John Splendid: The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn

by Neil Munro

I stood on the hillock clothed with its stunted saughtrees and waited for the day that was mustering somewhere to the cast, far by the frozen sea of moss and heather tuft. A sea more lonely than any ocean the most wide and distant, where no ship heaves, and no isle lifts beckoning trees above the level of the waves; a sea soundless, with no life below its lamentable surface, no little fish or proud leviathan plunging and romping and flashing from the silver roof of fretted wave dishevelled to the deep profound. The moorfowl does not cry there, the coney has no habitation. It rolled, that sea so sour, so curdled, from my feet away to mounts I knew by day stupendous and not so far, but now in the dark so hid that they were but troubled clouds upon the distant marge. There was a day surely when, lashing up on those hills around, were waters blue and stinging, and some plague-breath blew on them and they shivered and dried and cracked into this parched semblance of what they were in the old days when the galleys sailed over. No galleys now. No white birds calling eagerly in the storm. No stiver bead of spray. Only in its season the cannoch tuft, and that itself but sparsely; the very bluebell shuns a track so desolate, the sturdy gall itself finds no nourishment here.

The grey day crept above the land; I watched it from my hillock, and I shrunk in my clothing that seemed so poor a shielding in a land so chill. A cold clammy dawn, that never cleared even as it aged, but held a hint of mist to come that should have warned me of the danger I faced in venturing on the untravelled surface of the moor, even upon its safer verge. But it seemed so simple a thing to keep low to the left and down on Glenurchy that I thought little of the risk, if I reflected upon it at all.

Some of the stupidity of my venturing out on the surface of Rannoch that day must have been due to my bodily state. I was not all there, as the saying goes. I was suffering mind and body from the strain of my adventures, and most of all from the stormy thrashings of the few days before—the long journey, the want of reasonable sleep and food. There had come over all my spirit a kind of dwam, so that at times my head seemed as if it were stuffed with wool; what mattered was of no account, even if it were a tinker’s death in the sheuch. No words will describe the feeling except to such as themselves have known it; it is the condition of the man dead with care and weariness so far as the body is concerned, and his spirit, sorry to part company, goes lugging his flesh about the highways.

I was well out on Rannoch before the day was full awake on the country, walking at great trouble upon the coarse barren soil, among rotten bog-grass, lichened stones, and fir-roots that thrust from the black peatlike skeletons of antiquity. And then I came on a cluster of lochs—grey, cold, vagrant lochs—still to some degree in the thrall of frost Here’s one who has ever a fancy for such lochans, that are lost and sobbing, sobbing, even-on among the hills, where the reeds and the rushes hiss in the wind, and the fowls with sheeny feather make night and day cheery with their call But not those lochs of Rannoch, those black basins crumbling at the edge of a rotten soil. I skirted them as far off as I could, as though they were the lochans of a nightmare that drag the traveller to their kelpie tenants’ arms. There were no birds among those rushes; I think the very deer that roamed in the streets of Inneraora in the Novembers blast would have run far clear of so stricken a territory. It must be horrible in snow, it must be lamentable in the hottest days of summer, when the sun rides over the land, for what does the most kindly season bring to this forsaken place except a scorching for the fugitive wild-flower, if such there be?

These were not my thoughts as I walked on my way; they are what lie in my mind of the feelings the Moor of Rannoch will rouse in every stranger. What was in my mind most when I was not altogether in the swound of wearied flesh was the spae-wife’s story of the girl in Inneraora, and a jealousy so strong that I wondered where, in all my exhausted frame, the passion for it came from. I forgot my friends left in Dalness, I forgot that my compact and prudence itself called for my hurrying the quickest way I could to the Brig of Urchy; I walked in an indifference until I saw a wan haze spread fast over the country in the direction of the lower hills that edged the desert I looked with a careless eye on it at first, not reflecting what it might mean or how much it might lead to. It spread with exceeding quickness, a grey silver smoke rolling out on every hand, as if puffed continually from some glen in the hills. I looked behind me, and saw that the same was happening all around. Unless I made speed out of this sorrowful place I was caught in the mist Then I came to the full understanding that trouble was to face. I tightened the thongs of my shoes, pinched up a hole in my waist-belt, scrugged my bonnet, and set out at a deer-stalker’s run across the moor. I splashed in hags and stumbled among roots; I made wild leaps across poisonous-looking holes stewing to the brim with coloured water; I made long detours to find the most fordable part of a stream that twisted back and forth, a very devil’s cantrip, upon my way. Then a smirr of rain came at my back and chilled me to the marrow, though the sweat of travail a moment before had been on every part of me, and even dripping in beads from my chin. At length I lifted my eyes from the ground that I had to scan most carefully in my running, and behold! I was swathed in a dense mist that cut off every view of the world within ten yards of where I stood. This cruel experience dashed me more than any other misadventure in all my wanderings, for it cut me off, without any hope of speedy betterment, from the others of our broken band. They might be all at Urchy Bridge by now, on the very selvedge of freedom, but I was couped by the heels more disastrously than ever. Down I sat on a tuft of moss, and I felt cast upon the dust by a most cruel providence.

How long I sat there I cannot tell; it may have been a full hour or more, it may have been but a pause of some minutes, for I was in a stupor of bitter disappointment And when I rose again I was the sport of chance, for whether my way lay before me or lay behind me, or to left or right, was altogether beyond my decision. It was well on in the day: high above this stagnant plain among tall bens there must be shining a friendly and constant sun; but Elrigmore, gentleman and sometime cavalier of Mackay’s Scots, was in the very gullet of night for all he could see around him. It was folly, I knew; but on somewhere I must be going, so I took to where my nose led, picking my way with new caution among the bogs and boulders. The neighbourhood of the lochs was a sort of guidance in some degree, for their immediate presence gave to a nostril sharpened by life in the wild a moist and peaty odour fresh from the corroding banks. I sought them and I found them, and finding them I found a danger even greater than my loss in that desolate plain. For in the grey smoke of mist those treacherous pools crept noiselessly to my feet, and once I had almost walked blindly into an ice-clear turgid little lake. My foot sank in the mire of it almost up to the knees ere I jumped to the nature of my neighbourhood, and with an effort little short of miraculous in the state of my body, threw myself back on the safe bank, clear of the death-trap.

And again I sat on a hillock and surrendered to the most doleful meditations. Noon came and went, the rain passed and came again, and passed once more, and still I was guessing my way about the lochs, making no headway from their neighbourhood, and, to tell the truth, a little glad of the same, for they were all I knew of the landscape in Moor Rannoch, and something of friendship was in their treacherous presence, and to know they were still beside me, though it said little for my progress to Glenurchy, was an assurance that I was not making my position worse by going in the wrong airt.

All about me, when the rain was gone for the last time, there was a cry of waters, the voices of the burns running into the lochans, tinkling, tinkling, tinkling merrily, and all out of key with a poor wretch in draggled tartans, fleeing he knew not whither, but going about in shortened circles like a hedgehog in the sea.

The mist made no sign of lifting all this time, but shrouded the country as if it were come to stay for ever, and I was doomed to remain till the end, guessing my way to death in a silver-grey reek. I strained my ears, and far off to the right I heard the sound of cattle bellowing, the snorting low of a stirk upon the hillside when he wonders at the lost pastures of his calfhood in the merry summer before. So out I set in that direction, and more bellowing arose, and by-and-by, out of the mist but still far off, came a long low wail that baffled me. It was like no sound nature ever conferred on the Highlands, to my mind, unless the rare call of the Benderloch wolf in rigorous weather. I stopped and listened, with my inner head cracking to the strain, and as I was thus standing in wonder, a great form leaped out at me from the mist, and almost ran over me ere it lessened to the semblance of a man, and I had John M’Iver of Barbreck, a heated and hurried gentleman of arms, in my presence.

He drew up with a shock, put his hand to his vest, and I could see him cross himself under the jacket.