Tir-Na-N'og

I

TIR-XA-N’OG is the country of youth. No one dies there, nor loses beauty of soul or body. There trees bear rosy blossom, living green leaf, and golden fruit all in one glorious harvest. And all these lovelinesses are as nothing to this one that has given Tir-na-n’og its name — no one ever grows old!

The country of youth lies somewhere off the west coast of Ireland, a shadowy blossom of an island, dimly seen sometimes by those who look with very clear eyes; found only now and then by a happy few. We were there for all of one enchanted day, Tommy and Ritchie, and Annie and I.

As a matter of fact, we left the village to go to Clare Island. It lies only four miles across the rough waters of Clew Bay. To cross in a canoe, spend a few hours in the island, and return sounds simple enough, indeed. Yet, Ould Dick has gone in on a cloudless summer morning to do just that, only to find himself weather-bound for days. Once Tommy Lannon, refusing to be weather-bound, rashly faced out in the teeth of wind and tide, winning through to the mainland after hours of bitter struggle by the grace of God — and that alone. Years ago Nancy’s two brothersin-law and her brother vanished completely from the surface of that small stretch of water which can easily be seen across on calm days.

No wonder, then, that there were many conferences held by the old and wise, many conflicting opinions offered, many decisions made and unmade the day we started for Clare Island. Every weather-wise man in the village, — and which man is not that? — squinting a knowing eye at the turquoise sky with little white puffballs floating about in it, advised against the trip. And we — already, perhaps unconsciously, surmising our real destination — must defer to each opinion, pretend assent to each decision, placate every adviser we met from the top of the brae to the place where the brown stream wins the sea — while we tremblingly but firmly rejected his advice.

‘Let ye wait another little hour annyways,’ shouted Redmond Pat Forick from the last field on the road to the strand. ‘Them fellows up above mean trouble.’

We waved to him, pretending not to grasp his meaning, as we hurried on. Just then Ritchie’s father rose steeply from behind a wall in another meadow, hailing him, ‘This way, sir; a moment, if ye plaze!’

‘That settles it,’ sighed Tommy despairingly, sinking down on the stone ditch. ‘Sure, if Ritchie cannot come, what business have we of it, at all?’

‘Arrah, what about?’ said Annie, sensibly. ‘To-morrow’s another day.

I, who am not so young and not so old as Annie, was frankly disconsolate. When Ritchie, hurrying back across the meadow, shouted to let us know at once that it was not a veto but only an injunction to look at certain bullocks in the island, we fled to the canoe before anything further should delay us.

The canoe would have looked like any other canoe to the ordinary observer. It was so much more than that to us! It had been slowly and painstakingly fashioned by loving, unskilled, untaught hands, from scanty material, with wholly inadequate tools. The rough strong paddles were hewn from timber found on the strand. The whole was a triumph over every adverse circumstance, a strong, stout, seaworthy craft, a credit to the gallant little crew of two that sent her skimming like a bird over the green waves.

Around us white gulls dipped and glided fearlessly; the Callaigh Dhu (Black Hag) floated sombrely and watchfully by or made her queer trembling dive into the clear water after fish. Behind us stretched the pleasant checkered green of familiar fields with here and there a cluster of sunlit low white walls and golden roofs; the whole ringed round with the bloomy purple of Connemara hills outlined softly against a lovely, changing sky. Before us lay Clare Island, its lowlands like slender arms outstretched, its two hills

shining across the tumbled waters of the bay.

The bay has many islands lying on its ample bosom, more than three hundred of them. If there had been time, Tommy could have told us a story about each one. He used many of them to mark the course and the distance traveled. When Mweemor was on a line with a certain chimney we were ‘one quarter over.’ At Mweemor a boat from the village was lost many years ago and all the fishermen drowned. The bodies were washed ashore at Achill Island, being buried there by the islanders. Among the latter there is a belief that it is unlucky to remove or disturb in any way a body which has once been decently laid to rest. So there the villagers slept — a lonely and uneasy sleep, their friends were sure, far from their own quiet home across the water.

‘One woman, a woman on our family, I am sure,’said Tommy, ‘could not bear by anny means to leave her own man there. She coaxed and bribed a good few strong young fellows, plying them with whiskey until she had persuaded them to row her on a moonless night to the lonely Achill shore where her beloved lay. She had plenty of “the good stuff” with her. She gave it and gave it again, because she knew well they would never do the work she had in mind for them without they were steeped in it. There in the still darkness she drove and coaxed them through their ghastly task until at last they rowed her shudderingly back through the night with her man across her lap, his dark head pillowed on her breast. And she laid him down to sleep among his own.'

II

When we had ‘Cahir free of Innisturk,’so that they no longer appeared as one, but showed the water clear between them, we were one half over. Cahir is a lonely, uninhabited island, but a holy one. Tradition says Saint Patrick once fled to its solitude for rest and prayer. Here are the ruins of an old abbey, within which is a stone having peculiar properties. It is shaped like a large deep bowl. It looks, and should be, very heavy; yet it is light as any feather. Those who are ill, crippled, or — worst of all fates — childless, make a pilgrimage to the abbey, kneeling to pray beside the stone. Sometimes the bowl brims full of water, sometimes it is empty, although it is completely sheltered in its shrine from rain. If there is water in it, this is sprinkled liberally over the body while the suppliant prays fervently and with deep faith. If the bowl should be empty there will be no cure. It is believed, however, that one who had the courage to remain all night alone on the island would be cured of any illness, no matter how malignant or far advanced, whether he found the bowl full or empty; but no one, so far as I know, has ever tried this.

Once some men from Achill profaned the shrine by carrying away with them the hollow stone. They had gone only a little way from Cahir when a most sudden and terrible storm threatened to swamp their boat. Whereupon they cast into the raging waters the stolen stone, which they knew to be the cause of their peril. The next pilgrims to Cahir found it back in its ancient resting place. And once Jamesie Austin, who was very delicate and weak, as well as being sadly crippled in one leg, made a pilgrimage to the stone and found it filled with water. Joyfully and prayerfully he plunged both hands in it, dashing the water up on his arms. Just then a passing shadow at the low open door startled and distracted him — which, of course, he should have allowed nothing to do. He glanced up quickly, turning toward the door, where, after all, nothing was to be seen. When his attention returned to the bowl it was quite empty. Jamesie Austin remained crippled to the end of his long life; but he had always, from that day forth, most extraordinary strength in his hands and arms.

All this we learned from Tommy while he and Ritchie were industriously pulling to a point where Cahir was seen clear of Innisturk, with green water between the two. Of Innisturk he had nothing to tell us except that once a lady from that island, landing at the mainland harbor, was hailed by an old fellow working in the bog at Offaly, who cried to her that his wife was apparently very near dead, and proposed for her hand on her return should the wife have passed on. The woman paused in her swift and powerful stride long enough to consider and accept. Then she went about her business, which was a small matter of walking fourteen miles to Croagh Patrick (the Hill of Patrick), climbing some two thousand feet to the chapel on its summit, performing ‘a station,’ and returning on foot in time to milk her cows in the evening. That she might not be needlessly idle on the way she knitted a pair of socks as she walked. According to the story, she finished the socks and married the man before returning to Innisturk.

With Innisturk left behind, the captain and his crew of one sped the last half of the journey until the canoe, rounding its way into the curved quiet little harbor, grated on the gravelly strand. High on a cliff above us loomed the frowning slit-eyed gray walls of an old castle which had once been a stronghold of Grannia Uaile, that dauntless pirate queen who answered Elizabeth’s imperious command to appear forthwith in the English court with an equally imperious retort that, though Elizabeth might be queen in England, Grannia Uaile was queen in Mayo — where she intended to stay while it pleased her. Sir Richard Bingham said of her in 1593 that she had been ‘nurse to all the rebellions in the Province for forty years.’

The cliff where Grannia’s ruined castle stands, in fact every cliff, every hill, and every hollow, was covered with thick short velvety grass, jeweled with purple violets, delicate yellow mayflowers, and clusters of small starry pink-tipped daisies. There were, too, masses of long-stemmed cloverlike flowers, deep lavender in color, the name of which none of us knew, which lay in bands across the meadows like lovely trailing purple scarfs. There were three of us that day who the moment we stepped upon that enchanted shore, had a secret joyous suspicion that we had, after all, missed the way to Clare Island and stumbled instead upon Tir-na-n’og. That suspicion grew into certainty as we went along; for, although we never saw the blossomy leafy fruit-trees, we did find ourselves laughing often, joyously, and without reason; suddenly and mysteriously gifted with song, we joined the thousand larks that filled the air with liquid silver; wine ran in our veins; and we walked endless miles on tireless feet that seemed scarcely to touch the turfy, grass-grown road beneath them.

‘But where are we going? ‘ demanded Annie, who is nineteen, and practical. ‘How far? What’s there to see?’

‘To the tower,’ answered Tommy, ‘the old watchtower where Brian long ‘go lit the false beacon-fires to lure the Armada to destruction; and after that to the abbey where Grannia sleeps.’

He struck out along the first road that his feet found. Tommy, who is eight years older than Annie, by the way, is also very much younger. I joined him, leaving the others to follow as they might.

The hills, covered halfway up with a flowery green mantle, rose to the right; the sea moved bright and restless on our left; the road wound about between the two. We walked a long time.

‘Tommy,’ I said with sudden suspicion, ‘have you ever seen that tower?’

’I have not,’ he assured me gravely.

‘Do you know where it is? ‘ I insisted. ‘Are you sure this is the right road?’

‘I do not,’ answered Tommy, joyously. ‘I am not, indeed!’

‘Lovely,’ said I. ‘I was afraid you did. Let’s go.’

III

The day sparkled like a shining heap of jewels; sapphire of sea, turquoise of sky, deep emerald of fields, soft amethyst of hilltops. The road was grassgrown and uncertain. Sometimes it ran broad and plain before us, hedged on either side with spiny whin-bushes covered with a golden glory of blooms that smelled like all the spicy perfumes of the East. Sometimes it grew narrow and brown and small, and ran here and there through turfy bogs studded with quiet topaz pools. Sometimes we lost it altogether in a rushing crystal stream from the hills that towered over us, only to find it waiting on the other side when we had picked a barefoot way through icy water. It led us on and on, a fascinating road that ran up hill and down, through narrow gaps, out into wide spaces; that now marched before us confidently, now wavered here and there, now hid until it was searched for.

We met a girl on her way to the well. She sang as she walked lightly along, a quiet ruminative little song. Her feet were bare, her body slender and tall as a young willow, her hair a shining copper mass that curled to her waist. She shook it back as she turned her head in answer to Tommy’s Gaelic greeting, ‘God save ye, miss.’

‘God save ye kindly,’ she answered with a flashing smile.

‘Who do you think that was, Tommy?’ I asked as we passed along.

’I believe, myself,’ said he, ‘’t was Nia of the Golden Hair. Her father is King in Tir-na-n’og. And her lover was Oisin, who had been born and lived his young days in Ireland and who loved it so that after three hundred years of happiness he still longed for just one more ride along its homely roads. So Nia lent him her horse, shod with silver, that flew so fast that he caught up with the wind before him, and the wind behind him could n’t catch up with him. Nia warned Oisin to remain all the while upon the horse’s back until he returned to Tir-na-n’og. Above all things his foot must not touch Irish soil, or all the weight of his three hundred years in the Country of Youth that had been like the passing of a single day would fall upon him at once. But he forgot the warning, mind you, and found himself stripped of youth and strength, wandering aged and alone among strangers in his own land.’

‘Poor Oisin,’ I sighed, looking about me at the beauty he had lost.

‘Ah, well,’ said Tommy quickly, ‘it was none so bad at all! To have lived and loved, to die for very love of Ireland and let your dust at last become a part of her — sure, what could be better than that?’

Following our little road for miles and miles, we met only one other person, a tall man riding. His cheeks were ruddy, his eyes like calm lovely lakes beneath his heavy brows.

‘That must be the King himself, I’m certain sure,’ whispered Tommy as we exchanged greetings and passed on.

We stopped only once again, and that was when a sudden thought made me almost certain we had missed Clare Island and found Tir-na-n’og instead. ‘Tommy,’ I asked, to make assurance doubly sure, ‘how old am I?’

He regarded me seriously for a moment with clear golden eyes that are very wise and very innocent. ‘Eighteen, I think?’ he ventured. ‘Although I cannot rightly tell with your hair up in rolls of braid on your head that way. If it were free to the wind now’ — he hesitated — ‘I would think it could n’t be but drawing on sixteen, maybe.’

‘Good,’ said I, throwing the pins to either side as we strode on again. ‘That’s just what I thought myself, but could n’t be sure; it’s a lovely age.’

Tommy threw his hat after the pins.

Hats worried him. He never could keep one, anyway. ‘After the first one or two I never had another till I passed fourteen,’ he confided. ‘I used always to lose them; so mother would buy me none at the latter end. ‘T was no use.’

He never knew where his hats were. Once one of them had gone all the way to Westport on the tail of a cart, where he had absently laid it, and it never came back again. And once he went out from the bright hot noise of a dance to sit for just a few minutes on the banks over the sea, until he should see moonlight and dawnlight meet in a silvery embrace on the cool gray waters. And he stumbled back to the house so wrapped in dreams that he never knew until he faced the dark windows and barred door of the house that the dance had rollicked to its end, the dancers scattered to their homes with songs and shouts and boisterous partings, long before. Of course his hat was somewhere in the dark sleeping house. Bridget refused to give him that one. She said it gave her many a laugh at his foolishness whenever she spied it where it hung on a peg over the fireplace. But this hat he threw away — we walked more lightly without it.

Meanwhile our road had led us into a wild and lonely place. The sea still shone on our left, but the hill to our right was now brown and bare, the ground beneath our feet boggy, stony, broken more and more often with little pools of clear dark water. Coming around a sudden bend we saw the end of the road, the end of the island, and, high on a rugged cliff at its edge, the tower. The ground rose steeply before us for several hundred feet, rough ground with great outcroppings of harsh gray stone. On the summit of this rise stood the tower — rugged, grim, lonely relic of a great past. Roofless, open to the sky, its four thick walls with their narrow slits of windows face the wide Atlantic on two sides, the brown bog on the third, and on the fourth the steep dark hill behind them. All around are great rocks heaped and tumbled, moss-grown. One cannot tell which of these have fallen from the crumbling walls and which are natural outcroppings of the stone from which the tower was fashioned some four hundred years ago. There are no doors to the tower and, besides the narrow slits, only one window very high in each of three walls. Entrance must have been made through some underground passage long since lost and forgotten. There is about that steep hill, with its broken crown of granite, an air of indescribable loneliness.

We seated ourselves, Tommy and I, on a mossy rock with a commanding view. To our right lay the wide ocean, blue and sparkling under the summer sun. To our left the sea narrowed into Clew Bay, holding on its breast hundreds of islands large and small, barren or blooming, uninhabited or pearled with little villages. Before us, across the bay, lay the mainland, softly green in the distance, sheltered by the mountains of Connemara rising behind it. To the east Croagh Patrick lifted its gray head high into the moving clouds that made a constant play of light and shadow on it. And hundreds of feet below lay the rocky strand where thousands of white gulls wheeled and settled, and wheeled and fluttered away again. On this beach the survivors of the Spanish Armada were wrecked, lured on to the dangerous rocks by false lights when they might have navigated the bay and found safety and comfort with Grannia Uaile had they reached her castle at the opposite end of the island.

‘The Spaniard, you see,’ Tommy explained, ‘was one of Grannia’s lovers. She had many. All men loved her stout heart and great pride. The Spanish captain knew well he was safe could he once reach her castle, the one we saw beyond at the harbor. From her people he expected nothing but good, and so he should, for the Irish and the Spaniards were ancient friends. Now when he saw the fires burning here where the tower stands, he pressed in, misled, thinking to make a safe landing, never guessing that a black traitor of a cousin of Grannia’s, O’Flaherty by name, had made a plan with the English to lure him to death and ruin. He was beached below here on the strand. The traitor with his followers finished whatever destruction the sea and storm had left undone. There was a grand fight, hand to hand, with all odds against the gallant Spaniards.

' Grannia heard, too late, what had happened, and hurried to the spot just as the men of O’Flaherty were beginning to gather rich loot. I don’t know did she come by boat or galloping on her mare, but I like to think she strode along the road we came to-day, with fine brave steps, her mighty shoulders squared, her head high. However she came, at anny rate she carried her trusty sword — and herself could use it to good advantage by all I hear. She came upon one of the traitor’s men grasping a string of pearls in his hand. With one stroke she cut off the hand, threw it, still grasping the pearls, far out into the sea there, and cried, “Let those who seek such things as these go out there to find them!”

‘Sure, the real battle began then! There was a great champion among Grannia’s men — Uaile, like herself, so I believe — and himself tackled O’Flaherty. Now, traitor though he was, there was no champion greater than that same O’Flaherty, for no one had yet bested him in battle. But Grannia’s champion bested him at the latter end, because right was upon his side, and faithfulness to friend. He did n’t kill the traitor at the latter end, far, when O’Flaherty in the struggle found himself for the first time in his life thrown to the ground, he reached quickly for his own long slender knife and thrust it through his own false heart. He was a bad man — but a brave one.'

IV

It was at this point that Annie and Ritchie joined us at last. Ritchie still walked joyously, his blue eyes filled with the same young dreams that shone from Tommy’s golden ones. He, too, was in Tir-na-n’og. But Annie’s lagging step and disappointed face told at a glance that she had not even guessed where we were. She gazed, speechlessly, for a moment from the tower to Tommy. ‘ Is it that we walked all these miles to see?’ she demanded.

‘What do you see, Annie?’ I queried anxiously. ‘What do you see?’

‘Four ould sheep walls!’ she answered scornfully. ‘ I could build as good m’self from the stones below on the strand. It looks for all the world like a spike,’ she went on. ‘An ould spike. Sure, this must be the last place on the green earth He made, and what does He do but finish it off with an ould spike!’

Annie was still in Clare Island, you see. She has lovely sparkling brown eyes in her head, — and, as Ritchie says with a sigh, ‘Brown eyes are the divil!' — but none in her imagination.

We rose up meekly and followed our way back along our magic road without ever telling her where she had been. We never did tell her. She would n’t have believed it, anyway.

On our way back we turned off on a little side road to visit the ancient abbey where Grannia lies waiting for the winding of a certain horn to call her at last to the final victorious battle. It is gray and bleak and tumbled as the tower itself, this ‘doorless, shrineless, monkless’ abbey by the sea. The delicate graceful arches of the windows, which must once have risen high above the bent heads of worshipers, are now only a few feet above the damp mossy ground. Wind and weather have long since filled in the main body of the abbey with drifting earth and sand. The vaulted ceiling still shows the last traces of a very fine and delicate decoration; the figures, a deer with branching horns, a dancer, a fleet slender hound; the colors, soft yellows, greens, and blues, a little faded, stained with a dark, velvety, greenish stain of age and dampness. The composition of the roof, a sort of cement the secret of which has long since been lost, is crumbling at last into slow decay. A tablet of bronze marks the place where Grannia Uaile sleeps. It bears her coat of arms and the motto, the right to which she won from all her enemies, ‘Terra marique potens.’ Just opposite this is an enclosed staircase, dark and damp, with shallow, much-worn stone steps, and so narrow that one must go up sidewise to reach the roof above. The roof is surrounded with a parapet about ten feet high. At either end an arched and windowlike opening frames an exquisite view of the bay. Any enemy entering from either end of the bay would be seen at once by sentries stationed here; and loopholes for guns around the base of the wall suggest that he might receive a warm welcome.

Tommy had settled himself on the top of the wall, which he had scaled in some mysterious flylike fashion, prepared to recount further deeds of bygone glorious days, when an indignant wail from Annie recalled him.

‘D’ye see that sun?’ she demanded, pointing to a west of rose and gold and lavender; ‘and d’ye see that star?’ pointing to an east of cool clear green where one silver star was set. ‘And d’ ye know that not bit nor bite nor sup has passed our lips since day-dawn this morning? Let you come down out o’ that and let us be off home to our supper.’

Tommy came down precipitately. ‘Let ye follow me,’ he said. ‘We will go into the first house we meet and there we will have mead to drink and honey to eat with — ‘

‘Talk sense!’ interrupted Annie. ‘I’m famished. I want my tea — and eggs with it.’

Reluctantly we wended our way through the gathering dusk to where the canoe waited to bear us back again to Ireland. The sun had long set when we came in under the banks at Sikeen. A cold wind blew through the darkness and gusts of rain chilled us. Hand in hand we ran up the wet road to the brae and were soon drinking the tea beside a glowing fire. Through the window, when I pressed my face against it, I could dimly see in the darkness the looming mass across the bay that is Clare Island. And I made a silent promise to myself — and to Tommy — that I should never again embark for Clare Island. I might find it — and lose Tir-na-n’og.