arty is of a bolder character than even the
southern one--abrupt, and stern, and precipitous as that is. It presents
a loftier and more unbroken wall of rock; and, where it bounds on the
Moray Frith, there is a savage magnificence in its cliffs and caves, and
in the wild solitude of its beach, which we find nowhere equalled on the
shores of the other. It is more exposed, too, in the time of tempest:
the waves often rise, during the storms of winter, more than a hundred
feet against its precipices, festooning them, even at that height, with
wreaths of kelp and tangle; and, for miles within the bay, we may hear,
at such seasons, the savage uproar that maddens amid its cliffs and
caverns, coming booming over the lashings of the nearer waves, like the
roar of artillery. There is a sublimity of desolation on its shores, the
effects of a conflict maintained for ages, and on a scale so gigantic.
The isolated, spire-like crags that rise along its base, are so drilled
and bored by the incessant lashings of the surf, and are ground down
into shapes so fantastic, that they seem but the wasted skeletons of
their former selves; and we find almost every natural fissure in the
solid rock hollowed into an immense cavern, whose very ceiling, though
the head turns as we look up to it, owes evidently its comparative
smoothness to the action of the waves. One of the most remarkable of
these recesses occupies what we may term the apex of a lofty promontory.
The entrance, unlike that of most of the others, is narrow and rugged,
though of great height; but it widens within into a shadowy chamber,
perplexed, like the nave of a cathedral, by uncertain cross lights, that
come glimmering into it through two lesser openings, which perforate the
opposite sides of the promontory. It is a strange, ghostly-looking
place; there is a sort of moonlight greenness in the twilight which
forms its noon, and the denser shadows which rest along its sides; a
blackness, so profound that it mocks the eye, hangs over a lofty passage
which leads from it, like a corridor, still deeper into the bowels of
the hill; the light falls on a sprinkling of half-buried bones, the
remains of animals that, in the depth of winter, have creeped into it
for shelter, and to die; and, when the winds are up, and the hoarse roar
of the waves comes reverberated from its inner recesses, or creeps
howling along its roof, it needs no over-active fancy to people its
avenues with the shapes o