Part 2

The evening sky was growing red above me when I drove into Isle Oronsay, which consists of perhaps fifteen houses in all. It sits on the margin of a pretty bay, in which the cry of the fisher is continually heard, and into which the _Clansman_ going to or coming from the south steams twice or thrice in the week. At a little distance is a lighthouse with a revolving light.--an idle building during the day, but when night comes, awakening to full activity,--sending now a ray to Ardnamurchan, now piercing with a fiery arrow the darkness of Glenelg. In Isle Oronsay is a merchant's shop, in which every conceivable article may be obtained. At Isle Oronsay the post-runner drops a bag, as he hies on to Armadale Castle. At Isle Oronsay I supped with my friend Mr Fraser. From him I learned that the little village had been, like M'Ian's house, fiercely scourged by rains. On the supper-table was a dish of trouts. "Where do you suppose I procured these?" he asked. "In one of your burns, I suppose." "No such thing; I found them in my potato-field." "In your potato-field! How came that about?" "Why, you see the stream, swollen by three days' rain, broke over a potato-field of mine on the hill-side and carried the potatoes away, and left these plashing in pool and runnel. The Skye streams have a slight touch of honesty in them!" I smiled at the conceit, and expounded to my host the law of compensation which pervades the universe, of which I maintained the trouts on the table were a shining example. Mr Fraser assented; but held that Nature was a poor valuator--that her knowledge of the doctrine of equivalents was slightly defective--that the trouts were well enough, but no reimbursement for the potatoes that were gone.

Next morning I resumed my journey. The road, so long as it skirted the sea-shore, was pretty enough; but the sea-shore it soon left, and entered a waste of brown monotonous moorland. The country round about abounds in grouse, and was the favourite shooting-ground of the late Lord Macdonald. By the road-side his lordship had erected a stable and covered the roof with tin; and so at a distance it flashed as if the Koh-i-noor had been dropped by accident in that dismal region. As I went along, the hills above Broadford began to rise; then I drove down the slope, on which the market was held--the tents all struck, but the stakes yet remaining in the ground--and after passing the six houses, the lime-kiln, the church, and the two merchants' shops, I pulled up at the inn door, and sent the horse round to the stable to feed and to rest an hour.

[Sidenote: Island of Scalpa.]

After leaving Broadford the traveller drives along the margin of the ribbon of salt water which flows between Skye and the Island of Scalpa. Up this narrow sound the steamer never passes, and it is only navigated by the lighter kinds of sailing craft. Scalpa is a hilly island of some three or four miles in length, by one and a half in breadth, is gray-green in colour, and as treeless as the palm of your hand. It has been the birthplace of many soldiers. After passing Scalpa the road ascends; and you notice as you drive along that during the last hour or so the frequent streams have changed colour. In the southern portion of the island they come down as if the hills ran sherry--here they are pale as shallow sea-water. This difference of hue arises of course from a difference of bed. About Broadford they come down through the mossy moorland, here they run over marble. Of marble the island is full; and it is not impossible that the sculptors of the twentieth century will patronise the quarries of Strath and Kyle rather than the quarries of Carrara. But wealth is needed to lay bare these mineral treasures. The fine qualities of Skye marble will never be obtained until they are laid open by a golden pickaxe.

Once you have passed Scalpa you approach Lord Macdonald's deer forest. You have turned the flank of the Cuchullins now, and are taking them in rear, and you skirt their bases very closely too. The road is full of wild ascents and descents, and on your left, for a couple of miles or so, you are in continual presence of bouldered hill-side sloping away upward to some invisible peak, overhanging wall of wet black precipice, far-off serrated ridge that cuts the sky like a saw. Occasionally these mountain forms open up and fall back, and you see the sterilest valleys running no man knows whither. Altogether the hills here have a strange weird look. Each is as closely seamed with lines as the face of a man of a hundred, and these myriad reticulations are picked out with a pallid gray-green, as if through some mineral corrosion. Passing along you are strangely impressed with the idea that some vast chemical experiment has been going on for some thousands of years; that the region is nature's laboratory, and that down these wrinkled hill-fronts she had spilt her acids and undreamed-of combinations. You never think of verdure in connexion with that net-work of gray-green, but only of rust, or of some metallic discoloration. You cannot help fancying that if a sheep fed on one of those hill-sides it would to a certainty be poisoned. Altogether the sight is very grand, very impressive, and very uncomfortable, and it is with the liveliest satisfaction that, tearing down one of the long descents, you turn your back on the mountain monsters, and behold in front the green Island of Raasay, with its imposing modern mansion, basking in sunshine. It is like passing from the world of the gnomes to the world of men.

[Sidenote: Lord Macdonald's forest.]

I have driven across Lord Macdonald's deer forest in sunshine and in rain, and am constrained to confess that, under the latter atmospherical condition, the scenery is the more imposing. Some months ago I drove in the mail-gig from Sligachan to Broadford. There was a high wind, the sun was bright, and consequently a great carry and flight of sunny vapours. All at once, too, every half-hour or so, the turbulent brightness of wind and cloud was extinguished by fierce squalls of rain. You could see the coming rain-storm blown out on the wind toward you like a sheet of muslin cloth. On it came racing in its strength and darkness, the long straight watery lines pelting on road and rock, churning in marsh and pool. Over the unhappy mail-gig it rushed, bidding defiance to plaid or waterproof cape, and wetting every one to the skin. The mail jogged on as best it could through the gloom and the fury, and then the sunshine came again making to glisten, almost too brightly for the eye, every rain-pool on the road. In the sunny intervals there was a great race and hurry of towered vapour, as I said; and when a shining mass smote one of the hill-sides, or shrouded for a while one of the more distant serrated crests, the concussion was so palpable to the eye that the ear felt defrauded, and silence seemed unnatural. And when the vast mass passed onward to impinge on some other mountain barrier, it was singular to notice by what slow degrees, with what evident reluctance the laggard skirts combed off. [Sidenote: The meek-faced man of fifty.] All these effects of rain and windy vapour I remember vividly, and I suppose that the vividness was partly due to the lamentable condition of a fellow-traveller. He was a meek-faced man of fifty. He was dressed in sables, his swallow-tailed coat was thread-bare, and withal seemed made for a smaller man. There was an uncomfortable space between the wrists of his coat and his black-thread gloves. He wore a hat, and against the elements had neither the protection of plaid nor umbrella. No one knew him, to no one did he explain his business. To my own notion he was bound for a funeral at some place beyond Portree. He was not a clergyman--he might have been a schoolmaster who had become green-moulded in some out-of-the-way locality. Of course one or two of the rainy squalls settled the meek-faced man in the thread-bare sables. Emerging from one of these he resembled a draggled rook, and the rain was pouring from the brim of his pulpy hat as it might from the eaves of a cottage. A passenger handed him his spirit-flask, the meek-faced man took a hearty pull, and returning it, said plaintively, "I'm but poorly clad, sir, for this God-confounded climate." I think often of the utterance of the poor fellow: it was the only thing he said all the way; and when I think of it, I see again the rain blown out towards me on the wind like a waving sheet of muslin cloth, and the rush, the concussion, the upbreak, and the slow reluctant trailing off from the hill-side of the sunny cloud. The poor man's plaintive tone is the anchor which holds these things in my memory.

The forest is of course treeless. Nor are deer seen there frequently. Although I have crossed it frequently, only once did I get a sight of antlers. Carefully I crept up, sheltering myself behind a rocky haunch of the hill to where the herd were lying, and then rushed out upon them with a halloo. In an instant they were on their feet, and away went the beautiful creatures, doe and fawn, a stag with branchy head leading. They dashed across a torrent, crowned an eminence one by one and disappeared. Such a sight is witnessed but seldom; and the traveller passing through the brown desolation sees usually no sign of life. In Lord Macdonald's deer forest neither trees nor deer are visible.

When once you get quit of the forest you come on a shooting-box, perched on the sea-shore; then you pass the little village of Sconser; and, turning the sharp flank of a hill, drive along Loch Sligachan to Sligachan Inn, about a couple of miles distant. This inn is a famous halting-place for tourists. There are good fishing streams about, I am given to understand, and through Glen Sligachan you can find your way to Camasunary, and take the boat from thence to Loch Coruisk, as we did. It was down this glen that the messenger was to have brought the tobacco to our peculiar friend. If you go you may perhaps find his skeleton scientifically articulated by the carrion crow and the raven. From the inn door the ridges of the Cuchullins are seen wildly invading the sky, and in closer proximity there are other hills which cannot be called beautiful. Monstrous, abnormal, chaotic, they resemble the other hills on the earth's surface, as Hindoo deities resemble human beings. The mountain, whose sharp flank you turned after you passed Sconser, can be inspected leisurely now, and is to my mind supremely ugly. In summer it is red as copper, with great ragged patches of verdure upon it, which look by all the world as if the coppery mass had _rusted_ green. On these green patches cattle feed from March to October. You bait at Sligachan,--can dine on trout which a couple of hours before were darting hither and thither in the stream, if you like,--and then drive leisurely along to Portree while the setting sun is dressing the wilderness in gold and rose. And all the way the Cuchullins follow you; the wild irregular outline, which no familiarity can stale, haunts you at Portree, as it does in nearly every quarter of Skye.

[Sidenote: Portree.]

Portree folds two irregular ranges of white houses, the one range rising steeply above the other, around a noble bay, the entrance to which is guarded by rocky precipices. At a little distance the houses are white as shells, and as in summer they are all set in the greenness of foliage the effect is strikingly pretty; and if the sense of prettiness departs to a considerable extent on a closer acquaintance, there is yet enough left to gratify you so long as you remain there, and to make it a pleasant place to think about when you are gone. The lower range of houses consists mainly of warehouses and fish-stores; the upper, of the main hotel, the two banks, the court-house, and the shops. A pier runs out into the bay, and here, when the state of tide permits, comes the steamer, on its way to or from Stornoway and unlades. Should the tide be low the steamer lies to in the bay, and her cargo and passengers come to shore by means of boats. She usually arrives at night; and at low tide, the burning of coloured lights at the mast-heads, the flitting hither and thither of busy lanterns, the pier boats coming and going with illumined wakes, and ghostly fires on the oar-blades, the clatter of chains and the shock of the crank hoisting the cargo out of the hold, the general hubbub and storm of Gaelic shouts and imprecations make the arrival at once picturesque and impressive. In the bay the yacht of the tourist is continually lying, and at the hotel door his dog-cart is continually departing or arriving. In the hotel parties arrange to visit Quirang or the Storr, and on the evenings of market-days, in the large public rooms, farmers and cattle-dealers sit over tumblers of smoking punch and discuss noisily the prices and the qualities of stock. Besides the hotel and the pier, the banks, and the court-house already mentioned, there are other objects of interest in the little island town--three churches, a post-office, a poor-house, and a cloth manufactory. And it has more than meets the eye--one of the Jameses landed here on a visitation of the Isles, Prince Charles was here on his way to Raasay, Dr Johnson and Boswell were here; and somewhere on the green hill on which the pretty church stands, a murderer is buried--the precise spot of burial is unknown, and so the entire hill gets the credit that of right belongs only to a single yard of it. In Portree the tourist seldom abides long; he passes through it as a fortnight before he passed through Oban. It does not seem to the visitor a specially remarkable place, but everything is relative in this world. It is an event for the Islesman at Dunvegan or the Point of Sleat to go to Portree, just as it is an event for a Yorkshireman to go to London.

[Sidenote: Skeabost.]

When you drive out of Portree you are in Macleod's country, and you discover that the character of the scenery has changed. Looking back, the Cuchullins are wild and pale on the horizon, but everything around is brown, softly-swelling, and monotonous. The hills are round and low, and except when an occasional boulder crops out on their sides like a wart, are smooth as a seal's back. They are gray-green in colour, and may be grazed to the top. Expressing once to a shepherd my admiration of the Cuchullins, the man replied, while he swept with his arm the entire range, "There's no feeding there for twenty wethers!" here, however, there is sufficient feeding to compensate for any lack of beauty. About three miles out of Portree you come upon a solitary-looking school-house by the wayside, and a few yards farther to a division of the roads. A finger-post informs you that the road to the right leads to Uig, that to the left to Dunvegan. As I am at present bound for Dunvegan, I skirr along to the left, and after an hour's drive come in sight of blue Loch Snizort, with Skeabost sitting whitely on its margin. Far inland from the broad Minch, like one of those wavering swords which mediæval painters place in the hands of archangels, has Snizort come wandering; and it is the curious mixture of brine and pasture-land, of mariner life and shepherd life, which gives its charm to this portion of the island. The Lochs are narrow, and you almost fancy a strong-lunged man could shout across. The sea-gull skims above the feeding sheep, the shepherd can watch the sail of the sloop, laden with meal, creeping from point to point. In the spiritual atmosphere of the country the superstitions of ocean and moorland mingle like two odours. Above all places which I have seen in Skye, Skeabost has a lowland look. There are almost no turf-huts to be seen in the neighbourhood; the houses are built of stone and lime, and are tidily white-washed. The hills are low and smooth; on the lower slopes corn and wheat are grown; and from a little distance the greenness of cultivation looks like a palpable smile--a strange contrast to the monotonous district through which, for an hour or so, you have driven. As you pass the inn, and drive across the bridge, you notice that there is an island in the stony stream, and that this island is covered with ruins. The Skyeman likes to bury his dead in islands, and this one in the stream at Skeabost is a crowded cemetery. I forded the stream, and wandered for an hour amongst the tombs and broken stones. [Sidenote: The Island of Graves.] There are traces of an ancient chapel on the island, but tradition does not even make a guess at its builder's name or the date of its erection. There are old slabs, lying sideways, with the figures of recumbent men with swords in their hands, and inscriptions--indecipherable now--carved on them. There is the grave of a Skye clergyman who, if his epitaph is to be trusted, was a burning and a shining light in his day--a gospel candle irradiating the Hebridean darkness. I never saw a churchyard so mounded, and so evidently over-crowded. Here laird, tacksman, and cotter elbow each other in death. Here no one will make way for a new-comer, or give the wall to his neighbour. And standing in the little ruined island of silence and the dead, with the river perfectly audible on either side, one could not help thinking what a picturesque sight a Highland funeral would be, creeping across the moors with wailing pipe-music, fording the river, and his bearers making room for the dead man amongst the older dead as best they could. And this sight, I am told, may be seen any week in the year. To this island all the funerals of the country-side converge. Standing there, too, one could not help thinking that this space of silence, girt by river noises, would be an _eerie_ place by moonlight. The broken chapel, the carved slabs lying sideways, as if the dead man beneath had grown restless and turned himself, and the head-stones jutting out of the mounded soil at every variety of angle, would appal in the ink of shadow and the silver of moonbeam. In such circumstances one would hear something more in the stream as it ran past than the mere breaking of water on stones.

After passing the river and the island of graves you drive down between hedges to Skeabost church, school, post-office, and manse, and thereafter you climb the steep hill towards Bernesdale and its colony of turf-huts; and when you reach the top you have a noble view of the flat blue Minch, and the Skye headlands, each precipitous, abrupt, and reminding you somehow of a horse which has been suddenly reined back to its haunches. The flowing lines of those headlands suggest an onward motion, and then, all at once, they shrink back upon themselves, as if they feared the roar of breakers and the smell of the brine. But the grand vision is not of long duration, for the road descends rapidly towards Taynlone Inn. In my descent I beheld two bare-footed and bare-headed girls yoked to a harrow, and dragging it up and down a small plot of delved ground.

[Sidenote: A Highland hut.]

Sitting in the inn I began to remember me how frequently I had heard in the south of the destitution of the Skye people and the discomfort of the Skye hut. During my wanderings I had the opportunity of visiting several of these dwellings, and seeing how matters were transacted within. Frankly speaking, the Highland hut is not a model edifice. It is open to wind, and almost always pervious to rain. An old bottomless herring-firkin stuck in the roof usually serves for chimney, but the blue peat-reek disdains that aperture, and steams wilfully through the door and the crannies in the walls and roof. The interior is seldom well-lighted--what light there is proceeding rather from the orange glow of the peat-fire, on which a large pot is simmering, than from the narrow pane with its great bottle-green bull's-eye. The rafters which support the roof are black and glossy with soot, as you can notice by sudden flashes of firelight. The sleeping accommodation is limited, and the beds are composed of heather or ferns. The floor is the beaten earth, the furniture is scanty; there is hardly ever a chair--stools and stones, worn smooth by the usage of several generations, have to do instead. One portion of the hut is not unfrequently a byre, and the breath of the cow is mixed with the odour of peat-reek, and the baa of the calf mingles with the wranglings and swift ejaculations of the infant Highlanders. In such a hut as this there are sometimes three generations. The mother stands knitting outside, the children are scrambling on the floor with the terrier and the poultry, and a ray of cloudy sunshine from the narrow pane smites the silver hairs of the grandfather near the fire, who is mending fishing-nets against the return of his son-in-law from the south. Am I inclined to lift my hands in horror at witnessing such a dwelling? Certainly not. I have only given one side of the picture. The hut I speak of nestles beneath a rock, on the top of which dances the ash-tree and the birch. The emerald mosses on its roof are softer and richer than the velvets of kings. Twenty yards down that path you will find a well that needs no ice in the dog-days. At a little distance, from rocky shelf to shelf, trips a mountain burn, with abundance of trout in the brown pools. At the distance of a mile is the sea, which is not allowed to ebb and flow in vain; for in the smoke there is a row of fishes drying; and on the floor a curly-headed urchin of three years or thereby is pommeling the terrier with the scarlet claw of a lobster. Methought, too, when I entered I saw beside the door a heap of oyster shells. Within the hut there is good food, if a little scant at times; without there is air that will call colour back to the cheek of an invalid, pure water, play, exercise, work. That the people are healthy, you may see from their strong frames, brown faces, and the age to which many attain; that they are happy and light-hearted, the shouts of laughter that ring round the peat-fire of an evening may be taken as sufficient evidence. I protest I cannot become pathetic over the Highland hut. I have sat in these turfen dwellings, amid the surgings of blue smoke, and received hospitable welcome, and found amongst the inmates good sense, industry, family affection, contentment, piety, happiness. And when I have heard philanthropists, with more zeal than discretion, maintain that these dwellings are a disgrace to the country in which they are found, I have thought of districts of great cities which I have seen,--within the sound of the rich man's chariot wheels, within hearing of multitudinous Sabbath bells--of evil scents and sights and sounds; of windows stuffed with rags; of female faces that look out on you as out of a sadder Inferno than that of Dante's; of faces of men containing the debris of the entire decalogue, faces which hurt you more than a blow would: of infants poisoned with gin, of children bred for the prison and the hulks. Depend upon it there are worse odours than peat smoke, worse next-door neighbours than a cow or a brood of poultry; and although a couple of girls dragging a harrow be hardly in accordance with our modern notions, yet we need not forget that there are worse employment for girls than even that. I do not stand up for the Highland hut; but in one of these smoky cabins I would a thousand-fold rather spend my days than in the Cowgate of Edinburgh, or in one of the streets that radiate from Seven Dials.

[Sidenote: A Highland village.]