Discussion: The Truth is A Cave in the Black Mountains

This is my discussion on The Truth is A Cave in the Black Mountains. This is also part of my literary thesis and i hope that anyone who would have to undergo such torture and is assigned to use this story as well may benefit too. It's kinda like a summary but it conveys a deeper understanding on the main characters.

                        The story is set in a country that Neil Gaiman described as “a slightly skewed version of Scotland a few hundred years ago”. With its ominous grey skies, vertiginous cliffs, verdant grassy inclines speckled with the lurid yellows and vibrant purples of gorse and heather growing wild, Scotland is a beautiful country with such an inherent sense of isolation that few places in the modern world can match it. It’s a perfect setting for a fantasy or horror story that should be taken advantage. Revenge plays well with this setting as it gives the atmosphere of justice taken in the hands of man.

                        The protagonist of the story is a dwarf man, always mistaken as a child at first. They are usually treated as deformed and the understanding of people back then was harsh on the dwarf sized men. In the story the dwarf man encountered a girl who was leading a donkey with a tinker, it was stated “(she) who smiled at me when she thought me to be a child, and then scowled when she perceived me to be what I am, and would have thrown a stone at me had the tinker not slapped her hand with the switch he had been using to encourage the donkey”. The dwarf seemed to be used to it as he stated:

“It’s not a bad thing to be small, young Calum. There was a night when the Campbells came knocking on my door, a whole troop of them, twelve men with knives and sticks, and they demanded of my wife, Morag, that she produce me, as they were there to kill me, in revenge for some imagined slight. And she said, ‘Young Johnnie, run down to the far meadow, and tell your father to come back to the house, that I sent for him.’ And the Campbells watched as the boy ran out the door. They knew that I was a most dangerous person. But nobody had told them that I was a wee man, or if that had been told them, it had not been believed.” “Did the boy call you?” said the lad. “It was no boy,” I told him, “but me myself, it was. And they’d had me, and still I walked out the door and through their fingers.”

                        The dwarf man although takes advantage of his height, he is after all still a man and takes pride of being such whole-heartedly as when he was thought to be a child and would pay only the fee of one instead of a man’s fee in their way to a boat he said:

  “I am not as big as other men are, but I have as much pride as any of them. “I am also a man,” I said. “I’ll pay your shilling.”                    

At the start of the story, it was revealed that he had already taken his vengeance and it seems that the audience or the reader is asking him if he can forgive himself for what he did to Calum MacInnes and he says yes he could forgive himself but the one thing he couldn’t forgive was that he hated his daughter for over a year thinking that she had ran away from home to a city. But when he found out that his daughter, Flora, was instead murdered tied up to a thorn brush, he felt guilty for having accused her wrongly for the aximize she placed on their family and for the worry and tears his wife shed for their daughter. He realized it was not her fault that she died because it was clearly an act of murder.

  And so when he entered the cave in the Misty Isle, he asked for confirmation that it was really Calum MacInnes who killed his daughter. He then asked for an awl and a way to know when Calum MacInnes was sleeping. When Calum MacInnes was badly hurt and could not move an inch from the hawthorn tree by the ledge of the mountain, the dwarf man left him there just like how Calum MacInnes left Flora tied up to the thorn bush tree until after a year he would return. From here, the dwarf man has extracted revenge for Flora. 

      This story is considered to be a gothic, with its ominous and chilling description of the highlands. The mystery of the Misty Isle and why people do not go into the cave and take its gold is stated in the tale as:

“ . . . No. The cave feeds on something else. Not good and evil. Not really. You can take your gold, but afterwards, things are,” he paused, “things are flat. There is less beauty in a rainbow, less meaning in a sermon, less joy in a kiss . . .”

The spectre in the cave also gives its own explanation on how it feeds on the soul of the person who takes the gold as compensatory as stated in the story:

“And what do you take, for the gold you give them?”

Little enough, for my needs are few, and I am old; too old to follow my sisters into the West. I taste their pleasure and their joy. I feed, a little, feed on what they do not need and do not value. A taste of heart, a lick and a nibble of their fine consciences, a sliver of soul. And in return a fragment of me leaves this cave with them and gazes out at the world through their eyes, sees what they see until their lives are done and I take back what is mine.

The menacing tale gets more chilling as the vengeance of the dwarf man is foreshadowed by the old woman, they met, who could read the future of a man by their palms. It said that for the dwarf man “I see death in your past and death in your future; There is a woman in a tree, there will be a man in a tree” while for Calum MacInnes the old woman said “You return to where you began. You will be higher than most men. And there is no grave waiting for you, where you are going”. Her predictions on the two men prove to be true as the death in the past of the dwarf meant his daughter but the death in his future meant Calum MacInnes. This is as well as the woman in a tree, referring to Flora in the thorn bush while the man in a tree will be referring to Calum MacInnes by the hawthorne tree.

The prediction of the old woman on Calum MacInnes wherein that there will be no grave waiting for him does not mean that there is no death in his future but that when he dies, he will not be buried. For the dwarf man decided to leave Calum MacInnes by the hawthorn tree by the ledge of the mountain until Calum MacInnes starves and dies or until he returns after a year. Calum MacInnes will be returning to where he began meant that his quest for gold up in the mountain will be recurred, only this time he will be staying by the mountain up to his death bed by the hawthorne bush. For the year that the dwarf man’s family suffered, as well as how his daughter died drove the dwarf man to vengeance especially when the cause of the crime is within reach.