gloaming, when the birds have stopped their song. But he slept on, and the night passed, and a breeze stole through the heather, and kissed his brow. And a leveret stood up, and looked upon his face, for it saw that his eyes were veiled. And a deer came to the stream, and gazed on his form, and fled not. And the day stood still, and said, ‘Lo, this is death!’ But a grey linnet out of the rocks came down, and perched upon his pale hand where it lay across his bosom, and it looked the sun in the face, and sang—sang till the world woke to music,—but the dead man did not wake.
And the hills said to one another, when the shadows sank again across the land, ‘He has found Death and Life. For we know, and God knows, all his dreams. And in this land of ours at the Back of the World, he has found the fountainhead of song, the secret of the sea, the message of all the streams.’
So they spread it over the world—gave it to the burns to carry, and they bore it to the sea. And that is why the waves have sadness in them still to-day, in the Loch at the Back of the World.
And the heather faded, and the grasses drooped, and the leaves dropped from the trees. And the dust out of the world blew into the glens, and covered the dead man where he lay asleeping. And no man knows his grave.
And the ages passed, and brought people with them, and galleys with oars of thunder, and shields like shining gold, and men with war upon their lips. And they, too, passed, and faded; for the waves were sad and bitter, and tasted always of sorrow, and graves grew by the sea. But still the stream sang on; and some who heard it with the ear of knowledge, which the wind and the sun had spoken to, said that it sang of the dreams of him whose dust was in the heather—dreams of broken music, without a thought of dying, and lands across the waters, where death was never known. And that is the secret of the sorrow of the Loch at the Back of the World.
