But these men know the sudden moods of that western sea. And when he finished up with: ‘You should have one other man aboard whatever’, I realised, I think, the experience out of which he talked.

When we met Maurice Walsh and his wife at the railway station, they were enchanted with their trip across country from Fort William, surely one of the finest pieces of natural scenery to be encountered anywhere. And in sun and cloud and a healthy wind, Arisaig was looking very well indeed. They were on their way back to Dublin, and I hoped to take them as far as Oban. But clearly we could not tackle Ardnamurchan Head—the storm centre of all this land—in this wind, so in due course we set off to explore the country between Arisaig and Mallaig.

As you leave Arisaig and come over the hill looking down on Back o’ Keppoch, the view is very striking, not only of the mainland but of Eigg with its thousand-foot cliff, Rum of the mountains, and, far to the north-west, the headlands of Loch Bracadale, which we now knew so well, with all Skye northward and the Cuillin and Red Hills in purple. Everywhere white caps were racing on a glittering blue-green sea. We were gaining a little knowledge of this magical corner of the world, and inwardly I knew that months should be devoted to it. The restless desire to keep on visiting one island after another was wrong. No corner of the earth yields its secrets to the tripper. There is the first dramatic look, exquisite and forever memorable, but the crowding of one such moment on another is a form of cinematic debauch that in the end kills the deep motive powers of wonder and curiosity and puts a surface taste for crude sensationalism in their place.

How lovely that Morar country is! I don’t mean merely the famed sands—though we counted every variety of sea-colour over them, from a real yellow, through browns and greens, to a sparkling blue—but the moors, the turns and twists of road or path, the canna blowing in the wind, the wealth of wild flowers, the little strange intimate corners of peat bog; there, a red cow eating can convey the idea of Egyptian timelessness. And the hills, their lines flowing and merging. Morar River has its spell where the green water breaks into white over the cascading rocks. To spend a day there on one’s back, with sun and warm wind for happiness, or grey gloom for strange thought, might be an experience worth having stored away against the day when life seems drab and mechanical.