Edinburgh
Monday, July 17th, 2006I spread my sweatshirt on the spongy grass and lay down between the two mountains. The world went silent, a vacuum. There was no sign of the city that surrounded me or the wind blowing in off the Firth of Forth. All I could hear were the occasional voices of my companions, clear and pure.
We had climbed almost 800 feet, the last few on our hands and toes, gripping rocks, grass and the soft ground. The blood pumped into my neglected brain as the altitude took hold. I stared up at the blue marble sky with its veins of whipped clouds, and listened to nothing.
“You should try this. Seriously, lie down,” I told Mark, a Minnesotan I’d met at the hostel.
“Yeah, it’s amazing!” Kara said.
The two were students studying at Cambridge during the summer. They’d been friends since high school, and now went to college together. It was their hike and they’d invited me along.
We were only a about a hundred feet below Arthur’s Seat, the highest point in the Salisbury Crags. We climbed the last ridge to where the volcanic rocks were smoothed by hundreds of years of footprints. There we met Kara and Mark’s Singaporean friend, Rashad. He had taken his time scaling the crags in his tight black jeans and Italian shoes.
The view from the peak was spectacular, 360 degrees of Edinburgh, Scotland, a city that is gorgeous even from the ground, with rows of old grey stone buildings.
The castle rises to the south, perched on an extinct volcano. The waters of the Firth of Forth spread to the north, and the crags rise up all around.
We spotted what is left of St. Anthony’s Chapel dating from the 15th Century, and made our way back down a steep slope of Arthur’s Seat. My feet remembered what it was like to be ten, in the Adirondack’s, bounding down the slope of Watch Hill, skipping over rocks and tree roots, building momentum, and somehow making it to the bottom alive. My feet took off down Arthur’s Seat, and like I was ten, I went after them, screeching.
We explored the two remaining walls of St. Anthony’s Chapel, wondering which direction the building faced. We answered our own question when we found the rectangular foundation, outlined by a wall that held up part of the hill. I stood in the doorway and cooled off on the cold stones and the breeze they created. We waited for Rashad, who had disappeared again.
When we met him at the bottom of the mountain, his pants were a dusty brown, and his Italian shoes were no longer cream. He told the story of how the cliff had looked like the quickest way down to the path. How he’d slipped twice before he decided to turn around and climb up the way he’d come, only to look back up at the cliff towering above him; how he’d changed his mind.
Drea