Over in the Hill of Fare, new-timbered, a little belt of rain was falling, a thin screen that blinded the going of the light; behind, as she turned, she saw Skene Loch glimmer and glow a burnished minute; then the rain caught it and swept it from sight and a little wind soughed up the Barmekin. And now behind wind and rain came the darkness.

Lights had sprung up far in the hills, in little touns for a sunset minute while the folk tirred and went off to their beds, miles away, thin peeks in the summer dark.

Time she went home herself.

But she still sat on as one by one the lights went out and the rain came, beating the stones about her, and falling all that night while she still sat there, presently feeling no longer the touch of the rain or hearing the sound of the lapwings going by.

THE END OF
A SCOTS QUAIR

. . . .
. . .
. .
.

Grey Granite: Curtain Raiser

The following fragment is all that survives of the rejected Prelude to the novel. It is in NLS MS 26040(3–7), and is printed by kind permission of Mrs Rhea Martin, Gibbon’s daughter, and the National Library of Scotland. It consists of five quarto pages of Gibbon’s own first-draft typing. Typographical errors have been corrected and spelling brought into line with that of the first edition.

The City of Dundon stands midway the coast where they cease their speaking of beets and speens and take to a gabble of buits and spunes. To the north (but only if you’re country and ignorant) they still bake cakes and the folk are meated often enough on a dish of sowans; to the south the old wives still cougg above a girdle set with fine baps of bannocks, thick with fat and dripping with grease. Along that coast in the trawler fleets you come to the city of Aberdeen, genteel with its fine university and proud with a clatter of awful trams, and as full of fine tales as an egg of meat; but if you sail south you come to Dundee, nestling and pressing like an unwashed bairn under the flow of the Sidlaws, dark, you may not see Dundee for a while for the smoke, but you’ll smell it long ere your eyes light on it; and what there is there, and what it is like none know unless they’re native to the place, or sent to the jail on an awful crime.

When that Greek man Pytheas sailed these coasts long syne, he halted his boat one season by a little place, a wide bay that stretched with a cream and a froth of grey waters, ebbing and swaying into red mists, late autumn, the waters flung long hands upon the beaches, tearing at his craft. But there he cast anchor, and landed his men, strangers came down to trade with them, dark, hairy men of that Pictish coast, bringing corn and the skins of beasts, and Pytheas and his men planted there corn and built them huts against the sweep and the ding of that ill coast’s rains, pelting and salt-ridden, and watched the winter fade. Spring came with a whirling of sudden rains, and they took to the creaming seas again, and sailed north, out of the life of that land but that the Picts drifted here and built them a city of the long earth-houses, the dark broad men with their Kelt overlords, proud, with long, bronze daggers and curled hair, the men of the chariots and the red blood-sacrifice, kittle folk of a bloody mind and ill heart.