"Broad is his breast, his shoulders larger spread,
Though great Atrides overtops his head."
All around, as if topling, wave-like, over the outer edges of the comparatively flat area of Palæozoic rock which composes the middle ground of the landscape, rose a multitude of primary hill-peaks, barely discernible in the haze; while the long withdrawing Dingwall Frith, stretching on towards the open sea for full twenty miles, and flanked on either side by ridges of sandstone, but guarded at the opening by two squat granitic columns, completed the prospect, by adding to its last great feature. All was gloomy and chill; and as I turned me down the descent, the thick wetting drizzle again came on; and the mist-wreaths, after creeping upwards along the hill-side, began again to creep down. When I had first visited the valley, more than a quarter of a century before, it was on a hot breathless day of early summer, in which, though the trees in fresh leaf seemed drooping in the sunshine, and the succulent luxuriance of the fields lay aslant, half-prostrated by the fierce heat, the rich blue of Ben-Wevis, far above, was thickly streaked with snow, on which it was luxury even to look. It gave one iced fancies, wherewithal to slake, amid the bright glow of summer, the thirst in the mind. The recollection came strongly upon me, as the fog from the hill-top closed dark behind, like that sung by the old blind Englishman, which
"O'er the marish glides,
And gathers ground fast at the lab'rer's heel,
Homeward returning."
But the contrast had nothing sad in it; and it was pleasant to feel that it had not. I had resigned many a baseless hope and many an idle desire since I had spent a vacant day amid the sunshine, now gazing on the broad placid features of the snow-streaked mountain; and now sauntering under the tall ancient woods, or along the heath-covered slopes of the valley; but in relation to never-tiring, inexhaustible nature, the heart was no fresher at that time than it was now. I had grown no older in my feelings or in my capacity of enjoyment; and what then was there to regret?
I rode down the Strath in an omnibus which plies between the Spa and Dingwall, and then walked on to the village of Evanton, which I reached about an hour after nightfall, somewhat in the circumstances of the "damp stranger," who gave Beau Brummel the cold. There were, however, no Beau Brummels in the quiet village inn in which I passed the night, and so the effects of the damp were wholly confined to myself. I was soundly pummelled during the night by a frightful female, who first assumed the appearance of the miserable pauper woman whom I had seen beside the Auldgrande, and then became the Lady of Balconie; and, though sufficiently indignant, and much inclined to resist, I could stir neither hand nor foot, but lay passively on my back, jambed fast behind the huge gneiss boulder and the edge of the gulf. And yet, by a strange duality of perception, I was conscious all the while that, having got wet on the previous day, I was now suffering from an attack of nightmare: and held that it would be no very serious matter even should the lady tumble me into the gulf, seeing that all would be well again when I awoke in the morning. Dreams of this character, in which consciousness bears reference at once to the fictitious events of the vision and the real circumstances of the sleeper, must occupy, I am inclined to think, very little time,—single moments, mayhap, poised midway between the sleeping and waking state. Next day (Sunday) I attended the Free Church in the parish, where I found a numerous and attentive congregation,—descendants, in large part, of the old devout Munroes of Ferindonald,—and heard a good solid discourse. And on the following morning I crossed the sea at what is known as the Fowlis Ferry, to explore, on my homeward route, the rocks laid bare along the shore in the upper reaches of the Frith.
I found but little by the way: black patches of bitumen in the sandstone of one of the beds, with a bed of stratified clay, inclosing nodules, in which, however, I succeeded in detecting nothing organic; and a few fragments of clay-slate locked up in the Red Sandstone, sharp and unworn at their edges, as if derived from no great distance, though there be now no clay-slate in the eastern half of Ross; but though the rocks here belong evidently to the ichthyolitic member of the Old Red, not a single fish, not a "nibble" even, repaid the patient search of half a day. I, however, passed some time agreeably enough among the ruins of Craighouse. When I had last seen, many years before, this old castle,[21] the upper stories were accessible; but they were now no longer so. Time, and the little herdboys who occasionally shelter in its vaults, had been busy in the interval; and, by breaking off a few projecting corners by which the climber had held, and by effacing a few notches into which he had thrust his toe-points, they had rendered what had been merely difficult impracticable. I remarked that the huge kitchen chimney of the building,—a deep hollow recess which stretches across the entire gable, and in which, it is said, two thrashers once plied the flail for a whole winter,—bore less of the stain of recent smoke than it used to exhibit twenty years before; and inferred that there would be fewer wraith-lights seen from the castle at nights than in those days of evil spirits and illicit stills, when the cottars in the neighborhood sent more smuggled whiskey to market than any equal number of the inhabitants of almost any other district in the north. It has been long alleged that there existed a close connection between the more ghostly spirits of the country and its distilled ones. "How do you account," said a north country minister of the last age (the late Rev. Mr. M'Bean of Alves) to a sagacious old elder of his Session, "for the almost total disappearance of the ghosts and fairies that used to be so common in your young days?" "Tak my word for 't, minister," replied the shrewd old man, "it's a' owing to the tea; when the tea cam in, the ghaists an' fairies gaed out. Weel do I mind when at a' our neeborly meetings,—bridals, christenings, lyke-wakes, an' the like,—we entertained ane anither wi' rich nappy ale; an' whan the verra dowiest o' us used to get warm i' the face, an' a little confused in the head, an' weel fit to see amaist onything whan on the muirs on our way hame. But the tea has put out the nappy; an' I have remarked, that by losing the nappy we lost baith ghaists an' fairies."
Quitting the ruin, I walked on along the shore, tracing the sandstone as I went, as it rises from lower to higher beds; and where it ceases to crop out at the surface, and gravel and the red boulder-clays take the place of rock, I struck up the hill, and, traversing the parishes of Resolis and Cromarty, got home early in the evening. I had seen and done scarcely half what I had intended seeing or doing: alas, that in reference to every walk which I have yet attempted to tread, this special statement should be so invariably true to fact!—alas, that all my full purposes, should be coupled with but half realizations! But I had at least the satisfaction, that though I had accomplished little, I had enjoyed much; and it is something, though not all, nor nearly all, that, since time is passing, it should pass happily. In my next chapter I shall enter on my tour to Orkney. It dates one year earlier (1846) than the tour with which I have already occupied so many chapters; but I have thus inverted the order of time, by placing it last, that I may be able so to preserve the order of space as to render the tract travelled over in my narrative continuous from Edinburgh to the northern extremity of Pomona.