Outside, the Scuir dominates the scene, with its high perpendicular walls, and that evening we set off to have a look at it. There were gates with ‘Private: No Thoroughfare,’ but we pushed by them. The Big House was up in the woodland to our right. The walks were trim and the banks neatly cut. It all looked very prosperous and financial, but left upon the air the suggestion or reality of privilege and superiority, hardly the natural element in which a wanderer may feel at ease. However, we kept going happily towards the near base of the Scuir, intending to traverse its length (for now it was like the deep upturned keel of a boat) and get on top of it from the west side, whence the view would naturally be very extensive. But the visibility promised not to be too good and, in any case, we came on Gruiline which had once been a settlement of crofters. The ruins had still about them a feeling not of death so much as of ghosts—according to my friend, whose city boyhood finds the place quite eerie and haunted. Oighsgeir lighthouse was a thin white finger far in the western sea and Barra a small purple hump. Coll and Tiree lay to the southward and inland from them the Treshnish Isles with the crown of the Dutchman’s Cap quite clear. Then Mull, Ardnamurchan, and again the whole Western Highlands. We asked the names of peaks that darkened shadowily the ultimate haze. From land, I don’t know that I had ever seen anything so impressive, and when, that evening, I happened to pick up The Countryman and came on Sir Muirhead Bone giving his favourite landscape as from Arisaig, with the Small Isles in front of him and the white sands and peach-black rocks at his feet, I was pleased, but felt it was not the only point from which to regard this marvellous land and sea.

But the Scuir is what meets you at every turn.

‘The Scuir of Eigg’, wrote Hugh Miller, ‘is a veritable Giant’s Causeway, like that on the coast of Antrim, taken and magnified rather more than twenty times in height, and some five or six times in breadth, and then placed on the ridge of a hill nine hundred feet high.’

And when we tried to find out about this wonder rock with its sheer sides, we were caught in one of those geological stories that have the air of pure fantasy. For it is really difficult to believe that it lies on the bed of an ancient river, that much higher rocks rose on each side of it, forming a valley, and that the ages have washed all these away, leaving the Scuir to its lonely glory, surrounded by the sea. Whence did the river run and where did it end? The answer given is that once upon a time there was no sea here at all, that all this was high and dry land, and that, as a guess, the river may have been the Tweed! But how can anyone know?—for ‘caverns measureless to man’ are much easier to imagine than that.