Landmarks (8 page)

One hears it without listening as one breathes without thinking. But to a listening ear the sound disintegrates into many different notes – the slow slap of a loch, the high clear trill of a rivulet, the roar of spate. On one short stretch of burn the ear may distinguish a dozen different notes at once.

That morning we searched in the mist for the Wells of Dee, the springs that mark the river’s true birthplace. We began at the plateau rim, and from there we followed it back uphill, always taking the larger branch where the stream forked. At last we reached a point where the water rose from within the rock itself. Shepherd had also made this
‘journey to the source
’, and confronted matter in its purest form:

Water, that strong white stuff, one of the four elemental mysteries, can here be seen at its origins. Like all profound mysteries, it is so simple that it frightens me. It wells from the rock, and flows away. For unnumbered years it has welled from the rock, and flowed away.

This proof of the mountain’s mindlessness was to Shepherd both thrilling and terrifying. The Cairngorms exceeded human comprehension: what she called the
‘total mountain
’ could never totally be known. Yet if approached without expectation, the massif offered remarkable glimpses into its ‘being’.

Walking under Shepherd’s influence, led by her language, I had enjoyed an astonishing time of gifts. The eagle, the geese, the blue-gold loch, the parhelion, the mists, the springs, those few days
in the hills had compressed into them a year’s worth of marvels – and each had its precedent in
The Living Mountain
. The fortuity of it all was acute, approaching the eerie. It was as if we had walked
into
the pages of Nan’s book, though of course her book had emerged out of the Cairngorms themselves, so we were merely completing that circuit of word and world.