ther the Sea.

IV

SPACE

"Est impossibile? Certum est."
--TERTULLIAN.

Leithen told me this story one evening in early September as we sat
beside the pony track which gropes its way from Glenvalin up the Correi
na Sidhe. I had arrived that afternoon from the south, while he had
been taking an off-day from a week's stalking, so we had walked up the
glen together after tea to get the news of the forest. A rifle was out
on the Correi na Sidhe beat, and a thin spire of smoke had risen from
the top of Sgurr Dearg to show that a stag had been killed at the
burnhead. The lumpish hill pony with its deer-saddle had gone up the
Correi in a gillie's charge while we followed at leisure, picking our
way among the loose granite rocks and the patches of wet bogland. The
track climbed high on one of the ridges of Sgurr Dearg, till it hung
over a caldron of green glen with the Alt-na-Sidhe churning in its linn
a thousand feet below. It was a breathless evening, I remember, with a
pale-blue sky just clearing from the haze of the day. West-wind
weather may make the North, even in September, no bad imitation of the
Tropics, and I sincerely pitied the man who all these stifling hours
had been toiling on the screes of Sgurr Dearg. By-and-by we sat down
on a bank of heather, and idly watched the trough swimming at our feet.
The clatter of the pony's hoofs grew fainter, the drone of bees had
gone, even the midges seemed to have forgotten their calling. No place
on earth can be so deathly still as a deer-forest early in the season
before the stags have begun roaring, for there are no sheep with their
homely noises, and only the rare croak of a raven breaks the silence.
The hillside was far from sheer-one could have walked down with a
little care-but something in the shape of the hollow and the remote
gleam of white water gave it an extraordinary depth and space. There
was a shimmer left from the day's heat, which invested bracken and rock
and scree with a curious airy unreality. One could almost have
believed that the eye had tricked the mind, that all was mirage, that
five yards from the path the solid earth fell away into nothingness. I
have a bad head, and instinctively I drew farther back into the
heather. Leithen's eyes were looking vacantly before him.

"Did you ever know Hollond?" he asked.

Then he laughed shortly. "I don't know why I asked that, but somehow
this place reminded me of Hollond. That gl