Even the beautiful aspects of the Highland winter had something about them--an isolation, a terrible silence--that he grew almost to dread. What was this strange thing, for example? Early in the morning he looked from the windows of his room, and he could have imagined he was not at Dare at all. All the familiar objects of sea and shore had disappeared; this was a new world--a world of fantastic shapes, all moving and unknown--a world of vague masses of gray, though here and there a gleam of lemon-color shining through the fog showed that the dawn was reflected on a glassy sea. Then he began to make out the things around him. That great range of purple mountains was Ulva--Ulva transfigured and become Alpine! Then those wan gleams of yellow light on the sea?--he went to the other window, and behold! the heavy bands of cloud that lay across the unseen peaks of Ben-an-Sloich had parted, and there was a blaze of clear, metallic, green sky; and the clouds bordering on that gleam of light were touched with a smoky and stormy saffron-hue that flashed and changed amidst the seething and twisting shapes of the fog and the mist. He turned to the sea again--what phantom-ship was this that appeared in mid-air, and apparently moving when there was no wind? He heard the sound of oars; the huge vessel turned out to be only the boat of the Gometra men going out to the lobster-traps. The yellow light on the glassy plain waxes stronger; new objects appear through the shifting fog; until at last a sudden opening shows him a wonderful thing far away--apparently at the very confines of the world--and awful in its solitary splendor. For that is the distant island of Staffa, and it has caught the colors of the dawn; and amidst the cold grays of the sea it shines a pale, transparent rose.