Free The Silver Bough by Neil M. Gunn

visible things into the house for the night. It wouldn’t be dark until after eleven and even then a very deep dusk rather than a true darkness. The half-light, with its glimmer, had always had for him a curious historic reality, as though the world in this quiet hour turned itself into a stage whereon all that had been could once more be, but invisibly now and therefore magically. The word “magic” was as professionally real to him as the word “atom” to a physicist. He knew his learned theories. But, unlike the physicist, he had to translate his concepts in terms of human behaviour. He did not dislike doing this but he had to be very wary in doing it, or they would not permit him, even in method, the use of the word “scientific”.
    The trouble with this half-light was that it made the word “scientific” magical, and as the mood of the twilight grew in its airy and subtle delight, a silent and delicious mockery translated “scientific” into a mumbo-jumbo word, stripped its portentous solemnity from it and left it naked as any totem-pole. Once he had written an essay called “The Heresy of the Twilight”, but feeling that its irony was insufficiently concealed and its wit concealed only too well, he had modestly refrained from offering it for publication.
    From his medley of self-evolving thoughts, he awoke to find himself well away from Clachar, having followed a path which had brought him near the base of the first inland hill. Perhaps the sight of Fachie had unconsciously been heading him towards what that little old man had described as “the robbers’ glen”. He had got some old lore out of Fachie, though most of his talk had been of boyhood happenings, interesting but of no archaeological value. In talking to old inhabitants, one often went through the whole midden without unearthing the smallest of small finds; yet one had to be as patient and attentive as though excavating a real midden. But he had not properly begun on Fachie yet. So far, two points of interest had cropped up. The first referred to an uncouth human figure which haunted the Stone Circle. Mrs Sidbury had said something about this, which, though he joked about it at the time, he had mentally noted. Fachie had not been too willing to talk, apparently because it was “just old blethers”, but he had given the figure a name— Urisk . This hairy monstrous man of popular Gaelic legend lived in the cairn and came out only at night. “Ach, they would believe anything in the old days,” said Fachie, with a side-glance at the learned one beside him. “No one believes it now at all at all. There was a lot of superstition about such things in the old days.”
    â€œPerhaps there is more in superstition than always meets the eye,” Grant had suggested. And the little old man had asked, with the same quick sidelong look, “Do you think so now?”
    It had been an interesting half-hour, cram full at least of primitive psychology! But after all, the important point did emerge, namely, that such a superstition would have inevitably helped to keep the cairn intact. No natives of past generations would ever have had an urge to liberate an urisk! The boldest of them, the warrior who freed maidens from monsters and giants in castles, would merely have put more stones on his cairn to keep him down. They did stranger things to ward off the spirits of the dead.
    But the mention of a robbers’ glen had sent him back to his six-inch Ordnance Map in the hope that he might find thereon some reference to an antiquity. He had, however, found none. “In olden times they do say it was a terrible place for robbers. I remember my old grandfather saying they had a den there. No, no road went through that place, but they hid there, and came out to rob travellers. That was the story.” And it was clear from Fachie’s tone that he felt himself on much firmer ground with