The Silent Goddess

“…from the darkness there came a low sweet sound; thrilling joyous, thrillingly low; so low the ear could scarcely note it, so sweet the ear wished to catch nothing else and would strive to hear it rather than all sounds that may be heard by man; the music of another world!”

 

James Stephens

 

In the darkness of a December night, the Silent Goddess was laying her white cloak across the land. I laid awake in bed, watching the flakes of snow fall thickly on the other side of the window. Each blob of whiteness bobbed and weaved its own way down through the air, undulating through the glow of a street lamp. I returned to sleep, and the Goddess continued at her work.

In the morning we set off into the white woods by ski. The fresh snow was glued to every branch and twig for mile upon white mile. Whin bushes, taller than myself, lay prostrate and buried under a great burden of snow. Young birch trees were bent double by it, their sprays brushing on the ground and forming arches under which we passed. On every stump, nubbin and post, every ledge and crevice large enough to hold so much as a penny, were folded chef’s hats of snow. Every tree was a mold for its plaster double – a white streak of lightning upended and stuck in the ground.

The birch woods had been transformed. Branches under great weights of snow lay in different positions to normal, and so every line of sight to which I was accustomed had been altered. Here was a place where the path twisted between some young birches, which was now a tunnel. There, a white view down a corridor of space newly opened – an avenue of snowy delicacy. It seemed like a completely new wood.

We went forward into it, seeking wonders, sliding over buried moss and roots to the sough and sigh of our skis. The snow betrayed my usual habit of passing through the wood in near silence – every variation of movement across snow has its own telltale sound. The sliding of the ski was a finger running down a page; a step in fresh powder the soft creak of wood; a step upon old refrozen snow is a hollow crunch, and so intensely delightful that I would walk for miles just for the pleasure of listening to my own feet.

We were not the only ones to have our presence revealed by the snow. Every creature that touches it leaves a mark in the form of tracks, and there in plain sight were the lives of the wildlife written out for all to see. Each one had its own distinct print and pattern of steps. I could not help but read their marks like musical notes written out on a white sheet – little melodies of life running through the forest. The prints of a rabbit are like part of a musical scale – doh ray me ray, doh ray me ray, doh ray me ray, doh ray me ray. Then we found the punctuated marks of a squirrel hopping over open ground, front feet, back feet, front feet, back feet – da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM. 

 

We skied through a blank canvas of white. Ahead of us, and all around, the white sculpted trees stretched out into the distance. In any wood the further you look the less you can see, for the trees thicken and thicken, sight is closed off, and you are faced on all sides by a seemingly impenetrable barrier. As you move ahead, however, it eases open, showing you the way forward, and the barrier retreats. But it also follows behind you, silently following in your steps, and is a constant presence on both sides.

A while further on, though, the path and our sight opened up suddenly. We emerged from the density of tunneled branches and white walls that brushed us with snow, into a nave of space that drew our eyes into its distant vanishing point. In this part of the wood the sun was just breaking through the grey clouds, and we could look up to the brighter whiteness of the sky. The tops of the birch trees pointed white fingers up into the emerging blue, grasping at the warm sunlight that flooded down their white clad branches. Each one was so clear in its pattern; branching down and down and down into finer and finer detail.

 

Here and there along the path was a wider gap between the trees, allowing a rare shaft of sunlight to penetrate right to the snowy floor, or to catch itself on dangling chandelier sprays where it shone with light. The sunshine began to warm the world, and so every once in a while a branch would let go its load of snow without warning. Sometimes this would happen just as you were passing under the tree, and so you would feel its white touch in the back of your neck. But other times the branch would let go its burden just above a shaft of sunlight, releasing a silver curtain of sparkling crystals across the background of shadows. For a moment a ghost like avatar of the Silent Goddess herself would seem to appear before you in the air. Then she would fade, only to appear a few yards further on, beckoning. Come and see.

Our skis carried us effortlessly down a slight incline, flowing through the forest of snow. The sunlight flickered on our faces as we passed the shadow of every tree. We broke out of the trees into an open field where the sunlight washed across the ground, dazzlingly bright, and down into a slight hollow. There we stopped to take in our first proper sight of the land, the views expansive around us. The morning was wearing, and the sun was sailing through a pink sky, streaked with white stripes, patches of blue, and the dark grey of high clouds as a front approached from the northwest. The forest lay around us like a white palace with hanging fronds and branches detailed by the thin lines of black which indicated the real wood of branch and trunk. The footslopes of the Monadh Liath tumbled down toward us on one side, decorated with an air of white cloud drifting among their slanting woods. On the other side, magnificent in the distance, were the Cairngorms.

The mountains blazed in the morning sunlight, free of all cloud, devoid of any blemish or smudge upon their alabaster majesty. Soaring above the snowy strath, the elegant peaks were the unquestioned throne of the Silent Goddess and her court. Who could begrudge them that? So often their beauty was portrayed in subtlety – a flash of sun, a peeking out from behind a curtain or a secret to be found up in the high hills. Not today. Today they stood in their total glory.

I fancied then that I could half hear some secret music of the Cairngorms, as if the voice of some ultimate choir came from them, yet was itself impossible to directly hear. It was not the first time I felt this. Many are the days I stood upon the verge of the dark moor above the pine forest, my whole attention drawn to the hills beyond, for some reason that I could not quite place. In that place the sound of the river Beanaidh carries over the air, and I once thought it was the noise of the hills themselves; of distant waterfalls carried for miles upon the wind. But even after I realised my mistake it still seemed that there was something emanating from the high places. A sound, a light… just something. 

 

It was a similar feeling to one I had felt years earlier, standing in the darkness of the winter woods at night, staring upwards into the northern sky, where the Aurora flickered and blazed. No warning could have prepared me for the way it moved, the way it flashed from horizon to horizon. The vivid green curtains were punctuated by sheets of red, soaring for mile upon vertical mile toward the glimmering stars. But it gave you the feeling that there should be some attendant sound, or some other phenomenon that would inexorably draw the attention of even a blind mole toward the sky. Magnetic in a metaphorical sense as much as a literal one.

My mind turned to the ancient Highland tales of the Sidh – the Faery folk. There are many stories of travellers who heard music coming from the ground, and on occasion they would find themselves welcomed, tricked or even captured by the Sidh, taken to their dwellings beneath the ground in hollow hills where they would serve, join a dance, or sometimes maybe even love a Faery princess. When they returned above ground they would invariably discover many years had gone by, though they themselves believed they had only just passed through the door.

Maybe that was what I could hear; the fateful music of the Sidh, capturing me forever. And it did indeed surpass all music I had ever heard. This was music composed upon snow, played out by mountain, by rabbit, by water, by sunlight, mist and footstep. Just there was a measure, laid out upon the snow by the rays of the sun striking through the treeline. All played out in stillness, conducted by the lady of silence.

Wood, air and water make for powerful combinations of sound. As stillness settles across a loch, and dusk light strokes the blue with a red glow, everything recedes to total peace; at that moment who can’t stop themselves from lobbing a big stone from the shore, arcing it up high into the air, and shivering with joy at the perfection of the deep spladooosh? To break the silence feels like a small act of mischief; but there’s so much beauty in the fullness of the sound, the sudden slap and boom, the pulse of ring waves against the shore, that you just can’t help it. This is the music of the land.

 

Through the symphonic birch woods we continued to ski, returning at last as the sun set and the shadows crept out among the trees, making the whiteness dark once more. In the night the weather began to turn, bringing storm winds that thrashed the woods where all had been still.  

 

We ventured out again into the wild air, drawn by its drama to the shore of the loch beneath the mountains. I’ve never seen two lochs that had the same water. In one it is silver clear, plucked and teased by playful winds. The next is blue, scattering the sun as it gathers the waters of the hills, plunging to great depths. Another is binary; black and white wavelets rolling endlessly over and under each other. They never touch, but they are inseparable, like a million rolling yin-yang marbles.

In this loch there is always a storm hiding, and the white peace was no more. It may have briefly shown a stillness yesterday, but on this morning the waters were gun metal dark; blue steel set to the flash and lick of saffron sunlight. The storm was awake, the waters set in patterns of motion for which we have no names. There are waves within waves within waves.

The wind of the winter storm scoured the sandy shore, the snow stripped. Out there on the loch the water itself was being pulverised by it, hissing and roaring as waves rose and crashed into themselves. Here by the shore, though, new sound was brought forth from the cacophony of storm and water.

Just days ago the loch was frozen over, lost and hidden beneath the snow that made a new void of the space between shores. Snow lay across, mist flowed upon it, and light turned away from the depths. But the storm was crumpling up that blank page and tossing it aside. The windy beach was choked with the shattered shards of wind driven ice. It lay in a dense forest of angular knives, edge on to the sky, compressed together in dense sheaves.

As every turbulent wave came to the edge of the broken ice it settled immediately into laminar smoothness. Crisp, clear, and beautiful beyond comparison, it passed into the ice and gave it a flick with the clear cut periodicity of a sine function. The ice lifted and fell, ground together, split asunder, and I stood by the shore and stared into the hypnotic rhythm, giving all my attention to it; the sight, but even more so the sound. Every wave was a rolling avalanche of tumbling church bells. Expanding and compressing layers, resonating and echoing xylophonic notes ringing in the wind. Do it again. Do it again.

The rip and swell of wave and ice produced one of the most naturally perfect sounds I had ever heard. It was like the first beautiful chords of a symphony after the din of tuning up. Perfection from chaos. This wasn’t sound; this was Sound.

Up on the mountain the wind was whipping through the treeline where the trees taper down to chewed up whips of branch and needle. It flowed across the hillside with force and power. To walk there would be to feel the sudden gusts bursting upon you like a bucket of water to the face, forcing you to lean into it before staggering as it relents. Rucksack straps and draw cords snapping and fluttering, the wind bites at you with cold. The wind relents suddenly, then pops up again here and there with many sounds; shrieking through branches and then receding. It explodes with the suddenness of a firework, the crashing roar of a wave, the rumble of a rocky shore, and fades again. It mingles with the sound of the burns running in spate and twitches shivering brown rush blades where they protrude from the compacted ice. As you walk toward a flowing burn the diluted hiss of water becomes rich and full, a descending scale of gurgles and splashes that belong to this rock, to that rooster-tail of flying spray.

Beneath the hills we walked back from the loch through the woods, where the wind was gentler. But there was still that same noumenonic sound; music in the air. The wind moving there, now here, now there again. It doesn’t blow steadily. It’s a lazy snake that shifts one coil, then the next, and makes its way gradually through the tree tops, bit by bit. I stood beneath a pine with my head cocked one way, then the other, minutely turning this way and that to catch it. Layers of sound laid in vigorous brush strokes by the upper branches of a tall pine, the voluminous rush of expansion as the wind enters a clearing.

Now that I am attuned, listening carefully, my ears find more. The trickle of water through the bog – unceasing. The chirrup of unknown birds from an unseen branch – fleeting. I try to hold them all, to hear them all, to expand my awareness from a spot to a floodlight. But as soon as I move off again, my senses shrink back down to a tiny node of attention at the centre of a circle that is less and less clear the further you look from the centre.

I’ve already mentioned the sounds of the rain on the loch; there’s a different dance and tune for every degree of intensity. I’ve already mentioned the deer barking among the trees; the pulse of sound that sweeps through the morning. I’ve talked of the pitter patter of snow falling, of leaves falling, and of rain falling. But there is a danger, when faced with the sights of these events, to forget just how remarkable and wonderful the sound is in its own right. We are such visual creatures – we say ‘you should have seen it.’ Well I also say you should hear It.