176 ST. KILDA FROM WITHOUT 



British waters one island at least where the population 

 never increases, where the post comes in only once or 

 twice a year, and where the conditions of human 

 existence are much as they were a hundred if not a 

 thousand years ago. 



The hills and valleys which give so much of its 

 picturesqueness to the north-west of Scotland do not 

 end at the coast-line, but are continued, as soundings 

 show, under the sea some eighty or a hundred miles 

 beyond the Hebrides. At the extreme western edge of 

 this underwater mountainous tract which contains, 

 perhaps, the best fishing-grounds in Europe just before 

 the bottom settles down to ocean depths in the open 

 Atlantic, is a small oval bank of shallow water, from 

 which rises abruptly, like the peaks of a submerged 

 mountain, a little cluster of precipitous islands. 



Until a year or two ago, when summer excursion 

 steamers began to visit it more regularly, St. Kilda, or, 

 as the natives still prefer to call it, Hirta, the chief and 

 only inhabited island of the group, was comparatively 

 unknown. 



Every now and then it emerged for nine days from 

 its obscurity, when a corked bottle or toy ship, carrying 

 a message on which life or death depended, was 

 washed ashore somewhere on the opposite coast, 

 announcing, as in 1877, that an Austrian ship had been 

 lost on the rocks, and that, with the extra mouths of 

 the rescued crew to be filled, provisions could not hold 

 out long; or, as in 1885, that a storm had swept the 

 island and destroyed the crops. Once in its history 



