# Letters from England/"But I am Annie of Lochroyan"

​“But I am Annie of Lochroyan”
BUT the captain of the steamer did not allow himself to be lured by the open road northward; he was a wary fellow, and instead of making for Greenland or Iceland he simply sailed to Mallaig; evidently he had not read Jack London.
Why do you pursue us, sea-gulls, screaming ​boon-companions of ocean? If I could fly like you, I would soar across the sea to Hamburg; there is the river Elbe, and above it I would soar on strong wings; then near the town of Mělník I would make my way along another river, until I ended my flight at Prague; and I would soar through the triumphal arches of the bridges, screaming and chuckling with joy. People, I have flown here straight from Scotland, to warm my white belly on the mild Vltava. Beautiful and strange is the land, known also as Caledonia, or the land of Stevenson; but it is somehow mournful and gloomy. Here, it is true, you have no lakes, but, on the other hand, you have Vaclavské náměstí; and, although you have no Ladhar Bheinn here, ​you have the embankment by the river and the acacias and Vyšehrad and the Petřín hill; and I am to bring you greetings from a pilgrim who is just sailing through Sleat Sound. I have drawn for you this Sleat Sound with Ben Ladhar; I have drawn for you also the harbour of Mallaig, and I have included one mariner, so that nobody can say I have suppressed anything or not drawn the world as it is, with barques and soldiers.
Bear me, O train, through all the regions of Caledonia; for my heart feels happy and mournful here. And there is the lake Morar ​and Loch Shiel; and there are the mountain peaks, the hill-sides and the glens, broad shouldered summits dotted with rocks like a pudding with plums, pointed lakes with delicate islets, such as Loch Eilt, and lakes wherever there is any chance for them to be, long and glistening strips of water, surfaces ruffled by the wind with silvery paths of the water sprites: mountains which are rocky or ovally swollen up from a granite dough, summits striped, furrowed, bare as a hippopotamus, blue and russet and green, and the whole way along, forlorn mountains, unending and unpeopled.
​At last, Fort William, one of the iron bolts which once held back the rebellious mountaineers; and above it Ben Nevis, the highest peak in this land of mountains, a thick-set and sullen fellow above an ocean fjord, interwoven with white cataracts from the snow fields yonder on the top—and still more ​mountains and mountains, glens and lakes, valleys of shadows, bursts of black waters, the earth which God kneaded from a hard material and handed over to man that upon it he might fight with his fellow-man; for there can be no tussling with rocks and gorseland.
And this short postscript deals with you, O Glasgow, city without beauty, city of noise and commerce, city of factories and wharves, harbour for wares of all kinds. What am I to say about you? Is there then any beauty in factories, docks and warehouses, cranes in the harbour, towers of steel-works, flocks of gasometers, clattering cartloads of goods, tall chimneys and thunderous steam-hammers, structures of girders and iron, buoys in the water and mountains of coal? I, miserable sinner, think and see that a these things are very beautiful and picturesque and monumental; but the life which is born from this is neither beautiful nor picturesque, but it is deserted by the breath of God, crude and ​grimy and sticky, noisy, reeking and oppressive, disorderly and burdensome, more burdensome than hunger and more disorderly than squalor; and there sank upon me the weariness of myriads, and I fled, O Glasgow, for I had no courage to behold and compare.