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I reckon among my readers a class of non-geologists, who think my
geological chapters would be less dull if I left out the geology; and
another class of semi-geologists, who say there was decidedly too much
geology in my last With the present chapter, as there threatens to be an
utter lack of science in the earlier half of it, and very little, if any,
in the latter half, I trust both classes may be in some degree satisfied.
It will bear reference to but the existing system of things, - assuredly
not the last of the consecutive creations, - and to a species of animal
that, save in the celebrated Guadaloupe specimens, has not yet been found
locked up in stone. There have been much of violence and suffering in the
old immature stages of being, - much, from the era of the Holoptychius,
with its sharp murderous teeth and strong armour of bone, down to that of
the cannibal Ichthyosaurus, that bears the broken remains of its own kind
in its bowels, - much, again, from the times of the crocodile of the
Oolite, down to the times of the fossil hyena and gigantic shark of the
Tertiary. Nor, I fear, have matters greatly improved in that latest-born
creation in the series, that recognises as its delegated lord the first
tenant of earth accountable to his Maker.But there is a better and a last
creation coming, in which man shall re-appear, not to oppress and devour
his fellow-men, and in which there shall be no such wrongs perpetrated as
it is my present purpose to record, - “new heavens and a new earth,
wherein dwelleth righteousness.” Well sung the Ayrshire ploughman, when
musing on the great truth that the present scene of being “is surely not
the last,” - a truth corroborated since his day by the analogies of a new
science, -
“The poor, oppressed,
honest man,
Had never sure been born,
Had not there been some recompense
To comfort those that mourn.”
It was Sabbath, but the morning rose like a
hypochondriac wrapped up in his night-clothes, - gray in fog, and sad
with rain. The higher grounds of the island lay hid in clouds, far below
the level of the central hollow; and our whole prospect from the deck was
limited to the nearer slopes , dank, brown, and uninhabited, and to the
rough black crags that frown like sentinels over the beach. Now the rime
thickened as the rain pattered more loudly on the deck; and even the
nearer stacks and precipices showed as unsolid and spectral in the cloud
as moonlight shadows thrown on a ground of vapour; anon it cleared up for
a few hundred yards, as the shower lightened; and then there came in view,
partially at least, two objects that spoke of man, - deserted
boat-harbour, formed of loosely piled stone, at the upper extremity of a
sandy bay; and a roofless dwelling beside it, with two ruinous gables
rising over the broken walls. The entire scene suggested the idea of a
land with which man had done forever; - the vapour-enveloped rocks, - the
waste of ebb-incovered sand, - the deserted harbour, - the ruinous house,
- the melancholy rain-fretted tides eddying along the strip of brown
tangle in the foreground, - and, dim over all, the thick, slant lines of
the beating shower! - I know not that of themselves they would have
furnished materials enough for a finished picture in the style of
Hogarth’s “End of all Things”; but right sure am I that in the hands of
Bewick they would have been grouped into a tasteful and poetic vignette.
We set out for church a little after eleven, - the minister encased in his
ample-skirted storm jacket of oiled canvass, and protected atop by a
genuine sou-wester, of which the broad posterior rim sloped a half a yard
down his back; and I closely wrapped up in my gray maud, which proved,
however, a rather indifferent protection against the penetrating powers of
a true Hebridean drizzle. The building in which the congregation meets is
a low dingy cottage of turf and stone, situated nearly opposite to the
manse windows. It had been built by my friend, previous to the
Disruption, at his own expense, for a Gaelic school, and it now serves as
a place of worship for the people. We found the congregation already
gathered, and that the very bad morning had failed to lessen their
numbers. There were a few of the male parishioners keeping watch at the
door, looking wistfully out through the fog and rain for their minister;
and at his approach nearly twenty more came issuing from the place, -
like carder bees from their nest of dried grass and moss, - to gather
round him, and shake him by the hand. The islanders of Eigg are an
active, middle-sized race, with well-developed heads, acute intellects,
and singularly warm feelings. And on this occasion at least there could
be no possibility of mistake respecting the feelings with which they
regarded their minister. Rarely have I seen human countenances so
eloquently vocal with veneration and love. The gospel message, which my
friend had been the first effectually to bring home to their hearts, - the
palpable fact of his sacrifice for the sake of the high principles which
he has taught, - his own kindly disposition, - the many services which he
has rendered them, for not only has he been the minister, but also the
sole medical man, of the Small Isles, and the benefit of his practice they
have enjoyed, in every instance, without fee or reward, - his new life of
hardship and danger, maintained for their sakes amid sinking health and
great privation’, - their frequent fears for his safety when stormy nights
close over the sea, - and they have seen his little vessel driven from her
anchorage, just as the evening has fallen, - all these are circumstances
that have concurred in giving him a strong hold on their affections. The
rude turf-building we found full from end to end, and all a-steam with a
particularly wet congregation, some of whom, neither very robust nor
young, had travelled in the soaking drizzle from the farther extremities
of the island. And, judging from the serious attention with which they
listened to the discourse, they must have deemed it full value for all it
cost them. I have never yet seen a congregation more deeply impressed, or
that seemed to follow the preacher more intelligently; and I was quite
sure, though ignorant of the language in which my friend addressed them,
that he preached to them neither heresy nor nonsense. There was as little
of the reverence of externals in the place as can well be imagined: an
uneven earthen floor, - turf -walls on every side, and a turf-roof above,
- two little windows of four panes a-piece, adown which the rain-drops
were coursing thick and fast, - a pulpit grotesquely rude, that had never
employed the bred carpenter, - and a few ranges of seats of undressed
deal, - such were the mere materialisms of this lowly church of the
people; and yet here, notwithstanding, was the living soul of a Christian
community, - understandings convinced of the truth of the gospel, and
hearts softened and impressed by its power.
My friend, at the conclusion of his discourse,
gave a brief digest of its contents in English, for the benefit of his one
Saxon auditor; and I found, as I had anticipated, that what had so moved
the simple islanders was just the old wondrous story, which, though
repeated and re-repeated times beyond number, from the days of the
apostles till now, continues to be as full of novelty and interest as
ever, - “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that
whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
The great truths which had affected many of these poor people to tears
were exactly those which, during the last eighteen hundred years, have
been active in effecting so many moral revolutions in the world, and which
must ultimately triumph over all error and all oppression. On this
occasion, as on many others, I had to regret my want of Gaelic. It was my
misfortune to miss being born to this ancient language, by barely a mile
of ferry. I first saw the light on the southern shore of the Frith of
Cromarty, where the strait is narrowest, among an old established Lowland
community, marked by all the characteristics, physical and mental, of the
Lowlanders of the southern districts; whereas, had I been born on the
northern shore, I would have been brought up among a Celtic tribe, and
Gaelic would have been my earliest language. Thus distinct was the line
between the two races preserved, even after the commencement of the
present century.
In returning to the Betsey during the mid-day
interval in the service, we passed the ruinous two-gabled house beside the
boat-harbour. During the incumbency of my friend’s predecessor it had
been the public-house of the island, and the parish minister was by far
its best customer. He was in the practice of sitting in one of its dingy
little rooms, day after day, imbibing whisky and peat-reek’ and his
favourite boon companion on these occasions was a Roman Catholic tenant
who lived on the opposite side of the island, and who, when drinking with
the minister, used regularly to fasten his horse beside the door, till at
length all the parish came to know that when the horse was standing
outside the minister was drinking within. In course of time, through the
natural gravitation operative in such cases, the poor incumbent became
utterly scandalous, and was libelled for drunkeness before the General
Assembly; but as the island of Eigg lies remote from observation, evidence
was difficult to procure; and, had not the infatuated man got senselessly
drunk one evening, when in Edinburgh on his trial, and staggered, of all
places in the world, into the General Assembly, he would probably have
died minister of Eigg. As the event happened, however, the testimony thus
unwittingly furnished in the face of the Court that tried him was deemed
conclusive; - he was summarily deposed from his office, and my friend
succeeded him. Presbyterianism without the animating life is a poor
shrunken thing: it never lies in state when it is dead; for it has no
body of fine forms, or trapping of imposing ceremonies, to give it bulk or
adornment: without the vitality of evangelism it is nothing; and in this
low and abject state my friend found the Presbyterianism of Eigg His
predecessor had done it only mischief; nor had it been by any means
vigorous before. Rum is one of the four islands of the parish; and all my
readers must be familiar with Dr. Johnson’s celebrated account of the
conversion to Protestantism of the people of Rum. “The inhabitants,” says
the Doctor, in his “Journey to the Western Islands,” are fifty-eight
families, who continued Papists for some time after the laird became a
Protestant. Their adherence to their old religion was strengthened by the
countenance of the laird’sister, a zealous Romanist; till one Sunday, as
they were going to mass under the conduct of their patroness, Maclean met
them on the way, gave one of them a blow on the head with a yellow stick,
- I suppose a cane, for which the Earse had no name, - and drove them to
the kirk, from which they have never departed. Since the use of this
method of conversion, the inhabitants of Eigg and Canna who continue
Papists call the Protestantism of Rum the religion of the yellow stick.”
Now, such was the kind of Protestantism that, since the days of Dr.
Johnson, had also been introduced, I know not by what means, into Eigg.
It had lived on the best possible terms with the Popery of the island; the
parish minister had soaked day after day in the public-house with a Roman
Catholic boon companion; and when a Papist man married a Protestant woman,
the woman as a matter of course, became Papist also; whereas when it was
the man who was a Protestant, and the woman a Papist, the woman remained
what she had been. Roman Catholicism was quite content with terms, actual
though not implied, of a kind so decidedly advantageous; and the Roman
Catholics used good-humouredly to urge on their neighbours the
Protestants, that, as it was palpable they had no religion of any kind,
they had better surely come over to them, and have some. In short, all
was harmony between the two Churches. My friend laboured hard, as a good
and honest man ought, to impart to Protestantism in his parish the
animating life of the Reformation; and, through the blessing of God, after
years of anxious toil, he at length fully succeeded.
I had got wet, and the day continued bad; and so,
instead of returning the evening sermon, which began at six, I remained
alone aboard of the vessel. The rain ceased in little more than an hour
after; and in somewhat more than two hours I got up on deck to see whether
the congregation was not dispersing, and if it was not yet time to hang on
the kettle for our evening tea. The unexpected apparition of some one
aboard the Free Church yacht startled two ragged boys who were manoeuvring
a little boat a stonecast away, under the rocky shores of Eilean
Chaisteil, and who, on catching a glimpse of me, flung themselves below
the thwarts for concealment. An oar dropped into the water; there was a
hasty arm and half a head thrust over the gunwale to secure it; and then
the urchin to whom they belonged again disappeared. Meanwhile the boat
drifted slowly away: first one little head would appear for a moment over
the gunwale, then another, as if reconnoitring the enemy; but I still kept
my place on deck; and at length, tired out, the ragged little crew took to
their oars, and rowed into a shallow bay at the lower extremity of the
glebe, with a cottage, in size and appearance much resembling an ant-hill,
peeping out at its inner extremity among some stunted bushes. I had
marked the place before, and had been struck with the peculiarity of the
choice that could have fixed on it as a site for a dwelling: it is at once
the most inconvenient and picturesque on this side the island. A
semicircular line of columnar precipices, that somewhat resembles an
amphitheatre turned outside in, - for the columns that overlook the area
are quite as lofty as those which should form the amphitheatre’s outer
wall, - sweeps round a little bay, flat and sandy at half-tide, but
bordered higher up by a dingy , scarce passable beach of columnar
fragments that have toppled from above. Between the beach and the line of
columns there is a bosky talus, more thickly covered with brushwood than
is at all common in the Hebrides, and scarce more passable that the rough
beach at its feet. And at the bottom of this talus, with its one gable
buried in the steep ascent, - for there is scarce a foot-breadth of
platform between the slope and the beach, - and with the other gable
projected to the tide-line on rugged columnar masses, stands the cottage.
The story of the inmate, - the father of the two ragged boys, - is such a
one as Crabbe would have delighted to tell, and he could have told better
that any one else.
He had been, after a sort, a freebooter in his
time, but born an age or two rather late; and the law had proved over
strong for him. On at least one occasion, perhaps oftener, - for his
adventures are not all known in Eigg, - he had been in prison for
sheep-stealing. He had the dangerous art of subsisting without the
ostensible means, and came to be feared and avoided by his neighbours as a
man who lived on them without asking their leave. With neither character
nor a settled way of living, his wits, I am afraid, must have been ofter
whetted by his necessities; he stole lest he should starve. For some time
he had resided in the adjacent island of Muck; but, proving a bad tenant,
he had been ejected by the agent of the landlord, I believe a very worthy
man, who gave him half a boll of meal to get quietly rid of him, and
pulled down his house, when he had left the island, to prevent his
return. Betaking himself, with his boys, to a boat, he set out in quest
of some new lodgment. He made his first attempt or two on the mainland,
where he strove to drive a trade in begging, but he was always recognised
as the convicted sheep-stealer, and driven back to the shore. At length,
after a miserable term of wandering, he landed in the winter season on
Eigg, where he had a grown-up son a miller; and, erecting a wretched shed
with some spars and the old sail of a boat placed slantways against the
side of a rock, he squatted on the beach, determined, whether he lived or
died, to find a home on the island. The islanders were no strangers to the
character of the poor forlorn creature, and kept aloof from him, - none of
them, however, so much as his own son; and, for a time, my friend the
minister, aware that he had been the pest of every community among which
he had lived, stood aloof from him too, in the hope that at length,
wearied out, he might seek for himself a lodgement elsewhere. There came
on, however, a dreary night of sleet and rain, accompanied by a fierce
storm from the sea; and intelligence reached the manse late in the
evening, that the wretched sheep-stealer had been seized by sudden
illness, and was dying on the beach. There could be no room for further
hesitation in this case; and my friend the minister gave instant orders
that the poor creature should be carried to the manse. The party, however,
which he had sent to remove him found the task impracticable. The night
was pitch dark; and the road, dangerous with precipices, and blocked up
with rough masses of rock and stone, they found wholly impassable with so
helpless a burden. And so, administering some cordials to the poor
hapless wretch, they had to leave him in the midst of the storm, with the
old wet sail flapping about his ears, and the half-frozen rain pouring in
upon him in torrents. He must have passed a miserable night, but it could
not have been a whit more miserable than that passed by the minister in
the manse As the wild blast howled around his comfortable dwelling, and
shook the casements as if some hand outside were assaying to open them, or
as the rain pattered sharp and thick on the panes, and the measured roar
of the surf rose high over every other sound, he could think of only the
wretched creature exposed to the fury of a tempest so terrible, as
perchance wrestling in his death agony in the darkness beside the breaking
wave, or as already stiffening on the shore. He was early astir next
morning, and almost the first person he met was the poor sheep-stealer,
looking more like a ghost than a living man. The miserable creature had
mustered strength enough to crawl up from the beach. My friend has often
met better men with less pleasure. He found a shelter for the poor
outcast; he tended him, prescribed for him, and, on his recovery, gave him
leave to build for himself the hovel at the foot of the crags. The
islanders were aware they had got but an indifferent neighbour through the
transaction, though none of them, with the exception of the poor
creature’s son, saw what else their minister could have done in the
circumstances. But the miller could sustain no apology for the
arrangement that had given him his vagabond father as a neighbour; and
oftener than once the site of the rising hovel became a scene of noisy
contention between parent and son. Some of the islanders informed me that
they had seen the son engaged in pulling down the stones of the walls as
fast as the father raised them up; and, save for the interference of the
minister, the hut, notwithstanding the permission he gave, would scarce
have been built.
On the morning of Monday we unloosed from our
moorings, and set out with a light variable breeze for Isle Ornsay, in
Skye, where the wife and family of Mr. Swanson resided, and from which he
had now been absent for a full month. The island diminished, and assumed
its tint of diluting blue, that waxed paler and paler hour after hour, as
we left it slowly behind us; and the Scuir, projected boldly from its
steep hill-top, resembled a sharp hatchet-edge presented to the sky.
“Nowhere,” said my friend, “did I so thoroughly realize the Disruption of
last year as at this spot. I had just taken my last leave of the manse;
Mrs. Swanson had staid a day behind me in charge of a few remaining pieces
of furniture, and I was bearing some of the rest, and my little boy Bill,
scarce five years of age at the time, in the yacht with me to Skye. The
little fellow had not much liked to part from is mother, and the previous
unsettling of all sorts of things in the manse had bred in him thoughts he
had not quite words to express. The further change to the yacht, too, he
had deemed far from an agreeable one. But he had borne up, by way of
being very manly; and he seemed rather amused that papa should now have to
make his porridge for him, and to put him to bed, and that it was John
Stewart, the sailor, who was to be the servant girl. The passage,
however, was tedious and disagreeable; the wind blew a-head, and heart and
spirits failing poor Bill, and somewhat sea-sick to boot, he lay down on
the floor, and cried bitterly to be taken home. ‘Alas, my boy!’ I said,
‘you have no home now; your father is like the poor sheep-stealer whom you
saw on the shore of Eigg. This view of matters proved in no way
consolatory to poor Bill. He continued his sad wail, ‘Home, home, home!’
until at length he fairly sobbed himself asleep; and I never, on other
occasion, so felt the desolateness of my condition as when the cry of my
boy, - ‘Home, home, home!” - was ringing in my ears.”
We passed, on the one hand, Lock Nevis and Loch
Hourn, two fine arms of the sea that run far into the mainland, and open
up noble vistas among the mountains; and, on the other, the long
undulating line of Sleat in Skye, with its intermingled patches of
woodland and arable on the coast, and its mottled ranges of heath and rock
above. Towards evening we entered the harbour of Isle Ornsay, a quiet
well-sheltered bay, with a rocky islet for a breakwater on the one side,
and the rudiments of a Highland village, containing a few good houses, on
the other. Half a dozen small vessels were riding at anchor, curtained
round, half-mast high, with herring-nets; and a fleet of herring-boats lay
moored beside them a little nearer the shore.. There had been tolerable
takes for a few nights in the neighbouring sea, but the fish had again
disappeared, and the fisherman, whose worn-out tackle gave such evidence
of a long continued run of ill luck, as I had learned to interpret on the
east coast, looked gloomy and spiritless, and reported a deficient
fishery. I found Mrs. Swanson and her family located in one of the two
best housed in the village, with a neat enclosure in front, and a good
kitchen-garden behind. The following day I spent in exploring the rocks
of the district,-a primary region with regard to organic existence,
“without form and void.” From Isle Ornsay to the Point of Sleat, a
distance of thirteen miles, gneiss is the previling deposit: and in no
place in the district are the strata more varied and interesting that in
the neighbourhood of Knockhouse, the residence of Mr. Elder, which I
found pleasingly situated at the bottom of a little open bay, skirted with
picturesque knolls partially wooded, that present to the surf precipitous
fronts of rock. One insulated eminence, a gun-shot from the
dwelling-house, that presents to the sea two mural fronts of precipice,
and sinks in steep grassy slopes on two sides more, bears atop a fine old
ruin. There is a blind-fronted massy keep, wrapped up in a mantle of ivy,
perched at the one end, where the precipice sinks steepest; while a more
ruinous though much more modern pile of building, perforated by a double
row of windows, occupies the rest of the area. The square keep has lost
its genealogy in the mists of the past, but a vague tradition attributes
its erection to the Norwegians. The more modern pile is said to have been
built about three centuries ago by a younger son of M’Donald of the Isles;
but it is added that, owing to the jealousy of his elder brother, he was
not permitted to complete or inhabit it. I find it characteristic of most
Highland traditions, that they contain speeches: they constitute true
oral specimens of that earliest and rudest style of historic composition
in which dialogue alternates with narrative. “My wise brother is building
a fine house,” is the speech preserved in this tradition as that of the
elder son: “it is rather a pity for himself that he should be building it
on another man’s lands.” The remark was repeated to the builder, says the
story, and at once arrested the progress of the work. Mr. Elder’s boys
showed me several minute pieces of brass, somewhat resembling rust-eaten
coin, that they had dug out of the walls of the old keep; but the pieces
bore no impress of the dye, and seemed mere fragments of metal beaten thin
by the hammer.
The gneiss at Knock is exceedingly various in its
composition, and many of its strata the geologist would fail to recognise
as gneiss at all. We find along the precipices its two unequivocal
varieties, the schistose and the granite, passing not infrequently, the
former into a true mica schist, the latter into a pale felspathose rock,
thickly pervaded by needle-like crystals of tremolite, that, from the
style of the grouping, and the contrast existing between the dark green of
the enclosed mineral, and the pale flesh-colour of the ground, frequently
furnishes specimens of great beauty. In some pieces the tremolite assumes
the common fan-like form; in some, the crystals, lying at nearly right
angles with each other, present the appearance of ancient characters
inlaid in the rock; in some they resemble the footprints of birds in a
thin layer of snow; and in one curious specimen picked up by Mr. Swanson,
in which a dark linear strip is covered transversely by crystals that
project thickly from both its sides, the appearance presented is that of a
minute stigmaria of the Coal Measures, with the leaves, still bearing
their original green colour, bristling thick around it. Mr. Elder showed
me, intercalated among the gneiss strata of a little ravine in the
neighbourhood of Isle Ornsay, a thin land of a bluish-coloured indurated
clay, scarcely distinguishable, in the hand specimen, from a weathered
clay-stone, but unequivocally a stratum of the rock. I have found the
same stone existing, in a decomposed state, as a very tenacious clay,
among the gneiss strata of the hill of Cromarty; and oftener than once
had I amused myself in fashioning it, with tolerable success, into such
rude pieces of pottery as are sometimes found in old sepulchral tumuli.
Such are a few of the rocks included in the general gneiss deposit of
Sleat. If we are to hold, with one of the most distinguished of living
geologists, that the stratified primary rocks are aqueous deposits
altered by heat, to how various a chemistry must they not have been
subjected in this district! In one stratum, so softened that all its
particles were disengaged to enter into new combinations, and yet not so
softened but that it still maintained its lines of division from the
strata above and below, the green tremolite was shooting its crystals into
the pale homogeneous mass; while in another stratum the quartz drew its
atoms apart in masses that assumed one especial form, the feldspar drew
its atoms apart into masses that assumed another and different form, and
the glittering mica built up its multitudinous layers between. Here the
unctuous chlorite constructed its soft felt; there the micaceous schist
arranged its undulating layers; yonder the dull clay hardened amid the
intense heat, but, when all else was changing, retained its structure
unchanged. Surely a curious chemistry, and conducted on an enormous
scale!
It had been an essential part of my plan to
explore the splendid section of the Lower Oolite furnished by the line of
sea-cliffs that, to the north of Portree, rise full seven hundred feet
over the beach; and on the morning of Wednesday I set out with this
intention from Isle Ornsay, to join the mail gig at Broadford, and pass on
to Portree , - a journey of rather more than thirty miles..I soon passed
over the gneiss, and entered on a wide deposit, extending from side to
side of the island, of what is generally laid down in our geological maps
as Old Red Sandstone, but which, in most of its beds, quite as much
resembles a quartz rock, and which, unlike any Old Red proper I have ever
seen, passes, by insensible gradations, into the gneiss [Professor Nicol
of Aberdeen believes the Red Sandstones of the West Highlands are of
Devonian age, and the quartzite and limestone of Lower Carboniferous.-
See Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, February 1857- W.S.]
Wherever it has been laid bare in flat tables among the heath, we find it
bearing those mysterious scratches on a polished surface which we so
commonly find associated on the main land with the boulder clay; but here,
as in the Hebrides generally, the boulder clay is wanting. To the tract
of Red Sandstone there succeeds a tract of Lias, which, also extending
across the island, forms by far the most largely-developed deposit of this
formation in Scotland. It occupies a flat dingy valley, about six miles in
length, and that varies from two to four miles in breadth. The dreary
interior is covered with mosses, and studded with inky pools, in which the
botanist finds a few rare plants, and which were dimpled, as I passed them
this morning, with countless eddies, formed by myriads of small quick
glancing trout, that seemed busily engaged in fly-catching. The rock
appears but rarely, - all is moss, marsh, and pool; but in a few
localities on the hill-sides, where some stream has cut into the slope,
and disintegrated the softer shales, the shepherd finds shells of strange
form strewed along the water-courses, or bleaching white among the heath.
The valley, - evidently a dangerous one to the night traveller, from its
bogs and its tarns, - is said to be haunted by a spirit peculiar to
itself, - mischievous, eccentric, grotesque creature, not unworthy, from
the monstrosity of its form, of being associated with the old monsters of
the Lias. Luidag - for so the goblin is called - has but one leg,
terminating, like an ancient satyr’s, in a cloven foot; but it is
furnished with two arms, bearing hard fists at the end of them, with which
it has been known to strike the benighted traveller in the face, or to
tumble him over into some dark pool. The spectre may be seen at the close
of evening hopping vigorously among the distant bogs, like a felt ball on
its electric platform; and when the mist lies thick in the hollows, an
occasional glimpse may be caught of it even by day. But when I passed the
way there was no fog: the light, though softened by a thin film of cloud,
fell equally over the heath, revealing hill and hollow; and I was unlucky
enough not to see this goblin of the Liasic valley.
A deep indentation of the coast, which forms the
bay of Broadford, corresponds with the hollow of the valley. It is simply
a portion of the valley itself occupied by the sea; and we find the Lias,
from its lower to its upper beds, exposed in unbroken series along the
beach. In the middle of the opening lies the green level island of Pabba,
altogether composed of this formation, and which, differing, in
consequence, both in outline and colour, from every neighbouring island
and hill, seems a little bit of flat fertile England, laid down, as if for
contrast’s sake, amid the wild rough Hebrides. Of Pabba and its wonders,
however, more anon. I explored a considerable range of shore along the
bay; but as I made it the subject of two after explorations ere I mastered
its deposits, I shall defer my description till a subsequent chapter. It
was late this evening ere the post-gig arrived from the south, and the
night and several hours of the following morning were spent in travelling
to Portree. I know not, however, that I could have seen some of the
wildest and most desolate tracts in Skye to greater advantage. There was
light enough to show the bold outlines of the hills. - lofty, abrupt,
pyramidal, - just such hills, both in form and grouping , as a profile in
black showed best; a low blue vapour slept in the calm over the marshes at
their feet; the sea, smooth as glass, reflected the dusk twilight gleam in
the north, revealing the narrow sounds and deep mountain-girdled lochs
along which we passed; gray crags gleamed dimly on the sight;
birch-featheed acclivities presented against sea and sky their rough
bristly edges; all was vast, dreamy, obscure, like one of Martin’s darker
pictures: the land of the seer and the spectre could not have been better
seen. Morning broke dim and gray, while we were yet several miles from
Portree; and I reached the inn in time to see from my bed-room windows the
first rays of the rising sun gleaming on the hill-tops. |
