A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 61 



sand" The Mountain of the Bell has been since carefully- 

 explored by Lieutenant J. Welsted of the Indian navy ; and 

 the reader may see it exhibited in a fine lithograph, in his 

 travels, as a vast irregularly-conical mass of broken stone, 

 somewhat resembling one of our Highland cairns, though, of 

 course, on a scale immensely more huge, with a steep angu- 

 lar slope of sand resting in a hollow in one of its sides, and 

 rising to nearly its apex. " It forms," says Lieutenant Wel- 

 sted, " one of a ridge of low calcareous hills, at a distance of 

 three and a half miles from the beach, to which a sandy plain, 

 extending with a gentle rise to their base, connects them. 

 Its height, about four hundred feet, as well as the material 

 of which it is composed, a light-coloured friable sandstone, 

 is about the same as the rest of the chain ; but an inclined 

 plane of almost impalpable sand rises at an angle of forty 

 degrees with the horizon, and is bounded by a semicircle of 

 rocks, presenting broken, abrupt, and pinnacled forms, and 

 extending to the base of this remarkable hill. Although their 

 shape and arrangement in some respects may be said to re- 

 semble a whispering gallery, yet I determined by experiment 

 that their irregular surface renders them but ill adapted for 

 the production of an echo. Seated at a rock at the base of 

 the sloping eminence, I directed one of the Bedouins to 

 ascend ; and it was not until he had reached some distance 

 that I perceived the sand in motion, rolling down the hill to 

 the depth of a foot It did not, however, descend in one 

 C9ntinued stream ; but, as the Arab scrambled up, it spread 

 out laterally and upwards, until a considerable portion of the 

 surface was in motion. At their commencement the sounds 

 might be compared to the faint strains of an ^Eolian harp 

 when its strings first catch the breeze : as the sand became 

 more violently agitated by the increased velocity of the de- 

 scent, the noise more nearly resembled that produced by draw- 

 ing the moistened fingers over glass. As it reached the base, 



