"'Tis a time of strange changes," he said; "I thought to have lived and died in that house, and found a quiet grave in the burying-ground yonder beside the ruin; but my path was a clear though a rugged one; and from almost the moment that it opened up to me, I saw what I had to expect. It has been said that I might have lain by here in this out-of-the-way corner, and suffered the Church question to run its course, without quitting my hold of the Establishment. And so I perhaps might. It is easy securing one's own safety, in even the worst of times, if one look no higher; and I, as I had no opportunity of mixing in the contest, or of declaring my views respecting it, might be regarded as an unpledged man. But the principles of the Evangelical party were my principles; and it would have been consistent with neither honor nor religion to have hung back in the day of battle, and suffered the men with whom in heart I was at one to pay the whole forfeit of our common quarrel. So I attended the Convocation, and pledged myself to stand or fall with my brethren. On my return I called my people together, and told them how the case stood, and that in May next I bade fair to be a dependent for a home on the proprietor of Eigg. And so they petitioned the proprietor that he might give me leave to build a house among them,—exactly the same sort of favor granted to the Roman Catholics of the island. But month after month passed, and they got no reply to their petition; and I was left in suspense, not knowing whether I was to have a home among them or no. I did feel the case a somewhat hard one. The father of Dr. M'Pherson of Eigg had been, like myself, a humble Scotch minister; and the Doctor, however indifferent to his people's wishes in such a matter, might have just thought that a man in his father's station in life, with a wife and family dependent on him, was placed by his silence in cruel circumstances of uncertainty. Ere the Disruption took place, however, I came to know pretty conclusively what I had to expect. The Doctor's factor came to Eigg, and, as I was informed, told the Islanders that it was not likely the Doctor would permit a third place of worship on the Island: the Roman Catholics had one, and the Establishment had a kind of one, and there was to be no more. The factor, an active messenger-at-arms, useful in raising rents in these parts, has always been understood to speak the mind of his master; but the congregation took heart in the emergency, and sent off a second petition to Dr. M'Pherson, a week or so previous to the Disruption. Ere it received an answer, the Disruption took place; and, laying the whole circumstances before my brethren in Edinburgh, who, like myself, interpreted the silence of the Doctor into a refusal, I suggested to them the scheme of the Betsey, as the only scheme through which I could keep up unbroken my connection with my people. So the trial is now over, and here we are, and yonder is the Betsey."
We descended the Scuir together for the place of meeting, and entered, by the way, the cottage of a worthy islander, much attached to his minister. "We are both very hungry," said my friend: "we have been out among the rocks since breakfast-time, and are wonderfully disposed to eat. Do not put yourself about, but give us anything you have at hand." There was a bowl of rich milk brought us, and a splendid platter of mashed potatoes, and we dined like princes. I observed, for the first time, in the interior of this cottage, what I had frequent occasion to remark afterwards, that much of the wood used in building in the smaller and outer islands of the Hebrides must have drifted across the Atlantic, borne eastwards and northwards by the great Gulf-stream. Many of the beams and boards, sorely drilled by the Teredo navalis, are of American timber, that, from time to time, has been cast upon the shore,—a portion of it, apparently, from timber-laden vessels unfortunate in their voyage, but a portion of it, also, with root and branch still attached, bearing mark of having been swept to the sea by transatlantic rivers. Nuts and seeds of tropical plants are occasionally picked up on the beach. My friend gave me a bean or nut of the Dolichos urens, or cow-itch shrub, of the West Indies, which an islander had found on the shore sometime in the previous year, and given to one of the manse children as a toy; and I attach some little interest to it, as a curiosity of the same class with the large canes and the fragment of carved wood found floating near the shores of Madeira by the brother-in-law of Columbus, and which, among other pieces of circumstantial evidence, led the great navigator to infer the existence of a western continent. Curiosities of this kind seem still more common in the northern than in the western islands of Scotland. "Large exotic nuts or seeds," says Dr. Patrick Neill, in his interesting "Tour," quoted in a former chapter, "which in Orkney are known by the name of Molucca beans, are occasionally found among the rejectamenta of the sea, especially after westerly winds. There are two kinds commonly found: the larger (of which the fishermen very generally make snuff-boxes) seem to be seeds from the great pod of the Mimosa scandens of the West Indies; the smaller seeds, from the pod of the Dolichos urens, also a native of the same region. It is probable that the currents of the ocean, and particularly that great current which issues from the Gulf of Florida, and is hence denominated the Gulf Stream, aid very much in transporting across the mighty Atlantic these American products. They are generally quite fresh and entire, and afford an additional proof how impervious to moisture, and how imperishable, nuts and seeds generally are."
The evening was fast falling ere the minister closed his discourse; and we had but just light enough left, on reaching the Betsey, to show us that there lay a dead sheep on the deck. It had been sent aboard to be killed by the minister's factotum, John Stewart; but John was at the evening preaching at the time, and the poor sheep, in its attempts to set itself free, had got itself entangled among the cords, and strangled itself. "Alas, alas!" exclaimed the minister, "thus ends our hope of fresh mutton for the present, and my hapless speculation as a sheep farmer for evermore." I learned from him, afterwards, over our tea, that shortly previous to the Convocation he had got his glebe,—one of the largest in Scotland,—well stocked with sheep and cattle, which he had to sell, immediately on the Disruption, in miserably bad condition, at a loss of nearly fifty per cent. He had a few sheep, however, that would not sell at all, and that remained on the glebe, in consequence, until his successor entered into possession. And he, honest man, straightway impounded them, and got them incarcerated in a dark, dirty hole, somewhat in the way Giant Despair incarcerated the pilgrims,—a thing he had quite a legal right to do, seeing that the mile-long glebe, with its many acres of luxuriant pasture, was now as much his property as it had been Mr. Swanson's a few months before, and seeing Mr. Swanson's few sheep had no right to crop his grass. But a worthy neighbor interfered,—Mr. M'Donald, of Keil, the principal tenant in the island. Mr. M'Donald,—a practical commentator on the law of kindness,—was sorely scandalized at what he deemed the new minister's gratuitous unkindness to a brother in calamity; and, relieving the sheep, he brought them to his own farm, where he found them board and lodging on my friend's behalf, till they could be used up at leisure. And it was one of the last of this unfortunate lot that now contrived to escape from us by anticipating John Stewart. "A black beginning makes a black ending," said Gouffing Jock, an ancient border shepherd, when his only sheep, a black ewe, the sole survivor of a flock smothered in a snow-storm, was worried to death by his dogs. Then, taking down his broadsword, he added, "Come awa, my auld friend; thou and I maun e'en stock Bowerhope-Law ance mair!" Less warlike than Gouffing Jock, we were content to repeat over the dead, on this occasion, simply the first portion of his speech; and then, betaking ourselves to our cabin, we forgot all our sorrows over our tea.
CHAPTER IV.
An Excursion—The Chain of Crosses—Bay of Laig—Island of Rum—Description of the Island—Superstitions banished by pure Religion—Fossil Shells—Remarkable Oyster Bed—New species of Belemnite—Oölitic Shells—White Sandstone Precipices—Gigantic Petrified Mushrooms—"Christabel" in Stone—Musical Sand—Jabel Nakous, or Mountain of the Bell—Experiments of Travellers at Jabel Nakous—Welsted's Account—Reg-Rawan, or the Moving Sand—The Musical Sounds inexplicable—Article on the subject in the North British Review.
There had been rain during the night; and when I first got on deck, a little after seven, a low stratum of mist, that completely enveloped the Scuir, and truncated both the eminence on which it stands and the opposite height, stretched like a ruler across the flat valley which indents so deeply the middle of the island. But the fogs melted away as the morning rose, and ere our breakfast was satisfactorily discussed, the last thin wreath had disappeared from around the columned front of the rock-tower of Eigg, and a powerful sun looked down on moist slopes and dank hollows, from which there arose in the calm a hazy vapor, that, while it softened the lower features of the landscape, left the bold outline relieved against a clear sky. Accompanied by our attendant of the previous day, bearing bag and hammer, we set out a little before eleven for the north-western side of the island, by a road which winds along the central hollow. My friend showed me as we went, that on the edge of an eminence, on which the traveller journeying westwards catches the last glimpse of the chapel of St. Donan, there had once been a rude cross erected, and another rude cross on an eminence on which he catches the last glimpse of the first; and that there had thus been a chain of stations formed from sea to sea, like the sights of a land-surveyor, from one of which a second could be seen, and a third from the second, till, last of all, the emphatically holy point of the island,—the burial-place of the old Culdee,—came full in view. The unsteady devotion, that journeyed, fancy-bound, along the heights, to gloat over a dead man's bones, had its clue to carry it on in a straight line. Its trail was on the ground; it glided snake-like from cross to cross, in quest of dust; and, without its finger-posts to guide it, would have wandered devious. It is surely a better devotion that, instead of thus creeping over the earth to a mouldy sepulchre, can at once launch into the sky, secure of finding Him who once arose from one. In less than an hour we were descending on the Bay of Laig, a semi-circular indentation of the coast, about a mile in length, and, where it opens to the main sea, nearly two miles in breadth; with the noble island of Rum rising high in front, like some vast breakwater; and a meniscus of comparatively level land, walled in behind by a semi-circular rampart of continuous precipice, sweeping round its shores. There are few finer scenes in the Hebrides than that furnished by this island bay and its picturesque accompaniments,—none that break more unexpectedly on the traveller who descends upon it from the east; and rarely has it been seen, to greater advantage than on the delicate day, so soft, and yet so sunshiny and clear, on which I paid it my first visit.
The island of Rum, with its abrupt sea-wall of rock, and its steep-pointed hills, that attain, immediately over the sea, an elevation of more than two thousand feet, loomed bold and high in the offing, some five miles away, but apparently much nearer. The four tall summits of the island rose clear against the sky like a group of pyramids; its lower slopes and precipices, variegated and relieved by graceful alternations of light and shadow, and resting on their blue basement of sea, stood out with equal distinctness; but the entire middle space from end to end was hidden in a long horizontal stratum of gray cloud, edged atop with a lacing of silver. Such was the aspect of the noble breakwater in front. Fully two-thirds of the semi-circular rampart of rock which shuts in the crescent-shaped plain directly opposite lay in deep shadow; but the sun shone softly on the plain itself, brightening up many a dingy cottage, and many a green patch of corn; and the bay below stretched out, sparkling in the light. There is no part of the island so thickly inhabited as this flat meniscus. It is composed almost entirely of Oölitic rocks, and bears atop, especially where an ancient oyster-bed of great depth forms the subsoil, a kindly and fertile mould. The cottages lie in groups; and, save where a few bogs, which it would be no very difficult matter to drain, interpose their rough shag of dark green, and break the continuity, the plain around them waves with corn. Lying fair, green and populous within the sweep of its inaccessible rampart of rock, at least twice as lofty as the ramparts of Babylon of old, it reminds one of the suburbs of some ancient city lying embosomed, with all its dwellings and fields, within some roomy crescent of the city wall. We passed, ere we entered on the level, a steep-sided narrow dell, through which a small stream finds its way from the higher grounds, and which terminates at the upper end in an abrupt precipice, and a lofty but very slim cascade. "One of the few superstitions that still linger on the island," said my friend the minister, "is associated with that wild hollow. It is believed that shortly before a death takes place among the inhabitants, a tall withered female may be seen in the twilight, just yonder where the rocks open, washing a shroud in the stream. John, there, will perhaps tell you how she was spoken to on one occasion, by an over-bold, over-inquisitive islander, curious to know whose shroud she was preparing; and how she more than satisfied his curiosity, by telling him it was his own. It is a not uninteresting fact," added the minister, "that my poor people, since they have become more earnest about their religion, think very little about ghosts and spectres: their faith in the realities of the unseen world seems to have banished from their minds much of their old belief in its phantoms."
In the rude fences that separate from each other the little farms in this plain, we find frequent fragments of the oyster bed, hardened into a tolerably compact limestone. It is seen to most advantage, however, in some of the deeper cuttings in the fields, where the surrounding matrix exists merely as an incoherent shale; and the shells may be picked out as entire as when they lay, ages before, in the mud, which we still see retaining around them its original color. They are small, thin, triangular, much resembling in form some specimens of the Ostrea deltoidea, but greatly less in size. The nearest resembling shell in Sowerby is the Ostrea acuminata,—an oyster of the clay that underlies the great Oölite of Bath. Few of the shells exceed an inch and a half in length, and the majority fall short of an inch. What they lack in bulk, however, they make up in number. They are massed as thickly together, to the depth of several feet, as shells on the heap at the door of a Newhaven fisherman, and extend over many acres. Where they lie open we can still detect the triangular disc of the hinge, with the single impression of the abductor muscle; and the foliaceous character of the shell remains in most instances as distinct as if it had undergone no mineral change. I have seen nowhere in Scotland, among the secondary formations, so unequivocal an oyster-bed; nor do such beds seem to be at all common in formations older than the Tertiary in England, though the oyster itself is sufficiently so. We find Mantell stating, in his recent work ("Medals of Creation"), after first describing an immense oyster bed of the London Basin, that underlies the city (for what is now London was once an oyster-bed), that in the chalk below, though it contains several species of Ostrea, the shells are diffused promiscuously throughout the general mass. Leaving, however, these oysters of the Oölite, which never net inclosed nor drag disturbed, though they must have formed the food of many an extinct order of fish,—mayhap reptile,—we pass on in a south-western direction, descending in the geological scale as we go, until we reach the southern side of the Bay of Laig. And there, far below tide-mark, we find a dark-colored argillaceous shale of the Lias, greatly obscured by boulders of trap,—the only deposit of the Liasic formation in the island.