nd the highest well,
which we afterwards learned was called Well Dee, and other five
copious fountains, which make a considerable stream before they
fall over the precipice. We sat down completely exhausted, at four
o'clock P.M. and drank of the highest well, which we found to be
four thousand and sixty feet above the level of the sea; and whose
fountain was only thirty-five degrees of heat on the 17th of July,
or three degrees above the freezing point. We mixed some good
whisky with this water, and recruited our strength [a very
judicious proceeding.] Then we poured as a libation into the
fountain a little of the excellent whisky which our landlord had
brought along with him [a very foolish proceeding.] After resting
half an hour, we ascended to the top of Brae Riach at five P.M.,
and found it to be four thousand two hundred and eighty feet above
the level of the sea."[9]

We must not bid farewell to this mountain desert without asking
attention to a peculiar feature in the hills connected with a disastrous
history. In many places the declivities are seamed with trenches some
forty or fifty feet deep, appearing as if they were made by a gigantic
plough-share which, instead of sand, casts up huge masses of rock on
either side, in parallel mounds, like the morains of a glacier. There
are many of these furrows on the side of Ben Muich Dhui, nearest to the
Dee. Though we had long noticed them, it was not until we happened to be
in that district, immediately after the great floods of 1829, that we
were forcibly told of the peculiar cause of this appearance. The old
furrows were as they had been before--the stones, gray, weather-beaten,
and covered with lichen, while heather and wildflowers grew in the
interstices. But among them were new scaurs, still like fresh wounds,
with the stones showing the sharpness of late fracture, and no herbage
covering the blood-red colour of the sand. It was clear from the
venerable appearance of the older scaurs, that only at long intervals do
the elements produce this formidable effect--at least many years had
passed since the last instance before 1829 had occurred. The theory of
the phenomenon appeared to be pretty simple. Each spring is a sort of
stone cistern, which, through its peculiar duct, sends forth to one part
of the surface of the earth the water it receives from another. If,
through inordinately heavy falls of