Free The Silver Bough by Neil M. Gunn Page B

that man’s worship was devious beyond following and vastly more ardent than the mystery of the stones.
    Then, as always in such fluid fancy, a knot formed about the one solitary fact, namely, that the cairn was a great tomb; and instantly, as if his mind were indeed a radioactive substance emitting thoughts of an inconceivable swiftness, he completed the destruction of the world by atomic bombs, saw the cairn of Westminster Abbey and a future race of archaeologists opening it up. The evidence would disclose that this had been a chambered tomb in the Pre-Atomic Age. And to the inevitable idealist who would put forward the theory that something—perhaps an Ancestor—had been worshipped here, a future Simon Grant would tolerantly reply, “Perhaps—who knows?”
    Westminster Abbey and Stonehenge, the Kremlin and the Stone Circle in Clachar. Up swooped his thought upon its metaphysical air and he comprehended in a flash that idealist and materialist were both right, that they separated in order to gather their strength to come together in higher fusion; to separate and come together again. And then, induced like the flash between positive and negative, his thought apprehended that they were never really separated, that the famous dialectical process was merely another of man’s illusions, helpful as crutches or Euclidean figures were helpful but essentially an illusion; much as the physicists, long contending between their theories of waves and particles, were now accepting the notion that waves and particles were but different aspects of the same thing.
    He gave an involuntary shiver, for he had been heated in his climb and an air came coolly from the sea. Swivelling round for a last look at the Robbers’ Glen, he was stilled on his supporting palms.
    A man was walking down there who had come from nowhere.
    Shocked beyond thought he lowered himself to the heather. The figure was too solid for an apparition, yet had all the solitariness of one. He watched him for quite a time, just watched him, fascinated. The man continued in his purposeful way down the glen.
    During the few minutes he had been fancifully contemplating the west, the man could not conceivably have come from the mountain and down the glen to where he now was. The place had been empty, and lo! there the fellow was with a small bundle over his back, held by one hand, walking away down below by the side of the stream.
    He must have been sitting down resting. But the thought was not convincing. He did not move like a figure that had been resting. Besides, he never looked up, and Grant had been striding about on the skyline.
    When he had passed by him, Grant crawled forward a little. His long sight was good, but he now made a small funnel of his fist and peered through it with his right eye, and at once the movement of the figure was vaguely familiar.
    It’s Martin! he thought.
    There could be no certainty, because the distance was long and the light beginning to go, but all the same he was quite certain. He followed the figure until it dwindled at the glen mouth and turned away out of sight by the Clachar burn. It was a very roundabout way of going home to Clachar House!
    For a long time he wondered; then feeling like a spy who must not be seen, he retreated down the hillside to his lodging.

Chapter Nine
    I
t was Tuesday, blue-skied, and Simon Grant was enjoying himself with the earnestness which time leaves alone. He had his reflex camera, with large focusing-screen, whose reactions were known to him intimately, naked or in filter, together with its head-like movements on the universal joint of its telescopic tripod, and he called it, with obscure but pleasurable irony, his innocent eye. Before its pictures, the scientific critics bowed down. His prismatic compass, which he could carry before him as a deacon his church-offering, gave him his ground angles, and his Abney clinometer his vertical angles. He had his linen measuring