348 RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST. 



deep coffer-dam, and, rising through the submerged opening 

 of his cell, shelters safely within, beyond reach of pursuit. 

 The great transverse valleys of the country, from its eastern 

 to its western coasts, are still occupied by the sea, they exist 

 as broad ocean-sounds ; and many of the detached hills rise 

 around its shores as islands. The northern Sutor forms a 

 bluff high island, for the plains of Easter Ross are still sub- 

 merged ; and the Black Isle is in reality what in later times 

 it is merely in name, a sea-encircled district, holding a mid- 

 way place between where the Sound of the great Caledonian 

 Valley and the Sounds of the Valleys of the Conan and Car- 

 ron open into the German Ocean. Though the climate has 

 greatly softened, it is still, as the local glaciers testify, unge- 

 nial and severe. Winter protracts his stay through the later 

 months of spring ; and still, as of old, vast floats of ice, de- 

 tached from the glaciers, or formed in the lakes and shallower 

 estuaries of the interior, come drifting down the Sounds every 

 season, and disappear in the open sea, or lie stranded along 

 the shores. 



Ages have again passed : the huge boulder, from the fur- 

 ther sinking of the waters, lies dry throughout the neaps, and 

 is covered only at the height of each stream-tide j there is a 

 float of ice stranded on the beach, which consolidates around 

 it during the neap, and is floated off by the stream ; and the 

 boulder, borne in its midst, as of old, again sets out a voyag- 

 ing. It has reached the narrow opening of the Sutors, swept 

 downwards by the strong ebb current, when a violent storm 

 from the north-east sets in ; and, constrained by antagonist 

 forces, the sweep of the tide on the one hand, and the roll 

 of the waves on the other, the ice-raft deflects into the little 

 bay that lies to the east of the promontory now occupied by 

 the town of Cromarty. And there it tosses, with a hundred 

 more jostling in rude collision ; and at length bursting apart, 

 the Clack Mattock, its journeyings for ever over, settles on its 



