From sand Grant led him to seals (the Islands were full of seal stories, it seemed; the translation of seals into men and vice versa; if they were to be believed half the population of the Islands had some seal blood in them) and from seals to walking stones, and on all Mr Tallisker was interesting and informative. But on streams he fell down. Streams seemed to be the only things on Cladda that were exactly like their counterpart anywhere else. Except that they too often spread into little lochs or lost themselves in bog, the streams of Cladda were just streams; water in the process of finding its own level.

Well, thought Grant, going away to meet Tommy for lunch, that in a way was ‘standing’. Running into standing water; into bog. B Seven might have used the word because he needed the rhyme. He had wanted something to rhyme with sand.

He listened with only half an ear to the talk of the two fellow sheep-farmers that Tommy brought to lunch, and envied them their untroubled eyes and their air of unlimited leisure. Nothing hounded these large rangé creatures. Their flocks were decimated every now and then by strokes of fate; great snowstorms or swift disease. But they themselves stayed quiet and sane, like the hills that bred them. Big slow men, full of little jokes and pleased with small things. Grant was very conscious that his obsession with B Seven was an unreasonable thing; abnormal; that it was part of his illness. That in his sober mind he would not have thought a second time about B Seven. He resented his obsession and clung to it. It was at once his bane and his refuge.

But he drove home with Tommy even more cheerful than when he had set out. There was practically nothing about the inquest on Charles Martin, French mechanic, that he did not now know. He was that much to the good. And that was a lot.

After supper that night he discarded the book on European politics which had shared with Tommy’s telephone his interest on the previous evening and went hunting along the bookshelves for something about the Islands.

‘Are you looking for anything in particular, Alan?’ Laura asked, looking up from The Times.

‘I’m looking for something about the Islands.’

‘The Hebrides?’

‘Yes. I suppose there is a book about them.’

‘Hah!’ said Laura, mock amused. ‘Is there a book about them! There’s a whole literature, my dear. It’s a distinction in Scotland not to have written a book about the Islands.’

‘Have you any of them?’

‘We have practically all of them. Everyone who has ever come to stay here has brought one.’

‘Why didn’t they take them away with them?’

‘You’ll see why when you have a taste of them. You’ll find them on the bottom shelf. A whole row of them.’

He began to go through the row, gutting the books with a swift practised eye.

‘Why this sudden interest in the Hebrides?’ Laura asked.

‘Those singing sands that Wee Archie talked about stuck in my mind.’

‘That must be the first time Wee Archie has ever said anything that stuck in someone’s mind.’

‘I expect his mother remembers his first word,’ Tommy put in from behind the Clarion.

‘It seems that Tir nan Og is just one jump west from the singing sands.’

‘So is America,’ said Laura. ‘Which is much nearer the Islanders’ idea of Heaven than Tir nan Og is.’

Grant, repeating Mr Tallisker’s speech on comparative heavens, said that the Gaels were the only race who visualised Heaven as a country of the young; which was endearing of them.

‘They are the only known race who have no word for no,’ Laura said drily. ‘That is a much more revealing characteristic than their notions of eternity.’

Grant came back to the fire with an armful of books and began to go through them at leisure.

‘It is difficult to imagine a mind that has never evolved a word for no, isn’t it?’ Laura said musingly, and went back to The Times.

The books varied from the scientific, through the sentimental, to the purely fantastic. From kelp-burning to the saints and heroes. From bird-watching to soul’s pilgrimages. They varied, too, from the admirable but dull to the unbelievably bad. It seemed that no one who had ever visited the Islands had refrained from writing about them. The bibliographies at the end of the soberer books would have done justice to the Roman Empire. On one thing all were agreed, however: the Islands were magic. The Islands were the last refuge of civilisation in a world gone mad. The Islands were beautiful beyond imagining; a world carpeted with wild flowers and bounded by a sea that broke in sapphire on silver beaches. A land of brilliant sunlight; of good-looking people and heart-searching music. Wild, lovely music handed down from the beginning of time, from an age when the gods were young. And if you wanted to go there, see MacBrayne’s time-table on Page 3 of the Appendix.

The books lasted Grant very happily until bed-time. And while they drank their nightcaps he said: ‘I’d like to have a look at the Islands.’

‘Make a plan for next year,’ Tommy said, agreeing. ‘There’s quite good fishing on Lewis.’

‘No, I mean now.’

‘Go now!’ Laura said. ‘I never heard anything so daft.’

‘Why? I can’t fish until my shoulder is better, so I might as well go exploring.’

‘Your shoulder will be better in two days with my treatment.’

‘How does one get to Cladda?’

‘From Oban, I should think,’ Tommy said.

‘Alan Grant, don’t be absurd. If you can’t fish for a day or two there are a hundred other things you can do instead of being bucketed about on a Minch crossing in March.’

‘Spring comes early to the Islands, they say.’

‘It doesn’t to the Minch, believe me.’

‘You could fly, of course,’ Tommy said, considering the subject as he considered everything that was put in front of him, with a kind sobriety. ‘You could fly one day and come back the next, if you liked. It’s quite a good service.’

There was a little silence while Grant met his cousin’s eye. She knew that he could not fly; and why.

‘Give it up, Alan,’ she said, in a kinder tone. ‘There are much nicer things to do than being stood on one’s head in the middle of the Minch in March. If you just want to get away from Clune for a bit why don’t you hire a car—there’s a very good garage in Scoone—and go exploring on the mainland for a week or so? Now that the weather is soft it will be getting green in the West.’

‘It isn’t that I want to get away from Clune. Quite the contrary. If I could take Clune en bloc with me I would. It is just that I have got bitten with the idea of those sands.’

He saw Laura begin to consider the idea from a new angle, and he could follow her thought quite well. If this was what his sick mind wanted, then it would be wrong to try to dissuade him. The interest of a place he had never seen before should be an ideal counteraction to self-conscious brooding.

‘Oh, well, what you want is a Bradshaw, I suppose. We do have one, but it’s mostly used as a door-stop or a step for the top bookshelf, so it’s a little out of date.’

‘As far as the services to the Outer Islands are concerned, it won’t matter what the date of it is,’ said Tommy. ‘The Laws of the Medes and the Persians are not more unchangeable than MacBrayne’s schedules. As someone has remarked, they don’t exactly encroach on eternity but they very nearly outlast time.’

So Grant found the Bradshaw and took it to bed with him.

And in the morning he borrowed a small case from Tommy, and packed into it the bare necessities of existence for a week or so. He had always had a passion for travelling light, and it always pleased him to be getting away by himself, even from people he loved (a trait that had done much to keep him single) and he caught himself whistling under his breath as he put the few things into the small space. He had not whistled to himself since the shadow of unreason had reached out and taken the sunlight from him.