He added:
"I think I should like to be an eagle. Is it true they take babies to their nests?"
"They build," said Creggan, "on shelves of rock, that in some parts here rise sheer up from the sea a thousand feet or more. Their nests are huge bundles of sticks, built as a wild pigeon arranges her nest, and in the centre is often moss, hay, and feathers. These are called eeries. Men or big boys have sometimes been let down by ropes to rob these of their yellow, fluffy, red-throated gaping fledglings; but Mr M'Ian says it is very cruel, and highly dangerous. Once, when a man went down like this and stood on the eerie, where whole skeletons of lambs lay bleaching in the sun, and many other strange bones as well, the she-eagle with a deafening scream dashed at him. He managed to beat her off, and the fight for a time was fearful. He signalled soon to be hauled up, but hardly was he in the air before the eagle swooped down again. This time she tore at the rope, and—oh! wasn't it awful, Willie?—it snapped, and the man was hurled down, down eight hundred feet into the sea."
"Terrible!"
"Yes. But though his body was found it was a headless trunk, for in his descent, you know, and when about half-way down, a piece of sharp rock cut the head clean off; and they do say that when well out to sea you can see the bleached skull, if you have a good glass, grinning on that shelf of rock."[[4]]
[[4]] The same kind of accident occurred to a shepherd in Skye, who had fallen over a precipice while trying to save a lamb.
They went on now.
Not only was the moorland covered with moss and green heather, but many charming wild flowers were scattered about, with here and there patches of sweetly-scented bog-myrtle and white downy toad's-tail, and the whole place was musical with the song of tit-larks and linnets.
They climbed that day high up into the crater of the extinct volcano Quiraing. Right in the centre is a round raised green plot, big enough to drill a company of soldiers on. At one side the wall of rock is black, wet, and solid, but at the other it is split up into needles, higher far than Cleopatra's on the Thames embankment, and between these, to-day, the boy-adventurers could catch glimpses of a sea of Italian blue, dotted here and there with many a sail, snow-white or brown.
To gaze on such a scene as this, in a silence so dread that you could hear the water dropping from the rocks, is very impressive; but like everything solemn and beautiful in nature, I think it brings one into closer union with God.