Читать книгу The Road to Nowhere - Maurice Walsh - Страница 10

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THE breeze of morning died, and the sun, poised on the shoulder of Slievemaol, grew ardent, too ardent for Rogan Stuart, somnolently abstracted on his lump of stone. Through his abstraction he felt the dry heat beat on the back of his neck, and looked lazily around for a patch of shelter. On the near side of the bridle-path a jag of basalt stood a man’s height out of the ground and cast a few feet of shadow on the heather. He lifted slowly to his feet and climbed leisurely towards it.

‘O shadow of a rock in a thirsty land!’ he murmured deeply, and sank down in the heather; he snuggled his shoulders between the two bumps on the stone and sighed comfortably. From the thighs down his legs were in the blaze of the sun, but the warmth, through the grey flannels, was not unpleasant. He clasped his hands across his flat stomach and receded into his somnolence.

Turning head to left, he could see along the bridle-path to where it curved round a buttress of the hill a hundred yards away; to the right he looked down the length of Dounbeg Bay as far as the narrows of Corullish, four miles distant. The tide was running out through the narrows, and some trick of refraction down there seemed to make the waters run uphill, a canal of shimmering pale gold curving over into the sky. All the rest of the bay was smoothed out into a level floor, and little crinkles of silver ran and spent themselves on the surface of it. Across near the other shore, which was sandy and shelving, the water was a translucent green, but under the basalt bluffs on the near side it was dark-blue, deepening to slate purple.

‘I’ll be asleep in a minute,’ thought Rogan Stuart.

Last night he had not slept well in his bracken bed, but that was not unusual; sleep had been an unsafe harbourage for him many and many a night. The sea air had had a bite, and years of city life had thinned his Scots blood. He had been roused by the chill dawn and had looked, with a strange desolation of spirit, at the panorama of mountains outlined starkly against a wan sky; and the floor of the bay was a cold steel mirror wherein the peaks stood head downwards. Then the tall bens were blacker than purple, darker than any blue, and a thick band of mist, softer than pearl, bridged Glounagrianaan and made a scarf for the shoulder of tall Leaccamore. Now the hills were less starkly outlined and more far-away, and looked bigger; green pastures, hazed by the sun, lapped the slopes between the rocky scarps; high up, basalt flashed yellow and pink and rust-brown; smoked shadows lay in fold and hollow; and the corries hid their ruggedness under a soft veil.

He liked the green over there across the water. It was lovely in the wide opening of the valley, and the trees were dark and restful. But what Fomorian had raised those red turrets? Some foreign man coming into these Irish glens and aping baronial architecture in red brick! Some idea, probably, of warming the ruggedness of the hills. Could it be that here too, as in the Highlands, strangers were stealing the lovely places from the old breed? And here was Rogan Stuart, of no stranger blood—out of Appin, like the great Alan Breck whom Stevenson had marvellously created without quite understanding—sleeping in the heather and the bracken—same as poor lost Davy Balfour—and ready to sleep at this instant—now—in one minute.... He was asleep in half that minute.