22 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, 



leisure, and taking with us his companion to assist us in car- 

 rying such specimens as we might procure, we passed west- 

 wards for a few hundred yards under the crags, and came 

 abreast of a dark angular opening at the base of the preci- 

 pice, scarce two feet in height, and in front of which there 

 lies a little sluggish, ankle-deep pool, half-mud, half-water, 

 and matted over with grass and rushes. Along the mural 

 face of the rock of earthy amygdaloid there runs a nearly ver- 

 tical line, which in one of the stratified rocks one might per- 

 haps term the line of a fault, but which in a trap-rock may 

 merely indicate where two semi-molten masses had pressed 

 against each other without uniting, just as currents of cool- 

 ing lead poured by the plumber from the opposite ends of a 

 groove, sometimes meet and press together, so as to make a 

 close, polished joint, without running into one piece. The 

 little angular opening forms the lower termination of the line, 

 which, hollowing inwards, recedes near the bottom into a shal- 

 low cave, roughened with tufts of fern and bunches of long 

 silky grass, here and there enlivened by the delicate flowers 

 of the lesser rock-geranium. A shower of drops patters from 

 above among the weeds and rushes of the little pool. My 

 friend the minister stopped short. " There," he said, point- 

 ing to the hollow, "you will find such a bone-cave as you 

 never saw before. Within that opening there lie the remains 

 of an entire race, palpably destroyed, as geologists in so many 

 other cases are content merely to imagine, by one great catas- 

 trophe. That is the famous cave of Frances ( Uamh FhraingJ, 

 in which the whole people of Eigg were smoked to death by 

 the M'Leods." 



We struck a light, and, worming ourselves through the 

 narrow entrance, gained the interior, a true rock gallery, 

 vastly more roomy and lofty than one could have anticipated 

 from the mean vestibule placed in front of it. Its extreme 

 length we found to be two hundred and sixty feet ; its ex- 



