Stones of Aran (51 page)

“Solution-hollows” are common features on smooth
pavements
like this, and they too pose their questions. They are
usually
rather flat-bottomed, a few inches deep, with sharply-defined, near-vertical sides, and as varied in shape as puddles on roads. Many hold rainwater long enough for algae to flourish in them, not only the free-swimming single-celled sorts that under the
microscope
look like bizarre clockwork toys, but grape-sized blobs of a blue-green alga called
Nostoc,
sometimes enough of it to cover the floor of the hollow. In a dry spell this squashy stuff is reduced to a black soil and generally blows away, but if some of it remains
and accumulates, mosses and herbs will seize their chance and eventually the hollow may be plugged with a grassy “scraw” or sod; thus
Nostoc
is in the front line of the vegetable-world’s
unremitting
struggle to take over the crags in the teeth of the wind and the herbivore. But this primitive life-form may be an agent of creation and destruction at an even deeper level; for it secretes a weak acid which attacks limestone. The solution-hollows
themselves
are the work of
Nostoc,
slowly eating out nests for itself from whatever little toeholds its spore wash into. The cratering of clint-surfaces by this almost amorphous slime is one of the forces rendering Aran down to oceanic solutes once again. On the way to this end,
Nostoc
helps make the place liveable, fit for grass, cows, humans, books. It may also explain those fissures closed on the surface and open below, that I puzzled over in “Modalities of Roughness.” But it leaves another puzzle in its wake, that often makes me halt and kneel to examine it when I am mooning about the crags. The curiosity is that many of the solution-hollows have rims standing a quarter or half an inch proud of the pavement and fretted into little crests and thorn-like points. One might wonder if these have been built up by deposition of calcium
carbonate
, as a side-effect of the chemical activity of
Nostoc,
but so far as I can see they are composed of exactly the same limestone as they arise from, and have been carved out of it. Why would such delicate structures not be abolished in their incipiency by erosion? Why have they been excepted from the general
polishing-down
of the surface? Again, I search the land and the literature of limestone in vain for an answer.

To see the unarguable signature of the last Ice Age, one should make for a prominent cluster of perched boulders on another little headland of this terrace, a third of a mile to the west. Most of them are of limestone and so must have been ripped out by the ice not much further to the north, for the limestone strata feather out (to borrow a neat term from the geologists) somewhere under the North Sound, exposing the underlying Galway granite. The
biggest
of the limestone boulders—it has a prostrate juniper bush
growing on top—has toppled off its pedestal, revealing a small sample of what the pavement surface looked like before it was rubbed down by ten thousand years of rain. On this unweathered patch are a few “glacial striae,” scratches made by stones
embedded
in the ice. The limestone specialist Conor MacDermot pointed them out to me one day when we were roving these crags, exclaiming and hypothesizing over every step. Somehow these tentative, almost childish, markings which have only escaped
erasure
by a fluke give the glaciers more presence in my mind than all their titanic works displayed around us. Also I am pleased to note that their orientation is the same as that of the mysterious channels of Creig na Leacht (but I could get no confirmation from Conor the Hammer of the glacial origin of the latter).

We agreed that day that, if ever it became necessary to select a suite of crags for preservation, it should be these, from Gort na gCapall to Cill Mhuirbhigh. (Fifteen years later, having seen the casual wrecking of other superb areas of pavement by quarrying and building, I think some such measure is urgently necessary.) Towards the north-western end of this crescent an oblique set of grykes, bearing about 128 degrees east, replaces the normal
east-west
set. This feature seems to correlate with very broad clints and correspondingly wide grykes. Many of these grykes are eighteen inches or more across, six or ten feet deep, and are enlarged at their intersections into cavernous funnels which the rain gargles down. As for the clints, one of them even figures in a census
return
; Patrick O’Flaherty of what was later to be called Kilmurvey House, after enumerating his own household for the census of 1821 adds, “There is
a little to the south of Patrick O’Flaherty’s house a large sheet of flag 130 steps long.” This would be on Creig an Tobair, the last crag of this sequence, named from the well below its scarp, that delivers the water from those capacious grykes to the village of Cill Mhuirbhigh. These magnificent flags are so smooth, and sound so well underfoot, that they invite one to dance, and in fact it is said that when Lady Digby visited the island in 1888 a
céil
í
was held in her honour here. The former
O’Flaherty estate begins with the better land just west of Creig an Tobar, across the boreen leading up towards Dún Aonghasa, but the crag itself, like the others east of it, was Gort na gCapall
territory
. It was Gort na gCapall men who paid rent on those 130 steps of flag, and who with Nostocian persistence have stitched together a ragged cloak of pasturage over all the barren mile from here back to their village by countless interventions with the rock that the stroller might well not notice. There must have been some bitterness to drown when they made the rock ring to their steps, at the entertainment the O’Flaherty offered to their landlady.

A living has been made out of these crags in another way too; they have been cropped for tombstones. The main site of this
bygone
craft was just south of the clutch of glacial boulders, where large areas of the smooth upper layer of the pavement have been levered up, leaving ragged stone, but one can find half-finished tombstones, lying like table-tops propped on small boulders, here and there on most of Aran’s larger-clinted crags. One or two have a little wall beside them thrown together out of loose blocks, to shelter the mason from the weather as he worked. It seems strange that it was the custom to finish the slab out on the exposed crag, but no doubt it was not possible to assemble the team of eight or ten men needed to shift such a stone, typically six foot by three, and eight inches thick, to the graveyard, with the necessary logs and planks and the quart of
poitín
to lubricate its progress, before the carving and lettering had been successfully completed. The use of these massive, horizontal, grave-slabs died out some decades ago, regretted by none because of the labour and indeed the danger involved in their transport, but leaving the field to sliced-bread religiosity supplied from Galway in glossy black or white marble. These nobly proportioned flags with their classic decorations of compass-drawn sun-bursts in the corners, diamond-patterned margins, formalized palm-fronds and the like, and their laconic “Pray for the soul of…,” are a dignified collective memorial to those generations whose very ground was of equal nobility, and it is fitting that some of them still lie on the crags themselves.
Mortality echoes underfoot at such sites, though, and when it is particularized and named, even the monumental discretion of these crags can be tactless. Coleman Dirrane, old Uncle Coleman of Gilbert Cottage, mooching about on Creig an Tobair one
Sunday
afternoon of his retirement, found himself reading a
tombstone
that said “Pray for the soul of Coleman Dirrane,” and it left him depressed for a fortnight. Why are there so many abandoned tombstones lying about to trip up one’s mood? Some of them obviously have cracked during the rough-shaping process, and one can almost hear the curse that rang out across the crags when that happened. But several are virtually finished. One that hardly needs another tap of the chisel is still perched on its little props near the perched boulders of the glacier’s own rough carving:

Why in fact did Sarah never erect it? I am told that this was one of the slabs carved for a Connemara grave—the Connemara people called them “slates”—and that it would have been taken out in a turf-boat if some accident or disagreement had not
intervened
. I have since noticed many such Aran slabs in those
evocatively
jumbled, hummocky, cemeteries around roofless medieval chapels on the south Connemara coast. This export trade, now of course extinct, as is the importation of turf, seems to me like the last word in the grim comedy of relationships between the two neighbouring poverties of Aran limestone and Connemara
granite
. While the Connemara man was stripping the ground from under his own feet to sell it as turf to Aran, so that much of south Connemara was reduced to bare rock by the end of the last
century
, the Araner found a way of repaying him in bare rock itself,
with his tombstone; thus Connemara lies under Aran at the last. But in the case of Valentine Connolly, was the last laugh, the last tear, with his wife Sarah, or with some Joeen na gCloch, little Joe of the stones, stonemason of Aran?

Not far from one corner of one of the crags traversed by the
previous
chapter is—
I interrupt myself to apologize for this topographical vagueness, which, uncharacteristic as it is of this book, so dense with a superfluity of distances, bearings and dimensions specified more accurately than needful for a travellers’ guide or a literary evocation of the Aran of my memories as to suffuse with space—and space of the most everyday sort, the mere objective underlay of more subjective measures, even if slightly humanized by my preference for inches and feet (body-bits, fossilized, but not quite cold), yards and miles and the human pace that guarantees them, rather than the metric arbitrarily hinged on the meridian of Paris and the false start of the Year One—to the point of intoxication the consciousness that is being built up, coral-wise, by this writing towards a sense, crystallized from oceanic solutes, of the coherence of mind with all that stems from and is still in a connection that can be symbolized as spatial with that universal origin, the dot, the full stop to nothingness in relation to which I stand at this moment like a finger-post at ground-zero, is an exception forced upon me by the existence, obliging me to break the continuity of my progress from east to west with this locational obfuscation, and inducing an irruption of indignation that makes me try to say
everything
at once, of people—my curse on them: may they wander
moon-cold
crags for eternity!—for whom, because they would use me as a guide to something they could break out of the continuity of Aran to steal, being so lost to a sense of where things should be that one has to deny them the knowledge of where things are, apology should be addressed to Aran itself, that stone-deaf land from which all our 
apostrophes re-echo, readdressed as, in this instance, the apology of the human mind to itself
—a mark on the pavement, a dark spiral that draws the eye in like a vortex, reproving one’s bovine
ramblings
and calling for concentrated presence, persistence in
looking
. It is a fossil; Conor MacDermot identified it for me as that of a nautiloid, a cephalopod mollusc related to the modern
octopuses
and squids, and to the extinct belemnites whose conical shells are to be found here and there in the Aran rocks. Many species of nautiloids, some with straight or curved shells, others with coiled shells like this specimen, inhabited the waters from which the limestone was deposited. Their shells were divided by thin partitions into a number of compartments, the outer of which was occupied by the animal itself while those further back were full of gas and functioned as buoyancy-chambers. All the nautiloids are now extinct except the pearly nautilus of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Like the Aran nautiloid, the pearly nautilus has a shell coiled into a flat spiral, and it swims (in a style at once dreamy and sedate, as I recall from some TV nature-film), with its coil in a vertical plane and its round eyes and wavering
tentacles
appearing in the aperture below.

My description of this fossil will perhaps give an exaggerated sense of its physical presence, because of the weight it assumes in my mind as I write about it. Of course in fossilization all the soft parts are lost and only the shell or part of it survives. The Aran specimen is unusually large, but it is only a foot across, and not much more than the two outer turns of the spiral is preserved, showing up as a slight ridge of rough, dark material in the smooth light-grey pavement. Two partitions are visible, the one the
animal
sat into, forming a concave curve across the outer whorl a few inches in from the aperture, and close behind that the one it had most recently grown out of. The texture and colour are those of crusted ash, the spectrum of life collapsed.

Hoping to bring this nautiloid to its glorious resurrection, my mind goes back to an illustration in a book of my childhood days,
The
Story
of
Living
Things
and
their
Evolution
by Eileen Mayo,
showing a pearly nautilus wonderfully striped in carmine on rosy white. This magically named creature used to conduct my imagination through phosphorescent seas across which
jungle-archipelagoes
breathed cinnamon and a diffuse longing for some incomprehensible adventure. Now it is this rough charcoal sketch of the nautiloid on the stark northern rock that draws me down to the sumptuous waters of the Carboniferous Period. Pangaea was coming into existence then; South America, Africa, Antarctica and Australia were already fused together into a mega-continent the geologists call Gondwanaland, while North America,
Greenland
and northern Europe, united into another called Laurasia, were drifting southwards to join it. Aran’s nautiloid lived in a shallow continental-shelf sea near the centre of this all-embracing land-mass. The world had long lost its initial nakedness to the poisonous rays of the sun and was wrapped in its sphere of
protective
vapours, into which a three-billion-year growth of microbial action had already released enough oxygen to fuel every
complexity
of life. All, or nearly all, of the great inventions of biology had found themselves out in the evolutionary exuberance of the
previous
few hundred million years: sexual reproduction, the
many-celled
organism, the eye, the protective shell, even the backbone and the lung. The coal-swamps, the monstrous reptiles, the first mammals and the first flowers were in the immediate future, soon to be followed by the break-up of Pangaea. But even before the tearing apart of the New World and the Old, the age of the nautiloids was over. Almost every species of them, together with ninety per cent of the species of shallow-sea animals and most of the amphibians, reptiles and proto-mammals, were extinguished over a few million years, about two hundred and fifty million years ago. Like the famous extinction of the dinosaurs just seventy million years ago, this partial apocalypse was perhaps triggered by the collision of a large asteroid with the earth, an accident the statistics of solar-system orbits suggest will happen on average every forty or fifty million years. But in its own terms the
life-world
of the nautiloid lasted forever. Each individual one of them
slowly created its coil by adding onto the rim of its aperture, building forward over the curved back of the previous whorl, as its millions of ancestors had and its millions of descendants would do. Each one hunted small drifting and darting things through the fretted grottoes of—but perhaps I should not describe that iridescent feathery world other than as a fantasy waiting to be dreamed, for the neuron webs were not yet woven that could see its loveliness (unless—for the cephalopod brain and retina are richly interconnected—the nautiloid itself had some dawning sense of its own and its world’s beauty). Our world too, if “the great star from heaven” of the Apocalypse does not fall on it too soon, will no doubt be caught up retrospectively in thousands or millions of years’ time by faculties unimaginably different from the feeble gifts of love, wonder and knowledge we can bring to it. In the meantime, one’s patient attention to one of the best bits of ground that could be covered by a pace or two is demanded, in the sign of the spiral the nautiloid traced on Aran.

A few square feet of the rock-surface around the spiral carry numerous scars and blemishes, which on examination turn out to be the remains contributed by a variety of the nautiloid’s
contemporaries
to the bone-yard that was to become Aran; what fluke of sea-bed dynamics preserved such an exhibition-caseful of them just here is not apparent. When Conor was giving me their names, I noted their positions by taking the spiral as a clock-face, with twelve o’clock marked by the first internal partition. At five o’clock, then, and within the spiral itself, lies something that looks like fragments of a whitish comb embedded in the rock, while at two o’clock and just outside the spiral is a shape like part of a rounded leaf with delicate radial veins. These are both fossils of an extinct coral called
Caninia.
Like today’s corals
Caninia
secreted a limy skeleton around itself, which remained after the soft body of the animal itself had decayed. It was a “solitary” coral, a single polyp like a sea-anemone living in a cupped hollow in the end of the tube it built up for itself, which was usually an inch or two across and up to two feet long. The comb-like fossil
here is part of such a tube seen in a longitudinal section, the teeth of the comb representing the successive floors the polyp formed under itself across the tube as it grew. The leaf-like fossil is a rather oblique cross-section of a tube, exposing the dozens of fine radial plates that supported the polyp in its cup. The original material of the coral skeleton has been replaced by calcite in the process of fossilization, and if one takes a lens to it the fine detail is seen to be made up of glittering crystals; it is in itself a labyrinth one could get lost in for hours.

A foot or so away from the nautiloid, at about three o’clock, is a scattering of much smaller marks like dark fingerprints, with indistinct radial patterns made up of the same white crystals; the lens reveals about twenty-four radii in each print. This is
Lith
ostrotion
,
a “compound” coral in which a large number of polyps have built up a communal skeleton of many loosely bunched tubes.
Lithostrotion
is frequent in the Aran limestones; the
white-spotted
pebbles found on the shingle-banks are wave-polished fragments of it. Next to this colony and at four o’clock by the nautiloid is another, an eruption of much smaller, crooked, interlinking tubes in which no radial lines are to be seen:
Syringopora,
a common member of a simpler and more primitive order of
corals
in which the radial plates or septa are scarcely developed. The polyps of a compound coral are not completely individualized creatures but interconnect within the skeleton.
Syringopora
has many short cross-tubes linking the branches of the “thicket” (the geologists’ apt term), giving it a thorny, matted look. And like pale birds in this thicket are three oval fossils of another solitary coral,
Dibunophyllum,
with many septa and tiny concentric plates between them making a pattern in the centre, like a spider’s web according to the textbooks, more accurately a closely packed set of nested diamond-shapes.

Close to the last and an hour farther round the clock is
another
Lithostrotion
colony, of a form in which the branches are so bunched together that in cross-section they look like the cells of a honeycomb. Parts of this fossil have been replaced by silica
rather than calcite, and as limestone wears away faster than silica they stand out of the surface of the rock as if a finely tooled bronze bracelet were being revealed. The point in common with the other, round-tubed,
Lithostrotion,
and which serves to identify it, at least among the Aran fossils, as a member of the same genus, is the flattened, rod-like structure in the centre of each tube; in these cross-sections it looks as if each hexagon or roundel has a tiny compass needle in it.

The last of the corals here is another solitary,
Palaeosmilia
, a pale patch like the thumbprint of a giant frost on the rock,
touching
the nautiloid at six o’clock. Its structure is incredibly delicate, with perhaps fifty septa (more than I can count) and innumerable tiny curved plates between them forming a pattern like
overlapping
round tiles or fish-scales. There is another
Palaeosmilia
four paces away at half past four, showing a longitudinal section in which the septa appear as a bank of slightly curved lines. A rough band across them perhaps records an accident to the creature, from which it recovered and grew on.

Some fauna other than corals of the Carboniferous sea can be sampled along this same half-past-four line. First, right by the nautiloid, is a spiral a couple of inches across, showing slight traces of ornamentation but none of the partitions that
distinguish
the nautiloids; it is a gastropod, a mollusc like the modern snail or winkle. Eighteen inches further out is something that looks like a shard of bone-china—one of the large lamp-shells or brachiopods,
Gigantoproductus,
that I described in my first
volume
in connection with the shell-beds on the coast nearby.
Immediately
beyond it are dozens of white bits and pieces, some like beads or short rows of beads stuck together, and some like a thick letter O, which are the remains of sea-lily stems. Sea-lilies or
crinoids
are animals related to the starfish, with five plume-like arms for trawling the water, and all the Carboniferous species of them, like many modern ones, were anchored by a flexible stalk, which falls apart into short cylindrical bits after death. In places the Aran limestone is almost entirely composed of minute crinoid
fragments. Finally, beyond the beads, are traces of some
mud-dwelling
invertebrate species; their boneless bodies have left no fossils, but their burrows have been filled in with some material that now shows up in the surface of the limestone as intermittent ribbons and patches of a darker tint. And all over the surrounding crag are other dim or pallid shadows of once brilliantly coloured creatures. At any hour of the clock the ghosts of Aran’s gorgeous natal sea are around one’s feet.

Lithostrotion,
Palaeosmilia,
Dibunophyllum
—to some, these polysyllables may sound like dog-eared labels curling in the drought of a museum, but to me they are as fresh and exotic as the names Adam gave the beasts were to him. As I have presented them here, they are so many isolated bits fallen out of a structure of which I know little, in which each has its place and its
significance
, naming a link in an evolutionary chain, indicating a
distinction
between strata, commemorating a discovery, insinuating a hypothesis. The only question that arises as regards this book is whether they serve to focus vision or stand opaque between the eye and its object, for I call on the past only to cast its colours on the present. And I have found in practice that the attempt to learn the names of things magnifies their features; even when detached from the apparatus of science such nouns are powerful lenses. With them I peer into this rock-surface as if it were a glass case in a museum—and when I lift my tired eyes to the museum clock, whose spring winds back through so many aeons,
sometimes
its face is a stony blank, and sometimes it indicates the present moment with a scrupulous and hard-won exactitude.