The Light on Ullin Skerry

by Robert Louis Stevenson, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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My name stands in the journal of the Ullin Skerry lighthouse under the tenth of April, 1869, with the words Examined and found correct above it, in my own hand. It is the only false entry I ever made in ink, and I have made a good many in conversation since. I set it down here because the journal is now in a cupboard in George Street with a thousand others like it, and nobody will ever open it; and because a lie that nobody will ever read seems to me, now I am older, a heavier thing than one that is found out.

The light was my father's. He had built it in the 'fifties on a reef eleven miles west of the Ross of Mull. It is a black tooth of rock that the Atlantic covers at every spring tide, and before the tower stood on it the reef had drowned more men than any rock between Barra Head and the Mull of Kintyre. I was two-and-twenty, apprenticed in his office, and of very little use to him. I would sooner have been reading Montaigne in a howff in Leith Walk. He sent me out that spring with a box of new four-wick burners for the lamp, a letter of instructions as long as a sermon, and a private commission. He gave me the commission on the quay at Oban with his hand on my shoulder. I liked it a great deal less than the burners.

"There is a complaint come in," he said. "A herring skipper, one MacPhail, of the Morning Star of Tobermory. He swears the Ullin light was dark on the night of the thirteenth of March, from a little before two in the morning to near three. He was beating up from Colonsay and lost it, and found it again when he was nearer the rock than he cared to be."

"Was he sober?"

"The Board supposes not. That is why the Board has done nothing." My father looked at the steamer, and then at me, with that long grey look of his that seemed always to be measuring the distance between a thing and its foundation. "I have never known a fisherman to lie about a light. About fish, yes. Look at the journal. Look at the oil. Say nothing to Moodie."

---

We landed on the Wednesday, in a lop of swell that made the landing a matter of judgement. The boat rose and fell eight feet against the iron ladder, and you stepped across at the top of the rise or not at all. Above the ladder the tower went up a hundred and thirty feet in grey granite, smooth as a candle. It had no window on the weather side, and on the lee side a row of little windows set one above another like the stops of a flute. There was no other thing on the rock: not a blade of grass, not a gull's nest. There was the tower and the weed and the noise of the water, which never stopped, and which I heard for a week afterwards in my bed in Edinburgh.

The principal keeper met me at the head of the ladder and took my bag before I could prevent him. Andrew Moodie was a man of fifty. He was short and very broad, with a grey beard cut close and square, like a hedge in a manse garden, and pale eyes that had looked at the sea so long they had taken something of its colour. He had been twenty-three years in the service, nine of them on Ullin, and he was what the Board means when it says a superior man. He could read Greek a little and Hebrew a little more. He did not drink. He sent his whole pay ashore to a wife and five children in the shore-station at Bunessan, all but four shillings, and he had never once in twenty-three years been fined.

He showed me up through the tower as a man shows you his house. At the foot was the store, with the coal and water and the oil in its tall casks. Over that was the kitchen, with a range no bigger than a fiddle-case, and over that the bedroom, with its beds built round the curve of the wall like the drawers of a bureau. Then came the library, where the Board's books stood in their Board's case, Chambers's Journal and Paley's Evidences and Mr. Smiles on Self-Help. At the top, up a last iron ladder, was the lantern. Every room was round and every room was the size of the last, so that climbing the tower was like being passed up through a stack of plates. Everything was clean. The brass on the stairs was bright as the inside of a watch. In the window of the library there was a box of earth, brought out from Bunessan a sackful at a time, and in it Moodie grew three geraniums. He had kept them alive through four winters on a rock where nothing else lived.

"They want the light, you see," he said, touching a leaf. "Same as the ships."

The two assistants were Peter Linklater, an Orkneyman as long and silent as a mast, and a red-faced boy from Skye called Hector MacInnes, eighteen years old and four months in the service. I have seldom seen a man look at another as that boy looked at Moodie. I had looked at my father so, when I was ten, before I knew better.

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I fitted the burners on the Thursday, which took the day. On the Friday I asked for the journal and the oil-book, in the ordinary way of inspection. Moodie brought them to the library table and laid them square to the table's edge, and then he went down to the kitchen and left me alone with them. I remember that he left me alone. I think now it was the boldest thing he did.

The journal was the most beautiful I ever saw, and I have seen some hundreds. It was kept in a copperplate like an engraving: wind, weather, barometer, the hour of lighting and the hour of extinguishing, the watches and who kept them, every night for nine years. Under the thirteenth of March it said: Light exhibited 6.31 p.m. Extinguished 6.44 a.m. Wind S.W., fresh, with rain. Bar. 29.6. Middle watch, A. Moodie. All well. That was all it said. It did not seem to me to be the hand of a man who had anything to hide. But then I could not have said what such a hand would look like, and I was beginning to think, sitting at that table, that nobody could.

So I went down to the oil.

I must explain, for the benefit of anyone who has not been brought up among lighthouses, that the Board is a careful master, and that its care is principally for oil. The lamp burned colza, which is the oil of the rape-seed, and burned it at a rate that the Board's engineers had measured to a nicety for every lamp it owned. Each night the keeper entered in his oil-book what the lamp had consumed. Each quarter he gauged his own casks against the book and sent the return to George Street; and now and then, when the Board had a mind, an officer came out and gauged them again. A keeper who wasted oil was fined. A keeper whose book did not agree with his casks was dismissed. I have known men thrown out of the service for a discrepancy of a quart.

I gauged the casks myself with the rod, on my knees on the stone floor of the store, with a candle in a tin on the floor beside me. Then I sat on a coil of rope with the oil-book on my knee and did the sum three times, because I did not like the answer the first time, nor the second.

The casks were too full. They were not short. A thief or a drunkard steals oil, and there would have been nothing in that but a dismissal. These casks held more colza than the book allowed, and the surplus was something over four pints. Now the four-wick burner on that lamp took a pint and a half in the hour, or near it. Since the last officer had gauged those casks at Martinmas, then, the Ullin light had burned near three hours fewer than the book said it had burned. And every entry in the book was in the principal keeper's hand.

I sat on the rope and looked at the casks a long time. A man might so easily have poured four pints into the sea. The sea was forty feet from the door, and it never gave anything back. A man who had falsified his journal would surely do that. But Moodie had not done it. He had kept the Board's oil safe in the Board's cask, as he had kept it for twenty-three years. He had lied in the book because the book was his own; but the oil was not his to waste.

I went back up the stair. Hector MacInnes was sitting on the kitchen bench polishing a lamp-glass with a chamois, and he smiled at me and said it was a grand evening. I believe I answered him.

---

That night I asked whose watch it was, carelessly, as a stranger asks. The middle watch was Moodie's. I went to bed in the spare berth at eleven, and lay in the dark in the curve of the wall with the sea going round the tower as if somebody were walking round it in sea-boots, and I did not sleep.

There is a sound in a lighthouse which a landsman never hears. It is the clockwork. The lamp of Ullin was a fixed light and did not revolve, but the Board had fitted it with a clockwork pump to raise the oil to the wicks. This was wound by a weight, and the weight came down through the middle of the tower in a tube, and it made a small, steady, ticking sound, a little louder than a watch. You do not hear it after the first night. But I heard it, because I was listening for everything. And at about a quarter to two in the morning, by my own watch held up to the window, the ticking stopped.

It did not stop all at once. It slowed, as a man's breathing slows when he falls asleep; and then there was nothing in the tower but the sea.

I got up in my shirt and trousers. I did not light a candle. I went up through the library, past the geraniums, which I could just make out against the window, and up the iron ladder into the service-room under the lantern; and from there up the last short ladder, with my heart going like a hammer, and put my head through the trap.

The lantern was dark.

I want to be exact here, because I have told this to myself so many times that it has a kind of polish on it, like Moodie's brass, and I distrust it. The great lens stood in the middle of the lantern, taller than a man. It was a glass beehive, ring above ring of prisms, and by day it threw rainbows all over the walls; and in the middle of it the four wicks were out, and the brass chimney was still ticking as it cooled. The panes of the lantern went all round, and through them I could see the whole sea and the whole sky. There was no moon. There were a great many stars, and under them the sea was not black, as I had supposed, but a kind of faintly shining grey, like slate after rain. And on the gallery outside, with his two hands on the rail and his back to me, stood Andrew Moodie.

I went out to him. I do not know why I went out instead of down. The wind took my breath on the gallery. He did not turn his head.

"You'll have done the sum, Mr. Archibald," he said. He used my Christian name, as the keepers did with my father's son.

I said that I had.

"Aye. You were long enough in the store." He lifted one hand off the rail and pointed. "Yonder."

Far down to the south-west, and very small, there were three lights low on the water: a white one, high up, and under it a red and a green, close together. A steamer was coming up from the south, end on, and making straight for us.

"The Stornoway boat, going round the outside," said Moodie. "She is behind her time. She will have been weatherbound at the Mull of Kintyre. Her master is a man named Ferguson. He has a wife in Partick and a daughter at the school. At this minute he will be on his bridge with his glass up, looking for Ullin, and wondering. He'll be thinking his reckoning is out. He'll be thinking, I should see it by now."

His voice was perfectly quiet. It was the voice in which he had shown me the geraniums.

"For God's sake, man," I said, "light it."

"Bide a wee." He did not move. "Bide a wee, Mr. Archibald. Listen."

I listened. There was the wind in the rail, and the sea on the rock below, which was making a great noise, the noise of a cart of stones tipped out continually. And under that, so faint that I thought at first it was my own blood, there came a deep regular knocking, very far away: the engines of the steamer, carried over the water on the wind.

"Twenty-three years," said Moodie, "I have been a light. Every night of my life. Sixty-two thousand ships, or thereby, I have seen go by this rock. Not one of them knew my name. Not one of them gave a thought to me, except to be glad I was there; as a man is glad of a milestone. That's right. That's the service. I never complained of it." The red and green lights were a little bigger now, and a little farther apart. "But a man is not a milestone, Mr. Archibald. Once in a while a man would like to be — looked for."

The engines knocked. I had the matches in my trouser-pocket; I had brought them up without thinking. I could feel the box against my leg. The lamp was three steps behind me through the door. I could have had it lit in two minutes, for I had fitted those burners with my own hands not two days since, and I knew them better than he did.

I did not move.

I have tried, since, to say why, and I cannot do it honestly. I can say that I was frightened of him, which was true. I can say that I was a boy and he was a principal keeper, and the habit of obedience is very strong in the service, and that was true too. But there was another thing, and I will set it down plainly, since nobody will read this. I stood on that gallery in the wind with my hand on the match-box in my pocket, and I watched the red light and the green open out on the black water. And I felt the man on that bridge looking for us, straining his eyes, his heart in his mouth, and his wife in Partick and his daughter at the school and his forty passengers asleep below him all hanging on the eye of a man who could not see. And something in me that I had never met before stood up and was glad. It was a kind of enormous attention, as if the whole black sea had turned and was looking at the two of us on our rock.

Then the steamer's whistle went. It was long and thin and very far off, the sound a man makes who has called out in a dark house and is not sure he wishes to be answered. Moodie let go of the rail.

"That'll do," he said.

He went in past me and lit the lamp. He did it as he did everything, without haste and without waste: the taper, the four wicks one after the other, the chimney, the glass. Last, he took the brass key from its hook and wound the clockwork. The ticking began again under our feet, and the great lens woke up all at once round the flame, ring over ring, and threw its light out across the water in a fan; and the gallery where I stood, and my two hands, and the rail, came suddenly back into the world out of the dark.

Far off, the steamer's lights swung. They swung slowly to the west, the red going out of sight and the green holding, as her master put his helm over and gave the rock its proper berth. Moodie stood in the door of the lantern and watched her go by, with a face I will not try to describe. Then he took out his watch and looked at it by the lamp.

"Forty-one minutes," he said. "I have never lost one, Mr. Archibald. You may look in Lloyd's List."

He went down the ladder. After a while, standing where he had left me, I heard him in the kitchen below putting on the kettle for the morning watch.

---

The boat came for me on the Saturday forenoon, with the tide. My inspection was done, and the new burners were burning beautifully, and I had written my notes in my pocket-book in a fair hand, and I had not written anything in them about the thirteenth of March.

Moodie brought me the journal at the library table for the inspecting officer's signature, as the regulations require. He opened it at the day's page and laid it square to the table's edge, and set the pen and the ink beside it. He stood back with his hands behind him, in the window, in front of his geraniums. Down below, Hector MacInnes was singing a Gaelic song in the store, and the sound of it came up through the floor.

I dipped the pen. I meant, I am almost sure, to write the truth. I had composed the sentence on the gallery the night before; I had composed it again on the stair, and again in my berth until it was light. I looked up at Moodie. He was looking at me with his pale sea-coloured eyes, perfectly calm, with no request in them whatever. And I understood that he did not need me to lie for him. He had only to wait, and he had been waiting since the night I came up through the trap and did not light the lamp.

I wrote Examined and found correct, and the date, and my name.

Moodie came forward and took up the blotting-paper, and laid it over the wet ink, and pressed it down with the flat of his hand, carefully, as a man does who has never in his life wasted anything.

THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Rōbertō Lūdovīcō Stevensōne per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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