It was wild, it was fitful, it died on the breeze,
It wandered about into various keys;
It was jerky, spasmodic, and harsh, I declare,
But still—it distinctly suggested an air.
The bagpipes need no apology in ears to the manner born. They are well beloved in the Lowlands as in the Highlands; and even about a London terminus one is hardly more safe from them than in the wilds of Lorne or Lochaber. When the savant St. Fond came to Edinburgh, grave Adam Smith, learning that he held music part of the wealth of nations, took him to a bagpipe competition, which he describes as exciting such enthusiasm among sober citizens as might be expected on what is not the native heath of this instrument. It was once, indeed, no more specially Scottish than it was English, Irish, Italian, or, for the matter of that, European. What seems to have been added to it in the Highlands is the great drone, helping the pipes to express a fierce or melancholy music, whose strains, in turn exulting and wailing, recommended themselves strongly to the keenly-set feelings of the Gael. The chief’s piper was an hereditary official in several clans, often one of no little dignity, having his acolytes and his pipe-bearer, and not condescending to play for common revels. There was a college of M’Crimmon pipers at Dunvegan in Skye, where the Macdonalds maintained a rival school of MacCarters; and the names of other champion performers are not forgotten. The piper held his head so high in the Celtic world that still Highland pride seems typified in the swelling port and strut of his degenerate descendants. His finer notes are in danger of being lost, now that they will not be so much called on for occasions of state or mourning; but as often as we relapse into the savagery of war, there is found no screech like the bagpipe’s to heat men’s hearts to slaughter point, as some of our modern Highland stocks may have known to their cost when first they encountered the true children of mountain mists. In older days, “the harp that once through Tara’s halls” is claimed as the stately music of the Highlands also, and if we went far enough back, we might find cows’ horns the only music known to rude warriors, till some effeminate stranger introduced among them an art nursed on sunny Mediterranean lochs and sounds. But the reader need not fear to be let in for an antiquarian lecture. The bagpipes will serve me like the blessed word Mesopotamia as text for a rambling discourse on past and present in the country looked down on by Ben Nevis.
It seems typical of the new order that Ben Nevis, one of those mountains said to be held on a snowball tenure, belongs in part to a Southron whose very name denotes “England’s cruel red,” and in part to a family which has blended the once hostile blood of Campbell and of Cameron with that of Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, the “Justice Shallow” whose deer Shakespeare poached, according to Elizabethan scandal. No contrast could be greater than between this property and the Lucys’ lordly park in the flat Midlands. Rising to the heaven that names it, from a base thirty miles in circumference, the highest crest of Britain is not so much a towering peak as “a colossal bundle of the hugest of Scotland’s mountains rolled into one mighty mass” of cloudy ridges and stupendous precipices, whose magnitude grows on the beholder from various aspects, most impressive perhaps that of the dark gulf filled with rolling mists that opens on the north-east side. These stern steeps that once echoed to pibrochs and coronachs, and gave their fallen stones for the cairns of many a forgotten feud, were in our generation crowned by a monument of the spirit of a new age. Monument indeed, for as I write comes news that the Ben Nevis Observatory has been deserted through an unromantic lack of funds, which in any other civilised country would have been supplied from the public purse.
For years this cloudy post was garrisoned by a band of intrepid weather watchers, bearing the brunt of the great Atlantic storms, in whose teeth they snatched hints to build up scientific meteorology. Not that their knowledge has as yet risen much beyond its foundations, when Mr. Robert Omond, the first captain of that crow’s nest, truly then to be called highest British authority on the subject, rebukes more confident seers by the dictum that our weather’s “coming events cast their shadows before” no farther than a day or two, and then not for certain. More striking results were deserved by the devotion of these hermits of science. With hares, foxes, and weasels for nearest neighbours, their chief complaint seems to have been of only too many visitors, in summer at least, when scores daily would toil up the path made for constructing and provisioning their eyry, whereon the weak-kneed Lowlander may stumble and murmur; yet had he seen this road “before it was made,” he would rather bless the Scottish Meteorological Society that has done so much for it under such arduous circumstances. But again they would be weeks without seeing a human face, even on a postage stamp, unless some adventurer made an Alpine ascent through the snow to bring news from the outer world to their hermitage, built strong and solid like a lighthouse. At the height of summer banks of dirty snow may be found on the top, where John Leyden and his friends had an August snowball fight. In winter the crew of observers were often buried in snow-banks, through which they must dig themselves out; or it would be all they could do, roped together, to struggle against the wind to their instruments a few yards off. Sometimes it was impossible to crawl to windward against such a gale as once for fifteen hours kept them imprisoned in their cramped quarters, the only exposed window broken by a bombardment of hard snow lumps torn up and hurled by the wind. Rainbows proved rare so far up in the clouds, and so did heavy thunderstorms, though the air has at times been found alive with frizzlings and cracklings of invisible electricity that made men’s hair stand on end; and once their telegraph apparatus was fused by lightning. As often as not their mountain solitude was wrapped in dark, dank, chilly fog, through which they durst not lightly trust themselves by the edges of the perilous abysses around. In one day they measured more than seven inches of rain. But again that ark of theirs would stand up in glorious sunshine above the lower tops lying islanded in a sea of mist, which had rolled back from the top to leave its high tide-mark sparkling with feathery crystals. I once spent ten Christmas days at Bournemouth without a glimpse of the sun, when a letter came from the top of Ben Nevis reporting a fortnight of dry, clear weather, lit through the short day by a wonderful play of colours in the sky. And at all seasons, from their hundred-mile prospect point above the clouds, the observers might catch wonderful optical phenomena, coronæ of most vivid colouring painted on a film of scud-cloud, fog-bows, both solar and lunar, and the weird adumbration called “glories,” described by Mr. Omond:
In winter when the sun is low, even at noon, the shadow of a person standing near the cliff that runs all along the northern side of Ben Nevis is cast clear of the hill into the valley below. In bright winter weather this deep gloomy gorge is often full of loose shifting fog, and when the shadow falls upon it, the observer sees his head surrounded by a series of coloured rings, from two to five in number, varying in size from a mere blotch of light up to a well-defined arch 6 or 8 degrees in radius. This phenomenon does not present quite the same appearance as the better-known Brocken Spectre, for here the shadow of the observer, in consequence of the distance of the mist from him, does not appear unnaturally large; in fact the image of one’s head appears as a mere dark speck in the centre of the coloured rings. These glories are less common in summer—though they have been seen near sunrise and sunset.
