crevice must the surf have charged, wave after wave, for ages ere
the last upheaval of the land. When the Dog-stone at Dunolly existed as
a sea-stack, skirted with algae, the breakers on this shore must have
dashed every tide through the narrow opening of the cavern, and scooped
out by handfuls the decomposing trap within. The process of
decomposition, and consequent enlargement, is still going on inside, but
there is no longer an agent to sweep away the disintegrated fragments.
Where the roof rises highest, the floor is blocked up with accumulations
of bulky decaying masses, that have dropped from above; and it is
covered over its entire area by a stratum of earthy rubbish, which has
fallen from the sides and ceiling in such abundance, that it covers up
the straw beds of the perished islanders, which still exist beneath as a
brown mouldering felt, to the depth of from five to eight inches. Never
yet was tragedy enacted on a gloomier theatre. An uncertain twilight
glimmers gray at the entrance, from the narrow vestibule; but all
within, for full two hundred feet, is black as with Egyptian darkness.
As we passed onward with our one feeble light, along the dark mouldering
walls and roof, which absorbed every straggling ray that reached them,
and over the dingy floor, ropy and damp, the place called to
recollection that hall in Roman story, hung and carpeted with black,
into which Domitian once thrust his senate, in a frolic, to read their
own names on the coffin-lids placed against the wall. The darkness
seemed to press upon us from every side, as if it were a dense jetty
fluid, out of which our light had scooped a pailful or two, and that was
rushing in to supply the vacuum; and the only objects we saw distinctly
visible were each other's heads and faces, and the lighter parts of our
dress.

The floor, for about a hundred feet inwards from the narrow vestibule,
resembles that of a charnel-house. At almost every step we came upon
heaps of human bones grouped together, as the Psalmist so graphically
describes, "as when one cutteth and cleaveth wood upon the earth." They
are of a brownish, earthy hue, here and there tinged with green; the
skulls, with the exception of a few broken fragments, have disappeared;
for travellers in the Hebrides have of late years been numerous and
curious; and many a museum,--that at Abbotsford among the
rest,--exhibits, in a grinning skull, its memorial of the Massacre at
Eigg. We find, too, fu