Landlines

Water falls from the mountain with such force that it creates its own wind, driving noise and vapour upwards, until my clothes hang wet from the spray and I’m deafened by the cascading roar echoing back from the hillside. My boot slips on the damp rock, shifting the weight of the rucksack on my back and I skid towards the chasm below. Grasping a boulder ahead of me I stop my fall, but a landslide of stone hurtles down the near vertical wall of dripping vegetation, disappearing into the depths of the gorge. I cling to the rock and shiver, gripped by electric shocks of fear running through my body. Yet, just for a moment, as I look up, I can see another world: a world of blue sky, where a hooded crow glides silently beneath slow-moving clouds.

I breathe, inhaling the green dampness, and wish for wings. Wings, ropes, anything to give us safe passage out of the Falls of Glomach. It takes an almost physical e­ffort to turn my thoughts away from one of the highest waterfalls in Britain and the depth of the gully it carves through the earth, but as my view follows the narrow path upwards among the boulders, fear for myself is replaced by fear for Moth.

‘All right up there?’ I call up to him, hoping he can hear me above the roar of the water.

‘No. No, I can’t do this, I need to go down. You? Are you okay?’

I glance back down towards the water and disaster waiting for the slip of a foot. ‘Yeah, I’m fine, coming up to you now.’

I scramble up the rough broken rock, over steps that are so high I’m on my hands and knees by the time I reach Moth. He’s pressed sideways against the wall of the gully that rises away from us at an eighty-degree angle, as close as he can get with the rucksack on his back, his feet filling the width of the path that cuts into the fall of the hillside.

‘I can’t go on.’

I stand up close behind him, nowhere else to go. ‘We can’t go back.’

Walking the Cape Wrath Trail through the north of Scotland had seemed achievable as we planned the trip in the warmth of a Cornish spring, when the sun was shining and the apple blossom about to break. We’d been almost magnetically drawn to this rare place; a land of remote mountains rich with wildlife, a place of beauty and solitude. We knew it wouldn’t be an easy trail to navigate, with no signposts or quick ways out, but that was part of the challenge. The moments of awe and wild drama we’d already witnessed had made every long day and hard-to-find path worthwhile. But now, clinging to the side of this ravine, so immersed in nature that the smell of brackish water lingers on my skin and in my breath, those days of planning in Cornwall feel as though they happened in another life. All I can focus on now is the way out. And Moth, whose life-threatening illness hasn’t abated. Despite all my hopes and the miles we’ve already walked, he’s still finding it hard to put his rucksack on, says he’s forgotten how to read a map and now has developed a seemingly paralysing sense of vertigo.

‘I think I’m going to be sick.’ Moth’s face is grey as he looks back to me, while still clinging to an outcrop of bilberry.

‘No you’re not. Don’t think about it, just keep your eyes fixed on the path and keep going. You have to keep going.’

I’m weak with relief as the path levels to a rocky plateau and a plunge pool of calm water. Moth drops his rucksack and fear-soaked clothes and jumps in.

‘Come in, it’s okay now, we’re nearly there.’

We’re a long way from ‘nearly there’; the path winds higher and higher, until it almost disappears into a crevice of rock. I can’t see any way out of this. I watch him swimming, his thin white body naked in the dark water, his vertigo soothed by the coolness, and I relax for a moment too, feeling the adrenaline fading away but being replaced by exhaustion. What if we never get out of this? My thoughts wander to visions of us camped by the plunge pool indefinitely, surviving on food parcels left by passing hikers. But as I turn to share the prospect with Moth he’s already dressed and lifting his rucksack. We climb away from the pool on a slope of wet slippery grass, so steep that when I reach out my hands they’re almost on the earth in front of me. Dragging my post- adrenaline legs upwards, I’m beginning to despair; I’ve barely enough strength left to get out of this terrifying place. So focused on each step I don’t see him pass me, don’t see him step up the boulder that’s too high for me and I can’t climb. I just see his hand reaching down and pulling me up.

The path widens, but only for a moment. From here I can see it becomes steeper, narrower and more exposed, as it winds up to the head of the waterfall and the way out.

‘Just don’t look down. If we spot a way out of this before the waterfall we’ll take it.’

I let go of his hand and follow, my eyes on his feet. In the crevice, water runs down through gentler sloping grass before falling over stones to the base of the waterfall, nearly a hundred metres below. My legs have almost stopped responding and all I want is to sleep, but I follow him through water running over slippery grass. Each step up he takes I follow, his hand always there on the hardest parts. And then, finally, the fading blue sky of a Highland evening. I lie on a boulder warmed by the sun with no roar of water, no falling stones, just the hooded crow circling overhead.

We pitch the tent on flat ground among heather and bog-grass, high on a Scottish hillside, and I collapse inside. The mountains of the remote Highlands stretch out in shades of blue on every side, tall rock crags still picking up the pink and peach of twilight, framing Moth in the glow as he makes tea on the small gas stove, reading the map by its flickering light.

‘It’s downhill all the way tomorrow, I think it could be an easier day.’

Hope rises in the evening dew and takes flight with a thousand crane flies into the soft air.