It was the place of deluge. It was in that place of mountains, jungle and six-months-long torrents where the people, at nodal points of the solar or the lunar year, still sustain their stone rites by wreathing pillar and circle. My origin was there, and there I would return, other than in dreams. I would see that country with eyelashes untangled by the tendrils of sleep, hear the forgotten but re-echoing sounds, savour again that smell now only remembered from half-open trunks; savour again the taste, the different touch even of the air. I should be among the wild Nagas of the snake-like name, who might once have been at home in Avebury, the serpent town, with their ivory and spears, feathers and bangles; whose women have all the mates they choose. But how to get there? Oh, for a strong heart, a bloodstream not predisposed to fever, a stomach immune to enteritis, respiration resistant to damp and dust! To be taken there in a clear breath.
I began a Western search for an equivalent. I always maintained that I could remember the captain of the ship who, I believe, used to notice my precocity. He brought me away from home, and I have never returned. I used to describe him as wearing a casque-like helmet of black and gold and carrying a sword at his side, but I was told that this was impossible. After all, what could one remember at a year old?
So it had to be by the sea. I believed in the Gulf Stream, which is supposed to temper the bitterness of this air, bring- ing palms and fuchsias to Western shores. And the sea ought to lie southward; sea to the north puts me off my bearings. I wanted to watch the ships passing at a great distance, seemingly on their way to India, though I know that it does not lie to the west. But before I had learned any geography I sensed the land-locked Baltic to the east and felt that the Oriental route must have a westward starting down the Channel.
The poignancy of Gaelic melodies called to me, their scale identical with that of Peru: I think of
The Willow and
From Door to Door, which might have been heard in the Hebrides. Their common ancestry is Atlantean; Atlantis’s wisdom in their strains, they bring a message not otherwise to be expressed. How they once stabbed me to the heart; before the age of ten how vulnerable the heart is to memories of that foundered country, the ‘land-under-wave’, perfect symbol of the uncon- scious. They call me yet and perhaps more constantly, but now I accept their nostalgia – it is no longer a revelation visiting ‘the bottom of the monstrous world’ but an atmosphere. Oh ages, Oh western clouds! Sea stretches grey between relic-islands – Fastnet, Arran, Inishbofin, Tory and those farther north again, where quiet descends through air that is for ever unbreathed on.
Two huge islands now sunken are the Rockall Bank and, further southward, the Porcupine Bank; the peak of Rockall is all that remains above the water of Hy-Brasil. Sunset behind this keep of the seaboard’s last defence displays fiery cirrus torn for ‘the prince who would seek immortality’.
Where am I, between east and west? A lost soul indeed. Daunted by the length and cost of the journey to the nearest of Gaeldom, I had to find somewhere more accessible that would pander to my latent thrall. (For an animist is what I am; not even a pantheist, though so I pretend when I feel the need for some veneer of urbanity.) I had stayed at Mousehole – whose
name derives from the Cornish words
mo sul, dear sun – once or twice during the war. From thence I had visited Lamorna and was overcome by its leafy, water-loud charm.
Then the Isles of Scilly supervened. Once, on a brief escape from the scolding bombardment and the seamy side of the black- out curtain, I was riding in the airport bus from Penzance to St Just. I could see, far out beyond the landmark of St Buryan tower, beyond the last of the land and the first of the sea, a pale crescent lying in the horizon’s haze. That sandy stretch, white as coral, was the northern strand of St Martin’s Isle, just visible from the mainland on a clear day. It seemed to me like a glimpse of the earthly paradise, and I remembered, ages ago, having a dream of arrival in a tiny boat on just such a shore.
When the war was over, and I could partially escape from my own entangled life, it was to this region, this ‘end of the land’ with its occasional sight of the unattained past, that I was drawn. There is some balsamic quality in the air that never fails to bring healing; after years of blitz I felt that here I could find some humble refuge from the claustrophobic fright of cities. I determined that I would never be so trapped again.
The molecular dance of the particles composing an azure sky are best seen over Penwith’s moors – as once the circu- lation of atoms became visible to me in the nursery-door like dazzling sap that streamed through wood long since dry. Many have remarked on the strange light that bathes this peninsula; they say it is reflected from the seas which almost surround it upon the low-sailing clouds above. The same appearance, but intensified, illuminates the Scillies, but Penwith has shade as well as light. In Lamorna I first saw the falling of dew, and it was at Penberth that the shifting of the landscape-veil first presented itself to my clear sight, disclosing – what? Later I was told that it was in this tiny cove that the remnant of the Atlanteans, escaping from cataclysm, first landed, bringing with them primrose and convolvulus, poppy and furze. Ask one of the fishermen to take you in his boat, and you can pick out, if you look back landward, the plummet-sign with which they sealed the cliffs.
You get more sun here than in Wales or Scotland or Ireland: of eighteen parishes in West Cornwall, twelve have feasts or fairs on dates of ancient sun worship. It is as far south as you can easily get. In summer the gardens of Penzance flaunt the sweet-smelling pink tassels of dracaenas, or dragon trees, and the leaves of the gunnera, a plant imported from South America, spread sometimes to a span of six feet, hiding in sheltered hollows, reddish-toothed stems like a ferocious rhubarb and sticky cones of bloom. Violets are cultivated for market out of doors all winter, and anemones for a good part of it. But it is the clumps of bamboo, smelling of the damp of Eastern fabrics from a trunk just opened, which always make me stand still.
Valley of streams and moon leaves, wet scents and all that cries with the owl’s voice, all that flies with a bat’s wing, peace! Influences, essences, presences, whatever is here – in my name of a stream in a valley I salute you; I share this place with you. Stirrings of life, expanding spores, limbo of germination, for all you give me, I offer thanks. Oh, rooted here without time I bathe in you; genius of the fern-loved gully, do not molest me, and may you remain for ever unmolested.
Copyright © 2025 by Ithell Colquhoun. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
