22 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
shire hills * at sunset in the finer summer evenings, when the 
clear light threw the shadows of their gigantic, cone-like 
forms far over the lower tract, and lighted up the lines of 
their horizontal strata, till they showed like courses of ma- 
sonry in a pyramid. They seem at such times as if colored — 
by the geologist, to distinguish them from the surrounding 
tract, and from the base on which they rest as on a common 
pedestal. The prevailing gneiss of the district reflects a 
cold, bluish hue, here and there speckled with white, where 
the weathered and lichened crags of intermingled quartz 
rock jut out on the hill-sides from among the heath. The 
three huge pyramids, on the contrary, from the deep red of 
the stone, seem flaming in purple. There spreads all around 
a wild and desolate landscape of broken and shattered hills, 
separated by deep and gloomy ravines, that seem the rents 
and fissures of a planet in ruins, and that speak distinctly of 
a period of convulsion, when upheaving fires from the abyss, 
and ocean currents above, had contended in sublime antag- 
onism, the one slowly elevating the entire tract, the other 
grinding it down and sweeping it away. I entertain little 
doubt that, when this loftier portion of Scotland, including 
the entire Highlands, first presented its broad back over the 
waves, the upper surface consisted exclusively, from the one 
extremity to the other — from Benlomond to the Maidenpaps 
of Caithness — of a continuous tract of Old Red Sandstone; 
though, ere the land finally emerged, the ocean currents of 
ages had swept it away, all except in the lcwer and last- 
raised borders, and in the detached localities, where it still 
remains, as in the pyramidal hills of western Ross-shire, to 
show the amazing depth to which it had once overlaid the 
* Suil Veinn, Coul Beg, and Coul More. 
