Nan Shepherd Quotes

Yet often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him.

To aim for the highest point is not the only way to climb a mountain.

It’s a grand thing, to get leave to live

Walking thus, hour after hour, the senses keyed, one walks the flesh transparent. But no metaphor, transparent, or light as air, is adequate. The body is not made negligible, but paramount. Flesh is not annihilated but fulfilled. One is not bodiless, but essential body.

Knowing another is endless. The thing to be known grows with the knowing.

So simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.

This is the river. Water, that strong white stuff, one of the four elemental mysteries, can here be seen at its origins. Like all profound mysteries, it is so simple that it frightens me. It wells from the rock, and flows away. For unnumbered years it has welled from the rock, and flowed away. It does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself.

What he values is a task that, demanding of him all he has and is, absorbs and so releases him entirely.

In September dawns I hardly breathe - I am an image in a ball of glass. The world is suspended there, and I in it.

Am I such a slave as that? Dependent on a man to complete me! I thought I couldn't be anything without him- I can be my own creator!

Walking in mist tests not only individual self-discipline, but the best sort of interplay between persons.

The more one learns of this intricate interplay of soil, altitude, weather, and the living tissues of plant and insect (an intricacy that has its astonishing moments, as when sundew and butterwort eat the insects), the more the mystery deepens. Knowledge does not dispel mystery.

The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.

When the aromatic savour of the pine goes searching into the deepest recesses of my lungs, I know it is life that is entering. I draw life in through the delicate hairs of my nostrils.

Eye and foot acquire in rough walking a co-ordination that makes one distinctly aware of where the next step is to fall, even while watching sky and land.

It is worth ascending unexiting heights if for nothing else than to see the big ones from nearer their own level.

These tracks give to winter hill walking a distinctive pleasure. One is companioned, though not in time.

It is the eye that discovers the mystery of light, not only the moon and the stars and the vast splendours of the Aurora, but the endless changes the earth undergoes under changing lights.

For the most appalling quality of water is its strength. I love its flash and gleam, its music, its pliancy and grace, its slap against my body; but I fear its strength. I fear it as my ancestors must have feared the natural forces that they worshipped. All the mysteries are in its movement. It slips out of holes in the earth like the ancient snake. I have seen its birth; and the more I gaze at that sure and inremitting surge of water at the very top of the mountain, the more I am baffled. We make it all so easy, any child in school can understand it – water rises in the hills, it flows and finds its own level, and man can't live without it. Bud I don't understand it. I cannot fathom its power.

The presence of a person does not destruct from, but enhances the silence, if if the other person is the right sort of hill companion. The perfect hill companion is the one whose identity is for the time being merged in that of the mountains, as you feel your own to be.

my eyes were in my feet

Books work from the inside out. They are a private conversation happening somewhere in the soul.

To Martha it seemed that she stood outside life. The world went by her, colourless shapes on a flat pale background. Nothing had solidity or warmth. She felt numb, as though she could never be passionately alive again.

How can I number the worlds to which the eye gives me entry? - the world of light, of colour, of shape, of shadow: of mathematical precision in the snowflake, the ice formation, the quartz crystal, the patterns of stamen and petal: of rhythm in the fluid curve and plunging line of the mountain faces. Why some blocks of stone, hacked into violent and tortured shapes, should so profoundly tranquillise the mind I do not know. Perhaps the eye imposes its own rhythm on what is only a confusion: one has to look creatively to see this mass of rock as more than jag and pinnacle - as beauty. Else why did men for so many centuries think mountains repulsive? A certain kind of consciousness interacts with the mountain-forms to create this sense of beauty. Yet the forms must be there for the eye to see. And forms of a certain distinction: mere dollops won't do it. It is, as with all creation, matter impregnated with mind: but the resultant issue is a living spirit, a glow in the consciousness, that perishes when the glow is dead. It is something snatched from non-being, that shadow which creeps in on us continuously and can be held off by continuous creative act. So, simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.

To know, that is, with the knowledge that is a process of living.

Here then may be lived a life of the senses so pure, so untouched by any mode of apprehension but their own, that the body may be said to think.

It is when the body is keyed to its highest potential and controlled to a profound harmony deepening into something that resembles a trance, that I discover most nearly what it is to be. I have walked out of the body and into the mountain.

Summer on the high plateau can be delectable as honey; it can also be a roaring scourge. To those who love the place, both are good, since both are part of its essential nature. And it is to know its essential nature that I am seeking here. To know, that is, with the knowledge that is a process of living. This is not done easily nor in an hour. It is a tale too slow for the impatience of our age, not of immediate enough import for its desperate problems. Yet it has its own rare value. It is, for one thing, a corrective of glib assessment: one never quite knows the mountain, nor oneself in relation to it. However often I walk on them, these hills hold astonishment for me. There is no getting accustomed to them.

The whole skin has this delightful sensitivity; it feels the sun, it feels the wind running inside one's garment, it feels water closing on it as one slips under - the catch in the breath, like a wave held back, the glow that releases one's entire cosmos, running to the ends of the body as the spent wave runs out upon the sand. This plunge into the cold water of a mountain pool seems for a brief moment to disintegrate the very self; it is not to be borne: one is lost: stricken: annihilated. Then life pours back.

The air is part of the mountain, which does not come to an end with its rock and its soil. It has its own air; and it is to the quality of its air that is due the endless diversity of its colourings. Brown for the most part in themselves, as soon as we see them clothed in air the hills become blue. Every shade of blue, from opalescent milky-white to indigo, is there. They are most opulently blue when rain is in the air. Then the gullies are violet. Gentian and delphinium hues, with fire in them, lurk in the folds.

... haste can do nothing with these hills. I knew when I had looked for a long time that I had hardly begun to see.

Dried mud flats, sun-warmed, have a delicious touch, cushioned and smooth; so has long grass at morning, hot in the sun, but still cool and wet when the foot sinks into it, like food melting to a new flavour in the mouth. And a flower caught by the stalk between the toes is a small enchantment.

It is, as with all creation, matter impregnated with mind: but the resultant issue is a living spirit, a glow in the consciousness, that perishes when the glow is dead. It is something snatched from non-being, that shadow which creeps in on us continuously and can be held off by continuous creative act. So, simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.

But now and then comes an hour when the silence is all but absolute, and listening to it one slips out of time. Such a silence is not a mere negation of sound. It is like a new element, and the world is suspended there, and I in it...

Imagination is haunted by the swiftness of the creatures that live on the mountain - eagle and peregrine falcon, red deer and mountain hare. The reason for their swiftness is severely practical: food is so scarce up there that only those who can move swiftly over vast stretches of ground may hope to survive. The speed, the whorls and torrents of movement, are in plain fact the mountain's own necessity. But their grace is not necessity. Or if it is - if the swoop, the parabola, the arrow-flight of hooves and wings achieve their beauty by strict adherence to the needs of function - so much the more is the mountain's integrity vindicated. Beauty is not adventitious but essential.

One cannot know the rivers till one has seen them at their sources; but this journey to sources is not to be undertaken lightly. One walks among elementals, and elementals are not governable. There are awakened also in oneself by the contact elementals that are as unpredictable as wind or snow

The Cairngorm water is all clear. Flowing from granite, with no peat to darken it, it has never the golden amber, the ‘horse-back brown’ so often praised in Highland burns. When it has any colour at all, it is green, as in the Quoich near its linn. It is a green like the green of winter skies, but lucent, clear like aquamarines, without the vivid brilliance of glacier water. Sometimes the Quoich waterfalls have violet playing through the green, and the pouring water spouts and bubbles in a violet froth.

The thing to be known grows with the knowing.

I have walked out of the body and into the mountain.

To create the creator most be in naked touch with experience. He must know his material in the raw, not canned in books or the experience of others.

Like roundness, or silence, their quality is natural, but it is found so seldom in its absolute state that when we do so find it we are astonished.

The discrepancy between purpose and performance made me laugh aloud—a laugh that gave the same feeling of release as though I had been dancing for a long time.

I realise that the tale of my traffic with a mountain is as valid today as it was then. That it was a traffic of love is sufficiently clear; but love pursued with fervour is one of the roads to knowledge

Gales brandished the half-denuded boughs and whirled the leaves in madcap companies about the roads. The whole world sounded. A roaring and a rustle and a creak was everywhere; and dust and dead leaves eddied in the gateways.

But now and then comes an hour when the silence is all but absolute, and listening to it one slips out of time. Such a silence is not a mere negation of sound. It is like a new element, and the world is suspended there, and I in it.

The attempt to separate Lowland from Highland Scotland ignores the extent to which Lowland Scots are the descendants of Highlanders, and how many Lowland Scots, like Nan Shepherd, made the country's mountains the focus of their spiritual aspirations. 'Highlandism' is not simply the ersatz adoption of a stereotypical version of Scottish culture which is entirely unconnected with the reality of modern Scottish life: the Highlands are both the geographical and the historical backdrop with which 'Lowland' Scottish culture interacts.

This changing of focus in the eye, moving the eye itself when looking at things that do not move, deepens one’s sense of outer reality. Then static things may be caught in the very act of becoming. By so simple a matter, too, as altering the position of one’s head, a different kind of world may be made to appear. Lay the head down, or better still, face away from what you look at, and bend with straddled legs till you see your world upside down. How new it has become! From the close-by sprigs of heather to the most distant fold of the land, each detail stands erect in its own validity. In no other way have I seen of my own unaided sight that the earth is round. As I watch, it arches its back, and each layer of landscape bristles—though bristles is a word of too much commotion for it. Details are no longer part of a grouping in a picture of which I am the focal point, the focal point is everywhere. Nothing has reference to me, the looker. This is how the earth must see itself.

The presence of another person does not detract from, but enhances, the silence, if the other is the right sort of hill companion. The perfect hill companion is the one whose identity is for the time being merged in that of the mountains, as you feel your own to be. Then such speech as arises is part of a common life and cannot be alien.

To apprehend things—walking on a hill, seeing the light change, the mist, the dark, being aware, using the whole of one’s body to instruct the spirit—yes, that is a secret life one has and knows others have. But to be able to share it, in and through words—that is what frightens me ... It dissolves one’s being, I am no longer myself but a part of a life beyond myself when I read pages which are so much an expression of myself

Water so clear cannot be imagined, but must be seen. One must go back, and back again, to look at it, for in the interval memory refuses to re-create its brightness. This is one of the reasons, why the high plateau where these streams begin, the streams themselves, their cataracts and rocky beds, the corries, the whole wild enchantment , like a work of art is perpetually new when one returns to it. The mind cannot carry away all that it has to give, nor does it always believe possible what it has carried away.

...the high plateau where these streams begin, the streams themselves, their cataracts and rocky beds, the corries, the whole wild enchantment, like a work of art is perpetually new when one returns to it.

The universe merely refers you onwards.

We are co-natural with the world and it with us, but we only ever see it partially.

Parar l'orella al silenci és descobrir com n'arriba a ser de rar. Sempre hi ha alguna cosa que es mou (…). Aquesta mena de silenci no és una negació del so. El món s'hi queda suspès i jo a dins.

As I watch [the world],’ wrote Nan Shepherd in 1945, ‘it arches its back, and each layer of landscape bristles.’ It is a brilliant observation about observation. Shepherd knew that ‘landscape’ is not something to be viewed and appraised from a distance, as if it were a panel in a frieze or a canvas in a frame. It is not the passive object of our gaze, but rather a volatile participant – a fellow subject which arches and bristles at us, bristles into us. Landscape is still often understood as a noun connoting fixity, scenery, an immobile painterly decorum.* I prefer to think of the word as a noun containing a hidden verb: landscape scapes, it is dynamic and commotion causing, it sculpts and shapes us not only over the courses of our lives but also instant by instant, incident by incident. I prefer to take ‘landscape’ as a collective term for the temperature and pressure of the air, the fall of light and its rebounds, the textures and surfaces of rock, soil and building, the sounds (cricket screech, bird cry, wind through trees), the scents (pine resin, hot stone, crushed thyme) and the uncountable other transitory phenomena and atmospheres that together comprise the bristling presence of a particular place at a particular moment.

To apprehend things, walking on a hill, seeing the light change, being aware, using the whole of one’s body to instruct the spirit – yes, that is a secret life one has and knows others have. But to be able to share it, and thro’ words…it dissolves one’s being, I am no longer myself, but a part of a life beyond myself.

The sound of all this moving water is as integral to the mountain as pollen to the flower. On hears it without listening as one breathes without thinking. But to a listening ear, the sound disintegrates into many different notes- the slow slap of a loch, the high clear trill of a rivulet, the roar of spate.

To walk out through the top of a cloud is good. Once or twice I have had the luck to stand on a tip of ground and see a pearled and lustrous plain stretch out to the horizons. Far off, another peak lifts like a small island from the smother. It is like the morning of creation. Once on Lochnagar, we had watched the dawn light strike the Cairngorms, like the blue bloom on plums. Each scarp and gully was translucent, no smallest detail blurred. A pure, clear sun poured into each recess. But looking south, we caught our breath. For the world had vanished. There was nothing but an immense stretch of hummocked snow. Or was it sea? It gleamed, and was the high hills as the sea washes rock.

So there I lie on the plateau, under me the central cord of fire from which was thrus this mass of plutonic rock, over me, blue air, and between the fired of the rock and the fire of the sun, scree, soil, and water, moss, grass, flower and tree, insect, wind,rain, snow-the total mountain. Slowly I have found my way in.

Gales crash into the mountain with the boom of angry seas; one can hear the air shattering itself against rock. Cloud-bursts batter the earth and roar down ravines, and thunder reverberates with a prolonged and menacing roll. Mankind is sated with noise; but up here, this naked, this elemental savagery, this infinitesimal cross-section from the energies that have been at work for aeons in the universe, exhilarates rather than destroys

The Cairngorm Mountains are a mass of granite thrust up through the schists and gneiss that form the lower surrounding hills, planed down by the ice cap, and split, shattered and scooped by frost, glaciers and the strength of running water. Their physiognomy is in the geography books—so many square miles of area, so many lochs, so many summits of over 4000 feet—but this is a pallid simulacrum of their reality, which, like every reality that matters ultimately to human beings, is a reality of the mind.

What a wonderful concept, to be with a mountain. I do think this is how I’ve come to relate to mountains. I allow them to hold me, to show me. I sit with them and gaze out to valleys with them. The book is a poetic meditation in returning to our senses via the mountain, and “living all the way through” to ourselves. Nan Shepherd in The Living Mountain had scary moments – almost falling down a ravine, almost treading on an adder – that shocked her into a “heightened power” of herself. Fear became something that “enlarged rather than constricted the spirit.” “When walking for many hours on a mountain,” she wrote, “the body deepens into a fulfilled trance, the senses keyed,” and she discovers “most nearly what is it to be. I have walked out of the body and into the mountain.” Oh, yes, the knowingness of the mountain. I know such a knowingness.

Scent—fragrance, perfume—is very much pertinent to the theme of life, for it is largely a by-product of the process of living.

But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart ... and the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen ...

The eye sees what it didn’t see before, or sees in a new way what it had already seen. These moments come unpredictably, yet governed, it would seem, by a law whose working life is dimly understood. They come to me most often while waking out of outdoor sleep, gazing tranced at the running of water and listening to its song, and most of all after hours of steady walking, with the long rhythm of motion sustained until motion is felt, not merely known by the brain, as the ‘still centre’ of being. walking thus, hour after hour, the senses keyed, one walks the flesh transparent.

The grey Crown, that had soared through so many generations above the surge and excitement of youth, had told her that wisdom is patient and waits for its people. The greed went out of her as she looked up morning after morning at its serenity. It was like a great rock amid the changing tides of men's opinions. Knowledge alters - wisom is stable. It told her time and again that there is no need for haste. In the long Library, too, with the coloured light filtering through it's great window, and its dim recesses among the laden shelves - where thought, the enquiring experiencing spirit, the essence of man's long tussle with his destiny, was captured and preserved: a dessicated powder, dusted across inumerable leaves, and set free, volatile, live spirit again at the touch of a living mind - she learned to be quiet.

But at the end of February, out of a cold black north a dozen meandering snowflakes fell. They drifted about the air like thrums - blown from the raw edges of the coming storm. Next morning, colour had gone from the world. Shapes, sounds, the energies and acuteness of life, were muffled in the dull white that covered both earth and sky. No sun came through. The weeks dragged on with no lifting of the pallor. The snow melted a little and froze again with smears of dirt marbelling its surfaces. To the northward of the dykes it was lumped in obstinate seams, at the cottage doors trodden and caked, matted with refuse, straws and stones and clots of dung carried in about on clorted boots. The ploughs lay idle, gaunt, like half-sunk among the furrows.

For the sheep farmer, seventy years of intercourse had made the moor sit to him more closely than the most supple of garments... He had made his covenant with the moor: it had bogged him and drenched him, deceived, scorched, numbed him with cold, tested his endurance, memory and skill; until a large part of his nature was so interpenetrated with its nature that apart from it he would have lost reality. His love for it indeed was beyond all covenant. Like his love for Jenny, it had the quality of life itself, absolute and uncovenanted.

Ach!" cried Emmeline impatiently, "you had aye a saft side to Madge. Onybody wi' their twa een in their heid cud a' seen the road she was like to tak. Wi' her palaverin' an' her pooderin' an' her this an' that. She had a' her orders, had Madge. An' a stink o scent 'at wad knock ye doon. Foozlin' her face wi' pooders. Eneuch to pit faces ooten fashion. I wadna be seen ga'in' the length o' masel wi' a face like yon. A wadna ging the midden sic a sicht.

Martha Ironside was nine years old when she kicked her great-aunt Josephine. At nineteen she loved the old lady, idly perhaps, in her natural humour, as she loved the sky and space. At twenty-four, when Miss Josephine Leggatt died, aged seventy-nine and reluctant, Martha knew that it she who had taught her wisdom; thereby proving - she reflected - that man does not learn from books alone; because Martha had kicked Aunt Josephine (at the age of nine) for taking her from her books.

Martha said it over and over to herself: "Scotland is bounded on the south by England, on the east by the rising sun, on the north by the Arory-bory-Alice, and on the west by Eternity." ...She repeated the boundaries of Scotland with the same satisfaction as she repeated the rivers of Spain. Up to her University days she carried the conviction that there was something about Scotland in the Bible.

But oftner the nights were clear, marvellously lit. Darkness was a pale lustrous gloom. Sometimes the north was silver clear, so luminous that through the filigree of leaf and sapling its glow pierced burning, as though the light were a patterned loveliness standing out against the background of the trees. Later the glow dulled and the trees became the pattern against the background of the light. The hushed world took her in. Tranqil, surrendered, she became one with the vast quiet night. A puddock sprawled noiselessly towards her, a bat swooped, tracing gigantic patterns upon the sky, a corncrake scraighed, on and on through the night, monotonous and forgotten as one forgets the monotony of the sea's roar; and when the soft wind was in the south-west, the sound of the river, running among its stony rapids below the ferry, floated up and over her like a tide. She fell asleep to its running and wakened to listen for it; and heard it as one hears the breathing of another.

The clear water was at our knees, then at our thighs. How clear it was only this walking into it could reveal. To look through it was to discover its own properties. What we saw under water had a sharper clarity than what we saw through air. We waded on into the brightness, and the width of the water increased, as it always does when one is on or in it, so that the loch no longer seemed narrow, but the far side was a long way off. Then I looked down; and at my feet there opened a gulf of brightness so profound that the mind stopped. We were standing on the edge of a shelf that ran some yards into the loch before plunging down to the pit that is the true bottom. And through that inordinate clearness we saw to the depths of the pit. So limpid was it that every stone was clear.

The day came for Mary to go. There was a bustle of departure. 'Next year,' they all shouted. The dogs jumped and barked. Jenny ran to the end of the departure platform and waved and waved as the train drew out. 'Next year,' she cried. Then life went on. The dark came sooner. The first elm leaf grew yellow. The barley was brown.

Dorabel was now as pleased as a half-crown. Everyone knew her. With her scarlet cap and bright yellow dress she had, and her great height, she walked about like a petrol pump in a land where houses and garments alike seemed to grow out of the colouring of the place; and she had notions about that house of hers that made a filling station seem demure. She thought the other houses about as elegant as turnip-tops, and was proud of the stir she made with hers.

Life recommenced. Dogs barked, cocks crew, smoke rose, men shouted, women clattered their milk pails. Soon figures moved upon the empty fields. Somewhere a plough was creaking. Garry turned turned his head towards the noise and searched the brown earth until he saw the team. Seagulls were crying after it, settling in the black furrow, rising again to wheel around the horses. As he watched, the sun reached the field. The wet new-turned furrow was touched to light as though a line of fire had run along it. The flanks of the horses gleamed. They tossed their manes, lifting their arched necks and bowing again to the pull: brown farm horses, white nosed, white-footed, stalwart and unhurrying as the earth they trampled or the man who held the share.

This place is dead,' he thought. The world he had come from was alive. Its incessant din, the movement, the vibration that never ceased from end to end of the war-swept territory, were earnest of a human activity so enormous that the mind spun with thinking of it. Over there one felt oneself part of something big. One was making the earth. Here there were men, no doubt, leading their hapless, misdirected, individual lives; but they were a people unaware, out of it. He felt almost angry that Lindsay should be dwelling among them. He knew from her letters that she was in Fetter-Rothnie, and, convalescent, had written her that he would come to Knapperley; but that her young fervour should be shut in this dead world annoyed him. She was too far from life. The reconstruction of the universe would not begin in this dark hole, inhabited by old wives and ploughmen.

A blue April morning, the shimmer of light, a breath, a passing air, and it was no longer a harsh and stubborn country, its hard-won fields beleaguered by moor and whin, its stones heaped together in dyke and cairn, marking the land like lines upon a weathered countenance, whose past must stay upon it to the end; but a dream, willing men's hearts. In the sun the leafless boughs were gleaming. Birches were like tangles of shining hair; or rather, he thought, insubstantial, floating like shredded light above the soil. Below the hills blue floated in the hollows, all but tangible, like a distillation that light had set free from the earth; and on a rowan tree in early leaf, its boughs blotted against the background, the tender leaves, like flakes of green fire, floated too, the wild burning life of spring loosened from earth's control. On every side, earth was transmuted. Scents floated, the subtle life released ftom earth and assailing the pulses. Song floated. This dour and thankless country, this land that grat a' winter and girned a' summer could change before one's eyes to an elfin and enchanted radiance, could look, by some rare miracle of light or moisture, essentialised.

Lead us not into imagination, but deliver us from understanding.

Around him he noted that the woods were flaming. A fine flame was playing over the leafless branches, not gaudy like the fires of autumn, but strong and pure. The trees,not now by accident of life but in themselves, were again etherialised. For a brief space, in spring, before the leaf comes, the life in trees is like a pure and subtle fire, in buds and boughs. Willows are like yellow rods of fire, blood-red burns in sycamore and scales off in floating flakes as the bud unfolds and the sheath is loosened. Beeches and elms, all dull beneath, have webs of golden and purple brown upon their spreading tops. Purple blazes in the birch twigs and smoulders darkly in the blossom of the ash. At no other season are the trees so liitle earthly. Mere vegetable matter they are not. One understands the dryad myth, both the emergence of the vivid delicate creature and her melting again in her tree; for in a week, a day, the foliage thickens, she is a tree again.

Alexander Kilgour, in true Scottish style, was educated for the Church. At thirty-five he filled a Chair of Divinity. Two members of his Presbytery, before his appointment, were overheard to say, 'We don't want Kilgour of Inverald - he has far too acute a mind for a Professor.' And indeed Alexander, in a short while, had a wasps' bike about his ears. 'As bad as Smith o' Aiberdeen,' cried the critics. Alexander Kilgour, however, had not only the advantage of teaching ten years later than Robertson Smith, he had also the Kilgour habit of success in all he put his hand to. He retained his Chair, silenced the mutterers by tact and suavity, and gave width of outlook to a succession of young Scottish divines. His urbane persuasiveness of manner, however, covered a true prophetic zeal. He was passionate for enlightenment, drunk on the word: though in this matter too the pre-war whiskies were the best. The ageing man would sit with brooding brows over the later distilations.

Though it was eighteen years since they had seen her, there was no mistaking Bella now. She might have walked out of the door last week, with her cheap cardboard case finished to look like leather, and her impudent copper hair puffed out in front. There was less hair now, and a good deal more flesh, but it was the same ruddy face and the same style of walk, Bella carried her curves like a queen.

In the complexity of its structure, its kaleidoscope of perspectives, its confrontation with the effects of the First World War, its attentiveness to experience at all life stages and it embrace of linguistic, formal and philosophical 'difficulty', The Weatherhouse is arguably the great Scottish modernist feminist novel of the period.

As a matter of fact, I read few novels. They bore me. I never wanted or intended to write one myself, and can't tell you why I did it.

The inaccessibility of this loch is part of its power.

As they ascend, the air grows rarer and more stimulating, the body feels lighter and they climb with less effort, till Dante's law of acent on the Mount of Purgation seems to become a physical truth: 'This mountain is such, that ever at the beginning below 'tis toilsome, and the more a man ascends the less it wearies.' At first I had thought that this lightness of body was a universal reaction to rarer air. It surprised me to discover that some people suffered malaise at altitudes that released me, but were happy in low valleys where I felt extinguished. Then I began to see that our devoltions have more to do with our physiological peculiarities than we admit. I am a mountain lover because my body is at its best in the rarer air of the heights and communicates its elation to the mind.