I watched carefully as the islands slowly acquired form and contour in front of me. Their grey whale-backed outlines grew and ballooned into something substantial. Dark rocks, grassy slopes, a sheltered bay, the little white house, stony beaches. I had never seen this scale of things before: tall, cliffed, remote, fierce, beautiful, harsh and difficult but, for all that, dazzlingly and almost overwhelmingly thick with the swirl of existence, lichened, the rocks glowing saffron orange on that summer morning, the air and the sea around us filled with 300,000 birds, a pumping, raucous
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