"While no sound falls upon his ears, save now and then a fitful moaning of the wind among the snow-rifts of the dark precipice below, let him try to analyze some of the chief elements of the landscape. It is easy to recognize the more marked heights and hollows. To the south, away down Loch Linnhe, he can see the hills of Mull and the Paps of Jura closing the horizon. Westward, Loch Eil seems to lie at his feet, winding up into the lonely mountains, yet filled twice a day with the tides of the salt sea. Far over the hills, beyond the head of the loch, he looks across Arisaig, and can see the cliffs of the Isle of Eigg and the dark peaks of Rum, with the Atlantic gleaming below them. Farther to the northwest the blue range of the Coolin Hills rises along the skyline, and then, sweeping over all the intermediate ground, through Arisaig and Knoydart and the Clanranald country mountain rises after mountain, ridge beyond ridge, cut through by dark glens, and varied here and there with the sheen of lake and tarn. Northward runs the mysterious straight line of the Great Glen, with its chain of locks. Then to east and south the same billowy sea of mountain tops stretches out as far as eye can follow it—the hills and glens of Lochaber, the wide green strath of Spean, the gray corries of Glen Treig and Glen Nevis, the distant sweep of the moors and mountains of Brae Lyon and the Perthshire Highlands, the spires of Glencoe, and thence again to the blue waters of Loch Linnhe."
This may not be "the roof of the world," but it is a very high gable.
CHAPTER IX
THE WESTERN ISLES
Oban
here is something theatrical about Oban, artificial, and therefore among Scottish towns Oban is a contrast. It is as uncovenanted as—joy! And it is very beautiful, "the gay and generous port of Oban," as William Winter calls it, set in its amphitheater of high hills, and stretching about its harbour, between confining water and hill. An embankment holds it in, and at twilight the scimeter drawn from the scabbard of night flashes with light, artificial, but as wonderful at Oban as at Monte Carlo. One is content to be, at Oban. Quite certainly Oban has centered its share of Scottish history and romance, history from the time of the Northmen, romance from the time resurrected by Scott and continued indigenously by William Black. But in Oban and round about Oban, one is quite content to take that past as casually as one takes yesterday.
It is very interesting, very fascinating; one wakes now and then, here and there, to keen remembrance, to a sensitiveness that so much beauty could not be only for to-day and of to-day, that men must have come hither to claim it or dispute possession of it in the beginning of time. Of course the Stewarts came out of this Island West! But, either because one has made a round circle of Scotland from out of romantic Edinburgh, or because one has come from practical Glasgow and is about to make a round circle of Scotland, Oban has a peculiarly satisfying and yet undemanding beauty.
It is set for pageantry; life is always, has been always, a procession at Oban. If ever the history of Scotland is set forth as pageant—I do not know that this has ever been done, but it should be—it should be staged at Oban, on the esplanade.