ch they saw so high among the cliffs, right over
their mast, did not proceed from the shrine of some saint or the cell of
some hermit. At length an ingenious ship-captain determined on marking
its place, brought with him from England a few balls of chalk, and took
aim at it in the night-time with one of his great guns. Ere he had
fired, however, it vanished, as if suddenly withdrawn by some guardian
hand; and its place in the rock front has ever since remained as
undistinguishable, whether by night or by day, as the scaurs and clefts
around it. The marvels of the present time abide examination more
patiently. It seems difficult enough to conceive, for instance, that the
upper deposit of the Lower Old Red in this locality, out of which the
mountains of Hoy have been scooped, once overlaid the flag stones of all
Orkney, and stretched on and away to Dunnet Head, Tarbet Ness, and the
Black Isle; and yet such is the story, variously authenticated, to which
their nearly horizontal strata, and their abrupt precipices lend their
testimony. In no case has this superior deposit of the formation of the
Coccosteus been known to furnish a single fossil; nor did it yield me on
this occasion, among the Hills of Hoy, what it had denied me everywhere
else on every former one. Sly search, however, was by no means either
very prolonged or very careful.

I found I had still several hours of day-light before me; and these I
spent, after my return on a rough tumbling sea to Stromness, in a second
survey of the coast, westwards from the granitic axis of the island, to
the bishop's palace, and the ichthyolitic quarry beyond. From this point
of view the high terminal Hill of Hoy, towards the west, presents what
is really a striking profile of Sir Walter Scott, sculptured in the rock
front by the storms of ages, on so immense a scale, that the Colossus of
Rhodes, Pharos and all, would scarce have furnished materials enough to
supply it with a nose. There are such asperities in the outline as one
might expect in that of a rudely modelled bust, the work of a master,
from which, in his fiery haste, he had not detached the superfluous
clay; but these interfere in no degree with the fidelity, I had almost
said spirit, of the likeness. It seems well, as it must have waited for
thousands of years ere it became the portrait it now is, that the human
profile, which it preceded so long, and without which it would have
lacked the element of individual truth