It is now past nine o’clock; I have dined, and Hurricane Bob and I go out for a stroll in the sweet moonlight, which is flooding mountain, moor, and dell.
The day has been fiercely hot, but the night is still and starry, and before morning there will be ice on every pool.
How black and bare the hills are, and how lonesome and wild! but what must they be in winter, when the storm winds sweep over them, and when neither fur nor feather can find food and shelter anywhere near them?
“Bob, my boy, we will go to bed.”
The stillness of the night is sublime, unbroken save by the distant murmur of the Garry, a sound so soothing that I verily believe it would have lulled even Maecenas himself to sleep.
On August 20th, as fresh as larks, cold though it had been all night, we started on our route for Dalwhinnie. What an appetite the Highland air gives one! I felt somewhat ashamed of myself this morning, as rasher after rasher of bacon, and egg after egg, disappeared as if by legerdemain; and after all, the probability is that a biscuit and cheese at eleven o’clock may be deemed a necessity of existence.
It is a bright sunny morning, but the road is rough and stony; on some parts the débris has been washed from the mountain sides, and left to lie across the road, in others some faint attempts at repairs have been undertaken. The plan is primitive in the extreme. A hole is dug in the hillside, and the earth and shingle spaded on to the road.
Plenty of sheep are grazing on the boulder-covered mountains, plenty of snakes and lizards basking in the morning sunshine. Some of the snakes are very large and singularly beautiful, and glitter in the sunlight as if they had been dipped in glycerine.
This is a land of purple heath, but not of shaggy wood. It would be impossible for any one to hang himself here, unless he requisitioned one of the snow-posts. It is the land of the curlew, the grouse, and the blackcock,—the land mayhap of the eagle, though as yet we have not seen the bird of Jove. The road now gets narrower and still more narrow, while we ride close to the cliffs, with—far below us—the turbulent Garry. Were we to meet a carriage now, passing it would be impossible, and there is no room to draw off.
Never before perhaps did a two-ton caravan attempt to cross the Grampians. There are heath-clad braelands rising around us at all sides. Some of the banks near Dalnaspiddal are a sight to behold. The heather that clothes them is of all shades, from pink to the deepest, richest red. So too are the heaths. These last rest in great sheets, folded over the edge of cliffs, clinging to rocks, or lying in splendid patches on the bare yellow earth. Here, too, are ferns of many kinds, the dark-green of dwarf-broom, and the crimson of foxglove bells.