Some Past Anger

From Gavin Maxwell's, The Rocks Remain.

I read this many years ago but I suspect some of my subscribers, followers, whatever, would appreciate reading, so I rooted it out and copied it on here. It is from part of his life that he almost decided not to record, a time spent in Morocco which he wrote off as the Haywire Winter:

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Again, I dream that I am following the footprints of somebody who is lost. They are plain at first, for I walk in the red dust of a desert, and I pass the bones of a camel. Somewhere close at hand there is a palm oasis, but I skirt it as though by intention. Presently the sky seems to become lower above my head; I realise that I have left the desert and begun to climb.

I am in the dry bed of a river filled with shale and stones, and at my flanks are low brick-coloured cliffs of dry earth. (Curious stones are embedded in this bank, like raisins in a cake.) The footprints have become very difficult to follow, and all the time the sky is getting lower and darker. Then I see where someone has scrambled up the mud wall at one side of the river. I try to struggle up, but the loose grit gives beneath my fingers and my feet, and my mouth is choked with dust so that I gasp for breath. I seem always to be slipping further and further downward, but I never regain the river bed I have left.

A hand that I can feel but cannot see grips my right wrist and pulls me upward with enormous strength. It relinquishes me upon the lip of the drop, and I lie there with the feeling of thick red dust packed under my finger-nails. My throat is dry and hurts terribly, but I am filled with a feeling of urgency, and I rise and begin to climb again. I am sure of the trail, and yet I cannot see it, for I am climbing though harsh knee-high aromatic shrubs that rasp against my clothing, and it is almost dusk.

Then I understand that I am following a blood trail; even in the dimness the drops glow like rubies on the small hard leaves. The slope becomes always steeper and steeper; it rises to meet the sky, and then suddenly I am beyond the line of verdure and out on the clean mountain snow. Now the footprints are clear once more, but there is blood in the centre of each. I am labouring and far gone in exhaustion, and to make sure of following the trail I place my own naked feet in the naked prints before me. Then the sky closes in upon me and I stop, for I know that the trail I am following is my own.