painting which Sir Walter Scott poesessed in so high a degree. Turn again to the narrative of the poem. Yonder, we can picture the meeting with the five caitiffs of the clan Dugal of Lorn, " of evil mien, down-looked, unwilling to be seen,' the jutting crag overhanging the rude canvas shelter - booth, the slaughtered deer, the slender figure of the disguised Edith, and all the accessories. Next, the separate feast, the watch by turns by the flickering fire, till "over Coolin's eastern head the greyish light begins to spread," and the luckless page taking post as sentinel. Then, as

"On Coolin's cliffs the mist lay furled, The morning breeze the lake had curled,

The short dark waves, heaved to the land,

With ceaseless plash kissed cliff or sand,"

we suddenly hear the shriek of the maiden, see the steel glimmer above the slumbering Allan, the instant awakening of Lord Ronald "de Insulis" and the king, their avenging onslaught on the ruffian crew, and so on to the meeting with Edward Bruce. Finally, we listen to the wail of the pibroch, the while

"Coriskin dark and Coolin high

Echoed the dirge's doleful cry," and watch the corpse of the poor murdered stripling, "young heir of Donagajle," as it is borne solemnly down alongside the rushing river to the sea-shore. All this it is easy to picture to the mind's eye as we linger here, under the spell of the poet, beside

"That dread shore

blackness of this desolate mountaintrough, shut in by its towering walls of lurid rock-all spikes, knobs, and pyramids-one might fancy the inky waters of the tarn an Avernian lake, and that here was the portal of the "Inferno," with the pillars thereof.

But now, yet a moment, having contemplated the poetic and picturesque aspect of the spot, let us open another page of its history. Geologically, according to the latest lights, this colossal rock-caldron, Coruisg, part filled with water,1 is the sepulchre of a great glacier, which again was a component of the vast ice sheet that in an archaic epoch covered the bulk of the Scottish mainland, stretching over the highest mountain-chains and filling up the valleys. The footprints of the glacier are here visible upon

the naked rock,

marked out by many a grooved and seamed and smoothened surface, wrought by the great icy incubus as it ground its slow way down the basin to the sea. And these enormous boulders which are seen lying about in every direction, many of them poised along cliffedges or surmounting rock-bosses, are the relics the glacier deposited as it gradually shrank and dwindled away. Most graphically has this been told by an eminent uisg, he says— authority. The rock-tarn of Cor

"is almost surrounded by an array of the blackest and most jagged preciof which they consist is of volcanic pices in Britain. The rock (gabbro) origin, and is endowed with singular toughness and durability. Along the crests and upper parts of the cliffs it has been split by the weather acting

Coriskin roar.”

And, indeed, gazing up into the

presents a notched and splintered sky-line to which there is elsewhere no equal within these islands.

But

lower down, where the ice that once filled the corry has been able to act upon its sides, this obdurate rock has

been ground smooth, polished, and striated. Its very obduracy, which must have made the task of the glacier a more than usually laborious one, has enabled it to retain the impress of the ice-work with a freshness and

perfection truly astonishing. Dome rises above dome, hummock beyond hummock, so smooth and shorn that it is difficult to realise that the ice has long since vanished from them. Polished surfaces of rock form the lip of the basin, and their grooves and striæ, rising out of the dark sullen tarn, tell as plainly as words could do how the glacier that once filled the corry pressed its way up over that lip and out into the fjord beyond. Scores of huge blocks, which, loosened by the winter frosts, fell on the surface of the ice and were carried onward, still rest where the ice left them-some perched on the brink of a crag, and thereby showing how gently, as the ice melted away from them, they settled down into their places. Impressive, therefore, as Coruisk is, considered only from the scenic point of view, it inspires still fuller wonder and admiration when the eye can both enjoy its picturesqueness and mark how marvellously it recalls the later aspect of the long Ice Age."

"1

Let me not forget to note one outward and visible sign of the surely he himself would have emgreat master's presence, which phatically deprecated, if not imprecated. Blazoned in huge painted letters along a rock-face on the opposite shore of Loch Scavaig, he who runs may read the name (or initials, I forget which), of Walter Scott, stuck there, I suppose, by way of commemorating the place of his landing.

O tempora! O mores! It calls to mind a certain hill of crags and caves, the natural beauty of which was marred and vulgarised by a plague of advertising placards posted upon every conspicuous rock and stone, announcing where, in the adjacent big town, you might buy somebody's best superfine hats! "Quid nos dura refugimus ætas, quid intactum nefasti liquimus?”

more

And now it is high time to hurry along on our way to camp, for there are yet a good three miles to be done, reckoning the windings of the track, and a rugged nasty piece of walking too. Descending a narrow rock-sheets, one reaches the seagap, and clambering over shore at a little cove, "Port Sgàile" (shadowy or ghostly bay), and then begins the task of skirting round the base of Sgùrr na Stri (not inaptly named, Scaur of Strife), the precipitous promontory which interposes between the two arms of Loch Scavaig. Here, as elsewhere in this extraordinary region, the mountain-side is simply a series of ledges or stairs of bare rock slanting at an inclination so steep that, but for the strips and tufts of vegetation precariously clinging to them in places, it would be an im

Macmillan: 1887.

possibility to scramble along. One spot and one only, in what is rather the spectre of a path than its reality, need I particulariso. which has to be passed very soon after leaving Coruisg. It has been locally anglicised into "The had step," otherwise. with a tine touch of irony, "The Ladies' Step." Climbing along, you are compelled by the exigencies of the ground to a point where it is as if the way were absolutely barred :—upwards. level - wards. downwards, there seems to be no possibility of moving on. A great bare smooth rock-slab, the actual mountain-side itself, here slants down sheer into the deep sea at a slope impossible for human foot to tread. But, on a close scrutiny, a gaping cleft, a few inches wide, is seen. where the rock-face has split open and the under portion fallen the least thing away. And it is along the lower lip of this crevice in the rock, narrowest conceivable of footledges, that one has to creep or sidle along for some yards, at the end of which there is a sudden drop into a bouldered recess. To any one coming the opposite way, that is, towards Coruisg, the spot when reached is a veritable puzzle to overpass; indeed, for a great part of the so-called track round this promontory, the ordinary tourist would almost require a "Fair Rosamond's" clue to guide him on his way.

I cannot advise the average visitor to these wilds to attempt this landward approach to Loch Coruisg from Camasunary. Fortunately, it was not our first time of traversing it on the day I have

been describing, or we should have fared badly. For it was on the stroke of nine o'clock and almost dark when we caught sight of the welcome glimmer of the tentlights, and recrossed the little river we had left behind us thirteen hours before. So ended a day long to be remembered, and an exploration of what is beyond doubt a tract of mountain scenery absolutely unique in the British Isles.

And we were only just in time, for soon the mists came lowering down the great peaks, and by the time the last consolatory pipe before bed was smoked, the walls of my tent were flapping and bulging with an ominous sound in a gale of wind that by next morning had risen to a furious tempest, roaring and raging against the marquee canvas in its exposed situation as though the whole fabric must bodily collapse.

The reader will have by this tine perceived one characteristic of this Hebridean locality,-the unfamiliar garb in which nearly all the place-names are dressed up. They are for the most part Gaelic (i.e., Scoto-Celtic) with some admixture of Norse, due to the period when these islands were under the sway of the Norwegian kings, and formed kings, and formed the battleground of inany a Jarl and Viking and Celtic chieftain. And without some smattering of the ancient language, one can hardly decipher the topographical nomenclature in the maps of the Government Survey, which are such invaluable guides to the tourist throughout the Scottish Highlands. 1

Before quitting this grimly fascinating corner of Skye, perhaps the reader may like to bear me company in a couple of hours' sea-trout fishing on the neighbouring lake already mentioned, Loch na Creitheach, which I had on the evening following the Coruisg tramp. All day the storm had continued, so that to us in camp it was perforce a dies non as to work; but the evening cleared up enough to allow a start for the lock I should explain that permission had been given me for a day's fishing in it; but strangers, so the shooting-tenant told me, are by no means particular about getting such permission, apparently regarding the lake as a sort of "no man's water. On arrival with my rod at the loch-side, C and I found a rickety old boat half-full of water, and a pair of sculls hidden away near by.

The boat baled out, she was soon launched, and C- having kindly volunteered to do the rowing, I tried casting along the shores, but all to no purpose; the wind had dropped, not a fin was stirring, and neither tinsel body nor varigated wing of any sort or kind had charm to raise a fish in the feebly rippling water. Then I bethought me of taking to the middle deeps of the lake, with a long line trailing out over the stern of the boat, and then the sport came. The rod and tackle were of the lightest, the former a slender single-handed one, bought for a lady. First, a biggish fellow-to judge by the rush and splash of him, about a couple of punds weight went for the fly, and carried it off, casting-line and all. This was irritating; but a new and stronger casting-line having been

supplied with a fresh fly, we went to work again. Taut goes the line, down goes the rod - top in violent jerks, and then the rapid click of the reel winding itself up as fast as fingers can turn the handle; then a stop, and a whirr out again, and so on, till the fish, after many a leap and spin into the air, is wheedled up alongside the boat, and hauled in somehow or other. Thus we secured four or five fine white sea-trout, ranging from one to two pounds apiece; and lastly, a splendid fellow that held me in play full half an hour with my light gear. We had no net, or anything with which to lift a fish of his weight into the boat, so there was nothing for it but to row slowly into the shingly beach and float him ashore, C—— meanwhile landing and seizing the prize just as he was flopping about at the edge of the water. It was an exciting moment, and afterwards, when the fish was put on the scales, he, just turned them at three pounds.

As I put up the rod, and while the rotten old punt was being hauled up high and dry and secured by its rusty chain to a boulder on the bank, the sun suddenly gleamed out through a rift in the clouds, and turned the topmost crags of Blaven into burnished gold, streaked with intense ultramarine in the shadows of the deep-furrowed clefts and crannies. Altogether, considering the gear at command, those two hours' sport, that still cloudy evening on this lonesome lake, dark with its majestic overhanging cliffs and their broad everdeepening reflections, is another episode of that brief camping-time worthy to live in the memory, albeit the take was not salmon.

For it needs not to tell the knowing among the perusers of these pages of the delights of sea-trout fishing in a spot like this, nor yet of the corresponding deliciousness of flavour appertaining to these "spolia," a flavour little inferior to that of their more illustrious kindred in the same waters.

While on the subject of fishing, let me just note the abundance of sea-trout and salmon the Coruisg river has always been famed for. In the notes to his poem Scott relates how they swarmed where the river Scavaig discharged into the bay. I was told this had been for a long time past a great poaching - ground for stray yachts and light craft. These would run in to the little deep water haven, often at night; and in so solitary a place it is the easiest thing to slip ashore, and rod or net both the river and loch, without any one in the neighbourhood being a whit the wiser.

There is not much more to tell. Another day in camp took us to the top of "Sgùrr nan Gillean " (3167 feet high, exactly the altitude of Sgurr na Banachdich), the best known of the Cuillin peaks, and much the easiest of ascent, though correctly described in the guide-books as "difficult." Our route left the main bridle-path to Sligachan at Loch Dubh (black lake), crossed the river where it emerges from Harta Corrie, and thence struck up the shoulder of the great eastern lip of that corrie till the sharp jagged watershed ridge was reached. Following this north-westerly, you are brought, after some pretty stiff climbing, to the summit of the Scaur, whence a wonderful sight is obtained of the northern extremity of the mighty range, which here thrusts out its great spurred and spiked talons in

VOL. CXLVI.—NO. DCCCLXXXVI.

In the pile of

every direction. stones which caps the peak we found a bottle stowed away. containing one or two paper records of those who had climbed to the spot-three or four names in as many years, proof that this spirelike pinnacle is decidedly "caviare to the general." A couple of men, who appeared clambering up the cliffs with ropes and guides while we were there, and posed as pastmåsters in mountaineering, assured us they had tried most Alpine and other difficult ascents on the Continent; but that, altitude for altitude, they had never met with harder climbing than this. C C-— and I added our names to the MSS. in the-let us hope-imperishable bottle, and then had to hurry down to escape the threatening mists which came rolling up, and might very soon have belated us.

And here a word of warning. Let no one attempt to search out the dark mysteries of the Cuillins alone, if it be possible to get a companion. The weather is at all times of the year most treacherous in this locality, and the vapour from the warm Gulf Stream which courses up these western Scottish coasts is perpetually passing into great cloud-wreaths, which loom up from the Atlantic, and descend in mists or rain down the inner slopes of the glens and corries. Not even the weather-wisest here can forecast the elements for many hours, and if a man be overtaken by the mist anywhere high up the rocky fastnesses of the Cuillins, ten chances to one he has no choice but to stop where he is till the mist clears (which may be one, two, or more days), unless he is bent upon running the risk of breaking his neck. In such circumstances, lucky is he who has a fair supply of food left in his pocket, good store of whisky

P