Perhaps the most striking of these ‘deserts’ in Scotland is to be found on the uninhabited rock known as Sùla Sgeir, which rises out of the Atlantic, about forty miles to the north of the Butt of Lewis. Though much less imposing in height and size than the Skellig off the coast of Kerry, it is at least four times further from the land, and must consequently have been still more difficult to reach in primitive times. I had a few years ago an opportunity of landing on this rock, during a yachting cruise to the Faroe Islands. With some little difficulty, on account of the heavy swell, I succeeded in scrambling ashore, and found the rock to consist of gneiss, like that of the Long Island. My arrival disturbed a numerous colony of sea-fowl. The puffins emerged from their holes, and sat gazing at me with their whimsical wistful look. Flocks of razo-bills and guillemots circled overhead, filling the air with their screams, while the gannets, angry that their mates should be disturbed from their nests, wheeled to and fro still higher, with mocking shouts of ha! ha! ha! A dank grey sea-fog hung over the summit of the islet. Everything was damp with mist and clammy with birds’ droppings, which in a dry climate would gather as a deposit of guano. Loathsome pools of rain-water and sea-spray, putrid with excrement, filled the hollows of the naked rock, while the air was heavy with the odours of living and dead birds. The only things of beauty in the place were the tufts of sea-pink that grew luxuriantly in the crannies. Some traces of recent human occupation could be seen in the form of a few rude stone-huts erected as shelters by the men who now and then come to take off the gannets and their eggs, and who when there lately had left some heaps of unused peat behind them. [Sidenote: THE SAINT OF SULA SGEIR] Yet this desolate, bird-haunted rock, with the heavy surf breaking all round it and resounding from its chasms and caves, was the place chosen by one of the Celtic saints as his ‘desert.’ His little rude chapel yet remains, built of rough stones and still retaining its roof of large flags. It measures inside about fourteen feet in length by from six to eight in breadth, with an entrance doorway and one small window-opening, beneath which the altar-stone still lies in place. There could hardly ever have been a community here; one is puzzled to understand how even the saint himself succeeded in reaching this barren rock, and how he supported himself on it during his stay. He came, no doubt, in one of the light skin-covered coracles, which could contain but a slender stock of provisions. When these were exhausted, if the weather forbade his return to Lewis or to the mainland, he had no fuel on the rock to fall back upon, with which to cook any of the eggs or birds of the islet, and there was no edible vegetation, save the dulse or other sea-weeds growing between tide-marks.