56 The Shetlands in the 



so. But if the view from below is more impressive 

 than that on which we looked down from the summit, 

 it must be one of extraordinary grandeur. 



The waves were rolling in, and breaking into foam 

 on the rocks 600 feet below us. Puffins, Guillemots 

 and 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 Bressa 

 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 

 amazement 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. 



