The rain had taken off while we had been in the cathedral, and the oasis of blue we had seen towards Ireland was now enlarging itself in so wonderful a manner that it brought forth visitors from the houses, who looked at it and called to one another. Clean-shaven faces and bright faces and fine shiny silk stockings and creased and white and coloured clothes; so very clean, this community of the Washed, that we felt a little like bedraggled seabirds, with a hanging pinion or two, so I looked carefully at the anchorage off the pier, which was crammed with small boats, and at the anchorage a little farther down, which is Martyr’s Bay, and satisfied myself that, for Iona, we were in the right spot. All the little shops being closed, we turned back, following approximately the ancient Street of the Dead, along which kings and chiefs and other important men (never a woman) were brought, after being landed at Martyr’s Bay, on the way to their burial at Reilig Orain. Though Martyr’s Bay itself is so named from that first slaughter of the monks by the Danes in 806 (Columba died 597).

The rain had now quite passed away and the air was so full of a soft brightness and warmth, that we had to stop by Maclean’s Cross and strip off our oilskins. This is the second interesting cross on the island, and the carving on it seems to have been done about the fifteenth century, though how long its shaft of characteristic bluish schist has faced the sun upright is another matter. This is the spot, we learned, where Columba rested as he returned to the monastery on the last day of his life.

When at last we turned to go down through the fields, the fragrance of the clover and wild flowers and young grass was indeed ‘of a wondrous odour, as that of all flowers collected into one’. What, in the reading, had perhaps appeared to be a trifle overstressed, was now perceived to be wonderfully precise, and we were in the silence of this when all at once the cathedral bell began clanging its summons to evening service. It rent the air to a shivering agony. Peace threw a cowl over its head and ran, bowed, seeking shelter. It was the bell of the ‘killing times’, of Covenanters and Calvin and the wrath to come. A city bell, to clang above tramcars and the clatter on the cobbled closes of slums. The monks might have rung such a bell as a warning of the coming of the murderous Danes, and a dying hand have rung it after to tell the tale. But never would the hand of Columba have clanged it for his services of faith and peace.

Perhaps we had become, after these weeks at sea, a little over-sensitive to peace, and when, having got aboard again and eaten, we heard the sound of military music, marching with precision to the beat of drums, invisible, but traversing the island, rising to a near high note and falling away to ‘the tread of infinite cavalcades filing off’, we might easily have believed ourselves forever after to have been the victims of a strange delusion, had not the Mate, who had stayed with the boat, been so positive that he kept time to the invisible feet.