Some Kind of Grace by Robin Jenkins

Author:Robin Jenkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birlinn

Twelve

Those lakes at Faizabad were to McLeod more impressive than the giant Buddhas at Kalak. Here, too, was indifference to man and his attempts to scratch a brief living out of barren earth; but here it was neither ostentatious nor megalomaniac. Suddenly, in a land as arid as the moon, there they were, blue and translucent or suavely green, set in deep canyons of red cliffs. From the edge could be glimpsed, twenty fathoms down, large, tranquil fish, and on the tops of the hills round about fossils of sea-shells could be picked up, thousands of miles from the sea. Along the cliff edges the ground was so dry it would have seemed nothing could ever grow and live in it; yet hundreds of prickly plants grew in the dust, with flowers and leaves of strange shapes and colours, and myriads of grasshoppers as big as dragonflies kept leaping as high as a man’s hand in a constant chirp and dance. Very different from the gentler flowers and humbler grasshoppers of the lush, West Highland sea-meadows.

Little wonder that a shrine containing the bones of a holy man had been built on the shore of the large blue lake. Every few years religious gatherings were held there, and lepers from all over the country were bathed in the water. That lake was like a gigantic cup, over whose rim of grass and flowers the water kept spilling, in a series of waterfalls. The height of the cup was increased every thousand years or so by the lime left by the water. It was possible, though hazardous, to walk along the rim, with the lake lapping at one’s feet, and on the other side a sheer fall of fifty to a hundred feet into a plain of shining water. In a country of handleless cups, from which companionable tea was drunk several times a day, it was easy to see how the lake, in the native imagination, could appear as God’s cup, from which He, too, often drank.

Beyond the lakes rose the high mountains. The moon was gleaming on their snowy tops as McLeod approached. Across the big lake he could see, on the shore under the shrine, a fire burning, and thought it must have been lit by Azim and his son. Wrapped in striped blankets, they would be crouched close to it, for always at night a breeze blew coldly down from the mountains. They would see his headlamps and would watch them all the way round until they disappeared at the head of the lake, to appear again only a hundred yards from their fire. They would take him for some foreign tourist come to admire the lakes, and they would be instantly hospitable in inviting him to use their fire and drink their tea. What they would do or say when they learned he intended to accompany them back to the valley, he did not know. Visitors were rare, and made all the more welcome for that, especially

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