The Spell of Scotland Part 20

CHAPTER IX

THE WESTERN ISLES

_Oban_

There is something theatrical about Oban, artificial, and therefore among Scottish towns Oban is a contrast. It is as uncovenanted as--joy!

And it is very beautiful, "the gay and generous port of Oban," as William Winter calls it, set in its amphitheater of high hills, and stretching about its harbour, between confining water and hill. An embankment holds it in, and at twilight the scimeter drawn from the scabbard of night flashes with light, artificial, but as wonderful at Oban as at Monte Carlo. One is content to be, at Oban. Quite certainly Oban has centered its share of Scottish history and romance, history from the time of the Northmen, romance from the time resurrected by Scott and continued indigenously by William Black. But in Oban and round about Oban, one is quite content to take that past as casually as one takes yesterday.

It is very interesting, very fascinating; one wakes now and then, here and there, to keen remembrance, to a sensitiveness that so much beauty could not be only for to-day and of to-day, that men must have come hither to claim it or dispute possession of it in the beginning of time.

Of course the Stewarts came out of this Island West! But, either because one has made a round circle of Scotland from out of romantic Edinburgh, or because one has come from practical Glasgow and is about to make a round circle of Scotland, Oban has a peculiarly satisfying and yet undemanding beauty.

It is set for pageantry; life is always, has been always, a procession at Oban. If ever the history of Scotland is set forth as pageant--I do not know that this has ever been done, but it should be--it should be staged at Oban, on the esplanade.

Life moves swiftly through the streets and across the waters. For it is a place that all the world comes to, in its search for the next beautiful place. Steamers from the Caledonian Ca.n.a.l and Inverness, steamers from the Crinan Ca.n.a.l and Glasgow, coaches from the near country, railroads from the east and north, bring the world to Oban. And from Oban boats move out on the Firth of Lorne and the Sound of Mull and through the broken waters of the Hebrides, out into the unbroken waters of the Atlantic. People come and go, come and go. It is not that Oban is filled with people. Very often the inns are filled and the careless traveler may seek eagerly if not vainly for a lodging for the night, to find his landlady a Campbell of the Campbells.

But there is seldom a feeling of too many people in Oban. They come and go, night and morning. They do not stay. In the evening the esplanade may be filled and the crowd very gala; the circle of lights marking the embankments, steamers lying at their ease after the day's work, looking, yes, like pirates, retired pirates, rakish, with tapering spars and brave red funnels, the soft plash of oars out on the bay and the moving lights of the rowboats, with perhaps--no quite certainly--a piper, or two or three, dressed in tartan, more like the red and black of the Campbells in this historic region of Argyle, piping up bravely "The Campbells are Coming, yoho, yoho."

It is lively in the evening, there is always a touch of pageantry. Yet Oban is a very good place in which to stay and make the little foot excursions that penetrate only a few miles into the circ.u.murban territory. The most constrained walker may find rich foot-interest out of Oban; nowhere do comfort and beauty and story combine in more continuous lure. Easy and attainable is Dunolly Castle, much more attainable than it was in the old days when the Lord of the Isles made his permanent seat here, and defied the world and the king; more attainable now than when Scott came this way seeking "copy" and "colour"

and declaring "nothing can be more beautifully wild than Dunolly."

To-day Dunolly is beautiful, but scarcely wildly beautiful; that is, in comparison with other wild castles of this wild West; and very attainable, the walk being provided with seats all the way, casual "rest and be thankfuls," of the munic.i.p.al corporation.

But beyond Dunolly, four miles of good highway, with Loch Linnhe breaking magnificently on the eye, and Loch Etive reaching off endlessly into the deep purple, is Dunstaffnage, which, before Stirling, or Perth, or Edinburgh, was capital of Scotland and the place of destiny. Very redoutable it sits on its high crag, as picturesque a castle as there is in the world--and we are in a land of castles picturesquely set. The walls above the waters lift themselves in lofty height, and promise to remain, with their great thickness presented to the consuming world. It is still towered for strength and scope, and looks its part of royal residence. Here was found the Stone of Destiny--after Jacob or another had carried this Jacobite sleeping pillow hither from Palestine. Kenneth McAlpine, somewhat sacrilegiously, carried the Stone away to Perth. And Edward sacrilegiously carried it down to Westminster, where George V sat on it, in 1911, or nearly on it, so as to prove his destined right.

Bruce took the castle from the Lord of Lorne, at what time he was taking all the castles of Scotland. And even The Bruce in his busy days of castle-storming, must have paused in this height, at these bastions, to look over this western world and decide that it was good and should be added to his Scottish world. Across Loch Linnhe he could see the bens of Morven and of Appin, and up Loch Etive, Ben Cruachan--even as you and I.

The Highlands and the Islands are still primitive, man dwindles here, and the world becomes what it was before the Sixth Day.

But The Bruce did not see these bra.s.s cannon from a wreck of the Armada, The Bruce lived too far before that great day to see the coast "strewn with the ruined dream of Spain." And he was too early for the ancient ruined Gothic chapel of much austere beauty which stands near.

It is from Pulpit Hill that Oban gives the best view of all the lyric lay of this water and land world; on a clear day when the wind is from the west, when suns.h.i.+ne has been drenching the world, and when the sun is about to sink behind Ben More. Pulpit Hill is a wooded steep bluff to the east of Oban, at its foot parklike drives and forest-embowered cottages with their windows open to the sea, with rich roses filling the air and flaunting fuchias filling the eye. It is an easy climb, even after a day of Scotch-seeing in the backward of the land.

Here one may sit and meditate on the life and character of David McCrae, to whom the pulpit is dedicated. Or one may look over the land and "soothly swear was never yet a scene so fair." Or, to borrow again from that same Scottish scene painter, and another scene--"One burnished sheet of living gold."

The eye runs far out over the world, across the Bay of Oban, across the Island of Kerrera, across the Island of Mull set against the late sky, and over to Lismore which lies s.h.i.+ning and tender against the deepening purple background of Morven. The sun casts slant rays across the land and across the bay, bathing the far land in tender lilac, the sea in steely blue, while Kerrera lies in patches of dark and light, a farmhouse sharp against a rose mist that rises in shallow places and quickly fades, leaving all the world purple in hue. Shepherd lads and shepherd dogs may be seen at this last moment preparing to watch the flocks by night, and long horned s.h.a.ggy cattle browse at peace in the fading light. Flocks of birds fly over, starlings in scattered black patches, sea swallows poising for prey, and sea gulls resting on the wave after a weary day. Everything is at peace.

Two longer excursions one must make from Oban; to Loch Awe, to Glencoe.

Each is possible in a day, and yet a night in Glencoe is almost imperative if one would be played upon by its full tragic compa.s.s; and a lifetime of summers would not exhaust Loch Awe.

The Loch I would visit; because of its beauty; and because of Kilchurn Castle, which is picturesque in fact as well as in picture, on its densely wooded island with its broken outline lying against the farther mountain; because of Ardchonnel Castle, ivy covered, and "it's a far cry to Loch Awe"; because of Fraoch-Eilean (isle of heather) which is the island of Ossian's Hesperides; and because, capitally because, Innishail is the island where Philip Gilbert Hamerton established his camp through so many summers and through a number of Scottish winters.

[Ill.u.s.tration: KILCHURN CASTLE.]

One must belong, oh, quite to "another generation," to admit any debt of instruction or pleasure to Philip Gilbert Hamerton. I do not think that this generation knows him, hardly as a name. But when I was young, collegiately young, Hamerton was an authority on life and art, and a preceptor of beauty. And, if one read "The Intellectual Life," then, of course, one read the rest of him. And so, one came to Loch Awe before one came to Loch Awe.

To the lake I went quite shamelessly on train. But repenting half way, over-awed by Ben Cruachan, as who should not be, I left the train at the "platform" and won the memory on foot. The mountain looks as high and as mighty as a Rocky, and the white foaming threads of falls, hundreds of feet high, dashed down the sides in a true "Rocky" splendour; like those on the Cut bank or the Piegan trails in Glacier Park, yet not quite so high. I did not climb Ben Cruachan to look on the Atlantic--but I have not made my last journey to Scotland. On foot and alone, I threaded "the dark pa.s.s of Brandir," and felt in my blood and bone that something in me ancestral had been there before. Perhaps we inherit where we hero-wors.h.i.+p. In any event, Sir William Wallace went through this defile in 1300, and King Robert Bruce in 1310, with his faithful friend Sir James Dougla.s.s, fighting John of Lorn (the dead are still heaped beneath these gray cairns), and going on to take Dunstaffnage. Sir Walter Scott came here when he sought environ for "The Highland Widow."

On one side is the sheer cliff which guards the foot of Ben Cruachan. On the other the rapid awesome dash of the River Awe. "You will not find a scene more impressive than the Brandir Pa.s.s, where the black narrowing water moves noiselessly at midnight between its barren precipices, or ripples against them when the wind wails through its gates of war."

In the Loch lies the island of Innishail, still green, and not less solitary than when Hamerton entertained travelers, unaware of his ident.i.ty. It still carries old gravestones, for islands in the far days were the only safe places, safe for the dead as for the living; war and ravage would pa.s.s them by. Throughout this western land you will find island graveyards, and the procession of quiet boats carrying the dead to their rest must have been a better expression than can be had by land.

From here one sees Ben Cruachan to advantage, even as one saw it in 1859 with Hamerton.

"At this moment the picture is perfect. The sky has become an exquisite pearly green, full of gradations. There is only one lonely cloud, and that has come exactly where it ought. It has risen just beyond the summit of Cruachan and pauses there like a golden disk behind a saint's white head. But this cloud is rose-colour, with a swift gradation to dark purple-gray. Its under edge is sharply smoothed into a clearly-cut curve by the wind; the upper edge floats and melts away gradually in the pale green air. The cloud is shaped rather like a dolphin with its tail hidden behind the hill. The sunlight on all the hill, but especially towards the summit, has turned from mere warm light to a delicate, definite rose-colour; the shadows are more intensely azure, the sky of a deeper green. The lake, which is perfectly calm, reflects and reverberates all this magnificence. The islands, however, are below the level of the suns.h.i.+ne, and lie dark and cold, the deep green Scotch firs on the Black Isles telling strongly against the snows of Cruachan."

It was even as Hamerton had told me so long ago, a trifle different in July from what he saw it in December, but equal in magnificence, and the outlines had not changed in a half-century.

And so I did not hesitate to go with Hamerton to Glencoe, lovely and lonely and most terrible glen. There is such a thing as being haunted, the dead do cry for revenge, the evil that men do does live after them.

It is a wide valley, yet closed in by great granite precipices, for safe guarding against betrayal. The first section of the strath is calm enough, human, green, habitable, with Loch Leven, a branch of Loch Etive, sparkling in the sun. The second wide opening is terrible as ma.s.sacre, not green, very stern, and wild as Scottish nature, human or not, can become. Even the little clachan of the Macdonalds seems not to welcome the world except on suspicion. And that murder, that a.s.sa.s.sination (February 14, 1692) when William was king--William who might have been "great" except for Boyne and Glencoe--still fills the memory.

Hamerton painted the picture--"In the vastness of the valley, over the dim, silver stream that flowed away into its infinite distance, brooded a heavy cloud, stained with a crimson hue, as if the innocent blood shed there rose from the earth even yet, to bear witness against the a.s.sa.s.sins who gave the name of Glen Coe such power over the hearts of men. For so long as history shall be read, and treachery hated, that name, Glen Coe, shall thrill mankind with undiminished horror! The story is a century old now (1859). The human race has heard it talked of for over a hundred years. But the tale is as fresh in its fearful interest as the latest murder in the newspapers."

Yet, a half century still later, I have heard those who declared Glencoe lovely and not terrible. No doubt the generation does not read history and does not feel story.

We did not go on to the King's House, built in the days of King William, when roads were being driven through the Highlands in order that they might be held to a doubtful Stewart sovereignty. For we had read how Hamerton thought it more than enough to drink a gla.s.s here, and we doubted not he had read of the trials of Dorothy Wordsworth, sheets that must be dried for hours before the beds could be made, the one egg for breakfast, and--could we have found that china cup that Dorothy forgot?

Rather, we chose to return down the lake side for another look at the red roofs of the home of Lord Strathcona, that wizard of the nineteenth century, who had left Scotland with only his wits and returned from America with his millions and a t.i.tle.

_Iona_

There is no pilgrimage which can be taken to any shrine excelling pilgrimage to Iona. And all the pilgrim way is lined with memory and paved with beauty.

On almost every promontory stand ruined castles, not so frequent as the watch towers on the Mediterranean heights, and therefore not so monotonous. One knows that each of these, as of those, has had its history, and here one ponders that history, perhaps tries to remember it, or, tries to evoke it. Dunolly which we visited in the day's drift from Oban stood up on the right with the city still in view. But it is when the Firth opens into the Sound that the glory of the water-world of the West comes on you.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AROS CASTLE.]

The Sound of Mull is, so Sir Walter has said, "the most striking water of the Hebrides." It is very lovely in this sh.e.l.l-pink light of early morning, it could not have looked lovelier when Sir Walter estimated it.

The hills begin to stand boldly forth, for the gray mists of the morning are rising. It is to be a fine day, which here because of its exception means a brilliant sun-stricken day, and all things clear as geography. But, at least once, one should see things one wishes always to keep as material for remembrance and for imagination, not in the mist dimly, but face to face like this. Or, as the Maid of Lorn in Ardtornish, when she was led

"To where a turret's airy head Slender and steep and battled round, O'erlooked, dark Mull! thy mighty Sound.

Where thwarting tides, with mingled roar Part thy swarth hills from Morven's sh.o.r.e."

On the left of Mull stands the grim Castle of Duart on its high rock, on the right on Morven the Castle of Ardtornish, and Aros a little farther on, and Kinlochalive at the top of the bay of the Loch--mighty were these lords of the islands, and most mighty the Lord of the Isles.

Perhaps--it has been suggested--Sir Walter overstated the might of the Lord, the grandeur of the islands, the splendour of those thirteenth century days. It depends on what light one views them in.

Tobermory is the capital of Mull, and is a place of some resort. Like all these little capitals it is set in the wilderness world, and what one would like best to do instead of sailing past them is to stay with them and go far into the backward. Perhaps traversing Mull as did McLeod of Dare when he hunted so royally--and in such a moonstruck way; or David Balfour when he was s.h.i.+pwrecked and walked through Mull; or the Pennells when they sought to walk through and did not take pleasure in it. It is the pilgrims who won their goal one chooses to remember--not the defeated Pennells. And here--I am leaving Mull and Tobermory behind me, perhaps for always.

Suddenly one sweeps out into the Atlantic! The stretch is wide, oceanic, although far and away there are islands, black lines thickening here and there the horizon edge. The sea is exquisitely, deeply blue, like the Mediterranean at its best.

One pa.s.ses Ardnamurchan point, the most westerly point of the mainland of Great Britain, "Cape of the Great Seas"; how one loves the poetic grandeur, the sufficing bigness of these names, and the faith, and the limitations back of them; as though there should never be a greater world with greater seas and mountains in the greater West. To the south the boat pa.s.ses Trehinish isles, black gems lying on the sea.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ENTRANCE TO FINGAL'S CAVE.]

Far out on the horizon lie Col and Tiree, low clouds in the line. "Col,"

I heard the professorial people--from Oberlin--speak the name. "Col! So that is Col!" they said to each other, "so that is Col off there!"

"Col," I said to myself, "so that is Col." And we all became related through the great Doctor.