Archibald Geikie

“ The precipices are built up of nearly level sheets of brown basalt, edged with narrow strips of grassy herbage, cleft into chasms, and eaten out into tunnels and caves by the restless surge. From the horizontal bars of the great cliffs, the eye ranges upward to the brightly verdant slopes above, and marks dark-brown ribs of rock running parallel with these bars in a series of terraces away up to the crests of the ridges and hills. Only in the little bays, which here and there indent the ranges of formidable precipice, does one catch sight of evidence of human occupation. ”

“ The traveller who stands on those plains where the human race was cradled, marks still the same valleys with their winding rivers, still the same rocks and hills, still the same blue sky overhead. The dust of centuries has gathered over the graves and the dwellings of the early races, yet the covering is but thin, and if we could conjure from their resting-place some of these venerable patriarchs, they might perhaps see little or no change on the haunts of their boyhood. We feel it otherwise, however, when we contemplate the ocean. In sunshine and in storm its surface never rests. ”

“ If we detach one of these loosened blocks and set it in downward motion, we may watch it plunge into the abyss, flash from crag to crag, career down the screes of rubbish and make no pause until, if it survive so far, it dashes into the surge below. What we can thus carelessly do in a few moments is done deliberately every winter by the hand of Nature. Slowly but ceaselessly this vast seawall, swept by Atlantic storm, sapped by frost, soaked with rain, dried and beaten by sun and wind, is being battered down under the fire of Nature's resistless artillery. ”

“ In the fall of rain and the flow of rivers, in the bubble of springs and the silence of frost, in the quiet creep of glaciers and the tumultuous rush of ocean-waves, in the tremor of the earthquake and the outburst of the volcano, we may recognize the same play of terrestrial forces by which the framework of the continents has been step by step evolved. ”

“ To return from such a scene to the west of Skye cannot but fill the heart with sadness as one passes inlet after inlet, either with no inhabitants or with only a handful of them, housed in squalid, miserable, dirty huts, too poor to provide themselves with good seagoing boats, too timid or too lazy and unenterprising to gather the harvest of the sea, as the men do in Faroe, but content to live as their fathers have done, save that now they have become possessed by a greed for more land, which, when they get it, they will doubtless cultivate in the same unskilful and slovenly fashion. ”

“ It will not, I think, be hard to show that in dissipating the popular misconceptions which have grown up around the question of the origin of scenery, science has put in their place a series of views of nature which appeal infinitely more to the imagination than anything which they supplant. While in no way lessening the effect of human association with landscape, science lifts the veil that hides the past from us, and in every region calls up a succession of visions which, by their contrast with what now presents itself to the eye and by their own unlooked-for marvels, rivet our attention. ”

“ It is now possible, with more or less confidence, to trace backward the history of every terrestrial area, to see how sea and land have there succeeded each other, how rivers and lakes have come and gone, how the crust of the earth has been ridged up at widely separated intervals, each movement determining some line of mountains or plains, how the boundaries of the oceans have shifted again and again in the past, and thus how, after so prolonged a series of revolutions, the present topography of each country, and of the globe as a whole, has been produced. ”

“ We dig into the earth and exhume these old forests to supply us with light and fuel; we quarry into the ripple-marked shores which fringed that old land, and build our houses with the hardened sand; we calcine the ferruginous mud that gathered in its swampy hollows, and extract therefrom our most faithful ally both in peace and war—metallic iron; we burn the delicate corals and shells and lily-like zoophytes which lived in the sea of that far-distant era, to enable us to smelt our iron, to build our houses, and manure our fields ”

“ They would tell how the sky rapidly darkened even in the blaze of mid-day, how the land was smothered with dust and stones, how over the sea there spread such a covering of ashes that the oarsmen could hardly drive their vessels onward, how red-hot stones, whirling high overhead, rained down on sails and deck, and crushed or burnt whatever they fell upon, and how, as the earth shook and the sea rose in sudden waves and the mountain gave forth an appalling din of constant explosion, it verily seemed that the end of the world had come. ”

“ They show none of the grandeur and ruggedness of the Highlands. The hills, on the whole, have smooth, rounded outlines, save here and there, where some crag of grey rock protrudes from the pervading mantle of green bent and purple heath. Yet the topography is sufficiently varied not to become monotonous, while the slopes in every season of the year glow with colour, spread over them like a delicate sheet of enamel. There is beauty enough in the landscape of itself to please, and even here and there to fascinate. ”

“ As it is impossible to understand the genius and temperament of a people, its laws and institutions, its manners and customs, its buildings, and its industries, unless we trace back the history of that people, and mark the rise and effect of each varied influence by which its progress has been molded in past generations; so it is clear that our knowledge of the aspect of a continent, its mountains and valleys, rivers and plains, and all its surface features, can not be other than singularly feeble and imperfect, unless we realize what has been the origin of these features. ”

“ Yonder lies a drier islet, rolling with ferns of every shape and size, with here and there a lofty tree-fern, waving its massive boughs high overhead. The vegetation, rank and luxuriant in the extreme, strikes us as different from anything visible at the present day, though, as our eyes rest on the muddy discoloured current, we can mark, now and then, huge trunks, branchless and bare, that recall some of the living pine-trees. The denizens of the water seem to be equally strange. ”

“ Prominent features of landscape, such as mountain-chains with their snows, clouds and thunderstorms, dark river-chasms that seem purposely cleft open in order to give passage to the torrents that rush through them, crags with their impressive array of pinnacles and recesses must have appealed of old, as they still do, to the awe and wonder of those who for the first time behold them. ”

“ And when, high up on this bare mountain-side, we come upon the ruined cells which these devoted men built with their own hands out of the rough stones of the crest, and to which they betook themselves for quiet intercourse with Heaven, amid the wild winds and driving rains of these western hills, the halo of human courage and self-denial falls for us on this solitude to heighten its loneliness and desolation. ”

“ Having sailed along a good part of the coast of Europe, including Norway and the Aegean Sea, I am convinced, that for variety of form, the west coast of Scotland is unsurpassed on the Continent, while for manifold range and brilliance of colour it has no equal. One who has passed a long enough time amidst this scenery, more especially if he has made his home upon the water, sailing across firth and sound, threading the narrows of the kyles, and passing from island to island, can watch how the very forms of the hills seem to vary from hour to hour as the atmospheric conditions change. ”

“ The rocks have been gently rounded off into broad featureless hills, which sink into winding valleys, each with its thread of streamlet and its farms along the bottom, and its scattered remnants of birch-wood or alder-copse along its slopes and dingles. Across miles of heathy pasture and moorland, on the summits of this great tableland, we may perchance see no sign of man or his handiwork, though the bleating of the sheep and the far-off barking of the collie tell that we are here within the quiet domain of the south-country shepherd. ”

“ For centuries, perhaps, they have taken their share in the fertility of the plains and have ministered to the nurture of flower and tree, of the bird of the air, the beast of the field and of man himself. But their destiny is still the great ocean. In that bourne alone can they find undisturbed repose, and there, slowly accumulating in massive beds, they will remain until, in the course of ages, renewed upheaval shall raise them into future land, there once more to pass through the same cycle of change. ”