From her tower window in Lunga House, Mathilda, the Dowager Duchess of Argyll, can look out on the mist-covered, mystical islands of the Inner Hebrides.

When the wind is right, she can hear the roar of the Corryvechan Whirlpool, nature howling at a point where the waters of the Irish Sea meet the Sound of Jura. It is where romantic Celtic myth and the hard, cold realities of the sea come crashing against one another.

The 67-year-old widow of Ian Campbell, 11th duke of Argyll and 25th chief of Clan Campbell, moved in 1975 to the Lunga peninsula on the west coast of Argyllshire.

The duke had died in 1972. But the tragedy that propelled her to this remote spot-far from Paris and the French academic circles where she spent most of her life-occurred in 1974, when her youngest son, Alexis, died at age 21.

In the late 1960s, Alexis had become a devotee of Sufism, a mystical Muslim sect that seeks God through ecstasy or the cessation of conscious thought. Alexis, who had developed a heart condition, died shortly after a night in Morocco of furious dancing with Dervishes, Sufis who practice poverty and chastity.

Mathilda, a painfully shy, reserved woman, had lost all focus in her life. Her husband-the person who had supported her attempts to become a writer-was gone. Her son-whose problems and youthful quest for answers had consumed her life for the last five years-was dead.

She was left with little but her books and ideas. It was time to sort out her thoughts and refocus her life.

At tea recently at Lunga House, she tried to talk about her feelings after Alexis died. Always proper, courtly and ever so rational, she could not use the adjectives expected from a parent who had lost a son to what some might describe as a cult.

"I was a bit baffled," she said of her son's attraction to Sufism. "I can't say I was angry. (Sufism) was a different way of looking at the world. All I could think of was to make myself aware of what he was looking for.

"I suppose the hardest thing I've had to deal with in my life was bringing up and losing Alexis," she said. "I suppose it is any mother's nightmare."

Coming to Lunga and jumping head-first into the study of Eastern mystical religion was her "rational" way of dealing with the hard, cold reality of the death of a child. Educated in the dictums of Rene Descartes-the French philospher and mathematician who said, "I think, therefore I am."-she had read voraciously to understand what Western philosophers defined as truth and reality.

Two more different ways of contemplating life and death-Sufism and Cartesian logic-would be hard to find.

Eight years later, she surfaced, having crafted a novel, "Orion," based on her search to understand his death and the world of the Sufis.

She was born Mathilda Costa ("I think I was christened Mathilde, with an `e',") in 1925 in Geneva, Switzerland, of wealthy American parents who soon divorced. At the age of two weeks, she was taken to live with her grandmother in an apartment in Paris.

"My childhood was most formative," she said, one of privilege, intense education and all the romance of "Gigi."

"My great-aunt was the greatest influence in my life. She had a lovely chateau where I spent all my holidays. She took me to all the museums and to the theater. I saw all the great classics. Occasionally she'd take me to Deanna Durbin movies."

During World War II she studied philosophy at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Mass. Returning to Europe in 1945, she married her first husband, Clemens Heller, a Viennese-born Harvard scholar who founded the Seminar of American Studies, a summer school that continues today in Salzburg, Austria. During the academic year, they lived in her grandmother's Paris flat, which she inherited.

"We lived and moved in French academic circles," she said. "I guess you can say that I am a French skeptic."

They had three children: First born were twin boys, Yvan and Michael, both of whom were sent to school in Switzerland, where they live today; one is a pediatrician, the other a psychotherapist. Alexis, an asthmatic, was born in 1953.

"He was very creative, with a very positive outlook toward life," she said. "Yet, very combative and strong as a wee boy.

"There was a photograph of him when he was small that we used to say looks like a young Achilles. He read a lot. Myself and both my husbands read a lot.

"He was a particularly bright child, interested in everything. Very receptive.

"He and his father got along well," she said. "They liked each other very much."

In 1962, she and Heller divorced. In 1963, she married the Duke of Argyll, his third marriage. She and Alexis moved into the Inverary Castle, near Lunga House on Loch Fyne. Inverary, a storybook feudal bastion, is the seat of a vast fortune of real estate and power, a far cry from the French academic circles of her past.

"I don't think Alexis was overawed," she said. "At first the duke liked him very much, but then when he became very rebellious and wild they didn't get along so well together."

In the late 1960s, Alexis matriculated through English public schools, but failed to gain entrance to Oxford University, which had been expected of him.

"I suppose one might attribute his problems to the turmoil of the times," she said. "Like so many youth then, he was asking a lot of questions."

Alexis' questions soon led him to a London-based group of Sufis.

"He was very serious about that," she said. "They were a very strict group of Muslims. I found it difficult at the time to understand it. But he was very earnest in his endeavors. He concentrated on the mystical dictums, almost simple-mindedly. I was always very interested in his search for things."

Meanwhile, she and the duke moved to Paris, leaving Inverary and the estates to his oldest son to avoid taxes.

In a vain attempt to keep up communications with Alexis after he left school and before he was totally immersed in the life of the Sufis, she rented a house in Burgundy.

"We had a very good time, on the whole," she said of the three years she and Alexis lived there. "I rented a mare and we'd go riding together. He took up the flute. He would just play it his way for hours on end."

His search took him with a group of Sufis, all Englishmen, to Morocco several times and to Oregon in the United States. Somehow, Alexis contracted polyarteritis nodosa, a fatal disease that affects arterial walls.

"I was beyond exasperation because I knew he had only a short time to live, though I didn't tell him or anyone," she said. "I thought the best thing was to let him do pretty much what he was intent on doing."

In the end he followed the Sufis to Morocco again, where he took part in what would prove to be his dance of death, with the Dervishes, who howl and twirl until they drop in exhaustion.

Alexis did not recover. He returned to Paris, entered a hospital and died there a few months later.

His Sufi friends, she said, "saw him as some sort of saint, which I found very strange, being sort of unmystical myself.

"But I think it (Sufism) sustained him. Maybe he felt death coming and he turned to religion," she said.

She decided she needed time to think. Her twins were settled in Switzerland. Since the death of the duke, she had been receiving a stipend that comes with being the Dowager Duchess. So she moved to Lunga House where she could reflect on things.

But why would a cosmopolitan woman, product of French academia, move to such a remote house?

"I think it's because I've always had to reflect on things. The combination of the isolation and the silence and the beautiful landscapes and seascapes are a good background for thought," she said.

She soon realized a common ground with her son:

"I remember when I was about 12, I can still see myself in my room in Paris in my grandmother's flat looking out the window at the sky and having such an intense feeling.

"Sometimes when you feel things very intensely, you write it down. I remember a blank sheet of paper and writing down on it in French `I seek.' I certainly think I had been on a quest during my life, but I can't say that I really ever found anything that one could put a name to. It sounds very likely that Alexis had the same need. I felt very close to him. But I can't say literally that I am responsible for what happened to him."

So she set out to understand her son's quest. Much of her time was spent traveling. She went several times to both India and Nepal.

And she read and built a considerable library on Sufism. Between trips she returned to Lunga House and wrote, usually in pen and ink on a blank, bound volume, facing a window that looks out to the islands.

Meanwhile, she learned photography from a young photographer she had hired as her private secretary. She stationed a camera on a tripod in the window, and for an entire year, she photographed the seascape as it changed from day to day, season to season.

The result of those efforts was a photography exhibit mounted in New York several years ago. This was the French realist expressing herself. "The cold reality of the camera ... self-effacement, so-called objectivity . . . offering a degree of firsthand realism, which a painting cannot," she wrote in the catalog to the exhibit.

Into the world of mysticism she continued, finally completing a book. What had begun as a philosophical dissertation had evolved into a mystical odyssey revolving around a character named after Orion, the mighty hunter of gigantic stature and great beauty in Greek mythology. She published 1,500 copies of the novel with her own money.

It is an ephemeral, meandering dissertation about her son and herself.

"I think a lot of what I wrote in the book as things happening to my son, in point of fact, were happening to me," she said.

"I put a great deal of myself in this character (Orion) and a great deal of my son, which made up an imaginary hero.

"Since I had done a fair amount of writing and a fair amount of thinking in my life, I didn't want it to go to waste. I tried to transmit in the book what understanding I had reached. Which doesn't make for a very good novel. There was no suspense in it that would make the reader go on.

"I managed to cram in all the material I wanted to cram into it. In that sense it was a success," she said.

Did the skeptic learn anything on her quest?

"No, not really," she said. "I think it's because of my French education.

"I am a realist. I don't think that I learned anything but patience," she said.

She has continued to travel, recently returning from a trip with French friends to China. She now has been to Nepal 11 times. And she can't remember how many times she has returned to India.

She has thoughts about writing a biography, and she continues to be a voracious reader.

But what did the parent grieving for a dead child gain from writing her first book?

" `A busy bee knows no sorrow,"' she said, quoting from the mystical poet William Blake.

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