nd what could a wee fellow do up there then but sit quiet and cry and
be terribly afraid? And your cry would be heard no more than the
whinnying of the curlew.... Or you might venture down through it, and
that was more terrible still, for the strange host of the air had their
domicile in the clouds, and there they held cruel congress, speaking in
their speechless tongue, and out of the clouds they took shape and
substance ... their cold, malevolent eyes, their smoky antennae of hands
... and nothing to turn to for company, not even the moody badger or the
unfriendly sheep. There was no going down. You must stay there by the
lake, and even then the cloud might creep upward until it capped
mountain and lake, and enveloped a wee fellow scared out of his wits....

Nevertheless, he was going to the top of that mountain, clouds or no
clouds. For he had heard it said that the mirage of Portcausey was being
seen again--the Devil's Troopers, and the _Oilean-gan-talamh-ar-bith_,
the Isle of No Land At All, and the Swinging City, and they were to be
seen in the blue heat haze over the sea from the Mountain of Fionn....

And wee Shane was going to see it, clouds or no clouds, host or no host
of the air.

Section 2

He had won half-ways up the mountain now, and from the brae of heather
he could see the glen stretch like a furrow to the sea. The Irish
Channel they called it on the maps in school, but _Struth na Maoile_ it
was to every one in the country-side, the waters of Moyle. Very green,
very near, very gentle they seemed to-day, but often they roared like
giants in 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 hillt