That clothe with many a varied hue
The bleakest mountain-side.
LOCH CORUISK, SKYE
In coasting Skye, not indeed along the finest stretch, all our ponderous Rambler observed was how the crags made landing difficult, especially for an enemy; while Boswell cast a glance at “hills and mountains in gradations of wildness.” The latter, even when not perturbed by a rough sea-passage, owns that he finds “a difficulty in describing visible objects,” such as those revealing themselves thus to a ready writer of our time:
Here we beheld a sight which seemed the glorious fabric of a vision:—a range of small heights sloping from the deep green sea, every height crowned with a columnar cliff of basalt, and each rising over each, higher and higher, till they ended in a cluster of towering columns, minarets, and spires, over which hovered wreaths of delicate mist, suffused with the pink light from the east. We were looking on the spiral pillars of the Quiraing. In a few minutes the vision had faded; for the yacht was flying faster and faster, assisted a little too much by a savage puff from off the Quiraing’s great cliffs; but other forms of beauty arose before us as we went. The whole coast from Aird Point to Portree forms a panorama of cliff scenery quite unmatched in Scotland. Layers of limestone dip into the sea, which washes them into horizontal forms, resembling gigantic slabs of white and grey masonry, rising sometimes stair above stair, water-stained, and hung with many-coloured weed; and on these slabs stand the dark cliffs and spiral columns: towering into the air like the fretwork of some Gothic temple, roofless to the sky; clustered sometimes together in black masses of eternal shadow; torn open here and there to show glimpses of shining lawns sown in the heart of the stone, or flashes of torrents rushing in silver veins through the darkness; crowned in some places by a green patch, on which the goats feed small as mice; and twisting frequently into towers of most fantastical device, that lie dark and spectral against the grey background of the air. To our left we could now behold the island of Rona, and the northern end of Raasay. All our faculties, however, were soon engaged in contemplating the Storr, the highest part of the northern ridge of Skye, terminating in a mighty insulated rock or monolith which points solitary to heaven, two thousand three hundred feet above the sea, while at its base rock and crag have been torn into the wildest forms by the teeth of earthquake, and a great torrent leaps foaming into the Sound. As we shot past, a dense white vapour enveloped the lower part of the Storr, and towers, pyramids, turrets, monoliths were shooting out above it like a supernatural city in the clouds.
From writers like Robert Buchanan one might quote dozens of such enthusiastic descriptions, showing how a later generation has gone back closer to the bosom of Mother Nature than lay that age of wigs and nightcaps. Yet it is those whose play rather than their work takes them into the wilds who are most prone to such new enthusiasm. Now that Skye is somewhat thinly dotted with birch and larch clumps and gardens, and belted with a high-road winding round her deep inlets between groups of houses where church, schoolhouse, and hotel have sprung up beneath cairns and ruins, her inhabitants are rather apt to wonder why strangers give themselves so much trouble in seeking out the most forbidding wilds of their island, that excite their own feelings no more than Cobbett admired Hindhead when he found the roads rough and the soil not suitable for turnips. Those weird scenes which the well-fed Sassenach seeks, as Buchanan says, to “galvanise” his soul with holiday emotion, overshadow the cottar’s daily life with poverty, hunger, and dread. Some parts of Skye have now been made comparatively trim and tame, beside others left hopelessly barren and dismal, with peat and rushes for their best crop; but nowhere perhaps in Britain can one better learn how “nature is not always gracious; that not always does she outstretch herself in low-lying bounteous lands, over which sober sunsets redden and heavy-uddered cattle low; but that she has fierce hysterical moods in which she congeals into granite precipice and peak, and draws around herself and her companions the winds that moan and bluster, veils of livid rain.” This poor “island of cloud” is indeed most rich in “frozen terror and superstition” for those who have eyes to see.
SKYE CROFTER
Between contemporary pilgrims of the picturesque and the dull observers of older days, came to Skye an invasion of geologists and such like, who did much towards proclaiming its grand points. One of the pioneers of scientific invasion was the Frenchman Faujas de St. Fond, who does not shine in the orthography of Scottish names. But of these explorers one need not speak here, unless to distinguish that humorous and hard-headed savant MacCulloch, whose hammer was brought to bear on many time-weathered sentiments. His Western Islands is more strictly geological, but his Highlands and Western Isles is full of rollicking pages, though stuffed rather too much with learned facetiousness, which would have tickled Mr. Shandy, while it may prove hard reading “when, in after ages, the youths of Polynesia shall be flogged into English and Gaelic as we have been into Greek and Latin” —a sentence that appears rough sketch for a more celebrated Mac’s New Zealander. Macaulay may also have lifted the formula, “every schoolboy knows,” from this author, who varies that phrase by “the merest schoolboy” or “the minutest Grecian,” and in more boldly laying down “all the world knows what Callimachus says,” will not recommend himself to a generation better acquainted with Macaulay’s dicta and dogmata than with what song the Sirens sang, or what tartan Achilles wore when he seems to have disguised himself in a kilt. Another famous saying, that has become a cliché in our day, as to the South Sea islanders’ trade of taking in one another’s washing, seems adumbrated by MacCulloch’s wonder how Highland shop-keepers contrive to keep open, “unless they have agreed to live on gingerbread kings and carraway comfits, and to buy all their pins and tape from each other.” And for a final sample of this author’s shrewd wit, let us hear that “never have books been so black, so thick, so large and so long, as when they have been written about nothings.” This warning spurs me on from digressions that might be extended to a folio—