Columba thus commenced his mission by founding his monastery in the island of Iona. According to the old Irish Life, it was on Whitsun Eve, which in that year fell on the 12th of May, that he arrived in the island, when, we are further told, ‘two bishops who were in the island came to lead him by the hand out of it; but God now revealed to Columcille that they were not true bishops, whereupon they left the island to him, when he told of them their history and their true adventures.’[178] They were no doubt the remains of that anomalous church of seven bishops which here, as elsewhere, preceded the monastic church; and Columba appears to have refused to recognise them as legitimately entitled to the character of bishops, and the island was abandoned to him. It was an island well adapted in situation for his purpose, and must have possessed many attractions to one who, like Columba, possessed an intense love of nature and of natural objects, had the soul of a poet, and desired to combine with his active missionary work a life of purity and self-denial. [Sidenote: Description of the Island.] No one who pays merely a flying visit to Iona in an excursion steamer, with a crowd of tourists, and sees apparently a desolate-looking island with a few grey ruins, through which he is hurried by the guide in order that he may return in the steamer the same day, can form any conception of its hidden beauties,—its retired dells, its long reaches of sand on shores indented with quiet bays, its little coves between bare and striking rocks, and the bolder rocky scenery of its north-western and south-western shores, where it opposes wild barren cliffs and high rocky islets to the sweep of the Atlantic. Columba could hardly find a spot better adapted for the foundation of an island monastery which was to form the centre of a great missionary work, and to exhibit the Christian life in contrast with the surrounding paganism. He would find himself in possession of an island lying north-east and south-west, and separated from the island of Mull by a narrow channel of about a mile broad. Its length, about three miles and a half, and its breadth, about a mile and a half. In the centre of the island he would see a plain extending across it—at its narrowest part—from the eastern to the western sea, presenting apparently fertile land well adapted for agriculture or pasture, and, in the middle of it, a small green hillock surmounted by a circle of stones.[179] North of this plain, on the western shore, he would see a tract of wilder ground consisting of small grassy patches, or dells alternating with rocky elevations, culminating in the highest hill in the island, now called Dunii;[180] and on the northern shore, a strip of low land extending from the base of the hill to the sea, and terminating at the north-east end of the island in a stretch of the purest white sand, which was destined to be afterwards the scene of a cruel slaughter of the monks by the Danes.