The Wind Bloweth | Page 4

frenzy, fanned to fury by the winds of the nine glens, as a bellows livens a fire. But to-day it was like a lake, so gentle.... And there was purple Scotland, hardly, you'd think, a stone's throw from the shore--the Mull of Cantyre, a resounding name, like a line in a poem. It was from Mull that Moyle came, maol in Gaidhlig, bald or bluff ... a moyley was a cow without horns. The Lowlanders were coming into the Mull now, and the Highlanders being pushed north to Argyll, and westward to the islands, like Oran and Islay. He knew the Islay men, great rugged fishers with immense hands and their feet small as a girl's. They sang the saddest sea-chanty in the world:
'S tric mi sealltuinn o'n chnoc a's airde, Dh' fheuch am faic mi fear a'bhata; An tig thu'n aniugh, no'n tig thu amaireach, 'S mur tig thu idir, gur truagh a ta mi.
"From the highest hilltop I watched to see my boatman," went the sense of it. "Will you come to-day or will you come to-morrow? And if you never come--O God! help me!"
And there was a chorus to it that was like a keening for the dead:
Fhir a' bhata na horo eile! Fhir a' bhata na horo eile! Fhir a' bhata na horo eile! Mo shoraidh slan leat, fhir a' bhata!
My heart's good-by to you, O man of the boat!
But nearer than Islay was their own Raghery--Rathlin Island the maps had it--he could see it now to the north. A strange little world of its own, with great caves where the wind howled like a starving wolf, and the black divers went into the water like a bullet. It was in the caves of Raghery that the Bruce took refuge, and it was there he saw the spider of Scots legend.... Rathlin was queer and queer.... There were many women with the second sight, it was told, and the men were very big, very shy, very gentle, except when the drink was in them, and then they would rage like the sea.
A strange, mystical water, the Moyle, to have two isles in it like Islay of the pipers and Raghery of the black caves. It was over Moyle that Columkill went in his little coracle to be a hermit in Iona, the gentlest saint that Ireland ever knew. And it was over the Moyle that Patrick came, landing whilst the Druids turned their cursing stones and could not prevail against him. And it was on the Moyle that the Children of Lir swam and they turned into three white swans, with their great white wings like sails and their black feet like sweeps.... And in the night-time they sang a strange, sad music, and the echoes of it were still in the nine glens....
And northerly again were the pillars of the Giant's Causeway, blue-black against the sun. They were made so that the Finn MacCool, the champion of the giants, could take a running jump over to Scotland and he going deer-hunting in the forests of Argyll. So the country folk said, but wee Shane thought different, knew different. The Druids had made it for their own occult designs, the Druids, that terrible, powerful clan with their magic batons, and their sinister cursing-stones, and their long, white, benevolent beards....
And there, green and well kept as a duke's garden, was the Royal Links of Portrush. And the Irish golfers said that it was harder than St. Andrew's in Scotland and better kept. There King James had played a game before he went down to the defeat of the Boyne Water.
"And if he golfed as well as he fought," Shane's Uncle Robin used to laugh, "they s'ould never have let him tee up a ball on the course!"
Eigh! how wonderful it all was! wee Shane felt: Raghery and the waters of Moyle; Portrush and the Giant's Causeway; the nine glens with the purple heather, and the streams that sang as they cantered to the sea; the crowing grouse and the whinnying curlew, and the eagles barking on the cliffs; the trout that rose in the summer's evening, and the red berries of the rowan; the cold, clear lakes, and the braes where the blueberries grow. He could well understand the stories they told of Napper Tandy, and the great rebel in the gardens of Versailles. Napoleon had found him weeping amid all that beauty.
"Don't be afraid, Napper Tandy. I shall keep my word and send General Hoche to Ireland."
"It's not that, sir; it's not that." And Tandy could not keep the tears back. "Och, County Antrim, it's far I'm from you now!"
§ 3
He had reached the cairn of round stones that marks the town land of Drimsleive, and was turning the brae when a voice called to him:
"Eh,