Glen
Dessary, with its beautiful pastures, opens on the Loch, and leads
to Loch Nevish on the coast of Knoidart--Glen Pæan to Oban-a-Cave on
Loch Morer, Glen Canagorie into Glenfinnan and Loch Shiel; and Glen
Kingie to Glengarry and Loch Quoich. There is a choice! We chose Glen
Kingie, and after a long climb found a torrent that took us down to
Glengarry before sunset. It is a loch little known, and in grandeur
not equal to Loch Arkaig; but at the close of such a day’s journey,
the mind, elevated by the long contemplation of the great objects of
nature, cannot fail to feel aright, whatever it may be, the spirit of
the scene, that seems to usher in the grateful hour of rest. It is
surpassing fair--and having lain all night long on its gentle banks,
sleeping or waking we know not, we have never remembered it since but
as the Land of Dreams.
Which is the dreariest, most desolate and dismal of the Highland
lochs? We should say Loch Ericht. It lies in a prodigious wilderness
with which perhaps no man alive is conversant, and in which you may
travel for days without seeing even any symptoms of human life. We
speak of the regions comprehended between the Forest of Athole,
and Bennevis, the Moor of Rannoch, and Glen Spean. There are many
Lochs--and Loch Ericht is their grisly Queen. Herdsmen, shepherds,
hunters, fowlers, anglers, traverse its borders, but few have been
far in the interior, and we never knew anybody who had crossed it
from south to north, from east to west. We have ourselves seen
more of it, perhaps than any other Lowlander; and had traversed
many of its vast glens and moors before we found our way to the
southern solitude of Loch Ericht. We came into the western gloom of
Ben Alder from Loch Ouchan, and up and down for hours dismal but
not dangerous precipices that opened out into what might almost
be called passes--but we have frequently to go back for they were
blind--contrived to clamber to the edge of one of the mountains
that rose from the water a few miles down the Loch. All was vast,
shapeless, savage, black, and wrathfully grim; for it was one of
those days that keep frowning and lowering, yet will not thunder;
such as one conceives of on the eve of an earthquake. At first the
sight was dreadful, but there was no reason for dread; imagination
remains not longer than she chooses the slave of her own eyes, and
we soon began to enjoy the gloom, and to feel how congenial it was
in nature with the character of all those lifeless cliffs. Silence
and darkness suit well together in solitude at noonday; and settled
on huge objects make them sublime. And they were huge; all ranged
together, and stretching away to a great distance, with the pitchy
water, still as if frozen, covering their feet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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