By the time we came in sight of the Red Hills the sun was rising beyond them and turning their hollows into fiery chasms. The hills seemed to emit a red granitic dust that splintered the white shafts of light and dissolved them in molten air. I had never seen anything in landscape so startling, so magnificent. The chasms, too, appeared to be of an immense size and the hills themselves heightened and etherialised. By comparison, the Cuillin, standing back on the right, were now pale and insignificant. Rarely does the witchery of light perform so astonishing a miracle. And I hesitate in mentioning it here because I know how unexceptional, apart from their pink (and not very attractive) colour, the Red Hills normally appear. But that is the whole gamble of sight-seeing in Skye or, for that matter, anywhere on the West. The miracle is come upon unexpectedly and seldom if ever repeated.

That morning the Red Hills gave life to geological time. Though one realised in a flash that here the word time had no more meaning than the convenient word ether. It was something in which immense geological periods had a certain relation to one another. Skye, for example, was mostly a manifestation of the last or Tertiary period, at the beginning of which molten matter welled up quietly through great surface cracks and flowed over the land, filling up hollows, until there were formed those basaltic plateaux we had come upon in the north. This out-flowing happened many times, not only in Skye but right down as far as the north of Ireland, and in Mull to this day one can count as many as thirty terraces on the mountain side, thirty layers one above another, to a depth of about 3,000 feet. In between these eruptions were quiescent ages lasting so long that they still have evidence of plant and animal life.

But such out-flowings did not exhaust the reservoirs below, and when the heavy blankets of basalt tried to keep the molten matter down, it searched for the weakly cemented spots between the basalt and the rock it lay on, and heaved. Down in the Cuillin area this rock—or skin of the earth—was fairly tender, and the molten mass of basic rock, called gabbro, shot upward through vents or pipes until it heaved the basalt sheets into a dome, as a boy makes a ‘tent’ of his bedclothes with his toes. Under the strain the sheets cracked, and the gabbro thrust itself into the cracks, and having done all this more than once, it found such relief that it let its topmost anger cool—and solidify. Then through long ages (in this recent geological period) the basalts were weathered or worn away and the gabbro was laid bare in those shattered, angular, fantastic precipices we call the Cuillin. And being coarse-grained and tough, it makes for grand climbing.

Ages later there was a similar sort of disturbance in the region of the Red Hills, and molten masses this time of a granite-like rock (hence the red and sometimes yellowish colour) were thrust up through both basalt and gabbro, and, after more ages of denudation, showed themselves with some of their ancient fire to us on a summer morning.