There are light effects in Skye not seen elsewhere; forms of the cloud in relation to the mountain beyond desire. The Cuillin Hills and the clouds have much reciprocally to say; for the island, shaped as it is laterally and vertically, jammed as it is between the sun and the sea, is a place of conflicting temperatures. Look at a contour map, and you will see to the south-west what might be the fragment of a honeycomb cosmically vast. The corries formed in admirable number by means of this geological conformation are so many matrices for the gestation of clouds. These formed are slow to float, and cling reluctantly to the rocky summits.

Skye is of all the most mountainous of islands; only Tasmania may be mentioned in the same sentence. Island supposes sea; the configuration of this island is erratic, as if long fingers had played with dough. In any case, then, you would have incomparable scenery; but add to what is exceptional this : that the hills as hills are of the highest class, with every quality hills should have. Scale, if there be any need to repeat it, is an abstract thing of relation, having absolutely little value. The properties of hills are mass, outline, colour: these possess them with emphasis; colour and outline varied in so much beauty that comparisons taunt the mind in vain. There is no bracken in the black and red hills: which is to say that the glorious pest has only just roothold in the island : but what robust compensations : and the glory of the land the barren gabbro pinnacles. Vegetation has a meagre part assigned it in places where if lichen can cling to a stone it is lucky. Why, here you may speak of a scree as vertical and provoke no exclamation.