‘Pretty good,’ I said to the engineer.

‘We try to do our stuff,’ he answered modestly, and asked us where we had been. He knew every corner, had re-timed a Kelvin in a storm, and spoke of the wanderings of Alan Breck from the wreck on Erraid Island to the spot where Colin Campbell was murdered, ‘over beyond the eagle there. It makes a difference’, he added, ‘when you know the country.’

We spoke a trifle diffidently about these literary matters; still, they had their place.

‘I had hoped’, I said, ‘to go down Jura way and through the Gulf of Coirebhreacain, but the weather has been against us.’

‘Terrible currents down there,’ he said. ‘I was talking to a skipper once who told me that in a calm they had got drawn slowly into the current entering Coirebhreacain and couldn’t pull out of it. A sailing vessel. So they battened her down and abandoned her, getting to shore themselves in the small boat. She was carried away and got into the whirlpool, and went round and round and down until at last they could see nothing but the tops of her masts. But the pool threw her up again and they dodged alongshore in the eddies and picked her up none the worse. I believe that is quite true.’

The glory of it put gloom over my day, until the talk got going on landlords (for our little adventure had been noised abroad). That we had not lifted anchor when ordered to was all in our favour. There were folk who would have had us there yet, for oddly enough landlords as a general body are not beloved. I was told stories of petty tyrannies that I dare not repeat, in the interests of those concerned. Here is a typical one, which may pass. Those who run the Rena also own her, and one day at high tide they beached her at a certain spot in order to get her bottom scraped. In due course an emissary from the landlord appeared demanding the sum of two shillings as dues for beaching on his land—i.e., on an open beach below high-water mark.

‘Did you pay?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘But I wish I had—and got a receipt.’

But the hardest case I encountered was that of a sheep-farmer, who after many lean years (lambs had been selling in Oban the previous year at as low as a shilling each) had been warned out of his farm, just when prices were looking up and losses might be recouped, as the ground was required for sport.

Damning landlords of sporting estates is a warming and friendly business and doesn’t do anyone any harm, least of all the landlords.

The head of the loch is a wonderland of mountains. In front of us the two Shepherds of Etive lifted their heads into the haze. To our right Ben Starav, with Stob an Duine Ruaidh before it and many peaks behind. To our left mountain after mountain until, faint as a pencil line against the sky, we recognised Bidean na mBian, the highest ridge in Argyll.