Somehow it sounded good, and we laughed merrily; for it was a self-portrait to the life.

A few months before, two English travellers, following in Johnson’s footsteps through the Highlands, had told me how astonished they were to find little knowledge of Johnson’s visit, and even less concern about it, in any part of Scotland.

In the modern phrase, Johnson had failed to register. His dislike of the Scots was made obvious enough, yet it never raised any real opposition. No legend of antipathy to the man has been created. Whether this is evidence of a complacency even greater than Johnson’s own, or whether his prejudices were so strong that they became idiosyncratic and amusing, it is difficult to say. He would not wish not to be disgusted! One thinks of him hanging on to it—and the laugh is out spontaneously.

The unfortunate weather was another matter, for when at last we drew abreast of Staffa we found that we could not land. Our disappointment was keen, but as we watched the seas heave from under us and rush on the rocks we realised there was no help for it. Had we known our ground intimately, we might have risked dropping anchor somewhere and then tried to have stolen ashore in the dinghy, and with this thought in mind we did keep tossing about the island for fully half an hour, but in our ignorance clearly the proceeding would be beyond a reasonable risk. In fact, once or twice I got my heart in my mouth, when I felt what I thought was the ground-swing of the water, for the Crew was anxious for a photograph and we all wanted to see what we could. The photographs turned out to be failures, apparently from over-exposure. They were all taken at 1/100th of a second, but presumably the lens should have been closed more, for the amount of light about was really extraordinary. The sea was dancing alive with it; the broken tops of the waves dazzled the eyes with their whiteness; and heaving into the caves went billows of green fire.

Usually the show places of a country are disappointing, but I must say Staffa was arresting. We had never seen anything quite like its pillared rock formation, for at first glance it struck in us an incredulous note, as if the southern rock face had been artificially carved into high-relief columns and then the whole erection given a slight tilt. It certainly did not look like a piece of work by haphazard nature. The economy, the precision, the regularity seemed altogether too human, and, from the sea, rocks rarely appear very large or massive, in the way, say, a cathedral appears from a pavement, or the rocks themselves from their crests. Staffa is not at all spectacular in the grand manner. It comes upon one with an air of surprise and wonder, like a work of genius in a picture frame. And what I regretted missing most of all was not a close view of the perfect symmetry of the columns, but the colours of them and of the seaweed and of the water in Fingal’s Cave, with movement in the colours and in the underwater light. We could hear the modulated note of the booming wave, and remembered the old Gaelic name, Uaimh Bhinn, ‘the melodious cavern’.