The "Isles on the Edge of the Sea," so named by the Norse, form an Atlantic barrier along the western shore of Scotland. These remote islands of the Hebrides are a continuation of the mountains of the Western Highlands reaching far out to sea. For the most part they are barren projections, covered with machair, peat, rock and the vestiges of thousands of years of habitation. One of these projections, Beinn Dornie, a sister mountain of Beinn Dhubh, Black Mountain, on Harris, forms the island of Dorney about two miles west of the larger Isle of Harris. It is late winter, a miserably wet, cold,...