The Lighthouse Keeper by Alan Baker

Author:Alan Baker [Baker, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907777622
Google: bEaUtgAACAAJ
Publisher: Snowbooks
Published: 2012-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

11

The Living Sky

There was a table and chair in the lightroom. I placed the stone on the table and sat and looked at it, while the wind moaned around the tower and the clouds rolled and tumbled across the sky and the grey mass of the breathing sea rose and fell. Several times I stood up and walked restlessly around the confined space, but always I would return to the chair and sit hunched forward to examine the stone, while the hours moved by in their slow, inexorable procession.

I thought again and again of Milne’s words, of his reaction to the stone’s appearance. ‘Something that should never see the light of day,’ he had said. I recalled the expression on his face: a frown of deep concern, mixed with something akin to revulsion, as if the ocean had indeed thrown up some strange form of life, an aberration of Nature, a defect in God’s world.

I wondered whether he was right in suggesting that one of the clansmen of centuries past had left it here. I recalled Martin Martin’s description of the customs they followed while on the island, how they would take off their shirts and pray and meditate around the chapel, and I decided to consult his book again at the first available opportunity, to see if he made mention of anything like this.

In the meantime, I could not rid myself of the conviction that the stone had been created for some reason by the unknown man who had lived here in ancient ages, and I continued to examine it, with the sounds of the wind and the sea in my ears, and as I regarded it with greater and greater intensity, I began to feel its bizarre and incomprehensible shape enter my mind, as if I were a child learning to read, attempting to make sense of strange symbols on sheets of paper. If I could only interpret the lines of the stone, the intention behind its form, the guiding principle that had inspired it, might I then gain some insight into the mystery of Eilean Mòr?

My reverie halted at that thought. Why should this be so? I wondered. What could this object possibly tell me about the island and what we had seen here? ‘What a strange notion,’ I whispered to myself. I recalled that outside, I had wondered if the stone were the product of madness, and yet, I reflected, it made a curious kind of sense to suppose that whoever had carved the stone had been attempting to express something, to describe something that words alone could not describe – a feeling, an event, a revelation… or perhaps an obscure epiphany.

Had Milne sensed something of this when he saw the stone? Was that the reason for his curious reaction, which had surprised me in its vehemence? He had not wanted it in the house, had wanted me to cast it into the ocean; he had seemed genuinely afraid of it. For my part, I was

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