The Merry Men | Page 2

is covered with big granite rocks, some of them
larger than a two- roomed house, one beside another, with fern and
deep heather in between them where the vipers breed. Anyway the
wind was, it was always sea air, as salt as on a ship; the gulls were as
free as moorfowl over all the Ross; and whenever the way rose a little,
your eye would kindle with the brightness of the sea. From the very
midst of the land, on a day of wind and a high spring, I have heard the
Roost roaring, like a battle where it runs by Aros, and the great and
fearful voices of the breakers that we call the Merry Men.
Aros itself - Aros Jay, I have heard the natives call it, and they say it
means THE HOUSE OF GOD - Aros itself was not properly a piece of
the Ross, nor was it quite an islet. It formed the south- west corner of
the land, fitted close to it, and was in one place only separated from the
coast by a little gut of the sea, not forty feet across the narrowest. When
the tide was full, this was clear and still, like a pool on a land river;
only there was a difference in the weeds and fishes, and the water itself
was green instead of brown; but when the tide went out, in the bottom
of the ebb, there was a day or two in every month when you could pass
dryshod from Aros to the mainland. There was some good pasture,
where my uncle fed the sheep he lived on; perhaps the feed was better
because the ground rose higher on the islet than the main level of the
Ross, but this I am not skilled enough to settle. The house was a good
one for that country, two storeys high. It looked westward over a bay,
with a pier hard by for a boat, and from the door you could watch the
vapours blowing on Ben Kyaw.
On all this part of the coast, and especially near Aros, these great
granite rocks that I have spoken of go down together in troops into the
sea, like cattle on a summer's day. There they stand, for all the world
like their neighbours ashore; only the salt water sobbing between them
instead of the quiet earth, and clots of sea-pink blooming on their sides
instead of heather; and the great sea conger to wreathe about the base of
them instead of the poisonous viper of the land. On calm days you can
go wandering between them in a boat for hours, echoes following you

about the labyrinth; but when the sea is up, Heaven help the man that
hears that cauldron boiling.
Off the south-west end of Aros these blocks are very many, and much
greater in size. Indeed, they must grow monstrously bigger out to sea,
for there must be ten sea miles of open water sown with them as thick
as a country place with houses, some standing thirty feet above the
tides, some covered, but all perilous to ships; so that on a clear,
westerly blowing day, I have counted, from the top of Aros, the great
rollers breaking white and heavy over as many as six-and-forty buried
reefs. But it is nearer in shore that the danger is worst; for the tide, here
running like a mill race, makes a long belt of broken water - a ROOST
we call it - at the tail of the land. I have often been out there in a dead
calm at the slack of the tide; and a strange place it is, with the sea
swirling and combing up and boiling like the cauldrons of a linn, and
now and again a little dancing mutter of sound as though the ROOST
were talking to itself. But when the tide begins to run again, and above
all in heavy weather, there is no man could take a boat within half a
mile of it, nor a ship afloat that could either steer or live in such a place.
You can hear the roaring of it six miles away. At the seaward end there
comes the strongest of the bubble; and it's here that these big breakers
dance together - the dance of death, it may be called - that have got the
name, in these parts, of the Merry Men. I have heard it said that they
run fifty feet high; but that must be the green water only, for the spray
runs twice as high as that. Whether they got the name from their
movements, which are swift and antic, or from the shouting they make
about the turn of the tide, so that all Aros shakes