Now I have never been much influenced by such superstitions or taboos, unless indeed in a sort of inverse fashion, so that by passing under a ladder or taking the number thirteen or spilling the salt, I actually hope to attract luck. Haeckel and Huxley did have an effect on our early teens, and to this day I can repeat the lengthy advice to the seeker after truth to beware of the Idols of the Tribe, meaning thereby. . . .

To-day the advice tends to come from the philosophic economist, like Marx, and youth finds, possibly, a greater thrill in conning and remembering it, because of the revolutionary impulse that demands action.

Yet here, at sea, the mind slips momentarily. The certainties of our industrial civilisation are not always in evidence. Neither the Douglas Theorem nor the Marxian Dialectic would help us if the engine broke down. So we fall into the habit of using if. ‘If we manage round into the Sound to-morrow, we should with any luck be able to . . . ’ When someone says, ‘I know it is going to be a good morning,’ we look as if we hadn’t heard. We all inwardly believe, from the signs, that at long last it is going to be a good morning, but why say it? Why risk saying it? Why permit the boast of our knowledge to be, as it were, overheard? Very foolish, and indeed, in bad taste. To these old fishermen, beating west to Castlebay in their small part-decked sailing boats, the nearest of all the gods, the omnipresent, the incalculable, the terribly swift, was Death.

Before setting out each of us had written on a sheet of paper what we hoped would pass for wills (for unwitnessed holograph wills are good enough in Scotland). Instinctively, I suppose, we felt it was as well to give the Old One respectful recognition.

So the Crew refused to say anything about the cloud over Iona, as we headed for the white beacon that marks the east point of a group of islets lying in the entrance to Loch Lathaich. We could pass this group on either hand, and decided on the eastern passage, so that the loch, which is one and a half miles long, could be opened up. In this game of approaching unknown anchorages, we had become firm believers in the wisdom of opening out the maximum that can be seen, before proceeding to a decision or final action. In this way it is astonishing how what had appeared rather alarming in the Directions, or impossible in the small-scale chart, lays its problem open for an obvious and even easy solution.

It was while we were on this course that we got a first view of that massive headland between Loch na Keal and Loch Scridain that rises in terraced grandeur to Ben Mor. It is a whole peninsula rather than a headland, and during the days we spent in Loch Lathaich, waiting sea weather, it impressed us in its ever-varying atmospheric effects more profoundly than any other place we saw. It came and went, loomed gigantic or withdrew in mists and twilights, primordial and everlasting.