IN THE SHETLANDS 169 
ending in nothing—sheer vacuity. How one would 
fly down this, and then over !—but not like a guille- 
mot. It is horrid to think of, and the little painted 
puffins seem waiting to see it take place—grouped as 
they are on every rock and all over the green spongy 
turf, honeycombed everywhere with their breeding- 
holes—a vast amphitheatre of impassive spectators. 
Lower down, when it gets to the rock, it seems 
safer, but I doubt if it really is. The path then 
leads over a great jagged spur of the precipice, made 
up of its down-tumblings from the heights above, 
which are piled very loose, so that the blocks are 
sometimes hardly held together by the soil between 
them, this having been formed entirely out of their 
own crnumblings and disintegration. I was appalled, 
the other day, by displacing a huge one just 
above me, which I had been going to climb up. 
It looked as firm as it was massive, and I have been 
very careful since. That boulder, which, had it really 
fallen, would have brought down an avalanche with it, 
has a nasty look to me now, and I have to pass it 
each time, descending and returning, the whole path 
being a razor’s edge, though the mere climbing 1s easy 
enough. 
As I halted and looked back, this afternoon, in the 
midst of my ascent, I was struck by the figure of a 
shag, or smaller cormorant, standing 1n the exact centre 
of the highest ridge of one of those great isolated 
piles of rock that the sea has cut off from their parent 
precipice, and which are called here “stacks.” It 
