140 THE SHETLANDS IN THE 



Shags shot in and out by thousands. Gulls in numbers 

 incalculable sailed round and round or hung motionless 

 in the wind so near some of them that, without any 

 need for glasses, we could see the ruffling of each little 

 feather, and the expression of eyes turned on us and 

 faded in perspective as we looked down into a living 

 milky way of birds. 



To make the picture complete, a Peregrine Falcon, 

 monarch in the absence of the White-tailed Eagles, 

 which have usually an eyrie either on Noss or Bressay 

 of all he surveyed, looking, far up in the blue, 

 scarcely bigger than a fly, screamed in notes, which 

 rung out clearly above all other sounds, defiance to the 

 world at large. 



Nothing that ever has been or ever will be written 

 of such scenes will make the reader see them with his 

 own eyes for the first time, or for that matter for the 

 hundredth, without a sense of almost dazing amaze- 

 ment at the numbers in which the birds collect. 



A couple of hundred yards or so from the south-west 

 of the Noup lies the 'Holm,' a corner of the main 

 island, cut off by a chasm, through which the sea runs. 

 The Holm some years ago was connected with Noss by 

 a rope bridge, put up by a reckless cragsman who lost 

 his life on returning after the work was completed. It 

 is now inaccessible, and was, when we saw it, crowded 

 with nests of the Lesser Black-backed and Herring Gulls, 

 which here, as elsewhere, breed socially together. 



In the remoter islands something of the old spirit of 

 the Norseman, who believed that the only safe road to 



