[Illustration: A CROFT NEAR TAYNUILT, LOCH ETIVE, ARGYLLSHIRE] one has the far-spread prospect masterly laid out by Sir Archibald Geikie:-- “While no sound falls upon his ear, save now and then a fitful moaning of the wind among the snow-rifts of the dark precipice below, let him try to analyse some of the chief elements of the landscape. It is easy to recognise the more marked heights and hollows. To the south, away down Loch Linnhe, he can see the hills of Mull and the Paps of Jura closing the horizon. Westward, Loch Eil seems to lie at his feet, winding up into the lonely mountains, yet filled twice a day with the tides of the salt sea. Far over the hills, beyond the head of the loch, he looks across Arisaig, and can see the cliffs of the Isle of Eigg and the dark peaks of Rum, with the Atlantic gleaming below them. Farther to the north-west the blue range of the Coolin Hills rises along the sky-line, and then, sweeping over all the intermediate ground, through Arisaig and Knoydart and the Clanranald country, mountain rises beyond mountain, ridge beyond ridge, cut through by dark glens, and varied here and there with the sheen of lake and tarn. Northward runs the mysterious straight line of the Great Glen, with its chain of lochs. Thence to east and south the same billowy sea of mountain-tops stretches out as far as eye can follow it--the hills and glens of Lochaber, the wide green strath of Spean, the grey corries of Glen Treig and Glen Nevis, the distant sweep of the moors and mountains of Brae Lyon and the Perthshire Highlands, the spires of Glencoe, and thence round again to the blue waters of Loch Linnhe.”