A weather-lined face, thin, with an untidy moustache, leans towards Davy, catches him by the shoulder, for the good-natured mouth from the hills hasn’t had time to take anything beyond a drink or two.

‘It’s not the dance, Davy. No—not only the dance—it’s the walk hom’.’

‘Wheesht!’ says Davy.

It was getting dark enough by the time we took our own road home. We had to walk three miles. With the midnight glimmer on the water, we did not bother to light our lamp. We had seen enough to reflect upon as we stretched ourselves on our soft bunks. It must have taken me nearly a minute to go off, and in that time I asked the Mate something but got no answer.

All this western part of the Ross of Mull, from Bunessan to the Sound of Iona, is red granite, and in several places we came across evidence of quarries that were once worked. We admired the solid sea-wall of granite, as we left Bunessan the following night, and got the Mate talking on geology. The effect of sea-action was particularly marked on the foreshore just opposite our boat, where there are one or two small indifferent bathing bays (and the warmest sea-water we struck on all the West Coast). The gradation from the solid granite boulders above high-water mark to the granitic sand, almost mud, over which we bathed provided about the clearest ‘object lesson’ I have seen.

Seaweeds were noticeably lacking in variety, being composed almost entirely of the two common varieties of bladder wrack and, below low-water mark, of the chorda filum. In fact we were struck every now and then, during many days we spent on the Ross, by an absence of life or, at least, of multitudinous life. Shell life was quite healthy, but lacking in number and variety. We fished all round these inner bays and caught nothing and saw only one native small boat on the water while we were there, and though we watched it for a long time saw no fish being landed. The Mate, who knows much about the ways of rabbits and asserts that in July the young are tender, was certain from the greenness of bracken and undergrowth that ‘the whole place must be crawling with them’. For there was little evidence of sheep and cattle on the ground, and less evidence than usual of obtrusive landlordism. But the total number of rabbits he saw was three. They ran at terrific speed. No gentle hopping and looking up. And where they disappeared one charge of dynamite would not have been enough. We saw no grouse at all and very little bird life. Though we hardly expected to see grouse in a deer forest. And we were too low to see deer.

The wind kept us in Loch Caol for over three days, and though we grudged the time, we had many fine exploratory walks. After Portnalong, no anchorage could be uncomfortable, and we resisted the Mate’s sugestion to move into the shelter of a headland. The sun was bright, and on land the wind defeated the efforts of the only truly abundant life we found there, namely horse-flies or clegs.