Nan Shepherd, The living mountain-
The midsummer sun has drawn up the moisture from the earth, so that for part of the way I walked in cloud, but now the last tendril had dissolved into the air and there is nothing in all the sky but light.
As I stand there in the silence, I become aware that the silence is not complete. Water is speaking. I go towards it, and almost at once the view is lost: for the plateau has its own hollows, and this one slopes widely down to one of the great inward fissures, the Garbh Coire.
The immense leaf that it drains is bare , surfaced with stones, gravel, sometimes sand, and in places moss and grass grow on it. Here and there in the moss a few white stones have been piled together. I go to them, and water is welling up, strong and copious, pure cold water that flows away in rivulets and drops over the rock. (p.22-23)
On the other side of the watershed, towards the Spey, this havoc of boulders seems quite dry. One is surprised when suddenly a piece of running stream appears in the bottom, but it is soon swallowed again(p.24).
Sometimes the Quoich waterfalls have violet playing through the green, and the pouring water spouts and bubbles in a violet froth (p.25).
The sound of all this moving water is as integral to the mountain as pollen to the flower. One hears it without listening as one breathes without thinking. But to a listening ear the sound disintegrates into many different notes- the slow slap of Loch, the high clear trill of a rivulet the roar of spate. On one short stretch of burn the ear may distinguish a dozen different notes at once.(p.26).
When I was a child, I loved to hold my fingers over the tap at full cock and press with all my puny strength until the waterdefeated me and spurted over my newly-laundered frock. Sometimes I have had an insane impulse to hold back with my fingers amountain spring. Absurd and futile gesture! The water is too much for me (p.28).
“Walking thus, hour after hour, the senses keyed, one walks the flesh transparent. But no metaphor, transparent, or light as air, is adequate. The body is not made negligible, but paramount. Flesh is not annihilated but fulfilled. One is not bodiless, but essential body.”
“This is the river. Water, that strong white stuff, one of the four elemental mysteries, can here be seen at its origins. Like all profound mysteries, it is so simple that it frightens me. It wells from the rock, and flows away. For unnumbered years it has welled from the rock, and flowed away. It does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself.”
“For the most appalling quality of water is its strength. I love its flash and gleam, its music, its pliancy and grace, its slap against my body; but I fear its strength. I fear it as my ancestors must have feared the natural forces that they worshipped. All the mysteries are in its movement. It slips out of holes in the earth like the ancient snake. I have seen its birth; and the more I gaze at that sure and in remitting surge of water at the very top of the mountain, the more I am baffled. We make it all so easy, any child in school can understand it – water rises in the hills, it flows and finds its own level, and man can’t live without it. But I don’t understand it. I cannot fathom its power.”
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