"Once, long before Buddha, long before Allah, long before the Christ, the peoples on either side of the Pentland Firth worshipped Mara, the Green Goddess of the sea.

Mara gave them food, seals, birds, shellfish. She also gave them life; the tides of women's courses that brought on the passion, and then the pain of birth.

When angry she raged and swept away the sand and flooded inland: but none had ever seen her in the flesh except for the shamaness. In her conical stone hut she lived by a bay daily filled by the tide"