And silent and fair on the mountain descends the shadowy veil of night. Darkening high up there against the sapphire heaven, the dome-topped hill, keeping watch with the stars, has treasured for twenty centuries strange memories of an older world. Whether or not, in the earth’s green spring, it served as a spot of offering for some primeval race, no man now can tell. But long before the infant Christ drew breath among the far-off Jewish hills, grave Druid priests ascended here to offer worship to their Unknown God. On the holy Beltane eve, the First of May, the concourse gathered from near and far, and as the sun, the divine sign-manual set in the heavens, arose out of the east, they welcomed his rising with an offering of fire. From sea to sea across dim Scotland, from the storm-cloven peaks of Arran to the sentinel dome of the Bass, could be seen this mountain summit; and from every side the awed inhabitants, as they looked up and beheld the clear fire-jewel glittering on Ben Ledi’s brow, knew that Heaven had once more favoured them with the sacred gift of flame. For the light on the mountain-top, like the altar fires of the Chaldean seers on the hills of the East of old, was understood to be kindled by the hand of God; every hearth in the land had been quenched, and the people waited for the new Bal-tein, or Baal-fire from Heaven, for another year.
Rude these people may have been--though that is by no means certain,--but few races on earth have had a nobler place of worship than this altar-mountain, which they called the Hill of God.
The climber on Ben Ledi to-day passes, near the summit, the scene of a sad, more modern story. On the shoulder of the mountain lies a small, dark tarn. It is but a few yards in width, yet once it acted a part in a terrible tragedy. Amid the snows of winter, and under a leaden heaven, a funeral party was crossing the ridge, when there was a crash; the slow wail of the pipes changed into a shriek of terror, and a hundred mourners, with the dead they were carrying, sank in the icy waters to rise no more. That single moment sufficed to leave sixty women husbandless in Glen Finglas below. No tablet on that wind-swept moor records the half-forgotten disaster; only the eerie lapping of the lochlet’s waves fills the discoverer with strange foreboding; and at dusk, it is said, the lonely ptarmigan may be seen, like souls of the departed, haunting the fatal spot.