"Mary Stewart - Wildfire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart Mary)

did you say, dear?" This to Father again, as she turned away from the receiver, leaving me listening in some
apprehension for the pips, which always reduce Mother from her normal pleasant abstraction to a state of
gibbering incoherence. "Your father says it's Gaelic and pronounced Camasunary," said Mother, "and it's at
the back of beyond, so you go there, darling, and have a lovely time with the birds and theтАФthe water, or
whatever you said you wanted."

I sat clutching the receiver, perched there above the roar of Regent Street. Before my mind's eye rose,
cool and remote, a vision of rain-washed mountains.

"D'you know," I said slowly, "I think I will."

"Then that's settled," said Mother comfortably. "It sounds the very thing, darling. So handy having that
address. It's as if it were meant."

I am glad to think that Mother will never appreciate the full irony of that remark.

So it came about that, in the late afternoon of Saturday, May 30th, 1953, I found myself setting out on the
last stage of my journey to Camas Fhionnaridh in the Isle of Skye. Mother, I found, had been right enough
about the back of beyond. The last stage had to be undertaken by boat, there being only a rough cart road
overland from Strathaird to Camas Fhionnaridh, which the solitary local bus would not tackle. This same
bus had brought me as far as Elgol, on the east side of Loch Scavaig, and had more or less dumped me and
my cases on the shore. And presently a boatman, rather more ceremoniously, dumped me into his boat, and
set out with me, my cases, and one other passenger, across the shining sea loch towards the distant bay of
Camasunary.

Nothing could have been more peaceful. The sea loch itself was one huge bay, an inlet of the Atlantic,
cradled in the crescent of the mountains. The fishing village of Elgol, backed by its own heather hills, was
within one tip of the crescent; from the other soared sheer from the sea a jagged wall of mountains, purple
against the sunset sky. The Cuillin, the giants of the Isle of Mist.

And, locked in the great arms of the mountains, the water lay quiet as a burnished shield, reflecting in
deeper blue and deeper gold the pageantry of hill and sky. One thin gleaming line, bright as a rapier,
quivered between the world of reality and the water-world below. Our boat edged its way, with drowsily
purring engine, along the near shore of the loch. Water lipped softly under the bows and whispered along
her sides. The tide was at half ebb, its gentle washes dwindling, one after one, among the sea tangle at its
edge. The seaweeds, black and rose-red and olive-green, rocked as the salt swell took them, and the smell
of the sea drifted up, sharp and exciting. The shore slid past; scree and heather, overhung with summer
clouds of birch, flowed by us, and our wake arrowed the silk-smooth water into ripples of copper and
indigo.

And now ahead of us, in the center of the mountain crescent, I could see the dip of a bay, where a green
valley cut through the hills to the sea's edge. Higher up this valley, as I knew, was a loch, where the hills
crowded in and cradled the water into a deep and narrow basin. Out of this the river flowed; I could see the
gleam of it, and, just discernible at that distance, a white building set among a mist of birch trees where the
glittering shallows fanned out to meet the sea. The boat throbbed steadily closer. Now I could see the
smoke from the hotel chimneys, a faint penciling against the darker blue of the hills. Then the glitter of
water vanished as the sun slipped lower, and the enormous shadow of the Cuillin strode across the little
valley. One arrogant wing of rock, thrusting itself across the sun, flung a diagonal of shadow over half the
bay.