Argyll reaches for the westering sun like a great, green fist, each peninsula a weathered finger calloused with cliffs and wrinkled with winding river and loch. Cowal, a homunculus of Argyll, curls upon itself relict south of the A83 and reaches for the Isle of Bute like a faerie reaching for remembrance. Lochs climb from the sea to lay in Cowal’s glens, to look darkly upon the forested hills and clouds drifting out of dream and memory. Loch Eck, in particular, shimmers this energy, a black and silver snake whose scales make a million mirrors.
A man wanders to the loch and kneels along its shore. There he is on that tiny spit. Does he focus on his visage, distorted by the wind and waves, or does his gaze fall upon the nimbus of light surrounding him, a gift of the setting sun? Perhaps he watches the blind things swimming in the deeps beneath the surface, just beyond recognition. Does he find himself in the reflection? The error is in the looking outward, and even there nature lends aid: All things, every sloping munro and drifting fog and glinting loch and leaping stag and towering plinth and gurgling stream, beg us to reach the crossroads where beauty turns from vision to insight and insight to self-knowledge.