LANDSCAPE. 125 



were so equally bathed in gold as to exhibit on the 

 horizon no dividing line, seemed in their transparent 

 purple, darker or lighter according to the distance, a 

 group of lovely clouds, that, though moveless in the 

 calm, the first light breeze might sweep away. Even 

 the flat promontories of sandstone, which, like out- 

 stretched arms, enclosed the outer reaches of the fore- 

 ground, promontories edged with low red cliffs, and 

 covered with brown heath, used to borrow at these 

 times, from the soft yellow beam, a beauty not their 

 own. Amid the inequalities of the gneiss region within, 

 a region more broken and precipitous, but of humbler 

 altitude, than the great gneiss tract of the midland 

 Highlands, the chequered light and shade lay, as the 

 sun declined, in strongly contrasted patches, that be- 

 trayed the abrupt inequalities of the ground, and bore, 

 when all around was warm-tinted and bright, a hue of 

 cold neutral grey ; while immediately over and beyond 

 this rough sombre base there rose two noble pyramids 

 of red sandstone, about two thousand feet in height, 

 that used to flare to the setting-sun in bright crimson, 

 and whose nearly horizontal strata, deeply scored along 

 the lines, like courses of ashlar in an ancient wall, added 

 to the mural effect communicated by their bare fronts 

 and steep rectilinear outlines. These tall pyramids 

 form the terminal members, towards the south, of an 

 extraordinary group of sandstone hills, of denudation 

 unique in the British Islands, which extends from the 

 northern boundary of Assynt to near Applecross. But 

 though I formed at this time my first acquaintance with 

 the group, it was not until many years after that I had 

 an opportunity of determining the relations of their 

 component beds to each other, and to the fundamental 

 rocks of the country/ 



