The clear blue of the overhead sky passed into the haze of the horizon out of which the hills rose in dim purple, full of distance and legendary peace. I had never realised how mountainous Harris was, and I gazed at the Clisham, on whose steep road an insignificant buzzing figure on a motorbike had once nearly broken his neck. Southward the eye caught the saddle-back of Ben Lee and the cone of Ben Eval in North Uist. South of that, Hecla, Beinn Mhor, and the hills towards Loch Boisdale in South Uist. And finally, remote, out of the mist, a nipple against the sky, insubstantial, inclined to vanish, that could only be Heaval in Barra. Land outlines and sea inlets in between were guessed at or perhaps imagined, so uncertain were they in the opalescent haze.

Above these lands, at no great height, hung a continuous ridge of puffed-out cloud, like the angel clouds in Renaissance pictures. Their whiteness had an internal warmth, a suggestion of pink, that tinted the sea to a gleaming hue, and the water undulated slowly like sheeted iron. A similar cumulus formation hung over Skye, but there it was Arctic white, like puffed-out snow, while the land beneath faded away in sunbright haze.

The water changed continuously in colour, and over its vast waste birds worked singly or in little coveys, black guillemots, large guillemots, puffins, fulmars, while a single gull made us feel truly at sea by following us from side to side and sometimes passing overhead and throwing a startling shadow on our hands.

As we came abreast of the Ascrib Isles, we passed quite close to a school of basking sharks. Their triangular dorsal fins, showing full above the water, looked like the mainsails of miniature yachts, only the fins were black and moved to some other caprice than the wind’s. They cut in and out in sudden swirling circles as if they were playing an amusing game or worrying some hidden life to death.

But within this visible world, I was haunted by my own particular worry, and every now and then I got up and felt the circulating pipes and cylinder heads. Occasionally new noises developed to my ear, thuds and thumps and queer irregular beats. Yet the engine was going steadily and I was afraid to experiment either by giving her more throttle or moving the ignition lever. We had left Duntulm at 10.30 a.m. and at 12.7 Waternish Point was abeam, so we were doing about six knots, and if in that time we had had the last of an ebbing tide in our favour, on the other hand we were towing a dinghy which though small was heavy. I was not dissatisfied. With the broad entrance to Loch Snizort behind us, the first step in our journey had been taken. It was a new anchorage now, whatever happened. At last we had won through the web of circumstance, with its decisions and clinging obstructions, into freedom. We set a course for Dunvegan Head, which lay in the sea like an immense squatting animal with its snub nose out of the water.