. and then a’ sort o’ daft things began to dance afore my een. Witches and bogles and brownies and things oot o’ the Bible. . . .’ Humour again lightens the starkness as, first, the shepherd’s Grannie, ‘deid thae sax year’, appears with little consolation for her grandson—she’s not in the Guid Place but in Purgatory, with ‘maist o’ the ministers o’ the countryside’; then ‘a muckle black-avised man’  torments the shepherd still further with a compellingly awful account of Hell. The humour, enhanced by the use of the vernacular, is skilfully applied.

There is no such light relief in the next two stories. ‘Streams of Water in the South’ tells of Yeddie towards the close of his days, appearing ‘like some old Druid recalled of the gods to his ancient habitation of the moors’. He has spent a lifetime amongst the hills, but he fears his time of usefulness is past. ‘Seeck unto death’, he drowns trying to cross the Solway. This absolute aloneness is even more starkly portrayed in the bleak tale ‘At the Article of Death’. Religion offers no comfort here—it is swept from the dying shepherd like a rotten garment. As the ‘morris-dance of shadows’ closes in, neither Spurgeon’s sermons nor his gaudy Bible can keep the terrors at bay: ‘The kindly ingle was no less than a malignant twisted devil, with an awful red eye glowering through smoke.’ Conscious of the last pangs of mortality ‘he passed into the short anguish which is death’. In each of the tales the question of the supernatural is left to the reader’s judgement.

This is also true of ‘The Moor-Song’—another story of a shepherd, Simon Etterick, who, losing patience with the cacophony of birdsong around him on the moor, cries out ‘Deil rax the birds’ thrapples’. One bird remains—a Respectable Whaup, who engages him in conversation. The shepherd, who until then had heard no songs ‘save the sacred psalms o’ God’s Kirk’, is seduced by the bird into listening to the Moor-Song, which makes the hearer a masterless man till death. His minister echoes perhaps the view of most readers of the tale: ‘Either ye are the victim of witchcraft, or ye are a self-deluded man.’ ‘Comedy in the Full Moon’ has been called a good soufflé by one critic. Satire and self-parody jostle with the faery and the prosaic. The Fairy Knowe is another example of Buchan’s fascination with the sacred spot—or temenos—‘where at midsummer the little folk danced, and where, so ran the tale, lay the mystic entrance, of which True Thomas spake, to the kingdom of dreams and shadows.’ What spirits there are turn out to be made of rather substantial flesh and bone.

Buchan’s third collection of short stories, The Watcher by the Threshold, was published in April 1902, while he was still in South Africa. All five feature here and were written whilst he was at Oxford, four appearing in Blackwood’s Magazine. ‘It is of the back-world of Scotland that I write, the land behind the mist and over the seven bends . . .’ ‘No-Man’s Land’, at more than 20,000 words, is the longest of Buchan’s short stories. Buchan again takes familiar surroundings and imbues them with supernatural properties. He himself described the tale as the ‘story of a primitive survival among Scottish moorland. It is a piece of rather wild fancy.’ The moorland country, once regarded by the narrator as ‘the freshest on earth—clean, wholesome, and homely’ becomes ‘like a horrible pit’. The landscape takes him in thrall and crushes him. ‘The silent vanished peoples of the hills seemed to be stirring; dark primeval faces seemed to stare at me from behind boulders and jags of rock.’ The Devil, manifold devils, abide in the hills ‘at the back o’ every stone and hidin’ in every clench.’ The temenos, the Pictish cave, is sacred to some old world god and the Picts themselves are degenerate and repellent, steeped in supernatural horror.

‘The Far Islands’, whose theme Buchan was to return to in his novel A Prince of Captivity (1933), posits the question whether a certain form of hallucination can run through generations of the same family.