The two young people, with John Pat and the basket close behind, stood at last upon the very summit of Gabriel—a wild and desolate jumble of naked rocks piled helter-skelter about them, and at their feet a strange, little, circular lake, which in all the ages had mirrored no tree or flowering rush or green thing whatsoever, but knew only of the clouds and of the lightning’s play and of the gathering of the storm-demons for descent upon the homes of men.
A solemn place is a mountain-top. The thin, spiritualized air is all alive with mysteries, which, down below in the sordid atmosphere, visit only the brains of men whom we lock up as mad. The drying-up of the great globe-floods; the slow birth of vegetation; the rank growth of uncouth monsters; the coming of the fleet-footed, bare-skinned savage beast called man; the primeval aeons of warfare wherein knowledge of fire, of metals, of tanned hides and habitations was laboriously developed and the huger reptiles were destroyed; the dawn of history through the clouds of sun and serpent worship; the weary ages of brutish raids and massacres, of barbaric creeds and cruel lusts—all this the mountain-tops have stood still and watched, and, so far as in them lay, understood.
Some have comprehended more of what they saw than others. The tallest man is not necessarily the wisest. So there are very lofty mountains which remain stupid, despite their advantages, and there are relatively small mountains which have come to be almost human in their understanding of and sympathy with the world-long drama they have watched unfolding itself. The Brocken, for example, is scarcely nipple-high to many another of its German brethren, yet which of the rest has such rich memories, stretching back through countless centuries of Teuton, Slav, Alemanni, Suevi, Frank and Celt to the days when nomad strove with troglodyte, and the great cave-bear grappled with the mammoth in the silent fastnesses of the Harz.
In Desmond, the broad-based, conical Gabriel has as unique a character of another kind. There is nothing of the frank and homely German familiarity in the reputation it enjoys at home. To be sure, the mountain is scarred to the throat by bogcutters; cabins and the ruins of cabins lurk hidden in clefts of rocks more than half-way up its gray, furze-clad sides; yet it produces the effect of standing sternly aloof from human things. The peasants think of it as a sacred eminence. It has its very name from the legend of the archangel, who flying across Europe in disgust at man’s iniquities, could not resist the temptation to descend for a moment to touch with his foot this beautiful mountain gem in the crown of Carbery.
Kate explained this legend to her young companion from Houghton County, and showed him the marks of the celestial visitor’s foot plainly visible in the rock. He bestowed such critical, not to say professional, scrutiny upon these marks that she made haste to take up another branch of the ancient fable.
“And this little round lake here,” she went on, “they’ll all tell you ’t was made by bodily lifting out a great cylinder of rock and carting it miles through the air and putting it down in the sea out there, where it’s ever since been known as Fasnet Rock. They say the measurements are precisely the same. I forget now if ’t was the Archangel Gabriel did that, too, or the divil.”
“The result comes to about the same thing,” commented the engineer. “Whoever did it,” he went on, scanning the regularly rounded sides of the pool, “made a good workmanlike job of it.”
“No one’s ever been able to touch the bottom of it,” said Kate, with pride.
“Oh, come, now—I’ve heard that of every second lake in Ireland.”
“Well—certainly I’ve not tested it,” she replied, frostily, “but ’t is well known that if you sink a bottle in this lake ’t will be found out there in Dun-manus Bay fourteen hundred feet below us.”
“Why, the very first principle of hydrostatics,” began Bernard, with controversial eagerness. Then he stopped short, stroked his smooth chin, and changed the subject abruptly. “Speaking of bottles,” he said, “I see your man there is eying that lunch basket with the expression of a meat-axe. Wouldn’t it be a clever idea to let him unpack it?” The while John Pat stripped the basket of its contents, and spread them upon a cloth in the mossy shadow of an overhanging boulder, the two by a common impulse strolled over to the eastern edge of the summit.
“Beyond Roaring Water Bay the O’Driscoll Castles begin,” said Kate. “They tell me they’re poor trifles compared wid ours.”
“I like to hear you say ‘ours,’” the young man broke in. “I want you to keep right on remembering all the while that I belong to the family. And—and I wish to heaven there was something I could do to show how tickled to death I am that I do belong to it!”
“I have never been here before,” Kate said, in a musing tone, which carried in it a gentle apology for abstraction. “I did not know there was anything so big and splendid in the world.”
The spell of this mighty spectacle at once enchanted and oppressed her. She stood gazing down upon it for some minutes, holding up her hand as a plea for silence when her companion would have spoken. Then, with a lingering sigh, she turned away and led the slow walk back toward the lake.
“’Twas like dreaming,” she said with gravity; “and a strange thought came to me: ’Twas that this lovely Ireland I looked down upon was beautiful with the beauty of death; that ’twas the corpse of me country I was taking a last view of. Don’t laugh at me! I had just that feeling. Ah, poor, poor Ireland!”
Bernard saw tears glistening upon her long, black lashes, and scarcely knew his own voice when he heard it, in such depths of melancholy was it pitched.
“Better times are coming now,” he said. “If we open up the mines we are counting on it ought to give work to at least two hundred men.”
She turned sharply upon him.
“Don’t talk like that!” she said, in half command, half entreaty. “’T is not trade or work or mines that keeps a nation alive when ’tis fit to die. One can have them ............