34 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, 



the Scuir lying nearly at right angles with the direction of 

 the drift-boulders of the western coast, which are, besides, of 

 rare occurrence in the Hebrides : nor has it a single neigh- 

 bour ; and it seems not improbable, as a tradition of the 

 island testifies, that it was removed thus far for the purpose 

 of marking some place of sepulture, and that the catastrophe 

 of the cave arrested its progress after by far the longer and 

 rougher portion of the way had been passed. The dry arm- 

 bones of the charnel-house in the rock may have been tugging 

 around it when the galleys of the M'Leod hove in sight. The 

 traditional history of Eigg, said my friend the minister, com- 

 pared with that of some of the neighbouring islands, pre- 

 sents a decapitated aspect : the M'Leods cut it off by the 

 neck. Most of the present inhabitants can tell which of 

 their ancestors, grandfather or great-grandfather, or great- 

 great-grandfather, first settled in the place, and where they 

 came from ; and, with the exception of a few vague legends 

 about St Donan and his grave, which were preserved appa- 

 rently among the people of the other Small Isles, the island 

 has no early traditional history. 



We had now reached the Scuir. There occur, intercalated 

 with the columnar beds, a few bands of a buff-coloured non- 

 columnar trap, described by M'Culloch as of a texture inter- 

 mediate between a greenstone and a basalt, and which, while 

 the pitchstone around it seems nearly indestructible, has 

 weathered so freely as to form horizontal grooves along the 

 face of the rock from two to five yards in depth. One of 

 these runs for several hundred feet along the base of the 

 Scuir, just at the top of the talus, and greatly resembles a 

 piazza lacking the outer pillars. It is from ten to twelve 

 feet in height, by froih fifteen to twenty in depth ; the columns 

 of the pitchstone-bed immediately above it seem perilously 

 hanging in mid air ; and along their sides there trickles, in 

 even the driest summer weather, for the Scuir is a con- 



