Mearing Stones Part 8

THE DARKNESS AND THE TIDE

"What time o' day is it?" My interrogator was an old man I met the other evening in a loaney running down from the back of Lochros to the sands of Lochros Beag Bay, near where the old fish-pa.s.s used to be. I looked at my watch, and told him it was five-and-twenty past seven. "Oh," said he, "is it so much as that? The darkness and the tide'll soon be coming in, then."

ERRIGAL

The hill of Errigal climbs like a wave to the sky. A pennon of white cloud tosses on its carn. Its sides are dark. They slope precipitously. They are streaked and mottled here and there with patches of loose stone, bleached to a soft violet colour with rain. Not a leaf of gra.s.s, not a frond of fern roots on these patches. They are altogether bare. Loch Nacung, a cold spread of water, gleams at the bottom, white as a shield and green at the margin with sedge. Dunlewy chapel, with its round tower--a black silhouette in the 'tweenlight--and the walls of the Poisoned Glen beyond.

THE SORE FOOT

"It's a provident thing," a tramp said to me the other day, "to lay something by for the sore foot."

ASHERANCALLY

A roar, as of breaking seas. We are approaching the open Atlantic, but though its salt is bitter on our lips, our view is obscured by sand-dunes. Then, as we round a bend in the road, the Fall of Asherancally breaks suddenly on us, tumbling through a gut in the mountainside--almost on to the road it seems. We stand under it. We watch the brown bulk of water dropping from the gut-head and dancing in foam on the rocks a hundred feet below. The roar is deafening. One might shout at the top of one's voice, and yet not be heard. The air is iridescent with spindrift, which shines in the sun and sprays coolingly on our cheeks. We lean on the bridge parapet, watching and listening.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LOCH NACUNG--MOONRISE.]

ORANGE GALLASES

I came across an old man to-day out in Lochros--a shock-headed old fellow in shirt and trousers, carrying water from a spring well near the Cross, and a troop of dogs snapping at his heels. "You don't seem to be popular with the dogs?" says I, laughing. "Oh, let them snap,"

says he. "It's not me they're snapping at, but my orange gallases!"

THE HUMAN VOICE

The human voice--what a wonder and mystery it is! "All power," said Whitman, "is folded in a great vocalism." I spoke to a man to-day on the roadside, near Maghery. He was a poor, raggedy fellow, with a gaunt, unshaven chin and wild eyes, and a couple of barefooted children played about the mud at his feet. He answered me in a voice that _thrilled_ me--deep, chestfull, resonant; a voice, that had he been an educated man, might have won fame for him, as a politician, say, or a preacher, or an actor. And voices like his are by no means uncommon along the western seaboard of Ireland. Men address you on the road in that frank, human, comrade-like way of Irishmen, out of deep lungs and ringing larynxes that bring one back to the time when men were giants, and physique was the rule rather than the exception. In such voices one can imagine the Fenians to have talked one with the other, Fionn calling to Sgeolan, and Oisin chanting the divine fragments of song he dreamed in the intervals of war and venery. Will Ireland ever recapture the heroic qualities--build personality, voice, gesture--or, as Whitman puts it: "Litheness, majestic faces, clear eyes"--that were hers down to a comparatively late period, and in places have not quite died out even yet? I believe she will.

LOCH ALUINN

A grey loch, lashed into foam by wind from nor' westward, lapping unquietly among reeds that fringe its margin. Boulders everywhere--erratics from the Ice Age--bleached white with rain. Crotal growing in their interstices, wild-mint, purple orchises and the kingly osmunda fern. A strip of tilled land beyond--green corn, for the most part, and potatoes. Slieve a-Tooey in the distance, a blue shadowy bulk, crossed and recrossed by mist-wreaths chasing one another over it in rapid succession. A rainbow framing all.

THE OPEN ROAD

The open road, the sky over it, and the hills beyond. The hills beyond, those blue, ultimate hills; the clouds that look like hills; the mystery plucked out of them, and lo, the sea, stretching away into the vast--white-crested, grey, inscrutable--with a mirage dancing on its furthest verge!