Stormy Petrel by Mary Stewart Page B

the village and everything clustered round. You can see where there could have been some buildings outside the main ring wall. Hey, Ann, be careful! Where d’you think you’re going?’
    Ann was already halfway up the primitive stairway, a series of flat stones jutting out from the inner surface of the highest section of wall. ‘To look at the view. It’s quite safe. They’re solid. Come on up.’ And Megan went, as she always went where Ann led.
    As she had said, there was really nothing left here but the view, and the girls were exclaiming over it now, talking eagerly, and pointing. I left them to it and made my way along the inner side of the curving wall towards the doorway. This high western section was remarkably well preserved, the stone slabs tightly laid, and the primitive stairway safe and solid. But apart from this the broch wall showed only as a circle of raised turf, with a tumble of stones here and there. Outside the circle a few mounds and stones were all that remained of the huddle of huts that had once crowded under the broch’s protection. Nettles grew everywhere, and ragwort, and the wall itself was thick with plants growing in every available gap. I saw saxifrages and wild thyme and others that were unfamiliar to me. There was a lot of some sort of stone-crop, which was pretty enough, but smelled at close quarters rather like cleaning fluid.
    The girls were still on their perch. I called out: ‘I’m going over to look at the birds,’ and left them to it.
    From what Neil had told me over supper last night, I knew that the main bird colonies were on the western side of the island, where the cliffy coastline was cut into deep gullies, some of them sheer, and some filled with tumbles of massed boulders. I walked across that way, over the crest of the island, easy walking on windswept turf which in a short distance sloped gently down towards the head of the cliffs, where clouds of seabirds were already wheeling and screaming at my approach.
    There was a long promontory thrusting out to sea, with a deep inlet to either side where the tide sucked and swirled among fallen rocks. Above the water the cliffs rose sheer, but seamed with ledges and tufted with seapink and white campion. The birds were there.
    I had never seen a big seabird colony before. The noise was horrendous, and the depths in front of me, filled with whirling wings, were frightening. I backed a step or two and sat down. Automatically – the writer’s habit – I was trying to find the right word to describe the scene. The one I came up with eventually was ‘indescribable’.
    I gave it up and sat still, content to watch.
    No rare birds; just the incredible numbers, and the variety. Every niche of the craggy cliff held a nest, every hollow of the turfy ledge just below me had eggs or young gulls nestling there. Further down I saw kittiwakes, with their gentle dark eyes and neat nests; below them, in deeper crevices, the ugly shags with their uglier young, showing the brilliant apricot gape of their beaks as they craned for food. Here and there, unperturbed, solitary among the crowd, the fulmars; and out there in the air, huge and unmistakable among the teeming thousands, those unpleasant predators the great black-backed gulls, with their cruel beaks and dead eyes like sharks’ eyes, and their ineffable grace of flight.
    The girls arrived then, breathless and laughing, and making sounds of disgust at the pervading smell and slime of birds’ droppings.
    â€˜And to think the stuff’s valuable!’ That was Ann. ‘Guano at how many thousand pounds a ton . . . What a job! I wonder what they pay the chaps that shovel it up? Why don’t they make an industry of it here? I’m sure there’s just as much on these islands as there is in Peru or wherever . . . No, don’t tell me. It’s a bit vertical, isn’t it? Do you mind if we move back a