Merrial looked out of the windows, around at the scene, and sat back with a slight shudder.
‘A strange place,’ she said, ‘with the hills around it like an ambush.’
‘But that’s why it’s a great place,’ I said, and told her the story of how the Cameronians had held off the Highland host and saved the Revolution to which they owed their freedom. She listened with more interest, even, than my telling of the tale deserved, and leaned back at the end and said, ‘Aye well, maybe there’s some use to history, after all. I’ll never be afraid of these hills again.’
It was two in the afternoon by the time the train reached Glasgow’s Queen Street Station, and glad enough we were to get off it. Sometimes two people who can fascinate each other endlessly when alone together, and who can spark off each other in convivial company, find themselves inhibited among strangers who are unignorably in earshot, and find themselves growing shy and silent and stale. So it was with us, towards the end of that journey. I couldn’t even find it in my heart to talk about the Battle of Stirling when we passed through the town.
We both brightened, though, on jumping down on the platform. The familiar Glasgow railway-station smell—of currying fish, and curing leaf, and spark-gapped air, and old iron and wood-alcohol and hot oil and burnt vanilla—hit my sinuses like a shot of poteen. Merrial, too, seemed invigorated by it, taking a deep breath of the polluted stench with a look of satisfaction and nostalgia.
‘Ah, it’s good to be back,’ she said.
I glanced sidelong at her as we walked down the platform. ‘When were you in Glasgow? And how could I have missed you?’
She smiled and squeezed my hand. ‘Oh, I forget. Ages ago. But the smell brings it back.’
‘That and the noise.’
‘The what?’
‘THE—’
But she was laughing at me.
We crossed the station concourse, agreeing that, on balance, pigeons were a worse nuisance than sea-birds (though, as Merrial gravely pointed out, better eating). This comment, and some of the more appetising components of the smell, reminded us that we were ravenous, so we bought sandwiches and bottles of beer from a stall in the station and carried them out to George Square.
We sat down on a bench by a grassy knoll under the statue of the Deliverer.
‘Shee that,’ Merrial said, pointing upwards as she munched. ‘It’sh mean.’
‘What?’
She swallowed. ‘The statue. The old city fathers must have been a bit stingy.’
I looked up. ‘No argument about the city fathers,’ I said. ‘They’re still tight-fisted. But that statue looks fine to me.’
‘The horse is black,’ Merrial pointed out. She tapped the handle of her knife on a fetlock. ‘And cast in bronze. The lady herself is green—just copper. They got out the oxy-acetylene torches and hacked off the original rider, a king or general or whatever, and stuck the Deliverer in his place!’
I stood up and paced around it, peering.
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘You can see the joins. I must have looked at that statue a hundred times, and not noticed anything wrong with it.’ I looked up at the lady’s head. ‘And she has a different face from the one in Carron Town, and they’re both different from any pictures I’ve seen of the Deliverer. ’
‘Well, there you go, colha Gree,’ she said. ‘Some things a tinker can teach a scholar, eh?’
‘Oh aye,’ I said. I sat down again. ‘Mind you, it could hardly be just
parsimony—it’s a fine piece of work after all, and they’ve done her hair in gold.’
‘Yon’s gold
paint
,’ she said scornfully. ‘And as for artistry, the breed and the trappings of the horse are all wrong for the time and the circumstances.’
She was right there, too, when I looked. This was no steppe horse, bareback broken, roughly saddled, such as was shown quite authentically in Carron Square. Instead, it was a hussar’s mount, in elaborate caparison. But I thought then, and still think, that the representation of the Deliverer herself was well done. A fine example of the Glasgow style; which, perhaps, makes the equine bodge appropriate, and part of the artist’s point.
We binned our litter and headed for the nearest tramway stop, in Buchanan Street. The transport system is one of Glasgow City Council’s proudest public works, a more than adequate replacement for the great Underground circle, which was—it’s said—one of the wonders of the ancient world. Judging by the remnants of it that here and there have outlasted centuries of flooding and subsidence, it is quite possible to agree that such it must have been.
The tram came along, bell clanging, and we jumped on and paid our groats and clattered like children up the spiral steps to the upper deck. The bell rang again and the tram lurched forward, creaking up Buchanan Street and swaying as it turned the corner into Sauchiehall.
Glasgow’s main drag looked clogged with traffic, but everything—steam-engine and motor-car and horse-cart and bicycle alike—made way for the tram’s implacable progress. The pedestrians, at this time of the day, were mostly women shopping. But all of them, whether young lasses just out of school or mothers with young children or retired ladies at their leisure, had to pick up their skirts, their pokes or their weans and run for their lives when the tram bore down on a crossing. The shops and offices from recent centuries are built of logs and planks, and rarely go higher than two storeys. The older, pre-Deliverance buildings are of stone; some have as many as five floors. In ancient times there were much higher buildings, but most of them were made of concrete, which doesn’t last well, and—agonising though it may be for archaeology—almost all of their structures have long since been plundered for steel and glass. Their foundations give rectangular patterns to the growth of trees in the forests around Glasgow: Pollock Fields, Possil Wood, Partick Thorn.
Farther away, to the west, we could just make out the haze and smoke from the Clydeside shipyards, on which most of Glasgow’s prosperity depended. The shipyards were the seedbed of the skills which—along with Kishorn’s deep-water dock, almost unique on this side of the Atlantic—had made Scotland the logical site for the launch-platform’s construction.
At the top of Sauchiehall there’s a new stone bridge, to replace the original
concrete one that has crumbled away. It carried us over the Eighth Motor Way and into Woodlands Road, which runs along beside the Kelvin Woods. (They, and the river that runs through them, are named after Lord Kelvin, who invented the thermometer.)
We stepped off the tram at the crest of University Avenue, and stood for a moment looking at the main building, a huge and ancient pile called Gilmore-hill. It looks like a piece of religious architecture that has run wild, but it is solely devoted to secular knowledge, a church of Man.
‘It’s not as old as it looks,’ Merrial said, as though determined not to be impressed. ‘That’s Victorian Gothic.’
I didn’t believe her, but I didn’t argue. I had felt in its chill stone and warm wood the shades of Scotus and Knox and Kelvin, of Watt and Millar and Ferguson, and no disputed date could shake my conviction that the place was almost as old as the nation whose mind it had done so much to shape.
‘Whatever,’ I said. ‘Anyway, the department we’re going to isn’t there.’
‘Just as well,’ Merrial said.
It was actually in one of the small side streets off University Avenue, all of whose buildings date back at least to the twentieth century. The trees that line it are probably as old, gigantic towers of branch and leaf, taller than the buildings. Their bulk darkened the street, the leaves of their first fall formed a slippery litter underfoot.
‘So we just walk up and knock on the door?’ Merrial asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a key.’
She glanced down at her leather bag. ‘And you’re sure we won’t be challenged?’
‘Aye, I’m sure,’ I said. We’d been over this before. As a prospective student, with my project already accepted even if as yet unfunded, I had every right to be here—in fact, I should have been here more often, through the summer. So no one should question us, or our presence in the old archive. We’d planned how we’d do the job, but its proximity seemed to be making Merrial more nervous than I was.
‘All right,’ she said.
The key turned smoothly in the oiled lock, and the tongue clicked back. I pushed the heavy door aside and we stepped in. I locked it behind us. The place was silent, and as far as I could tell it was empty. The hallway was dim and cool, its pale yellow paint darkened by generations of nicotine, and it divided after a few metres into a narrower corridor leading deeper into the Institute and a stairway leading to the upper floors. The place had a curious musty odour of old paper and dusty electric light-bulbs, and a faint whiff of pipe-smoke. I checked the piles of unopened mail on the long wooden table at the side. A few notes for me, which a quick check revealed were refusals
of various applications for patronage. I stuffed them in my jacket pocket and led the way up two flights of stairs to the library, switching on the fizzing electric lamps as we went.
Merrial wrinkled her nose as I opened the library door and switched on the lights.
‘Old paper,’ I said.
She smiled. ‘Dead flies.’
I made to close the door after we entered the room, but Merrial touched my arm and shook her head.
‘I couldn’t stand it,’ she said.
‘You’re right, me neither.’ The still, dead air made me feel short of breath. I held her hand, as much for my reassurance as for hers, as we threaded our way through the maze of ceiling-high book-cases. Merrial, to my surprise, once or twice tugged to make me pause, while she scanned the titles and names on cracked and faded spines with a look of recognition and pleasure.
‘
The Trial of the Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites
!’ she breathed. ‘Amazing! Do you know anything about that?’
‘It was some kind of public exorcism,’ I said, hurrying her along. I’d once glanced into that grim
grimoire
myself, and the memory made me slightly nauseous. ‘People claimed they had turned into rabid dogs who would go out and wreck machinery. Horrible. What superstitious minds the communists had.’
Merrial chuckled, but shot me an oddly pleased look.
At the far end of the library the ranks of book-cases stopped. Several tables and chairs were lined up there, apparently for study—but no one, to my knowledge, ever studied at them. The most anyone could do was to put down a pile of books or documents there for a quick inspection of their contents under the reading-lights, before rushing out of the library. I recalled Merrial’s comment that people today are more claustrophobic than their ancestors.
Beside these tables was another door, of iron, with a handle but no lock. The mere thought of the possibility of that door’s having a lock was enough to give me a cold sweat.
‘Here we are,’ I said, and added, to make light of it, ‘the dark archive.’
‘What’s inside it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve never been in it.’
She frowned. ‘Is it off limits, or what?’
‘No, no.’ I shook my head. ‘It’s not forbidden or anything. Hardly anybody wants to go in.’
‘No point in hesitating,’ said Merrial. ‘Let’s get it over with.’
I turned the handle and pulled the door back. To fit with my feelings, it
should have given off an eldritch squeak, but its heavy hinges were well-lubricated. A couple of times I worked the handle from the inside. It appeared to be in good order, but I dragged one of the chairs over and used it to prop the door open, just in case it closed accidentally.
I switched on the overhead light and stepped with an assumed air of boldness across the threshold. The small back room appeared innocent enough. It had a desk, with a couple of chairs in front of it and on its top a cluster of boxy, bulky structures like models of ancient architecture. Aluminium shelves lined the walls on either side. The air held a different, subtler smell, almost like the smell of washed hair or polished horn, with a sharp note of acetones.
Merrial sniffed. ‘Like a rotting honeycomb,’ she remarked cheerfully. I fought down a heave.
‘Would smoking get rid of the miasma?’ I suggested.
‘Yes, but it might damage the disks.’
While I was still looking around for anything that remotely resembled a disc, Merrial began rummaging along the shelves. The boxes arrayed there were translucent, the colour of sheepskin, with dusty, close-fitting lids. They contained flat black plates about nine centimetres square and two millimetres thick. She picked out a few at random, held them up and shook them slightly. From every one, a sooty black dust drifted down. Oxidation crystals crusted the small metal plates at their edges. She shook her head. ‘Hopeless, ’ she said.
In other, smaller boxes there were smaller, shiny wafers. These, when she picked them out, simply crumbled to the touch.
‘So much for them,’ she said. ‘We’ll just have to see if there’s anything on the hard drive.’ She pulled up a seat in front of the machines. The largest, before which she sat, had a sort of window-pane on the front of it. She opened her poke, rummaged out the clutter on top and carefully extracted her strange devices. She laid them on the table: the seer-stone glowing with random rainbow ripples, a small black box and the frame of lettered levers, all connected by the coils of insulated copper wire.