”You shouldn’t leave Stromness before you visit Hoy,” the lady at the front desk suggested with a motherly demeanor which tried to restore my sunny outlook on life, now sunk by the sudden circumstance through which I found myself alone again.

She smiled encouragingly, and pointed towards the pier, to the approaching ferry.

“Hurry up, now. If you rush, you can get there before it leaves.”

She nodded approvingly in response to my befuddled expression, and I obeyed her suggestion without too much mental struggle.

There were only a few people on the ferry, braving a fog so thick the contours of Graemsay Island, which we almost brushed on our way to Hoy, were barely visible.

As I entered the mist, the world as I knew it stayed behind: its joys and its pains, the music and the laughter, the plans and dreams. A different place awaited at the end of the fog, and the other travelers, veiled in the mist, looked like shadows, sharing a ride with me in Charon’s boat to the island of the dead.

This realm beyond the mists you approach in silence.

Nobody talked.

We walked quietly, a distance from each other, to respect our solitary retreat, instinctively following in each other’s footsteps along the wooden path snaking through the eerie wilderness towards the giant monolith of Dwarfie Stane.