Chapter 29

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,"