Where he, eager to please her and show her the beauties of the Highlands, saw lovely white sands, and smiling plains of verdure, and far views of the sunny sea, she only saw loneliness, and desolation, and a constant threatening of death from the fierce Atlantic. Could anything have been more beautiful? he said to himself—than this magnificent scene that lay all around her, when they reached a far point on the western shore, in face of them the wildly-rushing seas, coming thundering on to the rocks, and springing so high into the air that the snow-white foam showed black against the glare of the sky; the nearer islands gleaming with a touch of brown on their sunward side, the Dutchman’s Cap, with its long brim and conical centre, and Lunga, also like a cap, but with a shorter brim and a high peak in front becoming a trifle blue; then Coll and Tiree lying like a pale stripe on the horizon; while far away the mountains of Rum and Skye were faint and spectral in the haze of the sunlight. Then the wild coast around them, with its splendid masses of granite, and its spare grass a brown-green in the warm sun, and its bays of silver sand, and its sea-birds whiter than the white clouds that came sailing over the blue.... And could anything have been more magical than the beauty of that evening, after the storm had altogether died away? The red sunset sank behind the dark olive-green of the hills; a pale, clear twilight took its place, and shone over those mystic ruins that were the object of many a thought and many a pilgrimage in the far past and forgotten years; and then the stars began to glimmer as the distant shores and the sea grew dark; and then, still later on, a wonderful radiance rose behind the low hills of Mull, and across the waters of the Sound came a belt of quivering light as the white moon sailed slowly up into the sky.
Montalembert, in his Monks of the West, is very positive as to the austerity of scenes that, beheld by a wave-tossed scholar, might well seem the antipodes of La Belle France:
Nothing less attractive, on first approach, than this harsh and stern scenery. Its picturesque is without charm, and its grandeur without grace. One sadly traverses an archipelago of desert naked islets, like so many extinct volcanoes, scattered upon a dull leaden sea, sometimes broken by rapid currents and whirling gulfs. Except on rare days when the sun, that pale sun of the north, comes out to enliven these coasts, one’s eye wanders over a vast surface of brackish water, here and there streaked by whitening wave crests, or by a foamy line of surf breaking now upon a long reef, then against huge cliffs from which one hears afar the lugubrious roar. Through the fogs and incessant rains of this rude climate, it is hard to catch the summits of the mountain chains, whose steep, bare slopes fall down into these cold waters, always kept astir by the shock of contrary currents and of the squalls that burst from the lakes and narrow defiles inland.
Yet these Highland coasts, dull or forbidding as they may look from the sea, warm into charmingness under loyal eyes like Norman Macleod’s, that can never forget the wild play-place of a happy boyhood:
A castled promontory, a range of dark precipices supporting the upland pastures, and streaked with white waterfalls, which are lost in the copse at their base, form a picture not very imposing compared with “what one sees everywhere.” A long ridge of hill rising some two thousand feet above the sea, its brown sides, up to a certain height, chequered with green stripes and patches of cultivation; brown heather-thatched cottages, with white walls; here and there a mansion, whose chimneys are seen above the trees which shelter it—these are the chief features along its seaboard of many miles. But how different is the whole scene when one lands! New beauties reveal themselves, and every object seems to change its size, appearance, and relative position. A rocky wall of wondrous beauty, the rampart of the old upraised beach which girdles Scotland, runs along the shore; the natural wild wood of ash, oak, and birch, with the hazel copse, clothes the lower hills and shelters the herds of wandering cattle; lonely sequestered bays are everywhere scooped out into beautiful harbours; points and promontories seem to grow out of the land, and huge dykes of whinstone fashion to themselves the most picturesque outlines; clear streams everywhere hasten on to the sea; small glens, perfect gems of beauty, open up entrances into deep dark pools, hemmed in by steep banks hanging with ivy, honeysuckle, rowan-trees, and ferns; while on the hillsides scattered cottages, small farms, and shepherds’ huts, the signs of culture and industry, give life to the whole scene.
Perhaps few of us can rightly learn to love West Highland scenery who have not in youth grown familiar with every blush of heather, every skin of copse or bracken, every brown rib bared amid the turf, and all the moods of those stern features under changing lights and shadows. One surpassing glory of this region is the evening skies that may reward patient sufferers under rain, for which see William Black’s cruises, passim. I have travelled in four continents without elsewhere catching a more brilliant glow of summer sunset than on the hills of Ardnamurchan or Appin, where short winter days will sometimes die out in a rosy glory diffused all round the horizon. Waller Paton’s Highland skyscapes were accused of being too Turneresque in their gorgeous hues; but they make indeed no exaggeration of what a Gaelic bard calls “the tartan of the sky.” The more lovely for their uncertainty are the day-long or week-long spells of fine weather that may come in the heart of a stormy summer, sometimes lasting for a month or two while the plains of the south seem to draw away the freakish mountain clouds. Then in late autumn the west has often a truce of halcyon days brooding peacefully over horizons where Italian blue, touched with native softness, melts into a glassy sea among the openings of richly tinted hills. And at all times the clearing after rain may produce effects which a city poet aptly compares to the raising of the curtain on a pantomime transformation scene.
More often the face of this region shows overcast, in too true keeping with its gloomy traditions. The Christianity spread among these islanders seems long to have been but skin deep, where every ruin is haunted by memories of cruelty and hatred from days when the cross itself was dearest as a fiery summons to bloodshed. Between Lismore and Mull rises the Lady’s Rock, on which Maclean of Duart let his wife, Argyll’s daughter, be exposed to the mercy of the tide, by one account for no worse crime than that of being a Campbell; but a more elaborately romantic version brings in jealousy of a Spanish señora which urged this dame to procure the historical blowing up of an Armada ship, whose guns were recovered in the last century, and at our own day fresh attempts are on foot to dredge out her long-buried treasures, as to which has been suggested the knotty legal question whether they should not be the property of the king of Spain, then at peace with Scotland. The lady’s peril had a dramatic ending which made this an oft-told tale: she was rescued by fishermen of her father’s clan, and when the husband came to Inveraray clad in hypocritical woe, what seemed her ghost confronted him at the funeral feast that proved his own.
THE HILLS OF JURA