The Cruise of the Betsey
by Hugh Miller · English · Gutenberg #28273 · 1,012,029 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Cruise of the Betsey
Author: Hugh Miller
Editor: W. S. Symonds
Release date: March 8, 2009 [eBook #28273]
Most recently updated: December 24, 2019
Language: English
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THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY;
Or,
A Summer Ramble Among the Fossiliferous Deposits of the Hebrides.
With
RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST;
Or,
Ten Thousand Miles Over the Fossiliferous
Deposits of Scotland.
by
HUGH MILLER, LL. D.,
Author of "The Old Red Sandstone," "Footprints of the Creator,"
"My Schools and Schoolmasters," "The Testimony of the Rocks," Etc.
Boston:
Gould and Lincoln,
59 Washington Street.
New York: Sheldon and Company.
Cincinnati: Geo. S. Blanchard.
1862.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1858, by
Gould and Lincoln,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.
Authorized Edition.
By a special arrangement with the late Hugh Miller, Gould And Lincoln
became the authorized American publishers of his works. By a similar
arrangement made with the family since his decease, they will also
publish his POSTHUMOUS WORKS, of which the present volume is the first.
Electrotyped by W. F. Draper, Andover, Mass.
Printed by Geo. C. Rand & Avery, Boston.
PREFACE.
Naturalists of every class know too well how HUGH MILLER died--the
victim of an overworked brain; and how that bright and vigorous spirit
was abruptly quenched forever.
During the month of May (1857) Mrs. Miller came to Malvern, after
recovering from the first shock of bereavement, in search of health and
repose, and evidently hoping to do justice, on her recovery, to the
literary remains of her husband. Unhappily the excitement and anxiety
naturally attaching to a revision of her husband's works proved over
much for one suffering under such recent trial, and from an affection of
the brain and spine which ensued; and, in consequence, Mrs. Miller has
been forbidden, for the present, to engage in any work of mental labor.
Under these circumstances, and at Mrs. Miller's request, I have
undertaken the editing of "The Cruise of the Betsey, or a Summer Ramble
among the Fossiliferous Deposits of the Hebrides," as well as "The
Rambles of a Geologist," hitherto unpublished, save as a series of
articles in the "Witness" newspaper. The style and arguments of HUGH
MILLER are so peculiarly his own, that I have not presumed to alter the
text, and have merely corrected some statements incidental to the
condition of geological knowledge at the time this work was penned. "The
Cruise of the Betsey" was written for that well-known paper the
"Witness" during the period when a disputation productive of much bitter
feeling waged between the Free and Established Churches of Scotland; but
as the Disruption and its history possesses little interest to a large
class of the readers of this work, who will rejoice to follow their
favorite author among the isles and rocks of the "bonnie land," I have
expunged _some_ passages, which I am assured the author would have
omitted had he lived to reprint this interesting narrative of his
geological rambles. HUGH MILLER battled nobly for his faith while
living. The sword is in the scabbard: let it rest!
W.S. SYMONDS.
PENDOCK RECTORY, APRIL 1, 1858.
CONTENTS.
PART I.
THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY.
CHAPTER I.
Preparation--Departure--Recent and Ancient Monstrosities--A Free
Church Yacht--Down the Clyde--Jura--Prof. Walker's
Experiment--Whirlpool near Scarba--Geological Character of the
Western Highlands--An Illustration--Different Ages of Outer and
Inner Hebrides--Mt. Blanc and the Himalayas "mere
upstarts"--Esdaile Quarries--Oban--A Section through Conglomerate
and Slate examined--McDougal's Dog-stone--Power of the Ocean to
move Rocks--Sound of Mull--The Betsey--The Minister's
Cabin--Village of Tobermory--The "Florida," a Wreck of the
Invincible Armada--Geologic Exploration and Discovery--At Anchor. 15
CHAPTER II.
The Minister's Larder--No Harbor--Eigg Shoes--_Tormentilla
erecta_--For the _Witness'_ Sake--Eilean Chaisteil--Appearance of
Eigg--Chapel of St. Donan--Shell-sand--Origin of Secondary
Calcareous Rock suggested--Exploration of Eigg--Pitchstone Veins--A
Bone Cave--Massacre at Eigg--Grouping of Human Bones in the
Cave--Relics--The Horse's Tooth--A Copper Sewing Needle--Teeth
found--Man a worse Animal than his Teeth show him to have been
designed for--Story of the Massacre--Another Version--Scuir of
Eigg--The Scuir a Giant's Causeway--Character of the
Columns--Remains of a Prostrate Forest. 31
CHAPTER III.
Structure of the Scuir--A stray Column--The Piazza--A buried Pine
Forest the Foundation of the Scuir--Geological Poachers in a Fossil
Preserve--_Pinites Eiggensis_--Its Description--Witham's
Experiments on Fossil Pine of Eigg--Rings of the Pine--Ascent of
the Scuir--Appearance of the Top--White Pitchstone--Mr. Greig's
Discovery of Pumice--A Sunset Scene--The Manse and the Yacht--The
Minister's Story--A Cottage Repast--American Timber drifted to the
Hebrides--Agency of the Gulf Stream--The Minister's Sheep. 49
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--Oolitic 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. 66
CHAPTER V.
Trap-dykes--"Cotton Apples"--Alternation of Lacustrine with Marine
Remains--Analogy from the Beds of Esk--Aspect of the Island on its
narrow Front--The Puffin--Ru Stoir--Development of Old Red
Sandstone--Striking Columnar character of Ru Stoir--Discovery of
Reptilian Remains--John Stewart's wonder at the Bones in the
Stones--Description of the Bones--"Dragons, Gorgons, and
Chimeras"--Exploration and Discovery pursued--The Midway
Shieling--A Celtic Welcome--Return to the Yacht--"Array of Fossils
new to Scotch Geology"--A Geologist's Toast--Hoffman and his
Fossil. 85
CHAPTER VI.
Something for Non-geologists--Man Destructive--A Better and Last
Creation coming--A Rainy Sabbath--The Meeting House--The
Congregation--The Sermon in Gaelic--The Old Wondrous Story--The
Drunken Minister of Eigg--Presbyterianism without Life--Dr.
Johnson's Account of the Conversion of the People of Rum--Romanism
at Eigg--The Two Boys--The Freebooter of Eigg--Voyage resumed--The
Homeless Minister--Harbor of Isle Ornsay--Interesting Gneiss
Deposit--A Norwegian Keep--Gneiss at Knock--Curious
Chemistry--Sea-cliffs beyond Portsea--The Goblin Luidag--Scenery of
Skye. 105
CHAPTER VII.
Exploration resumed--Geology of Rasay--An Illustration--The Storr
of Skye--From Portree to Holm--Discovery of Fossils--An Island
Rain--Sir R. Murchison--Labor of Drawing a Geological Line--Three
Edinburgh Gentlemen--_Prosopolepsia_--Wrong Surmises corrected--The
Mail Gig--The Portree Postmaster--Isle Ornsay--An Old
Acquaintance--Reminiscences--A Run for Rum--"Semi-fossil
Madeira"--Idling on Deck--Prognostics of a Storm--Description of
the Gale--Loch Scresort--The Minister's lost _Sou-wester_--The Free
Church Gathering--The weary Minister. 123
CHAPTER VIII.
Geology of Rum--Its curious Character illustrated--Rum famous for
Bloodstones--Red Sandstones--"Scratchings" in the Rocks--A
Geological Inscription without a Key--The Lizard--Vitality broken
into two--Illustrations--Speculation--Scuir More--Ascent of the
Scuir--The Bloodstones--An Illustrative Set of the Gem--M'Culloch's
Pebble--A Chemical Problem--The solitary Shepherd's House--Sheep
_versus_ Men--The Depopulation of Rum--A Haul of Trout--Rum Mode of
catching Trout--At Anchor in the Bay of Glenelg. 139
CHAPTER IX.
Kyles of Skye--A Gneiss District--Kyle Rhea--A Boiling Tide--A
"Take" of Sillocks--The Betsey's "Paces"--In the Bay at
Broadford--Rain--Island of Pabba--Description of the Island--Its
Geological Structure--Astrea--Polypifers--_Gryphoea
incurva_--Three Groups of Fossils in the Lias of Skye--Abundance of
the Petrifactions of Pabba--Scenery--Pabba a "piece of smooth,
level England"--Fossil Shells of Pabba--- Voyage resumed--Kyle
Akin--Ruins of Castle Maoil--A "Thornback" Dinner--The Bunch of
Deep Sea Tangle--The Caileach Stone--Kelp Furnaces--Escape of the
Betsey from sinking. 159
CHAPTER X.
Isle Orusay--The Sabbath--A Sailor-minister's Sermon for
Sailors--The Scuir Sermon--Loch Carron--Groups of Moraines--A sheep
District--The Editor of the _Witness_ and the Establishment
Clergyman--Dingwall--Conon-side revisited--The Pond and its
Changes--New Faces.--The Stonemason's Mark--The Burying-ground of
Urquhart--An old Acquaintance--Property Qualification for Voting in
Scotland--Montgerald Sandstone Quarries--Geological Science in
Cromarty--The Danes at Cromarty--The Danish Professor and the "Old
Red Sandstone"--Harmonizing Tendencies of Science. 178
CHAPTER XI.
Ichthyolite Beds--An interesting Discovery--Two Storeys of Organic
Remains in the Old Red Sandstone--Ancient Ocean of Lower Old
Red--Two great Catastrophes--Ancient Fish Scales--Their skilful
Mechanism displayed by examples--Bone Lips--Arts of the Slater and
Tiler as old as Old Red Sandstone--Jet Trinkets--Flint
Arrow-heads--Vitrified Forts of Scotland--Style of grouping Lower
Old Red Fossils--Illustration from Cromarty Fishing
Phenomena--Singular Remains of Holoptychius--Ramble with Mr. Robert
Dick--Color of the Planet Mars--Tombs never dreamed of by
Hervey--Skeleton of the Bruce--Gigantic Holoptychius--"Coal money
Currency"--Upper Boundary of Lower Old Red--Every one may add to
the Store of Geological Facts--Discoveries of Messrs. Dick and
Peach. 192
CHAPTER XII.
Ichthyolite Beds of Clune and Lethenbarn--Limestone
Quarry--Destruction of Urns and Sarcophagi in the
Lime-kiln--Nodules opened--Beautiful coloring of the
Remains--Patrick Duff's Description--New Genus of Morayshire
Ichthyolite described--Form and size of the Nodules or Stone
Coffins--Illustration from Mrs. Marshall's Cements--Forest of
Darnaway--The Hill of Berries--Sluie--Elgin--Outliers of the Weald
and the Oolite--Description of the Weald at Linksfield--Mr. Duff's
_Lepidotus minor_--Eccentric Types of Fish Scales--Visit to the
Sandstones of Scat-Craig--Fine suit of Fossils at Scat-Craig--True
graveyard Bones, not mere Impressions--Varieties of pattern--The
Diker's "Carved Flowers"--_Stagonolepis_, a new Genus--Termination
of the Ramble. 212
CHAPTER XIII.
SUPPLEMENTARY.
Supplementary--Isolated Reptile Remains in Eigg--Small Isles
revisited--The Betsey again--Storm bound--Tacking--Becalmed--Medusae
caught and described--Rain--A Shoal of Porpoises--Change of
Weather--The bed-ridden Woman--The Poor Law Act for
Scotland--Geological Excursion--Basaltic Columns--Oolitic
Beds--Abundance of Organic Remains--Hybodus Teeth--Discovery of
reptile Remains _in situ_--Musical Sand of Laig
re-examined--Explanation suggested--Sail for Isle Ornsay--Anchored
Clouds--A Leak sprung--Peril of the Betsey--At work with Pump and
Pails--Safe in Harbor--Return to Edinburgh. 233
PART II.
RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.
CHAPTER I.
Embarkation--A foundered Vessel--Lateness of the Harvest dependent
on the Geological character of the Soil--A Granite Harvest and an
Old Red Harvest--Cottages of Redstone and of Granite--Arable Soil
of Scotland the result of a Geological Grinding Agency--Locality of
the Famine of 1846--Mr. Longmuir's Fossils--Geology necessary to a
Theologian--Popularizers of Science when dangerous--"Constitution
of Man," and "Vestiges of Creation"--Atop of the Banff Coach--A
Geologist's Field Equipment--The trespassing "Stirk"--Silurian
Schists inlaid with Old Red--Bay of Gamrie, how
formed--Gardenstone--Geological Free-masonry illustrated--How to
break an Ichthyolite Nodule--An old Rhyme mended--A raised
Beach--Fossil Shells--Scotland under Water at the time of the
Boulder-clays. 255
CHAPTER II.
Character of the Rocks near Gardenstone--A Defunct Father-lasher--A
Geological Inference--Village of Gardenstone--The drunken
Scot--Gardenstone Inn--Lord Gardenstone--A Tempest threatened--The
Author's Ghost Story--The Lady in Green--Her Appearance and
Tricks--The Rescued Children--The murdered Peddler and his
Pack--Where the Green Dress came from--Village of Macduff--Peculiar
Appearance of the Beach at the Mouth of the Deveron--Dr. Emslie's
Fossils--_Pterichthys quadratus_--Argillaceous Deposits of
Blackpots--Pipe-laying in Scotland--Fossils of Blackpots Clay--Mr.
Longmuir's Description of them--Blackpots Deposit a Re-formation of
a Liasic Patch--Period of its Formation. 270
CHAPTER III.
From Blackpots to Portsoy--Character of the Coast--Burn of
Boyne--Fever Phantoms--Graphic Granite--Maupertuis and the Runic
Inscription--Explanation of the _quo modo_ of Graphic
Granite--Portsoy Inn--Serpentine Beds--Portsoy Serpentine
unrivalled for small ornaments--Description of it--Significance of
the term _serpentine_--Elizabeth Bond and her "Letters"--From
Portsoy to Cullen--Attritive Power of the Ocean illustrated--The
Equinoctial--From Cullen to Fochabers--The Old Red again--The old
Pensioner--Fochabers--Mr. Joss, the learned Mail-guard--The Editor
a sort of Coach-guard--On the Coach to Elgin--Geology of
Banffshire--Irregular paging of the Geologic Leaves--Geologic Map
of the County like Joseph's Coat--Striking Illustration. 291
CHAPTER IV.
Yellow-hued Houses of Elgin--Geology of the Country indicated by
the coloring of the Stone Houses--Fossils of Old Red north of the
Grampians different from those of Old Red south--Geologic
Formations at Linksfield difficult to be understood--Ganoid Scales
of the Wealden--Sudden Reaction, from complex to simple, in the
Scales of Fishes--Pore-covered Scales--Extraordinary amount of
Design exhibited in Ancient Ganoid Scales--Holoptychius Scale
illustrated by Cromwell's "fluted pot"--Patrick Duff's Geological
Collection--Elgin Museum--Fishes of the Ganges--Armature of Ancient
Fishes--Compensatory Defences--- The Hermit-crab--Spines of the
Pimelodi--Ride to Campbelton--Theories of the formation of
Ardersier and Fortrose Promontories--Tradition of their
construction by the Wizard, Michael Scott--A Region of Legendary
Lore. 307
CHAPTER V.
Rosemarkie and its Scaurs--Kaes' Craig--A Jackdaw
Settlement--"Rosemarkie Kaes" and "Cromarty Cooties"--"The Danes,"
a Group of Excavations--At Home in Cromarty--The Boulder-clay of
Cromarty "begins to tell its story"--One of its marked Scenic
Peculiarities--Hints to Landscape Painters--"Samuel's Well"--A
Chain of Bogs geologically accounted for--Another Scenic
Peculiarity--"_Ha-has_ of Nature's digging"--The Author's earliest
Field of Hard Labor--Picturesque Cliff of Boulder-clay--Scratchings
on the Sandstone--Invariable Characteristic of true
Boulder-clay--Scratchings on Pebbles in the line of the longer
axis--Illustration from the Boulder-clay of Banff. 324
CHAPTER VI.
Organisms of the Boulder-clay not unequivocal--First Impressions of
the Boulder-clay--Difficulty of accounting for its barrenness of
Remains--Sir Charles Lyell's reasoning--A Fact to the
contrary--Human Skull dug from a Clay-bank--The Author's Change of
Belief respecting Organic Remains of the Boulder-clay--Shells from
the Clay at Wick--Questions respecting them settled--Conclusions
confirmed by Mr. Dick's Discoveries at Thurso--Sir John Sinclair's
Discovery of Boulder-clay Shells in 1802--Comminution of the Shells
illustrated--_Cyprina islandica_--Its Preservation in larger
Proportions than those of other Shells accounted for--Boulder-clays
of Scotland reformed during the existing Geological Epoch--Scotland
in the Period of the Boulder-clay "merely three detached groups of
Islands"--Evidence of the Subsidence of the Land in
Scotland--Confirmed by Rev. Mr. Cumming's conclusion--High-lying
Granite Boulders--Marks of a succeeding elevatory
Period--Scandinavia now rising--Autobiography of a Boulder
desirable--A Story of the Supernatural. 336
CHAPTER VII.
Relation of the deep red stone of Cromarty to the Ichthyolite Beds
of the System--Ruins of a Fossil-charged Bed--Journey to Avoch--Red
Dye of the Boulder-clay distinct from the substance
itself--Variation of Coloring in the Boulder-clay Red Sandstone
accounted for--Hard-pan how formed--A reformed Garden--An ancient
Battle-field--Antiquity of Geologic and Human History
compared--Burn of Killein--Observation made in boyhood
confirmed--Fossil-nodules--Fine Specimen of _Coccosteus
decipiens_--Blank strata of Old Red--New View respecting the Rocks
of Black Isle--A Trip up Moray and Dingwall Friths--Altered color
of the Boulder-clay--Up the Auldgrande River--Scenery of the great
Conglomerate--Graphic Description--Laidlaw's Boulder--_Vaccinium
myrtillus_--Profusion of Travelled Boulders--The Boulder _Clach
Malloch_--Its zones of Animal and Vegetable life. 355
CHAPTER VIII.
Imaginary Autobiography of the _Clach Malloch_ Boulder--Its
Creation--Its Long Night of unsummed Centuries--Laid open to light
on a desert Island--Surrounded by an Arctic Vegetation--Undermined
by the rising Sea--Locked up and floated off on an Ice-field--At
rest on the Sea-bottom--Another Night of unsummed Years--The
Boulder raised again above the waves by the rising of the
Land--Beholds an Altered Country--Pine Forests and Mammals--Another
Period of Ages passes--The Boulder again floated off by an
Iceberg--Finally at rest on the Shore of Cromarty Bay--Time and
Occasion of naming it--Strange Phenomena accounted for by
Earthquakes--How the Boulder of Petty Bay was moved--The Boulder of
Auldgrande--The old Highland Paupers--The little Parsi Girl--Her
Letter to her Papa--But one Human Nature on Earth--Journey
resumed--Conon Burying Ground--An aged Couple--Gossip. 375
CHAPTER IX.
The Great Conglomerate--Its Undulatory and Rectilinear
Members--Knock Farril and its Vitrified Fort--The old Highlanders
an observant race--The Vein of Silver--Summit of Knock Farril--Mode
of accounting for the Luxuriance of Herbage in the ancient Scottish
Fortalices--The green Graves of Culloden--Theories respecting the
Vitrification of the Hill-forts--Combined Theories of Williams and
Mackenzie probably give the correct account--The Author's
Explanation--Transformations of Fused Rocks--Strathpetlier--The
Spa--Permanent Odoriferous Qualities of an ancient Sea-bottom
converted into Rock--Mineral Springs of the Spa--Infusion of the
powdered rock a substitute--Belemnite Water--The lively young
Lady's Comments--A befogged Country seen from a
hill-top--Ben-Wevis--Journey to Evanton--A Geologist's
Night-mare--The Route Home--Ruins of Craig house--Incompatibility
of Tea and Ghosts--End of the Tour. 393
CHAPTER X.
Recovered Health--Journey to the Orkneys--Aboard the Steamer at
Wick--Mr. Bremner--Masonry of the Harbor of Wick--The greatest
Blunders result from good Rules misapplied--Mr. Bremner's Theory
about sea-washed Masonry--Singular Fracture of the Rock near
Wick--The Author's mode of accounting for it--"Simple but not
obvious" Thinking--Mr. Bremner's mode of making stone Erections
under Water--His exploits in raising foundered Vessels--Aspect of
the Orkneys--The ungracious Schoolmaster--In the Frith of
Kirkwall--Cathedral of St Magnus--Appearance of Kirkwall--Its
"perished suppers"--Its ancient Palaces--Blunder of the Scotch
Aristocracy--The patronate Wedge--Breaking Ground in Orkney--Minute
Gregarious Coccosteus--True Position of the Coccosteus' Eyes--Ruins
of one of Cromwell's Forts--Antiquities of Orkney--The
Cathedral--Its Sculptures--The Mysterious Cell--Prospect from the
Tower--Its Chimes--Ruins of Castle Patrick. 414
CHAPTER XI.
The Bishop's Palace at Orkney--Haco the Norwegian--Icelandic
Chronicle respecting his Expedition to Scotland--His Death--Removal
of his Remain to Norway--Why Norwegian Invasion
ceased--Straw-plaiting--The Lassies of Orkney--Orkney Type of
Countenance--Celtic and Scandinavian--An accomplished
Antiquary--Old Manuscripts--An old Tune book--Manuscript Letter of
Mary Queen of Scots--Letters of General Monck--The fearless
Covenanter--Cave of the Rebels--Why the tragedy of "Gustavus Vasa"
was prohibited--Quarry of Pickoquoy--Its Fossil Shells--Journey to
Stromness--Scenery--Birth-place of Malcolm, the Poet--His
History--One of his Poems--His Brother a Free Church Minister--New
Scenery. 437
CHAPTER XII.
Hills of Orkney--Their Geologic Composition--Scene of Scott's
"Pirate"--Stromness--Geology of the District--"Seeking
beasts"--Conglomerate in contact with Granite--A palaeozoic Hudson's
Bay--Thickness of Conglomerate of Orkney--Oldest Vertebrate yet
discovered in Orkney--Its Size--Figure of a characteristic plate of
the Asterolepis--Peculiarity of Old Red Fishes--Length of the
Asterolepis--A rich Ichthyolite Bed--Arrangement of the
Layers--Queries as to the Cause of it--Minerals--An abandoned
Mine--A lost Vessel--Kelp for Iodine--A dangerous Coast--Incidents
of Shipwreck--Hospitality--Stromness Museum--Diplopterus mistaken
for Dipterus--Their Resemblances and Differences--Visit to a
remarkable Stack--Paring the Soil for Fuel, and consequent
Barrenness--Description of the Stack--Wave-formed Caves--Height to
which the Surf rises. 457
CHAPTER XIII.
Detached Fossils--Remains of the Pterichthys--Terminal Bones of the
Coccosteus, etc., preserved--Internal Skeleton of Coccosteus--The
shipwrecked Sailor in the Cave--Bishop Grahame--His Character, as
drawn by Baillie--His Successor--Ruins of the Bishop's
Country-house--Sub-aerial Formation of Sandstone--Formation near
New Kaye--Inference from such Formation--Tour resumed--Loch of
Stennis--Waters of the Loch fresh, brackish, and salt--Vegetation
varied accordingly--Change produced in the Flounder by fresh
water--The Standing Stones, second only to Stonehenge--Their
Purpose--Their Appearance and Situation--Diameter of the
Circle--What the Antiquaries say of it--Reference to it in the
"Pirate"--Dr. Hibbert's Account. 476
CHAPTER XIV.
On Horseback--A pared Moor--Small Landholders--Absorption of small
holdings in England and Scotland--Division of Land favorable to
Civil and Religious Rights--Favorable to social Elevation--An
inland Parish--The Landsman and Lobster--Wild Flowers of
Orkney--Law of Compensation illustrated by the Tobacco
Plant--Poverty tends to Productiveness--Illustrated in
Ireland--Profusion of Ichthyolites--Orkney a land of Defunct
Fishes--Sandwick--A Collection of Coccostean Flags--A Quarry full
of Heads of Dipteri--The Bergil, or Striped Wrasse--Its Resemblance
to the Dipterus--Poverty of the Flora of the Lower Old Red--No true
Coniferous Wood in the Orkney Flagstones--Departure for Hoy--The
intelligent Boatman--Story of the Orkney Fisherman. 492
CHAPTER XV.
Hoy--Unique Scenery--The Dwarfie Stone of Hoy--Sir Walter Scott's
Account of it--Its Associations--Inscription of Names--George
Buchanan's Consolation--The mythic Carbuncle of the Hill of Hoy--No
Fossils at Hoy--Striking Profile of Sir Walter Scott on the Hill of
Hoy--Sir Walter, and Shetland and Orkney--Originals of two
Characters in "The Pirate"--Bessie Millie--Garden of Gow, the
"Pirate"--Childhood's Scene of Byron's "Torquil"--The Author's
Introduction to his Sister--A German Visitor--German and Scotch
Sabbath-keeping habits contrasted--Mr. Watt's Specimens of Fossil
Remains--The only new Organism found in Orkney--Back to
Kirkwall--to Wick--Vedder's Ode to Orkney. 507
THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY.
CHAPTER I.
Preparation--Departure--Recent and Ancient Monstrosities--A Free
Church Yacht--Down the Clyde--Jura--Prof. Walker's
Experiment--Whirlpool near Scarba--Geological Character of the
Western Highlands--An Illustration--Different Ages of Outer and
Inner Hebrides--Mt. Blanc and the Himalayas "mere
upstarts"--Esdaile Quarries--Oban--A Section through Conglomerate
and Slate examined--M'Dougal's Dog-stone--Power of the Ocean to
move Rocks--Sound of Mull--The Betsey--The Minister's
Cabin--Village of Tobermory--The "Florida," a Wreck of the
Invincible Armada--Geologic Exploration and Discovery--At Anchor.
The pleasant month of July had again come round, and for full five weeks
I was free. Chisels and hammers, and the bag for specimens, were taken
from their corner in the dark closet, and packed up with half a stone
weight of a fine _soft_ Conservative Edinburgh newspaper, valuable for a
quality of preserving old things entire. At noon on St. Swithin's day
(Monday the 15th), I was speeding down the Clyde in the Toward Castle
steamer, for Tobermory in Mull. In the previous season I had intended
passing direct from the Oolitic deposits of the eastern coast of
Scotland, to the Oolitic deposits of the Hebrides. But the weeks glided
all too quickly away among the ichthyolites of Caithness and Cromarty,
and the shells and lignites of Sutherland and Ross. My friend, too, the
Rev. Mr. Swanson, of Small Isles, on whose assistance I had reckoned,
was in the middle of his troubles at the time, with no longer a home in
his parish, and not yet provided with one elsewhere; and I concluded he
would have but little heart, at such a season, for breaking into rocks,
or for passing from the too pressing monstrosities of an existing state
of things, to the old lapidified monstrosities of the past. And so my
design on the Hebrides had to be postponed for a twelvemonth. But my
friend, now afloat in his Free Church yacht, had got a home on the sea
beside his island charge, which, if not very secure when nights were
dark and winds loud, and the little vessel tilted high to the long roll
of the Atlantic, lay at least beyond the reach of man's intolerance, and
not beyond the protecting care of the Almighty. He had written me that
he would run down his vessel from Small Isles to meet me at Tobermory,
and in consequence of the arrangement I was now on my way to Mull.
St. Swithin's day, so important in the calendar of our humbler
meteorologists, had in this part of the country its alternate fits of
sunshine and shower. We passed gaily along the green banks of the Clyde,
with their rich flat fields glittering in moisture, and their lines of
stately trees, that, as the light flashed out, threw their shadows over
the grass. The river expanded into the estuary, the estuary into the
open sea; we left behind us beacon, and obelisk, and rock-perched
castle;--
"Merrily down we drop
Below the church, below the tower,
Below the light house top,"
and, as the evening fell, we were ploughing the outer reaches of the
Frith, with the ridgy table-land of Ayrshire stretching away, green, on
the one side, and the serrated peaks of Arran rising dark and high on
the other. At sunrise next morning our boat lay, unloading a portion of
her cargo, in one of the ports of Islay, and we could see the Irish
coast resting on the horizon to the south and west, like a long
undulating bank of thin blue cloud; with the island of Rachrin--famous
for the asylum it had afforded the Bruce when there was no home for him
in Scotland,--presenting in front its mass of darker azure. On and away!
We swept past Islay, with its low fertile hills of mica-schist and
slate; and Jura, with its flat dreary moors, and its far-seen gigantic
paps, on one of which, in the last age, Professor Walker, of Edinburgh,
set water a-boil with six degrees of heat less than he found necessary
for the purpose on the plain below. The Professor describes the view
from the summit, which includes in its wide circle at once the Isle of
Skye and the Isle of Man, as singularly noble and imposing; two such
prospects more, he says, would bring under the eye the whole island of
Great Britain, from the Pentland Frith to the English Channel. We sped
past Jura. Then came the Gulf of Coryvrekin, with the bare mountain
island of Scarba overlooking the fierce, far-famed whirlpool, that we
could see from the deck, breaking in long lines of foam, and sending out
its waves in wide rings on every side, when not a speck of white was
visible elsewhere in the expanse of sea around us. And then came an
opener space, studded with smaller islands,--mere hill-tops rising out
of the sea, with here and there insulated groups of pointed rocks, the
skeletons of perished hills, amid which the tide chafed and fretted, as
if laboring to complete on the broken remains their work of denudation
and ruin.
The disposition of land and water on this coast suggests the idea that
the Western Highlands, from the line in the interior, whence the rivers
descend to the Atlantic, with the islands beyond to the outer Hebrides,
are all parts of one great mountainous plane, inclined slantways into
the sea. First, the long withdrawing valleys of the main land, with
their brown mossy streams, change their character as they dip beneath
the sea-level, and become salt-water lochs. The lines of hills that rise
over them jut out as promontories, till cut off by some transverse
valley, lowered still more deeply into the brine, and that exists as a
kyle, minch, or sound, swept twice every tide by powerful currents. The
sea deepens as the plain slopes downward; mountain-chains stand up out
of the water as larger islands, single mountains as smaller ones, lower
eminences as mere groups of pointed rocks; till at length, as we pass
outwards, all trace of the submerged land disappears, and the wide ocean
stretches out and away its unfathomable depths. The model of some Alpine
country raised in plaster on a flat board, and tilted slantways, at a
low angle, into a basin of water, would exhibit, on a minute scale, an
appearance exactly similar to that presented by the western coast of
Scotland and the Hebrides. The water would rise along the hollows,
longitudinal and transverse, forming sounds and lochs, and surround,
island-like, the more deeply submerged eminences. But an examination of
the geology of the coast, with its promontories and islands,
communicates a different idea. These islands and promontories prove to
be of very various ages and origin. The _outer_ Hebrides may have
existed as the inner skeleton of some ancient country, contemporary with
the main land, and that bore on its upper soils the productions of
perished creations, at a time when by much the larger portion of the
_inner_ Hebrides,--Skye, and Mull, and the Small Isles,--existed as part
of the bottom of a wide sound, inhabited by the Cephalopoda and
Enaliosaurians of the Lias and the Oolite. Judging from its components,
the Long Island, like the Lammermoors and the Grampians, may have been
smiling to the sun when the Alps and the Himalaya Mountains lay buried
in the abyss; whereas the greater part of Skye and Mull must have been,
like these vast mountain-chains of the Continent, an oozy sea-floor,
over which the ligneous productions of the neighboring lands, washed
down by the streams, grew heavy and sank, and on which the belemnite
dropped its spindle and the ammonite its shell. The idea imparted of
_old_ Scotland to the geologist here,--of Scotland, proudly,
aristocratically, supereminently old,--for it can call Mont Blanc a mere
upstart, and Dhawalageri, with its twenty-eight thousand feet of
elevation, a heady fellow of yesterday,--is not that of a land settling
down by the head, like a foundering vessel, but of a land whose hills
and islands, like its great aristocratic families, have arisen from the
level in very various ages, and under the operation of circumstances
essentially diverse.
We left behind us the islands of Lunga, Luing, and Seil, and entered the
narrow Sound of Kerrera, with its border of Old Red conglomerate resting
on the clay-slate of the district. We had passed Esdaile near enough to
see the workmen employed in the quarries of the island, so extensively
known in commerce for their roofing slate, and several small vessels
beside them, engaged in loading; and now we had got a step higher in the
geological scale, and could mark from the deck the peculiar character of
the conglomerate, which, in cliffs washed by the sea, when the binding
matrix is softer than the pebbles which it encloses, roughens, instead
of being polished, by the action of the waves, and which, along the
eastern side of the Sound here, seems as if formed of cannon-shot, of
all sizes, embedded in cement. The Sound terminates in the beautiful bay
of Oban, so quiet and sheltered, with its two island breakwaters in
front,--its semi-circular sweep of hill behind,--its long white-walled
village, bent like a bow, to conform to the inflection of the
shore,--its mural precipices behind, tapestried with ivy,--its rich
patches of green pasture,--its bosky dingles of shrub and tree,--and,
perched on the seaward promontory, its old, time-eaten keep. "In one
part of the harbor of Oban," says Dr. James Anderson, in his "Practical
Treatise on Peat Moss," (1794), "where the depth of the sea is about
twenty fathoms, the bottom is found to consist of quick peat, which
affords no safe anchorage." I made inquiry at the captain of the
steamer, regarding this submerged deposit, but he had never heard of it.
There are, however, many such on the coasts of both Britain and Ireland.
We staid at Oban for several hours, waiting the arrival of the Fort
William steamer; and, taking out hammer and chisel from my bag, I
stepped ashore to question my ancient acquaintance, the Old Red
conglomerate, and was fortunate enough to meet on the pier-head, as I
landed, one of the best of companions for assisting in such work, Mr.
Colin Elder, of Isle Ornsay,--the gentleman who had so kindly furnished
my friend Mr. Swanson with an asylum for his family, when there was no
longer a home for them in Small Isles. "You are much in luck," he said,
after our first greeting: "one of the villagers, in improving his
garden, has just made a cut for some fifteen or twenty yards along the
face of the precipice behind the village, and laid open the line of
junction between the conglomerate and the clay-slate. Let us go and see
it."
I found several things worthy of notice in the chance section to which I
was thus introduced. The conglomerate lies uncomfortably along the edges
of the slate strata, which present under it an appearance exactly
similar to that which they exhibit under the rolled stones and shingle
of the neighboring shore, where we find them laid bare beside the
harbor, for several hundred yards. And, mixed with the pebbles of
various character and origin of which the conglomerate is mainly
composed, we see detached masses of the slate, that still exhibit on
their edges the identical lines of fracture characteristic of the rock,
which they received, when torn from the mass below, myriads of ages
before. In the incalculably remote period in which the conglomerate base
of the Old Red Sandstone was formed, the clay-slate of this district had
been exactly the same sort of rock that it is now. Some long anterior
convulsion had upturned its strata, and the sweep of water, mingled with
broken fragments of stone, had worn smooth the exposed edges, just as a
similar agency wears the edges exposed at the present time. Quarries
might have been opened in this rock, as now, for a roofing-slate, had
there been quarriers to open them, or houses to roof over; it was in
every respect as ancient a looking stone then as in the present late age
of the world. There are no sermons that seem stranger or more impressive
to one who has acquired just a little of the language in which they are
preached, than those which, according to the poet, are to be found in
stones; a bit of fractured slate, embedded among a mass of rounded
pebbles, proves voluble with ideas of a kind almost too large for the
mind of man to grasp. The eternity that hath passed is an ocean without
a further shore, and a finite conception may in vain attempt to span it
over. But from the beach, strewed with wrecks, on which we stand to
contemplate it, we see far out towards the cloudy horizon, many a dim
islet and many a pinnacled rock, the sepulchres of successive eras,--the
monuments of consecutive creations: the entire prospect is studded over
with these landmarks of a hoar antiquity, which, measuring out space
from space, constitute the vast whole a province of time; nor can the
eye reach to the open, shoreless infinitude beyond, in which only God
existed; and, as in a sea-scene in nature, in which headland stretches
dim and blue beyond headland, and islet beyond islet, the distance seems
not lessened, but increased, by the crowded objects--we borrow a
larger, not a smaller idea of the distant eternity, from the vastness of
the measured periods that occur between.
Over the lower bed of conglomerate, which here, as on the east coast, is
of great thickness, we find a bed of gray stratified clay, containing a
few calcareo-argillaceous nodules. The conglomerate cliffs to the north
of the village present appearances highly interesting to the geologist.
Rising in a long wall within the pleasure-grounds of Dunolly castle, we
find them wooded atop and at the base; while immediately at their feet
there stretches out a grassy lawn, traversed by the road from the
village to the castle, which sinks with a gradual slope into the
existing sea-beach, but which ages ago must have been a sea-beach
itself. We see the bases of the precipices hollowed and worn, with all
their rents and crevices widened into caves; and mark, at a picturesque
angle of the rock, what must have been once an insulated sea-stack, some
thirty or forty feet in height, standing up from amid the rank grass, as
at one time it stood up from amid the waves. Tufts of fern and sprays of
ivy bristle from its sides, once roughened by the serrated kelp-weed and
the tangle. The Highlanders call it M'Dougal's Dog-stone, and say that
the old chieftains of Lorne made use of it as a post to which to fasten
their dogs,--animals wild and gigantic as themselves,--when the hunters
were gathering to rendezvous, and the impatient beagles struggled to
break away and begin the chase on their own behalf. It owes its
existence as a stack--for the precipice in which it was once included
has receded from around it for yards--to an immense boulder in its
base--by far the largest stone I ever saw in an Old Red conglomerate.
The mass is of a rudely rhomboidal form, and measures nearly twelve feet
in the line of its largest diagonal. A second huge pebble in the same
detached spire measures four feet by about three. Both have their edges
much rounded, as if, ere their deposition in the conglomerate, they had
been long exposed to the wear of the sea; and both are composed of an
earthy amygdaloidal trap. I have stated elsewhere ["Old Red Sandstone,"
Chapter XII.], that I had scarce ever seen a stone in the Old Red
conglomerate which I could not raise from the ground; and ere I said so
I had examined no inconsiderable extent of this deposit, chiefly,
however, along the eastern coast of Scotland, where its larger pebbles
rarely exceed two hundred weight. How account for the occurrence of
pebbles of so gigantic a size here? We can but guess at a solution, and
that very vaguely. The islands of Mull and Kerrera form, in the present
state of things, inner and outer breakwaters between what is now the
coast of Oban and the waves of the Atlantic; but Mull, in the times of
even the Oolite, must have existed as a mere sea-bottom; and Kerrera,
composed mainly of trap, which has brought with it to the surface
patches of the conglomerate, must, when the conglomerate was in forming,
have been a mere sea-bottom also. Is it not possible, that when the
breakwaters _were not_, the Atlantic _was_, and that its tempests, which
in the present time can transport vast rocks for hundreds of yards along
the exposed coasts of Shetland and Orkney, may have been the agent here
in the transport of these huge pebbles of the Old Red conglomerate?
"Rocks that two or three men could not lift," say the Messrs. Anderson
of Inverness, in describing the storms of Orkney, "are washed about even
on the tops of cliffs, which are between sixty and a hundred feet above
the surface of the sea, when smooth; and detached masses of rock, of an
enormous size, are well known to have been carried a considerable
distance between low and high-water mark." "A little way from the
Brough," says Dr. Patrick Neill, in his 'Tour through Orkney and
Shetland,' "we saw the prodigious effects of a late winter storm: many
great stones, one of them of several tons weight, had been tossed up a
precipice twenty or thirty feet high, and laid fairly on the green
sward." There is something farther worthy of notice in the stone of
which the two boulders of the Dog-stack are composed. No species of rock
occurs more abundantly in the embedded pebbles of this ancient
conglomerate than rocks of the trap family. We find in it
trap-porphyries, greenstones, clinkstones, basalts, and amygdalolds,
largely mingled with fragments of the granitic, clay-slate, and quartz
rocks. The Plutonic agencies must have been active in the locality for
periods amazingly protracted; and many of the masses protruded at a very
early time seem identical in their composition with rocks of the trap
family, which in other parts of the country we find referred to much
later eras. There occur in this deposit rolled pebbles of a basalt,
which in the neighborhood of Edinburgh would be deemed considerably more
modern than the times of the Mountain Limestone, and in the Isle of
Skye, considerably more modern than the times of the Oolite.
The sunlight was showering its last slant rays on island and loch, and
then retreating upwards along the higher hills, chased by the shadows,
as our boat quitted the bay of Oban, and stretched northwards, along the
end of green Lismore, for the Sound of Mull. We had just enough of day
left, as we reached mid sea, to show us the gray fronts of the three
ancient castles,--- which at this point may be at once seen from the
deck,--Dunolly, Duart, and Dunstaffnage; and enough left us as we
entered the Sound, to show, and barely show, the Lady Rock, famous in
tradition, and made classic by the pen of Campbell, raising its black
back amid the tides, like a belated porpoise. And then twilight
deepened into night, and we went snorting through the Strait with a
stream of green light curling off from either bow in the calm, towards
the high dim land, that seemed standing up on both sides like tall
hedges over a green lane. We entered the Bay of Tobermory about
midnight, and cast anchor amid a group of little vessels. An exceedingly
small boat shot out from the side of a yacht of rather diminutive
proportions, but tautly rigged for her size, and bearing an outrigger
astern. The water this evening was full of phosphoric matter, and it
gleamed and sparkled around the little boat like a northern aurora
around a dark cloudlet. There was just light enough to show that the
oars were plied by a sailor-like man in a Guernsey frock, and that
another sailor-like man,--the skipper, mayhap,--attired in a cap and
pea-jacket, stood in the stern. The man in the Guernsey frock was John
Stewart, sole mate and half the crew of the Free Church yacht Betsey;
and the skipper-like man in the pea-jacket was my friend the minister of
the Protestants of Small Isles. In five minutes more I was sitting with
Mr. Elder beside the little iron stove in the cabin of the Betsey; and
the minister, divested of his cap and jacket, but still looking the
veritable skipper to admiration, was busied in making us a rather late
tea.
The cabin,--my home for the greater part of the three following weeks,
and that of my friend for the greater part of the previous
twelvemonth,--I found to be an apartment about twice the size of a
common bed, and just lofty enough under the beams to permit a man of
five feet eleven to stand erect in his night-cap. A large table, lashed
to the floor, furnished with tiers of drawers of all sorts and sizes,
and bearing a writing desk bound to it a-top, occupied the middle space,
leaving just room enough for a person to pass between its edges and the
narrow coffin-like beds in the sides, and space enough at its fore-end
for two seats in front of the stove. A jealously barred skylight opened
above; and there depended from it this evening a close lantern-looking
lamp, sufficiently valuable, no doubt, in foul weather, but dreary and
dim on the occasions when all one really wished from it was light. The
peculiar furniture of the place gave evidence to the mixed nature of my
friend's employment. A well-thumbed chart of the Western Islands lay
across an equally well-thumbed volume of Henry's "Commentary." There was
a Polyglot and a spy-glass in one corner, and a copy of Calvin's
"Institutes," with the latest edition of "The Coaster's Sailing
Directions," in another; while in an adjoining state-room, nearly large
enough to accommodate an arm-chair, if the chair could have but
contrived to get into it, I caught a glimpse of my friend's printing
press and his case of types, canopied overhead by the blue ancient of
the vessel, bearing, in stately six-inch letters of white bunting, the
legend, "FREE CHURCH YACHT." A door opened, which communicated with the
forecastle, and John Stewart, stooping very much, to accommodate himself
to the low-roofed passage, thrust in a plate of fresh herrings,
splendidly toasted, to give substantiality and relish to our tea. The
little rude forecastle, a considerably smaller apartment than the cabin,
was all a-glow with the bright fire in the coppers, itself invisible; we
could see the chain-cable dangling from the hatchway to the floor, and
John Stewart's companion, a powerful-looking, handsome young man, with
broad bare breast, and in his shirt-sleeves, squatted full in front of
the blaze, like the household goblin described by Milton, or the
"Christmas Present" of Dickens. Mr. Elder left us for the steamer, in
which he prosecuted his voyage next morning to Skye; and we tumbled in,
each to his narrow bed,--comfortable enough sort of resting places,
though not over soft; and slept so soundly, that we failed to mark Mr.
Elder's return for a few seconds, a little after daybreak. I found at my
bedside, when I awoke, a fragment of rock which he had brought from the
shore, charged with Liasic fossils; and a note he had written, to say
that the deposit to which it belonged occurred in the trap immediately
above the village-mill; and further, to call my attention to a house
near the middle of the village, built of a mouldering red sandstone,
which had been found _in situ_ in digging the foundations. I had but
little time for the work of exploration in Mull, and the information
thus kindly rendered enabled me to economize it.
The village of Tobermory resembles that of Oban. A quiet bay has its
secure island-breakwater in front; a line of tall, well-built houses,
not in the least rural in their aspect, but that seem rather as if they
had been transported from the centre of some stately city entire and at
once, sweeps round its inner inflection, like a bent bow; and an
amphitheatre of mingled rock and wood rises behind. With all its beauty,
however, there hangs about the village an air of melancholy. Like some
of the other western coast villages, it seems not to have grown,
piece-meal, as a village ought, but to have been made wholesale, as
Frankenstein made his man; and to be ever asking, and never more
incessantly than when it is at its quietest, why it should have been
made at all? The remains of the Florida, a gallant Spanish ship, lie off
its shores, a wreck of the Invincible Armada, "deep whelmed," according
to Thompson,
"What time,
Snatched sudden by the vengeful blast,
The scattered vessels drove, and on blind shelve,
And pointed rock that marks th' indented shore,
Relentless dashed, where loud the northern main
Howls through the fractured Caledonian isles."
Macculloch relates, that there was an attempt made, rather more than a
century ago, to weigh up the Florida, which ended in the weighing up of
merely a few of her guns, some of them of iron greatly corroded; and
that, on scraping them, they became so hot under the hand that they
could not be touched, but that they lost this curious property after a
few hours' exposure to the air. There have since been repeated instances
elsewhere, he adds, of the same phenomenon, and chemistry has lent its
solution of the principles on which it occurs; but, in the year 1740,
ere the riddle was read, it must have been deemed a thoroughly magical
one by the simple islanders of Mull. It would seem as if the guns,
heated in the contest with Drake, Hawkins, and Frobisher, had again
kindled, under some supernatural influence, with the intense glow of the
lost battle.
The morning was showery; but it cleared up a little after ten, and we
landed to explore. We found the mill a little to the south of the
village, where a small stream descends, all foam and uproar, from the
higher grounds along a rocky channel half-hidden by brushwood; and the
Liasic bed occurs in an exposed front directly over it, coped by a thick
bed of amygdaloidal trap. The organisms are numerous; and, when we dig
into the bank beyond the reach of the weathering influences, we find
them delicately preserved, though after a fashion that renders difficult
their safe removal. Originally the bed must have existed as a brown
argillaceous mud, somewhat resembling that which forms in the course of
years, under a scalp of muscles; and it has hardened into a more
silt-like clay, in which the fossils occur, not as petrifactions, but
as shells in a state of decay, except in some rare cases, in which a
calcareous nodule has formed within or around them. Viewed in the group,
they seem of an intermediate character, between the shells of the Lias
and the Oolite. One of the first fossils I disinterred was the Gryphaea
obliquata,--a shell characteristic of the Liasic formation; and the
fossil immediately after, the Pholadomy aequalis, a shell of the Oolitic
one. There occurs in great numbers a species of small Pecten,--some of
the specimens scarce larger than a herring scale; a minute Ostrea, a
sulcated Terebratula, an Isocardia, a Pullastra, and groups of broken
serpulae in vast abundance. The deposit has also its three species of
Ammonite, existing as mere impressions in the clay; and at least two
species of Belemnite,--one of the two somewhat resembling the Belemnites
abbreviatus, but smaller and rather more elongated: while the other, of
a spindle form, diminishing at both ends, reminds one of the Belemnites
minimus of the Gault. The Red Sandstone in the centre of the village
occurs detached, like this Liasic bed, amid the prevailing trap, and may
be seen _in situ_ beside the southern gable of the tall, deserted
looking house at the hill-foot, that has been built of it. It is a soft,
coarse-grained, mouldering stone, ill fitted for the purposes of the
architect; and more nearly resembles the New Red Sandstone of England
and Dumfriesshire, than any other rock I have yet seen in the north of
Scotland. I failed to detect in it aught organic.
We weighed anchor about two o'clock, and beat gallantly out the Sound,
in the face of an intermittent baffling wind and a heavy swell from the
sea. I would fain have approached nearer the precipices of Ardnamurchan,
to trace along their inaccessible fronts the strange reticulations of
trap figured by Macculloch; but prudence and the skipper forbade our
trusting even the docile little Betsey, on one of the most formidable
lee shores in Scotland, in winds so light and variable, and with the
swell so high. We could hear the deep roar of the surf for miles, and
see its undulating strip of white flickering under stack and cliff. The
scenery here seems rich in legendary association. At one tack we bore
into Bloody Bay, on the Mull coast,--the scene of a naval battle between
two island chiefs; at another, we approached, on the mainland, a cave
inaccessible save from the sea, long the haunt of a ruthless Highland
pirate. Ere we rounded the headland of Ardnamurchan, the slant light of
evening was gleaming athwart the green acclivities of Mull, barring them
with long horizontal lines of shadow, where the trap terraces rise step
beyond step, in the characteristic stair-like arrangement to which the
rock owes its name; and the sun set as we were bearing down in one long
tack on the Small Isles. We passed the Isle of Muck, with its one low
hill; saw the pyramidal mountains of Rum looming tall in the offing; and
then, running along the Isle of Eigg, with its colossal Scuir rising
between us and the sky, as if it were a piece of Babylonian wall, or of
the great wall of China, only vastly larger, set down on the ridge of a
mountain, we entered the channel which separates the island from one of
its dependencies, Eilean Chaisteil, and cast anchor in the tideway,
about fifty yards from the rocks. We were now at home,--the only home
which the proprietor of the island permits to the islanders' minister;
and, after getting warm and comfortable over the stove and a cup of tea,
we did what all sensible men do in their own homes when the night wears
late,--got into bed.
CHAPTER II.
The Minister's Larder--No Harbor--Eigg Shoes--_Tormentilla
erecta_--For the _Witness'_ Sake--Eilean Chaisteil--Appearance of
Eigg--Chapel of St. Donan--Shell-sand--Origin of Secondary
Calcareous Rock suggested--Exploration of Eigg--Pitchstone Veins--A
Bone Cave--Massacre at Eigg--Grouping of Human Bones in the
Cave--Relics--The Horse's Tooth--A Copper Sewing Needle--Teeth
found--Man a worse Animal than his Teeth show him to have been
designed for--Story of the Massacre--Another Version--Scuir of
Eigg--The Scuir a Giant's Causeway--Character of the
Columns--Remains of a Prostrate Forest.
We had rich tea this morning. The minister was among his people; and our
first evidence of the fact came in the agreeable form of three bottles
of fine fresh cream from the shore. Then followed an ample baking of
nice oaten cakes. The material out of which the cakes were manufactured
had been sent from the minister's store aboard,--for oatmeal in Eigg is
rather a scarce commodity in the middle of July; but they had borrowed a
crispness and flavor from the island, that the meal, left to its own
resources, could scarcely have communicated; and the golden-colored
cylinder of fresh butter which accompanied them was all the island's
own. There was an ample supply of eggs too, as one not quite a conjuror
might have expected from a country bearing such a name,--eggs with the
milk in them; and, with cream, butter, oaten cakes, eggs, and tea, all
of the best, and with sharp-set sea-air appetites to boot, we fared
sumptuously. There is properly no harbor in the island. We lay in a
narrow channel, through which, twice every twenty-four hours, the tides
sweep powerfully in one direction, and then as powerfully in the
direction opposite; and our anchors had a trick of getting foul, and
canting stock downwards in the loose sand, which, with pointed rocks all
around us, over which the current ran races, seemed a very shrewd sort
of trick indeed. But a kedge and halser, stretched thwartwise to a
neighboring crag, and jammed fast in a crevice, served in moderate
weather to keep us tolerably right. In the severer seasons, however, the
kedge is found inadequate, and the minister has to hoist sail and make
out for the open sea, as if served with a sudden summons of ejectment.
Among the various things brought aboard this morning, there was a pair
of island shoes for the minister's cabin use, that struck my fancy not a
little. They were all around of a deep madder red color, soles, welts
and uppers; and, though somewhat resembling in form the little yawl of
the Betsey, were sewed not unskilfully with thongs; and their peculiar
style of tie seemed of a kind suited to furnish with new idea a
fashionable shoemaker of the metropolis. They were altogether the
production of Eigg, from the skin out of which they had been cut, with
the lime that had prepared it for the tan, and the root by which the tan
had been furnished, down to the last on which they had been moulded, and
the artisan that had cast them off, a pair of finished shoes. There are
few trees, and, of course, no bark to spare, in the island; but the
islanders find a substitute in the astringent lobiferous root of the
_Tormentilla erecta_, which they dig out for the purpose among the
heath, at no inconsiderable expense of time and trouble. I was informed
by John Stewart, an adept in all the multifarious arts of the island,
from the tanning of leather and the tilling of land, to the building of
a house or the working of a ship, that the infusion of root had to be
thrice changed for every skin, and that it took a man nearly a day to
gather roots enough for a single infusion. I was further informed that
it was not unusual for the owner of a skin to give it to some neighbor
to tan, and that, the process finished, it was divided equally between
them, the time and trouble bestowed on it by the one being deemed
equivalent to the property held in it by the other. I wished to call a
pair of these primitive-looking shoes my own, and no sooner was the wish
expressed, than straightway one islander furnished me with leather, and
another set to work upon the shoes. When I came to speak of
remuneration, however, the islanders shook their heads. "No, no, not
from the _Witness_: there are not many that take our part, and the
_Witness_ does." I hold the shoes, therefore, as my first retainer,
determined, on all occasions of just quarrel, to make common cause with
the poor islanders.
The view from the anchoring ground presents some very striking features.
Between us and the sea lies Eilean Chaisteil, a rocky trap islet, about
half a mile in length by a few hundred yards in breadth; poor in
pastures, but peculiarly rich in sea-weed, of which John Stewart used,
he informed me, to make finer kelp, ere the trade was put down by act of
Parliament, than could be made elsewhere in Eigg. This islet bore, in
the remote past, its rude fort or dun, long since sunk into a few grassy
mounds; and hence its name. On the landward side rises the island of
Eigg proper, resembling in outline two wedges, placed point to point on
a board. The centre is occupied by a deep angular gap, from which the
ground slopes upward on both sides, till, attaining its extreme height
at the opposite ends of the island, it drops suddenly on the sea. In the
northern rising ground the wedge-like outline is complete; in the
southern one it is somewhat modified by the gigantic Scuir, which rises
direct on the apex of the height, _i.e._, the thick part of the wedge;
and which, seen bows-on from this point of view, resembles some vast
donjon keep, taller, from base to summit, by about a hundred feet, than
the dome of St. Paul's. The upper slopes of the island are brown and
moory, and present little on which the eye may rest, save a few trap
terraces, with rudely columnar fronts; its middle space is mottled with
patches of green, and studded with dingy cottages, each of which this
morning, just a little before the breakfast hour, had its own blue
cloudlet of smoke diffused around it; while along the beach, patches of
level sand, alternated with tracts of green bank, or both, give place to
stately ranges of basaltic columns, or dingy groups of detached rocks.
Immediately in front of the central hollow, as if skilfully introduced,
to relieve the tamest part of the prospect, a noble wall of
semi-circular columns rises some eighty or a hundred feet over the
shore; and on a green slope, directly above, we see the picturesque
ruins of the Chapel of St. Donan, one of the disciples of Columba, and
the Culdee saint and apostle of the island.
One of the things that first struck me, as I got on deck this morning,
was the extreme whiteness of the sand. I could see it gleaming bright
through the transparent green of the sea, three fathoms below our keel,
and, in a little flat bay directly opposite, it presented almost the
appearance of pulverized chalk. A stronger contrast to the dingy
trap-rocks around which it lies could scarce be produced, had contrast
for effect's sake been the object. On landing on the exposed shelf to
which we had fastened our halser, I found the origin of the sand
interestingly exhibited. The hollows of the rock, a rough trachyte, with
a surface like that of a steel rasp, were filled with handfuls of broken
shells thrown up by the surf from the sea-banks beyond: fragments of
echini, bits of the valves of razor-fish, the island cyprina, mactridae,
buccinidae, and fractured periwinkles, lay heaped together in vast
abundance. In hollow after hollow, as I passed shorewards, I found the
fragments more and more comminuted, just as, in passing along the
successive vats of a paper-mill, one finds the linen rags more and more
disintegrated by the cylinders; and immediately beyond the inner edge of
the shelf, which is of considerable extent, lies the flat bay, the
ultimate recipient of the whole, filled to the depth of several feet,
and to the extent of several hundred yards, with a pure shell-sand, the
greater part of which had been thus washed ashore in handfuls, and
ground down by the blended agency of the trachyte and the surf. Once
formed, however, in this way it began to receive accessions from the
exuviae of animals that love such localities,--the deep arenaceous bed
and soft sand-beach; and these now form no inconsiderable proportion of
the entire mass. I found the deposit thickly inhabited by spatangi,
razor-fish, gapers, and large, well-conditioned cockles, which seemed to
have no idea whatever that they were living amid the debris of a charnel
house. Such has been the origin here of a bed of shell-sand, consisting
of many thousand tons, and of which at least eighty per cent. was once
associated with animal life. And such, I doubt not, is the history of
many a calcareous rock in the later secondary formations. There are
strata, not a few, of the Cretaceous and Oolitic groups, that would be
found--could we but trace their beginnings with a certainty and
clearness equal to that with which we can unravel the story of this
deposit--to be, like it, elaborations from dead matter, made through the
agency of animal secretion.
We set out on our first exploratory ramble in Eigg an hour before noon.
The day was bracing and breezy, and a clear sun looked cheerily down on
island, and strait, and blue open sea. We rowed southwards in our
little boat, through the channel of Eilean Chaisteil, along the
trap-rocks of the island, and landed under the two pitchstone veins of
Eigg, so generally known among mineralogists, and of which specimens may
be found in so many cabinets. They occur in an earthy, greenish-black
amygdaloid, which forms a range of sea-cliffs varying in height from
thirty to fifty feet, and that, from their sad hue and dull fracture,
seem to absorb the light; while the veins themselves, bright and
glistening, glitter in the sun, as if they were streams of water
traversing the face of the rock. The first impression they imparted, in
viewing them from the boat, was, that the inclosing mass was a pitch
caldron, rather of the roughest and largest, and much begrimmed by soot,
that had cracked to the heat, and that the fluid pitch was forcing its
way outwards through the rents. The veins expand and contract, here
diminishing to a strip a few inches across, there widening into a
comparatively broad belt, some two or three feet over; and, as well
described by M'Culloch, we find the inclosed pitchstone changing in
color, and assuming a lighter or darker hue, as it nears the edge or
recedes from it. In the centre it is of a dull olive green, passing
gradually into blue, which in turn deepens into black; and it is exactly
at the point of contact with the earthy amygdaloid that the black is
most intense, and the fracture of the stone glassiest and brightest. I
was lucky enough to detach a specimen, which, though scarce four inches
across, exhibits the three colors characteristic of the vein,--its bar
of olive green on the one side, of intense black on the other, and of
blue, like that of imperfectly fused bottle-glass, in the centre. This
curious rock,--so nearly akin in composition and appearance to
obsidian,--a mineral which, in its dense form, closely resembles the
coarse dark-colored glass of which common bottles are made, and which,
in its lighter form, exists as pumice,--constitutes one of the links
that connect the trap with the unequivocally volcanic rocks. The one
mineral may be seen beside smoking crater, as in the Lipari Isles,
passing into pumice; while the other may be converted into a substance
almost identical with pumice, by the chemist. "It is stated by the
Honorable George Knox, of Dublin," says Mr. Robert Allan, in his
valuable mineralogical work, "that the pitchstone of Newry, on being
exposed to a high temperature, loses its bitumen and water, and is
converted into a light substance in every respect resembling pumice."
But of pumice in connection with the pitchstones of Eigg, more anon.
Leaving our boat to return to the Betsey at John Stewart's leisure, and
taking with us his companion, to assist us in carrying such specimens as
we might procure, we passed westwards for a few hundred yards under the
crags, and came abreast of a dark angular opening at the base of the
precipice, scarce two feet in height, and in front of which there lies a
little sluggish, ankle-deep pool, half mud, half water, and matted over
with grass and rushes. Along the mural face of the rock of earthy
amygdaloid there runs a nearly vertical line, which in one of the
stratified rocks one might perhaps term the line of a fault, but which
in a trap rock may merely indicate where two semi-molten masses had
pressed against each other without uniting--just as currents of cooling
lead, poured by the plumber from the opposite end of a groove, sometimes
meet and press together, so as to make a close, polished joint, without
running into one piece. The little angular opening forms the lower
termination of the line, which, hollowing inwards, recedes near the
bottom into a shallow cave, roughened with tufts of fern and bunches of
long silky grass, here and there enlivened by the delicate flowers of
the lesser rock-geranium. A shower of drops patters from above among the
weeds and rushes of the little pool. My friend the minister stopped
short. "There," he said, pointing to the hollow, "you will find such a
bone cave as you never saw before. Within that opening there lie the
remains of an entire race, palpably destroyed, as geologists in so many
other cases are content merely to imagine, by one great catastrophe.
That is the famous cave of Frances (_Uamh Fraingh_), in which the whole
people of Eigg were smoked to death by the M'Leods."
We struck a light, and, worming ourselves through the narrow entrance,
gained the interior,--a true rock gallery, vastly more roomy and lofty
than one could have anticipated from the mean vestibule placed in front
of it. Its extreme length we found to be two hundred and sixty feet; its
extreme breadth twenty-seven feet; its height, where the roof rises
highest, from eighteen to twenty feet. The cave seems to have owed its
origin to two distinct causes. The trap-rocks on each side of the
vertical fault-like crevice which separates them are greatly decomposed,
as if by the moisture percolating from above; and directly in the line
of the crevice must the surf have charged, wave after wave, for ages ere
the last upheaval of the land. When the Dog-stone at Dunolly existed as
a sea-stack, skirted with algae, the breakers on this shore must have
dashed every tide through the narrow opening of the cavern, and scooped
out by handfuls the decomposing trap within. The process of
decomposition, and consequent enlargement, is still going on inside, but
there is no longer an agent to sweep away the disintegrated fragments.
Where the roof rises highest, the floor is blocked up with accumulations
of bulky decaying masses, that have dropped from above; and it is
covered over its entire area by a stratum of earthy rubbish, which has
fallen from the sides and ceiling in such abundance, that it covers up
the straw beds of the perished islanders, which still exist beneath as a
brown mouldering felt, to the depth of from five to eight inches. Never
yet was tragedy enacted on a gloomier theatre. An uncertain twilight
glimmers gray at the entrance, from the narrow vestibule; but all
within, for full two hundred feet, is black as with Egyptian darkness.
As we passed onward with our one feeble light, along the dark mouldering
walls and roof, which absorbed every straggling ray that reached them,
and over the dingy floor, ropy and damp, the place called to
recollection that hall in Roman story, hung and carpeted with black,
into which Domitian once thrust his senate, in a frolic, to read their
own names on the coffin-lids placed against the wall. The darkness
seemed to press upon us from every side, as if it were a dense jetty
fluid, out of which our light had scooped a pailful or two, and that was
rushing in to supply the vacuum; and the only objects we saw distinctly
visible were each other's heads and faces, and the lighter parts of our
dress.
The floor, for about a hundred feet inwards from the narrow vestibule,
resembles that of a charnel-house. At almost every step we came upon
heaps of human bones grouped together, as the Psalmist so graphically
describes, "as when one cutteth and cleaveth wood upon the earth." They
are of a brownish, earthy hue, here and there tinged with green; the
skulls, with the exception of a few broken fragments, have disappeared;
for travellers in the Hebrides have of late years been numerous and
curious; and many a museum,--that at Abbotsford among the
rest,--exhibits, in a grinning skull, its memorial of the Massacre at
Eigg. We find, too, further marks of visitors in the single bones
separated from the heaps and scattered over the area; but enough still
remains to show, in the general disposition of the remains, that the
hapless islanders died under the walls in families, each little group
separated by a few feet from the others. Here and there the remains of a
detached skeleton may be seen, as if some robust islander, restless in
his agony, had stalked out into the middle space ere he fell; but the
social arrangement is the general one. And beneath every heap we find,
at the depth, as has been said, of a few inches, the remains of the
straw-bed upon which the family had lain, largely mixed with the smaller
bones of the human frame, ribs and vertebrae, and hand and feet bones;
occasionally, too, with fragments of unglazed pottery, and various other
implements of a rude housewifery. The minister found for me, under one
family heap, the pieces of a half-burned, unglazed earthen jar, with a
narrow mouth, that, like the sepulchral urns of our ancient tumuli, had
been moulded by the hand, without the assistance of the potter's wheel;
and to one of the fragments there stuck a minute pellet of gray hair.
From under another heap he disinterred the handle-stave of a child's
wooden porringer (_bicker_), perforated by a hole still bearing the mark
of the cord that had hung it to the wall; and beside the stave lay a few
of the larger, less destructible bones of the child, with what for a
time puzzled us both not a little,--one of the grinders of a horse.
Certain it was, no horse could have got there to have dropped a
tooth,--a foal of a week old could not have pressed itself through the
opening; and how the single grinder, evidently no recent introduction
into the cave, could have got mixed up in the straw with the human
bones, seemed an enigma somewhat of the class to which the reel in the
bottle belongs. I found in Edinburgh an unexpected commentator on the
mystery, in the person of my little boy,--an experimental philosopher in
his second year. I had spread out on the floor the curiosities of
Eigg,--among the rest, the relics of the cave, including the pieces of
earthern jar, and the fragment of the porringer; but the horse's tooth
seemed to be the only real curiosity among them in the eyes of little
Bill. He laid instant hold of it; and, appropriating it as a toy,
continued playing with it till he fell asleep. I have now little doubt
that it was first brought into the cave by the poor child amid whose
mouldering remains Mr. Swanson found it. The little pellet of gray hair
spoke of feeble old age involved in this wholesale massacre with the
vigorous manhood of the island; and here was a story of unsuspecting
infancy amusing itself on the eve of destruction with its toys. Alas,
for man! "Should not I spare Nineveh, that great city," said God to the
angry prophet, "wherein are more than six score thousand persons that
cannot discern between their right hand and their left?" God's image
must have been sadly defaced in the murderers of the poor inoffensive
children of Eigg, ere they could have heard their feeble wailings,
raised, no doubt, when the stifling atmosphere within began first to
thicken, and yet ruthlessly persist in their work of indiscriminate
destruction.
Various curious things have from time to time been picked up from under
the bones. An islander found among them, shortly before our visit, a
sewing needle of copper, little more than an inch in length; fragments
of Eigg shoes, of the kind still made in the island, are of
comparatively common occurrence; and Mr. James Wilson relates, in the
singularly graphic and powerful description of _Uamh Fraingh_, which
occurs in his "Voyage round the Coasts of Scotland" (1841), that a
sailor, when he was there, disinterred, by turning up a flat stone, a
"buck-tooth" and a piece of money,--the latter a rusty copper coin,
apparently of the times of Mary of Scotland. I also found a few teeth;
they were sticking fast in a fragment of jaw; and, taking it for
granted, as I suppose I may, that the dentology of the murderous M'Leods
outside the cave must have very much resembled that of the murdered
M'Donalds within, very harmless looking teeth they were for being those
of an animal so maliciously mischievous as man. I have found in the Old
Red Sandstone the strong-based tusks of the semi-reptile Holoptychius; I
have chiselled out of the limestone of the Coal Measures the sharp,
dagger-like incisors of the Megalichthys; I have picked up in the Lias
and Oolite the cruel spikes of the Crocodile and the Ichthyosaurus; I
have seen the trenchant, saw-edged teeth of gigantic Cestracions and
Squalidae that had been disinterred from the Chalk and the London Clay;
and I have felt, as I examined them, that there could be no possibility
of mistake regarding the nature of the creatures to which they had
belonged;--they were teeth made for hacking, tearing, mangling,--for
amputating limbs at a bite, and laying open bulky bodies with a crunch;
but I could find no such evidence in the human jaw, with its three
inoffensive looking grinders, that the animal it had belonged to,--far
more ruthless and cruel than reptile-fish, crocodiles, or sharks,--was
of such a nature that it could destroy creatures of even its own kind by
hundreds at a time, when not in the least incited by hunger, and with no
ultimate intention of eating them. Man must surely have become an
immensely worse animal than his teeth show him to have been designed
for; his teeth give no real evidence regarding his real character. Who,
for instance, could gather from the dentology of the M'Leods the passage
in their history to which the cave of Frances bears evidence?
We quitted the cave, with its stagnant damp atmosphere and its mouldy
unwholesome smells, to breathe the fresh sea-air on the beach without.
Its story, as recorded by Sir Walter in his "Tales of a Grandfather,"
and by Mr. Wilson, in his "Voyage," must be familiar to the reader; and
I learned from my friend, versant in all the various island traditions
regarding it, that the less I inquired into its history on the spot, the
more was I likely to feel satisfied that I knew something about it.
There seem to have been no chroniclers, in this part of the Hebrides, in
the rude age of the unglazed pipkin and the copper needle; and many
years seem to have elapsed ere the story of their hapless possessors was
committed to writing; and so we find it existing in various and somewhat
conflicting editions. "Some hundred years ago," says Mr. Wilson, "a few
of the M'Leods landed in Eigg from Skye, where, having greatly
misconducted themselves, the Eiggites strapped them to their own boats,
which they sent adrift into the ocean. They were, however, rescued by
some clansmen; and, soon after, a strong body of the M'Leods set sail
from Skye, to revenge themselves on Eigg. The natives of the latter
island feeling they were not of sufficient force to offer resistance,
went and hid themselves (men, women, and children) in this secret cave,
which is narrow, but of great subterranean length, with an exceedingly
small entrance. It opens from the broken face of a steep bank along the
shore; and, as the whole coast is cavernous, their particular retreat
would have been sought for in vain by strangers. So the Skye-men,
finding the island uninhabited, presumed the natives had fled, and
satisfied their revengeful feelings by ransacking and pillaging the
empty houses. Probably the _movables_ were of no great value. They then
took their departure and left the island, when the sight of a solitary
human being among the cliffs awakened their suspicion, and induced them
to return. Unfortunately a slight sprinkling of snow had fallen, and the
footsteps of an individual were traced to the mouth of the cave. Not
having been there ourselves at the period alluded to, we cannot speak
with certainty as to the nature of the parley which ensued, or the
terms offered by either party; but we know that those were not the days
of protocols. The ultimatum was unsatisfactory to the Skye-men, who
immediately proceeded to 'adjust the preliminaries' in their own way,
which adjustment consisted in carrying a vast collection of heather,
ferns, and other combustibles, and making a huge fire just in the very
entrance of the _Uamh Fraingh_, which they kept up for a length of time;
and thus, by 'one fell smoke,' they smothered the entire population of
the island."
Such is Mr. Wilson's version of the story, which, in all its leading
circumstances, agrees with that of Sir Walter. According, however, to at
least one of the Eigg versions, it was the M'Leod himself who had landed
on the island, driven there by a storm. The islanders, at feud with the
M'Leod's at the time, inhospitably rose upon him, as he bivouacked on
the shores of the Bay of Laig; and in a fray, in which his party had the
worse, his back was broken, and he was forced off half dead to sea.
Several months after, on his partial recovery, he returned, crook-backed
and infirm, to wreak his vengeance on the inhabitants, all of whom,
warned of his coming by the array of his galleys in the offing, hid
themselves in the cave, in which, however, they were ultimately
betrayed--as narrated by Sir Walter and Mr. Wilson--by the track of some
footpaths in a sprinkling of snow; and the implacable chieftain, giving
orders on the discovery, to unroof the houses in the neighborhood,
raised high a pile of rafters against the opening, and set it on fire.
And there he stood in front of the blaze, hump-backed and grim, till the
wild, hollow cry from the rock within had sunk into silence, and there
lived not a single islander of Eigg, man, woman, or child. The fact that
their remains should have been left to moulder in the cave is proof
enough, of itself, that none survived to bury the dead. I am inclined
to believe, from the appearance of the place, that smoke could scarcely
have been the real agent of destruction; then, as now, it would have
taken a great deal of pure smoke to smother a Highlander. It may be
perhaps deemed more probable, that the huge fire of rafter and roof-tree
piled close against the opening, and rising high over it, would draw out
the oxygen within as its proper food, till at length all would be
exhausted; and life would go out for want of it, like the flame of a
candle under an upturned jar. Sir Walter refers the date of the event to
some time "about the close of the sixteenth century;" and the coin of
Queen Mary, mentioned by Mr. Wilson, points at a period at least not
much earlier; but the exact time of its occurrence is so uncertain, that
a Roman Catholic priest of the Hebrides, in lately showing his people
what a very bad thing Protestantism is, instanced, as a specimen of its
average morality, the affair of the cave. The _Protestant_ M'Leods of
Skye, he said, full of hatred in their hearts, had murdered, wholesale,
their wretched brethren, the _Protestant_ M'Donalds of Eigg, and sent
them off to perdition before their time.
Quitting the beach, we ascended the breezy hill-side on our way to the
Scuir,--an object so often and so well described, that it might be
perhaps prudent, instead of attempting one description more, to present
the reader with some of the already existing ones. "The Scuir of Eigg,"
says Professor Jamieson, in his 'Mineralogy of the Western Islands,' "is
perfectly mural, and extends for upwards of a mile and a half, and rises
to a height of several hundred feet. It is entirely columnar, and the
columns rise in successive ranges, until they reach the summit, where,
from their great height, they appear, when viewed from below,
diminutive. Staffa is an object of the greatest beauty and regularity;
the pillars are as distinct as if they had been reared by the hand of
art; but it has not the extent or sublimity of the Scuir of Eigg. The
one may be compared with the greatest exertions of human power; the
other is characteristic of the wildest and most inimitable works of
nature." "The height of this extraordinary object is considerable," says
M'Culloch, dashing off his sketch with a still bolder hand; "yet its
powerful effect arises rather from its peculiar form, and the commanding
elevation which it occupies, than from its positive altitude. Viewed in
one direction, it presents a long irregular wall, crowning the summit of
the highest hill, while in the other it resembles a huge tower. Thus it
forms no natural combination of outline with the surrounding land, and
hence acquires that independence in the general landscape which
increases its apparent magnitude, and produces that imposing effect
which it displays. From the peculiar position of the Scuir, it must also
inevitably be viewed from a low station. Hence it everywhere towers high
above the spectator; while, like other objects on the mountain outline,
its apparent dimensions are magnified, and its dark mass defined on the
sky, so as to produce all the additional effects arising from strong
oppositions of light and shadow. The height of this rock is sufficient
in this stormy country frequently to arrest the passage of the clouds,
so as to be further productive of the most brilliant effects in
landscape. Often they may be seen hovering on its summit, and adding
ideal dimensions to the lofty face, or, when it is viewed on the
extremity, conveying the impression of a tower, the height of which is
such as to lie in the regions of the clouds. Occasionally they sweep
along the base, leaving its huge and black mass involved in additional
gloom, and resembling the castle of some Arabian enchanter, built on the
clouds, and suspended in air." It might be perhaps deemed somewhat
invidious to deal with pictures such as these in the style the
connoisseur in the "Vicar of Wakefield" dealt with the old painting,
when, seizing a brush, he daubed it over with brown varnish, and then
asked the spectators whether he had not greatly improved the tone of the
coloring. And yet it is just possible, that in the case of at least
M'Culloch's picture, the brown varnish might do no manner of harm. But a
homelier sketch, traced out on almost the same leading lines, with just
a little less of the aerial in it, may have nearly the same subduing
effect; I have, besides, a few curious touches to lay in, which seem
hitherto to have escaped observation and the pencil; and in these
several circumstances must lie my apology for adding one sketch more to
the sketches existing already.
The Scuir of Eigg, then, is a veritable Giant's Causeway, like that on
the coast of Antrim, taken and magnified rather more than twenty times
in height, and some five or six times in breadth, and then placed on the
ridge of a hill nearly nine hundred feet high. Viewed sideways, it
assumes, as described by M'Culloch, the form of a perpendicular but
ruinous rampart, much gapped above, that runs for about a mile and a
quarter along the top of a lofty sloping talus. Viewed endways, it
resembles a tall massy tower,--such a tower as my friend, Mr. D.O. Hill,
would delight to draw, and give delight by drawing,--a tower three
hundred feet in breadth by four hundred and seventy feet in height,
perched on the apex of a pyramid, like a statue on a pedestal. This
strange causeway is columnar from end to end; but the columns, from
their great altitude and deficient breadth, seem mere rodded shafts in
the Gothic style; they rather resemble bundles of rods than
well-proportioned pillars. Few of them exceed eighteen inches in
diameter, and many of them fall short of half a foot; but, though lost
in the general mass of the Scuir as independent columns, when we view it
at an angle sufficiently large to take in its entire bulk, they yet
impart to it that graceful linear effect which we see brought out in
tasteful pencil sketches and good line engravings. We approached it this
day from the shore in the direction in which the eminence it stands upon
assumes the pyramidal form, and itself the tower-like outline. The
acclivity is barren and stony,--a true desert foreground, like those of
Thebes and Palmyra; and the huge square shadow of the tower stretched
dark and cold athwart it. The sun shone out clearly. One half the
immense bulk before us, with its delicate vertical lining, lay from top
to bottom in deep shade, massive and gray; one half presented its
many-sided columns to the light, here and there gleaming with tints of
extreme brightness, where the pitchstones presented their glassy planes
to the sun; its general outline, whether pencilled by the lighter or
darker tints, stood out sharp and clear; and a stratum of white fleecy
clouds floated slowly amid the delicious blue behind it. But the minuter
details I must reserve for my next chapter. One fact, however,
anticipated just a little out of its order, may heighten the interest of
the reader. There are massive buildings,--bridges of noble span, and
harbors that abut far into the waves,--founded on wooden piles; and this
hugest of hill-forts we find founded on wooden piles also. It is built
on what a Scotch architect would perhaps term a pile-_brander_ of the
_Pinites Eiggensis_, an ancient tree of the Oolite. The gigantic Scuir
of Eigg rests on the remains of a prostrate forest.
CHAPTER III.
Structure of the Scuir--A stray Column--The Piazza--A buried Pine
Forest the Foundation of the Scuir--Geological Poachers in a Fossil
Preserve--_Pinites Eiggensis_--Its Description--Witham's
Experiments on Fossil Pine of Eigg--Rings of the Pine--Ascent of
the Scuir--Appearance of the Top--White Pitchstone--Mr. Greig's
Discovery of Pumice--A Sunset Scene--The Manse and the Yacht--The
Minister's Story--A Cottage Repast--American Timber drifted to the
Hebrides--Agency of the Gulf Stream--The Minister's Sheep.
As we climbed the hill-side, and the Shinar-like tower before us rose
higher over the horizon at each step we took, till it seemed pointing at
the middle sky, we could mark peculiarities in its structure which
escape notice in the distance. We found it composed of various beds,
each of which would make a Giant's Causeway entire, piled over each
other like stories in a building, and divided into columns, vertical, or
nearly so, in every instance except in one bed near the base, in which
the pillars incline to a side, as if losing footing under the
superincumbent weight. Innumerable polygonal fragments,--single stones
of the building,--lie scattered over the slope, composed, like almost
all the rest of the Scuir, of a peculiar and very beautiful stone,
unlike any other in Scotland--a dark pitchstone-porphyry, which,
inclosing crystals of glassy feldspar, resembles in the hand-specimen, a
mass of black sealing-wax, with numerous pieces of white bugle stuck
into it. Some of the detached polygons are of considerable size; few of
them larger and bulkier, however, than a piece of column of this
characteristic porphyry, about ten feet in length by two feet in
diameter, which lies a full mile away from any of the others, in the
line of the old burying-ground, and distant from it only a few hundred
yards. It seems to have been carried there by man: we find its bearing
from the Scuir lying nearly at right angles with the direction of the
drift-boulders of the western coast, which are, besides, of rare
occurrence in the Hebrides; nor has it a single neighbor; and it seems
not improbable, as a tradition of the island testifies, that it was
removed thus far for the purpose of marking some place of sepulture, and
that the catastrophe of the cave arrested its progress after by far the
longer and rougher portion of the way had been passed. The dry-arm bones
of the charnel-house in the rock may have been tugging around it when
the galleys of the M'Leod hove in sight. The traditional history of
Eigg, said my friend the minister, compared with that of some of the
neighboring islands, presents a decapitated aspect: the M'Leods cut it
off by the neck. Most of the present inhabitants can tell which of their
ancestors, grandfather, or great-grandfather, or great-great-grandfather,
first settled in the place, and where they came from; and, with the
exception of a few vague legends about St. Donan and his grave, which were
preserved apparently among the people of the other Small Isles, the island
has no early traditional history.
We had now reached the Scuir. There occur, intercalated with the
columnar beds, a few bands of a buff-colored non-columnar trap,
described by M'Culloch as of a texture intermediate between a greenstone
and a basalt, and which, while the pitchstone around it seems nearly
indestructible, has weathered so freely as to form horizontal grooves
along the face of the rock, from two to five yards in depth. One of
these runs for several hundred feet along the base of the Scuir, just at
the top of the talus, and greatly resembles a piazza, lacking the outer
pillars. It is from ten to twelve feet in height, by from fifteen to
twenty in depth; the columns of the pitch stone-bed immediately above
it seem perilously hanging in mid air; and along their sides there
trickles, in even the driest summer weather,--for the Scuir is a
condenser on an immense scale--minute runnels of water, that patter
ceaselessly in front of the long deep hollow, like rain from the eaves
of a cottage during a thunder shower. Inside, however, all is dry, and
the floor is covered to the depth of several inches with the dung of
sheep and cattle, that find, in this singular mountain piazza, a place
of shelter. We had brought a pickaxe with us; and the dry and dusty
floor, composed mainly of a gritty conglomerate, formed the scene of our
labors. It is richly fossiliferous, though the organisms have no
specific variety; and never, certainly, have I found the remains of
former creations in a scene in which they more powerfully addressed
themselves to the imagination. A stratum of peat-moss, mixed with
fresh-water shells, and resting on a layer of vegetable mould, from
which the stumps and roots of trees still protruded, was once found in
Italy, buried beneath an ancient tesselated pavement; and the whole gave
curious evidence of a kind fitted to picture to the imagination a
background vista of antiquity, all the more remotely ancient in aspect
from the venerable age of the object in front. Dry ground covered by
wood, a lake, a morass, and then dry ground again, had all taken
precedence, on the site of the tesselated pavement, in this instance, of
an old Roman villa. But what was antiquity in connection with a Roman
villa, to antiquity in connection with the Scuir of Eigg? Under the old
foundations of this huge wall we find the remains of a pine forest,
that, long ere a single bed of the porphyry had burst from beneath, had
sprung up and decayed on hill and beside stream in some nameless
land,--had then been swept to the sea,--had been entombed deep at the
bottom in a grit of Oolite,--had been heaved up to the surface, and
high over it, by volcanic agencies working from beneath,--and had
finally been built upon, as moles are built upon piles, by the architect
that had laid down the masonry of the gigantic Scuir, in one fiery layer
after another. The mountain wall of Eigg, with its dizzy elevation of
four hundred and seventy feet, is a wall founded on piles of pine laid
crossways; and, strange as the fact may seem, one has but to dig into
the floor of this deep-hewn piazza, to be convinced that at least it
_is_ a fact.
Just at this interesting stage, however, our explorations bade fair to
be interrupted. Our man who carried the pickaxe had lingered behind us
for a few hundred yards, in earnest conversation with an islander; and
he now came up, breathless and in hot haste, to say that the islander, a
Roman Catholic tacksman in the neighborhood, had peremptorily warned him
that the Scuir of Eigg was the property of Dr. M'Pherson of Aberdeen,
not ours, and that the Doctor would be very angry at any man who meddled
with it. "That message," said my friend, laughing, but looking just a
little sad through the laugh, "would scarce have been sent us when I was
minister of the Establishment here; but it seems allowable in the case
of a poor Dissenter, and is no bad specimen of the thousand little ways
in which the Roman Catholic population of the island try to annoy me,
now that they see my back to the wall." I was tickled with the idea of a
fossil preserve, which coupled itself in my mind, through a trick of the
associative faculty, with the idea of a great fossil act for the
British empire, framed on the principles of the game-laws; and, just
wondering what sort of disreputable vagabonds geological poachers
would become under its deteriorating influence, I laid hold of the
pickaxe and broke into the stonefast floor; and thence I succeeded in
abstracting,--feloniously, I dare say, though the crime has not yet got
into the statute-book--some six or eight pieces of the _Pinites
Eiggensis_, amounting in all to about half a cubic foot of that very
ancient wood--value unknown. I trust, should the case come to a serious
bearing, the members of the London Geological Society will generously
subscribe half-a-crown a-piece to assist me in feeing counsel. There are
more interests than mine at stake in the affair. If I be cast and
committed,--I, who have poached over only a few miserable districts in
Scotland,--pray, what will become of some of them,--the Lyells,
Bucklands, Murchisons and Sedgwicks,--who have poached over whole
continents?
We were successful in procuring several good specimens of the Eigg pine,
at a depth, in the conglomerate, of from eight to eighteen inches. Some
of the upper pieces we found in contact with the decomposing trap out of
which the hollow piazza above had been scooped; but the greater number,
as my set of specimens abundantly testify, lay embedded in the original
Oolitic grit in which they had been locked up, in, I doubt not, their
present fossil state, ere their upheaval, through Plutonic agency, from
their deep-sea bottom. The annual rings of the wood, which are quite as
small as in a slow-growing Baltic pine, are distinctly visible in all
the better pieces I this day transferred to my bag. In one fragment I
reckon sixteen rings in half an inch, and fifteen in the same space in
another. The trees to which they belonged seem to have grown on some
exposed hill-side, where, in the course of half a century, little more
than from two or three inches were added to their diameter. The _Pinites
Eiggensis_, or Eigg pine, was first introduced to the notice of the
scientific world by the late Mr. Witham, in whose interesting work on
"The Internal Structure of Fossil Vegetables" the reader may find it
figured and described. The specimen in which he studied its
peculiarities "was found," he says, "at the base of the magnificent
mural escarpment named the Scuir of Eigg,--not, however, _in situ_, but
among fragments of rocks of the Oolitic series." The authors of the
"Fossil Flora," where it is also figured, describe it as differing very
considerably in structure from any of the coniferae of the Coal Measures.
"Its medullary rays," says Messrs. Lindley and Hutton, "appear to be
more numerous, and frequently are not continued through one zone of wood
to another, but more generally terminate at the concentric circles. It
abounds also in turpentine vessels, or lacunae, of various sizes, the
sides of which are distinctly defined." Viewed through the microscope,
in transparent slips, longitudinal and transverse, it presents, within
the space of a few lines, objects fitted to fill the mind with wonder.
We find the minutest cells, glands, fibres, of the original wood
preserved uninjured. _There_ still are those medullary rays entire that
communicated between the pith and the outside,--_there_ still the ring
of thickened cells that indicated the yearly check which the growth
received when winter came on,--_there_ the polygonal reticulations of
the cross section, without a single broken mesh,--_there_, too, the
elongated cells in the longitudinal one, each filled with minute glands
that take the form of double circles,--_there_ also, of larger size and
less regular form, the lacunae in which the turpentine lay: every nicely
organized speck, invisible to the naked eye, we find in as perfect a
state of keeping in the incalculably ancient pile-work on which the
gigantic Scuir is founded, as in the living pines that flourish green on
our hill-sides. A net-work, compared with which that of the finest lace
ever worn by the fair reader would seem a net-work of cable, has
preserved entire, for untold ages, the most delicate peculiarities of
its pattern. There is not a mesh broken, nor a circular dot away!
The experiments of Mr. Witham on the Eigg fossil, furnish an
interesting example of the light which a single, apparently simple,
discovery may throw on whole departments of fact. He sliced his specimen
longitudinally and across, fastened the slices on glass, ground them
down till they became semi-transparent, and then, examining them under
reflected light by the microscope, marked and recorded the specific
peculiarities of their structure. And we now know, in consequence, that
the ancient Eigg pine, to which the detached fragment picked up at the
base of the Scuir belonged,--a pine alike different from those of the
earlier carboniferous period and those which exist contemporary with
ourselves,--was, some _three creations_ ago, an exceedingly common tree
in the country now called Scotland,--as much so, perhaps, as the Scotch
fir is at the present day. The fossil trees found in such abundance in
the neighborhood of Helmsdale that they are burnt for lime,--the fossil
wood of Eathie, in Cromartyshire, and that of Shandwick, in Ross,--all
belong to the _Pinites Eiggensis_. It seems to have been a straight and
stately tree, in most instances, as in the Eigg specimens, of slow
growth. One of the trunks I saw near Navidale measured two feet in
diameter, but a full century had passed ere it attained to a bulk so
considerable; and a splendid specimen in my collection, from the same
locality, which measures twenty-one inches, exhibits even _more_ than a
hundred annual rings. In one of my specimens, and one only, the rings
are of great breadth. They differ from those of all the others in the
proportion in which I have seen the annual rings of a young, vigorous
fir that had sprung up in some rich, moist hollow, differ from the
annual rings of trees of the same species that had grown in the shallow,
hard soil of exposed hill-sides. And this one specimen furnishes curious
evidence that the often-marked but little understood law, which gives us
our better and worse seasons in alternate groups, various in number and
uncertain in their time of recurrence, obtained as early as the age of
the Oolite. The rings follow each other in groups of lesser and larger
breadth. One group of four rings measures an inch and a quarter across,
while an adjoining group of five rings measures only five-eighth parts;
and in a breadth of six inches there occur five of these alternate
groups. For some four or five years together, when this pine was a
living tree, the springs were late and cold, and the summers cloudy and
chill, as in that group of seasons which intervened between 1835 and
1841; and then, for four or five years, more springs were early and
summers genial, as in the after group of 1842, 1843 and 1844. An
arrangement in nature,--first observed, as we learn from Bacon, by the
people of the Low Countries, and which has since formed the basis of
meteoric tables, and of predictions and elaborate cycles of the
weather,--bound together the twelvemonths of the Oolitic period in
alternate bundles of better and worse: vegetation throve vigorously
during the summers of one group, and languished, in those of another, in
a state of partial development.
Sending away our man shipwards, laden with a bag of fossil wood, we
ascended by a steep broken ravine to the top of the Scuir. The columns,
as we pass on towards the west, diminish in size, and assume in many of
the beds considerable variety of direction and form. In one bed they
belly over with a curve, like the ribs of some wrecked vessel from which
the planking has been torn away; in another they project in a straight
line, like muskets planted slantways on the ground to receive a charge
of cavalry; in others the inclination is inwards, like that of ranges of
stakes placed in front of a sea-dyke, to break the violence of the
waves; while yet in others they present, as in the eastern portion of
the Scuir, the common vertical direction. The ribbed appearance of every
crag and cliff, imparts to the scene a peculiar character; every larger
mass of light and shadow is corded with minute stripes; and the feeling
experienced among the more shattered peaks, and in the more broken
recesses, seems near akin to that which it is the tendency of some
magnificent ruin to excite, than that which awakens amid the sublime of
nature. We feel as if the pillared rocks around us were like the
Cyclopean walls of Southern Italy,--the erections of some old gigantic
race passed from the earth forever. The feeling must have been
experienced on former occasions, amid the innumerable pillars of the
Scuir; for we find M'Culloch, in his description, ingeniously analyzing
it. "The resemblance to architecture here is much increased," he says,
"by the columnar structure, which is sufficiently distinguishable, even
from a distance, and produces a strong effect of artificial regularity
when seen near at hand. To this vague association in the mind of the
efforts of art with the magnitude of nature, is owing much of that
sublimity of character which the Scuir presents. The sense of power is a
fertile source of the sublime; and as the appearance of power exerted,
no less than that of simplicity, is necessary to confer this character
on architecture, so the mind, insensibly transferring the operations of
nature to the efforts of art where they approximate in character,
becomes impressed with a feeling rarely excited by her more ordinary
forms, where these are even more stupendous."
The top of the Scuir, more especially towards its eastern termination,
resembles that of some vast mole not yet levelled over by the workmen;
the pavement has not yet been laid down, and there are deep gaps in the
masonry, that run transversely, from side to side, still to fill up.
Along one of these ditch-like gaps, which serves to insulate the eastern
and highest portion of the Scuir from all its other portions, we find
fragments of a rude wall of uncemented stones, the remains of an
ancient hill-fort; which, with its natural rampart of rock on three of
its four sides, more than a hundred yards in sheer descent, and with its
deep ditch and rude wall on the fourth, must have formed one of the most
inaccessible in the kingdom. The masses of pitchstone a-top, though so
intensely black within, are weathered on the surface into almost a pure
white; and we found lying detached among them, fragments of common
amygdaloid and basalt, and minute slaty pieces of chalcedony that had
formed apparently in fissures of the trap. We would have scrutinized
more narrowly at the time had we expected to find anything more rare;
but I did not know until full four months after, that aught more rare
was to be found. Had we examined somewhat more carefully, we might
possibly have done what Mr. Woronzow Greig did on the Scuir about
eighteen years previous,--picked up on it a piece of _bona fide_ Scotch
pumice. This gentleman, well known through his exertions in statistical
science, and for his love of science in general, and whose tastes and
acquirements are not unworthy the son of Mrs. Somerville, has kindly
informed me by letter regarding his curious discovery. "I visited the
island of Eigg," he says, "in 1825 or 1826, for the purpose of shooting,
and remained in it several days; and as there was a great scarcity of
game, I amused myself in my wanderings by looking about for natural
curiosities. I knew little about Geology at the time, but, collecting
whatever struck my eye as uncommon, I picked up from the sides of the
Scuir, among various other things, a bit of fossil wood, and, nearly at
the summit of the eminence, a piece of pumice of a deep brownish-black
color, and very porous, the pores being large and round, and the
substance which divided them of a uniform thickness. This last specimen
I gave to Mr. Lyell, who said that it could not originally have belonged
to Eigg, though it might possibly have been washed there by the sea,--a
suggestion, however, with which its place on the top of the Scuir seems
ill to accord. I may add, that I have since procured a larger specimen
from the same place." This seems a curious fact, when we take into
account the identity, in their mineral components, of the pumice and
obsidian of the recent volcanoes; and that pitchstone, the obsidian of
the trap-rocks, is resolvable into a pumice by the art of the chemist.
If pumice was to be found anywhere in Scotland, we might _a priori_
expect to find it in connection with by far the largest mass of
pitchstone in the kingdom. It is just possible, however, that Mr.
Greig's two specimens may not date farther back, in at least their
existing state, than the days of the hill-fort. Powerful fires would
have been required to render the exposed summit of the Scuir at all
comfortable; there is a deep peat-moss in its immediate neighborhood,
that would have furnished the necessary fuel; the wind must have been
sufficiently high on the summit to fan the embers into an intense white
heat; and if it was heat but half as intense as that which was employed
in fusing into one mass the thick vitrified ramparts of Craig Phadrig
and Knock Farril, on the east coast, it could scarce have failed to
anticipate the experiment of the Hon. Mr. Knox, of Dublin, by converting
some of the numerous pitchstone fragments that lie scattered about,
"into a light substance in every respect resembling pumice."
It was now evening, and rarely have I witnessed a finer. The sun had
declined half-way adown the western sky, and for many yards the shadow
of the gigantic Scuir lay dark beneath us along the descending slope.
All the rest of the island, spread out at our feet as in a map, was
basking in yellow sunshine; and with its one dark shadow thrown from its
one mountain-elevated wall of rock, it seemed some immense fantastical
dial, with its gnomon rising tall in the midst. Far below, perched on
the apex of the shadow, and half lost in the line of the penumbra, we
could see two indistinct specks of black, with a dim halo around
each,--specks that elongated as we arose, and contracted as we sat, and
went gliding along the line as we walked. The shadows of two gnats
disporting on the edge of an ordinary gnomon would have seemed vastly
more important, in proportion, on the figured plane of the dial, than
these, our ghostly representatives, did here. The sea, spangled in the
wake of the sun with quick glancing light, stretched out its blue plain
around us; and we could see included in the wide prospect, on the one
hand, at once the hill-chains of Morven and Kintail, with the many
intervening lochs and bold jutting headlands that give variety to the
mainland; and, on the other, the variously complexioned Hebrides, from
the Isle of Skye to Uist and Barra, and from Uist and Barra to Tiree and
Mull. The contiguous Small Isles, Muck and Rum, lay moored immediately
beside us, like vessels of the same convoy that in some secure roadstead
drop anchor within hail of each other. I could willingly have lingered
on the top of the Scuir until after sunset; but the minister, who, ever
and anon, during the day, had been conning over some notes jotted on a
paper of wonderfully scant dimensions, reminded me that this was the
evening of his week-day discourse, and that we were more than a
particularly rough mile from the place of meeting, and within, half an
hour of the time. I took one last look of the scene ere we commenced our
descent. There, in the middle of the ample parish glebe, that looked
richer and greener in the light of the declining sun than at any former
period during the day,--rose the snug parish manse; and yonder,--in an
open island channel, with a strip of dark rocks fringing the land
within, and another dark strip fringing the barren Eilean Chaisteil
outside,--lay the Betsey, looking wonderfully diminutive, but evidently
a little thing of high spirit, taut-masted, with a smart rake aft, and a
spruce outrigger astern, and flaunting her triangular flag of blue in
the sun. I pointed first to the manse, and then to the yacht. The
minister shook his head.
"'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--Oolitic 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 Oolitic 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 Oolite 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 Oolite, 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.
A line of trap-hills that rises along the shore seems as if it had
strewed half its materials over the beach. The rugged blocks lie thick
as stones in a causeway, down to the line of low ebb,--memorials of a
time when the surf dashed against the shattered bases of the trap-hills,
now elevated considerably beyond its reach; and we can catch but partial
glimpses of the shale below. Wherever access to it can be had, we find
it richly fossiliferous; but its organisms, with the exception of its
Belemnites, are very imperfectly preserved. I dug up from under the
trap-blocks some of the common Liasic Ammonites of the north-eastern
coast of Scotland, a few of the septa of a large Nautilus, broken pieces
of wood, and half-effaced casts of what seems a branched coral; but only
minute portions of the shells have been converted into stone; here and
there a few chambers in the whorls of an Ammonite or Nautilus, though
the outline of the entire organism lies impressed in the shale; and the
ligneous and polyparious fossils we find in a still greater state of
decay. The Belemnite alone, as is common with this robust fossil,--so
often the sole survivor of its many contemporaries,--has preserved its
structure entire. I disinterred from the shale good specimens of the
Belemnite _sulcatus_ and Belemnite _elongatus_, and found, detached on
the surface of the bed, a fragment of a singularly large Belemnite, a
full inch and a quarter in diameter, the species of which I could not
determine.
Returning by the track we came, we reach the bottom of the bay, which we
find much obscured with sand and shingle; and pass northwards along its
side, under a range of low sandstone precipices, with interposing grassy
slopes, in which the fertile Oolitic meniscus descends to the beach. The
sandstone, white and soft, and occurring in thick beds, much resembles
that of the Oolite of Sutherland. We detect in it few traces of fossils;
now and then a carbonaceous marking, and now and then what seems a thin
vein of coal, but which proves to be merely the bark of some woody stem,
converted into a glossy bituminous lignite, like that of Brora. But in
beds of a blue clay, intercalated with the sandstone, we find fossils in
abundance, of a character less obscure. We spent a full half-hour in
picking out shells from the bottom of a long dock-like hollow among the
rocks, in which a bed of clay has yielded to the waves, while the strata
on either side stand up over it like low wharfs on the opposite side of
a river. The shells, though exceedingly fragile,--for they partake of
the nature of the clayey matrix in which they are imbedded,--rise as
entire as when they had died among the mud, years, mayhap ages, ere the
sandstone had been deposited over them; and we were enabled at once to
detect their extreme dissimilarity, as a group, to the shells of the
Liasic deposit we had so lately quitted. We did not find in this bed a
single Ammonite, Belemnite, or Nautilus; but chalky Bivalves, resembling
our existing Tellina, in vast abundance, mixed with what seem to be a
small Buccinum and a minute Trochus, with numerous rather equivocal
fragments of a shell resembling an Oiliva. So thickly do they lie
clustered together in this deposit, that in some patches where the
sad-colored argillaceous ground is washed bare by the sea, it seems
marbled with them into a light gray tint. The group more nearly
resembles in type a recent one than any I have yet seen in a secondary
deposit, except perhaps in the Weald of Moray, where we find in one of
the layers a Planorbis scarce distinguishable from those of our ponds
and ditches, mingled with a Paludina that seems as nearly modelled after
the existing form. From the absence of the more characteristic shells of
the Oolite, I am inclined to deem the deposit one of estuary origin. Its
clays were probably thrown down, like the silts of so many of our
rivers, in some shallow bay, where the waters of a descending stream
mingled with those of the sea, and where, though shells nearly akin to
our existing periwinkles and whelks congregate thickly, the Belemnite,
seared by the brackish water, never plied its semi-cartilaginous fins,
or the Nautilus or Ammonite hoisted its membranaceous sail.
We pass on towards the north. A thick bed of an extremely soft white
sandstone presents here, for nearly half a mile together, its front to
the waves, and exhibits, under the incessant wear of the surf, many
singularly grotesque combinations of form. The low precipices,
undermined at the base, beetle over like the sides of stranded vessels.
One of the projecting promontories we find hollowed through and through
by a tall rugged archway; while the outer pier of the arch,--if pier we
may term it,--worn to a skeleton, and jutting outwards with a knee-like
angle, presents the appearance of a thin ungainly leg and splay foot,
advanced, as if in awkward courtesy, to the breakers. But in a winter
or two, judging from its present degree of attenuation, and the yielding
nature of its material, which resembles a damaged mass of arrow-root,
consolidated by lying in the leaky hold of a vessel, its persevering
courtesies will be over, and pier and archway must lie in shapeless
fragments on the beach. Wherever the surf has broken into the upper
surface of this sandstone bed, and worn it down to nearly the level of
the shore, what seem a number of double ramparts, fronting each other,
and separated by deep square ditches exactly parallel in the sides,
traverse the irregular level in every direction. The ditches vary in
width from one to twelve feet; and the ramparts, rising from three to
six feet over them, are perpendicular as the walls of houses, where they
front each other, and descend on the opposite sides in irregular slopes.
The iron block, with square groove and projecting ears, that receives
the bar of a railway, and connects it with the stone below, represents
not inadequately a section of one of these ditches, with its ramparts.
They form here the sole remains of dykes of an earthy trap, which,
though at one time in a state of such high fusion that they converted
the portions of soft sandstone in immediate contact with them into the
consistence of quartz rock, have long since mouldered away, leaving but
the hollow rectilinear rents which they had occupied, surmounted by the
indurated walls which they had baked. Some of the most curious
appearances, however, connected with the sandstone, though they occur
chiefly in an upper bed, are exhibited by what seem fields of petrified
mushrooms, of a gigantic size, that spread out in some places for
hundreds of yards under the high-water level. These apparent mushrooms
stand on thick squat stems, from a foot to eighteen inches in height;
the heads are round like those of toad-stools, and vary from one foot to
nearly two yards in diameter. In some specimens we find two heads
joined together in a form resembling a squat figure of _eight_, of what
printers term the Egyptian type, or, to borrow the illustration of
M'Culloch, "like the ancient military projectile known by the name of
double-headed shot;" in other specimens three heads have coalesced in a
trefoil shape, or rather in a shape like that of an ace of clubs
divested of the stem. By much the greater number, however, are
spherical. They are composed of concretionary masses, consolidated, like
the walls of the dykes, though under some different process, into a hard
siliceous stone, that has resisted those disintegrating influences of
the weather and the surf, under which the yielding matrix in which they
were embedded has worn from around them. Here and there we find them
lying detached on the beach, like huge shot, compared with which the
greenstone balls of Mons Meg are but marbles for children to play with;
in other cases they project from the mural front of rampart-like
precipices, as if they had been showered into them by the ordnance of
some besieging battery, and had stuck fast in the mason-work. Abbotsford
has been described as a romance in stone and lime; we have here, on the
shores of Laig, what seems a wild but agreeable tale, of the extravagant
cast of "Christabel," or the "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner," fretted
into sandstone. But by far the most curious part of the story remains to
be told.
The hollows and fissures of the lower sandstone bed we find filled with
a fine quartzose sand, which, from its pure white color, and the
clearness with which the minute particles reflect the light, reminds one
of accumulations of potato-flour drying in the sun. It is formed almost
entirely of disintegrated particles of the soft sandstone; and as we at
first find it occurring in mere handfuls, that seem as if they had been
detached from the mass during the last few tides, we begin to marvel to
what quarter the missing materials of the many hundred cubic yards of
rock, ground down along the shore in this bed during the last century or
two, have been conveyed away. As we pass on northwards, however, we see
the white sand occurring in much larger quantities,--here heaped up in
little bent-covered hillocks above the reach of the tide,--there
stretching out in level, ripple-marked wastes into the waves,--yonder
rising in flat narrow spits among the shallows. At length we reach a
small, irregularly-formed bay, a few hundred feet across, floored with
it from side to side; and see it, on the one hand, descending deep into
the sea, that exhibits over its whiteness a lighter tint of green, and,
on the other, encroaching on the land, in the form of drifted banks,
covered with the plants common to our tracts of sandy downs. The
sandstone bed that has been worn down to form it contains no fossils,
save here and there a carbonaceous stem; but in an underlying harder
stratum we occasionally find a few shells; and, with a specimen in my
hand charged with a group of bivalves resembling the existing conchifera
of our sandy beaches, I was turning aside this sand of the Oolite, so
curiously reduced to its original state, and marking how nearly the
recent shells that lay embedded in it resembled the extinct ones that
had lain in it so long before, when I became aware of a peculiar sound
that it yielded to the tread, as my companions paced over it. I struck
it obliquely with my foot, where the surface lay dry and incoherent in
the sun, and the sound elicited was a shrill, sonorous note, somewhat
resembling that produced by a waxed thread, when tightened between the
teeth and the hand, and tipped by the nail of the forefinger. I walked
over it, striking it obliquely at each step, and with every blow the
shrill note was repeated. My companions joined me; and we performed a
concert, in which, if we could boast of but little variety in the tones
produced, we might at least challenge all Europe for an instrument of
the kind which produced them. It seemed less wonderful that there should
be music in the granite of Memnon, than in the loose Oolitic sand of the
Bay of Laig. As we marched over the drier tracts, an incessant _woo_,
_woo_, _woo_, rose from the surface, that might be heard in the calm
some twenty or thirty yards away; and we found that where a damp
semi-coherent stratum lay at the depth of three or four inches beneath,
and all was dry and incoherent above, the tones were loudest and
sharpest, and most easily evoked by the foot. Our discovery,--for I
trust I may regard it as such,--adds a third locality to two previously
known ones, in which what may be termed the musical sand,--no unmeet
counterpart to the "singing water" of the tale,--has now been found. And
as the island of Eigg is considerably more accessible than _Jabel
Nakous_, in Arabia Petraea, or _Reg-Rawan_, in the neighborhood of Cabul,
there must be facilities presented through the discovery which did not
exist hitherto, for examining the phenomenon in acoustics which it
exhibits,--a phenomenon, it may be added, which some of our greatest
masters of the science have confessed their inability to explain.
_Jabel Nakous_, or the "Mountain of the Bell," is situated about three
miles from the shores of the Gulf of Suez, in that land of wonders which
witnessed for forty years the journeyings of the Israelites, and in
which the granite peaks of Sinai and Horeb overlook an arid wilderness
of rock and sand. It had been known for many ages by the wild Arab of
the desert, that there rose at times from this hill a strange,
inexplicable music. As he leads his camel past in the heat of the day, a
sound like the first low tones of an Aeolian harp stirs the hot
breezeless air. It swells louder and louder in progressive undulations,
till at length the dry baked earth seems to vibrate under foot, and the
startled animal snorts and rears, and struggles to break away. According
to the Arabian account of the phenomenon, says Sir David Brewster, in
his "Letters on Natural Magic," there is a convent miraculously
preserved in the bowels of the hill; and the sounds are said to be those
of the "_Nakous_, a long metallic ruler, suspended horizontally, which
the priest strikes with a hammer, for the purpose of assembling the
monks to prayer." There exists a tradition that on one occasion a
wandering Greek saw the mountain open, and that, entering by the gap, he
descended into the subterranean convent, where he found beautiful
gardens and fountains of delicious water, and brought with him to the
upper world, on his return, fragments of consecrated bread. The first
European traveller who visited _Jabel Nakous_, says Sir David, was M.
Seetzen, a German. He journeyed for several hours over arid sands, and
under ranges of precipices inscribed by mysterious characters, that
tell, haply, of the wanderings of Israel under Moses. And reaching,
about noon, the base of the musical fountain, he found it composed of a
white friable sandstone, and presenting on two of its sides sandy
declivities. He watched beside it for an hour and a quarter, and then
heard, for the first time, a low undulating sound, somewhat resembling
that of a humming top, which rose and fell, and ceased and began, and
then ceased again; and in an hour and three quarters after, when in the
act of climbing along the declivity, he heard the sound yet louder and
more prolonged. It seemed as if issuing from under his knees, beneath
which the sand, disturbed by his efforts, was sliding downwards along
the surface of the rock. Concluding that the sliding sand was the cause
of the sounds, not an effect of the vibrations which they occasioned, he
climbed to the top of one of the declivities, and, sliding downwards,
exerted himself with hands and feet to set the sand in motion. The
effect produced far exceeded his expectations; the incoherent sand
rolled under and around in a vast sheet; and so loud was the noise
produced, that "the earth seemed to tremble beneath him to such a
degree, that he states he should certainly have been afraid if he had
been ignorant of the cause." At the time Sir David Brewster wrote
(1832), the only other European who had visited _Jabel Nakous_ was Mr.
Gray, of University College, Oxford. This gentleman describes the noises
he heard, but which he was unable to trace to their producing cause, as
"beginning with a low continuous murmuring sound, which seemed to rise
beneath his feet," but "which gradually changed into pulsations as it
became louder, so as to resemble the striking of a clock, and became so
strong at the end of five minutes _as to detach the sand_." The Mountain
of the Bell has been since carefully explored by Lieutenant J. Welsted,
of the Indian navy; and the reader may see it exhibited in a fine
lithograph, in his travels, as a vast irregularly conical mass of broken
stone, somewhat resembling one of our Highland cairns, though, of
course, on a scale immensely more huge, with a steep, angular slope of
sand resting in a hollow in one of its sides, and rising to nearly its
apex. "It forms," says Lieutenant Welsted, "one of a ridge of low,
calcareous hills, at a distance of three and a half miles from the
beach, to which a sandy plain, extending with a gentle rise to their
base, connects them. Its height, about four hundred feet, as well as the
material of which it is composed,--a light-colored friable
sandstone,--is about the same as the rest of the chain; but an inclined
plane of almost impalpable sand rises at an angle of forty degrees with
the horizon, and is bounded by a semi-circle of rocks, presenting
broken, abrupt, and pinnacled forms, and extending to the base of this
remarkable hill. Although their shape and arrangement in some respects
may be said to resemble a whispering gallery, yet I determined by
experiment that their irregular surface renders them but ill adapted for
the production of an echo. Seated at a rock at the base of the sloping
eminence, I directed one of the Bedouins to ascend; and it was not until
he had reached some distance that I perceived the sand in motion,
rolling down the hill to the depth of a foot. It did not, however,
descend in one continued stream; but, as the Arab scrambled up, it
spread out laterally and upwards, until a considerable portion of the
surface was in motion. At their commencement the sounds might be
compared to the faint strains of an Aeolian harp when its strings first
catch the breeze: as the sand became more violently agitated by the
increased velocity of the descent, the noise more nearly resembled that
produced by drawing the moistened fingers over glass. As it reached the
base, the reverberations attained the loudness of distant thunder,
causing the rock on which we were seated to vibrate; and our
camels,--animals not easily frightened,--became so alarmed that it was
with difficulty their drivers could restrain them."
"The hill of _Reg-Rawan_ or the 'Moving Sand,'" says the late Sir
Alexander Burnes, by whom the place was visited in the autumn of 1837,
and who has recorded his visit in a brief paper, illustrated by a rude
lithographic view, in the "Journal of the Asiatic Society" for 1838, "is
about forty miles north of Cabul, towards Hindu-kush, and near the base
of the mountains." It rises to the height of about four hundred feet, in
an angle formed by the junction of two ridges of hills; and a sheet of
sand, "pure as that of the sea-shore," and which slopes in an angle of
forty degrees, reclines against it from base to summit. As represented
in the lithograph, there projects over the steep sandy slope on each
side, as in the "Mountain of the Bell," still steeper barriers of rock;
and we are told by Sir Alexander, that though "the mountains here are
generally composed of granite or mica, at _Reg-Rawan_ there is sandstone
and lime." The situation of the sand is curious, he adds: it is seen
from a great distance; and as there is none other in the neighborhood,
"it might almost be imagined, from its appearance, that the hill had
been cut in two, and that the sand had gushed forth as from a sand-bag."
"When set in motion by a body of people who slide down it, a sound is
emitted. On the first trial we distinctly heard two loud hollow sounds,
such as would be given by a large drum;"--"there is an echo in the
place; and the inhabitants have a belief that the sounds are only heard
on Friday, when the saint of _Reg-Rawan_, who is interred hard by,
permits." The phenomenon, like the resembling one in Arabia, seems to
have attracted attention among the inhabitants of the country at an
early period; and the notice of an eastern annalist, the Emperor Baber,
who flourished late in the fifteenth century, and, like Caesar, conquered
and recorded his conquests, still survives. He describes it as the
_Khwaja Reg-Rawan_, "a small hill, in which there is a line of sandy
ground reaching from the top to the bottom," from which there "issues in
the summer season the sound of drums and nagarets." In connection with
the fact that the musical sand of Eigg is composed of a disintegrated
sandstone of the Oolite, it is not quite unworthy of notice that
sandstone and lime enter into the composition of the hill of
_Reg-Rawan_,--that the district in which the hill is situated is not a
sandy one,--and that its slope of sonorous sand seems as if it had
issued from its side. These various circumstances, taken together, lead
to the inference that the sand may have originated in the decomposition
of the rock beneath. It is further noticeable, that the _Jabel Nakous_
is composed of a white friable sandstone, resembling that of the white
friable bed of the Bay of Laig, and that it belongs to nearly the same
geological era. I owe to the kindness of Dr. Wilson of Bombay, two
specimens which he picked up in Arabia Petraea, of spines of Cidarites of
the mace-formed type so common in the Chalk and Oolite, but so rare in
the older formations. Dr. Wilson informs me that they are of frequent
occurrence in the desert of Arabia Petraea, where they are termed by the
Arabs petrified olives; that nummulites are also abundant in the
district; and that the various secondary rocks he examined in his route
through it seem to belong to the Cretaceous group. It appears not
improbable, therefore, that all the sonorous sand in the world yet
discovered is formed, like that of Eigg, of disintegrated sandstone; and
at least two-thirds of it of the disintegrated sandstone of secondary
formations, newer than the Lias. But how it should be at all sonorous,
whatever its age or origin, seems yet to be discovered. There are few
substances that appear worse suited than sand to communicate to the
atmosphere those vibratory undulations that are the producing causes of
sound: the grains, even when sonorous individually, seem, from their
inevitable contact with each other, to exist under the influence of that
simple law in acoustics which arrests the tones of the ringing glass or
struck bell, immediately as they are but touched by some foreign body,
such as the hand or finger. The one grain, ever in contact with several
other grains, is a glass or bell on which the hand always rests. And the
difficulty has been felt and acknowledged. Sir John Herschel, in
referring to the phenomenon of the _Jabel Nakous_, in his "Treatise on
Sound," in the "Encyclopaedia Metropolitana," describes it as to him
"utterly inexplicable;" and Sir David Brewster, whom I had the pleasure
of meeting in December last, assured me it was not less a puzzle to him
than to Sir John. An eastern traveller, who attributes its production
to "a reduplication of impulse setting air in vibration in a focus of
echo," means, I suppose, saying nearly the same thing as the two
philosophers, and merely conveys his meaning in a less simple style.
I have not yet procured what I expect to procure soon,--sand enough from
the musical bay at Laig to enable me to make its sonorous qualities the
subject of experiment at home. It seems doubtful whether a small
quantity set in motion on an artificial slope will serve to evolve the
phenomena which have rendered the Mountain of the Bell so famous.
Lieutenant Welsted informs us, that when his Bedouin first set the sand
in motion, there was scarce any perceptible sound heard;--it was rolling
downwards for many yards around him to the depth of a foot, ere the
music arose; and it is questionable whether the effect could be elicited
with some fifty or sixty pounds weight of the sand of Eigg, on a slope
of but at most a few feet, which it took many hundred weight of sand of
_Jabel Nakous_, and a slope of many yards, to produce. But in the
stillness of a close room, it is just possible that it may. I have,
however, little doubt, that from small quantities the sound evoked by
the foot on the shore may be reproduced: enough will lie within the
reach of experiment to demonstrate the strange difference which exists
between this sonorous sand of the Oolite, and the common unsonorous sand
of our sea-beaches; and it is certainly worth while examining into the
nature and producing causes of a phenomenon so curious in itself, and
which has been characterized by one of the most distinguished of living
philosophers as "the most celebrated of all the acoustic wonders which
the natural world presents to us." In the forthcoming number of the
"North British Review,"--which appears on Monday first,[1]--the reader
will find the sonorous sand of Eigg referred to, in an article the
authorship of which will scarcely be mistaken. "We have here," says the
writer, after first describing the sounds of _Jabel Nakous_, and then
referring to those of Eigg, "the phenomenon in its simple state,
disembarrassed from reflecting rocks, from a hard bed beneath, and from
cracks and cavities that might be supposed to admit the sand; and
indicating as its cause, either the accumulated vibration of the air
when struck by the driven sand, or the accumulated sounds occasioned by
the mutual impact of the particles of sand against each other. If a
musket-ball passing through the air emits a whistling note, each
individual particle of sand must do the same, however faint be the note
which it yields; and the accumulation of these infinitesimal vibrations
must constitute an audible sound, varying with the number and velocity
of moving particles. In like manner, if two plates of silex or quartz,
which are but large crystals of sand, give out a musical sound when
mutually struck, the impact or collision of two minute crystals or
particles of sand must do the same, in however inferior a degree; and
the union of all these sounds, though singly imperceptible, may
constitute the musical notes of the Bell Mountain, or the lesser sounds
of the trodden sea-beach at Eigg."
Here is a vigorous effort made to unlock the difficulty. I should,
however, have mentioned to the philosophic writer,--what I inadvertently
failed to do,--that the sounds elicited from the sand of Eigg seem as
directly evoked by the slant blow dealt it by the foot, as the sounds
similarly evoked from a highly waxed floor, or a board strewed over with
ground rosin. The sharp shrill note follows the stroke, altogether
independently of the grains driven into the air. My omission may serve
to show how much safer it is for those minds of the observant order,
that serve as hands and eyes to the reflective ones, to prefer incurring
the risk of being even tediously minute in their descriptions, to the
danger of being inadequately brief in them. But, alas! for purposes of
exact science, rarely are verbal descriptions otherwise than inadequate.
Let us look, for example, at the various accounts given us of _Jabel
Nakous_. There are strange sounds heard proceeding from a hill in
Arabia, and various travellers set themselves to describe them. The
tones are those of the convent _Nakous_, says the wild Arab;--there must
be a convent buried under the hill. More like the sounds of a
humming-top, remarks a phlegmatic German traveller. Not quite like them,
says an English one in an Oxford gown;--they resemble rather the
striking of a clock. Nay, listen just a little longer and more
carefully, says a second Englishman, with epaulettes on his shoulder:
"the sounds at their commencement may be compared to the faint strains
of an Aeolian harp when its strings first catch the breeze," but anon, as
the agitation of the sand increases, they "more nearly resemble those
produced by drawing the moistened fingers over glass." Not at all,
exclaims the warlike Zahor Ed-din Muhammed Baber, twirling his whiskers:
"I know a similar hill in the country towards Hindu-kush: it is the
sound of drums and nagarets that issues from the sand." All we really
know of this often-described music of the desert, after reading all the
descriptions, is, that its tones bear certain analogies to certain other
tones,--analogies that seem stronger in one direction to one ear, and
stronger in another direction to an ear differently constituted, but
which do not exactly resemble any other sounds in nature. The strange
music of _Jabel Nakous_, as a combination of tones, is essentially
unique.
CHAPTER V.
Trap-Dykes--"Cotton Apples"--Alternation of Lacustrine with Marine
Remains--Analogy from the Beds of Esk--Aspect of the Island on its
narrow Front--The Puffin--Ru-Stoir--Development of Old Red
Sandstone--Striking Columnar character of Ru-Stoir--Discovery of
Reptilian Remains--John Stewart's wonder at the Bones in the
Stones--Description of the Bones--"Dragons, Gorgons, and
Chimeras"--Exploration and Discovery pursued--The Midway
Shieling--A Celtic Welcome--Return of the Yacht--"Array of Fossils
new to Scotch Geology"--A Geologist's Toast--Hoffman and his
Fossil.
We leave behind us the musical sand, and reach the point of the
promontory which forms the northern extremity of the Bay of Laig.
Wherever the beach has been swept bare, we see it floored with
trap-dykes worn down to the level, but in most places accumulations of
huge blocks of various composition cover it up, concealing the nature of
the rock beneath. The long semi-circular wall of precipice which,
sweeping inwards at the bottom of the bay, leaves to the inhabitants
between its base and the beach their fertile meniscus of land, here
abuts upon the coast. We see its dark forehead many hundred feet
overhead, and the grassy platform beneath, now narrowed to a mere talus,
sweeping upwards to its base from the shore,--steep, broken, lined thick
with horizontal pathways, mottled over with ponderous masses of rock.
Among the blocks that load the beach, and render our onward progress
difficult and laborious, we detect occasional fragments of an
amygdaloidal basalt, charged with a white zeolite, consisting of
crystals so extremely slender that the balls, with their light fibrous
contents, remind us of cotton apples divested of the seeds. There
occur, though more rarely, masses of a hard white sandstone, abounding
in vegetable impressions, which, from their sculptured markings,
recalled to memory the Sigillaria of the Coal Measures. Here and there,
too, we find fragments of a calcareous stone, so largely charged with
compressed shells, chiefly bivalves, that it may be regarded as a shell
breccia. There occur, besides, slabs of fibrous limestone, exactly
resembling the limestone of the ichthyolite beds of the Lower Old Red;
and blocks of a hard gray stone, of silky lustre in the fresh fracture,
thickly speckled with carbonaceous markings. These fragmentary
masses,--all of them, at least, except the fibrous limestone, which
occurs in mere plank-like bands,--represent distinct beds, of which this
part of the island is composed, and which present their edges, like
courses of ashlar in a building, in the splendid section that stretches
from the tall brow of the precipice to the beach; though in the slopes
of the talus, where the lower beds appear in but occasional protrusions
and land-slips, we find some difficulty in tracing their order of
succession.
Near the base of the slope, where the soil has been undermined and the
rock laid bare by the waves, there occur beds of a bituminous black
shale,--resembling the dark shales so common in the Coal Measures,--that
seem to be of fresh water or estuary origin. Their fossils, though
numerous, are ill preserved; but we detect in them scales and plates of
fishes, at least two species of minute bivalves, one of which very much
resembles a Cyclas; and in some of the fragments, shells of Cypris lie
embedded in considerable abundance. After all that has been said and
written by way of accounting for those alternations of lacustrine with
marine remains, which are of such frequent occurrence in the various
formations, secondary and tertiary, from the Coal Measures downwards, it
does seem strange enough that the estuary, or fresh-water lake, should
so often in the old geologic periods have changed places with the sea.
It is comparatively easy to conceive that the inner Hebrides should have
once existed as a broad ocean sound, bounded on one or either side by
Oolitic islands, from which streams descended, sweeping with them, to
the marine depths, productions, animal and vegetable, of the land. But
it is less easy to conceive, that in that sound, the area covered by the
ocean one year should have been covered by a fresh-water lake in perhaps
the next, and then by the ocean again a few years after. And yet among
the Oolitic deposits of the Hebrides evidence seems to exist that
changes of this nature actually took place. I am not inclined to found
much on the apparently fresh-water character of the bituminous shales of
Eigg;--the embedded fossils are all too obscure to be admitted in
evidence; but there can exist no doubt that fresh water, or at least
estuary formations, do occur among the marine Oolites of the Hebrides.
Sir R. Murchison, one of the most cautious, as he is certainly one of
the most distinguished, of living geologists, found in a northern
district of Skye, in 1826, a deposit containing Cyclas, Paludina,
Neritina,--all shells of unequivocally fresh-water origin,--which must
have been formed, he concludes, in either a lake or estuary. What had
been sea at one period had been estuary or lake at another. In every
case, however, in which these intercalated deposits are restricted to
single strata of no great thickness, it is perhaps safer to refer their
formation to the agency of temporary land-floods, than to that of
violent changes of level, now elevating and now depressing the surface.
There occur, for instance, among the marine Oolites of Brora,--the
discovery of Mr. Robertson, of Inverugie,--two strata containing
fresh-water fossils in abundance; but the one stratum is little more
than an inch in thickness,--the other little more than a foot; and it
seems considerably more probable, that such deposits should have owed
their existence to extraordinary land-floods, like those which in 1829
devastated the province of Moray, and covered over whole miles of marine
beach with the spoils of land and river, than that a sea-bottom should
have been elevated for their production, into a fresh-water lake, and
then let down into a sea-bottom again. We find it recorded in the
"Shepherd's Calendar," that after the thaw which followed the great
snow-storm of 1794, there were found on a part of the sands of the
Solway Frith known as the Beds of Esk, where the tide disgorges much of
what is thrown into it by the rivers, "one thousand eight hundred and
forty sheep, nine black cattle, three horses, two men, one woman,
forty-five dogs, and one hundred and eighty hares, beside a number of
meaner animals." A similar storm in an earlier time, with a soft
sea-bottom prepared to receive and retain its spoils, would have formed
a fresh-water stratum intercalated in a marine deposit.
Rounding the promontory, we lose sight of the Bay of Laig, and find the
narrow front of the island that now presents itself exhibiting the
appearance of a huge bastion. The green talus slopes upwards, as its
basement, for full three hundred feet; and a noble wall of perpendicular
rock, that towers over and beyond for at least four hundred feet more,
forms the rampart. Save towards the sea, the view is of but limited
extent; we see it restricted, on the landward side, to the bold face of
the bastion; and in a narrow and broken dell that runs nearly parallel
to the shore for a few hundred yards between the top of the talus and
the base of the rampart,--a true covered way,--we see but the rampart
alone. But the dizzy front of black basalt, dark as night, save where a
broad belt of light-colored sandstone traverses it in an angular
direction, like a white sash thrown across a funeral robe,--the
fantastic peaks and turrets in which the rock terminates atop,--the
masses of broken ruins, roughened with moss and lichen, that have fallen
from above, and lie scattered at its base,--the extreme loneliness of
the place, for we have left behind us every trace of the human
family,--and the expanse of solitary sea which it commands,--all
conspire to render the scene a profoundly imposing one. It is one of
those scenes in which a man feels that he is little, and that nature is
great. There is no precipice in the island in which the puffin so
delights to build as among the dark pinnacles overhead, or around which
the silence is so frequently broken by the harsh scream of the eagle.
The sun had got far adown the sky ere we had reached the covered way at
the base of the rock. All lay dark below; and the red light atop, half
absorbed by the dingy hues of the stone, shone with a gleam so faint and
melancholy, that it served but to deepen the effect of the shadows.
The puffin, a comparatively rare bird in the inner Hebrides, builds, I
was told, in great numbers in the continuous line of precipice which,
after sweeping for a full mile round the Bay of Laig, forms the
pinnacled rampart here, and then, turning another angle of the island,
runs on parallel to the coast for about six miles more. In former times
the puffin furnished the islanders, as in St. Kilda, with a staple
article of food, in those hungry months of summer in which the stores of
the old crop had begun to fail, and the new crop had not yet ripened;
and the people of Eigg, taught by their necessities, were bold cragsmen.
But men do not peril life and limb for the mere sake of a meal, save
when they cannot help it; and the introduction of the potato has done
much to put out the practice of climbing for the bird, except among a
few young lads, who find excitement enough in the work to pursue it for
its own sake, as an amusement. I found among the islanders what was
said to be a piece of the natural history of the puffin, sufficiently
apocryphal to remind one of the famous passage in the history of the
barnacle, which traced the lineage of the bird to one of the
pedunculated cirripedes, and the lineage of the cirripede to a log of
wood. The puffin feeds its young, say the islanders, on an oily scum of
the sea, which renders it such an unwieldy mass of fat, that about the
time when it should be beginning to fly, it becomes unable to get out of
its hole. The parent bird, not in the least puzzled, however, treats the
case medicinally, and,--like mothers of another two-legged genus, who,
when their daughters get over stout, put them through a course of
reducing acids to bring them down,--feeds it on sorrel leaves for
several days together, till, like a boxer under training, it gets
thinned to the proper weight, and becomes able, not only to get out of
its cell, but also to employ its wings.
We pass through the hollow, and, reaching the farther edge of the
bastion, towards the east, see a new range of prospect opening before
us. There is first a long unbroken wall of precipice,--a continuation of
the tall rampart overhead,--relieved along its irregular upper line by
the blue sky. We mark the talus widening at its base, and expanding, as
on the shores of the Bay of Laig, into an irregular grassy platform,
that, sinking midway into a ditch-like hollow, rises again towards the
sea, and presents to the waves a perpendicular precipice of redstone.
The sinking sun shone brightly this evening; and the warm hues of the
precipice, which bears the name of _Ru-Stoir_,--the Red
Head,--strikingly contrasted with the pale and dark tints of the
alternating basalts and sandstones in the taller cliff behind. The
ditch-like hollow, which seems to indicate the line of a fault, cuts off
this red headland from all the other rocks of the island, from which it
appears to differ as considerably in texture as in hue. It consists
mainly of thick beds of a pale red stone, which M'Culloch regarded as a
trap, and which, intercalated with here and there a thin band of shale,
and presenting not a few of the mineralogical appearances of what
geologists of the school of the late Mr. Cunningham term Primary Old Red
Sandstone, in some cases has been laid down as a deposit of Old Red
proper, abutting in the line of a fault on the neighboring Oolites and
basalts. In the geological map which I carried with me,--not one of high
authority however,--I found it actually colored as a patch of this
ancient system. The Old Red Sandstone is largely developed in the
neighboring island of Rum, in the line of which the _Ru-Stoir_ seems to
have a more direct bearing than any of the other deposits of Eigg; and
yet the conclusion regarding this red headland merely adds one proof
more to the many furnished already, of the inadequacy of mineralogical
testimony, when taken in evidence regarding the eras of the geologist.
The hard red beds of _Ru-Stoir_ belong, as I was fortunate enough this
evening to ascertain, not to the ages of the Coccosteus and Pterichthys,
but to the far later ages of the Plesiosaurus and the fossil crocodile.
I found them associated with more reptilian remains, of a character more
unequivocal than have been yet exhibited by any other deposit in
Scotland.
What first strikes the eye, in approaching the _Ru-Stoir_ from the west,
is the columnar character of the stone. The precipices rise immediately
over the sea, in rude colonnades of from thirty to fifty feet in height;
single pillars, that have fallen from their places in the line, and
exhibit a tenacity rare among the trap-rocks,--for they occur in
unbroken lengths of from ten to twelve feet,--lie scattered below; and
in several places where the waves have joined issue with the precipices
in the line on which the base of the columns rest, and swept away the
supporting foundation, the colonnades open into roomy caverns, that
resound to the dash of the sea. Wherever the spray lashes, the pale red
hue of the stone prevails, and the angles of the polygonal shafts are
rounded; while higher up all is sharp-edged, and the unweathered surface
is covered by a gray coat of lichens. The tenacity of the prostrate
columns first drew my attention. The builder scant of materials would
have experienced no difficulty in finding among them sufficient lintels
for apertures from eight to twelve feet in width. I was next struck with
the peculiar composition of the stone; it much rather resembles an
altered sandstone, in at least the weathered specimens, than a trap, and
yet there seemed nothing to indicate that it was an _Old Red_ Sandstone.
Its columnar structure bore evidence to the action of great heat; and
its pale red color was exactly that which the Oolitic sandstones of the
island, with their slight ochreous tinge, would assume in a common fire.
And so I set myself to look for fossils. In the columnar stone itself I
expected none, as none occur in vast beds of the unaltered sandstones,
out of some one of which I supposed it might possibly have been formed;
and none I found: but in a rolled block of altered shale of a much
deeper red than the general mass, and much more resembling Old Red
Sandstone, I succeeded in detecting several shells, identical with those
of the deposit of blue clay described in a former chapter. There
occurred in it the small univalve resembling a Trochus, together with
the oblong bivalve, somewhat like a Tellina; and, spread thickly
throughout the block, lay fragments of coprolitic matter, and the scales
and teeth of fishes. Night was coming on, and the tide had risen on the
beach; but I hammered lustily, and laid open in the dark red shale a
vertebral joint, a rib, and a parallelogramical fragment of solid bone,
none of which could have belonged to any fish. It was an interesting
moment for the curtain to drop over the promontory of _Ru-Stoir_; I had
thus already found in connection with it well nigh as many reptilian
remains as had been found in all Scotland before,--for there could exist
no doubt that the bones I laid open were such; and still more
interesting discoveries promised to await the coming morning, and a less
hasty survey. We found a hospitable meal awaiting us at a picturesque
old two-story house, with, what is rare in the island, a clump of trees
beside it, which rises on the northern angle of the Oolitic meniscus;
and after our day's hard work in the fresh sea-air, we did ample justice
to the viands. Dark night had long set in ere we reached our vessel.
Next day was Saturday; and it behooved my friend, the minister,--as
scrupulously careful in his pulpit preparations for the islanders of
Eigg as if his congregation were an Edinburgh one,--to remain on board,
and study his discourse for the morrow. I found, however, no unmeet
companion for my excursion in his trusty mate John Stewart. John had not
very much English, and I had no Gaelic; but we contrived to understand
one another wonderfully well; and ere evening I had taught him to be
quite as expert in hunting dead crocodiles as myself. We reached the
_Ru-Stoir_, and set hard to work with hammer and chisel. The fragments
of red shale were strewed thickly along the shore for at least three
quarters of a mile; wherever the red columnar rock appeared, there lay
the shale, in water-worn blocks, more or less indurated; but the beach
was covered over with shingle and detached masses of rock, and we could
nowhere find it _in situ_. A winter storm powerful enough to wash the
beach bare might do much to assist the explorer. There is a piece of
shore on the eastern coast of Scotland, on which for years together I
used to pick up nodular masses of lime containing fish of the Old Red
Sandstone; but nowhere in the neighborhood could I find the ichthyolite
bed in which they had originally formed. The storm of a single night
swept the beach; and in the morning the ichthyolites lay revealed _in
situ_ under a stratum of shingle which I had a hundred times examined,
but which, though scarce a foot in thickness, had concealed from me the
ichthyolite bed for five twelvemonths together!
Wherever the altered shale of _Ru-Stoir_ has been thrown high on the
beach, and exposed to the influences of the weather, we find it fretted
over with minute organisms, mostly the scales, plates, bones, and teeth
of fishes. The organisms, as is frequently the case, seem
indestructible, while the hard matrix in which they are embedded has
weathered from around them. Some of the scales present the rhomboidal
outline, and closely resemble those of the _Lepidotus Minor_ of the
Weald; others approximate in shape to an isosceles triangle. The teeth
are of various forms: some of them, evidently palatal, are mere blunted
protuberances glittering with enamel,--some of them present the usual
slim, thorn-like type common in the teeth of the existing fish of our
coasts,--some again are squat and angular, and rest on rectilinear
bases, prolonged considerably on each side of the body of the tooth,
like the rim of a hat or the flat head of a scupper nail. Of the
occipital plates, some present a smooth enamelled surface, while some
are thickly tuberculated,--each tubercle bearing a minute depression in
its apex, like a crater on the summit of a rounded hill. We find
reptilian bones in abundance,--a thing new to Scotch geology,--and in a
state of keeping peculiarly fine. They not a little puzzled John
Stewart: he could not resist the evidence of his senses: they were
bones, he said, real bones,--there could be no doubt of that: _there_
were the joints of a backbone, with the hole the brain-marrow had
passed through; and _there_ were shank-bones and ribs, and fishes'
teeth; but how, he wondered, had they all got into the very heart of the
hard red stones? He had seen what was called wood, he said, dug out of
the side of the Scuir, without being quite certain whether it was wood
or no; but there could be no uncertainty here. I laid open numerous
vertebrae of various forms,--some with long spinous processes rising over
the body or _centrum_ of the bone,--which I found in every instance,
unlike that of the Ichthyosaurus, only moderately concave on the
articulating faces; in others the spinous process seemed altogether
wanting. Only two of the number bore any mark of the suture which
unites, in most reptiles, the annular process to the centrum; in the
others both centrum and process seemed anchylosed, as in quadrupeds,
into one bone; and there remained no scar to show that the suture had
ever existed. In some specimens the ribs seem to have been articulated
to the sides of the centrum; in others there is a transverse process,
but no marks of articulation. Some of the vertebrae are evidently dorsal,
some cervical, one apparently caudal; and almost all agree in showing in
front two little eyelets, to which the great descending artery seems to
have sent out blood-vessels in pairs. The more entire ribs I was lucky
enough to disinter have, as in those of crocodileans, double heads; and
a part of a fibula, about four inches in length, seems also to belong to
this ancient family. A large proportion of the other bones are evidently
Plesiosaurian. I found the head of the flat humerus so characteristic of
the extinct order to which the Plesiosaurus has been assigned, and two
digital bones of the paddle, that, from their comparatively slender and
slightly curved form, so unlike the digitals of its cogener the
Ichthyosaurus, could have belonged evidently to no other reptile. I
observed, too, in the slightly curved articulations of not a few of the
vertebrae, the gentle convexity in the concave centre, which, if not
peculiar to the Plesiosaurus, is at least held to distinguish it from
most of its contemporaries. Among the various nondescript organisms of
the shale, I laid open a smooth angular bone, hollowed something like a
grocer's scoop; a three-pronged caltrop-looking bone, that seems to have
formed part of a pelvic arch; another angular bone, much massier than
the first, regarding the probable position of which I could not form a
conjecture, but which some of my geological friends deem cerebral; an
extremely dense bone, imperfect at each end, which presents the
appearance of a cylinder slightly flattened; and various curious
fragments, which, with what our Scotch museums have not yet
acquired,--entire reptilian fossils for the purposes of
comparison,--might, I doubt not, be easily assigned to their proper
places. It was in vain that, leaving John to collect the scattered
pieces of shale in which the bones occurred, I set myself again and
again to discover the bed from which they had been detached. The tide
had fallen, and a range of skerries lay temptingly off, scarce a hundred
yards from the water's edge: the shale beds might be among them, with
Plesiosauri and crocodiles stretching entire; and fain would I have swum
off to them, as I had done oftener than once elsewhere, with my hammer
in my teeth, and with shirt and drawers in my hat; but a tall brown
forest of kelp and tangle in which even a seal might drown, rose thick
and perilous round both shore and skerries; a slight swell was felting
the long fronds together; and I deemed it better, on the whole, that the
discoveries I had already made should be recorded, than that they should
be lost to geology, mayhap for a whole age, in the attempt to extend
them.
The water, beautifully transparent, permitted the eye to penetrate into
its green depths for many fathoms around, though every object
presented, through the agitated surface, an uncertain and fluctuating
outline. I could see, however, the pink-colored urchin warping himself
up, by his many cables, along the steep rock-sides; the green crab
stalking along the gravelly bottom; a scull of small rock-cod darting
hither and thither among the tangle-roots; and a few large medusae slowly
flapping their continuous fins of gelatine in the opener spaces, a few
inches under the surface. Many curious families had their
representatives within the patch of sea which the eye commanded; but the
strange creatures that had once inhabited it by thousands, and whose
bones still lay sepulchred on its shores, had none. How strange, that
the identical sea heaving around stack and skerry in this remote corner
of the Hebrides should have once been thronged by reptile shapes more
strange than poet ever imagined,--dragons, gorgons and chimeras! Perhaps
of all the extinct reptiles, the Plesiosaurus was the most
extraordinary. An English geologist has described it, grotesquely
enough, and yet most happily, as a snake _threaded_ through a tortoise.
And here on this very spot, must these monstrous dragons have disported
and fed; here must they have raised their little reptile heads and long
swan-like necks over the surface, to watch an antagonist or select a
victim; here must they have warred and wedded, and pursued all the
various instincts of their unknown natures. A strange story, surely,
considering it is a true one! I may mention in the passing, that some of
the fragments of the shale in which the remains are embedded have been
baked by the intense heat into an exceedingly hard, dark-colored stone,
somewhat resembling basalt. I must add further, that I by no means
determine the rock with which we find it associated to be in reality an
altered sandstone. Such is the appearance which it presents where
weathered; but its general aspect is that of a porphyritic trap. Be it
what it may, the fact is not at all affected, that the shores, wherever
it occurs on this tract of insular coast, are strewed with reptilian
remains of the Oolite.
The day passed pleasantly in the work of exploration and discovery; the
sun had already declined far in the west; and, bearing with us our
better fossils, we set out, on our return, by the opposite route to that
along the Bay of Laig, which we had now thrice walked over. The grassy
talus so often mentioned continues to run on the eastern side of the
island for about six miles, between the sea and the inaccessible rampart
of precipice behind. It varies in breadth from about two to four hundred
yards; the rampart rises over it from three to five hundred feet; and a
noble expanse of sea, closed in the distance by a still nobler curtain
of blue hills, spreads away from its base: and it was along this grassy
talus that our homeward road lay. Let the Edinburgh reader imagine the
fine walk under Salisbury Crags lengthened some twenty times,--the line
of precipices above heightened some five or six times,--the gravelly
slope at the base not much increased in altitude, but developed
transversely into a green undulating belt of hilly pasture, with here
and there a sunny slope level enough for the plough, and here and there
a rough wilderness of detached crags and broken banks; let him further
imagine the sea sweeping around the base of this talus, with the nearest
opposite land--bold, bare and undulating atop--some six or eight miles
distant; and he will have no very inadequate idea of the peculiar and
striking scenery through which, this evening, our homeward route lay. I
have scarce ever walked over a more solitary tract. The sea shuts it in
on the one hand, and the rampart of rocks on the other; there occurs
along its entire length no other human dwelling than a lonely summer
shieling; for full one-half the way we saw no trace of man; and the
wildness of the few cattle which we occasionally startled in the
hollows showed us that man was no very frequent visitor among them.
About half an hour before sunset we reached the midway shieling.
Rarely have I seen a more interesting spot, or one that, from its utter
loneliness, so impressed the imagination. The shieling, a rude
low-roofed erection of turf and stone, with a door in the centre some
five feet in height or so, but with no window, rose on the grassy slope
immediately in front of the vast continuous rampart. A slim pillar of
smoke ascends from the roof, in the calm, faint and blue within the
shadow of the precipice, but it caught the sunlight in its ascent, and
blushed, ere it melted into the ether, a ruddy brown. A streamlet came
pouring from above in a long white thread, that maintained its
continuity unbroken for at least two-thirds of the way; and then,
untwisting into a shower of detached drops, that pattered loud and
vehemently in a rocky recess, it again gathered itself up into a lively
little stream, and, sweeping past the shieling, expanded in front into a
circular pond, at which a few milch cows were leisurely slaking their
thirst. The whole grassy talus, with a strip mayhap a hundred yards
wide, of deep green sea, lay within the shadow of the tall rampart; but
the red light fell, for many a mile beyond, on the glassy surface; and
the distant Cuchullin Hills, so dark at other times, had all their
prominent slopes and jutting precipices tipped with bronze; while here
and there a mist streak, converted into bright flame, stretched along
their peaks or rested on their sides. Save the lonely shieling, not a
human dwelling was in sight. An island girl of eighteen, more than
merely good-looking, though much embrowned by the sun, had come to the
door to see who the unwonted visitors might be, and recognized in John
Stewart an old acquaintance. John informed her in her own language that
I was Mr. Swanson's sworn friend, and not a _Moderate_, but one of their
own people, and that I had fasted all day, and had come for a drink of
milk. The name of her minister proved a strongly recommendatory one: I
have not yet seen the true Celtic interjection of welcome,--the kindly
"O o o,"--attempted on paper; but I had a very agreeable specimen of it
on this occasion, _viva voce_. And as she set herself to prepare for us
a rich bowl of mingled milk and cream, John and I entered the shieling.
There was a turf fire at the one end, at which there sat two little
girls, engaged in keeping up the blaze under a large pot, but sadly
diverted from their work by our entrance; while the other end was
occupied by a bed of dry straw, spread on the floor from wall to wall,
and fenced off at the foot by a line of stones. The middle space was
occupied by the utensils and produce of the dairy,--flat wooden vessels
of milk, a butter-churn, and a tub half-filled with curd; while a few
cheeses, soft from the press, lay on a shelf above. The little girls
were but occasional visitors, who had come, out of a juvenile frolic, to
pass the night in the place; but I was informed by John that the
shieling had two other inmates, young women, like the one so hospitably
engaged in our behalf, who were out at the milking, and that they lived
here all alone for several months every year, when the pasturage was at
its best, employed in making butter and cheese for their master, worthy
Mr. M'Donald of Keill. They must often feel lonely when night has closed
darkly over mountain and sea, or in those dreary days of mist and rain
so common in the Hebrides, when nought may be seen save the few
shapeless crags that stud the nearer hillocks around them, and nought
heard save the moaning of the wind in the precipices above, or the
measured dash of the wave on the wild beach below. And yet they would do
ill to exchange their solitary life and rude shieling for the village
dwellings and gregarious habits of the females who ply their rural
labors in bands among the rich fields of the Lowlands, or for the
unwholesome backroom and weary task-work of the city seamstress. The
sunlight was fading from the higher hill-tops of Skye and Glenelg as we
bade farewell to the lonely shieling and the hospitable island girl.
The evening deepened as we hurried southwards along the scarce visible
pathway, or paused for a few seconds to examine some shattered block,
bulky as a Highland cottage, that had fallen from the precipice above.
Now that the whole landscape lay equally in shadow, one of the more
picturesque peculiarities of the continuous rampart came out more
strongly as a feature of the scene than when a strip of shade rested
along the face of the rock, imparting to it a retiring character, and
all was sunshine beyond. A thick bed of white sandstone, as continuous
as the rampart itself, runs nearly horizontally about midway in the
precipice for mile after mile, and, standing out in strong contrast with
the dark-colored trap above and below, reminds one of a belt of white
hewn work in a basalt house front, or rather,--for there occurs above a
second continuous strip, of an olive hue, the color assumed, on
weathering by a bed of amygdaloid,--of a piece of dingy old-fashioned
furniture, inlaid with one stringed belt of bleached holly, and another
of faded green-wood. At some of the more accessible points I climbed to
the line of white belting, and found it to consist of the same soft
quartzy sandstone that in the Bay of Laig furnishes the musical sand.
Lower down there occur, alternating with the trap, beds of shale and of
blue clay, but they are lost mostly in the talus. Ill adapted to resist
the frosts and rains of winter, their exposed edges have mouldered into
a loose soil, now thickly covered over with herbage; and, but for the
circumstance that we occasionally find them laid bare by a water-course,
we would scarce be aware of their existence at all. The shale exhibits
everywhere, as on the opposite side of the _Ru-Stoir_, faint
impressions of a minute shell resembling a Cyclas, and ill-preserved
fragments of fish-scales. The blue clay I found at one spot where the
pathway had cut deep into the hill-side, richly charged with bivalves of
the species I had seen so abundant in the resembling clay of the Bay of
Laig; but the closing twilight prevented me from ascertaining whether it
also contained the characteristic univalves of the deposit, and whether
its shells,--for they seem identical with those of the altered shales of
the _Ru-Stoir_,--might not be associated, like these, with reptilian
remains. Night fell fast, and the streaks of mist that had mottled the
hills at sunset began to spread gray over the heavens in a continuous
curtain; but there was light enough left to show me that the trap became
more columnar as we neared our journey's end. One especial jutting in
the rock presented in the gloom the appearance of an ancient portico,
with pediment and cornice, such as the traveller sees on the hill-sides
of Petraea in front of some old tomb; but it may possibly appear less
architectural by day. At length, passing from under the long line of
rampart, just as the stars that had begun to twinkle over it were
disappearing, one after one, in the thickening vapor, we reached the
little bay of Kildonan, and found the boat waiting us on the beach. My
friend the minister, as I entered the cabin, gathered up his notes from
the table, and gave orders for the tea-kettle; and I spread out before
him--a happy man--an array of fossils new to Scotch Geology. No one not
an enthusiastic geologist or a zealous Roman Catholic can really know
how vast an amount of interest may attach to a few old bones. Has the
reader ever heard how fossil relics once saved the dwelling of a monk,
in a time of great general calamity, when all his other relics proved of
no avail whatever?
Thomas Campbell, when asked for a toast in a society of authors, gave
the memory of Napoleon Bonaparte; significantly adding, "he once hung a
bookseller." On a nearly similar principle I would be disposed to
propose among geologists a grateful bumper in honor of the revolutionary
army that besieged Maestricht. That city, some seventy-five or eighty
years ago, had its zealous naturalist in the person of M. Hoffmann, a
diligent excavator in the quarries of St. Peter's mountain, long
celebrated for its extraordinary fossils. Geology, as a science, had no
existence at the time; but Hoffmann was doing, in a quiet way, all he
could to give it a beginning;--he was transferring from the rock to his
cabinet, shells, and corals, and crustacea, and the teeth and scales of
fishes, with now and then the vertebrae, and now and then the limb-bone,
of a reptile. And as he honestly remunerated all the workmen he
employed, and did no manner of harm to any one, no one heeded him. On
one eventful morning, however, his friends the quarriers laid bare a
most extraordinary fossil,--the occipital plates of an enormous saurian,
with jaws four and a half feet long, bristling over with teeth, like
_chevaux de frise_; and after Hoffmann, who got the block in which it
lay embedded, cut out entire, and transferred to his house, had spent
week after week in painfully relieving it from the mass, all Maestricht
began to speak of it as something really wonderful. There is a cathedral
on St. Peter's mountain,--the mountain itself is church-land; and the
lazy canon, awakened by the general talk, laid claim to poor Hoffmann's
wonderful fossil as _his_ property. He was lord of the manor, he said,
and the mountain and all that it contained belonged to him. Hoffmann
defended his fossil as he best could in an expensive lawsuit; but the
judges found the law clean against him; the huge reptile head was
declared to be "treasure trove" escheat to the lord of the manor; and
Hoffmann, half broken-hearted, with but his labor and the lawyer's bills
for his pains, saw it transferred by rude hands from its place in his
museum, to the residence of the grasping churchman. The huge fossil head
experienced the fate of Dr. Chalmer's two hundred churches. Hoffmann was
a philosopher, however, and he continued to observe and collect as
before; but he never found such another fossil; and at length, in the
midst of his ingenious labors, the vital energies failed within him, and
he broke down and died. The useless canon lived on. The French
Revolution broke out; the republican army invested Maestricht; the
batteries were opened; and shot and shell fell thick on the devoted
city. But in one especial quarter there alighted neither shot nor shell.
All was safe around the canon's house. Ordinary relics would have
availed him nothing in the circumstances,--no, not "the three kings of
Cologne," had he possessed the three kings entire, or the jaw-bones of
the "eleven thousand virgins;" but there was virtue in the jaw-bones of
the Mosasaurus, and safety in their neighborhood. The French _savans_,
like all the other _savans_ of Europe, had heard of Hoffmann's fossil,
and the French artillery had been directed to play wide of the place
where it lay. Maestricht surrendered; the fossil was found secreted in a
vault, and sent away to the _Jardin des Plantes_ at Paris, maugre the
canon, to delight there the heart of Cuvier; and the French, generously
addressing themselves to the heirs of Hoffmann as its legitimate owners,
made over to them a considerable sum of money as its price. They
reversed the finding of the Maestricht judges; and all save the monks of
St. Peter's have acquiesced in the justice of the decision.
CHAPTER VI.
Something for Non-geologists--Man Destructive--A Better and Last
Creation coming--A Rainy Sabbath--The Meeting House--The
Congregation--The Sermon in Gaelic--The Old Wondrous Story--The
Drunken Minister of Eigg--Presbyterianism without Life--Dr.
Johnson's Account of the Conversion of the People of Rum--Romanism
at Eigg--The Two Boys--The Freebooter of Eigg--Voyage Resumed--The
Homeless Minister--Harbor of Isle Ornsay--Interesting Gneiss
Deposit--A Norwegian Keep--Gneiss at Knock--Curious
Chemistry--Sea-cliffs beyond Portsea--The Goblin Luidag--Scenery of
Skye.
I reckon among my readers a class of non-geologists, who think my
geological chapters would be less dull if I left out the geology; and
another class of semi-geologists, who say there was decidedly too much
geology in my last. With the present chapter, as there threatens to be
an utter lack of science in the earlier half of it, and very little, if
any, in the latter half, I trust both classes may be in some degree
satisfied. It will bear reference to but the existing system of
things,--assuredly not the last of the consecutive creations,--and to a
species of animal that, save in the celebrated Guadaloupe specimens, has
not yet been found locked up in stone. There have been much of violence
and suffering in the old immature stages of being,--much, from the era
of the Holoptychius, with its sharp murderous teeth and strong armor of
bone, down to that of the cannibal Ichthyosaurus, that bears the broken
remains of its own kind in its bowels,--much, again,
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