And all this, including the complete weathering away over vast areas of the whole 3,000 feet of tough basalts, took but a short while in the immense space of time that goes back to the formation of the Lewisian gneiss now exposed in Sleat.

Against such conceptions of time the thought of the length of a human life draws a smile from that odd detached wisdom that comes one knows not whence.

And taking everything into account, particularly the recent pattern of our rather hectic doings, the smile was decidedly ‘on me’!

For here was I, suddenly become the owner of a boat—with the prospect of three weeks’ cruising! Three weeks! It sounded like some love relation, rather than an adventure into—or out of—time! In fact, bad weather might very easily prevent our going to sea altogether. What then?

What had really prompted the buying of the boat? Was it that I wanted to outdo the folk of the West in their disregard of time (‘You were surely in an awful hurry’), to have some sort of revenge on the monstrousness of time itself?

Facile speculation, perhaps, that yet could crystallise into a definite picture—as vague hope generally does in the lazy mind. For I could always become haunted by one very clear picture: a sea-loch, the boat at anchor, evening passing into the peace and glimmer of summer midnight, with a sea-bird calling along the shore to intensify the quiet.

That at least was no vague dream. It was a piece of reality that I had experienced more than once. I knew it in all its intricate detail of thought and mood and sound and silence and sight, flowing and merging; too intricate ever to reproduce, to do more than hint at.

It is easy, of course, to dismiss the picture by calling it the escapist’s dream, and difficult to defend it, without pretentiousness, by an excursion into speculative thought on the condition of human affairs in the world to-day.

Have we, in this sense, grown afraid to escape, become dominated by the idea of a social duty that must keep our noses to the human grindstone, the grindstone that an ever-increasing mass hysteria keeps whirling with an ever-increasing madness of momentum? Work, records of unemployment, misery, conflicting politics, wars, and the lowering nightmare of a universal war, until sensitive beings can hardly listen in to the wireless news, so grisly its tales of disasters and mass human destruction. Are we in social honour bound to increase this ghastly momentum by adding the thrust of our own forebodings and fears? or has a time come when it may be the better part of courage to withdraw sufficiently far from it to observe with some sense of proportion what exactly is taking place? Not to mention the purely personal point of view that one has only one life to live and that, before shuffling off, a little peace may be necessary in which to exercise one’s mental attributes and try to get some glimmering of what all the madness is about, or even of what is due to oneself, despite all the man-made duties in the world?