Page:A Companion and Useful Guide to the Beauties of Scotland.djvu/364

has rendered them of a very black and dark green hue, consequently very gloomy. Adjoining this extraordinary weeping mass, is a continued range, of a mile in descent, of other crags equally perpendicular and high; in most of which appear caves and arched passages, with pillars, like the communication from one ile to another, high up in the sides of Gothic cathedrals; also small Gothic-like windows and doors. The whole mass, to an eye below, appears like an immense and inaccessible ruin of the finest architecture, mouldered, defaced, and become uneven by a vast lapse of time, and inclemency of weather, which has variegated its native grey, by ten thousand soft tints, that nothing but time and weather can produce. In a few of the very high hollows I perceived considerable protuberances of something white, like crystal, (and the Highlandman told me they were such) which, when the sun shone upon them, glistened like diamonds. It is under this range of wonderful crags, that the Coe dashes loud, though unseen; at the edge of which birch, alder, mountain ash, nut, and many other small branching trees growing out of the crevices of the rocks, give a degree of softness to this solemn, sublime, gloomy, steep pass. Probably the