My Dear Fiona

Chapter 9 - Souterrains

The four-day festival was approaching the end, and after my friend's departure I figured I'd better head back to Kirkwall and see if I can find more puzzle pieces for my study, but I just couldn't face the stones again. Not yet.

I headed north instead, not really sure about the destination, and followed the road until it reached the shore.

Living on an island offers one the unique experience of being bound by a circular water line: no matter what direction you travel in, you are soon stopped by the edge of the sea.

This makes some people feel closed in, in ways that start wearing on them as time passes, but for the true lovers of island living there is no greater comfort than the sight of the sea, and its effortless proximity always puts them at ease.

The sea gives life, and it takes it. Brings riches and bounty, reveals and conceals what it chooses and keeps jealous guard over her secrets.

For four thousand years the village of Skara Brae was just another green bluff battered by the whims of the sea, until 1850, when a deadly storm stripped the grass and the topsoil off the ruins of a stone settling, perfectly preserved by the sand for millennia, a time capsule of Neolithic living.

It is right on the edge of the beach, carefully protected with walls of flagstones braced by mounds of middens, a strange organic maze of houses and corridors, all connected to each other but in a way that permits closing off the living spaces for privacy.

The complex is now open to the sky, and one only gets the genuine experience of what the place must have been like back in its day from the house replica built inside the museum: a series of dark twisted corridors, so low one had to crawl on hands and knees to travel through them, opening up in tall, wide rooms covered by wood and animal skin roof structures, lit only by the embers of their perpetual hearth fires.

A cozy cluster of artificial caves, dug deep enough underground to stay comfortably warm and dry during the Orkney winters.

You can almost hear the giggles of children, running around through their familiar underground stone burrows, not daunted by the scant light and completely safe from harm. There were no weapons found at Skara Brae, just tools and artifacts of their lives.

This Stone Age village housed a thriving culture before humans built the Egyptian pyramids.

I have felt it before, in other ancient sites, the pulse of human life, devoid of all the technology advancements we boast today, but otherwise not essentially different from our own. They are not dead stones; they embody the joys and hopes and love and pain and togetherness we all feel the same, and the eagerness to understand this thing we call life, so short and hard and strange, and whose meaning seems impossible to grasp.

I'm starting to think my project a fool's errand, Fiona. How am I going to find traces of you so far back in time? The people at Skara Brae have lived and died in its protective earth womb for six hundred years until greener pastures caught the eyes of the younger generation, who slowly abandoned the old stones to the sand and the sea.

Their artifacts still bear the marks and carving their hands placed on them, while their bodies have been worn to nothing by the creatures and the elements, and their bones were slowly moved through the landscape, from ossuary to ossuary, by doting descendants which handled them like precious relics and items of personal pride, their legacy.

This abandoned village must have been in better shape in your time, and if you ever visited it, your spirit left no traces here. Maybe the sea gulped it whole, and returned it buried in sand, and by the time you passed through this life, its stone chambers were already steeped in their underground slumber.