Eoin was certainly lost in labyrinthine ways, when I got hold of him hours later. I could see the dark entanglement in his eyes. While we sped northwards, he unburdened himself, and something bigger than an Admiralty chart would be needed to record all the soundings on that rock-infested sea of island diplomacy. There had been, moreover, a sensational crop of applications for new licences—no less than the staggering total of five. For tourism is increasing in Skye, and soon the ancient Gael of the Misty Isle may be living by selling beer, if he is lucky, or ginger-beer if he is not, and taking in washings in any case. Furthermore, these applications were for no low pubs or public bars. Each applicant would be fully satisfied with a refined ‘table licence’ for the use of tourists who know how to behave themselves and, coming from the south, would expect the usual civilised amenities.

But there was a snag that even the licensing authorities could not overcome, for the law had made no provision for the granting of an exclusive table licence. A licence must be a licence to retail strong drink, and accordingly the native, brutally indifferent to civilised refinements, might walk in the front door and in his quiet way demand his dram. A very difficult and complicated situation for landlords, female teetotallers, etc.

Sympathetically Eoin and I discussed their difficulties, as, heading northward, we passed croft houses and cattle and hens, living in the inoffensive quietude that seemed to have come down from the dawn of time. I could remember, too, from my recent reading of ancient statutes, that once in the Isles, hundreds of years ago, each man had his own still for making his own whisky, and then there was neither licence duty nor drunkenness. Legislation against drunkenness came in with foreign wines, which were forbidden except to the landlords, etc., and so the folk had to remain perpetually sober on whisky.

However, one thing was clear to us: the court, due to sit in a few days, would have to grant all five licences or none at all. Democratic logic acting on sets of similar circumstances made that sure. It was the general opinion even in Portree, said Eoin.

When the court did sit it granted two and refused three. Eoin was one of the rejected. Doubtless the bench could give reason for its wisdom. Equally doubtless it never did.

But while all this was going on, at the back of my mind was a boat sailing the seas. Skye is called in Gaelic the Isle of Mist. But its name is also traced to another word meaning The Winged Isle; and that surely is the perfect description. For one is always coming on the sea, on inlets like heron wings, on mountain tops about to take off or already above the clouds. Always I seem to have been rushing through the island. Though that is not true, for I have spent autumn weeks of perfect laziness on the west side of the Cuillin, when speed or haste in mind or body seemed an odd sort of treachery to the strange fact of being. There is one stretch of moorland, when Talisker distillery is left behind and the moor begins to roll down again towards Glen Brittle, that has an autumn tint of such austere loveliness that an ex-president of the Alpine Club once assured me he had never met anything like it in all his travels, and he had climbed in the Himalayas, the Andes, and the Rockies. It occurs when the early autumn sun has turned the bent not to gold but to a wine that in colour is somewhere between golden brown and amontillado. No trace here of the flamboyant, of the vivid primitive. An ancient mood, but still as honey in the comb. Heats and humours evaporate before it, and the stillness invites the mind away. Let the colour deepen into the dusk of evening—into that hour when the wings of the Cuillin fold on dark breasts and eagle heads sleep unbowed.