Book of Iona by Robert Crawford

Author:Robert Crawford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-07-24T16:00:00+00:00

The fever returned but this time even more virulently. When her father finally realised his daughter was dying, he took her on the boat to Fingal’s cave. Orla was gradually feeling more detached from the natural world, as if she could not sense it anymore. Joy was being replaced by an objective sense of omnipotence. As if it didn’t matter whether she lived or died. It was arbitrary. It was not a sadness, it was a sense of leaving life behind. Was it a kind of spiritual awakening? Orla was too young to know whether it was or not.

Towers of basalt formed columns all around them as her father rowed the boat over the calm water into the entrance of the cave. The cave was as cavernous as a huge cathedral. As she lay on the floorboards of the boat, she looked up at her father’s face. How thin he looked now, grief beginning to be etched on his angular features, the indifference no longer holding.

‘Columba had powers of prophecy, you know,’ she whispered to her father, ‘he could see the present and the future at the same time.’

She sat up with difficulty in the boat to look back at Iona for the last time. Orla touched her body. It felt oddly papery. Now everything around them seemed white, except for splashes of bright colour.

Iona now was a phantom of a place, like a hologram, that took the form of an illuminated manuscript. A manuscript that depicted in words and imagery the story of the whole island: information stored for eternity. Orla saw the Druids worshipping beneath the oaks, Columba arriving in his coracle, his retreat to Elachnave, the invasion of the Danish pirates, the monastery and the nunnery in flames, red as the setting sun.

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