The Wild Places (Penguin Original) (5 page)

The ground was uneven, and sloped down to a set of cliffs that were cleft by big wave channels. Finally I found somewhere I could sleep: a body-length patch of grass on a terraced bank, above a deep gorge-like inlet. The bank tilted slightly inwards; there was no danger of me rolling off it in my sleep. I could make out the shapes of seals moving through the water. Sweeping above me were the beams of the lighthouse, long thin spokes of light opening out into the darkness, turning in slow predictable yellow rotation. It was warm enough for me not to need the bivouac bag I had carried, so I laid out my mat and sleeping-bag on the grass.
The noise began at around midnight, or that was when I woke to it. Birds were falling through the air above me, screaming while they fell, leaving long curved trails of sound as they plunged. I could hear them landing with soft thumps on the ground around me.
Every few seconds, one of the plunging birds and one of the turning lighthouse beams would coincide, vertical through lateral. I began to see them, here and there, momentarily outlined in the light - birds, with arrow-wings swept back from their little bomb-bodies, so that even as they disappeared, my eye retained an image of their streaking forms.
Shearwaters. Of course - they were shearwaters. Migratory, long-travelling, long-lived birds, which nested in burrows, and which waited until the cover of darkness before coming into land. Their name derives from their habit of gliding low over the water, wing-tips skidding the waves and striking droplets from them. The longest recorded wave-top glide of a Manx shearwater is one and a half miles. They are remarkable, too, for the distance of their pilgrimages. In a single day, they can cover as much as 200 miles. When the breeding season is over, obeying impulses beyond our cognition, the shearwaters of Enlli will fly thousands of miles to spend the rest of the year at sea in the South Atlantic.
Ynys Enlli, like so many of the islands and marshes on the east and west coasts of Britain, is a refuge for migrating birds. Hundreds of species stop off during their search for undisturbed feeding grounds. Tides and currents of birds, sweeping seasonally north and south, dispersing and returning, linking remote place to remote place.
Around two o’clock, the shearwaters settled. I lay in the quiet dark, watching the light beams turning silently above me, until I slipped back into sleep.
I woke to a still dawn. The sea, breathing quietly to my south, was pearly, with a light low mist upon it. The sky was pale with breaks of blue. The splash made by a black-backed gull diving fifty yards away sounded like a stone lobbed into the water nearby. I sat up, and saw that dozens of tiny dun-coloured birds were littering the rocks around me, making a high playground cheeping. Pipits. They gusted off when I moved.
I clambered down the shallowest side of the gulch, to the sharp angled rocks at the sea’s edge, and washed my face in the idle water. On a rock ledge, I found and kept a heart-sized stone of blue basalt, beautifully marked with white fossils: coccoliths no bigger than a fingernail, the fine fanwork of their bodies still visible. I set a thin shell afloat, carrying a cargo of dry thrift heads. As I placed it on the water, it was sucked out away from my fingers on an invisible back eddy, bobbing with the gentle swell.
Two big seals were hauled out on the rocks on the far point of the gulch. They watched me, and when I neared them they began to toil off their perches. Then they slipped into the water, rolled onto their backs, and sculled past the mouth of the gulch, gazing at me. They both dived. One disappeared. The other surfaced close to me, his thick head rising like a periscope. His big liquid eyes locked on to mine, and he watched me with a calm intransitive attention. For ten seconds or so we stared at each other. Then he ducked his head under the water with a splash, as though to rinse it, and disappeared.
Seals have long figured in the folklore of the Atlantic fringes as possessors of an uncannily double nature: in-between creatures, half-human and half-marine. In the 1940s, the writer David Thomson travelled between the westerly sea communities of Ireland and Scotland, gathering stories about the seals. Everywhere he went, he found that the tales told were the same: of the capacity of the seal’s gaze to compel and hold its subject, of seals stepping from the sea and becoming humans, and humans slipping into the form of seals. The seal was a living reminder, he noted, of how close we are to animals, and of our aquatic ancestry. ‘Land animals may play their roles in legend,’ he concluded in the book he wrote about his journeys, ‘but none, not even the hare, has such a dream-like effect on the human mind as the seal.’
I walked back to the shingle beach on that still morning, past the burrows of the shearwaters, over the soft moulded grass, back through the field of thrift. I tried to imagine the conversations the monks would have had with one another about the places in which they dwelled: their discussions, implicit and explicit, about what it meant to be in affinity with the land they occupied. I admired the ways in which their spirituality found expressions and correlations in the physical world. In the view over a low-misted sea from a headland. In the fall of light upon the margin of a page, or a bay. In feathers rocking down through still air like snow, or snow rocking down through still air like feathers. Of course there were physical discomforts to their lives in these places; of course there would have been disagreements, dislikes, currents of bad feeling between the men themselves. But these ascetics had desired and celebrated an affluence which was beyond the economic, and which found its forms in the clearness of the air over the sea, or the shoaling patterns of a flock of seabirds in flight. Henry David Thoreau had written about such ideas of value. A lake, he said, a hill, a cliff, or individual rocks, ‘a forest or ancient trees standing singly’, ‘such things are beautiful, they have a high use which dollars and cents never represent.’
Much had changed since the time of the
peregrini
. Plastic flotsam washed up in Enlli’s coves and gulleys. Power-boats thumped over the water near the mainland. There were problems with sewage, piped out into the Irish Sea from the Welsh coastal towns, and with chemical pollution which, on certain days, set the water foaming like shampoo on the rocks. And I could not have survived on the monks’ island, could not have lived on it even for a month, probably - the draw of the city, my own routines, my need for libraries, luxuries, connection, variety. Yet aspects remained of what had attracted the
peregrini
there, centuries earlier, and it felt somehow right to have begun my journeys in a landscape where people had, in the past, lived companionably with the wild.
Later we sailed back across the Sound to the mainland, at the turn of the tides, passing as we did so over water that was plump and gleaming, as though it were covered in a sheeny surface membrane beneath which the upwelling current seemed to pause and tremble.
John moored the boat a hundred yards offshore, near a point jutting west towards Enlli, facing a small bay. To either side of the bay rose jagged cliffs, complicatedly recessed and cut into by caves, off which bird cries pinged. The boat rolled on the subtle green swell, snapping its anchor rope tight with each roll, so that water sprang from it. Its mast, seen from the stern, ticked from side to side like a metronome.
I dived in. Blue shock. The cold running into me like a dye. I surfaced, gasping, and began to swim towards the cliffs at the eastern side of the bay. I could feel the insistent draw of the current, sliding me out to the west, back towards Enlli. I swam at a diagonal to it, to keep my course.
Nearing the cliffs, I moved through different ribbons and bands of temperature, warm, then suddenly cold again. A large lustrous wave surged me between two big rocks, and as I put a hand out to stop myself from being barged against them, I felt barnacles tear at my fingers.
I swam to the biggest of the caves. Holding on to an edge of rock, and letting the swell lift me gently up and down, I looked inside. Though I could not see the back of the cave, it seemed to run thirty or forty feet into the cliffs: cone-shaped, tightening into the earth from its mouth. I released the rock, and drifted slowly into the opening. As I crossed the shadow cast by the cave’s roof, the water grew cold. There was a big hollow sucking and slapping sound. I shouted, and heard my call come back at me from all sides.
As I got deeper in, the water shallowed. I swam breast-stroke, to keep myself as flat as possible. I was passing over dark red and purple rocks: the voodoo colours of basalt, dolerite. The lower sides of the cave were lined with frizzy green seaweed, which was slick and shiny where the water reached it, like wet hair.
Further back into the cave, the light was diffused and the air appeared powdery. The temperature had dropped, and I sensed the whole gathered coldness of the unsunned rock around and above me, pushing out into the air and water.
I glanced back over my shoulder. The big semicircular mouth of the cave had by now shrunk to a cuticle of light. I could only just see out to the horizon of the sea, and I felt a sudden involuntary lurch of fear. I swam on, moving slowly now, trying to sense the sharp rocks over which I was moving.
Then I reached the end of the cave, and there, at its very back, and in its very centre, lifted almost entirely out of the water, sat a single vast white boulder, made of smooth creamy rock, shaped roughly like a throne or seat. It must have weighed five or six tons. I climbed awkwardly out of the water, slipping on weed, and sat on the rock, while the water slopped around its base, and looked back down the cave to the curved rim of light, all that remained of the world beyond.
Remembering the white rock now, it seems like a hallucination. I cannot explain what it really looked like, certainly not what it was doing there, among the red and purple basalts. Nor could I conceive of the might of the storm waves that, over the centuries, must have brought that boulder to the cave, and then shifted it deeper and deeper in, until finally they had heaved it into that position, placed perfectly at the centre and the back of the cave.
That afternoon the sun returned, filling the air with low warm light. We climbed steep cliffs near the cove, above deep sea water which would catch us if we fell, and gathered the rock samphire that grew in vertical fields. We perched in little nooks and sentry holes, facing out to the setting sun, and talked to each other across the cliff, as we chewed on the samphire’s pale green leaves, relishing its saltiness.
As dark was finally falling, we returned to the cove off which the boat was moored. It lay at the mouth of a small steep-sided valley, cut by a stream. The valley’s two banks were thick with small trees - ash, elder, rowan - hung with wild honeysuckle, and bindweed, whose almond scent gathered in the air and moved with the wind in currents through the dusk, and whose white trumpet-shaped flowers shone in the fading light.
The cove’s beach was formed of hundreds of thousands of stones, some as smooth as eggs. Several old rusted tractors with black plastic bucket seats were pulled up to either side, near the cliffs, ready to haul fishing boats out of the water. Where it was sandier, near the water, three wading birds moved forwards together in a line, swinging their beaks from side to side in arcs as they advanced, like a team of metal detectors. We moved boulders to make seats, and sat for a while, watching the sun complete its combustion over the western sea.
When it was fully dark, we lit a birchwood fire in a pit of stones beneath the westernmost cliff edge of the cove, and sat round it, drinking, eating, talking. The orange fire popped bright sun-flares out into the darkness. Resin hissed, and wood cracked as it tore itself along its grain. Sparks rushed in flocks into the darkness, before passing out of sight. The sea hushed on the shingle. Time became measured by the fire’s failing and flaring. Later in the evening, I walked across the cove. I looked back through the dark at the fire, to see its orange sway, and the figures, visible only as shadows, moving about it.
By two in the morning the fire had dulled down to a pyre of embers, which pulsed black and orange with the light wind. The night was moonless and tepid. It was then that I saw the glimmering of the water. A line of blinking light - purple and silver - rimming the long curve of the beach. I walked down to the edge, squatted, and waved a hand in the water. It blazed purple, orange, yellow and silver. Phosphorescence!
I left my clothes on the stones, and waded into the warm shallows. Where it was undisturbed, the water was still and black. But where it was stirred, it burned with light. Every movement I made provoked a brilliant swirl, and everywhere it lapped against a floating body it was struck into colour, so that the few boats moored in the bay were outlined with luminescence, gleaming off their wet sloped sides. Glancing back, the cove, the cliffs and the caves all appeared trimmed with light. I found that I could fling long streaks of fire from my fingertips, sorcerer-style, so I stood in the shallows for a few happy minutes, pretending to be Merlin, dispensing magic to right and left.
Then I walked out into the deeper water, and slipped forward and swam in a squall of tangerine light. I rolled on to my back, and sculled along the line of the shore, looking back at the land, and kicking my legs so that complex drapes of colour were slung outwards. What was it Thoreau had written about a similar experience at Walden Pond? ‘It was a lake of rainbow light, in which, for a short while, I lived like a dolphin. ’ I remembered Roger describing how he had stood one night on the beach at Walberswick in Suffolk and seen dozens of swimmers out in the phosphorescent water, their bodies ‘striking through the neon waves like dragons’.
It was dark in the cove, and there was little loose light in the sky, and I realised that I could not see myself, only the phosphorescence that surrounded me, so that it appeared as though I were not there in the water at all: my body was unclear, defined only as a shape of darkness set against the swirling aqueous light.

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