“What,” I cried, “is Cluny still here?”

“Ay, is he so!” said Alan.  “Still in his own country and kept by his own clan.  King George can do no more.”

I think I would have asked farther, but Alan gave me the put-off.  “I am rather wearied,” he said, “and I would like fine to get a sleep.”  And without more words, he rolled on his face in a deep heather bush, and seemed to sleep at once.

There was no such thing possible for me.  You have heard grasshoppers whirring in the grass in the summer time?  Well, I had no sooner closed my eyes, than my body, and above all my head, belly, and wrists, seemed to be filled with whirring grasshoppers; and I must open my eyes again at once, and tumble and toss, and sit up and lie down; and look at the sky which dazzled me, or at Cluny’s wild and dirty sentries, peering out over the top of the brae and chattering to each other in the Gaelic.

That was all the rest I had, until the messenger returned; when, as it appeared that Cluny would be glad to receive us, we must get once more upon our feet and set forward.  Alan was in excellent good spirits, much refreshed by his sleep, very hungry, and looking pleasantly forward to a dram and a dish of hot collops, of which, it seems, the messenger had brought him word.  For my part, it made me sick to hear of eating.  I had been dead-heavy before, and now I felt a kind of dreadful lightness, which would not suffer me to walk.  I drifted like a gossamer; the ground seemed to me a cloud, the hills a feather-weight, the air to have a current, like a running burn, which carried me to and fro.  With all that, a sort of horror of despair sat on my mind, so that I could have wept at my own helplessness.

I saw Alan knitting his brows at me, and supposed it was in anger; and that gave me a pang of light-headed fear, like what a child may have.  I remember, too, that I was smiling, and could not stop smiling, hard as I tried; for I thought it was out of place at such a time.  But my good companion had nothing in his mind but kindness; and the next moment, two of the gillies had me by the arms, and I began to be carried forward with great swiftness (or so it appeared to me, although I dare say it was slowly enough in truth), through a labyrinth of dreary glens and hollows and into the heart of that dismal mountain of Ben Alder.

CHAPTER XXIII

CLUNY’S CAGE

We came at last to the foot of an exceeding steep wood, which scrambled up a craggy hillside, and was crowned by a naked precipice.

“It’s here,” said one of the guides, and we struck up hill.

The trees clung upon the slope, like sailors on the shrouds of a ship, and their trunks were like the rounds of a ladder, by which we mounted.