Volume 3 - Electric Scotland

360 RASAY.
sails of the sbips that are navigating the inner channel
and the numerous inlets by which the distant line of
the water is diversified.
If nature had made a day on purpose for idle gentlemen
and gulls, she could not have made a better one
than that which enabled me to row all round the eastern
shore. It requires some knowledge in the art of walking,
to cross a land that is every where furrowed by ridges of
two or three hundred feet in depth, resembling those of a
stormy ocean suddenly converted into stone. Nearly all
the green and cultivated land of Rasay lies on the tops
of the high eastern cliffs, which are every where covered
with scattered farms, that form a striking contrast to the
solitary brown waste of the western coast. As we rowed
along beneath this lofty land, they appeared perched
above our heads ; often seeming to hang over the
deep below, like birds' nests, and, in some places, so
high as to be scarcely visible from the water. These
cliffs reach from five or six hundred to a thousand feet in
height, being formed of beautiful white sandstone, and
the precipices being intermixed with grassy slopes and
patches, and skirted at the foot by huge masses that have
slid down from above, or by piles of enormous fragments,
heaped in all the disorder of ruin. The flat forms of the
sandstone are fine, while they are diversified by broken
and detached masses, by torrents, green slopes, and dis-
persed, patches of brushwood and trees. The outline is
simple and grand, varied by spires and conical forms,
rising like towers and castles against the sky ; and the
diversified ochry tints of the rock producing a warmth
and splendour of colour, finely contrasted with the deep
dark green of the sea below. Here are quarries, out of
which cities might be built, without making a sensible
impression on the bulk of the cliffs; and could Rasay
transport his barren rocks to London, he would have little