f the scene presented. In some places, greatly
more than half their number lay stretched upon the ground. On the more
exposed prominences of the Hill, scarce a tree was left standing for
acres together: they covered the slopes; tree stretched over tree like
tiles on a roof, with here and there some shattered trunk whose top had
been blown off, and carried by the hurricane some fifteen or twenty
yards away, leaning in sad ruin over its fallen comrades. What, however,
formed the most striking, because less expected, parts of the scene,
were the tall walls of turf that stood up everywhere among the fallen
trees, like the ruins of dismantled cottages. The granitic gneiss of the
Hill is covered by a thick deposit of the red boulder clay of the
district, and the clay, in turn, by a thin layer of vegetable mould,
interlaced in every direction by the tree roots, which, arrested in
their downward progress by the stiff clay, are restricted to the upper
layer. And, save where here and there I found some tree snapped across
in the midst, or divested of its top, all the others had yielded at the
line between the boulder clay and the soil, and had torn up, as they
fell, vast walls of the felted turf, from fifteen to twenty feet in
length, by from ten to twelve feet in height. There were quite enough of
these walls standing up among the prostrate trees, to have formed a
score of the eastern Sultan's ruined villages; and they imparted to the
scene one of its strangest features. I have mentioned in an early
chapter, that the Hill had its dense thickets, which, from the gloom
that brooded in their recesses even at mid-day, were known to the boys
of the neighbouring town as the "dungeons." They had now fared, however,
in this terrible overturn, like dungeons elsewhere in times of
revolution, and were all swept away; and piles of prostrate trees--in
some instances ten or twelve in a single heap marked where they had
stood. In several localities, where they fell over swampy hollows, or
where deep-seated springs came gushing to the light, I found the water
partially dammed up, and saw that, were they to be left to cumber the
ground as the debris of forests destroyed by hurricanes in the earlier
ages of Scottish history would certainly have been left, the deep shade
and the moisture could not have failed to induce a total change in the
vegetation. I marked, too, the fallen trees all lying one way, in the
direction of the wind; and the thought a