ST. BRENDAN'S " DESERT OF THE SEA."
THE whole sky turned pallid, merging into greenish hues on its lower arc towards the south-west, where the fore- runner of the storm was visible, a rising continent of slate-
grey cloud, shaping itself as it rose into the mapped outline of Australia. We were camped on an island-rock of the Atlantic, which St. Brendan had loved to call his "Desert of the Sea." In those hours before the rain the mainland of Ireland stood up like a grotesque Titanic picture, dashed in by a strong impressionist hand, and worked over here and there in the minutest patchwork by some master of detail. All round our islet the leaden seas were lurching sullenly, and the wind, that had travelled over uninterrupted water from Newfoundland, hurried and hurled them in sheets of spray across the westernmost point, from which the narrow back of land shelved downwards to wide ramparts of shingle rounded and sea-worn. Remote and surf-beaten, Inisglora was not in the far-off days bereft of the kindling touch of human life. Behind the shelter of the shingle are groups of ruins, beehive huts, some sunk into mounds of turf, some partly excavated, of an origin rather to be guessed than proven, the slowly falling stones hallowed by the memory of the Saint, and a few marks of cabins, the latest built of all, yet now scarcely knee- high, almost dissolved to earth again and coloured with lichens of green and gold to a delicate uniformity with the marsh-grass and the tussocks. But in the course of the last ten centuries few strangers have set their feet on this shore; fishermen have landed in the fishing season, a handful of poor folk from the mainland once tried to make it their home ; for the rest, it has long been a forgotten island, strewn with men's bones, yet marking itself in a blazoned capital before one chapter of the history of the world. For it was here under the wings of heavy rainclouds that St. Brendan, the St. Paul of the Irish Church, conceived his mission to preach Christ in the West. Im- pelled by a hunger to save souls, he sailed forth in his frail craft of wicker and hide to cross an unknown ocean. Tradi- tion says he told his story on many a tropic beach, and even reached America. For years he fared upon the seas, meeting many and miraculous adventures. He discovered an island, cradled in warm seas, which he called after his name, but which, like the Saint's own story, has faded into the sunset of the past and is no more known. But the Irish islet still holds his memory, though his oratory there is now a broken ruin, the weather crumbles it year by year, and the walls, grown over with a rust of moss, lie open to the sky. The Chapel of the Men hard by is littered thick with skulls, but to whom they belonged it is difficult to determine, whether to disciples who lived and died here, or to those who desired their bones to be carried for burial to the Holy Isle. Once a tourist, chancing to land, stole away two of the skulls. Perhaps they now ornament his dwelling, their moss overlaid with city grime. A dreadful thought, that these poor human relics, though having lain many years under the soft rain, within sound of that dark-green, purple-clouded sea, should by the hand of a desecrator be exiled for ever to a London lodging from their chosen home.
This was our first evening on the rock. We had crossed during the day, swinging softly over the long rollers in a white sailing-boat, but we landed in a curragh, long, black, and snake-like, near akin, without doubt, to that in which St. Brendan dared his perilous voyage into the West, for so the Latin version tells : " Then St. Brendan and his companions, using iron implements, prepared a light vessel with wicker sides and ribs, such as is usually made in that country, and covered it with cowhide, tanned in oakbark, tarring the joints thereof, and put on board provisions for forty days, with butter enough to dress hides for covering the boat." The curraghs of to-day are built for one, two, or three pairs of oars, oars of the lightest, with blades from one and a half to two inches in width. Slightly built and rudderless as they are, these curraghs, with their high-tipped prows, are so mag- nificently handled by the island men that they can face almost any weather and outride almost any storm.
We stood and watched the white boat spread her brown lug-sail and float away into the darkening East, while our companions, the " King " of a neighbouring island and his brother, carried the curragh on their heavy shoulders above high-water mark. Many islets have their titular King, not only off the beaches of Ireland, but elsewhere round the British coasts. In the old days when illicit whisky distilling yet flourished in these parts, save that the mainland supplied turf and offered a market to the adventurous smuggler of smoky poteen, the islands were practically cut off from com- munication with the world, and the chief man in each became a very real ruler. Something of this obtains even at the present time.
A single but of sods, ruinous and minute, with an entrance like the hole of an animal, was to be our shelter. We cleared it out, mended the gap in the roof with the covers of a Wolseley mattress, and the King collected wreckage enough to build a fire to make tea. Tea was ready when the rain came, and ended when it was past. But the storm still sang wet-eyed over the island, revealing and heightening a scene of extraordinary beauty, sea and cloud, cloud and sea challenging each other with a thousand glorious effects of colour. A huge V of bernicle geese pinioned from the main- land in the eye of the storm, but seeing the smoke of our fire, swung away to some other haunt. Never for two days did the view from the island appear the same. Some new hill always swam into the picture, or else the mist altered all outlines, shaping, blotting out, and recreating as it furled and unfurled its curtains. We fetched water from the Saint's well for our needs, and the King told us stories of its powers. A fish hung beside it will not decay. No woman may visit it unless holding the hand of a male child, and should one venture to draw water, it would turn to blood. The well is reached by a few broken steps, it is dark, roofed in from the sun, a place of sweet, deep waters brooded over by legends.
On all sides of the isle you "could see the weather coming," as the King said ; the zenith often pale blue and clear, but at three points of the horizon the skirts of hail-squalls out- flung ; under the sky the eternal tumbling of the billows. The King, blue-eyed, bearded, six feet high, and built up of knotted strength, mused over the prospect with his sad hand- some face. " I have endured," he said slowly, "great hard- ship and slavery from the sea." The truth of this was plain enough. He was said to be the best boatman in the West. If skill and courage count, it may well be true. While we were encamped upon the rock he, with a brother, rowed a curragh twelve miles, exposed to the full force of the Atlantic in a heavy gale. The King had spent days in his boat, almost without food, unable to land because of the weather, and on one occasion, after long fasting, he was in the end obliged to swim ashore through the surf. The thought in looking at him was :—"What a man for an expedition ! What a Polar explorer lost !" In his youth he nearly enlisted in the Navy. Had he done so, some of six strong brothers would have followed him. Withal his modesty was inviolable. He was a silent man, sad and thoughtful, who, if his lot had been cast in less straitened places, must have written his name upon something more lasting than sand. I think he realised perhaps those wider horizons his life could never know.
Coming out in the early dawn, you generally startled a redshank from the stones at the tide-edge, and an oyster- catcher from among the rocks. That deep-sea haunt was rarely visited by curlews, but once and again during our days there one flew by, and his mournful, questing note—so different from the cry of startled affright that passes as the curlew's call—resounded in the sky above. Two great black-backed gulls, that breed near by, often flung their ominous shadows over the sopping grasses, and their cry, like a cruel old man's laugh, came down the wind. Puffins also and razorbills, a very few Bolan geese, infinite numbers of cormorants, and a solitary great northern diver dwelt in those waters. Sometimes a cruising seal fished past the outer reefs, still further to seaward an occasional finner whale, and close at hand, nearest of all, two little land- birds hopped and flirted on the broken wall of the chapel. Once as we looked the small-eared, alert head of an otter rose from the tide, and he came ashore on a jut of outlying rock. On another day high overhead a heron flapped past, remind- ing us of the legendary crane, said to have lived on Iniskea from the beginning of the world, and which, prophecy added, was destined to remain there until the Day of Judgment.
Waking in the solemn midnight, and leaving one's but companions turning in their dreams, come out into the rain- soft dark. All round the hut, especially upon the Western promontory, the Atlantic beats with a trumpeting of surf, and unceasingly the wind cries through the rifted masonry of the oratory. No light is visible, but stumbling out from among the fallen stones and human relies, stand above the sea and listen. It seems to be calling aloud the tale of Irish wrong and Irish sorrow to the night, and between the hoarse water-voices, and against the shrill insistence of the wind, the imaginative can almost hear the strenuous wrestling of the Saint in prayer, perhaps even echoes of the tuneful, strong- throated psalm.
No flowers soften the austerity of the Holy Isle: rains, rough grass, a few lingering ruins, and beyond the morass a line of cairns, that is all. The " Desert of the Sea " is a place' of memories, and also an isolation where Nature herself becomes apparent,---windy, wet-rocked, salted by green seas, purified by Western rain, rendered immortal by a man dead fifteen hundred years, holding in its keeping all the sorrow of the sad wet West, all the thoughts that dwell in turf-smoke, something of the splendour of history.
HEBRETH PRICHARD.
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