Better Than Fiction 2 (17 page)

‘By the end,’ I tell Alice, ‘it is not the Caucasus he calls Wonderland, but his home, Nordland. He went in a big circle and ended up home.’

The sleet is now real snow.

‘How annoying,’ Alice says, as the road climbs and twists. ‘It had to start snowing just as we get to the higher, thinner bits of the road.’

Up on a higher plateau, our visibility is now perhaps two metres. We are inside the cloud and on Alice’s side there is a steep drop into a ravine. We stop talking to concentrate; she is hunched over the wheel, both hands gripped. Cars creep towards us with hazard lights flashing and I remember something I read once by WG Sebald:
If you are travelling along the road and things come in from the sides to offer themselves, then you are going in the right direction. If nothing comes you are barking up the wrong tree.
What, then, does it mean if you can’t even see the sides of the road due to terrible weather? We edge along and then, in that mountain way, everything lifts. The flurry is behind us. We turn off the Sheki Road, into an unsigned mountain road which heads upwards into the Ismaili region of the Caucasus range.

The road follows the valley for some time before climbing properly. My ears pop, we turn a corner, and the mountains are grey slate-creviced scars, volcanic, dreamlike. The river bed below us is mostly stone, but the view is deceptive; the water
must be wider and fiercer than it looks because the sound of it resonates across the slate and quartz. I write down the name of the river, Girdimanchai, and on we climb. Each twist of the road reveals Tolkien-like mountain passes more dramatic than the last. I can hardly breathe with the beauty of it and for the first time, I relax. I let go of home and worry, remember why I travel. The road is so high now that I can’t bear to look down. We drive past a terrifying footbridge over the ravine that surely nobody would use and then we come to the end of the tarmac. Our destination, the village of Lahic, is 1376 metres high, but we are not there yet.

‘Where’s the village?’ I say.

‘Up there.’

From here on the road is a track, but there is a problem ahead. There has been a landslide, chunks of the mountain have fallen and blocked the road. Alice turns off the engine. We get out. I glance up to see if more rocks will fall, but for the moment all seems steady. The road at this point is too narrow to turn the car. Alice would have to reverse all the way back, on the twisty-turny road. We look at one another and even calm Alice is frowning.

As if answering a wish, we hear a clip-clopping noise behind us. A man on a pony comes towards us. Alice shouts out, ‘
Salaam!
’ The man puts his hand on his chest and answers with a formal, ‘
As-salamu alaykum.
’ Alice speaks to him in Azerbaijani, whispering to me that he speaks Tat, although they have found a way to communicate.

‘Tat?’

‘An old Persian dialect. There’s no alphabet.’ Alice, language geek, turns back to the man.

‘He says these landfalls get moved very quickly, but it won’t be today now.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘We have to leave the car for now and climb over the rocks,’ she says. ‘We’ll walk up to the village and sort out the guesthouse, get the car in the morning.’

It takes us an hour and a half to complete the walk to Lahic. We are greeted by chickens clucking and cockerels crowing. The guesthouse is a welcome place: warm, a fire glowing, a great relief, but without the car our only way of getting out of here is to walk. What if the weather changes? We have tea and the ubiquitous plate of sugary baklavas and then as the sky darkens we head to the village square to check out the Novruz celebrations.

Lahic’s square is flanked by a mosque, stables, a building with a sign above a door that Alice translates: ‘Man’s Club’. Music blares and people are gathered around a pile of tree branches waiting to be lit. The tradition is to jump over the fire. Small boys run around setting off bangers, and every now and then a firework is released by a child, directly into the air above, or simply thrown onto the ground in front of the fire so that everyone ducks and covers their ears. Health and safety measures are not remotely considered.

I stand near a wall as Alice wanders into the middle. It occurs to me that we are the only women, certainly the only foreigners. Presumably the village women and girls stay away or are kept inside. The fireworks and bangs make me jumpy. There is a cheer when the fire is lit, and more fireworks are let off at dangerous angles. A boy is looking at me. He takes a firework canister and points it at me as if it is a gun, makes a mock firing gesture. He is about six, the same age as my son; confident, cocky, he entirely
belongs here, thinks he is a man already. He disappears.

Alice is close to the fire, taking photographs, talking to one of the older men. The boy reappears, this time holding a rifle. Being British, I’m always shocked by guns because I rarely encounter them – but I have never before seen a child with a gun. I push myself against the wall hoping it is a toy. He waves it in the air, runs towards the other children, all wearing matching woolly hats, thick jumpers. Then he turns towards me, puts his rifle to his eye, trains its viewfinder on me. Somehow I know it is not a toy. I look over for Alice, still near the fire, laughing, her face lit up and pretty. The men here don’t scare me, they seem reserved, private, cautious, but that boy does.

Perhaps there is some truth to Alice’s theory that people are friendly if you just talk to them, but does this extend to children? To wild-eyed boys with no perspective to bring them caution? The bonfire is full-blaze and a man pokes a pitchfork into it, pushing it down into a manageable size. The kid still has his gun pointed at me. The music is loud and begins to be interspersed with a strong wail of the call to prayer. Young men jump the fire, leaping stags, each hop raising a cheer. They are burning away the troubles of the last year, cleansing themselves for the year ahead.

I don’t belong here, it’s true, against the mosque and the mountains and the men, this isolated community who do not even mix with Azerbaijanis let alone the British, but I am so blessed to visit and see it; I could at least be friendly, non-judgemental. Alice turns and waves. Because she shows no fear, she is part of the scene. I am the one cowering at the edge unable to find a way in, jumping out of my skin every time a firework is lit. It is easy to be scared: snowy ravines, mountains collapsing, terrorists behind every boulder, but I need to shake
away the feeling that the planet is pure danger. If I believe that, then it will be.

I walk towards the boy with the gun. He does not change his position. It is a real rifle, but I choose to believe it’s not loaded. I smile at him. He gives me a blank-dead look and then, as children do when an adult takes control, he is more comfortable, he shrugs, flings the rifle over his shoulder, and runs away to throw bangers at his friends.

I don’t jump over the fire, I can see that women aren’t supposed to do that here, but I hold my hands out and feel the heat from the flames. Men jump, and then rush to the mosque, and in an instant the square has entirely emptied as all the men have gone to pray. The craggy mountains around us are black triangles and shadows. Alice comes towards me.

‘Time for a tasty plate of
plov
?’

‘Sounds good.’

We return to the guesthouse. Objectively, it’s true: I am in the bad-lands where anything could happen, but this is something I have come to believe: the world would be a much darker, more misunderstood place if it weren’t for wandering types willing to cross over into parts of the map that politicians tell us are no-go. The further I travel, the dearer my home is, the Wonderland I return to from faraway places, but without the different perspectives travel brings me, I would never remember that safety is not necessarily staying at home. The fire has been stoked inside the guesthouse and two glasses of the best Georgian wine are waiting for us.

W
e have a house in the Highlands of Scotland, underneath a mountain, at the head of a long finger of sea that feels its way into the land. It is a wild and beautiful place, made all the more dramatic by the weather that comes at it directly from the Atlantic. There is rain just about every day – soft, warm rain that falls in shifting white veils, obscuring the dark shapes of the pine trees, the sweep of heather and bracken. From the window of my study I look up to a waterfall that traces a line of white down the mountainside, loud and throaty after prolonged rains, otherwise wispy and quiet, disappearing here and there behind rocks and vegetation. From the front of the house we look out across the sea loch to the next peninsula, Ardnamurchan, to where Ben Hiant rises to make a jagged, irregular horizon. Ben Hiant means
Holy Mountain
in Gaelic, the language that used to be spoken so widely here, but which
now is reduced to small clusters of native speakers and those outsiders who master its liquid vocables because they cannot bear to witness the death of yet another language.

Few live where we have this house,
more deer than people
, as they say in that part of Scotland. The peninsula was once home to almost four thousand people; now there are just over three hundred. The Highland Clearances, one of the great tragedies in Scottish history, saw small farmers – crofters – cleared off the land in the early years of the 19th century. Large landowners used their muscle to drive out their tenants, getting away with it, as one Scottish historian puts it, because the poor had no lawyers. They acted with callous ruthlessness: houses were burned and livestock dispersed as the Highlanders were shifted to make way for sheep. What had once been a land of small farmers, living on such livestock as they could raise and such bounty as the sea would yield, now became a depopulated wilderness, largely forgotten by the rest of Scotland, haunted by the ghosts of its vanished community.

This journey started at that house. It was not a long trip – just under two hours on the way there and slightly less on the way back – but it led to a most extraordinary consequence. Of course that can happen: the start of one journey may conceal the beginning of a much bigger one. And that bigger journey may be something you never expected, however experienced you may be in the ways of the world.

It was midsummer, and we had left our main home in Edinburgh to spend some time in our Highland house. I was looking forward to a few weeks during which I would do all the things that people who go off to a summer cottage like to do: walking, some fishing, catching up with some of the reading that the busy world stops you from doing. My wife, Elizabeth, was
hoping for good weather to spend time in the vegetable patch she had set up – a small square of uneven hill land protected by a high deer fence. Where we are, the deer will determinedly eat anything you plant; they have as little respect for flowers as they have for anything else that manages to grow – it is all fair game to them.

Peter, our neighbour in this bucolic spot, has a small estate on which he grazes cattle and hopes to generate hydro-electricity. He lives for most of the time in Northern Ireland, but he and his wife make their way over regularly in his own boat to spend time in Scotland. It was he who suggested the trip. ‘It’s weather for the Cairns of Coll,’ he said. ‘We could go out there together – you in your boat, us in mine.’

I consulted Elizabeth, who agreed that we should accept the invitation. She made flasks of tea and prepared buttered rolls. ‘Where exactly are we going?’ she asked.

Although I had a boat that I used regularly to make the journey to Mull, I had not at that time done much exploring of the coast. ‘The Cairns of Coll. I’ve looked them up on the marine charts. They’re just north of Coll.’

As it happened, Coll itself was an island we had visited before. It lies in the Hebridean Sea, some fifteen miles off the coast of mainland Scotland. Beyond it, across the stretch of sea known as the Minch, are the Outer Hebrides – the line of islands that marks the very edge of Europe. There is nothing further out, apart from the St Kilda group, forty miles or so off the Isle of Lewis – an astonishing cluster of tiny islands from which the last remaining inhabitants had been evacuated in the 1930s.

We set off at eleven in the morning and were back on the mooring in the late afternoon, not that it would have mattered had we been much later. In the middle of a Scottish summer,
especially at those latitudes, it barely gets dark, even at midnight: white nights, as the Russians call them.

There were two boats. Peter, his wife, his teenage children, and a couple of the children’s friends were in his boat, and Elizabeth and I were in ours. The boats were both
ribs
, open craft with engines capable of propelling them through the water at thirty knots or more if one was in a particular hurry. Peter’s boat was more powerful than mine but we kept more or less together as we made the crossing. The sea at that stage was in one of those states that go with high pressure – a flat blue field, almost glassy, only moving slightly, as if there were a heart beating gently somewhere deep beneath the surface. Here and there sea birds sat upon the almost imperceptible swell as if it were their private counterpane.

Our route took us across the top of the Sound of Mull, that long channel that runs down between the island and the Morvern Peninsula on the mainland. As we rounded the point of Ardnamurchan Head, the most westerly tip of the British mainland, a cluster of distant islands appeared to the north. The grandest of these was the Isle of Skye, with its great mountains, the Cuillin, dominating the far horizon. The mountains were of a delicate, attenuated blue, as distant mountains might be in a well-worked watercolour. In front of them, much closer to us, were the Small Isles, the beautifully named Rhum, Eigg, Canna and Muck. The island of Muck is the smallest of these, a tiny patch of green inhabited by only a handful of people but much loved by them and by the visitors who make their way out there.

Our destination, though, lay to the west rather than the north. There was Coll, now visible on the horizon – a long smudge of land with a ridge of small hills to give it salience above the flatness of the sea. And just above Coll, separated from the main
island by a channel of half a mile or so, was a small group of islands, some no more than rocky islets. These were the Cairns of Coll.

Not far from our destination we saw a small fishing trawler, and stopped to ask the skipper whether he had anything to sell. He did. A few hours earlier he had hauled up his creels and he had as many prawns as we would care to buy. These were what many would call large shrimps – the size of the jumbo shrimps served with Caesar salad in a thousand hotel dining rooms. In these parts they are called prawns and we bought a good bucketful of them before setting off again to complete our journey.

As we drew closer I was struck by the beauty of the Cairns of Coll. If one were to imagine an archetypical romantic island, complete with lagoons, pristine white beaches, and crystal-clear water, one would dream up something like the little island that we now approached. I could barely believe that such a place existed outside the doctored Caribbean travel brochure. But here it was in Scotland, made golden by the sparkling sunlight of that day – a place of such utter perfection that it seemed almost wrong to set foot upon it.

But we did. We secured the boats to rocks with grappling hooks and waded through the last few feet of water. And then, against a rock further up the beach, we laid a small fire of driftwood and cooked the prawns for our lunch. As we ate, inquisitive seal heads popped up in the water behind us, watching our moves with undisguised curiosity. There were more than ten of them – and others of the colony could be seen further out.

The teenagers swam in a lagoon concealed behind a flower-embroidered hillock. They allowed the outgoing tide to carry
them round a small point and then swam back onto the beach. The seals accompanied them like friendly lifeguards, interested in rather than resentful of this intrusion upon their world.

There was not a soul about – apart from us. Nor was there any sign of the works of man, other than an unattended lighthouse on the most northerly of the islands, a human structure than seemed utterly right in its setting.

After our picnic we explored the island on which we had landed. From the tops of the highest hillock, one could look out over the other islands in the group, all very small, some with patches of white where there were beaches, some very rocky, with the merest covering of vegetation. On the far side of the outer islands, the sea had begun to break, white against the black of the rock: a wind had come up and, with it, waves.

We began our journey back. The waves that had sprung up were not high, and they were rolling in the direction we were following. We rode them easily and they aided us in our passage home. Off to the south was the coast of Mull, seeming so large after this pocket-sized universe on which we had spent the last few hours. Before us, stretching out, were the mountains of Ardnamurchan and Morvern, the landscape I have come to love so much.

Over the couple of years that followed, we visited the islands occasionally, landing in the same place as we had landed that day. I enjoyed showing them to friends who visited us, and they were usually delighted by the discovery of what struck most people as an enchanting – and enchanted – place. Then, one morning in Edinburgh I opened my copy of the
Scotsman
newspaper and read that the Cairns of Coll were for sale. I had never really thought of them as being owned by anybody, but they obviously were, for here was the owner putting them on the
market. I took the newspaper into Elizabeth’s study.

‘The Cairns of Coll are for sale,’ I said. ‘And …’

She looked at me. ‘And?’

‘And I want to buy them.’

There was a silence.

‘I have to,’ I said.

They were not too expensive – around about the price of a modest flat in Edinburgh. I was in the fortunate position of being able to acquire them, and I did, phoning my lawyer immediately and asking her to set the transaction in motion. I spoke to the seller, who lived on one of the outer islands. The Cairns had been in her family for three generations. I assured her that my motive for wanting to acquire them was to protect them. I promised her I would look after them, which is exactly what I intend to do.

They are there for people who pass by in boats to wonder at. They can go ashore if they are able, as long as they are careful of the wildlife, the birds and seals who are the true owners of these astonishingly beautiful little gems. I go there myself a few times a year and stand under that high sky and let the breath of the Hebridean Sea envelop me. I shall not allow anything to be done to them. They shall never be built upon or spoiled.

Sometimes we make journeys that seem at the time to be small and unimportant ones. But these journeys may turn out to be ones that lead us along a surprising road, the outcome of which may be unsuspected, unknown, and wholly magical.