Page:A Companion and Useful Guide to the Beauties of Scotland.djvu/360

342. This track is the old military road; but the new one, which is easy, winds round the base of it to Loch Tollie, and the inn at Inverounon, close on a river's bank. From Loch Tollie the river Orchy winds its way to the lower part of the Glen of that name, and empties itself into Loch Awe. From Inverounon, the mountains of the Black Mount rise wonderfully high, black, pointed, and craggy. The new road winds up their sides, far easier than General Wade's over the tops of them, and will be a very fine piece of alpine road, when it is completed as far as King's House. The inn of King's House, as I approached it, looked like a dot in the midst of a barren wilderness; surrounded, except to the east, by the most craggy, bare, stupendous mountains that the mind can form an idea of; and the opening at their bases stretching to the east, and Rannoch, is nothing but a dreary, black, boggy moor, the loose soil of which is quite black, broken by pools and small lakes, and very thinly covered, where the water does not remain, with the coarsest brown heath, rushes, and bogs: but there is a crag to the west of the house of a wonderful height, in some degree conical, of grey rock over rock, like scales on an oyster shell, which as the sun shone upon