A narrow path took us winding down the grassy declivity that, before giving on the beach, turns in leftward to an opening at the base of the hill no larger than would admit a dog with comfort. Indeed it looked like the entrance to an animal’s den and certainly conveys no idea of the vastness of the cave beyond.

But we had been provided with candles, and, after scrambling in on all fours, stood up in the gloom. Ahead all was pitch darkness and when we lit our candles and stumbled forward, the darkness came about us in such an apprehension of substance that our hands went out against it gropingly. We could not see the walls until our fingers touched their dank surface and our eyes peered forward to glimpse the colour—or lack of it—that could so absorb the light.

To me the place was damp and wretched, with the sort of human wretchedness that tramps contrive to leave behind them in rotting wayside caves. I could not feel the tragedy that had been enacted here. Or perhaps the mind involuntarily refused the fullness of realisation, using a protective callousness to defeat anger—as if the deed had been committed not in the sixteenth century (as is generally believed now) but yesterday by men whom I knew to the marrow. And the Eigg version of the story that has the McLeod chief standing hump-backed and grim is like the truth. For his men would have been anything but inactive and grim; they would have been shouting in their lust for those within to come forth now. They would smoke them out, the badgers, the dogs! Unaware in the madness of their lust and laughter of the awful thing that was really happening. Incapable of realising it—callously not caring in the end—carried away by the very excess of their cruelty into cruelty’s final frenzy.

For their earliest records show them as a home-loving people, given to hospitality, and with many of the graces of life, their music and poetry an active personal possession. The early Christian missionaries went all over Caledonia, unharmed, even by the Druids. Indeed amongst them all only one appears to have suffered martyrdom—and for that a queen is held responsible (it happened on Eigg, too). One seems to have to introduce chiefs or self-seeking egoists of some kind, men with ruling power and avid in their vanity for more, before sensitive decent men can be worked up to blood lust on any senseless extravagant scale. It is not necessary to go back to the sixteenth century for proof of this.

The demoniac instrument here was the Macleod chief and his grimness is no metaphor. For the Macdonalds gathered in their pitiful little families inside the cave, as for the Macleods outside—fathers and brothers and sons—we may have some sort of baffled wretched understanding.

There is still another explanation offered of the massacre, founded on historical record. In 1588 Maclean of Duart was indicted by the Lord Advocate on the specific charge that he, with a party of a hundred Spaniards from the Spanish Armada ship, Florida, in Tobermory, sailed to the islands of Eigg, Rum, Muck and Canna, burning the whole of the inhabitants without distinction of age or sex. Maclean pled guilty and the Privy Seal Records contain an entry covering the remission of his deeds. But a strong folk tradition can hardly be superseded as easily as that. Maclean was manifestly another chief out on a foray of his own, and as he could not presumably rouse his clansmen to go with him, he roused some foreigners instead and shared with them the spoil. Before a chief could get his own men to rise, he first of all had to create a feud or ‘bad blood’. Just as nations have to do to-day.