The Ship of the Dead
Sur le Raz de Sein, au crépuscule, appara?t parfois un bateau qui navigue sans sillage toutes voiles dehors contre vents et marées.
Sometimes at dusk, between the mainland and the island of Sein, a boat appears that leaves no wake, its sails all unfurled, indifferent to wind or tide.
brETON LEGEND
Although the night was dark – no moon and the sky obscured by cloud – I was able to follow the pale pathway worn by generations of feet in the cliff top. The crash of the waves on rocks and the suck of the tide on shingle far below kept me on course.
The land rose and I followed the track, the flint and chalk faint but unmistakable in the turf. I had walked further than I had intended and I was weary, but at last I reached the summit of the headland and looked out over what I knew to be the ocean. Nothing between me and the Americas.
I sat on a well situated boulder and contemplated my solitude, regretting I was walking alone.
I was not – have never been – a clubbable sort.
All the same, I enjoyed the pleasure of the right sort of companion.
On this occasion, not one of my acquaintances had been available to undertake a walking tour of the Finistère coastline – for me, a return to the happy landscape of my childhood – so I had been obliged to travel alone.
I took out my tobacco pouch alone and smoked a pipe.
It is said that tobacco deters insects and that may be true in some climates and latitudes.
But here, on the Atlantic coast of Brittany, it had the opposite effect.
I was soon beset by a cloud of hovering midges, many of them bloodthirsty, all of them irritating and oppressive.
It quite spoiled my mood of contemplation.
I knocked out my pipe on the stone, stood up, adjusted my rucksack onto my shoulders, set my grip firm around my stick of hazel, and moved on.
The descent was no easier than the climb. The path was slippery beneath my boots – not from moisture, but from the small stones and gravel that I sent skittering down the steep slope ahead of me with every tread.
Just then, a pale moon was revealed by a rent in the clouds and I saw I was now walking along the edge of a field, lined with a drystone wall separating me from a substantial drop to a distant beach frilled with foam from the breaking waves.
Wondering how deep might be the drop, I picked a stone and threw it as far as I could out into the night.
I was able to count full to twelve before I heard a faint click.
I have never suffered from a fear of heights nor am I usually prone to flights of fancy, but it seemed to me that a breeze sprang up all at once, a plaintive sound, deliberate and demanding, like a vexed child, provoking in my imagination the idea that I had transgressed by hurling the pebble.
That its proper place was among its fellows in the wall, no doubt erected to prevent grazing animals from falling to their deaths.
The idea caused me to shiver. All at once, I was keen to be off the cliff-top path and installed in some boarding house or shelter for the night.
At the bottom of the dip was a fingerpost indicating routes in three different directions: one indicating the way I had come, the second a pathway that led inland, and the third, a continuation of the cliff-top path.
I suppose that had I taken the route away from the sea, I would have found shelter of some kind, if only a bothy for sheep or goats, but I was inclined to follow the wall and see where it would take me.
The land was rising again, though less steeply, and at the next crest I was gratified to see lights in the distance.
The wind grew stronger still as I trudged down the long descent towards the village.
The ragged curtain of cloud drew back revealing the stars, allowing my tired eyes to perceive more of the landscape.
Something about the play of darkness and sea tides and moonshine imbued everything with a dusty, earthy pallor.
Rather than a rich blue in the firmament and grey and charcoal and black of shadows on the land, this part of the world seemed to be clothed in the rough habit of a Franciscan monk.
I focused on the lights of the village and quickened my step.
Soon enough I realised I had made a mistake taking this path.
It was the hardest walking I had yet undertaken.
The village was down on the beach, by my reckoning some one hundred feet below the cliff path.
There was a precarious stairway, cut roughly into the escarpment, the steps lined with a mixture of timber and, here and there, flat stones.
Even so, I wondered whether the risk was worth the potential reward – a warm bed under cover.
But the memory of the strange wailing of the wind persuaded me.
I did not want to pass the night on the exposed path on the cliffs.
I began to descend, one awkward step at a time, my hands grasping at tussocks of wiry, salt-loving grass.
Halfway down I rested for a moment on a kind of ledge.
The tide was out and the beach an enormous pale crescent of perfect smooth sand, glistening in the starlight.
Below, at the foot of the stair, were the unmistakable hulks of fishing boats drawn up on to higher ground to keep them out of the water and it entered my mind that, should there be no welcome for me in the village, I might shelter well enough beneath one of these until morning.
Finally, I reached the easier terrain. Rough grass bordered the sand. Away to the left, on the south side of the bay, I counted thirteen lights in the cluster of indistinct shapes that were all I could make out of the low houses.
I walked a curved path around the edge of the beach and was within twenty yards or so of the first of the buildings when a vague movement of shadow upon darkness caused me to stop.
I cannot say why my hand went to my chest or why I held my breath – why shouldn’t someone be there at the fringe of the sand?
He had, no doubt, more right than I to be there.
Gathering my wits, I realised it was only the form of a man, kneeling low to the ground, tending to a sheep.
The animal was lying badly and I surmised it must have fallen from the cliff.
They do say that sheep, of all creatures, seek death.
Disturbed by my presence, the man lifted his head.
I saw that he was gaunt and that his eyes were black.
I was about to speak – I know a few words of the local dialect – when the animal let out a pitiful screech.
My few words of Breton deserted me and, stupidly, I heard myself speaking to the man instead in French. Asking if I could be of assistance. He paid me no more attention than the rocks pay to the tide.
Paralysed in some kind of embarrassment and horror, I watched him remove his coat and wrap it around the animal’s muzzle and lean the full weight of his body on its flank.
I glanced up, abruptly aware of the oddity of the scene.
There was no one else about, but when I looked to the village, I saw a rectangle of light open up in one of the dark low houses and the silhouette of a man appear in the doorway.
He called out, something I could not hear, and my man called out in reply.
I recognised the word for ‘dead’.
The door slammed shut and I don’t know why, but it seemed the action of shutting out the night was hurried, as if to place a barrier between the inhabitants of the house and some danger.
The sheep twitched for a final time. The man murmured reassuring words that I could not distinguish or understand, all the time gently patting and stroking at the animal’s thin shoulder and flank.
Escorting the animal to its death.
Feeling it would be, somehow, bad manners to leave, I waited. The wind that had felt so brisk at the top of the cliffs now seemed little more than a whisper.
Finally, both the man and the creature were still.
I introduced myself once again and, this time, he acknowledged me with a few words in the local dialect, one of which I recognised as the Breton for ‘stranger’.
I gave him my well-rehearsed paragraph of introduction – that I was walking the coast for the purposes of preparing to write a memoir in honour of my late grandfather who had grown up in the region and whose first language was now spoken by a diminishing brotherhood of isolated fishing villages.
He listened politely, though without sign of particular interest. I pressed on.
‘So I would be grateful for somewhere to stay the night, a bed or a chair – even a dry floor.’
He nodded slowly, unwrapped his leather coat from around the muzzle of the sheep and put it back on, pushing his arms into its heavy sleeves.
With strong hands he took hold of the animal’s hooves and lifted it from the ground, hooking it up onto his shoulders.
Then, without speaking, he turned and set off towards the village.
His behaviour seemed to indicate I should follow him.
We passed between the houses in silence, the gaunt man treading steadily ahead of me.
Here and there our feet crunched on shingle, but we were otherwise silent upon the sand and hardy grass.
All the doors were closed, although one or two windows remained open.
Smoke rose from several of the chimneys, despite the relative warmth of the evening.
In the centre of the village was a small open space with what looked like a shrine. An orange glow from an unshuttered window cast an ugly gleam across a stone effigy of some saint, no doubt reputed to bring good fortune to all those who trade and fish upon the sea.