The waters of the Firth were gleaming in gold, and the clouds cast a purple shadow on their bosom.
The deep green or russet-brown tints of the hills gradually became blue, and as I lay against a culverin, watching--with a heavy heart--the setting sun and the receding shore, I felt like the hundreds around me, very sorrowful and very sick.
I knew that when again the sun whitened our sails, we should see those old familiar hills no more. The wind favoured, and as the strong current which is ever passing in, or flowing out between the steep Sutors, ran with us, the two ships rolled heavily. On our larboard lay the old town of Cromartie, and as we passed, a great copper bombarde, which belonged to the provost, was repeatedly discharged in our honour. A flag was displayed at the ancient cross, which was then at the town-end; though I had heard my poor mother tell me, that its place, was wont to be the centre of the royal burgh, before the sea swallowed up one half its streets, the ruins of which, covered with seaweed, were visible to us as we passed along the shore.
The cavern of M'Farquhar's Bed seemed to open and shut again as we shot past it; we were soon between the stupendous brows of the Sutors, against whose shining rocks vast sheets of snow-white foam were hurled by the Murray Firth, though within the bay we were leaving--perhaps for ever--the water was smooth as a mountain lake. Being sharply built, and swift sailers, our ships glided through the narrow passage like shafts from a bow, and almost immediately the shores of the inner firth, the town of Cromartie, Craigrollo with its tower--already diminished to a speck--vanished from our view; and, like an ocean-gate fenced by the Sutors, two mighty towers of rock, with a narrow stripe of water between, was all that remained of the place we had left. The tide was ebbing, and the sunken reefs, known as _The King's Seven Sons_, were showing their naked and ghastly heads above the foam; there, as Mhona Toshach told me, the seven sons of a king had perished by shipwreck.
The features of the shore lessened and changed in hue and aspect, while the deep green water was thrown up beneath our bows in spray, leaving under our quarter galleries a long track of white froth on the ocean path behind us; but no sooner were the vessels clear of the Sutors, than a very sensible alteration in their motion made us remember that they were ploughing the stormy waves of the Firth of Murray, amid whose waters I saw the hills of Cromartie, reddened by the last flush of the sun that had set, sink gradually low and melt, as it were, away.