Besides, the brilliant morning had swept
out my sinister impressions.
I got my cap and stick from the rack by the door and went out.
The house was within a hundred paces of the loch, in a place of
wild beauty on a bit of moor, yellow with gorse, extending from
the great barren mountains behind it right down into the water.
Immense banners of mist lay along the tops of these mountain
peaks, and streams of water like skeins of silk marked the deep
gorges in dazzling whiteness.
The loch was a crooked finger of the sea hooked into the land.
It was clear as glass in the bright morning. The open sea was
directly beyond the crook of the finger, barred out by a nest of
needlepointed rocks. On this morning, with the sea motionless,
they stood up like the teeth of a harrow, but in heavy weather I
imagined that the waves covered them. To the eye they were not
the height of a man above the level water; they glistened in the
brilliant sun like a sheaf of black pikes.
This was Saint Conan's Landing, and it occurred to me that if the
holy man came in rough weather from the Irish coast he required,
in truth, all the perspicacity of a saint to get his boat in
without having it impaled on these devil's needles.
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