Atlantic Britain by Adam Nicolson Read Free Book Online Page B

see him. And they, when they saw him, wondered at the sight, for he had the same habit of body as before, and was neither fat, like a man without exercise, nor lean from fasting and striving with the demons; he was just the same as they had known him before his retirement. And again his soul was free from blemish, for it was neither contracted as if by grief, nor relaxed by pleasure, nor possessed by laughter or dejection, for he was not troubled when he beheld the crowd, nor overjoyed at being saluted by so many. But he was altogether guided by reason, and abiding in a natural state.
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    This beautiful emergence from incarceration, so reminiscent of Nelson Mandela’s slow, smiling walk from his imprisonment on Robben Island, is what, in retrospect, I imagine the quality of mind and soul of the monks on this Atlantic rock to have been. They had seen the best and the worst and had emerged whole.
    It is impossible to come this far into the heart of Atlantic spirituality and not go the final step. Claire and I found Harry taking photographs at Christ’s Saddle. She is frightened by heights and so would not come with us along the rough path the other way, to the western peak, the highest point of Skellig, 715 feet above the sea. In this most symbolic of places, that western peak represents Skellig’s other term: not social but passionately singular, not communal but eremitic, an exercise not in domination but submission, not a denial of nature but a subjection to it, the loneliest and most entrancing place I have ever been.
    After a few yards, the path is not heavily worn. Few tourists seem to go that way. It soon became obvious why. The path becomes a shaly rock-cut ledge about a foot or ten inches wide. Below, the cliff drops five hundred feet or so to the agitated sea. Above, the cliff, when you are not used to it, has a habit of pushingyour body out, as if it is bulging, pregnant. Every rock is animated here. Panic comes stealing up from your boots on these ledges, a fear that rises and has to be slowly wooed and seduced into calming down and subsiding like the sea.
    Then Harry and I found we had gone too far, into some ancient rock-cut cul-de-sac, perhaps a path on which the monks had picked their way to catch the fulmars that were still peering at us around every corner. Back, gingerly, to a point where a clear succession of rock-cut foot- and hand-holds stepped up the cliff for us. In none of them was the stone worn or polished like the public way up to the monastery. English stonecrop, buttons of thrift, and the long green hair of the lichen grew on their treads as well as the risers, the lines of the stone still sharp after ten, perhaps even thirteen centuries.
    We climbed. All around, the world was only vertical, dropping five or six hundred feet straight below us into the incredible brightness of the western sea. The
Auk
rocked far away, as if in a cradle, in the nine-foot swell. Up here, everything stood still. A puffin turned to me at one point and the wind behind him just lifted the feathers of his cheek as if it were ahat at Ascot. A section of the stair involved squeezing crab-like up a chimney in whose walls the steps had been cut. None of it was difficult if you forgot the height. Instead, I felt, these steps, so laboriously cut, forming so intimate a connection with the distant past - they were clearly made by a man not as tall as me, the reach between them shorter than I needed - were an act of generosity. A man we could never know was showing me and Harry the way to his summit hermitage. An immense quantity of work had been done here, perhaps over generations, by one hermit after another, a restless and relentless improving of Skellig, making the physical metaphysical, making an island’s holiness both explicit and accessible.
    We reached a terrace that was man-made. A dry-stone retaining wall had somehow been engineered to stand up from a near-vertical rock slope and the resulting wedge of