The Eye of The Stirlings

Andy Held, Deganwy, Conway UK

They say a mountain cave is a bad place to be during an electrical storm. The lightning strikes the peak and flows down, not through the rock, but over its surface. When it reaches the cave's upper lip, it jumps the gap and continues its journey earthwards. For occupants of the cave, its like sitting in the gap of some enormous spark plug.

Textbooks show the preferred location to avoid a strike. The carefully drawn figure sits on his insulating rucksack, knees drawn up to his chest, on an open boulder slope. Some of the boulders are bigger than he is , to act as decoys. There didn't seem to be any where remotely like this near the summit of the third arrow, so we stayed and watched the show.

From the farm at Glenelg, at the edge of the great plain, the single ridge of black teeth is so reminiscent of that from another Glenelg on the Isle of Skye that it can be no coincidence, rather an early settler's homesickness made him clear this patch. Woodlands stands between there and the foot of the ridge. We dodged, panting shade to shade. Ground rose, woodland gave way to low scrub. Occasional fleshy grass trees towered giving a thin strip of shade as a street lamp would. Heavy rucksacks sloshed, five litres of water each. We melted. Path, a burnt brown thread with branches and thorns tearing clothes, packs, legs. Rest became more frequent than shade.

Lowest rocks of the First Arrow, unwieldy juggernaut balance. The steep rock was of ancient metamorphic contortions giving huge jutting handholds which we were afraid to pull on, for fear of pulling them off. On over the first pinnacle, First Arrow, Second Arrow. This one ridge an enormous ruck in the endless blanket of the plain. And so it was, a kick from Antarctica's clumsy feet when he and Australia both lay in one bed. Any Geologist worth his halite will tell you that those distant bumps to the south at the continent's edge should therefore be granite. We had tectonic plateful of geologists and indeed the Porongurup Range and the coastal hills beyond are lovely pink and grey crystalline domes.

On the north side of the Third Arrow near the foot of it's cliffs is a cave, large enough to hold a small orchestra. It seemed a good place for the night. A large plastic barrel placed to catch drips stands in a damp gully inconveniently situated on the other side of the mountain. It took me some time to register that such gloomy spots lay on the south sides of the mountains here. We didn't really need more water but I hadn't hunter-gathered all day, so I scrambled round, swarmed up a fixed rope and filled our empty bottles, while others cooked and made home.

Content, we stared into the twilight deeps. The stillness was shattered by a fork of lightning far out over the plain to the north. Another, rapidly followed. The air crackled with electricity but thunder was strangely absent, such was the distance of our vision. The display continued for several hours with flashes of all shapes, zigs, zags, straight bolts, two, three and four headed monsters sheets which lit up the landscape and our flickering laughing faces. At first we discussed moving our position but then accepted the futility of it in this huge game of chance. The storm appeared to be moving almost imperceptibly closer as the evening wore on and sleep crept cosy into our bags.

What a crashing banging exploding calamity of noise and light startled us in the deepest night. Sally claiming "not to have slept a wink" described its six heads striking all around us. The rest of us sound asleep as the bolt began were completely awake in the split second before it finished. Even as we recovered from the blitz it was clear that the heart of the storm was moving away, past the eastern end of the range to lose itself over the Southern Ocean. There were many more flashes and claps and now rain but we knew that the most dangerous time had passed.

We awoke again to a cave of mists which a yellow dawn struggled to disperse, finally breaking through only as we climbed to the top of Third Arrow. A narrowing ledge ran below and above the tiers of cliffs on Pyungoorup Peak and we battled across it through dense and sometimes hostile vegetation, slicing my hand on a broad green blade. Near the summit, Sally who seems to get all the best, saw a flash of orange in the undergrowth "Tiger snake" they said gravely and walked on more vigilantly. My low cut trainer and socks began to feel very flimsy. I should at least have remembered to bring gaiters.

Ellen peak, the last great rocky knobble at the eastern end of the Stirling Range. We sat on it's rocky top. A Wedge Tail Eagle whose perch we'd taken, popped up on an updraught and with a whooshing noise glided malevolently past. Close enough for us to see ourselves sitting deep black within the cave of it's evil eagle eye.

They say that a mountain cave is a bad place to be during an electrical storm. What do they know? I wouldn't have missed it!

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