There’s the headstone. There it is. Wishful thinking. Seeing what one wants to see. They must keep on.
Salma had parked the car in the Achnashellach Forest car park so they were able to walk across the level crossing. Because they were on foot, they did not need to telephone for permission to cross the railway line. A sign explained that they should just look and listen to make sure that a train wasn’t coming. Once inside the estate, they followed the road upon which, if it wasn’t the stalking season, Salma would have been allowed to drive her car. After two miles there was a turbine and a deer fence with a locked gate they had to climb over – Iman nimbly, Salma with care, Moni with effort. On the other side of the fence, the path was rugged, suitable only for a 4×4. They continued on.
In January 1963, when Lady Evelyn died in a nursing home in Inverness, a telephone call was made to the mosque in Woking. The story the imam heard was strange. An aristocratic Scottish woman, over ninety years old, had laid down the terms of her funeral in a will. She wished to be interned according to the rules of her faith, a faith that was not that of her family or the people around her. She wanted an imam to read the prayers in Arabic. She wanted bagpipes to be played and no Christian minister must be present. She wanted to lie facing Mecca in a place where the red stags could run over her grave. The imam took the overnight train to Inverness, far away, he later said, like the distance between Lahore and Karachi. He was met at the station and driven sixty miles by car through the mountains to the hunting lodge in Glencarron. There the family were gathered, people from the estate, those who had known Lady Evelyn and spent time with her. Apart from the imam and the deceased, there were no other Muslims in the funeral procession. Severe frost covered the ground, an icy wind carried the tunes of ‘MacCrimmon’s Lament’. The ground was difficult to dig but it was dug. With no one to understand his words except the deceased, the wind, the rocks, angels and djinn, the imam asked Allah Almighty to forgive Lady Evelyn her sins and to grant her paradise. To fill her grave with comfort and light, to accept all the good she had done and overlook all that she should have done but couldn’t. As was her request, the verse of light was later inscribed on an inset bronze plaque over her grave.
It was the verse which, whenever she had opened her copy of the Qur’an, she found before her. She loved it because she understood it. And she understood it because it spoke to her of something that she had known, had always known, had glimpsed in these hills that were empty but not empty, that were more rough than pretty. Even their colours were unpolished. Her spirit was here where she wanted to be buried. The people who walked at her funeral knew it and now the three women sensed it too in the gentle wind and the tough climb, in the mists that lowered over the dark peaks and lifted.
They had moved, as she had moved symbolically, from the built monastery near the loch to the emptiness of the mountains. Left behind the hushed, thick, sombre atmosphere of organised religion and travelled up to where there was simplicity and balance. Not the indulgence of the secluded life, neither the gratification of service, nor the voluptuousness of identity. No, here was aloneness. The nothing of it. Just to be small, a conscious part of the whole. Lady Evelyn could not help her faith, it was given to her without asking and it paralleled her life unpremeditated, unplanned. It was separate and part of her roles as traveller, writer and mother; her social position, her aristocratic breeding and contacts. Where was Lady Evelyn’s Islam? So deep that when it surfaced it surprised her. When the Pope asked, her reply rose sincere, a reflex, the truth summoned forward by the authority of a man of God. ‘I am a Muslim.’ And where had that come from? From her childhood in Algiers and Cairo, the kindly servants who bowed to Allah alone and not to her parents, the murmur of their prayers, the sound of the azan floating through the window. Little girl, loved as one of them. Carried and fed, clutching the black veil of her nanny because they were leaving the house, the warm calloused hand nursing insect bites and bruises, holding up her chin to look into her eyes, voice soothing to her ears. All that she had absorbed. But her experience was not unusual for a colonial child. As a teenager, she had written in a poem, ‘I felt His Presence within and around’. But this in itself was not
