here you were born, and
rest, and get strength.... This is a deep thing.... Alan knew
something.... The rain and the mist and the wind among the rushes had
taught him natural secrets.... Maybe from the ground man drew strength,
and maybe strange ground was alien to other than its own ... a
motherland--why did they call a place a motherland ...? Antaeus, the
Libyan wrestler, was invincible so long as his feet were on mother
earth, and Heracles had lifted him into the air and the air had crushed
him.... What did the Greek parable mean ...? It meant something ... the
purple hills ... the purple heather.... The Moyle purple in the setting
sun....

"I'll go back," he decided. Scots superstition welled up in him. "A man
seeing death sees more than death. Sees life. The Keepers of the Door
maybe anoint his eyes, and if he looks back for an instant, God knows
what he sees ... I'll go."

"Can I give you a lift back to Ballycastle, Simon Fraser? Or a lift
anywhere you want. It's the least I can do and you coming this long way
to tell me news."

"I'm very thankful to you, Shane Campbell, very thankful indeed. It's
just the way of you to ask a poor sailor man does he want a lift halfway
across the world. But I'll never again see Ballycastle with living
eyes."

"And why not, man Simon?"

"It's this way, Shane Campbell. It's this way. When I came back after
six years--four years lost on the coast of Borneo--my three fine sons
were gone--twenty and nineteen and seventeen they were. Gone they were
following the trade of the sea. And herself the woman of the house was
gone, too. I didn't mind the childer, for 't is the way of the young to
be roving. But herself went off with another man. A great gift of making
a home she had, so there was many would have her, in spite of her forty
year. Into the dim City of Glasgow she went, and there was no word of
her. And she might have waited, Shane Campbell; she might so. Four years
lost on the coast of Borneo to come and find your childer scattered, and
your wife putting shame on you. That's a hard thing."

"You're a young man, Simon Fraser. You're as young as I am, forty-two.
There's a quarter-century ahead of you. Put the past by and begin again.
There'd be love at many a young woman for you. And a house, and new
bairns."

"I'm a back-thinking man, Alan's kinsman, a long back-thinking man. And
I'd always be putting the new beside the old and the new would not seem
good to me. The new b