Free Black Marsden by Wilson Harris

in blood
Nor yet in breaking human bones,
For Quixot-like they knock down stones.
Regardless they the mattock ply
To root out Scots antiquity.
     
    He struck away from the water’s edge now along West Granton Road, past a Ministry of Labour Training Centre and the Granton Gas Works, and towards the playing fields which bordered Silverknowes Road.
    Every time he came this way he delighted afresh in the open sky which sometimes appeared to him to knit itself into everything —into grey brick and green tree and into an everchanging mirror of space and water (where the city ran to meet the sea) as the days lengthened towards the summer solstice and the nights shortened into unpredictable spray of stars, veiled or unveiled galaxies.
    Was it, Goodrich wondered, because of that texture of sky that Edinburgh was regarded as a masculine city? Was it that open sky which accentuated the vertically of every spire or monument raised by man or nature?
    He made his way now along Silverknowes Road back to the water’s edge and dawdled along the foreshore to Cramond. The blue, green waves curled into animated frescoes of memory that seemed to reach towards Harp’s horizons and lakes across the Atlantic: to reach also farther south into the South Americas—South American savannahs pasted upon the globe like an abstract realm within fiery longitudes.
    He recalled the sky-line of Edinburgh which he had seen for the first time, he believed, from the vicinity of the disused quarry of Craigleith. It had been a clear day like this and upon the slate of time one could see spires, the hunched back of Arthur’s Seat and the Castle.
    He recalled also a view of the Lawnmarket from the roof of St. Giles Cathedral and the rock ridge with its pattern of the Old Town accentuated against the sea of the sky.
    All these vistas seemed to curl and uncurl now into ebbing and flowing waves or tides. The sea of the sky reached everywhere, spires and rocks seemed equally fraught with energies that shot upwards but witnessed to an inherent spatial design, geology of psyche.
    He was so immersed in the depth of the present and the recollections of the past that he stumbled into a tiny rivulet running to the sea. A soaked page of newspaper lay on the ground with glaring headlines on sewage pollution beyond Cramond. Beyond Cramond ,thought Goodrich. Not far from here. It seemed incredible. Near and yet far in an abstract haze of sun, rain and cloud mingling far away all of a sudden. A blissful paradox sealed his senses at that moment, an inner peace almost despite ominous headlines; he was lost again in contemplating distances. In contemplating the engineering marvel of the Firth of Forth Bridge which arched into the sky and across frescoes of water.
    *
    Goodrich arrived at last at Cramond and ascended the steps from the foreshore into the ordered village with its exquisite houses laid out like a child’s beautiful overgrown toys in which it seemed a marvel that flesh-and-blood lived. He passed the ancient church on the site of a Roman settlement before coming to a bus stop.
    Then the scene changed as the bus bore him out of the village passing a row of rather uniform-looking cottages on the right hand, open grounds on the left, into a great sweeping stretch of countryside dotted with occasional formal gardens and individual houses followed by a golf course and open lands running up to Lauriston Castle. Now he was back in Edinburgh proper, driving through rows of neat houses and shops; along Queensferry Road, through Blackhall to Dean Bridge where he alighted from the bus.
    Staring after the back of the bus which quickly vanished over the bridge Goodrich thought of the driver’s licence he possessed which had lapsed many years ago; later—though he had come into a lot of money—he was still apathetic about owning a car. He was a great walker; sometimes he would walk many miles, hop upon a bus, get off and walk again, savour every patch of wall or field or sky.