I remark now what in my slaughterous days I remember noticing, without attaching any meaning to it, viz. that there is a particular line or scroll or outswelling of feathers on each side of the guillemot's body, all along the lower breast and ventral surface. They are longer than the close feathers in front, and begin to be flecked with grey. It is just into this zone of deeper plumage that the young guillemot insinuates itself when wishing to go "sleepy-by." Also, when the old bird flaps its wings I seem to notice a little depression or alcove just underneath them—the chick's cradle, boudoir, or dormitory, as I am inclined to think—like a sleeping-bunk in the wall of a Highland cottage. Similar depressions I thought I saw once on the back of the dabchick, when I watched her domestic arrangements; but I will not be sure in either case.
Once again the chick comes out and walks to a little way from its mother. Having preened itself, it goes back to her, and then flaps its little wings. The quill feathers are growing and look just about an inch long. They are a good deal separated from one another, and have a very feeble appearance. Still, they might serve to make a fall a long fall, which is all that would be required of them to take their owner to the sea. The preening over, the chick, with considerable insistence, burrows once more under its mother's wing, and I now leave, it being all mist and raining into mist. I had meant to see the fulmar petrels again before returning, but by the time I get to the top of the path leading down to them it is nearly six, the drizzle increasing, and the mist on the hills thickening. The hut stands sufficiently high for it to be always enshrouded when a mist comes on, and it may then be difficult to strike. However, from the round house where the signals are shown, each morning, to the lighthouse on the great stack opposite, by a man who walks up from the village at the foot of the ness, there winds a foot-track with posts stuck at long intervals beside it. When one gets near to the fifth post one should see the hut if the mist is not very thick, and even if it is, one has then a good chance of striking it. The signal-house, or rather shed, one may strike by going constantly upwards till the highest point is reached; but it is possible to miss it, and also the track between post and post. As the gulls and the two kinds of skuas have each their separate breeding-place upon the ness—thus, as it were, mapping it out—they, too, are of some assistance in finding one's way. Still, the possibility of a night out at the end of any day is not a pleasant thing to think of, and I am always very glad when I see the hut through the mists, and still gladder when there are no mists to see it through.
It seems wonderful that any corner of the United Kingdom can hold a summer like this—little as I mistake the United Kingdom for paradise. It is like a bad November in England, but with more of the spirit of youth and freshness in it; always thought that the wind is perpetual and multiplied by about a hundred. I am told this summer is unprecedented, even in the Shetlands, but bad weather precedents are seldom remembered by the seasoned inhabitants of a place. I, as a visitor, can remember the June and July of two years ago, and "if it was not Bran, it was Bran's brother," as the Highlanders say.
I forgot to mention that whilst watching the guillemots on the ledges, one of them flew down into the sea, just below, which was like a great, clear basin, and thus gave me the first opportunity I have yet had of seeing a guillemot under water. It progressed, like the razorbill and puffin, by repeated strokes of its wings, which were not, however, outspread as in flight, but held as they are when closed, parallel, that is to say, roughly speaking, with the sides, from which they were moved outwards, and then back, with a flap-like motion, as though attached to them all along. Thus the flight through the water is managed in a very different way from the flight through the air.
The descent to these guillemot ledges—for they represent the first only, and lowest, of the up-piled strata of which the entire precipice is formed—seems to me, who am no particular cragsman, to get worse every day. There are parts of it which I very much dislike—a green edge, and not much of it, above a well-nigh precipitous slope of the same lush grass, starred, here and there, with points of rock, and ending in nothing—sheer vacuity. How one would fly down this, and then over!—but not like a guillemot. It is horrid to think of, and the little painted puffins seem waiting to see it take place—grouped as they are on every rock and all over the green spongy turf, honeycombed everywhere with their breeding-holes—a vast amphitheatre of impassive spectators. Lower down, when it gets to the rock, it seems safer, but I doubt if it really is. The path then leads over a great jagged spur of the precipice, made up of its down-tumblings from the heights above, which are piled very loose, so that the blocks are sometimes hardly held together by the soil between them, this having been formed entirely out of their own crumblings and disintegration. I was appalled, the other day, by displacing a huge one just above me, which I had been going to climb up. It looked as firm as it was massive, and I have been very careful since. That boulder, which, had it really fallen, would have brought down an avalanche with it, has a nasty look to me now, and I have to pass it each time, descending and returning, the whole path being a razor's edge, though the mere climbing is easy enough.
As I halted and looked back, this afternoon, in the midst of my ascent, I was struck by the figure of a shag, or smaller cormorant, standing in the exact centre of the highest ridge of one of those great isolated piles of rock that the sea has cut off from their parent precipice, and which are called here "stacks." It had the wings spread out, after its fashion, and looked thus, and in its "pride of place," absurdly like the heraldic eagle of some cock-crowing nationality or other: American, Austrian, Russian, or any of them—for they all crow and will all, one day, "yield the crow a pudding."
What month in the year was it that King Lear was turned out into the storm? This is August, but what a night! I can see no farther than a few paces outside the hut. All is mist, with spit-fire storms of rain, and a wind that seems as though it would blow the ness into the sea. "A brave night to cool a courtesan in," and so it was, last night; nor did it greatly differ the night before.
The wind is not so pleasant to hear at night-time here as it is in England. I cannot lie and listen to it with the same feelings. It has not the same poetry, for there are no trees for it to sigh and moan through, and therefore it cannot produce those sad, weird, mysterious sounds which appeal so powerfully to the imagination. Instead, it strikes the hut with sudden bangs and blows which upset one's nerves and have an irritating effect upon one. There is noise, racket, and bluster, but no mystery, no haunting mournfulness. It plays no "eolian harps amongst the trees." No, the wind here is "the fierce Kabibonokka" that—
"Shouted down into the smoke-flue,
Shook the lodge-poles in his fury,
Flapped the curtain of the doorway,"