ot
hear its cry. What giants are these right opposite our Pyramid?--Co--grim
chieftain--and his Tail. What an assemblage of thunder-riven cliffs!
This is what may be well called--Nature on a grand scale. And then, how
simple! We begin to feel ourselves--in spite of all we can do to support
our dignity by our pride--a mighty small and insignificant personage. We
are about six feet high--and everybody around us about four thousand.
Yes, that is the Four Thousand Feet Club! We had no idea that in any
situation we could be such dwindled dwarfs, such perfect pigmies. Our
Tent is about as big as a fir-cone--and Christopher North an insect!

What a wild world of clouds all over that vast central wilderness of
Northern Argyllshire lying between Cruachan and Melnatorran--Corryfinuarach
and Ben Slarive, a prodigious land! defying description, and in memory
resembling not realities, but like fragments of tremendous dreams. Is it
a sterile region? Very. In places nothing but stones. Not a blade of
grass--not a bent of heather--not even moss. And so they go shouldering
up into the sky--enormous masses--huger than churches or ships. And
sometimes not unlike such and other structures--all huddled together--yet
never jostling, so far as we have seen; and though often overhanging, as
if the wind might blow them over with a puff, steadfast in the storm
that seems rather to be an earthquake, and moving not an hair's-breadth,
while all the shingly sides of the mountains--you know shingle--with an
inconstant clatter--hurry-skurry--seem to be breaking up into debris.

Is that the character of the whole region? No, you darling; it has vales
on vales of emerald, and mountains on mountains of amethyst, and streams
on streams of silver; and, so help us Heaven!--for with these eyes we
have seen them, a thousand and a thousand times--at sunrise and sunset,
rivers on rivers of gold. What kind of climate? All kinds, and all kinds
at once--not merely during the same season, but the same hour. Suppose
it three o'clock of a summer afternoon--you have but to choose your
weather. Do you desire a close sultry breathless gloom? You have it in
the stifling dens of Ben-An[=e]a, where lions might breed. A breezy
coolness, with a sprinkling of rain? Then open your vest to the green
light in the dewy vales of Benl[=u]ra. Lochs look lovely in mist, and so
thinks the rainbow--then away with you ere the rainbow fade--away, we
beseech you, to the wild shores of Loc