und in Orkney--Back to
Kirkwall--to Wick--Vedder's Ode to Orkney.

We landed at Hoy, on a rocky stretch of shore, composed of the gray
flagstones of the district. They spread out here in front of the tall
hills composed of the overlying sandstone, in a green undulating
platform, resembling a somewhat uneven esplanade spread out in front of
a steep rampart. With the upper deposit a new style of scenery
commences, unique in these islands: the hills, bold and abrupt, rise
from fourteen to sixteen hundred feet over the sea-level; and the
valleys by which they are traversed,--no mere shallow inflections of the
general surface, like most of the other valleys of Orkney,--are of
profound depth, precipitous, imposing, and solitary. The sudden change
from the soft, low, and comparatively tame, to the bold, stern, and
high, serves admirably to show how much the character of a landscape may
depend on the formation which composes it. A walk of somewhat less than
two miles brought me into the depths of a brown, shaggy valley, so
profoundly solitary, that it does not contain a single human habitation,
nor, with one interesting exception, a single trace of the hand of man.
As the traveller approaches by a path somewhat elevated, in order to
avoid the peaty bogs of the bottom, along the slopes of the northern
side of the dell, he sees, amid the heath below, what at first seems to
be a rhomboidal piece of pavement of pale Old Red Sandstone, bearing
atop a few stunted tufts of vegetation. There are no neighboring objects
of a known character by which to estimate its size; the precipitous
hill-front behind is more than a thousand feet in height: the greatly
taller Ward Hill of Hoy, which frowns over it on the opposite side, is
at least five hundred feet higher; and, dwarfed by these giants, it
seems a mere pavior's flag, mayhap some five or six feet square, by from
eighteen inches to two feet in depth. It is only on approaching it
within a few yards that we find it to be an enormous stone, nearly
thirty feet in length by almost fifteen feet in breadth, and in some
places, though it thins, wedge-like, towards one of the edges, more than
six feet in thickness,--forming altogether such a mass as the quarrier
would detach from the solid rock to form the architrave of some vast
gateway, or the pediment of some colossal statue. A cave-like
excavation, nearly three feet square, and rather more than seven feet in
depth, opens on its gray an