Laig--Island of
Rum--Description of the Island--Superstitions banished by pure
Religion--Fossil Shells--Remarkable Oyster Bed--New species of
Belemnite--Oolitic Shells--White Sandstone Precipices--Gigantic
Petrified Mushrooms--"Christabel" in Stone--Musical Sand--_Jabel
Nakous_, or Mountain of the Bell--Experiments of Travellers at
_Jabel Nakous_--Welsted's Account--_Reg-Rawan_, or the Moving
Sand--The Musical Sounds inexplicable--Article on the subject in
the North British Review.

There had been rain during the night; and when I first got on deck, a
little after seven, a low stratum of mist, that completely enveloped the
Scuir, and truncated both the eminence on which it stands and the
opposite height, stretched like a ruler across the flat valley which
indents so deeply the middle of the island. But the fogs melted away as
the morning rose, and ere our breakfast was satisfactorily discussed,
the last thin wreath had disappeared from around the columned front of
the rock-tower of Eigg, and a powerful sun looked down on moist slopes
and dank hollows, from which there arose in the calm a hazy vapor, that,
while it softened the lower features of the landscape, left the bold
outline relieved against a clear sky. Accompanied by our attendant of
the previous day, bearing bag and hammer, we set out a little before
eleven for the north-western side of the island, by a road which winds
along the central hollow. My friend showed me as we went, that on the
edge of an eminence, on which the traveller journeying westwards catches
the last glimpse of the chapel of St. Donan, there had once been a rude
cross erected, and another rude cross on an eminence on which he catches
the last glimpse of the first; and that there had thus been a chain of
stations formed from sea to sea, like the sights of a land-surveyor,
from one of which a second could be seen, and a third from the second,
till, last of all, the emphatically holy point of the island,--the
burial-place of the old Culdee,--came full in view. The unsteady
devotion, that journeyed, fancy-bound, along the heights, to gloat over
a dead man's bones, had its clue to carry it on in a straight line. Its
trail was on the ground; it glided snake-like from cross to cross, in
quest of dust; and, without its finger-posts to guide it, would have
wandered devious. It is surely a better devotion that, instead of thus
creeping over the earth to a mould