The Spell of Scotland Part 16

We did not attempt Ben MacDui, although it may be approached by the ever-easy way of pony-back, even the queen--not Mary--having mounted it in this fas.h.i.+on. We were content to master, almost master, its p.r.o.nunciation according to the pure Gaelic--Muich Dhui. And then we learned that by more accurate and later scientific measurement, MacDui is not the tallest mountain in the kingdom, but Ben Nevis out-tops it.

To make our peace with an almost forfeited fate, we took a dander, that is, we walked back toward Glen Tilt by the way we had not come. There is a happy little falls a couple of miles from the town, Corrimulzie, plunging down a long fall through a deep narrow gorge, but very pleasantly. We pa.s.sed white milestone after white milestone, measured in particular Scottish accuracy--we timed ourselves to a second and found we could measure the miles by the numbers of our breaths. The forest is thick and bosky, not an original forest, doubtless. But I was reminded that Taylor, on his Pennyless Pilgrimage came to Braemar three hundred years ago, and wrote "as many fir trees growing there as would serve for masts (from this time to the end of the worlde) for all the s.h.i.+ppes, caracks, hoyes, galleyes, boates, drumiers, barkes, and water-crafte, that are now, or can be in the worlde these fourty yeeres." He lamented the impossibility of sending them down to tide water where they might meet their proper fate.

Only once did we meet a carriage in which we suspected that royalty, or at least ladies-in-waiting--if Duke's wives who are royal have such appendages--might be sitting.

And on to the Linn of Dee, which is truly a marvelous place. The Advocate of Aberdeen when we had asked him why so many of his townfolk came this way, explained with a sense of possession of the greater Dee, "we like to see what the Dee can do." Surely it can do it. In these rock walls it has spent centuries carving for itself fantastic ways, until not the Dalles of the St. Croix can excel its rock-bound fantasy. Given time, the Dee can "do" pretty much as it pleases in granite.

The few miles we ventured beyond the Linn were enough to prove that the way was long, the wind was cold, the minstrel was infirm and old. Had we walked all the mountain way we should have been much in need of a "plaidie to the angry airts." This air is very bracing.

But we sang many Jacobite songs in memory of the Risings. "Wha'll be King but Charlie?" and "Charlie is my Darling," and "Over the sea Charlie is coming to me," and "Will ye no come back again." And we sang with particular satisfaction that we were not, after all, to suffer royal wrongs--surely there is a falling away in the far generations in the far places, since a King's son could so adventure--

"Dark night cam' on, the tempest roar'd, Loud o'er the hills and valleys, An' where was't that your Prince lay down Who's hame should been a palace?

He row'd him in a Highland plaid, Which cover'd him but sparely, An' slept beneath a bush o' broom, Oh, wae's me for Prince Charlie."

On these braes of Mar, and in these hills and beside these very streams, the Prince made his adventure--yes, and simply because of that adventure will be forever remembered by those who believe in the heroic mood.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BALMORAL CASTLE.]

To leave Braemar the road leads down to Ballater, with motor cars to take it swiftly; past the castles of Mar old and new, where betimes sits the present Earl of Mar, not conning Risings but writing to the magazines his idea of a free Scotland, which shall have its Home Rule like Ireland--which was once Scotland--and which may have it at the great peace; down through an increasingly pleasant country. Balmoral Castle looks deserted now of its queen--and when queens desert, places are much emptier than when kings leave. But "queen's weather" is still possible here, even though the castle and our way are overshadowed by Lochnagar, on which we bestow more than pa.s.sing glance in memory of that Gordon who was Lord Byron.

"Ah! there my young footsteps in infancy wander'd; My cap was the bonnet, my cloak was the plaid; On chieftains long perished my memory ponder'd, As daily I strove through the pine-cover'd glade; I sought not my home till the day's dying glory Gave place to the rays of the bright polar star; For fancy was cheer'd by traditional story, Disclosed by the natives of dark Loch na Garr."

And one glance at Lumphanan-- "This Macbeth then slew they there in the wood of Lumphanan," so runs the old chronicle.

_Aberdeen_

There is no city in Scotland which seems to me to have more personality, a more distinct personality, than Aberdeen. It is plainly a self-sufficient city, and both in politics and in religion it thinks for itself, mindless if its thinking is not that of the rest of the kingdom.

Its provost cannot leave its borders; once he attended a battle, many and many a year ago, nineteen miles from the city at Harlow, and sad to say, he was killed. So now the provost remains in the city, he cannot leave it more than President can leave Republic, or Pope the Vatican.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MARISCHAL COLLEGE.]

In religion, Aberdeen is strongly Episcopalian, where it is not Catholic. In truth there is a band of Catholicism running across the country, from Aberdeen to Skye, through the heart of the Highlands. As might be expected, the Highlands never yielded to the reformatory methods of John Knox, but remained of the faith.

There is no city that looks so Scottish, and yet so different, as Aberdeen. It is a dignified and an extraordinarily clean city. After a rain its granite glitters as though it had been newly cut, and to one accustomed to smoke-grimed American cities Aberdeen looks as though it were built this morning, when no doubt much of this granite has a right to the h.o.a.r of antiquity.

Marischal College, founded by the Keiths, who were Earl Marischals, boasts of being the greatest granite pile in the world, after the Escorial. Having walked a day through a circ.u.mscribed portion of that Spanish granite, I chose to limit my footsteps in Marischal college.

Only to verify the stone did I enter. And there it stood, over the doorway of the inner entrance hall, that stone which gives me a certain ancestral right of hauteur--

Thay half said.

Quhat say thay?

Lat thame say.

Scots are astonis.h.i.+ngly fond of mottoes. They carve them, like Orlando's verse, if not on every tree, on every lintel and over every fireplace; from _Nemo me impune lacessit_ of the royal thistle race, to every clan and every cottage.

King's College (1495) is an older foundation than Marischal (1593), and where once they were rivals, since the Eighteen Sixties they have been harmonized, and since Mr. Carnegie gave them his benefaction, education is free in this University of Aberdeen. King's College, if not the next greatest granite pile, has a stone cross, which is the typical capping of n.o.ble edifice in Scotland; in truth it begins at Newcastle on Tyne when one enters the English beginning of the Border.

The cathedral of St. Machar's, first founded by the saint who was a disciple of Columba, was refounded by the saint who was David I--of course; what a busy saint this was--and looks the part of age, but of strength rather than arrogance, with its low lying towers.

There is an old town even in the new town, and the contrast is sharp. If one gets lost, turns suddenly into this old part, it is a curious experience. The buildings look medieval, French provincial, and the people look strange and foreign; also they treat you, a foreigner, with all that curiosity, and something of that disrespect which you, of course, deserve, having interloped into their sanctuary. The Duke of c.u.mberland lived here for six weeks before advancing on Culloden, and while he did not "butcher" here to deserve his name, his soldiers left as ugly a fame behind them as Montrose's men, what time he made b.l.o.o.d.y a.s.sault on the city.

And in Broad Street may be found the house in which George Gordon, Lord Byron, lived in his school days. In Don Juan, he autobiographically remembers--

"As 'Auld Lang Syne' brings Scotland one and all, Scotch plaids, Scotch snoods, the blue hills, and clear streams The Dee, the Don, Balgownie's Brig's black wall, All my boy feelings, all my gentle dreams Of what I then dreamt, clothed in their own pall Like Banquo's offspring;--floating past me seems My childhood in this childishness of mine: I care not--'tis a glimpse of 'Auld Lang Syne.'"

Aberdeen is a sea city, lying between the mouths of the Dee and the Don.

A bridge, dating from 1320, crosses the Don, and Byron steadfastly avoided it, lest he, a single son, might be found thereon on the single foal of a mare, and the prophecy be filled, the brig fall down.

One day in a small booth off Union Street I stopped to buy strawberries--if you pick up southern England in early May and make Inverness in late August, you can follow red strawberries and red poppies in the wheat all the way from Land's End to John o' Groat's.

I asked the price of the berries and was told. I asked again, and again. Finally, not ears but intuition told me. It was a Scandinavian-Gaelic-English. I remembered that in Edinburgh I had once asked a policeman the way, and hearing his reply I turned to my friend--"Wouldn't you think you were in Minneapolis?" For especially in Aberdeen you are looking to that Norway with which Scotland was so closely linked, as with all the Scandinavian countries, in the early centuries, till the Maid of Norway, granddaughter to Alexander III died on her way to take the crown, and till after Margaret of Denmark brought the Orkneys and the Hebrides to James III as her dowery.

"To Norroway, to Norroway, To Norroway o'er the faem; The King's daughter of Norroway, 'Tis thou maun bring her hame."

And I remember the tragedy of that frustrated journey--

"O forty miles off Aberdeen, 'Tis fifty fathoms deep, And there lies gude Sir Patrick Spens, Wi' the Scots lords at his feet."

Remembering the sea, which I had not yet seen, I tried to make my way down to the sh.o.r.e, but Aberdeen is a sea-port, and docks instead of sh.o.r.e line its sea edge. What I was seeking was rather rocks--

"On the rocks by Aberdeen, Where the whistlin' wave had been As I wandered and at e'en Was eerie--"

And after a visit to the fishmarket, which is a truly marvelous monstrous place, I set out to find the rocks, toward the south.

There is never a place more rock-bound, more broken into fantastic shapes, and worn daily and increasingly by the waves, than this east coast. Neither Biarritz nor Brittany nor Nova Scotia is more broken or more thunderous in resentment. I have not seen the Magellan straits.

One is constantly conscious of fish on this east coast. The railroads form the Great East Fish route. I have been coming up in the night from London and had to hold my breath until we pa.s.sed these swift fish trains which have the right of way to the metropolitan market. A little south of Aberdeen is the village of Findon; whence finnan haddie.

_Dunnottar_

The rocks which were my goal were those just below Stonehaven. At Stonehaven the French had landed supplies for the Forty Five--as from Montrose, a few miles farther down the coast, King James had sailed after the failure of the Fifteen. Fis.h.i.+ng vessels lay idly in the narrow harbour, their tall masts no doubt come "frae Norroway o'er the faem,"

since the trees on the east coast have not increased from that day when Dr. Johnson found the sight of a tree here equal to that of a horse in Venice.

Dunnottar stands on a great crag of this coast, against which the sea has beaten angrily since time and the coast began, against which it moans and whines at low tide, and then, come high tide, rushes thunderously in to see what havoc it can work once more.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DUNNOTTAR CASTLE.]

Dunnottar is impregnable. I cannot believe that sixteen inch guns--is it seventeen, now?--would make impression on this great red crag. I know they would; after Liege and Namur one knows that modern guns can outlaw any impregnability of the past. But I do not believe.

The road from Stonehaven runs for two miles over level country, and then, suddenly, the edge breaks in a sheer cliff.

Across a natural moat of great depth, on a cliff crag, stands the castle. The road picks its way down perilously; only a mule path, and that precipitous. Then it crosses the dry bed where once may have hung a draw bridge, and, entering through a portcullis, it climbs to the castle, through a winding, tortuous way, sometimes a climb, sometimes a flight of steps, sometimes open to the sky but ramped sternly on either side, sometimes through stone canyons; a place impossible to surprise.

Finally you reach the top, the sky.

The top is three acres large.

Far back, no doubt in Culdee times, a church stood there. Because churches must be sanctuary they took the high places; otherwise why should one lift prayer to G.o.d when the mad sea was continually contradicting the faith?