majestic;--the cliffs tower high on either
side in graceful magnificence: but from the peculiar inward slope of the
land, all within, as the loch reaches the line of the valley, becomes
tame and low, and a black dreary moor stretches from the flat terminal
basin into the interior. The opening of Loch Portree is a palace
gateway, erected in front of some homely suburb, that occupies the place
which the palace itself should have occupied.

There was, however, no such mixture of the homely and the magnificent in
the route I had selected to explore. It lay under the escarpment of the
cliff; and I purposed pursuing it from Portree to Holm, a distance of
about six miles, and then returning by the flat interior valley. On the
one hand rose a sloping rampart, full seven hundred feet in height,
striped longitudinally with alternating bands of white sandstone and
dark shale, and capped atop by a continuous coping of trap, that lacked
not massy tower, and overhanging turret, and projecting sentry-box;
while, on the other hand, spreading outwards in the calm from the line
of dark trap-rocks below, like a mirror from its carved frame of black
oak, lay the Sound of Rasay, with its noble background of island and
main rising bold on the east, and its long mountain vista opening to the
south. The first fossiliferous deposit which gave me occasion this
morning to use my hammer occurs near the opening of the loch, beside an
old Celtic burying-ground, in the form of a thick bed of hard sandstone,
charged with Belemnites,--a bed that must at one time have existed as a
widely-spread accumulation of sand,--the bottom, mayhap, of some
extensive bay of the Oolite, resembling the Loch Portree of the present
day, in which eddy tides deposited the sand swept along by the tidal
currents of some neighboring sound, and which swarmed as thickly with
Cephalopoda as the loch swarmed this day with minute purple-tinged
Medusae. I found detached on the shore, immediately below this bed, a
piece of calcareous fissile sandstone, abounding in small sulcated
Terebratulae, identical, apparently, with the Terebratula of a specimen
in my collection from the inferior Oolite of Yorkshire. A colony of this
delicate Brachiopod must have once lain moored near this spot, like a
fleet of long-prowed galleys at anchor, each one with its cable of many
strands extended earthwards from the single _dead-eye_ in its umbone.
For a full mile after rounding the northern boundary