The touch of the earth seemed strange to me after nearly a week spent at sea, and as I sprang from the launch on to the rough rocks, aided by Santoris, I was for a moment faint and giddy.  The dark mountain summits seemed to swirl round me,—­and the glittering water, shining like steel, had the weird effect of a great mirror in which a fluttering vision of something undefined and undeclared rose and passed like a breath.  I recovered myself with an effort and stood still, trying to control the foolish throbbing of my heart, while my companion gave a few orders to his men in a language which I thought I knew, though I could not follow it.

“Are you speaking Gaelic?” I asked him, with a smile.

“No!—­only something very like it—­Phoenician.”

He looked straight at me as he said this, and his eyes, darkly blue and brilliant, expressed a world of suggestion.  He went on:—­

“All this country was familiar ground to the Phoenician colonists of ages ago.  I am sure you know that!  The Gaelic tongue is the genuine dialect of the ancient Phoenician Celtic, and when I speak the original language to a Highlander who only knows his native Gaelic he understands me perfectly.”

I was silent.  We moved away from the shore, walking slowly side by side.  Presently I paused, looking back at the launch we had just left.

“Your men are not Highlanders?”

“No—­they are from Egypt.”

“But surely,”—­I said, with some hesitation—­“Phoenician is no longer known or spoken?”

“Not by the world of ordinary men,”—­he answered—­“I know it and speak it,—­and so do most of those who serve me.  You have heard it before, only you do not quite remember.”  I looked at him, startled.  He smiled, adding gently:—­“Nothing dies—­not even a language!”

We were not yet out of sight of the men.  They had pushed the launch off shore again and were starting it back to the yacht, it being arranged that they should return for us in a couple of hours.  We were following a path among slippery stones near a rushing torrent, but as we turned round a sharp bend we lost the view of Loch Scavaig itself and were for the first time truly alone.  Huge mountains, crowned with jagged pinnacles, surrounded us on all sides,—­here and there tufts of heather clinging to large masses of dark stone blazed rose-purple in the declining sunshine,—­the hollow sound of the falling stream made a perpetual crooning music in our ears, and the warm, stirless air seemed breathless, as though hung in suspense above us waiting for the echo of some word or whisper that should betray a life’s secret.  Such a silence held us that it was almost unbearable,—­every nerve in my body seemed like a strained harp-string ready to snap at a touch,—­and yet I could not speak.  I tried to get the mastery over the rising tide of thought, memory and emotion that surged in my soul like a tempest—­swiftly and peremptorily I argued with myself that the extraordinary