Free The Realms of Gold by Margaret Drabble Page A

was rather keen to have a closer look at his rocks.
    Meanwhile, he leafed aimlessly through an old copy of the
Guardian
, and thought about the Tassili rock paintings. They had been impressive, and he liked the thought that the Sahara had been thoroughly inhabited so long ago. Though he was himself, in the course of work, constantly setting off for uninhabited places, he was no conservationist: his aim was after all the exploitation and not the preservation of the world’s resources. The stuff was there to be got, and man was merely another agent of change, like wind, or water, or earthquakes. Ridiculous, to look at it in any other way.
    Here, in the
Guardian
, as usual, was another crappy conservationist article about the way of life in the Shetlands, and its threat from North Sea oil. There was a quaint ill-printed picture of an old lady clutching a shawl round her head, and a lot of nonsense by a female journalist about dying customs and mainland mentality. The female journalist had of course travelled up from London and no doubt had sampled the local customs for all of three or four days. It amazed him, the way in which people these days seemed to admire the primitive. If they admired it so much, why didn’t they go off like himself and try it? There were still plenty of extraordinarily uncomfortable places left in the world, and he had been to many of them. He was a useful geologist: the company he worked for made good use of his liking for unpleasant places.
    He read on, of the possibility of striking oil near Rockall, near the Hebrides: it was by no means as unlikely a discovery as it would once have seemed. Gold in the Sahara, oil at Rockall. David Ollerenshaw, perhaps understandably, held the minority view, that the earth’s resources are more or less illimitable, and also self-renewing: as yet man, in the shape of men very much like himself, had simply wandered around picking up lumps as they lay scattered on, or very near, the earth’s crust, lumps of coal, lumps of iron, of tin, of copper, gathered as unscientifically as Elgin (he was thinking of Frances Wingate) had gathered the marble of Athens. It was only recently that the intellect had been engaged at all in such searches.
    And yet. He stared at the photograph of the old lady. Perhaps, after all, he would be rather put out if the North West Highlands were to be transformed by oil rigs and property speculators. He remembered the first time that he had been there, alone, as a young man, for a holiday, in a summer so splendid that it had become legendary. He had taken his motor bike, had slept in bed-and-breakfast places, eating too much bacon and eggs, chipping bits of rock and measuring angles of strike, discovering outcrops, tracing faults, examining crystals, awestruck by the predominance of water, by the sudden lowering loaves of Torridonian sandstone, by the pink sands of Mull and the white sands of Sutherland; and finally, ending up late one night in the dark middle of nowhere, he had taken a winding path down to the sea between lochs and mountains, hoping to find a small village or a hamlet with a bed to let (the Ordnance Survey map marked a cluster of cottages), and had nearly turned back, but in the end reached the sea, in a deep sudden inlet, and there at the land’s end stood four cottages, and one of them had a sign out. Bed and Breakfast. In the morning, when he looked out of the bedroom window, there was the sea, right beneath him: he could see into the depths of clear and rocky water, he could see each limpet, each barnacle, each anemone, pink stone, blue stone, grey stone, and silvery crystalline crevasses. And looking up, there was the sea, an enormously high horizon, welling up above him.
    Hurried, he struggled into his clothes, and out through the garden where his motor bike stood amongst chickens and lobster pots: he struggled through a profusion of flowers, purple, yellow, blue, green, growing in a dense and lush long