So there could be no Inverness that night. There was, however, the still unsolved question of a dinghy, and after we had toasted the day’s work, we set off.

I liked the look of the dinghy when I saw her in the half-dark. About nine feet long, and beamy, with bottom boards. And a grand sea boat, I was told. So we decided to try her. She was no sooner in the water than the sea came pouring in through her seams, and five yards from shore she was about half full. So we hurriedly leapt to dry land, emptied her, and hauled her up. I accepted the assurance that there was nothing wrong with her but the seams, which would take up after a few days in water. As it happened, she belonged to the man from whom I had got the motor boat, so we repaired to his house, where there was talk and bargaining in two tongues, until in the end the one cheque was written for both boats, and the owner asked me if I would like to rob him of his suit of clothes as well. By that time he was tearing the tissue paper from a bottle of whisky, a beverage with a long history in the Island and still not unknown, despite its vindictive price.

Some time about midnight it occurred to Eoin and myself that we were expected in Inverness more than two hours before, so we had to hunt for a telephone and found one in the inn where we had spent the pleasant night. No one was in bed and I was now no longer a stranger.

When between four and five in the morning we left Duntulm, the mists were curling up from frost. Beyond the castle ruins, two Loch Fyne boats were ring-netting for herring and we remembered the oily patches on the sea’s surface the day before. The evolutions of the boats were slow and friendly, as if they were playing a game. The two buoys of Eoin’s net, which he had forgotten to haul, were still athwart the invisible wreck. (The crofter would perhaps haul it sometime.) Beyond, lay the Thistle at anchor. I thought she looked very well. I turned again and had another gaze at her. She was so peaceful there on that quiet sea in the silver morning that she might well have been wondering what on earth I was going away for. I suggested as much to Eoin. ‘I don’t blame her,’ said he.

And so on through Kilmuir, once the granary of Skye (did not Pennant find the fields ‘laughing with corn’?) with enough peaceful and bloody and romantic history between the ruins of the monastic establishment on Columba’s Loch (long since drained) and the sheep-disturbing siren of a Ford V-8 to fill a whole shelf with volumes of Transactions.

And long before the time of St. Columba, strange ongoings resounded down there by the shores of Loch Snizort. When Finn MacCumhail (or Fingal) and his men lost touch with the deer, they sent Caoilte, the Thin Man, to find them, while they resigned themselves to gather limpets and make a hash of them with milk from the grey-cheeked cow.