There is still another type of experience much more difficult to describe than any of the foregoing, perhaps impossible, for how can a unique experience, without tangible physical attributes, be conveyed at all? It is difficult, anyway, to conceive of its being conveyed at second hand, so the best the writer can do is to attempt the personal. I had been sleeping in the south wing of an old country mansion house when, sometime during the night, I awoke, sat up in bed in a room dim with starlight, and saw my door swing noiselessly open. The transition from sleep to sitting up watching the door open must have been almost instantaneous. I immediately went and stared into the long black corridor, but neither saw nor heard anything. Then I closed the door and went back to bed, but could not sleep, for I became aware—or rather I had an apprehension—of what I may tentatively call pure evil. Now strangely enough it did not come from inside the house but from outside, and not from the ground but from the air, from the vaults of space. It was not a being, a spirit, an imminent presence: it was a force; not a black magic but (if I may be understood) a black electricity. It was quite impersonal, yet not a mere death ray; an emanation from an active principle of evil, as though the old conception of two principles in creation, good and evil, were in fact true, and the evil was at that moment having an undisturbed innings. The method of its operation was disintegration for its own sake, a disintegrating of the mind, the personality, and finally of the body. Its purpose was to break up the tissue of what the good or creative principle had put together, and one had to strive against it with the utmost strength of one’s will. This, of course, was something utterly beyond any consideration of social or personal morality, as it was beyond any jugglery of the door, which had conceivably been opened by a current of wind in the long corridor acting on a catch not quite closed.

However, we are now reaching the point where discussion is as fruitless as it would be for two born-blind men to discuss the colour red. A little knowledge of such obscure forces does help one, all the same, to appreciate the feelings of the young girl in Eigg who is still afraid to cross a certain stream lest she see the ‘washer at the ford’.

Some of the western islands are remarkable in ways other than superstitious or geological.

Our host in Eigg had amassed a large amount of curious knowledge about his island, and one evening he took us over to Kildonan, with its ruins of an ancient monastery. It was here that Donan, contemporary with St. Columba, had his cill or religious cell. There is the early recorded story of Donan’s visit to Columba or Columcille with the object of making him his ‘soul’s friend’, and of Columcille’s reply: ‘I shall not be soul’s friend to a company of red martyrdom; for thou shalt come to red martyrdom and thy people with thee.’ The virtue of this reply is presumably meant to lie in its prophecy, which was duly fulfilled, for it is surely strange that Columcille should refuse friendship to one whom he foresaw would be martyred for furthering the Cause to which he himself had dedicated his life. There is something in that early attitude to fate that is a trifle elusive to us now. For no question of courage or loyalty can be involved. Again and again in the records of these times one comes on a happening which has upon it the light of a remote paganism, with its taboos, and should some shutter of the mind lift for a moment one gets the ancient vision, and, in that necromantic moment, all seems understood.