myself up the mountain, but I made it to the cave. There were dolphins in the blue on the way out and behind us the cube of the Iona church rock-steady on the sealine. And the waves poured in, no music to my ears, only the onomatopoeiac sham of words trying to capture something unsayable, Jack’s scribblings at Big Sur, Debussy and his beautiful sounds still missing the note. There’s no mind-born facsimile for waves on basalt. But in the reaching there’s something just as precious, moreso as it’s born from our yearnings, imaginings, the still-unknown sparkings and secret worlds set between human ears. The passengers gasped and gaped, thrown about on the swell, in wonder for Staffa and wonder too for their own journeys and driftings that had brought them here, to the quiet island of the church and the edges of the old western world. A clear-skied, glorious day.
