited, striving against a darkness that would blot him out.
“There was only one time since we came home,” she said, “that he was out of my sight for a little, and I will tell you the whole truth of it, for indeed if I can help you it’s me that will. It’s before we went to our beds. I was sitting in the chair you’re in now and Andie had gone out—as he always does, just before going to his bed. I was a little drowsy and nodded in my chair. When I came to myself, I wondered if he was in and went to the door. There was no sign of him. But just then he came round the corner of the house. I thought nothing about it, for I was wanting to my bed, though when I did get to my bed the sleep went from me. That’s the only time he was out of my sight.”
“How long were you asleep in your chair do you think?”
“It seemed to me just a minute or two, but I couldn’t say for certain.”
“He had nothing with him at all?”
“No, nothing. He was breathing a little heavy, and I thought that maybe he had been after the rat that came to the barn the day before yesterday. But I knew he hadn’t got it.”
After a further question or two about the length of time she might have been asleep, he asked her, “You are quite sure he’s in his bed now?”
“Oh yes. I’ll show you if you like.”
“I should like to be certain.”
“Very well.” But she hesitated. “If he’s asleep, maybe we shouldn’t wake him. For this is what I have been thinking. If it’s him that did take it, then he will have hidden it somewhere, and some time he will go to that place, and I will follow him. In that way we will find it. But if we frighten him now, then he will be hidden, for often he is cunning about little things.”
“Why do you say if it was him? Don’t you believe me?”
“Yes, oh yes, I believe you. I did not mean that.”
“There’s no other one like him, is there?”
“No, no. It’s just—it’s just overcome me.”
“Very well, Mrs Mackenzie. You do as you say.”
“Thank you, sir. If it can humanly be done, I’ll do it.”
He got up and she followed him, but at the door she continued towards the other room, the flaring candle in front of her, turned the brass knob and entered.
“Are you asleep?” she asked quietly. “Gu—gu——”
He heard a drawer being opened and shut, then she came back, carrying some article of clothing. She nodded to him from behind the light, and without a word he went away.
Through his physical weakness in the house, his mind had kept astonishingly clear, but now his body felt like collapse again. If it was him . . . . A note in the woman’s voice, a strangeness. Did she think it was the urisk or what? he asked of the night with a drunken bitterness. If it can be humanly done . . . . Did she think it was not human? He conjured up the face in the chamber. At first he had had the extraordinary conviction that the figure had come out of the monolith, but that was because if its solid darkness, outside the beam. And he hadn’t heard it come in. Why—how—hadn’t he heard it? Because he was too busy. But the face, hadn’t it breathed on him! And the hands, the arms, good God, didn’t he know them!
This self-questioning in its maddening futility weakened him still more. He missed the path, misjudged
the height of a low stone dyke, and on his back saw the moon look over the mountains. A faint glimmer in the deep dusk of high summer spread the earth under the moon soft as a cat’s paws, and as he turned to get up, it tilted in a bewitchment; then hadn’t tilted but was there, waiting. A figure moved up at the corner of the little field. Even as he watched, it faded away, was withdrawn. As he came by the corner of the garden wall, an animal sprang into and out of sight. The cat. The door was unlocked and he blundered through it noisily, paused, then knocked on the kitchen door. In a couple of minutes he found himself on Mrs Cameron’s chair while she, on her knees, was drawing the red embers from the ash and blowing the dry clods of peat to a flame.
“One jug of water in the kettle and I’ll have a drop of tea for you in a jiffy.” She was nimble on her feet, so great was her anxiety.
His head now ached dully, stupidly. He was going to let go when he saw Anna in the doorway. She looked extraordinarily beautiful in the soft shadowy light of the hand lamp now on the mantelpiece. The tawny hair, the pale wonder, the eyes grown large. She came in slowly as he watched her. Then he smiled.
Mrs Cameron explained that Mr Grant had had a bad fall. “I cannot find my spectacles,” she added in a worried voice. But Anna didn’t need spectacles, and as Mrs Cameron held the lamp, Anna examined the back of Mr Grant’s head. “There’s a slight swelling,” she said. Her fingertips explored under the hair. “The skin is not broken.”
“That’s fine,” he said. “Thank you. I’ll tell you what happened.” And he told them, as though the suffocating burden had at last been lifted from him and his voice found it easy to speak on its own. Mrs Cameron was at once full of assurance, of resource. She would see Mrs Mackenzie first thing in the morning. “Don’t you worry, Mr Grant. We’ll find the treasure, that’s sure.” She got the bellows once more on the peat until the flames enveloped the kettle and it began to sing.
