.i'4 Br. Mac Culloch's Sketch of the 



is for ever immured in some profound chasm of the mountains of 

 Caucasus. The lake Coruisk is rather more than two miles in 

 length, being fed by a powerful stream at its upper end, and dis- 

 charging itself into the sea by a wide and rocky channel, a 

 favourite resort of salmon. Its shores are every where covered 

 with liuge fragments of rock detached from the mountains above, 

 and it contains two or three small islands which diversify in some 

 measure the darkness of its surface. The nakedness of the rocks is 

 not poetical. On the declivity of the mountain Garsven in par- 

 ticular, they rise from the base to the very summit, a height of at 

 least 3000 feet, in huge smooth sheets at a very high angle, per- 

 fectly bare and of a dark iron brown colour, not checquered even 

 by the growth of a single lichen or by one foreign tint to enliven 

 the uniform gloom of the surface. This rock seems indeed abso- 

 lutely inimical to vegetation, nor does it appear to undergo the 

 slightest decomposition, or to admit of the formation of soil, the de- 

 tached fragments showing as little tendency to waste as the moun- 

 tain itself. Had the globe of the earth been entirely formed of this 

 rock it would still have been lifeless and void. It was among these 

 fragments that I observed a rocking stone of considerable size and 

 easily moved, having to all appearance fallen on such an edge as to 

 allow of the conditions required for producing this effect. 



In quitting this scene, for which favourable weather is required, 

 since it is inaccessible by land, and the ouier loch is subject to dan- 

 gerous and sudden squalls, little interest occurs on the east side of 

 Strathaird, except one fine example of a slide by which a large 

 mass of the hill has descended to the water. 



Having passed the point of Strathaird a succession of cliffs com- 

 mences which extends nearly to the end of Loch Slapin, formed of 



