Tristan Jones

by Ice! [V2. 0]

  "Sure, and so they are, as long as the birds do be left in peace."

  "That's a thought," I said. Arguing with a Gaelic Celt is always an exercise in convoluted geometry fit to make the Sermon on the Mount sound like the concept of relativity.

  Once in the lighthouse cottage, low, lime-washed walls and slated roof, with kettle singing on the peat-burning, black-polished stove and mugs of tea to hand (for the Western Irish and Scots are tremendous tea drinkers), I ad-dressed myself to Corghain, as Corrigan was known in his native tongue.

  "How is this island called Skellig Michael? Who was Michael?"

  "Begab, it's terrible pagans you must be in the wild land of Wales, if you don't know that the chief of all the angels and everythin' so high it would touch the foot of Almighty God"—he crossed himself swiftly—"is Michael himself with his flamin' sword and terrible eyes."

  I crossed over to the open door, the one on the side away from the wind, and looked down onto the sea, a hundred feet below. Cresswell was sitting down there in the green water over the black shadows of rock patches, like a toy boat. I saw Nelson, a mere dot, padding his way round and round the deck. In the near distance, a mile or so away, rested the perfect cone of Little Skellig, grey and blue, with the green grey Atlantic breakers heaving mightily against its symmetric shore.

  At eye level and above me, in the blue sky tempered by fat cumulus clouds spawned by the Azores High a thousand miles to the southwest, wheeled hundreds of fulmar petrels, surely, with the albatross, the most beautifully moving creatures in the whole natural world. With the faintest movement of their wings, they glided onto the ocean air streams and soared up, up, a thousand feet or more to hover like a song of joy and love. Then their wings sagged and down they went, right down to the neck bristles of the Atlantic seas heaving far below. It was a sight of holy wonder.

  "What are the round huts up there on the cliff face?" I asked Corghain. They were shaped like beehives.

  "The cells that the monks lived in the old times. Sure, when all hell was loose upon the world it's to here they came, and wasn't King Olaf of Norway himself christened here on this very island?"

  "When was that?"

  "Long, long ago, before the English came,"—he spoke as if it were yesterday that Gilbert, Raleigh and Cromwell had brought bloody murder to Erin—"when the wild Norse-men changed their ways and became themselves a blessin' to God."

  We climbed on up the steep narrow path cut into the face of the sheer cliff and came at last to two pinnacles on the peak, steep, needlelike crags, one with a hole about three feet diameter passing straight through it horizontally. Corghain told me to pass myself through the hole and lean over the crevice between them to kiss the rock on the other side. "It'll leave you never short of a word in your head," said he.

  Once my head passed through the hole I found myself looking straight down a two-hundred-foot drop, to where great Atlantic rollers crashed into a split cutting almost right through the island. The sight was enough to make me dizzy, but I persevered and leaned right over the four-foot gap, seemingly hanging between heaven and earth, and brushed the hard, cold rock on the other side with my lips. As I wriggled back to Corghain and safely, he said, "Sure, and it's the storyteller you are now even though it was myself that was thinkin' you were before you stepped your foot on this shore!" I was sweating, for I'd been swinging out there in space supported only to the thighs, with Corghain sitting on my feet.

  Shaken, I trod down the hill with Corghain still telling me tales, for he was a man of the long memory.

  "Do you get a lot of fog around here?" I asked him.

  "Aye, we do, and in the winter it's a fog so thick you could poke your finger in it and leave a hole. Sure and all, before the German war, Flaherty, whose younger brother's in America and who has great, grand ideas that would turn a hare into a fine racehorse, installed the new electric fog signal house."

  "Look." He pointed down, far below, to a small concrete hut perched over the great tumbled rocks of the shore where the ocean breakers broke in white spume under the soughing wind. "Look, you see, that's the place. In the old days we'd go down there in a fog, feelin' our way with nothin' but suspended vapor before our eyes and little else but faith in the Lord behind them, and set off the maroons [explosive fog signals—like big fireworks] by hand. Three hundred of the wild explosive cartridges we have in there. Well, Flaherty, whose older brother is no less than an inspector on the trams of Dublin City itself, said that this was too slow and dangerous, so he brought this little spalpeen of a fellow with his suit and tie, lookin' like he dug money out of the sands of Kerry, and his gossoon to carry all the wires and Paraphernalia, batteries and such like. Sure you would have thought it was Thomas Edison him-self come for a holiday! Then they set up the wires down the holy cliff of Archangel Michael, so we could set off the maroons one at a time from the cottage. Flaherty to me he said that this would preserve our lives until the Second Comin', with no more perilous scramblin' down the cliff, or risk of blowin' ourselves directly into the presence of the good Lord himself."

  "That was a good idea."

  "Sure, and it was, and would you not expect it to be, Flaherty's brother bein' in Boston and all and the Dublin tramways behind him?" He puffed on his short pipe as the cottage came into view below us. "But they got a sort shirk-it, they called it."

  "A what?"

  "A sort shirk-it."

  "A sort shirk-it."

  "And what happened?"

  "Well, I put my finger to the pressin' thing on the box and Holy Mother of God," he crossed himself, "if the whole three hundred maroons didn't blow up all at the same time with an explosion so mighty it almost lifted the island right out of the sea!" His eyebrows shot up above his sparkling blue eyes.

  "What did the Dublin men do then, Corghain?"

  "Ten Hail Marys, two mugs of tea, and off to the main-land they went. Flaherty brought over another three hundred maroons, which we still set off in God's way without fancy wires and boxes. But never a sight I had again of the spalpeen, nor his gossoon, and that was all of twenty years' past."

  We sat for a while in the whitewashed living room of his cottage, with the box-bed set in the wall by the fireplace and the picture of Patrick Pearse, the poet who gave labor to Irish independence, gazing with the look of crucified Christ from the wall and a calendar from Boston over the door.

  "And where is it you go from here, Tristan?"

  "I'm thinking of Waterville Spunkane, in Ballinskelligs Bay, for I must see the police and enter Ireland legally."

  "Ahh, they'll not miss a paper or two from a good man like yourself. Look, why don't you head for the Blaskets. I've good friends there, and Tom Keanan's king of it all. He'll look after you as I look after the light."

  "Well, Corghain, the weather looks promising enough, and it's only fifty miles, so that's what I'll do. We'll write down the names of your friends, and it's them I'll see when I fetch the Blaskets."

  Corghain walked down the hill with me to the jetty, still puffing on his pipe. "A fine craft you have there, and God go with you and calm the waters" were his last words as I pulled away from the jetty. Nelson was pleased to see me safe back onboard. We would sail that evening after tea and make a night passage to the Blasket Islands, the next parish to America!

  They have considerable knowledge of the stars, and their motions, and the dimensions of the earth, and the Universe around. Also of science in general, and of the powers and spheres of influence of the immortal gods. These subjects they debate, and also teach to their young students.

  Julius Caesar, De bello Gallico VI. 14— "Description of the Celtic Druids."

  9

  The Old Times

  The radio weather forecast from Niton was good, and in the western approaches to the British Isles this is more the exception than the rule. "Sea areas Shannon, Fastnet, Land's End, winds moderate to fresh, increasing to gale force in twenty-four hours." It was time to strike while the iron was cold—the crue
l cold blasts of Atlantic iron, which in the waters of that world are enough to daunt Finn McCool himself. Like a long, steady procession of Inquisition torture-masters, the sweeping black clouds of the low-pressure, anticyclonic gales roll in from the southwest, winter and summer, to breed a race of seamen and to sound a bass dirge to the rising descant of Celtic song, and draw a curtain of blinding energy and mighty force across the drift of Gaelic dreams.

  Hauling a sixty-pound anchor with its arresting chain is always a chore, but soon it was lashed down on the foredeck, the jewel green moss of Saint Michael's seabed clinging to it. Up jib, up staysail, and away, waving to Corghain as he slowly clambered the track to his eyrie and the portrait of Patrick Pearse, with the fulmar petrels hovering on the bellied edges of the clouds high above. On the fishing line I had left hanging over the stern was a fine shiny pollock, about eight pounds, which, before you could say "Holy Mother of God," was in the pressure cooker and sizzling away on the stove for supper. I grabbed the wheel and headed out to the offing, to pass well clear of the Dursey Islands and the Bull Rock, where many a fine mariner over the centuries has taken leave of this world, for this is the weather-edge of Europe, the receiving end of all the Atlantic furies. It was not for nothing that Shannon Airport was built on the western end of Ireland. The tail winds of the Atlantic all push home here.

  The night descended with stars steady and bright peeping through the scudding black clouds and a half-moon rising astern. As I was off a lee shore, I stayed on deck to fondle the kicking wheel and listen to the wind softly wailing in the shrouds, and to glimpse, now and then, lonely calling lights, signals of innocent intent, low on the distant black shore of Ireland. And I recalled what I had learned of the Old Times, before history had been trimmed to suit the ambitions of Rome and her heirs.

  Around three thousand years ago and more a people had lived in the west of Europe, the people who built the accurate Stonehenge solstice computer. Dark, with prominent noses, lithe, intelligent, worshiping the life force itself. Their descendants, clearly recognizable from other strains around them, still endure in the wild places on the edge of the continent—the mountain fastnesses of Northern Scotland, Wales, the Irish Islands, parts of Cornwall and Brittany. These people were called, in Ireland, the Goidels, or Gaels; in Britain, the Brythonics.

  About twenty-five hundred years ago, into their midst came a great wave of wandering fair-haired, blue-eyed nomads from northern Persia and Afghanistan—the Gaulish-Celts. When the Gaulish-Celts reached what is now Rumania, they split off into three main branches. One turned southeast down through Turkey and the Middle East, to mix with the Semites and become the Phoenicians. Others pushed on into North Africa to leave behind a racial strain known as Berbers, before crossing north over the Strait of Gibraltar into Spain (Iberia) to form the blood base of the nations of Portugal, Aragon, and Castile. Some of these Celto-Iberians, about 800 B.C., under one of the first known ocean navigators, Mabo, pushed on across the western ocean to the West Indies and America, there to establish Punic colonies and become the ancestors (at least by language) of the Pima Indians of New Mexico. The second stream of Gaulish-Celts turned directly south into the Greek peninsula and founded the great civilization of which the modern western world is the inheritor. The third stream pushed on due west across the plains and mountains of Europe, leaving behind pockets in Austria and Switzerland, to become the Gauls of France. From France other Gaulish-Celts passed on into the British Isles and, mixing with the Brythonic Goidel tribes, became the Cymru of Wales and Picts and Scots of Northern Ireland and Scotland. The Goidel Celts pushed out of England and Wales became the Erse of Ireland.

  With Gaulish-Celtic intelligence overlaid onto the dream-ing imagination of the Goidel-Brythonics of Western Europe, a great culture with widespread communications was developed, a loose confederation of states, in the ancient Greek style, with high priests, called vates, in charge of religion, kings, princes, and druids in secular command. To imagine that when Julius Caesar invaded Gaul he was fighting blue-painted savages is foolish. He in fact managed to overcome, and only by the skin of his teeth, a highly organized alliance of more-or-less democratic states peopled by a race in a state of civilization not far short of Rome itself, with a system of communications by land and sea, as good as, if not superior to, that of the Mediterranean folk. The Celts were sailing as far afield as present-day Morocco in the south, Germany in the east, America in the west, and the then much warmer Iceland in the north.

  When an invading army subdues a country, the majority of the inhabitants of that country remain as they were before the conquest. So with Britain during the so-called Roman times. Ninety-five percent of the population were Brito-Celt during the Roman occupation; ninety percent after the Norman Conquest; and probably eighty percent now, even after all the successive inroads by continentals and Scandinavians. But in four areas the population always was, and still is, ninety-nine percent Celtic—North Wales, the Irish Islands, the remote fastnesses of the Scottish High-lands, and Brittany.

  As early as 330 B.C., Pytheas of Massalia (now Marseille) sailed westward through the Mediterranean to the great Phoenician port of Gades (the modern Cadiz). There he transferred to a Gaelic curragh, a great ocean-worthy vessel over a hundred feet long, built of hides stretched over a wooden frame, even more sea-fit than the oar-and-sail-propelled galleys of the eastern Mediterranean. From Gades the ocean venturers of the western edge of the world sailed northwards, calling at the Celtic port of Vigo and the island of Oleron, on the west coast of Gaul, near the present-day port of La Rochelle. In those far-off days, before the might of Rome was hurled across the Rubicon, Oleron was a center of a maritime activity as important as Venice and Genoa were to become fifteen hundred years later, after the tide of barbaric ignorance had at last subsided in Europe.

  Here, at Oleron, the first internationally respected laws of the sea were drawn up between maritime merchants from as far afield as the Baltic, Iceland, Morocco, the northeast coast of America, and Phoenician Lebanon. Through oleron passed southward-bound around the Gibraltar Strait, or overland across Gaul to the Mediterranean Phoenician port of Massalia, wool, tin and gold, ambergris and walrus tusks and sweet-scented pine needles from the far-flung lands of the Northern and Western Celtic people in Iceland and America. From as far north as the Faroes and Scotland came the wools and ambergris, also from the Baltic; while from Cornwall, Ireland, and Wales, as well as England, came hundreds of cargo vessels even year in the spring and summer, bearing gold, tin, and woad dyes, much prized in Lebanon and Persia. In the great long warehouses of Oleron and Gades, these goods were exchanged for the fine woven silks, the aromatic scents, the wine and spices from the Mediterranean and the East, by Greek and Phoenician sailors, some of whom, calloused and wise in the ways of the sea, had ranged as far afield to the east as Arabia, Ceylon, Mozambique, and Borneo, and who told fantastic tales of sandy deserts, coal black people, and yellow men with slanted eyes living in unimaginable splendor, and of a land of gold and silver far to the east of Borneo. The Celts, in their turn, told of a country way to the north where hot water spewed out of the ground and islands were born out of the sea, only to die again in clouds of steam. They told stories of Lugh, the god of light, born on the island of Tory, off the kingdom of Terganaill (Donegal), who made far-ranging journeys into Europe with his mighty spear which he could hurl fifteen miles, who was the grandson of Balor, king of the Formorians, and who founded the cities of London (Londinium), Leyden (Lugudunum) in modern-day Holland, and Lyons, far away in eastern Gaul. They told tales of Dedaanan, the king of the Firbolgs, and his enemy, the magical man with three legs called Manaanan who ranged as far as the Isle of Man and Etrusca in Italy, where his sign, the triskelion (three legs), is still in use, and who, long, long before, with his great army, "rode the white horses" across the sea from Man to Ireland to defeat the Firbolgs at the battle of Moytura. And to this day, when the Atlantic winds sough across the blue green waters of the ocean, sailing
men speak of the driven seas as "white horses."

  It was with these storytelling sailors that Pytheas set off northward on his voyage to Thule, the end of the world, calling first at the busy Eirean port where now stands the city of Limerick. They sailed north through the Faroes, six days' hard sailing, ever to the north, until they sighted the spouting volcanoes and devil-torn rocks of Thule—Iceland. There they picked up a cargo of ambergris and walrus tusks, gathered by Celts temporarily settled in that lonely outpost of the world, and then returned south again. It is perfectly obvious from Pytheas's account that this was no voyage of exploration, but a merchant-venture along an old established trade route.

  In the night watches, as the curragh ploughed north, the Gaelic sailors from the Irish Islands and the rocky coast of Wales told Pytheas tales of Iarghal, "the land beyond the sunset" (later known in low Latin, even to the Irish and Welsh fighting to stay outside the Roman Empire, as Hy-Brasil), the enchanted land westward across the ocean, the Land of the Dead, to which the spirits of the Gaels sailed across the watery wastes of the Atlantic. Tales were told by men who had actually seen this land; who, after many weeks of hard voyaging, had sighted the land in the west, far, far away; who had landed and seen the Iarghaltes, "the Sundowners," red men of the redland, and who had stayed with them and traded with them for tusks and furs. They had made their way back across the ocean to Erin and to Cymru (Wales), and, as old men, told the tales over the tribal fires of peat on the cold winter nights when the sea was too wild for the curraghs to sail. And so Pytheas learned of the Celtic colonies of North America, the land of Iarghal, that is, if he did not already know about them.

  So the stories passed back to Phoenicia, where, along with all other knowledge of distant parts of the world, they were locked away until Phoenician power shifted, a millenium and a half later, to Venice and Genoa. In tattered scraps, these stories were handed down among families anciently rooted in Lebanon, like that of Christopher Columbus. (Columbus found an Irish sailor, living in Galway, who had seen the "redland" far to the west. This Irish-Gael sailed west with Columbus in the Santa Maria, and I have seen the stone slab on which his memory is kept in the church of Saint Nicholas in Galway town. He had seen the "red men" in the land of the sunset, Iarghal, in 1478!)