‘All over the universe,’ he replied.

He was quite clear on the subject of the weather, too, being certain that the summers had deteriorated since the Great War. Before then splendid sunny summers—now rain, rain. ‘When I came nrst—’

‘When was that?’

‘In 1887. The summers were long and sunny then. . . .’

Granite must have agreed with him, for he did not look old enough even to have been born in 1887. He had a lined humoursome face, with hair the exact colour of grey granite dust, and chuckled when we told him the way we had taken into Taynuilt. He pointed out a pathway over the wooded hill that could be seen even from the railway station. I thanked him as the train came in and he and the Mate went away together.

That evening, as I took the path over the Point, by birch and hazel and oak, with Loch Etive down below and more freshness and beauty around than the brain had the energy to think on, the refrain of the song Deirdre’s Farewell to Albyn entered and took control. For there are old Gaelic tunes that in the right atmosphere do take control, and subjugate and tyrannise over and hypnotise, until the mind itself falls in love with the drug and the emotion or harmony it engenders. And though this particular air may be neither old nor traditional (rather, in fact, like Clementine), yet the subject matter so influenced the cadences that the fume from the drug arose in its soft tide and floated the mind.

For the subject matter was clear enough, as clear as the story about Helen of Troy at least. To English classical men the story of Helen of Troy is the great story of the world.

Hers was

The face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topmost towers of Ilium

and when English lips mouth the familiar words gently, you see the fume being created.

Yet with the air always of ‘classical’ legend, of something half-intellectually conceived and poetically remote, with the glimmering outline of Greek statuary, inducing a nostalgia behind the port, but ever so delicate and even well bred; a nostalgia, perhaps, not for Helen so much after all as for something that oneself has lost, like youth.

But to the Gael, Deirdre is not a lovely woman of another race: she is flesh of the same flesh and bone of the same bone, and at the words ‘Deirdre the Beautiful is dead’, the head is bowed and the mind blinded.

What befell Deirdre and the Sons of Uisneach is one of the Three Sorrows of Gaelic story-telling and the best known of the three. There are many versions of the story, the oldest being found in the Book of Leinster, a twelfth-century MS. It tells of individual and social life, of taboos, of love, of escape, of a woman’s intuition of treachery, of man’s obtuseness, of journeys by land and sea, and of final tragedy.