I was a mile from Little Skellig when the first gannets began circling. There were a few dozen at first, scouts from the colony of over forty thousand on the island.  The closer I got to the island, the more gannets joined the flight, until the air was solid with birds turning in a vast wheel of black-tipped wings and golden heads.  I was the hub, the focal point of this massive spiral.  The only sound was the whir of hundreds of wings slicing through the air fifty feet over my head.  I forgot how vulnerable I had been feeling in the tippy boat and was drawn into the circular flight turning above me.

I paddled below this dizzying umbrella of life, pulling it slowly through the sky as I closed the distance between the two islands.  Slowly the circle began to break apart as I drew closer to the pinnacle of Skellig Michael.  I had been escorted across the final two miles of my pilgrimage, then left to stare, overwhelmed, at the mountain island towering over me.  It seemed to erupt out of the swells, splitting the seas and standing with undeniable power and certainty against the clear sky.

Somewhere on that seven hundred feet of near-vertical rock were the ruins of the sixth-century monastery.  I could see a track that led from the pier and gradually circled out of sight to where I knew the lighthouse stood a hundred feet above the waves.  From the track, my eyes wandered over the crags and patches of green searching for any sign of the beehive huts that I knew were there.  In the interplay of shadow and sunlight, I could see only walls of rock dotted with the white of soaring gulls.  I wanted to land, to get out of the boat and begin the climb. But I wanted to just sit in the relative calm of the island and savor the moment.

The approach had taken two hours.  Two hours of slowly drawing closer and feeling the anticipation building with each new detail of the island.  The seabirds, the feeling of being dwarfed by the expanse of ocean, and the awareness of moving away from the safety of the  mainland were all part of the crossing.  All of the waiting; the glimpses of the island through fog and rain, and the memory of that first sighting as I came around Dursey Head two weeks earlier added to the emotions of arriving.

I paddled around to the pier and made a difficult landing on the steps formed into the concrete.  I sat on the rear deck of the boat and clung to the concrete as the swells dropped out from under me.  I timed the swells and launched myself onto the steps, then waited in waist-deep water for the final move.  The swells washed over my waist, then dropped again as I lifted the boat and struggled up the steps.  Fiberglass scratching against stone, my back and arms straining against the weight of the boat, and my feet feeling blindly for the next step, I finally stood on the pier and gently set my scarred boat on the rocks.  Then I sat down and rested.

The air was filled with the noise of waves and the screams of a colony of kittiwakes nesting in the cliff above the track.

Skellig Michael:  named for the sighting of the Archangel by fishermen tossed on a stormy sea.  Gannets, gulls, sunlight, and the solid warmth of rock beneath my legs.  Straight above, an overhanging cliff darkened by shadow hid the sun-bathed flanks of the island.

I started up the paved stones of the track clinging to the side of the island, climbing higher with every blind turn leading to another view of the waves and rocks below.  I walked slowly, quietly, letting a calm settle over me after the rush of the landing.

I walked within ten feet of a puffin standing on a rock at the track's edge.  With mournful glistening eyes, heavy orange bill, and tuxedo jacket, he stood at attention:  A jester greeting the traveler on his pilgrimage.  He shuffled on his perch, uncertain of this stranger.   I turned my eyes deliberately away and stepped wide around his rock.  The nervous shuffling and turning of the head stopped and he watched me continue on.

Further along, more puffins dropped from hidden perches, catching the updraft of air currents and disappearing in a blur of orange and black.  From around a turn in the track other puffins appeared and flew straight toward the rocks above and below me.  At the last second, wings would flare and bright red feet would pop out of white-feathered bellies.  Suddenly there would be another puffin comically standing where there had been only rock.

After a few hundred yards the track leveled out and to my right a set of massive steps rose through dense ground cover, climbing steeply into the rocks above. The steps disappeared amid the outcroppings and hollows, then reappeared a hundred feet higher, steadily climbing until they melted into the confusion of ledge and protruding angles of rock.  Six hundred steps -- quarried, dragged into place, and leveled by monks fourteen hundred years ago -- rose in switchbacked silence.

One ancient step at a time slowly took me higher and higher above the sea.  The sound of wave against rock grew faint and the ocean never looked so vast.

Hundreds of puffins were everywhere, flying, standing, waddling, and growling from burrows that reached under tufts of grass.   Some stood on the same steps as I did, staring out with teary eyes toward the sea.

My pace was slow and gentle. Two or three steps.   Then a long pause to try and grasp some sense of the time I was walking through.

I tried to imagine the early Christian monks, working in leather sandals, clothed in coarse robes, lifting and struggling with the hundreds of pounds of each rock.

I was alone.  Free to wander back through more time than I could understand.  In that solitude and silence, with only the sound of a gentle breeze in my ears, I sat on the steps and listened.  Just listened.  Then stood and continued.

I reached a sloping ridge between the two summits of the island -- Christ's Saddle -- turned right, and climbed another hundred feet.   Around a corner, the steps ended on a level dirt path.  In front of me was a beautiful rock wall, the joints free of mortar, each stone locked in place by another.   The contrast couldn't have been greater: the crude heaviness of the steps suddenly replaced by the order and graceful beauty of this wall gently following the curve of hill.   It felt like an invitation, a hint of what was ahead.  The wall ended at the junction of another, the outer wall of the enclosure, this one having a heavy rock lintel above an opening that I crouched low to pass through.

I stood up and froze, unable to move for fear the scene in front of me might vanish.  It was as if a curtain had been drawn back to reveal the sudden beauty of the pilgrims' quest.

Six domed beehive huts, a small graveyard dominated by a standing stone cross, and the walls of an eleventh-century church stood huddled together on a narrow shelf of land.  The graceful curve of the far hut was framed by the sea and the green mainland nine miles away.

The paddle out to the island and the slow reflective climb had deepened a quietness within me.  In that silence I stood and let my eyes wander over the holy ground I was about to enter.

The stone huts were built above one side of a sunken courtyard.  A rock-lined burial plot  with a massive stone cross, a domed oratory, and a later tiny eleventh-century church comprised the lower level of the ruins.   The beehive huts seemed to huddle protectively over the courtyard and cross silhouetted against the sea below.  Finely built walls, tight passages, and the soothing curve of the domed cells interlocked with simple beauty and purpose.  This was indeed holy ground, somehow still very alive with the spirit of five hundred years of continuous monastic life.

I lowered the pack and camera to the ground and walked empty-handed into the courtyard.   Within and around me everything was still.  Peacefully, willingly empty, all was wrapped in a cloak of mystery and reverence.

I stood in the center of the courtyard and listened, the only sound a gentle touch of breeze brushing stone.  I reached out in my own silence and let my fingers lightly touch the stone of the oratory.

A few feet away was the graveyard.  The cross, crudely chipped out of thick stone, stood higher than my head.  Smaller crosses, a foot high, picketed the raised ground that held the dust of the long dead within the rubble of earth and fill.

I turned and walked up four or five steps leading to the first hut, crouched low, and crawled through the four-foot thickness of rock wall.   Inside, there was only dampness, a vacuum of light and sound.  In the darkness I sat on my heels, my back following the curve of the dome, my eyes shut, listening to the whisper of wind against stone.  No sound other than the softness of my own breath.   Inhaling, exhaling.  Feeling the dampness of the rock surrounding me and moving back through fourteen hundred years of time.

I tried to feel the fatigue of the monk who lived there.  I imagined his hands: dirty, sore, and callused.  Silent and in prayer, he must have felt the pulsing of blood in his fingers, the ache of muscles in back and arms.  I thought of his clothing, a coarse woven fabric that he worked, slept and prayed in.  I imagined the simplicity, the prayers, the singular devotion of the man.   For the briefest second I felt the monk beside me.  Felt him still and silent in prayer.  At the same time I could hear my own distant breathing feeding a stillness and mystery deeper than any I had known.

A tingling in my cramped legs brought me back to the present.  I shifted position, then tried to settle back into that moment of stillness.  But it was gone.

Who was that monk and what was it I had really felt?

Whatever it was had faded like a dream.  There was only the sound of my breathing and the low whistle of wind through stone.

I opened my eyes, looked around for a moment, then crawled out and stood blinking in the glare of day.

I ducked low into the next dome, a smaller, much lower roof.  Maybe a sleeping space but barely wide enough for me to stretch out full length.

The "Annals of Ulster" and the "Annals of Innisfallen," ancient manuscripts that have survived the ages, shed some light on the history of "Sceilig Mhichi'l."  The annals recorded that in the year 812, the first Viking raids plundered the monastery.  The Vikings landed on the rocky pinnacle again in 823, this time taking Etgal, the abbot of Skellig, and starving him to death.  In 833 and 839, Turgesius, sovereign of the Danes, raided again.  The last reference to the inhabitants of Skellig Michael was in 1044, when the "Annals of the Four Masters" simply states: "Aodh of Skellig died."

Again I walked around the tight cluster of buildings, my eye drawn to the artistry of stone, my mind halfway between the past and present.  Intellectually, I could not understand fourteen hundred years of time.   It was easier, somehow, to imagine the labor of the monks rather than the passing of the ages.

I let go of the struggle to understand and finally retrieved the camera to try to capture some of the beauty around me.

I retraced my steps back to Christ's Saddle, then began the climb to the seven hundred-foot summit of the island.  High overhead, like the Anasazi ruins of the American Southwest, I could see the regular lines of laid-up stone against the vertical face of a cliff.  But how to get there?  The trail climbed and wrapped around the pinnacle of the summit.  I would have to climb above the ruins and find a way to drop down to them.

The faint trail followed a ledge of rock clinging threadlike to the cliff face.  To my left, the ground fell away in a mix of scree and a few tufts of grass; then nothing but five hundred feet of air to the jagged rocks silently buried by breaking waves.  I kicked a rock over the ledge and watched it take two bounces, then free-fall out of sight.

Around a corner, the trail came to an abrupt end.   I cautiously peered over the edge.  It was undercut with the same drop as before, but this time there was nothing for the eye to focus on and my head began to spin.   I pulled back and explored a couple of dead ends, gingerly returning to the grass ledge, frustrated that the summit seemed impossible to reach.

I looked again at the wall of rock to my right, and then I saw it: a shallow gouge a foot above my  head and another near my hip.   Could it be?  I eased my sandaled toe into the carved step, pushed up, and settled my hand into the first gouge.  My heels hung in the air, my weight on fingertips and toes.  With every reach I found a hand-or foothold where I needed it and didn't stop until I reached a narrow chimney of rock that I wedged myself into.   I remembered Con telling me of a German student who felt to his death last year on this same climb.  One slip and I could see how it would happen.  I shuddered with the thought of that first impact and tried to forget the story.

I moved up through the narrow chimney, then out on a ledge that ran like a grassy tightrope between the safety of two rock pillars.  I rested on the far side, then found a way down to the single ruins I had seen from below.

Only the base of the hermitage remained.  It was ten feet across and covered all of the level ground on the tiny landing it was built on.  Against the cliff the hermitage leaned on was a shallow double basin cut out of solid rock.  Rainwater half filled the algae-covered sides and bottom.  Far below, across Christ's Saddle, then up on the other summit, I could see the beehive huts clinging impossibly to the slant of the island.  Their exposure seemed greater from this height.  Small, terribly vulnerable against a backdrop of ocean and distant mainland, I wondered how they had stood for fourteen centuries.

I thought of winter gales, of bitter-cold winds laced with freezing rains, of a small community of men surviving on seabirds, a few goats, and whatever could be gleaned from the garden plot below the ledge they lived on.  I remembered a poem written by one of the monks:

Bitter is the wind this night
Which tosses up the ocean's hair so white.
Merciless men I need no fear
Who cross from Lothland on an ocean clear.

Lothland was the land of the Vikings, and the poem spoke of the peace a winter gale afforded the defenseless monks.  Isolated by the fury of the storm they could sleep safe, for no man, including the fearsome raiders from the north, would dare take to the sea on such a night.

Five hundered years of prayers had drifted up over this peak; prayers, poems, and the sounds of men working stone.  Five hundred years of spring flowers, of long summer days, then dwindling hours as the autumns approached.   Sometime in the eleventh century, the island monastery was abandoned.

Now, except for the winds, the island was silent.

I finished the climb to the summit and sat for a long time lost in the flood of views that stretched out before me.  I could see Dursey Head, the Bull and Calf, Kenmare Bay, and Bolus Head.  I tried to imagine a kayak moving around or across each point.  It seemed impossible, yet I knew that I had paddled and lived each one of those places and had memories of each.  To the north was Dingle Bay and the Blasket Islands.  Soon I would know them as well.

As I sat perched atop one of the westernmost points of Europe, my back to the expanse of the Atlantic, I thought, as I had done so many other times, how blessed my life has been.  So much beauty -- magnificent soul-moving beauty.  Why was I lucky enough to sit on that peak and know all of the freedom and wonder of my life?  I didn't have an answer, just a powerful feeling of humility.

I returned to the single ruins below the peak, curled up on the grass, and shut my eyes.  I would climb down later, deal with the toeholds, the ledges, and eventually the nine-mile paddle back to the mainland.  But for now I just wanted to feel this moment: the silence, rest, and warmth of the sun.   On the edge of the known world of the sixth century, I drifted into sleep.

Copyright @1999 Chris Duff