The Kingdom by the Sea

by Paul Theroux

  And, just as suddenly, he was calm: "They call that mountain 'the Cobbler.' There's an open trough just behind it"—he pronounced it troch, to rhyme with loch.

  At flat, mirror-still Loch Lomond, white as ice under a white sky, Mr. Davidson began talking about printing unions. I had told him I was in publishing.

  "You're nae one of these bloody Fleet Street buggers!" he roared. It was another of his angry eruptions. "The printing unions are bloody! They're just protecting their own interests. They show up drunk and they get paid! 'Pay up!' 'But he's drunk!' 'Och, aye, but ye cannae bag Wully!' 'I'll bag him!' 'Bag him and we'll all go out!' It's bloody stupid!"

  Mr. Davidson was roaring at the window, at the creamy clouds reflected in the loch, not at me.

  "I'm nae a Queen Anne Tory," he said. "I'm a moderate Labour man. Aye, Jimmy, I was a trade unionist in 1912!"

  He said he had been in the retail trade all his life—the grocery trade, another man's shop. He worked long hours. Eight in the morning until eight in the evening. A half-hour for lunch, a half-hour for tea.

  The hills were bare from their midsection upward, and below this line were small pine trees. Mr. Davidson was very silent and then he leaned toward me and whispered sadly, "Everything you read's nae true."

  He exploded again.

  "They went daft with afforestation! It takes forty years for a tree to be useful. You could have forty years of lambs here, and instead they have trees!"

  But there were not many trees. Three hundred years ago this district was full of hardwood forests—oak and beech. They were cut down and made into charcoal for the iron smelters at Taynuilt, up the line, famous for its cannonballs—Lord Nelson had fired them at the Battle of Trafalgar. Now the trees were wispy pines, and the hills were rocky and bare and black-streaked with falling water. The dark clouds were like another range of mountains, another foreign land, and the sun on some stones gave them a pale bony gleam.

  I suppressed a shiver and said that it seemed rather bleak around here.

  "Aye," Mr. Davidson said. "That's where its beauty comes from."

  And he went to sleep. His mouth dropped open and he slept so soundly, I thought he had died.

  ***

  Later, Mr. Davidson awoke and gulped, seeming to swallow what remained of his fatigue. He recognized Kilchurn Castle. He said there had been a crazy old woman living in the ruin until very recently. She had thought she was the last of the Campbells. But he had also known hard times, he said. He had had "three spells of poverty"—no work and nothing to eat.

  "And I couldn't join the army. I wore spectacles, you see. If you wore spectacles, a gas mask was useless."

  Then he was talking about the Somme.

  "This country has no friends"—he meant Britain—"only enemies, and debts. We spent years paying off the Boer War debt. And we're still in debt."

  He hugged his heavy coat around himself and frowned. When he did this, he looked shaggy and bearish. He was thinking.

  "But there's nae debt for the Third World War. There'll be naebody left. Naebody can pay naebody! I blame"—he was erupting again—"I blame the poultices in the House of Commons! They'll start the next war and then there'll be naebody!"

  We came to Oban. The railway station was white with a blue trim and had a clock tower showing the right time. There were seals in the harbor. On a hill above town was a full-sized replica of the Roman Colosseum, started in 1897 by a banker who thought something so ambitious would solve the unemployment problem. It was never finished; it was lovely and skeletal, symmetrical, purposeless. McCaig's Folly, they called it.

  Even in Oban Mr. Davidson stayed by my side as he had in the empty railway car. He said the folly had a window for every day of the year.

  "I'm a bachelor," he then explained. "I never married."

  "No woman at all in eighty-seven years?"

  "Nothing. And no drinking."

  "Never had a drink?"

  "Maybe a toddy or two," he said. "And I never smoked."

  "A blameless life," I said.

  "I've been sick, though," he said. "But nothing as far as sexual, drinking, or smoking."

  Oban was made of stone. It was Scottish and solid, no honky-tonk, no spivs. It was a town of cold bright rooms, with rosy-cheeked people in sweaters sitting inside and rubbing their hands; it had fresh air and freezing water. If you were cold, you went for a walk and swung your arms to get the circulation up—no hearth fires until October. In Oban it struck me that most Scottish buildings looked as durable as banks. Here the dull clean town was on a coast of wild water and islands.

  Some of these Scottish coastal towns looked as if they had been thrown out of the ground. They were fine polished versions of the same rocks they were on, but cut square and higher—not brought and built there by bricklayers, but carved out of these granite cliffs.

  I saw Mr. Davidson my second day in Oban. He looked dead on a George Street bench, facing the harbor. His big hands were folded across his stomach, his mouth hung open. He had no suitcase—nothing but a rail ticket. Where had he slept? But I resisted asking questions, because I feared his answers.

  He opened his yellow eyes on me.

  I said, "I'm thinking of going to Fort William."

  "There's a train in an hour," he said. "Where's your knapsack, Jimmy?"

  He called everyone Jimmy.

  I said, "At the bus shelter. I'm taking a bus up the coast."

  He said, "I wasn't planning to do that."

  "I'm sticking to the coast."

  "Aye, Jimmy, stick to the coast." And he closed his eyes.

  But there was a wild-eyed man on the bus. His name was White-law, he chewed a pipestem, he watched the window and shouted.

  There were cages in the sea.

  He cried, "Fish farm!"

  There was dark and frothy water under the Connel Bridge.

  He cried, "Falls of Lora!"

  I saw boggy fields.

  He cried, "That's where they cut peat!"

  He was animated by the landscape. I wondered whether it was a Scottish trait. I had never seen an English person behave like this.

  He cried, "The tide's out!"

  It was. Eventually he got off the bus, at Portnacroish, on the Sound of Shuna.

  It was a complicated coastline of hills and bays, lochs and rushing burns. It could not have been anything but the Scottish coast—so much water, so much steepness, such rocks. Ballachulish was like an alpine valley that had been scoured of all its softness—the feathery trees and chalets and brown cows whirled off its slopes, and all the gentle angles scraped away, until it lay bare and rugged, a naked landscape awaiting turf and forest.

  Most of this western coastline in Scotland looked elemental in that way—as if it had been whipped clean and was waiting completion. It was hard and plain, most of it. It was very cold. I imagined sheep dying on it. Fort William was powerfully craggy. I began to think that this was the most spectacular coastline I had seen so far in Britain—huger than Cornwall, darker than Wales, wilder than Antrim. I stared at it and decided that it was ferocious rather than pretty, with a size and a texture that was surprisingly unfinished. It changed with the light, as coastal cliffs always did; it was always massive, but in a certain pale light it seemed murderous.

  ***

  I was anonymous in Fort William. The other visitors had knapsacks, too, and oily shoes and binoculars. With Ben Nevis above it, and all the campsites of the Highlands just behind it, Fort William was full of hikers and fresh-air fiends all frantically interrogating each other about footpaths. The town was crowded and unpleasant-looking, heaving with campers, so after lunch I wiped my mouth and walked north and west along the railway line to the coast. Once again I thought: Some travel is a fantasy of running away.

  Three miles away I came to the lower end of the Caledonian Canal. I wanted to see a boat passing through, but there was nothing on it except ducks. It was a sunny day and I was glad to be alone in the empty glen.

 
Then a wheezing voice said, "Hae ye got a match?" and I almost jumped out of my skin.

  It was Jock MacDougal, with red eyes and a filthy face, trembling next to a tree. He had a scabby wound on his forehead, and his clothes were rags.

  "I just want a match," he said. "I'm nae being cheeky."

  He was trying to reassure me: he knew he was filthy and dangerous-looking. I gave him my matches and he slowly lit an inch-long cigarette butt that was flat, as if it had been stepped on. What an odd person to meet in a green glen.

  He said, "I was never had up for assault or bodily harm or a breach of the peace in me whole life."

  I stared at him. I did not know what to say.

  "Only for being drunk and incapable," he said.

  He had a little camp nearby—a nest of rags, some bottles, a smoky fire, and two comrades. There was a frightened woman named Alice and a man named Crawfurd, who was even filthier than MacDougal. Crawfurd called himself Tex. He was from Aberdeen.

  "But I'm a Glasgow man," Jock said. "A Glasgow man will stick by you."

  Alice looked wildly at him, but said nothing. She looked injured and was very silent.

  Jock sang a song,

  "Coom doon the stairs.

  Tie up your bonny hairs!"

  This seemed to frighten Alice even more.

  He sang a song about a place called Fyvie. He there's a statue of a cow!"

  "What's your trade?" Crawfurd said. He had a end of his nose and smelled of dead leaves.

  I told them I was in publishing.

  "Ha!" Jock said. "I'm a tramp! I'm a man of the road!"

  Crawfurd said, "Do much traveling?"

  "A certain amount," I said.

  Crawfurd said, "I've been everywhere in the world."

  "New Jersey? Argentina? Fiji?" I asked.

  "Everywhere," he said.

  I asked him to describe for me some of the more colorful spots he had seen.

  "That would be too hard. There were so many."

  Five feet away, Jock was crouching with his arm around Alice. Then he thrust his hand under her green sweater and she squawked.

  "I have three passports," Crawfurd said. "A woman in Perth once said to me, 'I'd like to have twenty-four hours with you.'"

  This amazed me. He stank, his teeth were black, he had blades of grass in his beard.

  "She said, 'Know what you should do? You should write a travel book.'"

  "Why don't you?" I asked. Now I was sorry I had told him I was in publishing. But what would he write, under this tree?

  "There's too many bloody travel books," he said, and faced me, as if challenging me to deny it.

  I did not deny it.

  "Why are you here in Scotland?" Jock shouted to me. "People in Scotland are rubbish!"

  I said I had to go, but they stood on the path, blocking my way.

  "Give me some money," Jock said.

  "Which way to Corpach?" I asked, still walking.

  "I'm not telling any secrets unless you pay me!"

  "All right, I'll pay."

  He pointed. "Down there on the road."

  I gave him a ten-pence coin.

  He said, "Give me sixty or seventy."

  "That was only worth ten," I said. "Now step aside."

  The train was the 16:30 to Mallaig. I looked back and saw the hump of Ben Nevis, with streaks and splashes of snow in some of its hollows. It was a huge gray forehead of rock, with a green bare dome in front of it and three more on the south side. All the mountains here had the contours of hogs.

  Mrs. Gordon in the next seat said, "Taking the train, to me, is like going to the cinema."

  It was a splendid ride to Mallaig—one of the most scenic railway journeys in the world. But the train itself was dull, the passengers watchful and reverent, intimidated by all this scenery.

  Scotland had a paradoxical beauty—its landscape was both lovely and severe; it was a monotonous extravaganza. The towns were as dull as any I had ever seen in my life, and the surrounding mountains very wild. I liked what I saw, but I kept wanting to leave. And the Scots had a nervous way with a joke. Their wit was aggressive and unsmiling. I wondered: Was that meant to be funny? When they were forthright they could become personal, especially on the subject of money. A Scot I met in Oban had accused me of wasting money when I told him that I had been planning to take a first-class sleeper to London; he regarded it as wasteful and selfish that I should want to be alone. And here on this Mallaig train a man wanted to know why, if there was no youth hostel in Mallaig, I planned to stay the night there? And why hadn't I bought a round-trip ticket—didn't I know it was cheaper than the one-way fare on a weekday? This was Mr. Buckie, who saved rubber bands—he had fourteen on his wrist—and had been wearing the same tweed cap since 1953. Coronation Year. He was not trying to be helpful. Penny-pinching had made him abusive, obstructive, and cross. He ended up by disliking me, as if I were wasting his money.

  But I thought: In travel you meet people who try to lay hold of you, who take charge like parents, and criticize. Another of travel's pleasures was turning your back on them and leaving and never having to explain.

  I changed my seat as we passed along the shore of Loch Eil. There were high mountains rising in the west, and more lochs. Some of the mountains were three thousand feet high and some lochs a thousand feet deep (Loch Morar a few miles away was even deeper). We crossed the Glenfinnian Viaduct—it was curved and long and had Romanesque arches, and it stood at the north end of the shiny black water of Loch Shiel, which lay beneath more rugged mountains.

  There was great emptiness here. The train stayed high on the hillsides and did not descend into the valleys. There were ferns and bracken in the foreground, and some trees growing in narrow sheltered gullies out of the wind, but no human beings. The westerly gales had torn the soil from most hillsides. It was hard and lovely. The beauty was only part of it; you had to be tough to live here.

  The landscape widened after Loch Ailort Station, and we were heading west, where the bright sun was setting, making the water blaze on Loch Nan Uamh, which was also the sea, and making the green grass luminous and vibrant, as if the pasture were trembling a foot from the ground. The light was perfect, because there was nothing in the way: the mountains stood separate and all the sea lochs here were long and stretched westward, so that the last of the sun shone uninterruptedly down their length.

  The train bucked and turned north at Arisaig. The bays were like crater crusts filled with water. And offshore islands: Rhum, Eigg, Muck, and Canna—names like items from a misspelled menu. The Scour of Eigg was a hatchet shape against the sky. And now beneath the train there was a basin of green fields for three miles to the Sound of Sleat—and above the train were mountains of cracked rock and swatches of purple heather. Suddenly a horse was silhouetted in the sun, cropping grass beside the sea.

  The train stopped at the level crossing at Morar—the opening and closing of gates, the latching and unlatching, clunk, clunk; and then the train chugged into Mallaig, where people were swimming in the freezing water, the foaming waves making lace caps for their bobbing heads.

  That night I stared out the window at the freakish mountains on Skye. They were sharp-pointed, fantastic, and high, like peaks in dragon stories. They were the Cuillins, and their strange shape made them look unclimbable. Although it was after eleven, there was enough light for me to see them, and then near midnight they were ghostlier still: it was like winter light, a February afternoon in Boston, with the grayness of a gathering shadow.

  ***

  In all my coastal travel I never met a fisherman who said he was satisfied. They hated the life, they said. The prices were bad, the competition was tough, the waters were overfished. Foreign fishermen were to blame—the Russians, the Japanese, the Danes. Foreigners scooped up everything—sprats, fry, undersized fish—and beat them into fishmeal on their factory ships.

  Captain Cameron on his fishing boat, Lord Roberts, at Mallaig said, "Anyone here would sell hi
s boat if he could get a fair price for it. The fishing business is dead. I should have sold mine when I could, a few years ago. Now I'm fifty-seven, and I have to work as long as I can. I won't be able to retire—haven't got the money. I'll work until I'm too weak to go on, and then my kids will be cursed with this bloody boat."

  He was taking seventeen crates of prawns' tails ashore, about a thousand quids' worth ($1700), but his fuel bill for this trip was five hundred ($850), and he had a crew of five. There was hardly any profit in it. They had been at sea for nearly a week.

  "Someday there'll be no fishing at all," Captain Cameron said. "It'll pass into ancient history."

  On my second morning at Mallaig, Mrs. Fleming's daughter served me my breakfast and said, "Princess Diana's had a baby boy."

  Everyone was pleased: an heir to the throne. It was another national event in an eventful period. The Falklands War had started and finished as I had been traveling. The Pope had come and gone. The Royal Baby was born. A railway strike was threatened. Three million people were unemployed—13 percent of the workforce—and one person out of six in Scotland was without a job. There was a deranged murderer loose in Yorkshire. They were public events and they had the effect of making people unusually talkative. "This Falklands business—" And then the American President visited and went horseback riding with the Queen. He made a speech. People smiled a little when they heard my accent. "I just saw your President on television—" It was supposed to be a kingdom of close-mouthed people, but the war and the strife and the Pope and now the birth of a future King had brought about a relentless garrulity. I needed a little air.

  I took the road north out of the town. The road ended; a track began. It was a rough stony path that circled a gray hill above the sea. I walked along the shore of Loch Nevis. Just over the hill at Loch Morar people sometimes searched for underwater monsters. I walked to Inverie, which was a house on a road that went nowhere. I wondered how much farther I should go. The coast was in-and-out for hundreds of miles. I liked walking, but I was no snorting Rambler with plus fours and a pickaxe. If I saw a sheep on the path, I stopped and stared at it. I sat down and sketched a tall thistle at Inverie—the Scottish thistles seemed to me magical, and as complicated as crystals. I looked at birds. I tried to think of descriptions for these unusual islands—they were less like islands than old bare mountains in the sea. I was distracted by all the water and rock, the great heights of cloud, the ruined stone cottages along the coastal paths, the lived-in cottages in remote places that looked as though they were growing more remote—places reachable only in small boats.