Frof. Geikie—The Old Man of Boy. 53 



Below and beyond the horizon of the flagstones no evidence among 

 the Hoy Cliffs remains to lead vis. But in the neighbouring isles of 

 Pomona and Gremsa, bosses of crystalline rocks — :granite, gneiss 

 and schists — project from under the flagstones. They are wrapped 

 round with conglomerates, doubtless representing the shore-gravel 

 heaped vip around them when they rose as islets out of the Old Eed 

 Sandstone lake. 



So much for the materials out of which the Old Man has. been 

 carved. And now a few words as to the process of carving. If 

 the traveller who has reached Stromness finds himself with even 

 one spare day at his disjDOsal, he cannot employ it to more con- 

 spicuous advantage than by taking a boat with a couple of stalwart 

 Norse-like Orcadian boatmen, crossing the strait to Hoy, and ascending 

 that island by the Cam and the north-western headland, until he 

 finds himself at the summit of the great western precipice with the 

 surface of the surging Atlantic some 1300 feet below him. The 

 scene tells its own tale of ceaseless waste, and needs no lecture 

 or text-book for its comprehension. Pinnacles and turrets of the 

 richly-tinted sandstone roughen the upper edge of the cliff, often 

 fretted into the strangest shapes, and worn into such perilous 

 narrowness of base that they seem doomed to go headlong down 

 into the gulf below when the next tempest sweeps across from the 

 west. Butresses, sorely rifted and honey-combed, lean against the 

 main cliff as if to prop it up ; but separated from it by the yawning 

 fissures which will surely widen until they wedge off" the projecting 

 masses, and strip huge slices from the face of the cliff. One sees 

 as it were every step in the progress of degradation. It is by this 

 prolonged splitting and slicing and fretting that the precipice 

 has been made to recede, and has acquired its shattered but 

 picturesque contours. The Old Man is thus a monument of the 

 retreat and destruction of the cliffs of which it once formed a part. 

 To what accidental circumstance it may have owed its isolation, we 

 may not be able to say with certainty. But it is suffering in the 

 prevalent decay. Every year must insensibly tell upon its features. 



On the calmest day some motion of air always keeps playing 

 about the giddy crest of these precipices, and a surge with creaming 

 lines of white foam meets at their base. But when a westerly 

 gale sets in, the scene is said to be wholly indescribable. The 

 cliffs are then enveloped in driving spray torn from the solid sheets 

 of water which rush up the walls of rock for a hundred feet or 

 more, and roll back in thousands of tumultuous waterfalls. The 

 force of the wind is such as actually to loosen the weathered parts 

 of the rock and dislodge them. Thus along the mossy surface of 

 the slope which ascends inland from the edge of the cliff, large flat 

 pieces of naked stone may be picked up by scores lying on the 

 heather and coarse grass, whither they have been whirled up from 

 the shattered crags by successive gusts of the storms. 



The destruction of this coast-line has not yet, however, wholly 

 effaced traces of other powers of waste which have long since passed 

 away. On the very edge of the cliff, to the south-east of the Old 



