our fair mysterious land deserve her name: Inis Fail, the Isle
of Destiny.

II.

THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS.

Westward from Sligo--Town of the River of Shells--a tongue of land runs
toward the sea between two long bays. Where the two bays join their
waters, a mountain rises precipitous, its gray limestone rocks soaring
sheer upwards, rugged and formidable. Within the shadow of the mountain
is hidden a wonderful glen--a long tunnel between cliffs, densely arched
over with trees and fringed with ferns; even at midday full of a green
gloom. It is a fitting gateway to the beauty and mystery of
the mountain.

Slowly climbing by stony ways, the path reaches the summit, a rock table
crowned with a pyramid of loose boulders, heaped up in olden days as a
memorial of golden-haired Maeve. From the dead queen's pyramid a view of
surpassing grandeur and beauty opens over sea and land, mingled valley
and hill. The Atlantic stretches in illimitable blue, curved round the
rim of the sky, a darker mirror of the blue above. It is full of
throbbing silence and peace. Across blue fields of ocean, and facing
the noonday brightness of the sun, rise the tremendous cliffs of Slieve
League, gleaming with splendid colors through the shimmering air; broad
bands of amber and orange barred with deeper red; the blue weaves
beneath them and the green of the uplands above.

The vast amber wall rises out of the ocean, and passes eastward in a
golden band till it merges in the Donegal highlands with their
immeasurable blue. Sweeping round a wide bay, the land drawls nearer
again, the far-away blue darkening to purple, and then to green and
brown. The sky is cut by the outlines of the Leitrim and Sligo hills, a
row of rounded peaks against the blue, growing paler and more
translucent in the southern distance.

Under the sun, there is a white glinting of lakes away across the plain,
where brown and purple are blended with green in broad spaces of
mingling color. To the west the ground rises again into hills crowded
behind each other, sombre masses, for ages called the Mountains of
Storms. Far beyond them, vague as blue cloud-wreaths in the blue, are
the hills that guard our western ocean. From their sunset-verges the
land draws near again, in the long range of the Mayo cliffs,--fierce
walls of rock that bar the fiercer ocean from a wild world of
storm-swept uplands. The cliffs gradually lessen, and their colors grow
clearer, till they sink at